The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits | Hacker News Reader

The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits

booktwo.org

191 pointssp33271 comments

I find the destruction of written history very disturbing. While the examples given (Library of Alexandria, Yo La Long Dia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq) were dreadful, the worst was the destruction of the written Mayan records by Diego de Landa.

During the mid 1500's, Landa conducted an organized campaign to destroy every single written text in the Mayan language. He was mostly successful - only 3 complete text survive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices

I was puzzled by that spelling error: Yong Le Da Dian was the Chinese work, and the history I have read has always said that the complete work was lost before the time of the Boxer Rebellion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia

Wikipedia seems to agree with my recollection in part, and with the link in the submitted article in part.

That does suck - but I still argue that the Mayan where less important for us than the Greek and Roman writers.

So I would claim that the Library of Alexandria is a greater loss than the Mayans.

Since the bulk of Mayan writings were lost, you would never know anyway.

True, but still - we know that the Romans and Greeks had a great influence on our culture.

It is very unlikely that the Mayans had, simply because they are so far away, geographically.

Whose culture? Far away from who?

Man, reading this and the linked-to Gibson talk just gave me some sort of weird sense of like... not-deja vu. Like, remembering something that happened tomorrow.

I stumbled upon this infographic of Wikipedia edit wars yesterday, coincidentally also a dConstruct speaker: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/wikipedia-lamest-...

Cool infographic. Most of the little boxes seem to describe the conflicts in a way to make them seem sad and trivial. I'm fine with this, except it made one little box really stand out as extremely funny:

Hummus: Should hummus be in the "Israeli Cuisine" category, or is it a purely Arab food the Zionists have illegally occupied?

Funniest box in that graphic:

Arachnophobia: Appropriate to include a huge picture of a tarantula on a page about fear of spiders?

That is not funny, that should be a no-brainer "no" decision. Arachnophobia is not something to laugh about. You would not put an epilepsy-triggering image on an encyclopedic website either.

Even if the decision should be "no", that doesn't make that comment unfunny.

Yes - an unfunny comment would have been "Arachnophobia: It is inappropriate to include a huge picture of a tarantula on a page about fear of spiders."

The phrasing, minor as the changes are, is what makes it humorous.

Yes,

In any controversial topic or whenever a page doesn't seem to make sense, I go to the edits.

One cool app would be an editor with the ability to let you select a phrase in on MediaWiki page and then jump to the first edit in which that phrase appeared.

The audio recording of the talk is certainly worth listening to http://huffduffer.com/dConstruct/25256

It's the history of history!

It seems that the only thing that consistently amuses hackers is recursion.

"To iterate is human, recurse devine" -Anon

Iteration is just a special case.

When you hit Turing completeness, special casing is no longer a useful exercise.

Could you explain what you want to say?

I mean, iteration is a special case of recursion. Some languages [1] need special syntax constructs for iteration, like `while' or `for', because their support for recursion is broken.

[1] OK, most.

Iteration: until condition iterate state=update(state).

Recursion: recursive(state)=if atomic then state else recursive(refined(state)).

condition=atomic, update=refined. One is not a special case of the other; they are just different models for the same process (one is top-down, the other bottom-up). See also objects vs. closures.

To quote Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-11.html...):

[...] most implementations of common languages (including Ada, Pascal, and C) are designed in such a way that the interpretation of any recursive procedure consumes an amount of memory that grows with the number of procedure calls, even when the process described is, in principle, iterative. As a consequence, these languages can describe iterative processes only by resorting to special-purpose ``looping constructs'' such as do, repeat, until, for, and while. The implementation of Scheme we shall consider in chapter 5 does not share this defect. It will execute an iterative process in constant space, even if the iterative process is described by a recursive procedure. An implementation with this property is called tail-recursive. With a tail-recursive implementation, iteration can be expressed using the ordinary procedure call mechanism, so that special iteration constructs are useful only as syntactic sugar.

Right. Recursion has a problem with stack overflows, but that can sometimes be automatically fixed by turning it into iteration and throwing out the superfluous frames. Which one is the special case now?

Why? Iteration.

Stacks and stuff are just a way for computers to do some forms of recursion. Recursion itself is just a general mathematical idea.

Look at the Natural numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion#Example:_the_natural_...) or dynamic programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion#Recursive_optimizatio...). Dynamic programming is an interesting case, because in most languages the idiomatic way to express it uses iterative constructs.

10 PRINT "It seems that the only thing that consistently amuses hackers ";

20 PRINT "is the only thing that consistently amuses hackers ";

30 GOTO 20

That looks like iteration to me.

A goto with no arguments can be read as an recursive but optimized tail call, in some mythic Scheme-to-BASIC compiler.

In some sense, it's what makes us unique. Is CS the only discipline that deals with recursion on a regular basis?

There's recursive storytelling and poetry (the kind of stories/poems where, at the end, you find yourself looking at the beginning again). It's also possible to describe certain processes which occur as part of some mental disorders as recursive (e.g. the fear of fear; depression because of depression).

Mathematics is full of recursion. Everywhere. The part of CS that deals with recursion is just a tiny corner of mathematics.

I think there are other fields of Mathematics in which recursion plays some part (Mathematical Logic, for example).

It's SO true. I always laugh the hardest at recursive jokes.

What about writing about the history of histography?

Would that be histography-histography or histography-histography-histography?

It's historiography and it's already sufficiently meta. It's in the set of all sets that contain themselves. (But does the set of all sets that do not contain themselves contain itself? That is the question :-)

It's the iteration sensation.

If you mean consistently amusing recursion, then yes.

Minor annoyance, but in those pictures, book IX as after book XII rather than before X.

I saw that as a feature, not a bug - a subtle wink to the subjectiveness of historiography in general, and recongition that even this effort is not without flaws.

So ? - it's wiki, edit it.

it is interesting how source control systems like Git are making this process happening for source code: now that everybody getting the project will fetch the full history it will be very hard to lost the changes that happened in the full history of a given piece of code.

Where to buy this book , if that's not a joke ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books

I don't think book creator grabs history pages.

You can add them manually by going to each one and adding it to the book. I'm not sure if there is a less tedious way of doing it, though.

You can download the entire database, including history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Or, for a direct link,

http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20100130/enwiki-2010013...

31GB. Decompresses to TBs.

He made them himself.

Printed by LuLu

I suppose they could have been, but looking at the author's website it seems he runs an on-demand print house himself (whether he uses a third party provider to do the actual printing isn't clear).

I too would be interested in purchasing the(these) book(s).

history is composed not only of what our best guess is of what happened, but how that guess came to be and changed over time. my experience of studying modern history is that the biggest missing piece seems to be knowledge of where intellectual and political trends originated from and how they propagated. the information is there, but it is buried among many primary texts and largely ignored by "story centric" history. I don't blame historians for doing this, they must make history sexy or risk being considered irrelevant.

"I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily."

Geocities was the first digital Iram of the Pillars.

Reminds me of the heavy metal umlaut video. Props to who ever can find it.

http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html

[beaten]

The whole truth, is not necessarily the real truth.

It's all the truth we've got.

The first linked page, http://2010.dconstruct.org/ is strongly reminiscent of that other d_____ project...

Would anyone miss "the edits" if they simply vanished tomorrow, like Geocities?

Historians. Historians who aren't yet terribly interested in this sort of thing because the Iraq war still isn't very "historical", nor is Wikipedia.

Fortunately, the historians of tomorrow will probably have better tools for analyzing this stream of text than we do, too. Sure, no human is going to simply read the changelog of Wikipedia, but I absolutely think historians will be able to extract a lot of data from it even so, things we can only dream of extracting from our historical record. (We're lucky to figure out what color something a thousand years old is.)

This is why it annoyed me that so many people were outraged (or mock-outraged) that the Library of Congress would archive Twitter. It’s exactly the fact that Twitter tends to be topical, ephemeral, trivial, and faddish that make it worth a special effort to save.

In our time, historians are obsessed with the relatively few sources we have for casual thought in the ancient world – graffiti and so on. Knowing what ordinary people were thinking on ordinary days is important. For various reasons, our time is one of the first that will be able to leave that to later times.

I sometime go back and look at edits, especially if it is a controversial topic that someone might have vandalized. Of course I don't mean blatant vandalization but the more subtle kind.

Isn't subtle vandalism what's commonly known as 'history' ?

Wikipedia; without the edit history the license of the information becomes problematic.

Yes. Apart from the editorial aid mentioned by camiller, I use the history tab to get a quick sense of the trustworthiness of the article as a whole, and of individual claims.

There already are tools that can colour the text of article showing how old or new (or change-resistant, or controversial, or important - if proper metrics are discovered) the section or sentence is... Basically all kinds of interesting meta-information could be overlaid with the article text, by examining article change history; and at some point - will be. The text-body of article is only a single dimension, but quite a lot of other information waits to be discovered and overlaid.

Hi,

I am still interested in the link to any tools that overlay wiki history.. can u point me to any of them? thanks.

could you provide links to the tools that do this?

Would you like to have Napoleon/Wellington's thoughts of Waterloo minute-by-minute during the battle. Or only memoirs written 20-years later?

I've certainly found them useful and interesting.

I hate reading them...but they're essential if you're looking into something controversial (which may not be evident if you don't know the subject already) and you're worried about the accuracy of the current page.

Some of the edit wars are mildly disturbing - it's like this nice social consensus on the topic page, but the history pages seethe with bitterness and resentment. A rather unpleasant reflection of our society and psychology, in a lot of cases :-/

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