One “very senior Wikimedian,” we are told, “came to think of the project as a ‘city built by Asperger’s.’ ”
If you get the paywall, it’s readable at http://archive.today/R2rnW
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And yet… it’s orders of magnitude better than anything that came before it, and nobody’s found a better way to do it.
Do you mean print encyclopedias? If so, heavy disagree.
Less errors, more content, more up to date, more accessible. That said, I’ll admit the smell of a rarely opened tome is missed.
what are their advantages over wikipedia?
Sounds like the only real problem is all those jackass “deletionists”…
If an article is so niche no one ever looks at it, then it eats up zero bandwidth. Just the data storage for a small text file.
Nothing should ever be deleted, there’s no fucking benefit to that
If they weren’t acting up, then activity dying down wouldn’t matter
It’s the biggest repository of human knowledge ever, it existing and being freely accessible to the planet is massive.
But if they stop keep deleting “niche” content from Wikipedia, then people won’t have to use Fandom instead.
You know, the commercial, ad infested wiki that was also founded by a Wikipedia co-founder.
I don’t like Fandom as a commercial platform any more than you do, but in-universe topics for niche fandoms simply don’t belong on Wikipedia; they would make it harder for editors to focus copyediting time on articles that matter far more to most people.
There are nonprofit wiki farm alternatives to Fandom that are a better solution to that problem.
For example this interesting article
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Exocortex&oldid=813869381
was deleted with the reason “mostly unsourced speculation/science-fiction”.That reason is correct, though.
Just the data storage for a small text file.
That’s not true. It’s an entry in a database. That means it has to be indexed for search, and counted for “all pages where…” types of queries. It has to be replicated between database shards. You scale up your number of records, and you start hitting database, application, and operating system limits.
If non-notable articles were never deleted, millions of people and companies would create articles about themselves for promotion.
Self promotion is a different rule that exists. Also, their threshold for what constitutes ‘notability’ is ridiculously arbitrary and bureaucratic, or at least it was in the past. I doubt it’s changed.
It’s notable if there are reliable sources about it. If there are no reliable sources about it, you wouldn’t be able to write much about the topic anyway. Unless you conduct your original research.
In theory. I’ve seen firsthand the number of arguments about what constitutes notability and reliable sources. It’s not for nothing that this is the biggest divide among Wikipedia editors.
So? If the information they provide is accurate, what’s the big deal?
Because an encyclopedia with millions of promotional articles would lose not only its objectivity, but also crater the standard of quality of the average Wikipedia article.
The Cebuano Wikipedia is the poster child of a project expanding beyond its scope: millions of articles generated by a bot with no one there to edit them after they’re created.
TL;DR: This is largely a review/summary of The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke
Great article OP! First time I’d heard Wikipedia was in decline. I can’t see it ever going away.
Yes, the readership is not doing well. It won’t go away any time soon, but one day it might end up a ghost town. If everything develops linearly, which it might not.
Wikipedia is and has always been shit. It’s where institutions go to write down their propaganda so it sounds authoritative. In fact it’s the precursor to AI in that sense. It’s credentialism all the way down. If something is said somewhere by anyone, then it becomes a source. Unless that source is not
approved ofinstalled by the powers that let wikipedia gracefully host its websites.If a page regarding a political or historical event isn’t under constant scrutiny, state actors and “trolls” will gradually alter it until it says nothing conclusive at all. Everything must be up in the air, everything must be “neutral” (when language itself is political…)
Also think about the incentives. You’re a government. You have people working full time to redact history. You CAN and you WILL threaten people who write the wrong version of history. This is not even hidden, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Wikipedia–U.S._government_conflicts
They can see it happening, they can document it happening, and they can’t do shit to change it because they’re not a peer to peer project. Like the fediverse for that matter, it’s all vulnerable to the same exact “a guy in a suit rang your doorbell because the server is on your premises” tactic.
So in conclusion, believing that “wikipedia good” and “AI bad” is an incredibly naive way to understand the world. Read up on Wittgenstein and Sapir-Whorf and tell me how this isn’t literally their theories being implemented.
The way it’s usually treated by laymen, as here, Sapir-Whorf theory is pseudoscience, and you’re not even really talking about language but about information. As for Wittgenstein, you’re grossly banalising his work.
This is not even hidden
Yeah. Really makes you think…
Just quickly skimming the article you linked, I’m not seeing evidence that wikipedia is “shit”, just that there have been many attempts by governments and other powerful people to influence its content, which shouldn’t be surprising to anyone given how popular it is. Are there examples you could point to of those attempts being successful? (Including particular examples you want to highlight in that article; again I only skimmed it on a small screen.)
It also seems strange to link to a wikipedia article to support the claim that wikipedia is shit.
