Man, I have spent way too much time posting on php-based forums that don't accept HTML as input. Please forgive my hilariously malformed link, above...
Because before YouTube it was harder for the uneducated or misinformed to get an audience, and that limited the damage they could do.
Huh? I'm pretty sure this IntarWeb thing has been around a lot longer than Youtube, giving people [url=http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net]nearly costless speech[/url] to the world.
I am finding that more and more people don't care about getting the maximum quality out of their video system, and are pleased with just decent quality, even at high def.
I've been at this point since before high def. All I ever wanted to do was eliminate static. A clean VHS tape on a good player is good enough quality for me. I can remember playing my first DVD (2002 -- no joke!) and saying, "Ah, there really is higher quality," and I may be spoiled up to DVD quality, now.
I don't get a broadcast TV signal. I don't care about HDTV at all. The only thing I care about in a media upgrade would be getting more storage.
I also think it's funny that most of the ads about how great it is to have high quality feature sporting events. I don't care about sporting events, so that doesn't matter to me. I might care about seeing the bead of sweat on Obi-Wan Kenobi's brow or something, but not on some NASCAR driver.
Once these people figure something out that works they will become accustomed to more income, they will come back until they get caught, or the easy pickings disappear.
That's an amazingly apt description of how governments arise.
Now you're just fighting and trolling. Remember, if you lie down with dogs, you'll get up with fleas.
In the old days it was nice to watch you and some of the other Wikipedia regulars get on here on Slashdot and defend Wikipedia against groundless accusations. But today there's a real problem, and this article exposed it, along with many, many posters here, and still you don't see it. And while you're not seeing it, you're busy stooping to the level of trolls and insulters. This is just fighting; it doesn't help Wikipedia at all.
Though I'll admit, sometimes it feels really good.:) Scratch your own itch, and all, and if what's really important is defending yourself against some anonymous moron on the net (goodness knows it's been important to me at times) have at it.:)
it's further hampered by Jimbo Wales going out and making asinine statements about how Wikipedia aims to be "the sum of all human knowledge"
Well, there you go. The biggest problem on Wikipedia is that the powers that be completely disagree with the project's mission statement. How could things be any more messed up?
Ta bu shi da yu, I love you, but you're wrong. You're one of the more reasonable persons whose been involved with the power structure on Wikipedia, and I'm hoping you're going to see at some point just how wrong this is.
Wikipedia is destroying a lot of its value by attempting to fit some strange standard of encyclopedic that is an artifact from the days of dead trees.
Wow. You are very correct, and very insightful. I never realized how editing of the full community forms a consensus independent of the policy wonks before, but that's very true and significant.
Yep. I've definitely voiced my approval of trivia sections by ignoring the boxes and never removing them, except possibly for a small handful of instances when it actually really was a good idea to incorporate the material into the article elsewhere.
A page for every Pokemon" may be a catchy (if inaccurate) joke about Wikipedia, but it also represents a strength, not a weakness
I agree, though I didn't used to, and I feel really bad that I probably helped drive some people's work off of Wikipedia in the past because I wasn't interested. Today, I'd say bring it on. Wikipedia should, in fact, have a page for every Pokemon, or at least a page where they are all listed.
I was awestruck a few years ago when I realized people were painstakingly making a page for every Star Trek episode. Wonderful! There were even lists of the episodes with tiny little thumbnail screenshots. I'm sure all of this is going away: a couple of months ago I logged on to look up something about another very notable show we were watching on DVDs and discovered that almost all of its episode pages were marked for deletion for the new notability standards (although some of them still meet the new standards). That was a turning point for me. There's no reason the sum total of human knowledge shouldn't function as a complete episode guide to Star Trek.
Except one reason: http://www.wikia.org/ Jimbo makes a little more money if you're writing about such "unencyclopedic" things on his for-profit wiki. I love Jimbo and want him to make tons of money. But the correlation between the rise of Wikia, the occasional blending of roles between Wikimedia and Wikia, and the tightening of notability standards can't be ignored.
Look, trivia and notability are subjective. Just give me a slider and tag subjects according to different notability standards and let me, the reader, decide if it's notable enough that I want to see it or not. Wasn't part of the idea of Wikipedia 1.0 supposed to be that you could tag and polish the really important stuff for the "official" encyclopedia, without losing the rest? Now everything's got to meet unreasonable standards of "encyclopedic."
Lately I can't find what I want to know in Wikipedia anymore because some jerk has come around and deleted it after collaborating with other jerks to make the notability standards unreasonable and way inconsistent with what the community used to think. It makes me sad that I ever referred to anything as "cruft."
The truth to me seems to be that once Jimbo Wales had a for-profit wiki for other subjects we quit hearing ideas like the wiki medium is not paper and it's okay for Wikipedia to feature detailed articles on lots of poker variations. Coincidence? Now we need to delete everything that isn't notable to independent sources, which means there's no concept of things which are notable within a field, and totally destroys the concept of accumulating the sum total of human knowledge because of some outdated and irrelevant standard of "encyclopedic" based on old paper encyclopedias.
I didn't need any kind of organized boycott announcement over this. Wikipedia couldn't possibly get a dime from me right now for this reason. And I sincerely hope that all the ideas people had of using government as a club to steal money from other people and fund Wikipedia fall through. I hope somebody pulls an EGCS fork on Wikipedia, demonstrates how things should be done, and eventually overtakes them and either becomes the new official Wikipedia or just outcompetes them to become the best and most popular. I'm not going to support this status quo.
Ah, it does show the winner! For some strange reason I suffered from the delusion that I had looked and that it concealed everyone's ID, including the winner.
Anyway, kudos to netelder. I personally think this makes him cool, and I was the first to put myself down as a friend of his new account.
I wondered a bit about how the transplant would work, too. I would've wanted to work with the slashdot folks a little slower and see if I could persuade them to do things right. Maybe I could write the SQL for them, or something.:) But it sounds like this guy had so few comments he may not have felt it was worth it.
I for one think it's really cool, and I was one of the first bidders on the auction, and if I'd won I wouldn't have been anonymous about it. I would've bragged not just about the low UID, but about the fact that I got it under such unique circumstances.
I'm really curious how people found out who it was.
I saw the story in the mysterious future and bid about $30 on the low UID, the email address, and the URL display. It wasn't any time till I got outbid on a couple, so I upped my bid to about $75. Then I left my desk for a minute, came back, and the story was live and the bids were up to $300! Except for the URL display, which is still hovering just a little over my bid. I'd've thought that was the most economically valuable.
By my metric, Wikipedia is declining: it is becoming less useful to me when I want to find things out, because notability standards have tightened far too much, inconsistently of course. Let me be honest and blunt: I tried to read episode articles for a certain notable TV show a couple of months ago, and they were all tagged as slated for deletion because now they all have to be individually notable, in a way that most are not. (Although this was a notable enough show that many are.) So a complete Wikipedia portal for that show will have to go away. Wiki as a medium is not paper, there's plenty of room for this, and that's what everybody always said back in the good old days... but now Jimbo has a for-profit wiki that would make a much better place for your television show guides. Coincidence?
YES. Notability standards have gotten ridiculous. Once upon a time Wikipedia could be almost all things to all people: a complete guide to every episode of a significant TV series, a guide to the physical sciences, a history of everything, a complete gazetteer, a thorough guide to card and board games. Sure, there were always people who wanted to go too far, but erring on the side of "verifiability" kept things nice.
Now thousands of people's hard work is being flushed because its not notable. Meanwhile, Jimbo Wales has a new for-profit wiki service where you can set up a specialized wiki to document every episode of your favorite TV series, your card and board games, etc. Coincidence???
I've got the opposite philosophical problem. slashdot.org is a domain. It cannot be a machine. I agree it's weird, weird, weird that people came up with the idea that "in our domain, there will be one webserver machine, and its name will be www." But even still, machine's gotta have a name.:) And if a domain is going to have only one machine connected to the http web, then www is the conventional name for that machine. But I'd like to see more character for that. star.slashdot.org app.slashdot.org spock.slashdot.org main.slashdot.org
I'd also like to see the DNS system used more hierarchically, as it was designed. Especially within my own company's intranet, but that's a pipe dream.
Of course, I years ago just accepted that the best way to make sure Slashdot always worked is to make sure I go to slashdot.org. The only change in years since then is http -> https.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
:)
You're right, there is inertia, and steps like these can turn out to be the first step in a fork, rather than just a whine. But very often, they are just whining.:)
Slashdot Mirror
He comprehended you just fine. My question is, what color is the sky on your world?
Thanks. Now kindly offer that as an option to unborn human beings, and the problem is solved.
He never said he did.
Man, I have spent way too much time posting on php-based forums that don't accept HTML as input. Please forgive my hilariously malformed link, above...
Huh? I'm pretty sure this IntarWeb thing has been around a lot longer than Youtube, giving people [url=http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net]nearly costless speech[/url] to the world.
I've been at this point since before high def. All I ever wanted to do was eliminate static. A clean VHS tape on a good player is good enough quality for me. I can remember playing my first DVD (2002 -- no joke!) and saying, "Ah, there really is higher quality," and I may be spoiled up to DVD quality, now.
I don't get a broadcast TV signal. I don't care about HDTV at all. The only thing I care about in a media upgrade would be getting more storage.
I also think it's funny that most of the ads about how great it is to have high quality feature sporting events. I don't care about sporting events, so that doesn't matter to me. I might care about seeing the bead of sweat on Obi-Wan Kenobi's brow or something, but not on some NASCAR driver.
Another nostalgic part of childhood goes phtbbbbth!
Well, personally, I don't agree that copyright violation is stealing.
That's an amazingly apt description of how governments arise.
Now you're just fighting and trolling. Remember, if you lie down with dogs, you'll get up with fleas.
In the old days it was nice to watch you and some of the other Wikipedia regulars get on here on Slashdot and defend Wikipedia against groundless accusations. But today there's a real problem, and this article exposed it, along with many, many posters here, and still you don't see it. And while you're not seeing it, you're busy stooping to the level of trolls and insulters. This is just fighting; it doesn't help Wikipedia at all.
Though I'll admit, sometimes it feels really good. :) Scratch your own itch, and all, and if what's really important is defending yourself against some anonymous moron on the net (goodness knows it's been important to me at times) have at it. :)
Well, there you go. The biggest problem on Wikipedia is that the powers that be completely disagree with the project's mission statement. How could things be any more messed up?
Ta bu shi da yu, I love you, but you're wrong. You're one of the more reasonable persons whose been involved with the power structure on Wikipedia, and I'm hoping you're going to see at some point just how wrong this is.
Wikipedia is destroying a lot of its value by attempting to fit some strange standard of encyclopedic that is an artifact from the days of dead trees.
Wow. You are very correct, and very insightful. I never realized how editing of the full community forms a consensus independent of the policy wonks before, but that's very true and significant.
Yep. I've definitely voiced my approval of trivia sections by ignoring the boxes and never removing them, except possibly for a small handful of instances when it actually really was a good idea to incorporate the material into the article elsewhere.
I agree, though I didn't used to, and I feel really bad that I probably helped drive some people's work off of Wikipedia in the past because I wasn't interested. Today, I'd say bring it on. Wikipedia should, in fact, have a page for every Pokemon, or at least a page where they are all listed.
I was awestruck a few years ago when I realized people were painstakingly making a page for every Star Trek episode. Wonderful! There were even lists of the episodes with tiny little thumbnail screenshots. I'm sure all of this is going away: a couple of months ago I logged on to look up something about another very notable show we were watching on DVDs and discovered that almost all of its episode pages were marked for deletion for the new notability standards (although some of them still meet the new standards). That was a turning point for me. There's no reason the sum total of human knowledge shouldn't function as a complete episode guide to Star Trek.
Except one reason: http://www.wikia.org/ Jimbo makes a little more money if you're writing about such "unencyclopedic" things on his for-profit wiki. I love Jimbo and want him to make tons of money. But the correlation between the rise of Wikia, the occasional blending of roles between Wikimedia and Wikia, and the tightening of notability standards can't be ignored.
Unfortunately you won't be listened to when your very good reason is "Wikipedia's policy has gone completely too far."
Look, trivia and notability are subjective. Just give me a slider and tag subjects according to different notability standards and let me, the reader, decide if it's notable enough that I want to see it or not. Wasn't part of the idea of Wikipedia 1.0 supposed to be that you could tag and polish the really important stuff for the "official" encyclopedia, without losing the rest? Now everything's got to meet unreasonable standards of "encyclopedic."
Lately I can't find what I want to know in Wikipedia anymore because some jerk has come around and deleted it after collaborating with other jerks to make the notability standards unreasonable and way inconsistent with what the community used to think. It makes me sad that I ever referred to anything as "cruft."
The truth to me seems to be that once Jimbo Wales had a for-profit wiki for other subjects we quit hearing ideas like the wiki medium is not paper and it's okay for Wikipedia to feature detailed articles on lots of poker variations. Coincidence? Now we need to delete everything that isn't notable to independent sources, which means there's no concept of things which are notable within a field, and totally destroys the concept of accumulating the sum total of human knowledge because of some outdated and irrelevant standard of "encyclopedic" based on old paper encyclopedias.
I didn't need any kind of organized boycott announcement over this. Wikipedia couldn't possibly get a dime from me right now for this reason. And I sincerely hope that all the ideas people had of using government as a club to steal money from other people and fund Wikipedia fall through. I hope somebody pulls an EGCS fork on Wikipedia, demonstrates how things should be done, and eventually overtakes them and either becomes the new official Wikipedia or just outcompetes them to become the best and most popular. I'm not going to support this status quo.
Ah, it does show the winner! For some strange reason I suffered from the delusion that I had looked and that it concealed everyone's ID, including the winner.
Anyway, kudos to netelder. I personally think this makes him cool, and I was the first to put myself down as a friend of his new account.
I wondered a bit about how the transplant would work, too. I would've wanted to work with the slashdot folks a little slower and see if I could persuade them to do things right. Maybe I could write the SQL for them, or something. :) But it sounds like this guy had so few comments he may not have felt it was worth it.
I for one think it's really cool, and I was one of the first bidders on the auction, and if I'd won I wouldn't have been anonymous about it. I would've bragged not just about the low UID, but about the fact that I got it under such unique circumstances.
I'm really curious how people found out who it was.
I saw the story in the mysterious future and bid about $30 on the low UID, the email address, and the URL display. It wasn't any time till I got outbid on a couple, so I upped my bid to about $75. Then I left my desk for a minute, came back, and the story was live and the bids were up to $300! Except for the URL display, which is still hovering just a little over my bid. I'd've thought that was the most economically valuable.
Hi, Taxman! Long time no see!
By my metric, Wikipedia is declining: it is becoming less useful to me when I want to find things out, because notability standards have tightened far too much, inconsistently of course. Let me be honest and blunt: I tried to read episode articles for a certain notable TV show a couple of months ago, and they were all tagged as slated for deletion because now they all have to be individually notable, in a way that most are not. (Although this was a notable enough show that many are.) So a complete Wikipedia portal for that show will have to go away. Wiki as a medium is not paper, there's plenty of room for this, and that's what everybody always said back in the good old days ... but now Jimbo has a for-profit wiki that would make a much better place for your television show guides. Coincidence?
I'm hopeful for a good fork to save the project. I'm not about to implement it, but I'm hopeful.
YES. Notability standards have gotten ridiculous. Once upon a time Wikipedia could be almost all things to all people: a complete guide to every episode of a significant TV series, a guide to the physical sciences, a history of everything, a complete gazetteer, a thorough guide to card and board games. Sure, there were always people who wanted to go too far, but erring on the side of "verifiability" kept things nice.
Now thousands of people's hard work is being flushed because its not notable. Meanwhile, Jimbo Wales has a new for-profit wiki service where you can set up a specialized wiki to document every episode of your favorite TV series, your card and board games, etc. Coincidence???
I've got the opposite philosophical problem. slashdot.org is a domain. It cannot be a machine. I agree it's weird, weird, weird that people came up with the idea that "in our domain, there will be one webserver machine, and its name will be www." But even still, machine's gotta have a name. :) And if a domain is going to have only one machine connected to the http web, then www is the conventional name for that machine. But I'd like to see more character for that. star.slashdot.org app.slashdot.org spock.slashdot.org main.slashdot.org
I'd also like to see the DNS system used more hierarchically, as it was designed. Especially within my own company's intranet, but that's a pipe dream.
Of course, I years ago just accepted that the best way to make sure Slashdot always worked is to make sure I go to slashdot.org. The only change in years since then is http -> https.
Awesome! I'm not familiar with the Mac scene anymore, but keep up the good work!
:)
You're right, there is inertia, and steps like these can turn out to be the first step in a fork, rather than just a whine. But very often, they are just whining. :)