Exactly. I'm not sure about "inadvertantly", either; seeing what happens to the search term over time is part of the fun of that comic and was almost certainly intentional. About the only part of the headline that makes sense is "xkcd"...
He's a mass communication "specialist", and his idea of communicating with the masses is making misspelt changes to Wikipedia? High school kids do that.
seperate "notable" content from additional and detail content, dont put it all into the same huge article. That would increase in the amount of information, but decrease the quality significantly, especially without a matching increase in the number of people available to maintain it. There would also still be complaints from people who are sure their pet article is "notable" and refuse to have it relegated to the "additional and detail content" area of another article.
create additional article types for background knowledge, related textbook-like information or proofs Wikipedia always has been and always will be an encyclopedia, and is intended to fit a niche within a series of wiki-based projects supprted by the Wikimedia Foundation, in which these sorts of things would be more appropriate. Wikibooks, for example, is intended for textbooks; if you wish to write textbook-like information on something, do it there and link to it at the end of the relevant article.
make the content markup less chaotic and less ugly for humans, and better parsable for computers These two goals are more or less opposite ends of a spectrum. Design a markup language that eliminates problem X and you introduce problem Y. Until the day computers understand plain English, it's not going to happen.
allow "knowledge pieces", maybe in a separate namespace about every day knowledge and about entities that are not described by nouns, e.g. allow WP to contain articles about concepts represented by verbs or adjectives If it's the sort of word for which more than just a dictionary definition, there is likely to be an article about the concept behind it. If there is not, write one. (There is also a Wikimedia dictionary project, Wiktionary which contains dictionary definitions.)
make the connection between the dictionary and the concept entries better Most "word" articles have a Wiktionary link either with the external links or at the top. The search page and the page which appears when an article doesn't exist both also invite the user to search Wiktionary. The reverse is also true. Do you have any suggestions as to how your request might be implemented?
Why limit yourself? Limits are necessary. The problem is not space (or bandwidth) but the amount of time people can invest in maintaining the project. There may be thousands of regular contributors, but they are volunteers and have limited time available to contribute. In that time they need to fix vandalism, make formatting consistent, discuss issues and so forth, and still find time to improve the articles. If anyone could write about anything that would not be possible, and the project would simply be a mess: multiple articles on the same subject, completely different formatting styles, and vandalism everywhere.
Limiting what is considered appropriate for the project is the only way to create a work that is large enough to give an overview of knowledge without being too big to be maintainable by the available contributors.
Removing vandalism seems to work quite fine right now. It does. It wouldn't work very well at all if Wikipedia aimed to contain all knowledge and anyone could write about anything.
The bigger problem these days are the admins that delete other peoples work because they don't consider it relevant enough for Wikipedia... Why do people keep blaming this on the administrators? Articles that are deleted are deleted following a discussion, which anyone can initiate, and in which anyone may participate; administrators merely have the technical ability to carry out the decision at the end as allowing everyone to delete things directly is not workable.
People also seem to confuse the initiation of such a discussion with the actual deletion of the page. Even if the discussion was initiated by some random newcomer and all subsequent comments were in favour of keeping the article. Why, I'm not sure.
No, that was the CIA. Apparently every time some organization some people don't like edits Wikipedia, it's news, and grounds for a conspiracy theory. I'm not sure why.
But now with computers there is no reason to limit how much information goes into a wiki, especially for one hosted by a biggish organisation. The information has to be maintained. Vandalism and other unconstructive revisions have to be located and removed. Articles have to be kept up to date. Pages have to be styled and formatted to give a consistent feel to everything. Problems have to be identified and fixed. Issues have to be discussed, decisions made and implemented.
The limitation is not available space, but people, and the amount of time those people have.
The maintainers of Wikipedia really needs to ask themselves what they wants it to be. Do they want it to be an encyclopedia or does it want to be the source of all knowledge. It is long-established that it is the former, and not the latter; otherwise there would be no inclusion guidelines at all.
What the maintainers of Wikipedia need to do is settle on what should be included. Which is precisely what they are doing. And since many thousands of people actively maintain Wikipedia, and they don't all have identical viewpoints, some discussion is necessary.
For reasons I don't entirely understand, this discussion is apparently worthy of a Slashdot article. Strangely there is no corresponding story if, say, they're discussing what maintenance templates should look like or how process pages should be formatted.
Nor is it news if something like this happens anywhere other than Wikipedia, usually because in most organizations nobody knows about such internal things unless they work there.
Disk space is getting to the point where an encyclopedia could be built capable of containing the continuous typing of every human on earth for the rest of time. Not on Wikimedia's budget, it couldn't. Probably not even on Google's.
If you found an error in a printed encyclopedia and alerted them, it would be fixed in the next edition, in perhaps five years or so. If you found the error in Wikipedia you could fix it yourself there and then and, despite your claim, it would in all likelihood remain fixed, essentially, forever. Yes, it could be subject to transient vandalism, which would be reverted within seconds or sometimes even milliseconds.
Your claim that it is "impossible to find" accuracy is simply hyperbole. Read the main page right now; it tells you that "krill are shrimp-like marine invertebrate animals", which is true, that December 8 is Constitution Day in Romania, which is true, and that some guy has just shot a bunch people at a shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, which is, sadly, true. I just hit the "Random article" button and was told that "Stanford in the Vale is a large village with approximately 2,000 residents situated in the Vale of White Horse, Oxfordshire, England.", which is also true. While there are many errors, they nevertheless account for a very, very small proportion of the entire work.
"vandalism" (and still waiting for an acceptable definition of that) like that in the parent is not a problem. The definition that Wikipedia and its contributors use is any change that is intentionally unconstructive. Although not strictly included in such a definition, test edits are usually treated in a similar way.
If every Wikipedia article started with the words "Frist post!!!111oneone", contained a goatse link, several copy-and-paste trolls, at least three overused memes and a load of comments making bad analogies, your comparison might be valid.
Incompleteness is Incorrectness' evil twin. While true, even the largest collection of knowledge is an almost infinitesimally small sample of everything that is out there, and no general reference work can ever expect to be anywhere near "complete". If it came down to it, I'd have to say that incorrectness is by far the worst of the two.
It would be easy enough to create a publicly-readable, restricted-writable discussion forum for administrators inside Wikipedia space (and not on Wikia), and if all such discussion was public all the time, accusations and suspicions of conspiracy would cease. There is one. Here. Except that anyone can edit it because, you know, it's a wiki. Why would it be "restricted-writable"? Yet its existence doesn't seem to stop people whining.
What this article seems to hint at is that Wikipedia administrators, even a very small (but coordinated) subset of them, can have a significant impact on the pubic perception of issues and information that can move markets. Now you're getting yourself a little over-excited. I think you vastly overestimate the influence that a bunch of nerds sitting in front of computers can have on anything. On that note it's worth pointing out that, in the scale of things, your comment is worthless and nobody cares about it, as is this one, as is the -1, Troll moderation it will shortly be recieving.
Here is a graph showing requests over the past day. Pay attention to the scale; peak levels are around 45,000 requests per second. Slashdot's traffic in its entirety would barely be visible on that scale.
Simply, you run an app and whenever you go to wikipedia it routes through someone elses computer. I'll call it 'wikiproxia'. Then "someone else's computer" will be blocked instead. And you'll pretty quickly find yourself running out of someone elses sufficiently dumb to allow their IP address to be used for such things.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say the ideology is a bit different. Here is a video of them chanting "Death to America" at a political rally
And here is a video of John McCain singing "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran". Your point?
2^16 = 65536, not 63556.
System boot time is a function of many different factors, of which storage read and write speeds are only two.
Liars.
Uh... they're yellow.
Exactly. I'm not sure about "inadvertantly", either; seeing what happens to the search term over time is part of the fun of that comic and was almost certainly intentional. About the only part of the headline that makes sense is "xkcd"...
He's a mass communication "specialist", and his idea of communicating with the masses is making misspelt changes to Wikipedia? High school kids do that.
People also seem to confuse the initiation of such a discussion with the actual deletion of the page. Even if the discussion was initiated by some random newcomer and all subsequent comments were in favour of keeping the article. Why, I'm not sure.
No, that was the CIA. Apparently every time some organization some people don't like edits Wikipedia, it's news, and grounds for a conspiracy theory. I'm not sure why.
The limitation is not available space, but people, and the amount of time those people have.
If you found an error in a printed encyclopedia and alerted them, it would be fixed in the next edition, in perhaps five years or so. If you found the error in Wikipedia you could fix it yourself there and then and, despite your claim, it would in all likelihood remain fixed, essentially, forever. Yes, it could be subject to transient vandalism, which would be reverted within seconds or sometimes even milliseconds.
Your claim that it is "impossible to find" accuracy is simply hyperbole. Read the main page right now; it tells you that "krill are shrimp-like marine invertebrate animals", which is true, that December 8 is Constitution Day in Romania, which is true, and that some guy has just shot a bunch people at a shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, which is, sadly, true. I just hit the "Random article" button and was told that "Stanford in the Vale is a large village with approximately 2,000 residents situated in the Vale of White Horse, Oxfordshire, England.", which is also true. While there are many errors, they nevertheless account for a very, very small proportion of the entire work.
If every Wikipedia article started with the words "Frist post!!!111oneone", contained a goatse link, several copy-and-paste trolls, at least three overused memes and a load of comments making bad analogies, your comparison might be valid.
In such cases the page isn't deleted but redirected to the merged article.
Hey, I found one here.
Grow up. Please.
Here is a graph showing requests over the past day. Pay attention to the scale; peak levels are around 45,000 requests per second. Slashdot's traffic in its entirety would barely be visible on that scale.