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Submission + - Wikipedia admin's manipulation "messed up perhaps 15,000 students' lives" 5

Andreas Kolbe writes: Recently, "ArbCom", Wikipedia's highest court, banned an administrator account that for years had been manipulating the Wikipedia article of a bogus Indian business school – deleting criticism, adding puffery, and enabling the article to become a significant part of the school's PR strategy. Believing the school's promises and advertisements, families went to great expense to send sons and daughters on courses there – only for their children to find that the degrees they had gained were worthless. "In my opinion, by letting this go on for so long, Wikipedia has messed up perhaps 15,000 students’ lives," an Indian journalist quoted in the story says. India is one of the countries where tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet, making Wikipedia a potential gatekeeper.

Comment Pages should not be memorials (Score 1) 5

Deaths of children and other non-combatants in a war zone need analysis of the causes in general. Rarely do details of specific deaths advance understanding, unless the death is a specific trigger for a wider increase in violence. An example would assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and in that case you'd want to know why the death caused armies across Europe to mobilize. More recent example would be the killing of Michael Brown.

Comment Re:And the culprit is (Score 1) 165

I looked up a German Theologian the other day. The WP article was created in 2003 as a c&p of the 1911 EB article. No improvement has been made since to the WP article except to add some references to the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, and a couple of other pre 1910 sources. Modern scholarship discounts much of the 1911 EB article. EB has been updated WP has not. You know 113 years is a long time to wait for an update.

Comment Re:And the culprit is (Score 1) 165

I get a good laugh. I also don't correct it. Any one that is looking at wikipedia for reliable information deserves what they get. Eventually even lazy ass journalists and plagiarizing students will realize the folly. Until then "rock on dude". Did you hear about Jagged85 he made >100,000 edits to WP many of which had no bearing to the sources he quoted and in many case the sources were fictional too. He specialized in Mathematics, History, Philosophy, Medicine, and Literature. Much of what he wrote was invented. WP knew about this in 2008, but it wasn't until 2012 that he was banned (for falsifying articles on computer games), In 2010 they had an attempt to clean up the articles. Many of those that looked at it thought that the best thing to do was to stub out any articles that he'd made large contributions to. But they couldn't quite bite the bullet and stub out Number Theory and similar articles. Meanwhile Jagged85 continued to make his falsifying edits for a further 2 years adding an extra 30,000 or so. The 2010 cleanup effort fizzled out a few weeks after it started. So they are still finding sub-articles on subjects such as Evolution that were Jagged85'd.

Submission + - Guilt by Wikipedia: how lazy journalists made Joe Streater a basketball villain 2

Andreas Kolbe writes: For more than six years, Wikipedia named an innocent man as a key culprit in the 1978/79 Boston College point shaving scandal. The name Joe Streater was inserted into Wikipedia by an anonymous user in August 2008. The unsourced insertion was never challenged or deleted, and over time, Streater became widely associated with the scandal through newspaper and TV reports as well as countless blogs and fan sites, all of which directly or indirectly copied this spurious fact from Wikipedia. Yet research shows that Streater, whose present whereabouts are unknown, did not even play in the 1978/79 season. Before August 2008, his name was never mentioned in connection with the scandal. As journalists have less and less time for in-depth research, more and more of them seem to be relying on Wikipedia instead, and the online encyclopedia is increasingly becoming a vector for the spread of spurious information.

Submission + - Why women have no time for Wikipedia 2

Andreas Kolbe writes: Wikipedia is well known to have a very large gender imbalance, with survey-based estimates of women contributors ranging from 8.5% to around 16%. This is a more extreme gender imbalance than even that of Reddit, the most male-dominated major social media platform, and it has a palpable effect on Wikipedia content. Moreover, Wikipedia editor survey data indicate that only 1 in 50 respondents is a mother – a good proportion of female contributors are in fact minors, with women in their twenties less likely to contribute to Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation efforts to address this "gender gap" have so far remained fruitless. Wikipedia’s demographic pattern stands in marked contrast to female-dominated social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest, where women aged 18 to 34 are particularly strongly represented. It indicates that it isn’t lack of time or family commitments that keep women from contributing to Wikipedia – women simply find other sites more attractive. Wikipedia’s user interface and its culture of anonymity may be among the factors leading women to spend their online time elsewhere.

Comment Re: 'unreliability' (Score 1) 189

WP treats newspapers as a reliable source. You wrong about EBs reliability vs WP. Perhaps you are relying on the well debunked Nature article of some 8 years ago. The articles chosen were mainly mainstream science articles, and they treated all errors similarly regardless of severity. So for example a factual error such as saying that Origin of the Species was published on the 25 November 1859, counted the same as saying that its author was Charles Dickens. OK not quite so blatant but I'm sure you get the point. One FA had for three years "in 1345 during the reign of Richard II". You state that WP is 100x bigger than EB as if that is a good thing. However, that EB doesn't have 1000s of My Little Pony articles doesn't make WP better. Millions of WP articles are one sentence stubs that will never be expanded, and in themselves are worse than useless, as the Google juice pushes sites that may expand on the information down the listings. Example a stub article on some species of Lichen, that was constructed by some bot scrapping a biological database is unlikely to be expanded on WP. A site dedicated to the study of lichens may well do. WP and its mirror scrapper sites will ensure that the lichen site is off the first google hits page. Play the WP game press the random article link 20 times and see how many 1-2 sentence stubs you find, disambig page, and pages which are plastered with problem templates. Don't tell me its a work in progress I want information today that isn't loaded with bullshit and ignorance.

Comment Re:Citing Wikipedia (Score 1) 189

Maybe not necessarily but overwhelmingly amateur. But its not amateurs that are the problem it is people with an over inflated opinion of their abilities. It is the problem that the writers do not have sufficient command of the subject, and the reviews are equally ignorant. Copying swathes of text from sources chopping it up and regurgitating the results does not make an educational resource. Its like leaf cutter ants that chop out bits of leaves that are then dragged back to the nest for others to chew into a paste which is then fed to a fungus. Here is an example of where WP has missed the point 'cos they are too enamored with gossip.

Comment Re: 'unreliability' (Score 2) 189

And so?

The amount of wrong added to WP increases hourly, by the time that you have fixed one wrong a hundred other wrongs have been added. I don't mean POV wrongs but factual wrongs. Then if you fix the wrong someone the following day comes and unfixes it. You do no one any favours by fixing the crap, as that just hides the fact that the place is full of wrong.

Hercules had an easier task of cleaning out the stables than we have of fixing wrong on WP.

Comment Re:Citing Wikipedia (Score 1) 189

I'm fully aware of the etymology. Just because the pages aren't in chronological order does not make it NOT a blog. If I arrange pages on my site alphabetically does that make it not a blog? I have a 4500+ site the front page displays things in chronological order, if I promote them there. Does that make it a blog. Does only posting 1:10 pages to the front page make it NOT a blog?

BTW there is nothing in the WP description of a blog that says that WP is not a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important contribution to the popularity of many blogs.

See WP for what it really is.

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