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
You must log in or register to comment.
TL;DR: This is largely a review/summary of The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke
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?
Being written by professionals, each article written by a single person with an editor controlling their work – these two things lead to far better written text, more consistently organised material cross-article, with a good selection of the most relevant information in each article. Wikipedia is amateurs dumping all sorts of info (which they don’t always even understand properly) that they come across elsewhere online onto the site, and even the “deletionists” can’t really contain this tendency. Carefully written articles with a head and tail are rare and largely products of individuals who really know their shit, but that meticulous type of work is inevitably diluted in the overall landscape of the site.
Note: I’m a fairly regular Wikipedia editor. It’s useful and fun.* But when I need some non-trivial info in fields I’m somewhat adept in, I prefer skipping Wikipedia.
* Although WP in some smaller languages isn’t, some versions are actively harmful due to the amount of misinformation or propaganda, and I would vote for deleting them entirely, including my own contributions. I don’t think there’s any print encyclopedia so hopelessly bad that I’d throw it into the fire. But this is kind of outside the frame of discussion, I admit.
That control is usually about political correctness as defined by the organization making the encyclopedia in question. People often say Britannica is good, no fucking way, those people have just forgotten how miserable it is compared to 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.
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.
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.
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.
