Wikipedia Turns 15 | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia Turns 15

15.wikipedia.org

441 pointsdoppp109 comments

I was talking to a friend the other day and came up with a term to sorta quantify what I consider perhaps the most important revolution of my lifetime: TTK or Time To Knowledge.

The example I always use, the occasion when it first occurred to me, was a couple years ago when, for some reason, I decided I wanted to make a foam for a cocktail. Within 5 minutes, I had found a video on Youtube illustrating how, not to mention a dozen other sites documenting various techniques.

I imagined being back in the 1980s or 90s and confronting the same wild impulse. How would I have figured this out? Asked a couple people perhaps. Contemplate a trip to my local library. Maybe make a mental note to chat with a bartender next time I found myself at a cocktail bar. Probably just give up on the idea and go back to watching the A-Team.

This is a rather trivial example. But then consider the ease and dramatically lowered TTK where programming knowledge (via StackOverflow) or general knowledge (Wikipedia) is concerned. The internet itself cut the lag. But it was first Google, then Wikipedia, that turned TT#$&!%&@ (Time To me cursing that I have access to all this potentially useful information that I can't quite seem to reach) to TTK, Time To (real meaningful well-organized) Knowledge.

All magic comes at a price.

You could have learnt other tricks of the trade, could have made new friends talking to that human bartender.

Talking to someone who is a master at something is far more valuable than asking the internet specific questions - how do you know what questions to ask...

The internet's supply of masters is much larger and more accessible. Is there a reason to think the video or other sources he found are from someone inferior in expertise to a local? Does that reason apply even for people who live outside major urban centers?

Also, that line of thinking is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Remember the most likely outcome before was recognizing the cost of acquiring the knowledge exceeded the benefit of having it; there would have been no learning at all.

Most online videos are made by people good at making videos. There not the same people that are good at making drinks or whatever.

I'm subscribed to YouTube channels devoted to crafts such as woodworking, cooking, metalworking, development, sewing, drink mixing, and others, and very few of them use professional equipment or editing software. Some of the most entertaining ones do, of course, but mostly because they started small and were able to grow their audience enough to turn it into a career, over the course of which they picked up the skills to improve the quality of the videos.

Those other skills form the foundation of successful online video channels, with the video skills following suit.

Yea, there are plenty of people worth following out there. But, a few minutes of random searching is probably not going to show you one of the gems. Unless, I am just bad at finding videos.

Consider then finding an on-line community of enthusiasts first. Like, in case of woodworking, /r/woodworking and some of the other subreddits listed in the sidebar there. Spend few minutes there, and you'll know where to find the best 5% of woodworking sources available to mankind.

Let me emphasize it - thanks to the Internet, you have access to the best knowledge and experience entire humanity has produced. All it takes is some experience with using the Internet and spending little time on filtering links.

I think your vastly overstating what videos people put online.

I think woodworking is hard to qualify. So, let's simplify.

1) A master craftsman video demonstrating how to make an Italian style flat bread oven from someone that spent ~15+ years learning and building them.

2) One of those small but highly accurate mechanical clocks that's accurate enough for navigation at sea.

3) A European ed: (English) style saddle made by a craftsman, as in someone that made and sold 100 others before it.

I am sure there are at least a few hundred people with those skills world wide, but actually finding a detailed video made by one of them online seems much harder. As in something that's good enough to learn from not just advertising or a 'how it's made' video showing some highlights.

It's 3:30 EST on Friday. Let's give it 24 hours. ;)

Moving the goalposts to the furthest conceivable distance isn't going to prove anything to anybody. Nobody claimed you could completely master a trade skill just from watching YouTube videos.

The parent post (TeMPOraL) said:

have access to the best knowledge and experience entire humanity has produced

Sure, you can find plenty of videos on how make a hard boiled egg, apply tile, or do a card trick... But, that statement seems way over the top.

PS: Though, this is one case where I would haply be proved wrong.

Versus learning from the first person you come across in real life? Or not at all because it's all too hard compared with searching the net?

IMO, there is a fair amount of. "Those who can do. Those who can't teach."

Sure, you can find some videos of people making a wooden clock online. It's much harder to find master craftsman making a watch. A few PHD students putting together an electric car vs. someone at GM actually designing a car. Home cook vs. Five Star Chef.

Granted, generally an amateur is fine. But, don't be surprised if there making several mistakes without noticing.

and these master would teach random people from the street about their craft?

in sincerely doubt that...

> IMO, there is a fair amount of. "Those who can do. Those who can't teach."

That applies to occupations, not to hobbies. I.e. those who can't find a proper job using their skill go on to teach that skill.

It does not however apply to the most valuable content - one made not for money, but out of love for the subject. A lot of masters in all occupations simply like to share. Our industry is probably the best example - it's almost entirely built upon masters who gave away their knowledge. But it happens in other industries too.

Clickspring. /r/artisanvideos

Most people good at making videos have better things to make videos on than random niche hobbies and crafts. If you step out of the popculture, you'll see a lot of videos made by those who do the work.

The Internet's supply of poseurs is far greater still.

I think Stack Overflow is the canonical example. It feels like I deal daily with people who paste something from Stack Overflow instead of reading up on a library or API. It is made worse by all those to game their score system by being very quick to paste in a semi-related "answer".

The Internet's supply of poseurs is far greater still - Holden Caulfield

Ouch. Nailed it. :D

(unless xorcist is freakin' Holden himself!)

At least on the internet you can tell who's lying and who isn't. SO lets you vote. If a bartender blatantly lies to you, you don't find out until days and there is no accountability.

Sure, but you severely limit your potential knowledge if you have to hunt down an expert in person to learn something (especially if you couldn't use the internet to find the expert!).

If you find yourself enthralled in a subject after learning about it on Wikipedia/YouTube you can still find an expert and learn even more. Being seconds away from being able to learn about anything in the world is extremely powerful.

You can still go meet that bartender, but now when you ask her about the technique you can explain what you've already tried, and will almost certainly get better knowledge from her.

This is a valuable point. I no longer just ask questions of people: I try to be respectful of their time by trying hard myself to figure out the answer first.

The upside is that I learn a bunch of things. The downside is that I rarely have a question for anyone anymore. I'm either too lazy to dig into the question online to be sure that the question is worth asking, or I figure out the answer on my own.

Talking to someone who is a master at something is much more valuable than the internet... but the definition of a "stupid question" is becoming smarter.

This is really interesting, until you realize that 99% of the knowledge you acquire in this way is useless. In the 80s, if you didn't know how to do the foam you would just do without it, and nothing in the world would change because of that. Now, this would be certainly different if you were searching for a way to solve a hard engineering problem, but hard engineering problems cannot be learned with a 5 min youtube video anyway.

I hear your skepticism and acknowledge it. But I think you're being a little too flip with your 99% figure as well as your definition of useless.

The point is not to take a hard engineering problem and turn it into a 5 minute solution. You're right. Not all problems can be reduced to short Youtube videos (although it is amazing how many can).

The point is to take what may have been considered a hard, even impossible, engineering problem and get it in the hands or head of someone who might someday come up with a new or better solution. Even if the ultimate solution takes years or decades, it's still a radical reduction in TTK.

It's pretty cynical to call that knowledge useless. It's learning to do a thing you want to know how to do. That has use to you and often those around you. As for hard engineering problems, just because they're more complex doesn't make the knowledge less available. There's a massive amount of engineering knowledge free online, it only takes the initiative to go out and use it to learn it. The curriculum of many entire university degrees is now available for free online in a way its never been before.

Then replace a video with books. If I want to learn something hard, I can Google for the resources on the topic, quickly get the names of books considered the best resources humanity has on that subject, and then proceed to either Amazon or my favourite pirate source. All I can do in 10 minutes to half an hour, and then I can start learning. Contrast with the 80s, where you'd have to go to your local library, which may or may not have any book on the subject, and if it has, it's not necessarily the best.

Yes, finding something that teaches you how to do something you want to do is useless. Unless it's something YOU want to do, of course! Then it's fantastic.

I pay monthly to wikipedia, I use it tens of times a day, it is a fantastic unparalleled resource - a real public good.

Wikipedia is a proof of a utopian vision that infused the early web - ensuring public rights wins public contribution.

Humanities collective knowledge is better distributed because of Wikipedia, a true wonder of the modern world.

IMHO, we must treasure wikipedia as it is not clear it could happen again and it embiggens us all.

Wikipedia confirms that "embiggens" is a made up word from the Simpsons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_the_Iconoclast#Embiggen_a...

I'm not sure if you are passing judgement but this is how language evolves.

I'm perfectly cromulent with that as well.

This feels ungrammatical to me. I think "I find it perfectly cromulent." feels more correct.

(I only comment because I'm amused to find I've heard "cromulent" used as a "real word" enough that my brain has intuited rules for its usage.)

You failed at trying to make yourself sound smart by using a fancy word.

To be fair, all words are made up. Their usage is what makes them relevant.

This is so well put. It should be engraved over the entrance to a library or public monument somewhere.

Or at least the linguistics department at the local community college.

Also every dictionary should have a disclaimer written on its cover with big, bold letters:

DICTIONARIES ARE DESCRIPTIVE, NOT PRESCRIPTIVE. THEY DOCUMENT HOW WORDS ARE COMMONLY USED, THEY DO NOT DEFINE THEIR MEANINGS.

Although this is not universally accepted. This old DFW essay on the topic is good reading.

http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...

Dictionaries are embiggened by new words.

I feel like wikipedia killed the web in a way. Anytime you search for something 95% of the time wikipedia is the first result and thus 99% of the time it is I go to it for information. What websites or innovations have we missed out on because of this?

Maybe the encyclopedias would have developed micropayments? Or maybe they would have just gone for a traditional expensive paywall approach and information would have been denied to the masses?

Well there is no way that information wouldn't have gotten out. For the sake of argument I'm merely pointing out that having one website dominate as a source of information may have hurt the web in general.

Indeed, it's too bad that libraries were created as well. Just think of how many other knowledge sharing techniques would have been developed in its place. I know some of the other contenders were "smoke signals", "bird whistles", the list would be longer but I refuse to accept readily accessible, free sources of knowledge. And the smoke signals have been strangely quiet as of late.

In a library you get Bill O'Reilly and Howard Zinn and everyone in between. But on Wikipedia, you get the loudest and most obsessive voice.

Yeah.. Wiki's systemic culture problems have chased off a number of editors. The own admins don't even follow the site's rules when its convenient for them not to.

This is not a matter of opinion. One such rule is that there is a procedure to go through for deleting pages - I've personally been victim to a now-ex admin who killed a page I was working on, completely bypassing the checks and balances that are supposed to be in place. (Said admin was later kicked off the site for bot editing without approval, but not for ignoring deletion procedure.)

The site's still quite valuable as long as you avoid politically charged topics (and run, don't walk, from the talk pages), but they are open to being forked if this continues.

Wikipedia is as things should be. Consider why you go to it 99 out of 100 times. It's not just because it usually shows up first in Google. It's because you know that all the other results suck.

It is a limitation of your search engine, not of wikipedia

Definitely Encyclopædia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com) and Microsoft Encarta used to be much more popular.

I think wikipedia (along with Google) really allowed for the current transition to over-abundance of easily accessibly information -- at least in developed countries. For better or worse, I think we've started moving towards only considering application of knowledge to be a worthwhile topic of study, instead of just gaining it. If this is true, it'd be pretty catastrophic for services like wikipedia to suddenly disappear.

Whoa - Wikipedia has been around more than half my life already?

Good on them! It's one of the best things humanity has ever created. Hopefully they'll find a funding strategy that doesn't make them constantly feel like panhandlers. They provide uncountably huge value, yet I suspect with their current marketing, even very heavy readers rarely donate.

EDIT: Sounds like they are working on it: https://15.wikipedia.org/endowment.html

I find their campaigns rather effective. I have the impression they do a big surge once a year with banners everywhere on the site. I find it very effective at reminding you how wikipedia bring you value everytime you use it. At least it made me donate at each occasions and I don't consider myself as a heavy user (hardly one consultation / week), and I think it is the only project I have donated multiple times.

First campaign were subtler though, making me pay, and then it was big banner fest which me a bit angry. Maybe it's not the case if you're logged in and they track your donation so they can ask in finer ways.

FWIW, the more obnoxious campaigns also met with considerable dissent from the community as well.

It's the only site I have ever donated to. I believe that is the same for other hundreds of thousands of people. When I see the banners, I just have to reflect on the huge knowledge value I get from the site, and I donate. simple as that

Is it really only once a year? I feel like I saw it several times last year.

It should be. There are sometimes banners for other things, though, like to announce the Wikimania conference: <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar >. There are apparently also smaller fundraisers aimed at different languages/countries at different times of the year, so maybe you remember one of them.

Test banners are run through the year - small audiences, particular countries or whatever. (Wikimedia Fundraising A/B-test the heck out of everything they do.) But the big fundraiser is the annual one, around Nov/Dec, in which they go all-out to raise this year's target as quickly as possible.

I think these campaigns work. Kiva started doing it last December, we've been asking them to try for a while now. I believe that was effective too.

I think they will be more than fine once we figure out micropayments.

I don't think so. The problem micropayments face is that they're too close to free to represent value - if something is $0.05 then your brain sees that it isn't free but its value is so close to zero that it feels like it ought to be free. There'a a cognitive dissonance between "This is something I need so I should pay for it" and "This is so cheap it can't be worth anything, so I shouldn't pay for it." You need to persuade people that something they're buying for a tiny amount has enough value that they should pay actually for it. That is exceptionally hard. It might actually be impossible.

It will be free. There is just no convenient way for me to donate $0.05 (or $1) to wikipedia right now.

The psychology is the really hard part.

I think it should mimic tried and true real life coins. The spychological cost is managed by having limited number of different coins available. And the value of coin is small, but meaninful enough to be considered. In contrast to something infinitesimally close to zero.

Let's say I make payment of 5$ to your account with my email address in the message field. You send me 20 hashes to that address, each worth 20snt. Now I see artists webpage with "tip me" field. I paste a hash, you make the money happen. Simple enough?

I have run into people saying this for the last 15 years. I'm not convinced that micropayments will ever be solved.

Jimmy Wales was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 this morning (15th Jan 2016) and said they do absolutely everything they can to minimise the length of the banner campaigns. They set a budget and keep the campaign open until they hit the target. According to him they have gotten less agressive over the years.

edit date correction :)

I'm almost positive you meant 2016 :-)

I used to think it was the best thing humanity created.

Lately, I see individuals, and companies carefully crafting pages to further their agenda. It could be PR, name recognition, or inaccurate information reguarding their cause.

It could be as subtle as changing the definition of a neologism to singular, rather than plural. I ran across this recently. Someone wanted to promote their technospeck.whatever domain, but the plural was taken, so they deleted all the wiki information on the original neologism, and in turn just put, "for plural see the singular page.". Bringing in overnight credibility to their domain name.

What bothers me is the changes, or complete rewrite of certain pages are obviously done for monetary reasons, and the Editors don't seem to notice the motives behind the obvious manipulation.

I don't want to be one of those people who claims a service was better in the past, but once people realized they could use Wikipedia to as indirect/free advertising; that's when I lost interest.

I would miss Wikipedia if it collapsed. Do I have a feeling someone else might be able to do a better job? Yes! In this case, I feel the federal government could do a better job with Wikipedia? I would rather see four billion going to unemployed paid/trained Editors--instead of self-driving technology. Editors trained mainly in sniffing out manipulation of history/facts for personal/corporate gain.

Trusting the federal gov't to be the arbiter of truth? Sounds like a rather bad idea.

If you see something problematic, why don't you click the edit button and address it? Or if you don't have the necessary know-how, why don't you click the talk tab and bring up the issue there? Wikipedia belongs to all of us, if you have the mindset that it's someone else's problem to fix, then you're missing Wikipedia's point. There's nothing wrong with being just a consumer, but this is just like someone complaining that their favorite open source project is a buggy piece of crap. The solution? Open an issue in the bug tracker (the talk page) or send a pull request. (The edit button, where it's even easier because your changes don't need to be reviewed first) Yes, nefarious and subtle advertising on Wikipedia are serious issues, but as Linus's Law says: with enough eyes all bugs are shallow.

You make dealing with PR-driven agenda sound so easy, but the actual practice is so different. There was the guy from BP, who announced that he was indeed from BP and proceeded to whitewash the article on his employer. Then there was the fellow with the India Institute of Management, who took down the slightly less shady competition and made his employer look splendid, and carried on for years, and just now there was the guy from Monsanto that it took ages to get banned. As just some dude, I take more pleasure in walking the dog than fighting an unwinnable battle against better-equipped forces.

> If you see something problematic, why don't you click the edit button and address it? Or if you don't have the necessary know-how, why don't you click the talk tab and bring up the issue there?

In my case, I can't.

I began editing Wikipedia in 2004, and I got banned last year after leaving a message on the talk page of another user telling them not to use aggressive language when interacting with new users. The way oversight on Wikipedia works is that it's incredibly easy for someone to block you if you do something that they read as a slight towards them.

It's something you know all along if you spend any amount of time on Wikipedia. Over the years I was constantly running into people talking about things like overreach and abusive admins, but as an editor, you don't really look into those cases. When you're more interesting in creating content than getting involved, you trust that the admins are doing their jobs properly, and if they ever aren't, then the conflict resolution process will take care of them.

That's pretty odd and concerning. If you email me at ben@bencreasy.com I will look into it, because I've never seen an editor get blocked for something like that - unless you don't know the right people or process to ask for an appeal. Even then, Wikipedia is relatively forgiving and we're usually willing to take people back if they want to give it another shot. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Standard_offer

Wikipedia isn't without its problems, but there's no doubt it's been a very positive force on the internet. I'm not sure there's been anything like it in human history, where most people can have such easy access to such a wide variety of encyclopedic topics for free. It's an equalizer for sure in education.

For casual readers like myself it's also a real pleasure to occasionally just dive into a section of history, follow the links around, and learn about the world. Same goes for various other topics but that's the one that came to mind.

Here's to hoping Wikipedia sticks around for a long time to come.

Congratulations, Wikipedia! I found it tremendously useful over the years. I have one suggestion for them. I wouldn't mind making micro-donations for articles of particular quality and relevance to me. Say I find something useful and click on a '2c' donation button. The system doesn't trigger an immediate payment transaction because I would not have time to do it but instead waits until I accumulate $1+ in 'spend' and then displays another button 'Pay'. This way micropayments are easy for me as the reader and at the same time Wikipedia's transaction costs are minimized. Besides, I like to be able to pay later.

I really like that idea, it would give the user a sense of how much they use it over time.

I think its a pretty good idea, worth trying for sure. My concern is that what is currently a "free" resource will have a price tag placed on it. Also, people who are paying might start to act entitled to very high quality.

I think in that case I would somehow expect part of the money go towards the authors. By giving to Wikipedia as whole, it's easier to accept that I'm supporting the infrastructure and not the content.

This could also create a valuable dataset -- which pages on Wikipedia provide content that people consider useful enough to that they'll contribute funds.

This idea was proposed for mainstream news, and rejected. It would amplify the filter bubble effect. Certain topics which are probably already popular would get all kinds of funding, others , which might be just as important but just not currently popular, would be ignored. It's better to consider the content generally.

In the age of Unicorns, Wikipedia is truly the rare beast. Nothing is perfect, but Wikipedia has managed to not screw up one of the most impressive collections of information the world has ever seen. They haven't sold out (like say, Mozilla) and manage to fund one of the world's most popular web sites with an annual pledge drive. Bravo!

Wikipedians are hosting free events across the world for "Wikipedia Day" this weekend.

* San Francisco (Saturday): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/San_Francisco...

* New York City (Saturday): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Wikipedia...

* Boston (Saturday): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_15/Events/Boston

* Bangalore (Sunday): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_15/Events/Bangalor...

* London (Sunday): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/London/101

* Portland, Seattle, Vancouver (Saturday, meet Ward Cunnigham!): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_15/Events/West_Coa...

New York will feature a talk about Wikidata, how to query it with SPARQL, and how we are integrating it with Wikipedia and pushing forward the Semantic Web. Other NYC talks include things like "Git-flow approach to collaborative editing", "Copyright and plot summaries", and "Automated prevention of spam, vandalism and abuse". We will be linking up with San Francisco and likely some other cities for a global teleconference at 4:00 - 5:00 PM ET (21:00 UTC).

If you're interested, sign up and stop by!

I remember the announcement of the beginning of the project, probably on Slashdot. There was the call for participants.

I felt certain they would fail to achieve critical mass in order to become the large scale success that they have.

Glad to be proven wrong! And congrats.

I have contributed too. Here's hoping they solve the latest set of challenges with the insider community.

The page is 2.5mb and took 18 seconds to fully load. Is that why they've been badgering us for donations for donations recently?

(I am being facetious; I bloody love Wikipedia and do donate, but you think they'd be more careful about this sort of thing)

It's true, though I think it's being hugged by HN right now. So that means slow transfers. It took ~10 seconds to get to 115KB. The good part is that the text loaded after the first 615B, so I was able to read it.

I've always wondered if Wikipedia could come up with alternate revenue streams because of the huge amounts of people they touch, the mammoth cross section of content they have. And the kinds of traffic analysis they could do... Targeted ads? Analytics for companies (a medical, tech or other company could learn what their stakeholders are interested in), recommendation engines, content classification engines for media and news orgs (or even SEO or UX navigation conscious web devs) etc.. They could do these thighs gracefully. What do you think?

I for one sure hope that Wikipedia never falls so low as to have to run ads. :)

Which doesn't mean that there aren't any alternative revenue streams for the Wikimedia Foundation. But it's a very touchy topic here. Ideas I've heard is finding/accepting more large grants (rather rare now, since it affects the independence of the organization), collaborating with companies wishing to crawl the content (like search engines; nothing that isn't public, just easier access) or hosting MediaWiki wiki instances (many people want to run "their own Wikipedia" and there aren't very many good providers now).

Not that anyone is planning to switch to one of these models, as far as I know. But it's an alternative in case people stop donating.

I was thinking just yesterday whether wikipedia will ever change its design or if it is timeless (unless devices change radically). I don't remember any major changes, I guess there were gradual that I didn't notice?

They have an m. subdomain that's a bit cleaner, visually:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_...

versus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

The m. subdomain is for mobile devices, to make thing look chrisper on mobile phones. You can see at the bottom of page, there's an option to switch between mobile and desktop view.

However we can use this to read on desktop too.

There have been design changes. The most noticeable one happened in 2010.[1]

[1]: http://www.technorms.com/326/the-new-wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...

In my entirely unqualified opinion, that's a very well done redesign; it looks the same, only better.

As a reader I prefer the older design, so I was glad that they allowed me to keep using that. Other websites always force you to switch.

Have you used wikiwand? Much improved UX. Can't go back since I started using it.

My friend swears by Wikiwand, but I hate how it changes all links to its own domain. (It really should have been a browser extension instead of its own website that's merely a stylesheet) It also overoptimizes for the reader: minimizing the edit tab, hiding the talk page, hiding the history tab, over-enlarging images, and making disambiguation hatnotes nearly invisible. I do like how it has article preview popups on hover, though Wikipedia has had that feature in beta for a while. This blog post sums up the objection to redesigns well: http://jgthms.com/wikipedia-redesign.html

I'm not sure that blog post is really applicable. It's shunning the idea of using designer tools to generate mockups of Wikipedia which focus on eye candy at the expense of content. That's not really what's going on with Wikiwand.

I think it is applicable in how it brings up how these redesigns focus on aesthetics at the expense of information. Wikiwand puts aside what it doesn't think is important, but if they had talked to anyone who actually uses Wikipedia they would learn otherwise. For example, look how much prominence it gives to images. While these are aesthetically pleasing, they reduce the information density and give the images more prominence than the actual content. I also bought up how it hides so much important parts of an article. How is a reader/editor supposed to bring up their concerns if they don't clearly know that there is a talk page? What if they felt that the article suddenly changed drastically and wanted to view the article history? What if they landed on the wrong article and can't see the hatnotes that usually tell them about the article they likely wanted? The blog post has this to say:

> Why Wikipedia? Because you often stumbled upon it and thought “Urgh, it’s so ugly!”? If so, you weren’t using it. You were looking at it.

and I think it rings quite true.

Except Wikiwand isn't a Wikipedia redesign. It's explicitly a Wikipedia reader, and even advertises itself in that way.

The design evolves, just very carefully. There were typography tweaks in 2014: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh (mostly increasing the font size of the main page text and changing headings to use a serif font).

The logo has also changed quite a bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_logos

The one of the recent iteration removed the symbol from the Klingon alphabet to be replaced by a Geʿez character, along with other changes.

I first encountered Jimbo back in the 80's when he ran the Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP), an Objectivist mailing list that featured brilliant philosophical discussions among the stars of the Objectivist community. Jimbo's contributions were consistently excellent as well. [Anyone know if there's an archive anywhere?]

It was quite a surprise when he turned up years later in an entirely different context as a founder of Wikipedia - though I'm not surprised he did something big. His charisma showed in his MDOP contributions and he always seemed destined for something big. Congrats Jimbo, and all the other people who have made Wikipedia, for this amazing asset to humanity.

I love wikipedia, and contribute when I can, it does a great service to us all. Where it fails though is regarding controversial subjects. It would be a thesis paper to get into the meat of the issue, but thats its weakpoint.

Which is why I love they have shared their system open source so others can use it.

The real issue boils down to a filter bubble problem, and google isnt helping avoid this. Its that people use wikipedia as a panacea and forgoe actually following sources far too often.

Shades of trusting trust but instead of compilers its editors and censorship.

Pretty much the more important site on the internet. I make a small automatic monthly donation; you can set it up in a few clicks via https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give

Use it occasionally and donate to it annually, happy anniversary Wikipedia!

I support Wikipedia's efforts and would gladly donate once they sort out the NPOV issues on the site. A lot of power users think NPOV is their POV and revert anything they don't agree with.

The grid is no grid on chrome. The boxes are beyond each other.

It's a grid in my Chrome, but only after loading js for another 15 years. ;)

"Wikipedia is no banners at the top of the page"

They celebrated by sending spam email to past donors.

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