Wikipedia has many, many problems, but this is not one of them. An encyclopedia project has to reflect the current state of knowledge, regardless of where it's published. You can't just leave out all the bits that aren't Open Access.
Well said. Here is another example of Wikipedia re-writing history with the new, Wikipedia-based version, being regurgitated by Associated Press, among many others. Never mind that an innocent basketball player was defamed.
The Bhutanese Passport hoaxer, by the way, also worked on other "projects" that promptly infected Google's "Knowledge Vault", like all these Wikipedia hoaxes do.
Some of these hoaxes have entered academic literature. In such cases, Wikipedia actually destroys knowledge.
Wikipedians do seem to operate on the assumption that existing content, even if completely made up, is somehow superior to any recent change, as though content gained legitimate merit and factuality simply by being in Wikipedia. There was a concrete example of this in the edit history of the Thoreau case mentioned in the Washington Post article. The hoaxer had made up a reference to make their nonsense stick. When the hoaxer later himself tried to delete the hoax again, another Wikipedian REVERTED them, saying, "Rv; the information is referenced; if you say it's wrong, prove it." Just because the content had been on Wikipedia for a few months, it was assumed it must be correct. Discussed in more detail here.
I believe quite a bit of development work has gone into Wikipedia Zero (and into mobile generally, which is the Wikimedia Foundation's major growth sector, as desktop pageviews are going down). At present, the WMF staff and contractors page shows one Director of Mobile Partnerships, and four mobile partner managers. I don't know how much developer time Wikipedia Zero currently claims. There is also a project to get Wikipedia articles to subscribers via SMS. ("The Wikimedia Foundation added that it partnered with the Praekelt Foundation, a South African nonprofit with expertise in text messaging, to develop the necessary technology for the project.") Of course, SMS delivery seems like the worst possible format for article delivery, in terms of enabling a reader to assess a Wikipedia article's sourcing.
It's debatable. I appreciate there are two ways you can see this, but I believe band-aids like this are self-serving and ultimately slow progress towards that "eventual" point down. I'd rather see the Wikimedia Foundation putting their weight (and millions) behind AccessNow and EFF on this.
The school had a multi-million-dollar advertising and legal budget, and created a chilling effect. At one point, they even got government websites warning about the school censored.
Maheshwar Peri and other journalists who went up against them took a tremendous personal financial risk. As the Newsweek article makes clear, they were sued repeatedly, and had to defend each case. See also Siddhartha Deb's story: Siddhartha Deb’s Publishing Odyssey, ‘Why I Took On Arindam Chaudhuri’.
The stark truth is that Wikipedia was part of the problem here, not the solution. This is in part due to Wikipedia's own chilling atmosphere towards critics, a topic discussed right now on Jimmy Wales' talk page.
Whistle-blowers taking on an admin run a significant risk of being sanctioned themselves under some pretext like "battlefield conduct" or "incivility".
It's a band aid that ultimately benefits Wikimedia more than users, just like the equivalent Facebook Zero programme. A source that is as error-prone and vulnerable to manipulation as Wikipedia shouldn't be the only source people in these countries have access to.
They should at least have access to a broad range of news outlets, Google Scholar and Google Books. Zero-rated programmes diminish rather than increase the chances of that happening, perpetuating rather than ending the digital divide and treating people in the developing world as second-class citizens that are fed crumbs from the first world's table.
No. See Wikipedia Zero. "For many readers in the Global South, the primary (and often only) access to the internet is via mobile. However, mobile data costs are a significant barrier to internet usage. We created Wikipedia Zero so that everyone can access all the free knowledge on Wikipedia, even if they can't afford the mobile data charges."
There are lots of Wikipedia admins who are social entrepreneurs of one form or another. This should be clear if you think about the fact that they are not getting paid for this. Sure there are idealists; but there are also lots of admins who get their reward out of the fact that they can use Wikipedia to influence public opinion – via the top Google search result – in line with their social, commercial or political agenda, and do so anonymously. No one should be surprised by this. You get what you pay for.
It's not so easy. With Wikipedia Zero and Facebook Zero, tens of millions of Indians in rural areas do not have access to anything else. They get Wikipedia and Facebook free as part of their mobile phone deal, but would need an expensive data plan to access anything else on the Internet. The situation is the same in many other third-world countries. What you have then a is a large captive audience who can only consume Wikipedia, but cannot check its sources or access alternative sources. Hence the concerns voiced by AccessNow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation about Facebook and Wikipedia becoming gatekeepers: keeping information out as much as bringing information in. The potential for manipulation is stupendous, because only political and business elites will have read-write access to Wikipedia. This case illustrates why people in developing countries need affordable access to the entire internet, not a Wikipedia and Facebook band aid.
Lots of examples. Article talk page and subpage working areas where people collaboratively create an organised list of source quotes, or post draft paragraphs in wikitext for discussion and subsequent transfer to the article. Votes, polls and requests for comment, for example to decide which of several possible image files to use. Customised user talk pages. Talk pages that exceed three indent levels (the maximum allowed in Flow) are very common, and if you've ever tried to have an intricate discussion on Facebook (vs., say, Reddit, which has excellent indenting), you'll appreciate the benefits. Present talk pages are very flexible and handle all such uses very well. Flow not so much.
Here is a tweet showing what the e-mails look like: https://twitter.com/williampie... Wales says there is an opt-out. You can write to him.:) Let us know how you are getting on.
Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!
Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!
Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!
Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!
Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!
Etc.
Or simply look at this graph. The reserve they shoot for is a function of the spending, and the spending is a function of how much money they have.
They still want to "scale up" much more. And they can *always* justify that they need a bigger reserve next year than this year by spending more in this year. So it's always just "prudent and sensible" to ask for more money than last year, whether the money was spent sensibly or not.
I don't think anyone minds if they spend more, if there is a commensurate benefit to the end user, such as enhanced quality and reliability, and readers are told honestly what their donations are supposed to fund. But 1. product quality has been lacking, and 2. none of this is about "keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free" as the banner implies. The more they spend on paid staff, the smaller the proportion of their budget concerned with that actually becomes.
Just for a laugh, listen to Jimmy Wales speaking in 2005 about hosting, server and bandwidth costs. (Yes, articles are longer today, page views are 15 times higher than in 2005, but on the other hand bandwidth has become cheaper and there are economies of scale.)
These already exist. Wikiwand is one, and there are many other less sophisticated mirrors that do not make much of an impact, as they have poor Google rankings. It's partly why the Wikimedia Foundation feels it has to expand and professionalise its software engineering effort: the Wikipedia interface looks very dated today, and as Wikipedia content is free, anyone can host it. And if anyone does it better than the Wikimedia Foundation itself, it's conceivable that readers will flock elsewhere, leaving the Foundation in the lurch. The fact that Google includes data from Wikipedia in its Knowledge Graph (the information panel on the right that appears when you Google a word) is already having an impact on Wikipedia pageviews.
... and yet that's what is named in the banner punchline as the reason for the donations request, as though they didn't have enough money to pay for the servers any more.
What upsets me – and other volunteers – most is the "keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year" punchline in these banners. It's emotional manipulation, because it makes people think that Wikipedia is *lacking* funds to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year. That's ludicrously false, and it's not how a charity championing transparency should behave. It seems to me they're simply follow their Darwinian A/B testing and always plump for the banner that gets in more money per hour.
Apart from that, there is the issue of how the money is actually spent, and whether the spending has a tangible benefit for the end user. That's another big issue in its own right. There are weaknesses there too (see also this edit by Jimmy Wales – look for the words "miserable cost/benefit ratio"), but it's a separate issue from the banner wording.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia has many, many problems, but this is not one of them. An encyclopedia project has to reflect the current state of knowledge, regardless of where it's published. You can't just leave out all the bits that aren't Open Access.
For background on the Brazilian aardvark and the citogenesis phenomenon see the original New Yorker story and How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia
Well said. Here is another example of Wikipedia re-writing history with the new, Wikipedia-based version, being regurgitated by Associated Press, among many others. Never mind that an innocent basketball player was defamed.
The Bhutanese Passport hoaxer, by the way, also worked on other "projects" that promptly infected Google's "Knowledge Vault", like all these Wikipedia hoaxes do.
Some of these hoaxes have entered academic literature. In such cases, Wikipedia actually destroys knowledge.
Wikipedians do seem to operate on the assumption that existing content, even if completely made up, is somehow superior to any recent change, as though content gained legitimate merit and factuality simply by being in Wikipedia. There was a concrete example of this in the edit history of the Thoreau case mentioned in the Washington Post article. The hoaxer had made up a reference to make their nonsense stick. When the hoaxer later himself tried to delete the hoax again, another Wikipedian REVERTED them, saying, "Rv; the information is referenced; if you say it's wrong, prove it." Just because the content had been on Wikipedia for a few months, it was assumed it must be correct. Discussed in more detail here.
How could it be? It uses the same news media as its sources.
I believe quite a bit of development work has gone into Wikipedia Zero (and into mobile generally, which is the Wikimedia Foundation's major growth sector, as desktop pageviews are going down). At present, the WMF staff and contractors page shows one Director of Mobile Partnerships, and four mobile partner managers. I don't know how much developer time Wikipedia Zero currently claims. There is also a project to get Wikipedia articles to subscribers via SMS. ("The Wikimedia Foundation added that it partnered with the Praekelt Foundation, a South African nonprofit with expertise in text messaging, to develop the necessary technology for the project.") Of course, SMS delivery seems like the worst possible format for article delivery, in terms of enabling a reader to assess a Wikipedia article's sourcing.
It's debatable. I appreciate there are two ways you can see this, but I believe band-aids like this are self-serving and ultimately slow progress towards that "eventual" point down. I'd rather see the Wikimedia Foundation putting their weight (and millions) behind AccessNow and EFF on this.
I'm told IIPM showed the manicured Wikipedia article to prospective students.
The school had a multi-million-dollar advertising and legal budget, and created a chilling effect. At one point, they even got government websites warning about the school censored.
Maheshwar Peri and other journalists who went up against them took a tremendous personal financial risk. As the Newsweek article makes clear, they were sued repeatedly, and had to defend each case. See also Siddhartha Deb's story: Siddhartha Deb’s Publishing Odyssey, ‘Why I Took On Arindam Chaudhuri’.
The stark truth is that Wikipedia was part of the problem here, not the solution. This is in part due to Wikipedia's own chilling atmosphere towards critics, a topic discussed right now on Jimmy Wales' talk page.
Whistle-blowers taking on an admin run a significant risk of being sanctioned themselves under some pretext like "battlefield conduct" or "incivility".
It's a band aid that ultimately benefits Wikimedia more than users, just like the equivalent Facebook Zero programme. A source that is as error-prone and vulnerable to manipulation as Wikipedia shouldn't be the only source people in these countries have access to.
They should at least have access to a broad range of news outlets, Google Scholar and Google Books. Zero-rated programmes diminish rather than increase the chances of that happening, perpetuating rather than ending the digital divide and treating people in the developing world as second-class citizens that are fed crumbs from the first world's table.
can be found in this article by Mridula Chari on scroll.in: Wikipedia bans editor for consistent bias in favour of Arindam Chaudhuri's IIPM. Includes some more details on goings-on in the Indian-language Wikipedias (Marathi etc.)
No. See Wikipedia Zero. "For many readers in the Global South, the primary (and often only) access to the internet is via mobile. However, mobile data costs are a significant barrier to internet usage. We created Wikipedia Zero so that everyone can access all the free knowledge on Wikipedia, even if they can't afford the mobile data charges."
There are lots of Wikipedia admins who are social entrepreneurs of one form or another. This should be clear if you think about the fact that they are not getting paid for this. Sure there are idealists; but there are also lots of admins who get their reward out of the fact that they can use Wikipedia to influence public opinion – via the top Google search result – in line with their social, commercial or political agenda, and do so anonymously. No one should be surprised by this. You get what you pay for.
It's not so easy. With Wikipedia Zero and Facebook Zero, tens of millions of Indians in rural areas do not have access to anything else. They get Wikipedia and Facebook free as part of their mobile phone deal, but would need an expensive data plan to access anything else on the Internet. The situation is the same in many other third-world countries. What you have then a is a large captive audience who can only consume Wikipedia, but cannot check its sources or access alternative sources. Hence the concerns voiced by AccessNow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation about Facebook and Wikipedia becoming gatekeepers: keeping information out as much as bringing information in. The potential for manipulation is stupendous, because only political and business elites will have read-write access to Wikipedia. This case illustrates why people in developing countries need affordable access to the entire internet, not a Wikipedia and Facebook band aid.
Lots of examples. Article talk page and subpage working areas where people collaboratively create an organised list of source quotes, or post draft paragraphs in wikitext for discussion and subsequent transfer to the article. Votes, polls and requests for comment, for example to decide which of several possible image files to use. Customised user talk pages. Talk pages that exceed three indent levels (the maximum allowed in Flow) are very common, and if you've ever tried to have an intricate discussion on Facebook (vs., say, Reddit, which has excellent indenting), you'll appreciate the benefits. Present talk pages are very flexible and handle all such uses very well. Flow not so much.
Ear, ear!
Actually, they do consider themselves a "technology and grantmaking operation" rather than an educational organization.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Yeah, but I have written 2 FAs, so I'm allowed to, Maury. (And I have more edits than you.) :P
Here is a tweet showing what the e-mails look like: https://twitter.com/williampie... Wales says there is an opt-out. You can write to him. :) Let us know how you are getting on.
The circle goes like this:
Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!
Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!
Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!
Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!
Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!
Etc.
Or simply look at this graph. The reserve they shoot for is a function of the spending, and the spending is a function of how much money they have.
They still want to "scale up" much more. And they can *always* justify that they need a bigger reserve next year than this year by spending more in this year. So it's always just "prudent and sensible" to ask for more money than last year, whether the money was spent sensibly or not.
I don't think anyone minds if they spend more, if there is a commensurate benefit to the end user, such as enhanced quality and reliability, and readers are told honestly what their donations are supposed to fund. But 1. product quality has been lacking, and 2. none of this is about "keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free" as the banner implies. The more they spend on paid staff, the smaller the proportion of their budget concerned with that actually becomes.
Just for a laugh, listen to Jimmy Wales speaking in 2005 about hosting, server and bandwidth costs. (Yes, articles are longer today, page views are 15 times higher than in 2005, but on the other hand bandwidth has become cheaper and there are economies of scale.)
Check the links in my earlier post.
These already exist. Wikiwand is one, and there are many other less sophisticated mirrors that do not make much of an impact, as they have poor Google rankings. It's partly why the Wikimedia Foundation feels it has to expand and professionalise its software engineering effort: the Wikipedia interface looks very dated today, and as Wikipedia content is free, anyone can host it. And if anyone does it better than the Wikimedia Foundation itself, it's conceivable that readers will flock elsewhere, leaving the Foundation in the lurch. The fact that Google includes data from Wikipedia in its Knowledge Graph (the information panel on the right that appears when you Google a word) is already having an impact on Wikipedia pageviews.
Wikipedia has a significant problem with content related to this part of the world. Read How pro-fascist ideologues are rewriting Croatia's history. There are similar problems in Indonesia – see Don’t Trust Wikipedia on Indonesia – and in South Africa: The political economy of wikiality: a South African inquiry into knowledge.
It's all got to do with why people contribute to Wikipedia.
... and yet that's what is named in the banner punchline as the reason for the donations request, as though they didn't have enough money to pay for the servers any more.
What upsets me – and other volunteers – most is the "keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year" punchline in these banners. It's emotional manipulation, because it makes people think that Wikipedia is *lacking* funds to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year. That's ludicrously false, and it's not how a charity championing transparency should behave. It seems to me they're simply follow their Darwinian A/B testing and always plump for the banner that gets in more money per hour.
Apart from that, there is the issue of how the money is actually spent, and whether the spending has a tangible benefit for the end user. That's another big issue in its own right. There are weaknesses there too (see also this edit by Jimmy Wales – look for the words "miserable cost/benefit ratio"), but it's a separate issue from the banner wording.