Wikipedia Hits Million-Entry Mark 348
Sir Homer writes "The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the one millionth article in Wikipedia. Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is currently both the world's largest encyclopedia and fastest-growing, with articles under active development in over 100 languages. Nearly 2,500 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day, along with ten times that number of updates to existing articles. Wikipedia now ranks as one of the ten most popular reference sites on the Internet, according to Alexa.com. It is increasingly used as a resource by students, journalists, and anyone who needs a starting point for research. Wikipedia's rate of growth has continued to increase in recent months, and at its current pace Wikipedia will double in size again by next spring." stevejobsjr writes "Wikipedia needs our help. The Wikipedia project has no ads, and is run completely by volunteers. Still, it takes money to run such an amazing resource, and so they are running a fundraiser. The goal is to raise $50,000."
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Woah, hold off with that "-1 troll", I'm joking - albeit semi-seriously. Wikipedia is a great resource, and so far seems to do a pretty good job of keeping itself in check by the sheer volume of people checking each other's work.. but there is also the risk of important aspects being missed, or errors creeping in unchecked, as highlighted in a previous slashdot story.
Still a great resource though, but one best used in conjunction with more traditional ones than as a replacement to them, IMO
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I find it useful to have a reference work for all those things that are too geeky, obscure, or recent to be in proper encyclopedias. For the things I'm interested in, Wikipedia tends to be the best thing to use.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
If you use the Random Page link, you very often get a place in the US, which makes me wonder how much of the wikipedia consists of these entries!
There used to be a mention in the Southern Sri Lanka page of the Mexican Staring Frog, which as any fuly kno is a fictional animal from South Park. I removed the reference, but how much more crud is there in there?
.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
One example is that a whole bunch of articles from a 1911 dictionary were added. Another is that 30,000 US towns and cities were automatically added as stubs, with information being added later (basic information, such as state and population, were included I believe).
This might be useful: History of Wikipedia bots [wikipedia.org]
30,000 is a chunk of 1 million, but not that large a chunk. You just might have been unlucky
Re:Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
This is where I agree and disagree.
Sure, Wikipedia can get you information on the stuff you're interested in.
The coolest thing is (IMHO) that you can find out about topics you never knew you had interests in. This is the cool thing about any wiki. The ability to link pages that have nothing to do with each other can open the reader's eyes to new topics.
I find myself browsing Wikipedia all day sometimes reading about things I care nothing about because it's cool to at least check it out.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think Wikipedia was ever meant to replace the traditional library. Its strength has always been in tracking popular culture and trends, cultures, pop artifacts and events that are recent and/or developing. The fact that Wikipedia is ever-changing is a good thing in that regard, because the topics it covers best are in the process of change too.
Re:Yes (Score:2)
I'd venture to guess that there's more interest in Star Trek [wikipedia.org] and meme theory [wikipedia.org] in slashdot than your typical "important" things like how the king of england gets coronated [wikipedia.org]. don't you think encyclopedias should have information on what you want to know?
the great part, of course, is that both slashdot geeks and history geeks profit because wikipedia covers so much--in sufficient detail.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when I used to use encyclopedias on CD-ROM, often the topics I wanted to find out about had nothing, or maybe just a single paragraph.
With Wikipedia, if that was the case, after I had found some other resources, I could share my new found knowledge with the rest of humanity by submitting it to Wikipedia.
a whole paragraph? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Versioning: If I say I got something from the 1975 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, you can go and check that I got my reference right. Then you can check if the fact was right in that version. With wiki, if I say I got it from the 20.2.2002 wiki, simply finding out if I got the quote right can be a problem.
2. Continuity: Most books fix errors as the version number increases. There is no gaurantee of continuity in the wiki system.
3. Editorship: Most o
Re:Yes (Score:3, Informative)
3. Editorship: Most other sources have clear lines about which author is responsible for a whole article, and one person who is responsible for seeing that facts are preserved and false statements are revie
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Its far from perfect, but Wikipedia has come a long way from being the Encyclopedia That Slashdot Built...
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia started out as the progeny of Nupedia, a very serious, peer-reviewed encyclopedia which managed to produce all of two dozen articles. If you look at the Wayback Machine [archive.org] in July 2001, you will find that Wikipedia early on was actually quite philosophy-centric (in part because the original, full-time chief editor, Larry Sanger, is a philsopher).
Of course we have Slashdot readers among our editors, including myself. But we also have credentialed experts and amateurs from many different fields. We try to make it as easy as possible to join in, and many people who know nothing about computers do. If you (the reader, not the parent poster) know a way to make Wikipedia easier to use, please do not hesitate to submit a feature request [wikipedia.org].
We don't go around deleting articles on geeky subjects if they're well-written and encyclopedic. But Wikipedia never aimed exclusively at a nerdy audience and its editors were never made up exclusively of members of that audience.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
The Jargon file was one of the early sets of data that was imported. This highlights a general problem with importing data, in that large sets of data imported from a single source may skew the overall impression of Wikipedia in one direction or another, without that impression necessarily being based on any real inherent bias. It's just like saying "Wikipedia is made of US census fans".
I've first edited Wikipedia articles about half a year after it started and am quite familiar with the project's history.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
It was meant as a tongue in cheek line - and for what it's worth, I find memetics a very interesting subject, along with plenty of other geeky things (i'll.. uh.. pass on the Klingon though, thanks)
My point was simply that Wikipedia, by it's very nature, tends to lend itself to being extremely detailed in specific areas of interest that appeal to it's readership and contributor-ship (such as Klingon or memetics). That's not necessarily any bad thing, and in fact, you probably won't find any other encyclopedia anywhere with such a level of detail on some of the more obscure subjects in Wikipedia.. however, my main point (which I don't think I emphasised enough looking back on it) stands.. that Wikipedia is NOT a replacement to more traditional information resources, but a very good compliment to them
and as for the guy who said I was just going for a "+5 not completely stupid", feel free to mod me overrated if you want.. personally I don't think my first post should be at +5 either, but then I've long since given up on understanding
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
s/Wikipedia/Slashdot/
s/Wikipedia/Telephone directory/
s/Wikipedia/the bible/
s/Wikipedia/any document/
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's useful for the same thing a traditional encyclopedia is useful for: you can read it to get general background, or to sketch out your ideas, but when it comes to actually writing down an argument in detail you need to go to original sources for support. But there again Wikipedia or a good encyclope
Re:Yes (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yes (Score:3, Informative)
ok then [slashdot.org]
Re:Yes (Score:2)
Yes, I read that article too and he brings up a good point of why you should use multiple sources. This is of course not limited to Wikipedia, though.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst part of the whole thing is how Wikipedia is gradually making so many Google searches useless. More and more i find myself typing some term into Google, and getting back a number of "reference" sites that simply grab all the content from Wikipedia and slap advertisements on. Sometimes the whole first page of Google results is like this recently. Aaargh.
Re:So what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Think about it: Google want to differentiate themselves as the best search (I think they are ATM). This is another way for them to succeed! Filter out copies of Wikipedia/Other copiable sites....
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Fool.
Re:So what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
they [wikipedia.org] already [wikipedia.org] exist [wikipedia.org] on wikipedia.
want more? it takes a while to get to a million. maybe you can help...
Here's a metric. (Score:2, Interesting)
Here we go again (Score:5, Insightful)
ANYONE who takes into account only 1 source is a moron, unless they don't truly care about accuracy.
Wikipedia is 1 source and anyone who uses it exclusively is a moron as all people who only take 1 source into account are either morons or very trusting. Let's take Hatshepsut [wikipedia.org] for example.
The published historian Gardner claims that she was an overbearing mother who Thutmose III hated. For his proof he states the fact a lot of Hatshepsut's reliefs have been destroyed and replaced with other people and that this is obviously indicative of his pent up frustration and anger at her.
Gae Callendar (another published historian) says that this is completely false and that there's proof that the relief's were destroyed long after Thutmose III and that even if he DID do it, this was common practise amongst the Egyptian Pharoahs so it isn't indicative that he hated her, but was just following Egyptian tradition.
Gardner says that Hatshepsut wasn't a true Pharaoh because she didn't have enough military campaigns, Callendar says she was and that Gardner is just comparing her to the people that had the MOST military campaigns which is unfair and that she had more campaigns then other pharaohs and Gardner admits they're true Pharaohs.
Now I never read a book that laid out the information just as I did. I learnt all that by reading SEVERAL books. If I had only read 1 book I would have had an unbalanced viewpoint, such as the one evident in this page [touregypt.net] with the quote I would say Wikiepdia has a better article on this subject as it says
Re:Here's a metric. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So what? (Score:2)
Wow, that must be the understatement of the day.
You're saying that Wikipedia has a less-than-small number of good, well-edited articles? Come on [wikipedia.org]...
Wikipedia has a huge number of well-written articles, but I agree with others that you should use multiple sources if doing some research. As usual. It's not like I write an essay based on Ency
Who here has contributed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just curious.
I think I'll have to wait a few years before I'm in a position to make a noteworthy contribution in my current field.
Re:Who here has contributed? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you see a stub and have the time to donate, you can add a summary using information gathered from another source. The information is already there--the point of the encyclopedia is to put it in a place and format where it is easily accessible.
Re:Who here has contributed? (Score:3, Informative)
You can:
* correct typos
* reformulate obscure sentences
* fix invalid links (ie correct [[SlashDot]] => [[Slashdot]]
* translate articles from other languages (i translated from en: the history of a country i didn't even know
* send patches for the software, MediaWiki
Re:Who here has contributed? (Score:2)
Re:Who here has contributed? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't be having the best grammar, or anything, but a simple edit here and there can really help.
Take for example a article about the city where I live. For most (or all) cities there are lists of famous people from that city. I noticed some obscure, but a few notable, people were left out. All I had to do was stick them in there with a few brackets around their names and Viola!
An easy way to get started is to look for stub articles [wikipedia.org] and go from there. Many times the stub articles have related information already on Wikipedia. And many times the information can be gathered from the Internet and texts you already own. Grab a book of the shelf and write about the topic in your own words. See, you don't have to be the expert - people have already written volumes on most subjects.
Another way to get started with stub pages is to find a stub that has an official website. This article [wikipedia.org] is a good example. Even biography stubs are good candidates for this considering most actors (for example) have their own web sites today. Earlier I noticed that Lou Rawls [wikipedia.org] was a stub page. I simply put his official page as an "External Link" and listed it on "pages needing attention [wikipedia.org]" with a note and link telling everyone that he has an official bio. While the page isn't beautiful at this point it is starting out.
One last way to start out is just by surfing around reading things your interested in. If you notice that "Star Wars" links to "Luke Skywalker" but not the other way around then you can fix that. If you notice a sentence misworded or a word spelled wrong you can fix that too.
I'd recommend creating a user name because this allows you to later on claim certain articles as your own. By this I mean; even though you aren't the expert now, you could be someday. Imagine adding that to your resume. "I've created 150 articles for the Internet's free encyclopedia project" or something to that effect. It can help explain what you've been doing between jobs. Looks like charity work almost.
Even input on Wikipedia's discussion pages can help. There are several articles that seemed weird or unclear to me and all I did was suggest another route. It's worked in a few cases. Sometimes editors just need another point of view.
Re:Who here has contributed? (Score:2)
I think I'll have to wait a few years before I'm in a position to make a noteworthy contribution in my current field.
I've contributed mainly small bits here and there, like grammatical fixes. These usually don't require that much knowledge of the particular topic the article's about, and if I'm not sure about a change I make, I make a note of that in the comment part so people can change it back if I've made a mistake. So far, that system seems to work pretty well.
Re:Who here has contributed? (Score:2)
Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:2, Informative)
It's not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials. The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site [wikipedia.org].
It's fairly easy toinsert misleading and false information into Wiki. [frozennorth.org] Don't use it like as a replacement for an encyclopedia, or a properly vetted secondary source, unless you
Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
Authorative Source? Soon! (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia is currently working to reference all the facts on it. There is a project set up to do it also here Fact and Reference Check [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org]. Here is a quote:
Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
The days of solid sources for non-academic work are long gone. All we need is good enough, thats what Wikipedia is.
Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also fairly easy to make corrections or readjust bias in wikipedia. I quote:
"Recent research by a team from IBM found that most vandalism suffered by Wikipedia had been repaired within five minutes. That's fast: 'We were surprised at how often we found vandalism, and then surprised again at how fast it was
Congratulations. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's even worse, because the piece that the poster linked was written to debunk the sort of canned response that you offer. To rephrase the "discussion":
[Grandparent poster]: "Contrary to Wikipedia zealots' insistence that vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly, I can dem
Re:Congratulations. (Score:2)
Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:2)
Hmm...
Here's the definition I'm using, which are you using?
Encyclopedia: The circle of arts and sciences; a comprehensive summary of knowledge, or of a branch of knowledge; esp., a work in which the various branches of science or art are discussed separately, and usually in alphabetical order; a cyclopedia.
It's from Merriam-Webster too, which should be in your opinion well-researced enough to be used as well?
Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Wikipedia is "do-it-yourself". And it's damn good. It ranks, IMHO, as one of the best general knowledge sources out there.
All your comment did was to present well known facts in an overly dramatic and inflammatory manner. You, sir, are a troll.
Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:2)
Are you Al Fastold or are you just quoting him? (Score:3, Interesting)
Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source [syracuse.com]
Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia ISN'T gospel and certainly has quite a lot of errors, but to suggest that it's 'not authoritative' is a load of rubbish. In a printed encyclopeda (i.e. those pretentious brittanica things rich white middle class families seem to hav eon display), you depend on a select number of individuals to share their knowledge.
There's nothing to suggest that these people could be any more 'authoritative' than someone submitting on Wikipedia; Don't forget that the net is packed full of bored but highly intelligent 'geeks'... just read some of the more insightful/interesting slashdot comments in the sceintific articles & you'll see that the intellect of some people on the net surpasses that of the 'encyclopedia book writing' variety. Whatever suggests that the article in my brittanica encyclopedia WASN'T written by someone who knows less about the subject than myself, but has a good textbook to hand.
I'd never trust Wikipedia as being the absolute truth, but then again, as a kid & ever since, I've never trusted textbooks and the such to be 100% accurate.
Comments like yours are what gives - what is wholly a selfless project - a bad name for no really good reason. If they were intentionally creating their own little rift, i'd be annoyed, but it's all in the name of free information.
For someone like me who left education much MUCH erlier than I was ever advised to, but was always a very high scoring individual at school, I enjoy the resource because it means I can learn new things in my own time... not forgetting to use my head and check the validity of the content before I concrete it in my brain. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's learnt a lot of stuff just by clicking 'random page' a few times a day...
Congrats to wikipedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
Congrats to all the people of Wikipedia! Nowadays I spend a lot of time "surfing" Wikipedia -- I start on one subject and keep clicking interesting links until somehow I end up somewhere totally different and have a cursory grasp of at least a half dozen new subjects. This used to be a favourite passtime on the web many years back, but has since lost a lot of its appeal.
Despite a few criticisms from those who have to criticise everything, the fact is that Wikipedia is one of the best sources of information on the web. It's a great place to start the learning process, it's got a little something on virtually every topic, and it's FREE.
(That's free as in information, not free as in beer.)
Re:Congrats to wikipedia. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Congrats to wikipedia. (Score:2)
Damn.. you had to get me started reading that and following links, did you =)? Still, I found this page [wikipedia.org] after following a few doozen links, and the funny thing is that I wrote most of it... weird how seeminly unrelated subjects can somehow connect isn't it?
How nice to be asked (Score:3, Interesting)
I like the fund raising approach as it will allow them to be useful and ad free.
Can you think of any other sites who might've benefited from this user friendly approach?
Re:How nice to be asked (Score:2)
How much server power do you need to serve up to 700 requests per second [wikimedia.org]?
So which one is it? (Score:2)
It might be something completely useless, but I'm in the habit of making myself a mine of useless information.
Re:So which one is it? (Score:2)
Doesn't matter, it's a stub.
(Seriously though, I tried finding this myself... the only thing I could find was New pages on wikipedia [wikipedia.org])
Re:So which one is it? (Score:2)
Probably a stub, but who really cares? Stubs can grow pretty fast sometimes.
before you ask (Score:5, Interesting)
-source [wikipedia.org]
Congrats to Wikipedia for the 1 millionth entry...and (less easily measured) even more interesting [wikipedia.org], deep [wikipedia.org], and thoughtful [wikipedia.org] articles.
um. (Score:2, Interesting)
The serious question is: how good is the quality of information in the typical wikipedia article? That's the question that you'll see all the fanatics avoid frantically, either by pretending to have answered it ("it gets better all the time"), by blaming the critic ("that's *your* fault for not spending 3 hours a week editing Wikipedia!"), or just saying something completely unrelated ("...whenever somebody notices
Re:um. (Score:4, Insightful)
How good? In many cases better than proprietary solutions. Some cases not as good. You're right, many many Wikipedia articles suck. I've seen many of them through stupid google searches.
Yet I think we all share some kind of open-source optimism that it's getting there.
Then its your job to fix them! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:um. (Score:2)
Probably by own experiences. Note he didn't say "in all cases, I know it's better than proprietary solutions". You can draw a conclusion like that if you often find very good articles (without lying when saying so), you know.
Re:um. (Score:4, Insightful)
I tend to think that the burden of proof is on the wikipedia condemners to show that it's decidedly *worse* than proprietary solutions.
because nobody's even *trying* to get any sort of metrics on how good or bad the content is.
1) Do those metrics exist for traditional encyclopedias?
2) Why don't *you* try to make those metrics, if they're such a concern to you?
Re:before you ask (Score:2)
That article on leetspeak [wikipedia.org] is interesting... what other fun toys are Google [google.com] hiding?
A lot of criticism.. (Score:2, Insightful)
But wikipedia just works, like capitalism. A case of bad in theory good in practice.
Im donating 10 quid.
Re:A lot of criticism.. (Score:2)
Broken theory.
Before you say .. (Score:5, Informative)
Please read this:
Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.
Article review
Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates [wikipedia.org] nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion [wikipedia.org] negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page [wikipedia.org] which is in active use.
These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check [wikipedia.org] formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed [gmane.org] such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki [sourceforge.net], our free wiki software.
We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.
There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.
Neutrality
The Neutral Point of View [wikipedia.org] is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.
There's Wikinfo [wikinfo.org], which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia [disinfopedia.org] and dKosopedia [dkosopedia.com], which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.
We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database [wikimedia.org] and get going.
It's more than an encyclopedia
The Wikimedia Foundation [wikimediafoundation.org] currently operates Wikip
Re:Before you say .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Fact and Reference Project (Score:3, Informative)
Good post Eloquence, you might want to help with this project here that does fact and referencing checks [wikipedia.org] for Wikipedia.
There is already an example #2 [wikipedia.org] of how a tab format might auto generate the quotations, and then people can fill in the sources. Click edit to see the tab structure currently based on comment tabs.
Tim Starling already knows about this, we'd just need a couple lines of code added to Wikimedia to make some custom tabs.
Wikipedia is a great research tool... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wikipedia is a great research tool... (Score:3, Informative)
Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs? (Score:5, Interesting)
At $15-25 a disc they could've get enough money to maintain it IMHO. It hurts me when I see free projects begging with the bowl.
Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs? (Score:3, Informative)
And, i might add, there are several other projects for CD/DVD distributions as well (all on meta.) HTH.
Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs? (Score:3, Interesting)
A DVD would be obsolete the second it was created. It goes against the whole idea of Wikipedia.
Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs? (Score:4, Insightful)
An invaluable resource (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm friends with someone in marketing for a _large_ multi-national organisation and I know for a fact that they use upwards of 50 people in their marketing campaigns to visit websites to post innacurate information. "Buy product X. It's better than product Y. I've used it and it's true!"
Now translate that to Wikipedia and select something that you want to influence. "Windows LongDredgeUphillWarrior 2043 is the best due to it's powerful features - etc". How much would it cost you to hire 10 people to 'maintain' this information for a year?
The more popularity WikiP is the more likely this sort of disinformation will become.
Just my paranoia probably but the possibility for it is there. I realise other information sources are suceptible to this form of manipulation too but it's worth bearing it in mind when you're researching with WikiP as I know many assume the information is valid because it's checked by 'many eyeballs'!
Re:An invaluable resource (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm friends with someone in marketing for a _large_ multi-national organisation and I know for a fact that they use upwards of 50 people in their marketing campaigns to visit websites to post innacurate information. "Buy product X. It's better than product Y. I've used it and it's true!"
If there actually were law "by the people, for the people" rather than company-bought law those 50 people would be doing time for fraud. Company astroturfers are just the organised crime of spam and the police should be
Re:An invaluable resource (Score:5, Informative)
Here's what would probably happen in wikipedia:
1) These people would post this article.
2) Most people using wikipedia would recognize it as violating NPOV (neutral point of view)
3) The people editing would change the article to be more NPOV.
4) The hired "maintainers" would change it back.
5) Other people on wikipedia would change it back again.
6) An "edit war" would ensue, with the page rapidly being edited back and forth.
7) Someone would bring the edit war to the attention of a moderator.
8) The moderator would lock the page -- and put a disclaimer at the top noting that it was locked -- until the cause for the edit war was hashed out between the participating parties
9) It would eventually be determined that one or more of the "Maintatiners" were putting in the NPOV material on purpose.
10) These "maintainers" would be banned (by ip address), and the article would be deleted or unlocked (depending on its usefulness as an article)
11) Repeat until all the "maintainers" are banned.
The system works because there are more "good guys" than "bad guys", effectively.
fundraiser (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:fundraiser (Score:3, Funny)
Re:fundraiser (Score:3, Informative)
Quoth the parent poster; "Still, it takes money to run such an amazing resource, and so they are running a fundraiser. The goal is to raise $50,000." why dont they use Google Adsense?
According to About Wikipedia [wikimediafoundation.org], they do not wish to use advertisements. I read elsewhere (which I of course can't find now) that this is partly because they want to appear as unbiased as possible.
The really interesting pages... (Score:4, Interesting)
Look right down at the bottom [wikipedia.org]
Slashdot effect (Score:5, Interesting)
An example is The Slashdot Effect [wikipedia.org].
If Wikipedia's entry for the Effect would suffer from it after being discussed here, the world would certainly implode in a puff of poetic logic would it not?
Re:Slashdot effect (Score:4, Interesting)
First, they have more traffic than slashdot to begin with. (By now, it should be A LOT MORE).
Second, they use a squid array to dynamically cache requests. Its a 3 layer system: Database->Apache->Squid. If a lot of traffic goes to the same article, the requests wont even reach the apaches... (and you would need A TON of people to overload the squids, because even at 80% caching efficiency 1000hits/s dont crash them)
wikimedia for law school (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't understand why anyone would use word, or oneNote for that matter (which a lot of my peers do). For my money (free!), wikimedia beats 'em all hands down.
Anyone else using this tech for school?
Fundraising slashdot effect (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia helped me (Score:5, Interesting)
As and example, my daughter was recently diagnosed with an extremely rare condition called Opsoclonus Myoclonus Syndrome [wikipedia.org]. It only effects about 1 in 10,000,000 people per year, so you can imagine the difficulty we had finding information and medical practitioners who knew anything about it. I searched the Web and found lots of information and other people with the same condition, but it took a long time to find what I wanted and the information was fragmented and often very old, but eventually I knew more that any of the medical specialists we have been seeing. I wanted to share my knowledge, so I build my own web site, played with a blog, but then it hit me, Wikipedia! So created the OMS page and put all of the knowledge I had collected into it. My daughter will get better and we will forget the horrible episode, but the wikipedia page will live and grow and continue to help people long after I stop maintaining it.
This sort of information is only going to be accessed by small number of people, but it will be extremely valueable. Thanks Wikipedia!
Wikipedia's cabal (Score:3, Funny)
As far as entries on this or that, Wikipedia may be fine. As far as articles about history, news, or politics, there is a very heavy American bias, in fact it is basically a white collar American's view of the world encyclopedia.
For example, the entry for "East Germany" (before a friendly editor came across it) opened with: "East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union which, together with West Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990 in Germany." One wonders why it would be said on the East Germany page that it was a "satellite state of the former Soviet Union" and someone of that point of view would not say that West Germany was a satellite state of the USA.
It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the CIA Factbook, the US State Department, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the "History of Colombia [wikipedia.org]" article. That gives you an idea of what this history is grounded in.
Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wikis out there such as Infoshop Open Wiki [infoshop.org] which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wikis like Disinfopedia [disinfopedia.org] which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.
I think this is just something we learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of Wikinfo [wikinfo.org], Disinfopedia [disinfopedia.org], dKosopedia [dkosopedia.com], Infoshop Open Wiki [infoshop.org], and other alternative GFDL corpus access providers.
Why no ads..? (Score:3, Insightful)
How long can an expanding resource like wikipedia depend on donations? Wikipedia needs to start supporting itself and perhaps even a few other open source projects. Yes, I'd hate to see banners, but perhaps a few text ads won't annoy me as long as I know they are there to ensure wikipedia has the funds it needs to grow. As long as it's a not-for-profit organization, if it gathers too much money that it doesn't know what to do with, then just donate them to other open source efforts like mozilla.
My Biggest Complaint (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, I was reading some articles about music theory the other day (something I kno^Kew nothing about), and it was *dense* like a brick. If the point of the articles were to educate, then they were failing; they were describing beginner-level information, but they were doing it in a way that goes over the heads of most beginers.
I've noticed the same thing happening to some articles I've helped with. I try to write in a way that's accessible to the layman, but then later some self-important expert comes by and adds extra minutiae that obfuscate the points of the article, extra un-explained un-linked vocabulary that confuses the reader, and meaningless tangents that distract from the focus.
It's hard to keep up (and so, I haven't been). But please, keep my words in mind when editing! Particularly if you wrote the bits on music theory. Remember, you're writing to educate BEGINERS, not to impress your peers with how much trivia and jargon you know.
This is on my next to donate to list (Score:3, Interesting)
Today I donated to FireFox [mozillastore.com], actually I got one of the new T-Shirts and some stickers to put on my car but that counts right? It felt great. Sure it was a bit much for a T-Shirt, but I know that the profit is going to something I actually care about and I can only imagine how happy I will feel wearing that shirt around town, speaking the word of mozilla to all who ask about my shirt.
Next on my list to donate to is the EFF [eff.org], and I think I get a nifty bumper sticker for that too.
I really want to donate to wikipedia, I use it all the time. I find myself getting bored, then researching something random on wikipedia, and an hour later I've got 50 tabs open in FireFox and I'm super happy. I just thought I would point out to everyone that Wikipedia has T-Shirts available at cafepress.com/wikipedia [cafepress.com].
Ok, enjoy the rest of your day.
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
not strange but not linear growth (Score:2)
Maybe this page [wikipedia.org] will be useful to you. And there are of course Erik Zachte's amazing stats [wikipedia.org]