Wikipedia (and related sites) is aiming at this point to be standard reference. That's high up there on serious and pretentious. I don't see anything wrong with them taking the job seriously at this point.
Beating Britannica has consequences and one of them is what they say is treated with weight, and should be.
That would be good. But things are going to have to get a lot lot worse before a fork will be successful. Moderately troubled is not good enough to get a successful fork going. End users at this point haven't seen how much deletionism has hurt the encyclopedia.
How is a computer churning through billions of pages going to settle the issue of individual pages relative to one another? If you run a good site on a topic get linked from the wikipedia page.
As for the need for wikipedia articles, compiling information takes days.
No it doesn't. Lets keep our critique honest here. The bar on vandalism is pretty high. There are not many people who were adding bad content once blocked for vandalism. OTOH what does happen is people get 3RRed for bad content or start vandalizing after bad content is rejected.
North Korea and Cuba were both attacking and subject to sanctions. On the other hand democratic socialist countries like Denmark, Germany, Norway.... are the most well-off places in the world.
They actually had a mechanism for this called mediation cabal where people who were not involved in the dispute could administrate disputes on content. It was starting to work wonderfully and the model was spreading.
But.... it didn't have strong support from leadership who and the old guard (IRC) killed it.
Wikipedia review has clearly crossed the line when it comes to critique of wikipedia. But generally terrorism is the response to a government that doesn't offer legitimate redress of grievances. And there are lots of grievances about the way wikipedia is governed.
Many closed communities that have developed an insular culture have the notion of "external review" or "civilian review boards". I think wikipedia desperate needs a group of outsiders to the hierarchy who can review grievances and policy issues.
And I disagree with you strongly that RFCs, RfArbs, ANI... work well. These processes chew people up everyday for no good reason.
They openly admit that. The very first sentence is the verifiability policy (one of the core 3) is, "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truthâ"that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true. "
The verifiability policy is a good one. An expert can just post their own website and then site that. The "experts" on wikipedia are not leaders in the field but the "unemployed PhDs" that is the 2nd or 3rd tier. Allowing a 1st tier person to show up and declare truth when not accepted by the community they belong is disempowering to the people who write wikipedia.
In terms of the politics, wikipedia is an obnoxious spiteful community. The community needs a tremendous amount of work of issues of manners and etiquette and depoliticizing it. I wouldn't say wikipedia is a failure because of this environment but it does interfere with bringing new people on board.
What you are talking about is sabotage more than vandalism. That is inserting plausible but false information into articles. With popular/sem-popular articles or technical that (when it happens by accident) does get caught. With unpopular articles it might remain for a while. But that type of "vandalism" isn't common. I don't remember seeing much intentional sabotage.
They probably did try it. And it mostly worked, had lots of new features and way more bugs.
OK now what do you do:
1) Go with 3.5 and be considered as "slow to release". And remember we are talking years not months. For example Debian stable, Enterprise Linuxes and OpenBSD frequently choose this option.
2) Go with 4.0 and have a buggy implementation that doesn't work as well. What most of the desktop linux are OK with.
3) Support both and double to quadruple the complexity of supporting an integrated system. Slackware for example can do this because 2x almost nothing is still almost nothing, for the rest?
Where did you get your hands on a development kernel by mistake? Most of the distributions didn't have development kernels until very late. I was around for the 2.0 to 2.1 switch and it wasn't until 2.1.126 or something like that that any of the distributions used it. So I'm assuming you compiled your own from source you pulled off Linus' site? Well yeah that's going to be unstable for an open source package.
As for why they called it 4.0 and not 3.0 I agree. And I have no question it deserved a major version upgrade. It just deserved to be marked alpha (4.0) or beta (4.1) 4.2 should be the "4.0 release" version.
Yes distributions are supposed to look deeper. But they have a problem. Once KDE releases under 4.0 they are expected to include it. Which means they have 3 options:
1) Go with 3.5 and be considered as "slow to release". And remember we are talking years not months. For example Debian stable, Enterprise Linuxes and OpenBSD frequently choose this option.
2) Go with 4.0 and have a buggy implementation that doesn't work as well. What most of the desktop linux are OK with.
3) Support both and double to quadruple the complexity of supporting an integrated system. Slackware for example can do this because 2x almost nothing is still almost nothing.
Fedora likes state of the art and doesn't care as much care about bugs in versions that will get cleaned up so (2) was natural. Kubuntu is aimed at people who a less integrated experience because they demand KDE so again (2) is natural. I think they made the right choice given their bad options. But it was the KDE group who created those options.
I also think 4.2 is well beyond an Alpha at this point.
The KDE group made a mistake, they now have a reputation for low quality that will hang around for a decade. On the other hand their technology is well more advanced than Gnome and as those technologies turn into end user advantages they will get a lot of praise for having great features that Gnome doesn't.
The KDE culture has always been defensive about mistakes. When Debian legal came down with the judgment that given the current licensing distributing KDE was a copyright violation for anyone but KDE they argued this was nonsense or not that important.
That they had "fucked up" in taking licensing issues this unseriously for a major product never occurred to them. But they also learned their lesson and their licensing has gotten more and more sensible with time. Till at this point they are in a better position than Gnome, and Gnome was arguably created because of KDE's licensing.
They realized how badly they screwed up. Opensource projects with high viability that want to take on ambitious updates that are going to take a long time have a tough time. The moment you announce a new version is coming excitement starts to build. If they don't release it is considered vaporware (like the comments about Perl6, even though huge chunks of Perl6 work). The big distributions (and Linux users in general) tend to follow current code, so if you release buggy versions that's what people use and you get a reputation for bad quality. Finally if you fork off and just give the product a new name everyone complains we need 2.
Linus had a great idea with supporting at the same time a "productionish" version of the product and a "developerish" version both receiving regular updates. It was a good model. And given the complexity of KDE perhaps one they should follow.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia (and related sites) is aiming at this point to be standard reference. That's high up there on serious and pretentious. I don't see anything wrong with them taking the job seriously at this point.
Beating Britannica has consequences and one of them is what they say is treated with weight, and should be.
That would be good. But things are going to have to get a lot lot worse before a fork will be successful. Moderately troubled is not good enough to get a successful fork going. End users at this point haven't seen how much deletionism has hurt the encyclopedia.
Why? You would contribute to a page and then it would show up within a day or two with your changes.
How is a computer churning through billions of pages going to settle the issue of individual pages relative to one another? If you run a good site on a topic get linked from the wikipedia page.
As for the need for wikipedia articles, compiling information takes days.
No it doesn't. Lets keep our critique honest here. The bar on vandalism is pretty high. There are not many people who were adding bad content once blocked for vandalism. OTOH what does happen is people get 3RRed for bad content or start vandalizing after bad content is rejected.
I don't think that's true. I think he is quite happy that either one worked out. Larry Sanger OTOH is much more concerned so he founded
http://en.citizendium.org/
North Korea and Cuba were both attacking and subject to sanctions. On the other hand democratic socialist countries like Denmark, Germany, Norway.... are the most well-off places in the world.
Compare conservapedia to wikipedia and tell me which site takes evidence more seriously and examines the information more carefully.
Wikipedia I think represents the politics of the English speaking world pretty well.
They actually had a mechanism for this called mediation cabal where people who were not involved in the dispute could administrate disputes on content. It was starting to work wonderfully and the model was spreading.
But.... it didn't have strong support from leadership who and the old guard (IRC) killed it.
Agreed. Deletionism is out of control.
Wikipedia review has clearly crossed the line when it comes to critique of wikipedia. But generally terrorism is the response to a government that doesn't offer legitimate redress of grievances. And there are lots of grievances about the way wikipedia is governed.
Many closed communities that have developed an insular culture have the notion of "external review" or "civilian review boards". I think wikipedia desperate needs a group of outsiders to the hierarchy who can review grievances and policy issues.
And I disagree with you strongly that RFCs, RfArbs, ANI... work well. These processes chew people up everyday for no good reason.
There are no clear fiction notability criteria. When I tried to get a conversation going so the criteria where clear I got shot down.
Fiction has been around for thousands of years.
Put an article on your blog about your mud. Make sure the blog is associated with your name. Authors are reliable sources on their own creations.
They openly admit that. The very first sentence is the verifiability policy (one of the core 3) is, "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truthâ"that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true. "
I don't know the specifics of the comics issue but I would agree that deletionism has gotten way out of hand on wikipedia.
Has it been published in a book? Has it been cited in other articles as a preprint? Is it cited in thesis that have been published?
If not than it is a theory/information that has been rejected by the community. Encyclopedias are in the summary not the truth business.
I think there are really two issues here:
1) The verifiability policy.
2) The politics
The verifiability policy is a good one. An expert can just post their own website and then site that. The "experts" on wikipedia are not leaders in the field but the "unemployed PhDs" that is the 2nd or 3rd tier. Allowing a 1st tier person to show up and declare truth when not accepted by the community they belong is disempowering to the people who write wikipedia.
In terms of the politics, wikipedia is an obnoxious spiteful community. The community needs a tremendous amount of work of issues of manners and etiquette and depoliticizing it. I wouldn't say wikipedia is a failure because of this environment but it does interfere with bringing new people on board.
What you are talking about is sabotage more than vandalism. That is inserting plausible but false information into articles. With popular/sem-popular articles or technical that (when it happens by accident) does get caught. With unpopular articles it might remain for a while. But that type of "vandalism" isn't common. I don't remember seeing much intentional sabotage.
If you are agreeing to be self supporting (i.e. there is an IT guy on staff who is specifying the configuration) they will do it in ranges like 1500.
I doubt it was graphics card but almost any other device makes sense. 2.2 had way more device support than 2.0.
OK anyway, that was a difficult position but in general when you pull from the developer builds for any open source package....
The linux example is clear. There are a variety of kernel trees with different criteria. As far as Firefox I'm not sure if I understand what you mean.
They probably did try it. And it mostly worked, had lots of new features and way more bugs.
OK now what do you do:
1) Go with 3.5 and be considered as "slow to release". And remember we are talking years not months. For example Debian stable, Enterprise Linuxes and OpenBSD frequently choose this option.
2) Go with 4.0 and have a buggy implementation that doesn't work as well. What most of the desktop linux are OK with.
3) Support both and double to quadruple the complexity of supporting an integrated system. Slackware for example can do this because 2x almost nothing is still almost nothing, for the rest?
They haven't done that in years.
Where did you get your hands on a development kernel by mistake? Most of the distributions didn't have development kernels until very late. I was around for the 2.0 to 2.1 switch and it wasn't until 2.1.126 or something like that that any of the distributions used it. So I'm assuming you compiled your own from source you pulled off Linus' site? Well yeah that's going to be unstable for an open source package.
As for why they called it 4.0 and not 3.0 I agree. And I have no question it deserved a major version upgrade. It just deserved to be marked alpha (4.0) or beta (4.1) 4.2 should be the "4.0 release" version.
Yes distributions are supposed to look deeper. But they have a problem. Once KDE releases under 4.0 they are expected to include it. Which means they have 3 options:
1) Go with 3.5 and be considered as "slow to release". And remember we are talking years not months. For example Debian stable, Enterprise Linuxes and OpenBSD frequently choose this option.
2) Go with 4.0 and have a buggy implementation that doesn't work as well. What most of the desktop linux are OK with.
3) Support both and double to quadruple the complexity of supporting an integrated system. Slackware for example can do this because 2x almost nothing is still almost nothing.
Fedora likes state of the art and doesn't care as much care about bugs in versions that will get cleaned up so (2) was natural. Kubuntu is aimed at people who a less integrated experience because they demand KDE so again (2) is natural. I think they made the right choice given their bad options. But it was the KDE group who created those options.
I also think 4.2 is well beyond an Alpha at this point.
The KDE group made a mistake, they now have a reputation for low quality that will hang around for a decade. On the other hand their technology is well more advanced than Gnome and as those technologies turn into end user advantages they will get a lot of praise for having great features that Gnome doesn't.
The KDE culture has always been defensive about mistakes. When Debian legal came down with the judgment that given the current licensing distributing KDE was a copyright violation for anyone but KDE they argued this was nonsense or not that important.
That they had "fucked up" in taking licensing issues this unseriously for a major product never occurred to them. But they also learned their lesson and their licensing has gotten more and more sensible with time. Till at this point they are in a better position than Gnome, and Gnome was arguably created because of KDE's licensing.
They realized how badly they screwed up. Opensource projects with high viability that want to take on ambitious updates that are going to take a long time have a tough time. The moment you announce a new version is coming excitement starts to build. If they don't release it is considered vaporware (like the comments about Perl6, even though huge chunks of Perl6 work). The big distributions (and Linux users in general) tend to follow current code, so if you release buggy versions that's what people use and you get a reputation for bad quality. Finally if you fork off and just give the product a new name everyone complains we need 2.
Linus had a great idea with supporting at the same time a "productionish" version of the product and a "developerish" version both receiving regular updates. It was a good model. And given the complexity of KDE perhaps one they should follow.