Comment Re:More than just Wikipedia (Score 1) 5
" It seems intentionally inflammatory for the headline writer here to blame it all on Wikipedia."
Which WMF insider/shill is this?
Which WMF insider/shill is this?
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 Re:"Millions of dollars spent" / state of Flow (Score 1) 94
So, it looks like the WMF developed it, eh?
Comment Re:"Millions of dollars spent" / state of Flow (Score 1, Insightful) 94
Clever piece of evasion there. "I would ballpark the total money spent around $100-$150K max." Was that on Liquid Threads by itself, or for the entire combined ten-year-plus project? Do you even know how much money was spent on Flow by the WMF, Mr. Deputy Director?
Submission + - The bizarre and complex story of a failed Wikipedia software extension
metasonix writes: Originally developed by Wikia coders, "Liquid Threads" was intended to be a better comment system for use on MediaWiki talkpages. When applied to Wikipedia, then each Wikipedia talkpage or noticeboard would become something resembling a more modernized bulletin board, hopefully easier to use.
Unfortunately, the project was renamed "Flow" and taken over by the Wikimedia Foundation's developers. And as documented in this very long Wikipediocracy post, the result was "less than optimal". After seven years and millions of dollars spent, even WMF Director Lila Tretikov admits "As such it is not ready for “prime time” for us."
Thus, like almost every other large software project undertaken by the WMF in recent years (for example), "Flow" didn't flow, it crashed and burned. Remember this story the next time Wikipedia runs more fundraising banners on its articles; now you have some idea of where the money actually goes.
Unfortunately, the project was renamed "Flow" and taken over by the Wikimedia Foundation's developers. And as documented in this very long Wikipediocracy post, the result was "less than optimal". After seven years and millions of dollars spent, even WMF Director Lila Tretikov admits "As such it is not ready for “prime time” for us."
Thus, like almost every other large software project undertaken by the WMF in recent years (for example), "Flow" didn't flow, it crashed and burned. Remember this story the next time Wikipedia runs more fundraising banners on its articles; now you have some idea of where the money actually goes.
Comment Nothing attracts screaming rage to WP better (Score 1) 5
...than showing how pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli it is. I wonder if Wikipediocracy's sysop is getting anonymous death threats right now.
Comment Man, you "transhumanists" are easy to troll (Score 1) 455
Comment Mr. Streater is just a traffic generator (Score 1) 2
And as said in another thread on Wikipediocracy:
"the WMF is not in the business of providing an educational resource, it simply uses the term as a way of extracting money from the uninformed. That its sole purpose is putting data on screens, and finding ways for people to add more data that it can subsequently put on screens. What the data actually is it cares not. It just cares about getting $50 million a year to junket about." Traffic, and resulting donations, are obviously all the WMF cares about. We should not be "surprised" about outright, successful vandalism and defamation. It makes traffic and traffic fuels the Wikimedia "movement".
To hell with Mr. Streater's reputation. To hell with everyone's reputation. They're "building" an "encyclopedia" here.
"the WMF is not in the business of providing an educational resource, it simply uses the term as a way of extracting money from the uninformed. That its sole purpose is putting data on screens, and finding ways for people to add more data that it can subsequently put on screens. What the data actually is it cares not. It just cares about getting $50 million a year to junket about." Traffic, and resulting donations, are obviously all the WMF cares about. We should not be "surprised" about outright, successful vandalism and defamation. It makes traffic and traffic fuels the Wikimedia "movement".
To hell with Mr. Streater's reputation. To hell with everyone's reputation. They're "building" an "encyclopedia" here.
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.
Comment And the Wikipedians are ignoring this (Score 1) 2
As they usually do.
Submission + - The latest Wikipedia code-word for "dysfunction" is "Superprotection" 3
metasonix writes: As if the problems brought up during the recent 2014 Wikimania conference weren't enough, now Wikipedia is having an outright revolt by its editor and administrator community, especially on the German-language Wikipedia. A new Wikipediocracy blog post goes into some detail on the story. The WMF, currently awash in cash from its donors, keeps trying to force flawed new software systems onto the community, and they have repeatedly responded very negatively. This time, however, WMF Deputy Director Erik Moeller had the bright idea to create a new level of page protection to prevent the new software from being disabled. "Superprotection" has resulted in an outright revolt on German Wikipedia and subsequent coverage in the German press, plus demands that Moeller, one of Wikipedia's oldest insiders, be removed from his job. And one English Wikipedia insider started a change.org petition demanding the removal of "superprotection".
Comment Re:Take it Private (Score 1) 113
I'm not feeling the "Wiki-Love" here......:)
Comment Re:Copyright dispute with Wikipedia (Score 1) 113
>Personally, I think for 90% of the articles, Wales does a decent job as the final gatekeeper,
Which only indicates that you haven't looked at the actual content of Wikipedia very closely. I have. Yes, there are many good, usable articles on it. There are also millions of "junk" articles, thousands of hoaxes, tens of thousands of people being defamed in their biographies, hundreds of thousands of people glorifying themselves by writing their own bios (against Jimbo's own rule), and various other abuses. Some are repaired quickly, some sit there for years. And there's no way to tell if an article is valid or not, except by checking the references very carefully (which few people do anyway--Wikipedia is a lazy man's reference). Wales does no "gatekeeping" at all, he is purely a figurehead at this point.
What I really don't get: why do people worship him? He's one of the most inadequate leaders of a major online movement I've ever seen.
Which only indicates that you haven't looked at the actual content of Wikipedia very closely. I have. Yes, there are many good, usable articles on it. There are also millions of "junk" articles, thousands of hoaxes, tens of thousands of people being defamed in their biographies, hundreds of thousands of people glorifying themselves by writing their own bios (against Jimbo's own rule), and various other abuses. Some are repaired quickly, some sit there for years. And there's no way to tell if an article is valid or not, except by checking the references very carefully (which few people do anyway--Wikipedia is a lazy man's reference). Wales does no "gatekeeping" at all, he is purely a figurehead at this point.
What I really don't get: why do people worship him? He's one of the most inadequate leaders of a major online movement I've ever seen.
Comment Re:Quit whaling on Jimmy (Score 1) 113
(Hello, David! You've failed again with the anonymous backstabbing, we got what we wanted--on the front page. Give it up.)
Submission + - Jimmy Wales Embarrasses Himself at Wikimania
metasonix writes: On Sunday the 2014 Wikimania conference in London closed. Wikimania is the major annual event for Wikipedia editors, insiders and WMF employees to meet face-to-face, give presentations and submit papers. Usually they are full of "Wiki-Love" and good feelings; but this year, as the Wikipediocracy blog summarized, Wikipedia and its "god-king" Jimmy Wales came under considerable fire from the UK media — a very unusual occurrence. And much of it was direct criticism of Wales himself, including a very hostile interview by BBC journalist James O'Brien, who had been repeatedly defamed in his Wikipedia biography by persons unknown.
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