Sorry, I should stress that we (and I think I can say "we" here) do work very hard indeed to make Wikipedia as good and useful as we can. What we cannot do - obviously, by its nature - is guarantee quality. We're just people, doing our best. That's mostly way good enough, but we must caution the reader to keep their wits about them.
(At the moment, the thing MediaWiki most lacks is good coders - people who can do database programming to a MySQL database in PHP, efficiently enough to run a top-10 website which is nonprofit and hence broke by definition. CODERS WANTED!)
"Oh the horror. Just imagine if Wikipedia was written only by people who knew what they were talking about. Terrors like that keep me up at night."
Citizendium.org is trying to write such an encyclopedia. It's a small project, but it's pretty active already. It'll be interesting to see how it goes - there's got to be more than one way to do this, after all. See if it interests you.
"Personally, I'm astonished that Wikipedia hasn't done this from the beginning."
All the Wikipedias other than English have had this in place already. It's just that the flood of spammers has been so bad on English Wikipedia we've finally had to put it on there too.
"If somebody were really intent on "overgrazing" wikipedia, automated troll-bots would have no difficulty spewing crap all over it faster than the community could work to revert it. I'll be honest, I'm surprised I haven't seen more if it already."
You will be utterly unsurprised to know this happens already...
In general, any obvious objection to the idea of a wiki encyclopedia already happens and is already dealt with day to day. We have a ridiculous array of spambots and vandalbots already attacking Wikipedia and trying to turn it to their use, never mind our work trying to write an encyclopedia. So we have an EQUALLY ridiculous array of antivandalbots to deal with these things as needed. Our immune system is quite frightening to contemplate at times...
MediaWiki needs developers. If someone can write something to do this, cleanly enough that it passes the developers' exacting code standards (when you run a top-10 website on PHP and MySQL, you need to know what you're doing), please contribute!
We're not 'reliable' and we don't claim to be. This is important: we don't save the reader the trouble of having to think when reading.
Most of the complaints that 'Wikipedia isn't reliable' appear to be complaints that we haven't saved them the trouble of thinking. I have to say: too bad. It's useful or it wouldn't be a top 10 site. But it's just written by people. Keep your wits about you as you would reading any website. We work to keep it useful, but if you see something that strikes you as odd, check the references and check the history and check the talk page.
Wikipedia does not save the reader from having to think.
My Wikipedia user page makes me the number one hit on "David Gerard" (with and without quotes) because I use it as the link when responding to blog quotes about Wikipedia (in my role as volunteer press contact). I finally beat the Dutch painter!
Jimbo is the president of Wikia and the founder of Wikipedia. These are separate and distinct roles.
Speaking as a Wikipedia press volunteer, it's a goddamn nightmare keeping them separate in press perception. Because Jimbo is Mr Wikipedia, so even though Wikia is COMPLETELY UNASSOCIATED with Wikipedia, they keep conflating the two.
I ask that Slashdot not perpetuate this. Jimbo asked this as the founder of Wikipedia and the Final Authority on English Wikipedia, and Brion (the technical lead and Final Authority on MediaWiki) switched it on.
May I say also that we've been watching the spamming shitbags^W^WSEO experts bitch and whine about it, and it's deeply reassured us this was absolutely the right decision. We would ask Google to penalise links from Wikipedia, except the SEO experts^W^Wspamming shitbags would just try to fuck up each other's ranking by spamming their competitors.
To the spammers: I commend to you the wisdom of Saint Bill Hicks: "If you're a marketer, just kill yourself. Seriously."
The practical objection to ads on Wikipedia - one you don't cover above - is that if Wikipedia puts ads on then large chunks of the writing and editing community will just get up and leave. Volunteer motivation is annoyingly fragile.
The market for Wine is people who have one piece of obscure Windows crapware they have to use for whatever reason, and they can't find the original programmer or company at all, let alone to ask them for support. Current versions of Wine are getting better and better at this stuff.
I speak from experience - we use Wine at work, on production systems, to run awful Win32 software from a company that's gone broke that we're stuck with to keep going on. Replacement of the crapware is a year off at least.
No, it's the sixteen year old babyg*ths who are congealed out of Slimelight slime. Like a nasturtium growing out of a New Rock. That's why they look so young - they only spontaneously congealed a few weeks before - and why they look so utterly trashed at 7:30am chuckout time.
Yeah. Now if a meteor hit Slimelight there'd be no games for six months. Rockstar in particular would be broke the following week. All the sysadmins go to B-Movie now;-)
("I feel I can retire from Microsoft with the joy of finally having released the software that I, and Microsoft as a whole, have worked towards for thirty years." - Bill Gates)
Bantown is part of the LJDrama/Encyclopedia Dramatica group. Remember the Craigslist asshole? Them. I'm amazed anyone working for Sixapart is allowed to speak to anyone from LJDrama/ED.
The Linux pride, or simply pride, campaign of the open source movement has three main premises:
* that all people of all computing orientations should be proud, not ashamed, of being young white middle-class Linux-geek men;
* that computing diversity is a gift to young white middle-class Linux-geek men;
* that computing orientation and operating system type are inherent, unless of course you dual-boot Windows and FreeBSD and are therefore only fooling yourself.
Pride Parades are held worldwide, wherein young male white middle-class Linux geeks of all colours, ages, operating system types and backgrounds can walk down the centre of the main street of their city and commemorate the original Stallmanwall printer driver riots.
Many parades still have at least some of the original political or activist character, especially in less Linux-positive settings. However, in more Linux-positive cities, the parades take on an installfest-like character. Large parades often involve floats, coders, Mountain Dew, venture capitalists, and amplified music; but even such celebratory parades usually include political and educational contingents, such as local politicians and marching groups from open source institutions of various kinds. In some countries, Linux parades are now also called Linux Pride Install Festivals.
Even the most festive parades usually offer some aspect dedicated to remembering victims of Stallmanwall and anti-Linux FUD. Some particularly important Linux parades are funded by governments and corporate sponsors, and promoted as major tourist attractions for the cities that host them. Other typical parade participants include local Linux-friendly churches such as Emacs Community Churches and BSD Universalist Churches, PFLAB (Parents and Friends of Linux and BSD), and the nerd employee associations from large businesses.
Though the Stallmanwall riots themselves as well as the immediate and the ongoing political organizing that occurred following them were events that were fully participated in by BSD users, X11 people and future Sun founders as well as by white middle-class male Linux users of all races, genders and backgrounds, historically these events were first named Linux, the word at that time being used in a more generic sense to cover the entire spectrum of what is now variously called the Red Hat, SuSE or Debian community.
By the late '80s and early '90s, as many of the actual participants had grown older, moved on to other issues or passed away, this led to misunderstandings as to who had actually participated in the Stallmanwall riots, who had actually organized the subsequent demonstrations, marches and memorials and who had been members of early activist organizations such as the Linux Liberation Front and Linux Activists Alliance.
But eventually the language caught up with the reality of the community and the names have become more accurate and inclusive, though these changes met with initial resistance from some in their own communities who were unaware of the actual historical facts. Changing first to Linux and BSD, today most are called GNU/Linux/X11/KDE/GNOME/Mozilla/gcc (GLXKGMg) Pride Parades. But only by the sort of geeks even the other geeks don't want to hang out with.
Remember: just because you have a personal coding output of zero doesn't mean that you can't take full credit for the programming genius of others for a lifestyle of Slashdot, caffeine and masturbation.
And believe me, you haven't lived until you've seen twenty Linux geeks clad only in silver jockstraps.
It's actually worth a try. You are correct that the sticking point for getting off Windows is the weird little proprietary apps that are years old and you can't even find the programmer or company any more, but some business process absolutely requires this one opaque binary to keep working. Wine is actually getting better at running these, to my pleased surprise - which takes it from an interesting alpha to an early beta. It's hardly guaranteed to run J. Random Crapware, but it's certainly worth a spin.
If you think the Linux kernel is uncontroversial, you should see the edit history of the Wikipedia article... fighting back the advocates who don't understand and really couldn't care about Neutral Point Of View (think of it as the intellectual "view from 20,000 feet") from turning the article into the sort of advocacy even Slashdot posters got over five years ago. It made me want to go edit uncontroversial and easy-going areas, like Israel-Palestine.
Ah, yeah, I think I see what you mean. I think the concept you're after is the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Jimbo has said that the story of Nupedia vs Wikipedia is completely CatB.
(By the way, I wrote most of the present version of that article two years ago, and it's substantially the same.)
The open content license means "Use our stuff! And we can use your changes to it too." The Wikimedia Foundation has commented that they're happy for there to be more open content sources out there, because that's good for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I should stress that we (and I think I can say "we" here) do work very hard indeed to make Wikipedia as good and useful as we can. What we cannot do - obviously, by its nature - is guarantee quality. We're just people, doing our best. That's mostly way good enough, but we must caution the reader to keep their wits about them.
The actual problem is spammers. If you can cure that problem, you will win a Nobel Prize, fame and all the cocaine and chicks you can deal with.
There are all sorts of ideas on how to abstract a "reliable" subset of Wikipedia. Someone just has to bother, really.
(At the moment, the thing MediaWiki most lacks is good coders - people who can do database programming to a MySQL database in PHP, efficiently enough to run a top-10 website which is nonprofit and hence broke by definition. CODERS WANTED!)
Citizendium.org is trying to write such an encyclopedia. It's a small project, but it's pretty active already. It'll be interesting to see how it goes - there's got to be more than one way to do this, after all. See if it interests you.
All the Wikipedias other than English have had this in place already. It's just that the flood of spammers has been so bad on English Wikipedia we've finally had to put it on there too.
...
In general, any obvious objection to the idea of a wiki encyclopedia already happens and is already dealt with day to day. We have a ridiculous array of spambots and vandalbots already attacking Wikipedia and trying to turn it to their use, never mind our work trying to write an encyclopedia. So we have an EQUALLY ridiculous array of antivandalbots to deal with these things as needed. Our immune system is quite frightening to contemplate at timesYou will be utterly unsurprised to know this happens already
MediaWiki needs developers. If someone can write something to do this, cleanly enough that it passes the developers' exacting code standards (when you run a top-10 website on PHP and MySQL, you need to know what you're doing), please contribute!
Thanks for your interest in writing an encyclopedia! As opposed to spamming your site.
Most of the complaints that 'Wikipedia isn't reliable' appear to be complaints that we haven't saved them the trouble of thinking. I have to say: too bad. It's useful or it wouldn't be a top 10 site. But it's just written by people. Keep your wits about you as you would reading any website. We work to keep it useful, but if you see something that strikes you as odd, check the references and check the history and check the talk page.
Wikipedia does not save the reader from having to think.
My Wikipedia user page makes me the number one hit on "David Gerard" (with and without quotes) because I use it as the link when responding to blog quotes about Wikipedia (in my role as volunteer press contact). I finally beat the Dutch painter!
Speaking as a Wikipedia press volunteer, it's a goddamn nightmare keeping them separate in press perception. Because Jimbo is Mr Wikipedia, so even though Wikia is COMPLETELY UNASSOCIATED with Wikipedia, they keep conflating the two.
I ask that Slashdot not perpetuate this. Jimbo asked this as the founder of Wikipedia and the Final Authority on English Wikipedia, and Brion (the technical lead and Final Authority on MediaWiki) switched it on.
May I say also that we've been watching the spamming shitbags^W^WSEO experts bitch and whine about it, and it's deeply reassured us this was absolutely the right decision. We would ask Google to penalise links from Wikipedia, except the SEO experts^W^Wspamming shitbags would just try to fuck up each other's ranking by spamming their competitors.
To the spammers: I commend to you the wisdom of Saint Bill Hicks: "If you're a marketer, just kill yourself. Seriously."
The practical objection to ads on Wikipedia - one you don't cover above - is that if Wikipedia puts ads on then large chunks of the writing and editing community will just get up and leave. Volunteer motivation is annoyingly fragile.
I speak from experience - we use Wine at work, on production systems, to run awful Win32 software from a company that's gone broke that we're stuck with to keep going on. Replacement of the crapware is a year off at least.
No, it's the sixteen year old babyg*ths who are congealed out of Slimelight slime. Like a nasturtium growing out of a New Rock. That's why they look so young - they only spontaneously congealed a few weeks before - and why they look so utterly trashed at 7:30am chuckout time.
Yeah. Now if a meteor hit Slimelight there'd be no games for six months. Rockstar in particular would be broke the following week. All the sysadmins go to B-Movie now ;-)
("I feel I can retire from Microsoft with the joy of finally having released the software that I, and Microsoft as a whole, have worked towards for thirty years." - Bill Gates)
http://www.rawilson.com/ - same PayPal address, the author's own site.
Bantown is part of the LJDrama/Encyclopedia Dramatica group. Remember the Craigslist asshole? Them. I'm amazed anyone working for Sixapart is allowed to speak to anyone from LJDrama/ED.
The Linux pride, or simply pride, campaign of the open source movement has three main premises:
* that all people of all computing orientations should be proud, not ashamed, of being young white middle-class Linux-geek men;
* that computing diversity is a gift to young white middle-class Linux-geek men;
* that computing orientation and operating system type are inherent, unless of course you dual-boot Windows and FreeBSD and are therefore only fooling yourself.
Pride Parades are held worldwide, wherein young male white middle-class Linux geeks of all colours, ages, operating system types and backgrounds can walk down the centre of the main street of their city and commemorate the original Stallmanwall printer driver riots.
Many parades still have at least some of the original political or activist character, especially in less Linux-positive settings. However, in more Linux-positive cities, the parades take on an installfest-like character. Large parades often involve floats, coders, Mountain Dew, venture capitalists, and amplified music; but even such celebratory parades usually include political and educational contingents, such as local politicians and marching groups from open source institutions of various kinds. In some countries, Linux parades are now also called Linux Pride Install Festivals.
Even the most festive parades usually offer some aspect dedicated to remembering victims of Stallmanwall and anti-Linux FUD. Some particularly important Linux parades are funded by governments and corporate sponsors, and promoted as major tourist attractions for the cities that host them. Other typical parade participants include local Linux-friendly churches such as Emacs Community Churches and BSD Universalist Churches, PFLAB (Parents and Friends of Linux and BSD), and the nerd employee associations from large businesses.
Though the Stallmanwall riots themselves as well as the immediate and the ongoing political organizing that occurred following them were events that were fully participated in by BSD users, X11 people and future Sun founders as well as by white middle-class male Linux users of all races, genders and backgrounds, historically these events were first named Linux, the word at that time being used in a more generic sense to cover the entire spectrum of what is now variously called the Red Hat, SuSE or Debian community.
By the late '80s and early '90s, as many of the actual participants had grown older, moved on to other issues or passed away, this led to misunderstandings as to who had actually participated in the Stallmanwall riots, who had actually organized the subsequent demonstrations, marches and memorials and who had been members of early activist organizations such as the Linux Liberation Front and Linux Activists Alliance.
But eventually the language caught up with the reality of the community and the names have become more accurate and inclusive, though these changes met with initial resistance from some in their own communities who were unaware of the actual historical facts. Changing first to Linux and BSD, today most are called GNU/Linux/X11/KDE/GNOME/Mozilla/gcc (GLXKGMg) Pride Parades. But only by the sort of geeks even the other geeks don't want to hang out with.
Remember: just because you have a personal coding output of zero doesn't mean that you can't take full credit for the programming genius of others for a lifestyle of Slashdot, caffeine and masturbation.
And believe me, you haven't lived until you've seen twenty Linux geeks clad only in silver jockstraps.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Linux_Pride
It's actually worth a try. You are correct that the sticking point for getting off Windows is the weird little proprietary apps that are years old and you can't even find the programmer or company any more, but some business process absolutely requires this one opaque binary to keep working. Wine is actually getting better at running these, to my pleased surprise - which takes it from an interesting alpha to an early beta. It's hardly guaranteed to run J. Random Crapware, but it's certainly worth a spin.
If you think the Linux kernel is uncontroversial, you should see the edit history of the Wikipedia article ... fighting back the advocates who don't understand and really couldn't care about Neutral Point Of View (think of it as the intellectual "view from 20,000 feet") from turning the article into the sort of advocacy even Slashdot posters got over five years ago. It made me want to go edit uncontroversial and easy-going areas, like Israel-Palestine.
(By the way, I wrote most of the present version of that article two years ago, and it's substantially the same.)
Well, looking at your edit history I can see why you're pissed off. Oh wait, I can't, because you gave no evidence whatsoever.
The open content license means "Use our stuff! And we can use your changes to it too." The Wikimedia Foundation has commented that they're happy for there to be more open content sources out there, because that's good for everyone.