"that still means 100,000 articles. Which is just below that of Encyclopedia Britannica " - actually, Britannica only has 55,000 articles. (Their index has, last I heard, 768,000 entries - but typically an index entry will point to any article that mentions that subject)
The article count jumped from 999,990 to 1,000,150 in one second. I never saw anything like it. Luckily, the devs were doing a dump and were able to sort out which one had won. By the numbers:
* 999,996 Bobby Smith (baseball player)
* 999,997 Temporal coding
* 999,998 Steve Cox
* 999,999 One million articles
* 1,000,000 Jordanhill railway station
* 1,000,001 Squidoo
* 1,000,002 Tennessee Commissioner of Financial Institutions
* 1,000,003 Aaron Ledesma
* 1,000,004 Cellular architecture
If it makes the GP poster feel any better, 999,999 was a joke.
I can help you out there. See Wikipedia's oldest articles. Long story short - the edits prior to phase II were lost - the page histories simply don't go back that far. (Some portion of them were later recovered, but the main pages ones were not)
A similiar occurance happened at my university (University of Delaware). When I was an undergraduate, I took the 400 level security class. The teacher isn't a professor, but he's a staffer who happens to be amazingly knowledgable about all areas of unix and networking)
The assignments were some of the most practical security assignments you could imagine. For one assignment, he gave us the location of a target machine, and told us to "break in and find something that would make people a lot of money". The trick was to scan it with Nmap across an obscene number of ports (he was running a compromised telnet server on some really high port - like 11,000), telnet in, and look through the files to find a fictitious email about a stock buyout. ("But make sure not to scan any machines besides the target machine!") In another one, we telnetted into a mail server he set up, and emailed the TA with a faked 'from' address. "If it looks fake, you lose points", so you had to make damn sure to get all the fields looking immaculate. Another assignment was he gave us an XOR encrypted message, and we had to crack it. (The trick was to look for large areas with spaces, which gave away the key)
It was, all in all, a great class. Just one problem - the IT people *hated* the class. He told us he got a complaint during the Nmap assignment that it had been used to run 150,000 scans on campus machines. The computer science department adamantly defended the assignments, as important learning tools. It's an important issue of academic freedom, and (last I had heard) the CS department's concerns trumped IT's complaint.
"I'd say that China needs Western customers more than Western companies need China." - and you would be correct. China has an economic growth rate of something like 9-12%. Foreign trade accounts for something like 15-20% of their GNP. Both of these figures are, relatively speaking, astronomical. If China were to cut off trade with the rest of the world, their economy wouldn't just become stagnant - it would actually begin to contract. Foreign nations, on the other hand, do not rely on China all that much. Thus, while cutting off trade with China would hurt, it wouldn't be all that serious (they would still have non-trivial [positive] economic growth)
For those of us who don't feel like wading a 100 page discussion transcript in legalese, can someone link to a concise summary of the changes being made?
One analyst on NPR said that a format war ala Beta vs VHS, which causes confusion in the marketplace, can reduce the market by 90%. That is, 9 out of 10 would-be buyers stay away. So, bearing in mind that (1) both formats are copy protected, (2) to the point where the analog signal is being intentionally degraded, and that (3) a Playstation 3 is going to cost in excess of $800, thus giving the ~$250 Nintendo Revolution a huge advantage -- I can see definite positive outcomes of both formats imploding.
I believe one of the criteria for fair use is that it doesn't cause economic harm. - Not exactly. Fair use criteria are defined out in USC Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107. There's no real hard and fast rule for how to apply those criteria. Courts tend to make judgement calls on a per-case basis. (Which is why lawyers make a fortune on this kind of litigation) Or, to put it another way, "None of these factors alone is sufficient to make a use fair or not fair - all of them must be considered and weighed. It's routine for courts to express degrees of acceptability or unacceptability for each factor and try to come to a summary and conclusion based on the balance." --Wikipedia Copyright FAQ.
$1 million to distribute laptops and Wikipedia-on-DVD to rural areas of Africa. If they go with the $100 laptops the guys at MIT are working on, they could distribute 10,000 of them. That would make a big difference in areas where people aren't starving, but textbooks aren't affordable either. (We can neglect the price of producing DVDs -- it would cost perhaps a dollar for the media and maybe another few cents to have them stamped in bulk; negligible compared to the laptops)
"new article creation may slow considerably towards some ceiling, when most major topics have reasonable articles" - this hypothesis has been floating around for a while. While it does seem like that should happen at some point, the fact of the matter is that we are seeing exactly the opposite --- as Wikipedia has grown larger and covered all of the topics you'd expect, the rate of new article creation is increasing at a fantastic rate, with no evidence yet of slowing down.
"There is no indication that Wikipedia is turning into a trollfest. " - quite the opposite. Just a bit of a history lesson from someone who lived it:
Through early 2004, Jimbo handled all of the english wikipedia's "discipline problems" (for lack of a better word) himself. Of course, with all due respect to Jimbo, in retrospect it's clear that didn't do a particularly good job of it. Users like Helga and Lir - not quite vandals, but not good editors by any stretch of imagination - were allowed to troll the site for years without before Jimbo would intervene (if at all). Good users were stressed from having to deal with them, and some left the project as a result.
In early 2004, the Arbitration Committee was formed, to shift the burden of dealing with trolls from Jimbo. While things were rocky for the first 9 months or so (although the committee nominally had 12 members, only about 4 of them - including myself - were acitve on a regular basis, with 1 or 2 others active on a semi-regular basis. As a result, getting a majority on any issue was nearly impossible), over the last two years I think the site has become a lot more pleasant to edit.
Consider - one of the first arbitration cases was with a 'Plautus Satire', whose edits are hilarious, if you didn't have to clean up after him. Things along the lines of 'the hubble space telescope is an orbitting death ray laser', 'the shuttle columbia was shot down by the US military in order to secure more funding for Nasa', 'black holes are a myth like god', 'Albert Einstien was a theif who got all of his best ideas by plagurizing patent applications he came across while he was a patent clerk', and on and on. It took (I kid you not) 6 weeks to ban Plautus. 6 weeks of having to put up with that idiocy. Nowadays, we're much a much less tolerant place for nonsense like that, and (in my own personal view) it's a much nicer place to edit as a result.
" The encyclopaedic approach is (or should be) to cite all the sources of information for every article." - really? So when you look up earth, there should be a section about how the earth is flat (Or so some people would have you believe) Or how the Holocaust is a myth perpetrated by Zionists bankers? Or when you look up the Universe, it tells you about how it's all supported by turtles? The moral of the story is that for almost any article you can name, there is at least one group out there that has demonstrably false notions about it. It is an encyclopedia's job to exclude the falsities, and for subjects that have a legitimate debate (like string theory does, and evolution does not) to present them in a neutral tone
If you want raw data, look at the RFC here, which lists pretty much every edit made by congress (as well as other branches of the US Government). Note that most of them were good.
In any kind of vetting system - Speed and accuracy are all conflicting virtues. Wikipedia has a million articles. You can vet them quickly, or accurately, but not both. I do agree with you, though, that the rating system I saw on the test wikipedia was not something I cared for.
Personally, what I would like to see is admins given a "Copy to stable" button for each article. When pressed, it copies the article to http://en.wikipedia.org/stable/Article_name. The stable wikipedia would not be directly editable, but could only be changed by clicking the "Copy to stable" button. This would prevent stable from becoming a true fork.
"I wonder if the (highest moderated)/. questions were questions Jimmy Wales didn't want to answer."
(1) Do you have a single bit of evidence to back up this speculation? No? Then it's unsupported by the facts.
(2) Somehow, I don't think that qualifies as a "geniune" attempt to ask why the slashdot questions where not answered. It sounds more like a conspiracy theory to me.
(3) "But they are different interview questions, which was not explained in TFA" - seeing as how the write up says explicitely that the questions were submitted by wikipedia regulars, any confusion between this and the slashdot interview request was entirely your fault.
Slashdot Mirror
"that still means 100,000 articles. Which is just below that of Encyclopedia Britannica " - actually, Britannica only has 55,000 articles. (Their index has, last I heard, 768,000 entries - but typically an index entry will point to any article that mentions that subject)
The article count jumped from 999,990 to 1,000,150 in one second. I never saw anything like it. Luckily, the devs were doing a dump and were able to sort out which one had won. By the numbers:
* 999,996 Bobby Smith (baseball player)
* 999,997 Temporal coding
* 999,998 Steve Cox
* 999,999 One million articles
* 1,000,000 Jordanhill railway station
* 1,000,001 Squidoo
* 1,000,002 Tennessee Commissioner of Financial Institutions
* 1,000,003 Aaron Ledesma
* 1,000,004 Cellular architecture
If it makes the GP poster feel any better, 999,999 was a joke.
I can help you out there. See Wikipedia's oldest articles. Long story short - the edits prior to phase II were lost - the page histories simply don't go back that far. (Some portion of them were later recovered, but the main pages ones were not)
I saw on the mailing list, someone made a joke - next milestone is to get a million featured articles. Optomistic estimates are for early in 2053.
The 1,000,004th article was my article on Cellular architecture. Damn! Oh well, at least I got to post the press release.
Yes, it was.
A similiar occurance happened at my university (University of Delaware). When I was an undergraduate, I took the 400 level security class. The teacher isn't a professor, but he's a staffer who happens to be amazingly knowledgable about all areas of unix and networking)
The assignments were some of the most practical security assignments you could imagine. For one assignment, he gave us the location of a target machine, and told us to "break in and find something that would make people a lot of money". The trick was to scan it with Nmap across an obscene number of ports (he was running a compromised telnet server on some really high port - like 11,000), telnet in, and look through the files to find a fictitious email about a stock buyout. ("But make sure not to scan any machines besides the target machine!") In another one, we telnetted into a mail server he set up, and emailed the TA with a faked 'from' address. "If it looks fake, you lose points", so you had to make damn sure to get all the fields looking immaculate. Another assignment was he gave us an XOR encrypted message, and we had to crack it. (The trick was to look for large areas with spaces, which gave away the key)
It was, all in all, a great class. Just one problem - the IT people *hated* the class. He told us he got a complaint during the Nmap assignment that it had been used to run 150,000 scans on campus machines. The computer science department adamantly defended the assignments, as important learning tools. It's an important issue of academic freedom, and (last I had heard) the CS department's concerns trumped IT's complaint.
"I'd say that China needs Western customers more than Western companies need China." - and you would be correct. China has an economic growth rate of something like 9-12%. Foreign trade accounts for something like 15-20% of their GNP. Both of these figures are, relatively speaking, astronomical. If China were to cut off trade with the rest of the world, their economy wouldn't just become stagnant - it would actually begin to contract. Foreign nations, on the other hand, do not rely on China all that much. Thus, while cutting off trade with China would hurt, it wouldn't be all that serious (they would still have non-trivial [positive] economic growth)
For those of us who don't feel like wading a 100 page discussion transcript in legalese, can someone link to a concise summary of the changes being made?
Um, no. Paying a tax does not constitute jeapardy.
One analyst on NPR said that a format war ala Beta vs VHS, which causes confusion in the marketplace, can reduce the market by 90%. That is, 9 out of 10 would-be buyers stay away. So, bearing in mind that (1) both formats are copy protected, (2) to the point where the analog signal is being intentionally degraded, and that (3) a Playstation 3 is going to cost in excess of $800, thus giving the ~$250 Nintendo Revolution a huge advantage -- I can see definite positive outcomes of both formats imploding.
I believe one of the criteria for fair use is that it doesn't cause economic harm.
- Not exactly. Fair use criteria are defined out in USC Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107. There's no real hard and fast rule for how to apply those criteria. Courts tend to make judgement calls on a per-case basis. (Which is why lawyers make a fortune on this kind of litigation) Or, to put it another way, "None of these factors alone is sufficient to make a use fair or not fair - all of them must be considered and weighed. It's routine for courts to express degrees of acceptability or unacceptability for each factor and try to come to a summary and conclusion based on the balance." --Wikipedia Copyright FAQ.
"Most of the Net isn't in English, it's in Chinese" - Would you care to cite a source on this? I find this claim to be rather outlandish.
$1 million to distribute laptops and Wikipedia-on-DVD to rural areas of Africa. If they go with the $100 laptops the guys at MIT are working on, they could distribute 10,000 of them. That would make a big difference in areas where people aren't starving, but textbooks aren't affordable either. (We can neglect the price of producing DVDs -- it would cost perhaps a dollar for the media and maybe another few cents to have them stamped in bulk; negligible compared to the laptops)
"new article creation may slow considerably towards some ceiling, when most major topics have reasonable articles" - this hypothesis has been floating around for a while. While it does seem like that should happen at some point, the fact of the matter is that we are seeing exactly the opposite --- as Wikipedia has grown larger and covered all of the topics you'd expect, the rate of new article creation is increasing at a fantastic rate, with no evidence yet of slowing down.
Ouch - touche.
Funny you should mention that. I was asked, in my capacity as an arbitrator, about that same thing yesterday. Here is the reply I sent
"There is no indication that Wikipedia is turning into a trollfest. " - quite the opposite. Just a bit of a history lesson from someone who lived it:
Through early 2004, Jimbo handled all of the english wikipedia's "discipline problems" (for lack of a better word) himself. Of course, with all due respect to Jimbo, in retrospect it's clear that didn't do a particularly good job of it. Users like Helga and Lir - not quite vandals, but not good editors by any stretch of imagination - were allowed to troll the site for years without before Jimbo would intervene (if at all). Good users were stressed from having to deal with them, and some left the project as a result.
In early 2004, the Arbitration Committee was formed, to shift the burden of dealing with trolls from Jimbo. While things were rocky for the first 9 months or so (although the committee nominally had 12 members, only about 4 of them - including myself - were acitve on a regular basis, with 1 or 2 others active on a semi-regular basis. As a result, getting a majority on any issue was nearly impossible), over the last two years I think the site has become a lot more pleasant to edit.
Consider - one of the first arbitration cases was with a 'Plautus Satire', whose edits are hilarious, if you didn't have to clean up after him. Things along the lines of 'the hubble space telescope is an orbitting death ray laser', 'the shuttle columbia was shot down by the US military in order to secure more funding for Nasa', 'black holes are a myth like god', 'Albert Einstien was a theif who got all of his best ideas by plagurizing patent applications he came across while he was a patent clerk', and on and on. It took (I kid you not) 6 weeks to ban Plautus. 6 weeks of having to put up with that idiocy. Nowadays, we're much a much less tolerant place for nonsense like that, and (in my own personal view) it's a much nicer place to edit as a result.
" The encyclopaedic approach is (or should be) to cite all the sources of information for every article." - really? So when you look up earth, there should be a section about how the earth is flat (Or so some people would have you believe) Or how the Holocaust is a myth perpetrated by Zionists bankers? Or when you look up the Universe, it tells you about how it's all supported by turtles? The moral of the story is that for almost any article you can name, there is at least one group out there that has demonstrably false notions about it. It is an encyclopedia's job to exclude the falsities, and for subjects that have a legitimate debate (like string theory does, and evolution does not) to present them in a neutral tone
I linked to the wrong page above (it's related, but not what I wanted to link to). Here> ois the page I meant to link to.
If you want raw data, look at the RFC here, which lists pretty much every edit made by congress (as well as other branches of the US Government). Note that most of them were good.
In any kind of vetting system - Speed and accuracy are all conflicting virtues. Wikipedia has a million articles. You can vet them quickly, or accurately, but not both. I do agree with you, though, that the rating system I saw on the test wikipedia was not something I cared for.
Personally, what I would like to see is admins given a "Copy to stable" button for each article. When pressed, it copies the article to http://en.wikipedia.org/stable/Article_name. The stable wikipedia would not be directly editable, but could only be changed by clicking the "Copy to stable" button. This would prevent stable from becoming a true fork.
That's one of the most famous photos of all time, right - it would be logistically impossible to block every website that features it.
"I wonder if the (highest moderated) /. questions were questions Jimmy Wales didn't want to answer."
(1) Do you have a single bit of evidence to back up this speculation? No? Then it's unsupported by the facts.
(2) Somehow, I don't think that qualifies as a "geniune" attempt to ask why the slashdot questions where not answered. It sounds more like a conspiracy theory to me.
(3) "But they are different interview questions, which was not explained in TFA" - seeing as how the write up says explicitely that the questions were submitted by wikipedia regulars, any confusion between this and the slashdot interview request was entirely your fault.
Maybe this isn't an example of Congress rewriting history, but here is an example from two weeks ago of exactly that.