Ideally you want the editors who have no interest in the topic at all. That they have no knowledge in the area isn't a problem, since their job is just to see which side is backed up by sources.
I guess this might be harder with some mainstream and controversial topics. But I'm not convinced that other references will do a better job there.
1. To feel pain or distress; sustain loss, injury, harm, or punishment. 2. To tolerate or endure evil, injury, pain, or death. See synonyms at bear1. 3. To appear at a disadvantage: He suffers by comparison with his greater contemporary (Albert C. Baugh).
Now, it may be that using an iPhone gives one great injury, pain or death, I don't know. But I suspect the author was using definition number three.
99% of the population would be better off using Apple products, because they simply work better than the alternatives. Your perceived "lack of functionality" (which I would dispute, but that's another story..) doesn't bother Joe consumer because he's not an uber-geek.
The 99% who aren't uber-geeks would not be better off - they simply wouldn't care, and would do fine on any platform, for that reason. A BeBox would do the job. Of course, then you take into account other factors, such as cost.
(My parents recently bought their first laptop - supposedly I should have urged them to spend a few hundred pounds more to get a machine that I knew nothing about and couldn't help them with, because if they got Windows, I'd be swamped with trying to help them out with problems. And you know what? Not a problem. OTOH, I know they would've complained everytime someone gave them some software, and it wouldn't work on their machine...)
I would have paid... Oh wait, where can I get a standards-compliant web browser with a 3.5" screen, and a fully-functional POP/IMAP email client, on a phone again? From a bunch of other devices that cost just as much, or certainly nearly as much.
Note that any old dirt cheap phone can browse the web (either via internal web brower or using Opera Mini), and include a POP/IMAP email client. If that's all you need, you don't need a smart phone.
For the other features, well smart phones have been around for years. I don't understand why people give Apple all the free publicity as if they invented the concept.
Disclaimer: The info below may or may not be factual. It is offered only as a starting point, and may not represent the truth.
I wholeheartedly agree. And am in exactly the same position, I'm sure there are many of us.
The issue of trust is not one of sock puppetry, viral marketing, vandalism nor shill behavior of contributors. That is only to be expected -- and is of course absolutely rampant throughout the site.
That will NEVER stop. The perpetrators will simply get better at hiding it. If you run a large corporation, NGO, government etc etc, and you are not using Wikipedia to manipulate your agenda, then you are an idiot, because your competition / opposition most certainly is.
No, the most serious abuses of trust where Wikipedia is concerned lie with their admins. Some (if not in fact many) of them are corrupt and have a clear agenda. It seems to start at the top. Jimmy's agenda has been (rightly) questioned here many times.
Adding a new technology layer to that won't change a thing. If anything it will make it more obscured.
The fundamental issue is that the Wikipedia goals are arrogant and impossible. The solution is simple. Remove all admins. All of them. Put a big disclaimer at the top of every page saying something like that "the info below may or may not be factual. It is offered only as a starting point, and may not represent the truth".
That will go a long way to solving the issue. Wikipedia is an exercise in vanity and control. It's very clear that some people become admins because they believe their truth, and inwardly that they themselves, are better than everyone else. Their Wikiality is what you will accept... or else.
No. Fire all the admins, and Reality will take care of itself...
Well yes, this is the problem - elsewhere in this Slashdot article, I bet is someone complaining Wikipedia is crap because it has things which aren't reference. Wikipedia can't win. People will always complain which way things are done.
In this case, why is it a problem what happened? What were you trying to add, and why couldn't you give a source? Requiring information to be verifiable has always (AFAIK) been a Wikipedia policy, and not something they added recently to become more accepted.
I couldn't add it to the citations/sources without being a registered user for some reason. If I have to become a registered user to add a citation, and if I have to add citations to add things without them being automatically deleted (regardless of their merit), that destroys a lot of anonymity. Which may be good or bad depending on your POV.
This isn't true, you don't need to register to add it as a citation (and I don't see that a registered account is any less anonymous than being unregistered - in fact, I would argue it is more anonymous, as your IP address is not advertised to everyone).
No, but Wikipedia is about verifiable sources, not truth. Though yes, it requires editors that follow the rules. But there are places on Wikipedia to raise the issue with more editors.
This is leaving out the fact that wikipedia will never be seriously trusted due to it's open nature, to be taken seriously requires it to close off public access and to change to specialised, academic authorship - something that would corrupt it's mission.
There already exists such a project. But I think people take Wikipedia more seriously than Nupedia.
{{fact}}: give us an example of a poor article on a mainstream topic in religion?
Also of course, there is more to human knowledge than "pop culture" and "politics and religion", the latter being an area that involves disputes, and makes it hard to find any decent non-biased reference.
Not a religion, but still under the broader topic to give an example I am familiar with - I find Wikipedia's atheism article to be a better definition and description than Britannica's. Britannica: * Talks about atheism as if it is mutually exclusive to agnosticism. * Falsely claims that atheism rejects all religion (it doesn't - some religions don't require belief in a god, and atheism is only about rejecting belief in a god). * Whilst it has some good parts, it on the whole reads like a personal essay with the author's personal opinions, rather than covering objectively what people think from referenced sources. * Provides some further reading, but doesn't have sources inlined in the text.
Yes, things like politics and religion are sources of bias, but other encyclopedias are not immune to this, and with them, there is no chance for anyone to correct or even challenge the mistakes.
The reason it's acceptable, is because the Encyclopedia companies try to ensure all the information is accurate, and then print it. It can't be vandalized later, so it's generally more trustworthy than wikipedia is assuming it's not a really old edition.
and while the media loves to put up "for 30 minutes, this B-celebrity's bio said he was a kiddie fiddler".
And the only reason they can ever find such cases is because Wikipedia's history is open to all, and they can search for such things (and in the cases I've seen, it's been more like under 1 minute, which the media neglect to mention). If you could see the history of news websites, I bet you could find all sorts of mistakes. (Then again, what's worse is that the mainstream media commonly has bias and falsehoods way beyond what Wikipedia ever has, and it never gets corrected...)
They do have a similar system for their offline releases. I think it would be easier to mark a particular version of an article as "stable" rather than checking in individual edits (as the latter is more work, and may lead to conflicts or inconsistencies).
You have to be careful - I think one of the reasons Wikipedia has been so successful is due to being able to instantly edit it. You run the risk that people may know a lot about the subject, but be less likely to edit because they don't want to wait and see if their edit gets approved at some later point.
That may be in theory - but in practice, I still find Wikipedia overall far more accurate and reliable than any of those other pages maintained on the web.
Do you have any examples of sites which were better than Wikipedia, but have folded because of Wikipedia?
Or indeed any company - Microsoft, Google, and especially the RIAA/MPAA. If a company does something, people here may criticise it.
But according to the grandparent post, everytime there's a Slashdot story about a company, we should just say "Oh, they're trying to maximise profits. End of discussion" and move on... But for some reason, it's only Apple that gets this special treatment.
It's fairly common for companies to give permission to distribute only under some conditions. For example, someone may allow a company to use their music in an advert, or a software company may allow their engine to be used by a game developer for one particular game.
Are you seriously suggesting that a court may arbitrarily decide that such terms are invalid, and also that people may then distribute outside of such terms? Has there ever been a court case where this happened?
There is nothing special about the GPL. I don't understand why people assume that the GPL might be found invalid, when obviously no one worries this might happen with any other work.
True, but in that case, major companies would still be affected. If a company has software for free download, does that make it effectively public domain? If a few samples of a band's latest album are on their website, does that mean any restrictions they place on distribution are void, and it's okay for me to release a remix of the album?
Such an interpretation would set a precedent that would annoy software companies and the record industry far more than open source developers.
Indeed - given the difficult of doing this at all, I would hope that teams take as many advantages as they can, as opposed to making it arbitrarily harder just to maintain some illusion of "fairness".
The purpose of the competition is to get a rover on the moon, and to encourage private space exploration. The competition is not "having space travel done by people with no experience".
Presumably a taser could still be applied for varying lengths of time?
I was thinking not so much intentional abuse (which can't be avoided this way), but unintentional - someone applying excessive force, not realising the pain it causes. With a gun, you shoot and they're dead, which is what you intended. (Although I agree with HTH NE1 in that this could also encourage abuse...)
There are plenty of libraries and engines out there to do this sort of thing, though. If game developers don't use them, it's often because they want to write something better than what's available.
Well the intent of guns is to kill someone. You don't need to have an idea of how much it hurts or know how much is needed to incapacitate someone. It's also not something that could be abused by overusing it.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that simple games can be playable, and that commercial success isn't the only measure of success - but simple games aren't going to make money (perhaps because more people can write them, or because there are already lots of old games filling the market), so it's these challenges you face if you are a commercial game developer.
Why does the movie industry not get the same treatment? I mean, surely a film with bad acting, crappy looking props, no special effects and scenery provided by a backdrop drawn by a child with crayons, would still be good as long as the story was good, right? But no one complains that movie producers strive for realism.
What people do complain about is if a movie has a crap story, and loads of special effects - similarly it's annoying when a game is unplayable, but they've spent loads of effort making it look good. But if a movie has a good story, and looks good, people don't seem to mind.
Also I would argue that a text game is fundamentally different, but the same rules still apply. Consider, which would be better: a text game that said "You are in a room", or one which gave detailed and vivid descriptions?
Surely the former is just as good, if only the playability matters, right? But no - the latter is fundamentally important for stimulating the imagination, creating realism, and pulling the player in.
When you have a graphical game, you bring in problems that the text based game avoids. If you have unrealistic graphics, the player finds it harder to immerse himself in the game, just like the text game with badly written descriptions. I would argue that striving for more realistic graphics and behaviour is no different to a text game (or book) that has well written descriptions, and believable characters.
This is an article on technological challenges - which doesn't include gameplay. I don't see anything that implies that gameplay isn't as important, it just isn't a challenge in the same way that those other categories are. Obviously it goes without saying that gameplay is important, but covering how to get good gameplay is a topic for another article.
it is a good idea which translate to a good technical gameplay.
Not quite - ideas are cheap. In some simple cases, a good idea alone is good enough to make an addictive game, but in most cases, getting everything together to make a playable and addictive game takes more than just a good idea.
(One of my favourite and most addictive games is the Civilization series. But an idea of "a strategy game where you control a civilization throughout the whole of history" is the easy bit. Getting all the mechanics of the game to work in a playable fashion, and actually writing the damn thing, is the much harder part.)
Slashdot Mirror
Ideally you want the editors who have no interest in the topic at all. That they have no knowledge in the area isn't a problem, since their job is just to see which side is backed up by sources.
I guess this might be harder with some mainstream and controversial topics. But I'm not convinced that other references will do a better job there.
Suffer:
1. To feel pain or distress; sustain loss, injury, harm, or punishment.
2. To tolerate or endure evil, injury, pain, or death. See synonyms at bear1.
3. To appear at a disadvantage: He suffers by comparison with his greater contemporary (Albert C. Baugh).
Now, it may be that using an iPhone gives one great injury, pain or death, I don't know. But I suspect the author was using definition number three.
No one's forced to buy Windows - that doesn't stop Apple fans from bashing Microsoft though!
99% of the population would be better off using Apple products, because they simply work better than the alternatives. Your perceived "lack of functionality" (which I would dispute, but that's another story..) doesn't bother Joe consumer because he's not an uber-geek.
The 99% who aren't uber-geeks would not be better off - they simply wouldn't care, and would do fine on any platform, for that reason. A BeBox would do the job. Of course, then you take into account other factors, such as cost.
(My parents recently bought their first laptop - supposedly I should have urged them to spend a few hundred pounds more to get a machine that I knew nothing about and couldn't help them with, because if they got Windows, I'd be swamped with trying to help them out with problems. And you know what? Not a problem. OTOH, I know they would've complained everytime someone gave them some software, and it wouldn't work on their machine...)
I would have paid... Oh wait, where can I get a standards-compliant web browser with a 3.5" screen, and a fully-functional POP/IMAP email client, on a phone again? From a bunch of other devices that cost just as much, or certainly nearly as much.
Note that any old dirt cheap phone can browse the web (either via internal web brower or using Opera Mini), and include a POP/IMAP email client. If that's all you need, you don't need a smart phone.
For the other features, well smart phones have been around for years. I don't understand why people give Apple all the free publicity as if they invented the concept.
Fixed your comment:
Disclaimer: The info below may or may not be factual. It is offered only as a starting point, and may not represent the truth.
I wholeheartedly agree. And am in exactly the same position, I'm sure there are many of us.
The issue of trust is not one of sock puppetry, viral marketing, vandalism nor shill behavior of contributors. That is only to be expected -- and is of course absolutely rampant throughout the site.
That will NEVER stop. The perpetrators will simply get better at hiding it. If you run a large corporation, NGO, government etc etc, and you are not using Wikipedia to manipulate your agenda, then you are an idiot, because your competition / opposition most certainly is.
No, the most serious abuses of trust where Wikipedia is concerned lie with their admins. Some (if not in fact many) of them are corrupt and have a clear agenda. It seems to start at the top. Jimmy's agenda has been (rightly) questioned here many times.
Adding a new technology layer to that won't change a thing. If anything it will make it more obscured.
The fundamental issue is that the Wikipedia goals are arrogant and impossible. The solution is simple. Remove all admins. All of them. Put a big disclaimer at the top of every page saying something like that "the info below may or may not be factual. It is offered only as a starting point, and may not represent the truth".
That will go a long way to solving the issue. Wikipedia is an exercise in vanity and control. It's very clear that some people become admins because they believe their truth, and inwardly that they themselves, are better than everyone else. Their Wikiality is what you will accept... or else.
No. Fire all the admins, and Reality will take care of itself...
Well yes, this is the problem - elsewhere in this Slashdot article, I bet is someone complaining Wikipedia is crap because it has things which aren't reference. Wikipedia can't win. People will always complain which way things are done.
In this case, why is it a problem what happened? What were you trying to add, and why couldn't you give a source? Requiring information to be verifiable has always (AFAIK) been a Wikipedia policy, and not something they added recently to become more accepted.
I couldn't add it to the citations/sources without being a registered user for some reason. If I have to become a registered user to add a citation, and if I have to add citations to add things without them being automatically deleted (regardless of their merit), that destroys a lot of anonymity. Which may be good or bad depending on your POV.
This isn't true, you don't need to register to add it as a citation (and I don't see that a registered account is any less anonymous than being unregistered - in fact, I would argue it is more anonymous, as your IP address is not advertised to everyone).
Can I ask, what article is this on?
The truth is not reached via consensus.
No, but Wikipedia is about verifiable sources, not truth. Though yes, it requires editors that follow the rules. But there are places on Wikipedia to raise the issue with more editors.
This is leaving out the fact that wikipedia will never be seriously trusted due to it's open nature, to be taken seriously requires it to close off public access and to change to specialised, academic authorship - something that would corrupt it's mission.
There already exists such a project. But I think people take Wikipedia more seriously than Nupedia.
{{fact}}: give us an example of a poor article on a mainstream topic in religion?
Also of course, there is more to human knowledge than "pop culture" and "politics and religion", the latter being an area that involves disputes, and makes it hard to find any decent non-biased reference.
Not a religion, but still under the broader topic to give an example I am familiar with - I find Wikipedia's atheism article to be a better definition and description than Britannica's. Britannica:
* Talks about atheism as if it is mutually exclusive to agnosticism.
* Falsely claims that atheism rejects all religion (it doesn't - some religions don't require belief in a god, and atheism is only about rejecting belief in a god).
* Whilst it has some good parts, it on the whole reads like a personal essay with the author's personal opinions, rather than covering objectively what people think from referenced sources.
* Provides some further reading, but doesn't have sources inlined in the text.
Yes, things like politics and religion are sources of bias, but other encyclopedias are not immune to this, and with them, there is no chance for anyone to correct or even challenge the mistakes.
People can debate whether or not Wikipedia is better or worse than other encylopedias, but:
or Google interesting info for more solid documentation.
I find Googling for random webpages far less likely to give me reliable information than Wikipedia.
The reason it's acceptable, is because the Encyclopedia companies try to ensure all the information is accurate, and then print it. It can't be vandalized later, so it's generally more trustworthy than wikipedia is assuming it's not a really old edition.
So wait for the Wikipedia offline releases.
and while the media loves to put up "for 30 minutes, this B-celebrity's bio said he was a kiddie fiddler".
And the only reason they can ever find such cases is because Wikipedia's history is open to all, and they can search for such things (and in the cases I've seen, it's been more like under 1 minute, which the media neglect to mention). If you could see the history of news websites, I bet you could find all sorts of mistakes. (Then again, what's worse is that the mainstream media commonly has bias and falsehoods way beyond what Wikipedia ever has, and it never gets corrected...)
They do have a similar system for their offline releases. I think it would be easier to mark a particular version of an article as "stable" rather than checking in individual edits (as the latter is more work, and may lead to conflicts or inconsistencies).
You have to be careful - I think one of the reasons Wikipedia has been so successful is due to being able to instantly edit it. You run the risk that people may know a lot about the subject, but be less likely to edit because they don't want to wait and see if their edit gets approved at some later point.
That may be in theory - but in practice, I still find Wikipedia overall far more accurate and reliable than any of those other pages maintained on the web.
Do you have any examples of sites which were better than Wikipedia, but have folded because of Wikipedia?
Or indeed any company - Microsoft, Google, and especially the RIAA/MPAA. If a company does something, people here may criticise it.
But according to the grandparent post, everytime there's a Slashdot story about a company, we should just say "Oh, they're trying to maximise profits. End of discussion" and move on... But for some reason, it's only Apple that gets this special treatment.
It's fairly common for companies to give permission to distribute only under some conditions. For example, someone may allow a company to use their music in an advert, or a software company may allow their engine to be used by a game developer for one particular game.
Are you seriously suggesting that a court may arbitrarily decide that such terms are invalid, and also that people may then distribute outside of such terms? Has there ever been a court case where this happened?
There is nothing special about the GPL. I don't understand why people assume that the GPL might be found invalid, when obviously no one worries this might happen with any other work.
True, but in that case, major companies would still be affected. If a company has software for free download, does that make it effectively public domain? If a few samples of a band's latest album are on their website, does that mean any restrictions they place on distribution are void, and it's okay for me to release a remix of the album?
Such an interpretation would set a precedent that would annoy software companies and the record industry far more than open source developers.
Indeed - given the difficult of doing this at all, I would hope that teams take as many advantages as they can, as opposed to making it arbitrarily harder just to maintain some illusion of "fairness".
The purpose of the competition is to get a rover on the moon, and to encourage private space exploration. The competition is not "having space travel done by people with no experience".
Presumably a taser could still be applied for varying lengths of time?
I was thinking not so much intentional abuse (which can't be avoided this way), but unintentional - someone applying excessive force, not realising the pain it causes. With a gun, you shoot and they're dead, which is what you intended. (Although I agree with HTH NE1 in that this could also encourage abuse...)
There are plenty of libraries and engines out there to do this sort of thing, though. If game developers don't use them, it's often because they want to write something better than what's available.
Well the intent of guns is to kill someone. You don't need to have an idea of how much it hurts or know how much is needed to incapacitate someone. It's also not something that could be abused by overusing it.
And how well would a text based game sell?
Don't get me wrong, I agree that simple games can be playable, and that commercial success isn't the only measure of success - but simple games aren't going to make money (perhaps because more people can write them, or because there are already lots of old games filling the market), so it's these challenges you face if you are a commercial game developer.
Why does the movie industry not get the same treatment? I mean, surely a film with bad acting, crappy looking props, no special effects and scenery provided by a backdrop drawn by a child with crayons, would still be good as long as the story was good, right? But no one complains that movie producers strive for realism.
What people do complain about is if a movie has a crap story, and loads of special effects - similarly it's annoying when a game is unplayable, but they've spent loads of effort making it look good. But if a movie has a good story, and looks good, people don't seem to mind.
Also I would argue that a text game is fundamentally different, but the same rules still apply. Consider, which would be better: a text game that said "You are in a room", or one which gave detailed and vivid descriptions?
Surely the former is just as good, if only the playability matters, right? But no - the latter is fundamentally important for stimulating the imagination, creating realism, and pulling the player in.
When you have a graphical game, you bring in problems that the text based game avoids. If you have unrealistic graphics, the player finds it harder to immerse himself in the game, just like the text game with badly written descriptions. I would argue that striving for more realistic graphics and behaviour is no different to a text game (or book) that has well written descriptions, and believable characters.
Contrary to popular belief, not all game developers are striving for photorealism.
True, but there are far more genres than just first person shooters that are striving for photorealism (The Elder Scrolls series springs to mind).
This is an article on technological challenges - which doesn't include gameplay. I don't see anything that implies that gameplay isn't as important, it just isn't a challenge in the same way that those other categories are. Obviously it goes without saying that gameplay is important, but covering how to get good gameplay is a topic for another article.
it is a good idea which translate to a good technical gameplay.
Not quite - ideas are cheap. In some simple cases, a good idea alone is good enough to make an addictive game, but in most cases, getting everything together to make a playable and addictive game takes more than just a good idea.
(One of my favourite and most addictive games is the Civilization series. But an idea of "a strategy game where you control a civilization throughout the whole of history" is the easy bit. Getting all the mechanics of the game to work in a playable fashion, and actually writing the damn thing, is the much harder part.)