This is no reason to fork. The "stable version" addition to Mediawiki has been discussed for quite a while now, and is definitely feasible. When articles reach a certain quality, they can be protected so that certain editors (such as IP editors or week-old accounts) can still make changes, but those changes will not be visible until approved by an administrator. There will essentially be a stable live version, and an unstable edited version.
Veropedia exists because all of those promises of stable versions failed to materialize. I was present at a backroom discussion at Wikimania in August 2006 at Harvard Law School. All of the English Wikipedia bigwigs were there, including Jimmy Wales. They promised that stable versions were right around the corner. Well, it's been a year and months since then, and little progress has been made. How long are you willing to just sit around until someone else fixes something when you can do something about it yourself? Yes, stable versions on Wikipedia is a great idea. They've also been in discussion for years, so don't hold your breath.
This sounds unlikely. You mirror a specific edit that an expert identifies as good? So what does the expert do, go through each version of an article until he finds one that is both factually accurate and comprehensive? Or does the expert simply tell you which sentences are inaccurate, and then you delete them? The result will be a hacked-up article lacking flow and depth.
Once you get a hang for using the History tool on Wikipedia, you'll see that you can go through vast swaths of the article's history with relative ease. It's not nearly as tedious as having to read each specific revision one by one. Looking at the diffs really helps. Veropedia encourages all of its contributors to edit Wikipedia (and indeed, tens of thousands of edits on Wikipedia are now directly attributable to fixing up articles for import to Veropedia). I don't see why the article would appear to be hacked up and lacking flow and depth, any more so than regular editing would. We're all veteran Wikipedia editors. We're not just hacking up articles poorly.
Wikipedia is one project with many editors. Veropedia is one of many subprojects, each with few editors; given a finite (and likely small) number of people interested in working on this, you are providing yet another outlet for people to essentially reinvent the wheel by once again vetting the same set of Wikipedia articles for your own encyclopedia. Instead of everyone working together to produce a profitable, accurate subset of Wikipedia articles, users are stuck signing up with one of many subprojects, to do the exact same tasks as the other subprojects.
The difference is, none of the edits are made on Veropedia proper. They are made on Wikipedia, and then that version is imported to Veropedia. So it's not really a division of labor. Wikipedia is still getting all of the fruits of our labors. I don't see how we're reinventing the wheel by "once again vetting articles". As far as I know, there's no one else doing what we're doing. Citizendium, for instance, does have vetting, but it is a fork rather than a stable versions layer. And it's not like our work isn't available under the exact same license that everything else on Wikipedia is available under (it has to be!). So the work we do to improve articles is immediately usable by everyone. So I really don't see any wasted efforts - any other sites working on vetting can simply use the cleaned up versions of articles that we've made, and likewise, we can use theirs.
(Disclaimer: I wrote a good portion of the code that powers Veropedia.)
Yes, there are dozens of sites that mirror Wikipedia with ads. Actually, more like thousands, and most of those don't even bother giving any attribution. Veropedia is different. Whereas all those other sites mirror the most recent revision, Veropedia mirrors a specific revision that has been identified as good. This is where the editorial discretion and quality control come in, making it qualitatively different than other mirrors. In addition, Veropedia has rather strict rules on what can be imported, so after finding an article that you want to import, you often have to spend a good amount of time on Wikipedia fixing all the problems in the article. This is good for both sites: Wikipedia gets improved, and Veropedia gets the best revision.
As for there being other projects aimed at identifying and vetting important Wikipedia articles, that's good, but you can never have too much improvement. There's always room for more people trying to fix up and improve Wikipedia. Whereas those other projects are non-profit, Veropedia aims to generate revenue using text ads, thus freeing us from the beggar's paradox of Wikipedia. It also gives us cash we can use to reinvest back into Wikipedia, something we have already started doing by sponsoring best article contests with cash prizes.
The wiki model is great for building up something from scratch, but once you reach a decent level of quality, it becomes difficult. Wiki rot, the accumulated negative influences of vandalism, biased edits, and poor quality edits, is a serious problem, and oftentimes the best version of an article was written years ago, and the author simply lost the patience to keep reverting and fighting off all of the lesser editors who have come since. Wikipedia has needed to go to a stable versions model for a long while, but has been dragging its butt for way too long. That's where Veropedia comes in.
Four years ago, when I was just starting university, I bought a $200 bargain basement GNU/Linux PC from Wal-Mart (unfortunately they don't sell these anymore). I used it as a personal server in my dorm room. Yeah, it was severely underpowered compared to my desktop, but it was just fine for using to tinker around with GNU/Linux. I used it for a good three years until I had enough money to buy something better. But what an incredible value that was, three years of experience for only $200. This latest machine looks to be good for exactly the same thing. Buy it, strip off Windows, put on GNU/Linux, and it makes a good first server.
Bah, you and your facts. Obviously you're not a Wikipedia editor.
Damn right I'm not a Wikipedia editor. I'm a Wikipedia administrator. And it pisses me off to no end when we get lumped together with Wikia, which we really and truly have absolutely nothing to do with other than sharing the same wiki software (of course, there's thousands of other sites out there that also use MediaWiki).
Wikia is not the "company" behind Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation, is what's behind Wikipedia. Wikia is a totally separate for-profit company that is run by Jimbo Wales.
The Wikipedia community is NOT having a serious discussion about requiring credential verification. This is an idea that is being pushed by Jimmy Wales himself. The community has no real ability or desire to perform credential verification. It's way outside of the scope of the kinds of things that the community does.
Incidentally, this is why Wikipedia frequently gets in trouble with "experts" who think they can just waltz into an article and say that it should be one way because they're an expert in their field and they know best.
Well... how do we know you're really an expert in the field? Essjay claimed to be, and threw that weight around in a lot of arguments over articles, but he wasn't...
What do you mean, registering with NetworkSolutions must have money to burn? Yeah, it looks to be about $15 per domain registration versus $6 for some of the cheapest services, but does that really matter at all when you're talking about campaigns working with many millions of dollars?
I ditto this. Mergesort is a true comparison sort, which means it can sort anything so long as a comparison between two values is defined, e.g. strings (in lexigraphical order), floating point numbers, 1000-digit numbers... you get the drift. BitFast is a radix sort and only works in cases where the list elements obey certain limitations: for instance, if each list element can be expressed in 32 bits (an int).
The analogy is flawed, and you're actually somewhat rebutting yourself by using it. Using BitTorrent is not like hanging out like a bunch of drug dealers, but you can't be arrested because nobody saw you actually using any drugs. It's more like being arrested merely for being in a shop because some shoplifters tend to steal things. That's what BitTorrent is like; it has plenty of useful and legal applications, and only some people are going to "shoplift" using it. The analogy breaks down because the drug dealers are already doing something wrong, and it's really a stupid thing to be hanging around a bunch of active drug dealers if you're not using the drugs yourself, but there's nothing wrong whatsoever with being in a shop.
I know people modded you up as insightful, but really, logically speaking, 3. does not follow from 2. Just because A implies B does not mean that not A implies not B.
That is pretty much true. My reasoning is that the same could be said for most articles that Slashdot publishes. For example, ones that cite other computer technologies, such as numerous stories about PHP (what is PHP?) and linux (what is linux?). If this article assumes too much, then I guess most of the others do as well. I'm sure there's at least an order of magnitude difference in the number of people who know what "VT" is (in this context) and the number of people who know what PHP and Linux are. You're using a strawman argument.
Why would a supercivilisation build only 8 probes?They could have technology to detect Earth sized planets in the habitable zone.And they could send out hundreds of thousands probes to such planets.The problem is, if they don't have warp speed, these probes would not reach the planets until either the destination is already destroyed, or the sending civilisation itself is destroyed. Please re-examine your time scales. The galaxy is only 100,000 light-years across. Now it's likely that a civilization could wipe itself out in the amount of time it takes to get anywhere, but the destination is still going to exist. Remember, solar systems and planets exist on time scales on the order of billions of years. A few hundred thousand years is a blink in cosmological time.
And keep in mind, if they're detecting habitable planets, they're probably going to find many of those within a small radius (remember, an average spherical volume of the Milky Way that is just 100 lt-yr in diameter contains millions of stars). It's not going to take hundreds of thousands of years to explore the nearer systems, it'll take hundreds or thousands of years. That's not necessarily even too long to miss the civilizations while they still exist!
Wouldn't the speed of the ships increase during the thousand years? HEll what is to say we won't find a way around tha pesky speed of light. Yes, technology would definitely improve. But I used very low-ball, reasonable estimates in this calculation, which include that the laws of physics as we know them today are correct, and that FTL isn't possible. The point is, even under the most pessimistic of conditions, a civilization that is actively colonizing will cover the entire galaxy on the order of millions of years, not billions.
This figure is based on some very reasonable assumptions. Colony ships travel at much below the speed of light.
You're assuming interstellar colonization as practical. While it's a sci-fi staple, load of fun to imagine, it's quite likely not.
Why isn't it practical? There's no reason whatsoever that it won't be practical. Just over a hundred years ago they said human flight was impractical too, you know. And look at the airline industry these days. There's a huge difference between FTL, a science fiction staple that is physically impossible as far as we know, and space colonization another science fiction staple that has no physical laws standing in its way. Rockets are a science fiction staple too, you know, but nobody these days is claiming that they are impractical...
To be pedantic... the absolute minimum time to explore the whole galaxy from Earth is about 80,000 light-years, because the farthest part of the galaxy is about 80,000 light-years away from us. Although to be even more pedantic, double that, because you can't really say you've explored until the information about what you've found has made it back to you.
So, yeah, you can't explore the galaxy in only a few thousand years.
This figure of taking billions of years to explore the galaxy is utterly wrong. Actually, it only takes a few dozen million years to colonize the entire damn galaxy, which is a lot more effort than merely exploring it.
This figure is based on some very reasonable assumptions. Colony ships travel at much below the speed of light. Each colony gets a thousand years of development time from first colonization before it starts sending out its own colony ships. As you can see, even though it seems quite "slow", thanks to the magic of exponential growth, the entire galaxy is colonized in short order.
We won't merely be discovered if aliens exist - we'll be colonized. That's the most likely scenario for running into aliens. If they never spread beyond their home planet, they'll just be one star out of trillions - but if they do start colonizing, we'd find them everywhere.
This is yet another Slashdot article that assumes too much. I don't think the average reader is going to know what "VT" is. I certainly don't. It shouldn't be necessary to click through a link to understand the gist of what this story is about. VT should be explained in the synopsis.
Even the 6M claim could be a steaming pile, count the amount of users online at peak time please, not half made accounts, nor anything else, how many people play the game....
It doesn't really matter if the people are logging in regularly; they're still paying $15/month for the account.
The claim of 2.4 million users is a crock of shit. This blog post has some details on what the actual number of users is like.
Long story short, in Second Life it is free to signup for an account, so no conclusions can be drawn whatsoever from those numbers. Compare this with World of Warcraft, where each account costs $15/mo. or it is killed. Now when Blizzard tells you they have 6 million users, you know it's true. But as for Second Life, the number of simultaneous users in the game world really isn't that large. And the game lags horribly.
Putting the passwords in configuration files is another practice, but it is still quite insecure as cracking hashed passwords from a text file is a trivial exercise.
This simply isn't true. If salting is used (which is quite commonplace these days), it's pretty much going to be impossible to recover the password from the hash.
The article writeup says today is Grace Hopper's 100th birthday. What it neglects to tell you is that Grace Hopper died in 1992. So yes, today is the 100th anniversary of her birth, but I don't think many would consider it a 100th birthday.
Slashdot Mirror
This is no reason to fork. The "stable version" addition to Mediawiki has been discussed for quite a while now, and is definitely feasible. When articles reach a certain quality, they can be protected so that certain editors (such as IP editors or week-old accounts) can still make changes, but those changes will not be visible until approved by an administrator. There will essentially be a stable live version, and an unstable edited version.
Veropedia exists because all of those promises of stable versions failed to materialize. I was present at a backroom discussion at Wikimania in August 2006 at Harvard Law School. All of the English Wikipedia bigwigs were there, including Jimmy Wales. They promised that stable versions were right around the corner. Well, it's been a year and months since then, and little progress has been made. How long are you willing to just sit around until someone else fixes something when you can do something about it yourself? Yes, stable versions on Wikipedia is a great idea. They've also been in discussion for years, so don't hold your breath.
This sounds unlikely. You mirror a specific edit that an expert identifies as good? So what does the expert do, go through each version of an article until he finds one that is both factually accurate and comprehensive? Or does the expert simply tell you which sentences are inaccurate, and then you delete them? The result will be a hacked-up article lacking flow and depth.
Once you get a hang for using the History tool on Wikipedia, you'll see that you can go through vast swaths of the article's history with relative ease. It's not nearly as tedious as having to read each specific revision one by one. Looking at the diffs really helps. Veropedia encourages all of its contributors to edit Wikipedia (and indeed, tens of thousands of edits on Wikipedia are now directly attributable to fixing up articles for import to Veropedia). I don't see why the article would appear to be hacked up and lacking flow and depth, any more so than regular editing would. We're all veteran Wikipedia editors. We're not just hacking up articles poorly.
Wikipedia is one project with many editors. Veropedia is one of many subprojects, each with few editors; given a finite (and likely small) number of people interested in working on this, you are providing yet another outlet for people to essentially reinvent the wheel by once again vetting the same set of Wikipedia articles for your own encyclopedia. Instead of everyone working together to produce a profitable, accurate subset of Wikipedia articles, users are stuck signing up with one of many subprojects, to do the exact same tasks as the other subprojects.
The difference is, none of the edits are made on Veropedia proper. They are made on Wikipedia, and then that version is imported to Veropedia. So it's not really a division of labor. Wikipedia is still getting all of the fruits of our labors. I don't see how we're reinventing the wheel by "once again vetting articles". As far as I know, there's no one else doing what we're doing. Citizendium, for instance, does have vetting, but it is a fork rather than a stable versions layer. And it's not like our work isn't available under the exact same license that everything else on Wikipedia is available under (it has to be!). So the work we do to improve articles is immediately usable by everyone. So I really don't see any wasted efforts - any other sites working on vetting can simply use the cleaned up versions of articles that we've made, and likewise, we can use theirs.
(Disclaimer: I wrote a good portion of the code that powers Veropedia.)
Yes, there are dozens of sites that mirror Wikipedia with ads. Actually, more like thousands, and most of those don't even bother giving any attribution. Veropedia is different. Whereas all those other sites mirror the most recent revision, Veropedia mirrors a specific revision that has been identified as good. This is where the editorial discretion and quality control come in, making it qualitatively different than other mirrors. In addition, Veropedia has rather strict rules on what can be imported, so after finding an article that you want to import, you often have to spend a good amount of time on Wikipedia fixing all the problems in the article. This is good for both sites: Wikipedia gets improved, and Veropedia gets the best revision.
As for there being other projects aimed at identifying and vetting important Wikipedia articles, that's good, but you can never have too much improvement. There's always room for more people trying to fix up and improve Wikipedia. Whereas those other projects are non-profit, Veropedia aims to generate revenue using text ads, thus freeing us from the beggar's paradox of Wikipedia. It also gives us cash we can use to reinvest back into Wikipedia, something we have already started doing by sponsoring best article contests with cash prizes.
The wiki model is great for building up something from scratch, but once you reach a decent level of quality, it becomes difficult. Wiki rot, the accumulated negative influences of vandalism, biased edits, and poor quality edits, is a serious problem, and oftentimes the best version of an article was written years ago, and the author simply lost the patience to keep reverting and fighting off all of the lesser editors who have come since. Wikipedia has needed to go to a stable versions model for a long while, but has been dragging its butt for way too long. That's where Veropedia comes in.
Four years ago, when I was just starting university, I bought a $200 bargain basement GNU/Linux PC from Wal-Mart (unfortunately they don't sell these anymore). I used it as a personal server in my dorm room. Yeah, it was severely underpowered compared to my desktop, but it was just fine for using to tinker around with GNU/Linux. I used it for a good three years until I had enough money to buy something better. But what an incredible value that was, three years of experience for only $200. This latest machine looks to be good for exactly the same thing. Buy it, strip off Windows, put on GNU/Linux, and it makes a good first server.
Bah, you and your facts. Obviously you're not a Wikipedia editor.
Damn right I'm not a Wikipedia editor. I'm a Wikipedia administrator. And it pisses me off to no end when we get lumped together with Wikia, which we really and truly have absolutely nothing to do with other than sharing the same wiki software (of course, there's thousands of other sites out there that also use MediaWiki).
Wikia is not the "company" behind Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation, is what's behind Wikipedia. Wikia is a totally separate for-profit company that is run by Jimbo Wales.
The Wikipedia community is NOT having a serious discussion about requiring credential verification. This is an idea that is being pushed by Jimmy Wales himself. The community has no real ability or desire to perform credential verification. It's way outside of the scope of the kinds of things that the community does.
Incidentally, this is why Wikipedia frequently gets in trouble with "experts" who think they can just waltz into an article and say that it should be one way because they're an expert in their field and they know best.
... how do we know you're really an expert in the field? Essjay claimed to be, and threw that weight around in a lot of arguments over articles, but he wasn't ...
Well
What do you mean, registering with NetworkSolutions must have money to burn? Yeah, it looks to be about $15 per domain registration versus $6 for some of the cheapest services, but does that really matter at all when you're talking about campaigns working with many millions of dollars?
I ditto this. Mergesort is a true comparison sort, which means it can sort anything so long as a comparison between two values is defined, e.g. strings (in lexigraphical order), floating point numbers, 1000-digit numbers ... you get the drift. BitFast is a radix sort and only works in cases where the list elements obey certain limitations: for instance, if each list element can be expressed in 32 bits (an int).
The analogy is flawed, and you're actually somewhat rebutting yourself by using it. Using BitTorrent is not like hanging out like a bunch of drug dealers, but you can't be arrested because nobody saw you actually using any drugs. It's more like being arrested merely for being in a shop because some shoplifters tend to steal things. That's what BitTorrent is like; it has plenty of useful and legal applications, and only some people are going to "shoplift" using it. The analogy breaks down because the drug dealers are already doing something wrong, and it's really a stupid thing to be hanging around a bunch of active drug dealers if you're not using the drugs yourself, but there's nothing wrong whatsoever with being in a shop.
I know people modded you up as insightful, but really, logically speaking, 3. does not follow from 2. Just because A implies B does not mean that not A implies not B.
And keep in mind, if they're detecting habitable planets, they're probably going to find many of those within a small radius (remember, an average spherical volume of the Milky Way that is just 100 lt-yr in diameter contains millions of stars). It's not going to take hundreds of thousands of years to explore the nearer systems, it'll take hundreds or thousands of years. That's not necessarily even too long to miss the civilizations while they still exist!
You're assuming interstellar colonization as practical. While it's a sci-fi staple, load of fun to imagine, it's quite likely not.
Why isn't it practical? There's no reason whatsoever that it won't be practical. Just over a hundred years ago they said human flight was impractical too, you know. And look at the airline industry these days. There's a huge difference between FTL, a science fiction staple that is physically impossible as far as we know, and space colonization another science fiction staple that has no physical laws standing in its way. Rockets are a science fiction staple too, you know, but nobody these days is claiming that they are impracticalTo be pedantic ... the absolute minimum time to explore the whole galaxy from Earth is about 80,000 light-years, because the farthest part of the galaxy is about 80,000 light-years away from us. Although to be even more pedantic, double that, because you can't really say you've explored until the information about what you've found has made it back to you.
So, yeah, you can't explore the galaxy in only a few thousand years.
This figure of taking billions of years to explore the galaxy is utterly wrong. Actually, it only takes a few dozen million years to colonize the entire damn galaxy, which is a lot more effort than merely exploring it.
This figure is based on some very reasonable assumptions. Colony ships travel at much below the speed of light. Each colony gets a thousand years of development time from first colonization before it starts sending out its own colony ships. As you can see, even though it seems quite "slow", thanks to the magic of exponential growth, the entire galaxy is colonized in short order.
We won't merely be discovered if aliens exist - we'll be colonized. That's the most likely scenario for running into aliens. If they never spread beyond their home planet, they'll just be one star out of trillions - but if they do start colonizing, we'd find them everywhere.
This is yet another Slashdot article that assumes too much. I don't think the average reader is going to know what "VT" is. I certainly don't. It shouldn't be necessary to click through a link to understand the gist of what this story is about. VT should be explained in the synopsis.
Might want to research some physical cosmology ... the universe has expanded faster than the speed of light.
Even the 6M claim could be a steaming pile, count the amount of users online at peak time please, not half made accounts, nor anything else, how many people play the game....
It doesn't really matter if the people are logging in regularly; they're still paying $15/month for the account.
The claim of 2.4 million users is a crock of shit. This blog post has some details on what the actual number of users is like.
Long story short, in Second Life it is free to signup for an account, so no conclusions can be drawn whatsoever from those numbers. Compare this with World of Warcraft, where each account costs $15/mo. or it is killed. Now when Blizzard tells you they have 6 million users, you know it's true. But as for Second Life, the number of simultaneous users in the game world really isn't that large. And the game lags horribly.
Putting the passwords in configuration files is another practice, but it is still quite insecure as cracking hashed passwords from a text file is a trivial exercise.
This simply isn't true. If salting is used (which is quite commonplace these days), it's pretty much going to be impossible to recover the password from the hash.
The article writeup says today is Grace Hopper's 100th birthday. What it neglects to tell you is that Grace Hopper died in 1992. So yes, today is the 100th anniversary of her birth, but I don't think many would consider it a 100th birthday.
Nope, when a page is deleted, all of the contributions on that page are deleted too. You can see ABenis' contributions to other pages, at least.