Google gives Wikimedia millions
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Creating a missing article almost immediately is met with an admin nominating it for deletion for something like “notability”, the catch-all term for “I personally don’t care about this topic, and if it was important someone would have made it already.”
If you survive deletion then your article is often removed from the main Wikipedia site into “draft space” where it is hoped you’ll just go away, with a reason like “need more than the X-number of existing <refs> you have.”
If you still haven’t given up trying to contribute it is currently a 6 week wait to have your article reviewed to be moved back into Wikipedia-proper.
However! You’ll find any fair-use images you uploaded to support your article (say a movie poster), well those have been deleted since “draft space” articles are banned from containing them.
Those are just some of the trials I’ve gone through in the last two months trying to fill in some gaps on Wikipedia. It feels like they’ve added so many layers of bureaucracy over the last decade even longtime contributors are being forced away.
Last year I added an article about a musical ensemble. I followed the processes and it seemed to be fairly straightforward to get approved. (The ensemble had a bunch of articles written about them in the NYT).
8 years ago I tried to fix WP philosophies entry on the concept of "Appeal to Nature" and was even joined by an experienced academic but our efforts[1] where removed by admin/users wishing to describe the topic as a kind of simple fallacious trope[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appeal_to_nature&...
I remember when there was no Internet, and you never hear about it will possibly exist (where I was back then)
and then when it some day became something I just hear about and had the dream to use someday and see working with my own eyes.
And then I though Internet will bring the political (r) evolution that will make humanity human, and that it will have all the Knowledge of All the Scientists from All the World open to anyone, even a poor kid like me, to see and learn and thrive...
Wikipedia is still what is closer to that dream I had as a kid who had ever never touched a computer...So it is saddening, but we still have hope.
:Besides: "The devil in hell is smart not because he is The Devil, but because he is old"
pos-clarification:
I Still find your "communication and analytical technology" kind of very weak as a definition, but let's just stop here, better. While still time to edit, and now if you don't want to stop feel free, Let's call things by their real names. because there is no need to be polite towards pure Snark ,what is not polite as well. so...
This definition of yours : "communication and analytical technology"
...Is Not just very weak, is utterly Bullshit. And I don't like to waste time with people who's Cognitive Capacity allows himself to reason in such a clueless way, So I don't know if that manure you call a definition is arrived from Malice or just Ignorance itself, but it is Manure in both the 2 only possible cases.
And you yourself, in your cluelessly, ( The Irony of The destiny) This is a quote from you, yourself, from your Github:
"Fancy is a physics computing project developed with fanciful ideas of creating a programmatic sense of fantasy for the virtual minds of the coming AI revolution"
LOL ( it means I am laughing a lot here)
"coming AI revolution"
Anytime now, "Genious", I see it at the corner already. Lol. ;)
By the way, do you know what Snark is?
...look the dictionary and then read that your comment again, then you will know what Snark is. If you don't find it , look for Sarcasm, it's the same. "En passant" , you can look the other words you don't know the meaning in my comment,
And I am sure you don't know the meaning of too many words, by the way you write in your Github, imagine the way you write in a random insignificant comment in a Topic that was already dead long time before you make your clueless comment.
The above comment was made by someone Insane, I mean, Me myself, and some doctors will happily tell you I have Schizophrenia[1],
...(I don't exactly agree here, but they are doctors)...
...among other sometimes impairing Mental diseases,
...what brings me even close to what is called Tourette Syndrome[2] ( in a mild form, with mild ticks, sure, but this one I have to agree with the doctors)...
well, for sure, I went over the top, was before my first coffee of the day. Never comment before the first coffee. But I really assumed strainer was being Snarky. So, if you were being serious and not snarky in your comment, strainer, sorry, and really sorry, but it is too late to delete that now.
And if someone has the power to delete my Rant/comment, please do it as soon as possible, because it was not fair. Please Dang, or someone. I was not fair for him.
Not because of me, please note, I don't care for this account, It is not only Anonymous, is full of bits of private/personal misinformation, and wrong leads, and false clues[3], that I spread intentionally, exactly to anonymize myself.
( because Moriarty, the enemy of sherlock, was stupid and his decoy bits always converged, instead of diverge, that is what a decoy anonymizing bit/crum is)...
But is not fair for strainer. His account wasn't anonymous, and I made a big mistake of talking to HIM (adhominen) and I am not usually like this, was lack of morning coffee, really.
So I am very sorry for that, Strainer, really sorry, Mental Health is not my strong point, and I see now that your comment was made in Good Faith,
and I am sorry for assuming you were being snark, and Im sorry for the astronomically adhominen, Insane, batshit-crazy slip mistake I made.
Sorry Strainer, I see you are a nice guy, I hope no bad feelings left, and I really apologize , and who knows, maybe we drink a beer someday...I pay.
1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
The notability requirement helps ensure that articles are accurate and can be verified with trustworthy sources. A topic only needs 2 trustworthy sources for an article, and if it doesn't meet that bar, then the topic is probably better suited for a personal blog than a Wikipedia article.
A former coworker once told me about a stint he did working for a company that sold wikipedia edits. The founder was Brazilian and apparently their company was super popular with Central and South American politicians trying to scrub their pages of various financial scandals and other things unbecoming of a politician.
I was shocked when he first told me about it, but it's pretty easy to see in 2019 that managing one's image online can be incredibly lucrative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki-PR_editing_of_Wikipedia
In a community, one of the best ways to counter bad actors is to recruit more good actors. If you suspect that a Wikipedia article was deleted inappropriately, you can submit it for "deletion review":
I have no idea where I would even start if I wanted to fix that article. It's pretty ridiculous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Landmark_Worldwide
To contribute to articles on controversial topics (such as politics and religion), Wikipedia recommends the following:
1) Edit the article with the changes you want to make.
2) If another editor disagrees with you, they will revert your edit.
3) After your edit is reverted, go to the talk page of the article and discuss the contents of your edit.
The key step is #3. Reverted edits are to be discussed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...
If you're unable to come to an agreement with other editors, you can use some form of dispute resolution. The most popular method is the "request for comment", in which all Wikipedia editors are invited to participate in a debate, and the results determine the state of the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment
Your point of view won't always be the one that wins the debate, but Wikipedia editors are generally reasonable, and your arguments will be fairly heard.
> 1) Edit the article with the changes you want to make.
> 2) If another editor disagrees with you, they will revert your edit.
> 3) After your edit is reverted, go to the talk page of the article and discuss the contents of your edit.
This is actually a bad idea. It's fine for garden-variety editing that you don't expect to raise controversy, but if you want to affect something controversial and not look like you're acting in bad faith, you absolutely need to go to the talk page first and propose your edit there. If no one replies after a few days, then you have cover to just make the change 'per the talk page' (and sometimes you do get reverted here - but now you can complain that they didn't act fairly by commenting on your proposal!), but most likely they will, and you'll get to hash out the wording on talk.
> It is ideally suited to disputes that involve only a small number of people, all of whom are interested in making progress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...
Controversial edits in very popular articles will certainly require discussion and frequently involve requests for comment.
Perhaps some metric on the article page that indicates the level of controversy in the talk page...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Donald_Trump
Note the banner that says "The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute."
Articles in highly controversial areas (such as American politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict) are subject to additional restrictions meant to encourage discussion and reduce editing disputes. On these pages (including Talk:Donald Trump), you'll see a "Warning: Active arbitration remedies" banner with the details.
There are a few articles about it in Swedish, linked below. Company I worked for was Azzets, or Depicta, under Delling Group.
A few years after, when I google their names (Geir Lolleng and Aksel Bratvedt), nothing about this turned up on Google. Instead, there were links to all kinds of tumblr, blogspot, weebly, twitter, youtube etc links. (And the notice Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe.) I found Geir Lolleng's LinkedIn, and his next job after that was starting a new company:
Helmword is a specialist firm that protects and supports companies’ and executives’ reputation online. Together with the client we can achieve long term results. We work with clients in Asia, Europe, Africa and South-America.
https://www.resume.se/nyheter/artiklar/2011/03/23/sa-styckad...
https://www.affarsvarlden.se/bors-ekonominyheter/konkurser-n...
https://www.norrteljetidning.se/artikel/norrtalje-kommun/nye...
https://www.affarsvarlden.se/bors-ekonominyheter/konkursrytt...
https://www.affarsvarlden.se/bors-ekonominyheter/omstridd-re...
DistriPedia?
That's wrong. Low view articles still cost volunteer time to maintain, otherwise many would become home to malicious edits. That's a kind of hosting cost.
Also, deleted articles on Wikipedia are removed such that only admins can see them. I don't think it's common to remove them to the drafts area unless they're under construction and have some hope of meeting standards.
But some fraction of malicious edits aren't caught as they are made, and those will remain until they're accidentally noticed by someone and fixed. That's also true about honest errors and mistakes. If you add 10 million more articles, they'll either distract "accidental" QA from more popular articles, or (more likely) not receive an adequate amount of accidental QA at all.
Where can you store that amount of data for so cheap? Of course I'm assuming that you're including images in the size and not just raw text.
Here's the latest annual financial statement:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-...
They spent about 15x on staff as they did on internet hosting. They spend almost as much on travel as they do on internet hosting.
The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme.
Of course, there's no way they could formally audit every article. They're heavily reliant of some rando noticing something fishy in an obscure article and bringing it to their attention.
6 million / 30 minutes per article every 5 years at 15$ per hour ~= 9 million per year.
Wikipedia pulled in 55 million in 2017 from North America making this a major but affordable expenditure.
Allowing public edits is different from not paying editors. They can have a small staff of super users which only revert or remove content while remaining a Wiki.
It's neither. The volunteer community is wikipedia, and the foundation exists to serve it, not the other way around. If the foundation paid staff members to edit there would be uproar in the community
Also, if every volunteer quit tomorrow the website could still function, even if just by disabling edits until they employ enough people to review them. So, it’s clearly not the volunteers that are most critical.
There was a fun story I can't find here on HN right now (Algolia is pretty good to search now , but Im out of coffee), On how the guys who make OpenBSD(If I recall) use/used(not clear) CVS instead of GIT to filter out people they didn't ultimately wished to have the attention from.
I ended up asking, what if the WP entry for A New Hope gave away that very famous spoiler about Luke's father in the initial description and cast listing (it currently does not), and then I tried to delete the spoiler? Would the moderation policy roll back my change? He said yes, because of the same reason - WP does not protect audiences against spoilers. So I asked, well then why does the ANH WP article not have this spoiler? And he said, probably just because no one has made the edit yet.
Looking at the talk page of one of the related articles [0] there was someone noting that "An expert that didn't cite the literature would be contributing original research, not verifiable information" which is forbidden on Wikipedia. This sounds like a reasonable principle, but if you look at the existing text it's barely cited. It's not clear then if replacing un-cited text would be appropriate, or if this principle would just be a tool used to resist change.
And even then, I've had correctly cited changes reverted in the past. So after that I ended up not making any changes, and that section remains - to me at least - confusing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Helicopter_f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_needed
Then, find reliable sources that support the changes you want to make, and propose those changes on the article's talk page. If other editors agree, or if there is silence after a few days, then make your changes to the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
If other editors disagree, and you are unconvinced by their arguments, then escalate this discussion to a request for comment, and debate it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment
> Apple employee spoke at a recent OSM conference. Yes, they use OSM data as well. In some countries more than others. Apple also has a fulltime staff working on OSM. https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues, https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/
Apple uses OSM data in many parts of the world where their own mapping efforts will likely never reach.
Mr O’Beirne’s articles are very US-centric.
And contributes nothing to those, instead opting to build their own maps in the important markets.
Once again, I understand the profit motive. I just don't like it.
As the top commenter noted, there are problems.
Though it would be sad if a commercial entity put Wikipedia 'out of business' per say, I think 'more variety' in this space would be welcome.
I'd have no problem looking to different sources for a more authoritative source of information.
For example, maybe Unis get together to publish their own wikis on more academic subjects. Maybe companies can have a Wiki to make their own articles about their own articles (I understand they have web sites for that, but the Wiki format is different).
More variety would generally be better not worse.
There's nothing stopping them from doing this. Wikis are actually a nice example of a federated standard, with good support for "InterWiki" cross-linking, well-understood naming conventions (thanks to Wikipedia) for encyclopedia-like articles, and open licensing via CC-BY-SA.
(googler, but had never even heard of knol until now)
So no it’s not impossible, but it’s always gonna happen when it’s Google/Amazon and the “innovation” is a free alternative to a successful independent business.
Isn't that how everyone innovates?
(FWIW: you meant "vain", I think, but that doesn't seem like the right word either. Maybe "arrogant" was the spin you wanted?)
That is, after all, the end result of many of Google's attempts at dominating a space. Their love of shutting services down will likely make further future dominations of new fields even harder.
Not unlike the pop or sports star who suddenly gets a huge contract and stupidly begins spending loads of money in luxuries. By doing so he/she is now being forced to keep making tons of money to maintain that lifestyle, de facto becoming property of his/her management.
They've been running a revenue surplus of $20m+ per year for the last while and are currently sitting on a $130m cash & equivalents hoard.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-...