If you had asked me half a century ago if something like this would ever work - I would've said absolutely not. And yet, there it is.
If you had asked me half a century ago if something like this would ever work - I would've said absolutely not. And yet, there it is.
Oh man, if only it were true! If anything, wikipedia should be seen as an overcoming of our terrible human nature in making something good in the world, not as a property of humans. It is SO precious and fragile in our mortal hands.
The story of the Encyclopédie's origins is incredible and a great reminder that works like wikipedia are the exception, not the rule. The Philosophes worked very hard to get the volumes out and were under constant threat of censure. The very idea of the Encyclopédie was a direct threat to the Ancient Regime and it's publication was a direct cause (among many) of the French Revolution. A revolution whose effects we feel until this very day. The Encyclopédie was a lit cigarette in a powder cache. It's head editor, Diderot, is still a controversial person. If you can have haters and lovers nearly 250 years after you dance your last, well kiddo, you've done something right.
Even today wikipedia is vandalized by powerful interests and is routinely censored out of existence for many of the people of the world. Governments are still afraid of the free knowledge that wikipedia gives us. It is still a lit cigarette in a powder cache. But it is a fragile thing.
Cherish it: DONATE
https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...
For anyone interested, take a read through https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:FY17...
Most of the work on Wikipedia is done by unpaid editors.
On the other hand, Wikimedia Foundation (the one that collects donations and manages the project) is accumulating donations and increasing spendings at ever-increasing rates, way above its maintenance and development needs. Just google a bit. Something like this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9qqds7Z3Ykd9Kdeay/... Their history of being wasteful and not transparent about their spending is rather long.
The ability to learn and teach is the very core of human nature that sets us apart from other animals.
There was Google's attempt in 2007 wih knol(0) - which many called an attempt at a Wikipedia killer. Agreed... We dodged a bullet.
Authors could also choose to include ads from Google's AdSense on their pages ... All contributors to the Knol project had to sign in with a Google account ... authors were also able to choose the CC-BY-NC-3.0 license (which prohibits commercial reuse) or traditional copyright protection instead.
https://i.redd.it/y0oy7zsc72541.jpg
They were hijacking every link on mobile a while ago and messing with my browser so bad. Surely, there wasn't any "spyware js".
A small sticky donate button on bottom would have been better.
Wikipedia pages in general are fine because people constantly have to edit spammers out from them. They haven't done much to curb similar looking spam clearly distinct from content.
[Our super scale webhosting powers google services](superwebhosting.in) everywhere...I don't remember the times I had to remove it from the history of cloud providers, tech companies, web, https, etc.
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:History/Google_data_...
And it's... fine. But it was really amazing in the beginning. Much less cruft, much more usable.
There was a lot of drama on the late 90s internet that now seems impossible to read about or search for.
One thing that is fun to do after watching a totally crap movie - to make up for 2 wasted hours of your life - is read the 1-rated reviews. There is usually some brilliant sarcastic analysis there to make you laugh out loud.
A lot has changed since the mid-2000's. Wikipedia was so revolutionary at the time.
As they say, Wikipedia doesn't work in theory, only in practice.
As longtime GNU/Linux user then, I viewed the GPL as the foundation to it. Encyclopedias seemed a niche where a GPL-based project could thrive, like in making an operating system or web server.
I like the explanation that Wikipedia is built on nerds' need to correct each other.
If we jump to the most logical conclusion of the set of assumptions made above I think it then follows that readily accessible knowledge cannot necessarily be a good thing, otherwise, the market would have rewarded that. But we see in the case of imdb market did not reward it enough for it to achieve the same pedigree as Wikipedia.
It's not good for people to learn facts that easily. There should be a higher cost associated with that. This is of course a ridiculous conclusion but I think it could make sense why it would be true. It is a whole other post for why it would be true but I will only give an example or two.
One example is if knowledge is that easily accessible then anyone could achieve it without necessarily having enough desire to achieve said knowledge, and since we have limited capacity for knowledge acquisition and retainment we are most likely sacrificing knowledge that we are truly passionate about.
Second example is maybe it isn't good for people to know so much anyway. After all there are many things that due to the laws of nature we are inherently incapable of ever knowing such as what is beyond knowable universe (nothing can travel faster than speed of light so we cannot learn about it since the knowledge or light from stuff beyond the knowable universe won't have enough time to ever reach us.)
> And why did you write this comment?
I feel like you want comments to always have a political motive.
> There is no need for a "case against Wikipedia."
It's an intellectual exercise.
Imho the fact that Wikipedia is not commercially marketized is inherent to its success. Feels like a breath of fresh air to have such a rich source of open access information, to search for e.g. medical info rather than trusting Google with it.
If anything, Wikipedia shows to me that people have a longing for more initiatives like that, and they will then reject commercial alternatives that exist.
Gives me glimmers of hope for the future.
It looks like satire to me. If soheil is serious, I don't know what to say.
Err what? If a model of reality is incorrect you throw out the model, you dont try to modify reality to fit the model.
This is akin to saying something like: Solar panels* dont work in classical physics therefore coal is better.
* iana physicist. I assume they have something to do with quantum physics but dont really know
Well sometimes you do, McDonald's exists not because the food they provide is perfectly nutritious and what a human body needs to remedy hunger. I already concede that capitalism does distort reality.
I dont even know what you are trying to claim. Is one of your premises that capitalism predicts the highest quality product wins at the marketplace? Because that's not what capitalism is. If it was we would all be eating at 5 star resturants all the time as they have the highest quality product when you ignore price.
Are you trying to claim that part of the reason mcdonald's is succesful is because they have a lot of money to spend on advertising and inertia? If so you are misunderstanding my point (or its just a non sequitor). The fact that gaining a lot of capital allows you an (arguably unfair, especially relative to idealized capitalism) advantage in the market place has nothing to do with my criticism that you are fallaciously finding evidence that contradicts your simplified model and then concluding that reality is wrong instead of your model.