Wikipedia is 20
economist.com
economist.com
Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter.
But that was just the start. Wikipedia killed it in SEO when it was easy to do so, but it also did one other thing that most SEO-driven sites (eg: About) didn't do correctly - it cared deeply about the content quality and also resisted to run ads (anyone remember Jason Calacanis' articles on how they are leaving $100m on the table? See [1]). So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by Panda.
Wikipedia's dominance continues because it's basically impossible to overcome its lead in inbound links and domain authority. Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.
Well done.
[1] https://calacanis.com/2006/10/28/wikipedia-leaves-100m-on-th...
I think more than half the things you mentioned are only good SEO because search engines want to send people to websites they will like reading. I think when that is the case, we should be crediting people for making good websites, not good SEO.
The Google search rank algorithms changed a lot more than the overall structure of a good Wikipedia article in the last 20 years.
"...because a <a>blue</a> <a>whale</a> did..."
rather than
"...because a <a>blue whale</a> did..."
Obviously, the latter version would have been more useful, and I find it difficult to believe that a human being would have made such a mistake. Don't get me wrong - such instances are rare, but they do happen and are an indicator that not all links are generated manually. I don't know what they are using today (if anything), but as someone else pointed out, in the early days they used UseModWiki to ensure a high level of deep interlinking. We can argue that this was done to improve the UX, but the level of ambition that went into it signals that they also saw it as a strategic move (and they would have been right to assume that - 20 years ago, a highly interlinked site was likely the best bang for the buck in SEO when it came to how to prioritize your time and resources).
Prior to 2011, Google enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with content farms which splattered their pages with AdSense ads (and Google ranked them highly). Can you imagine how it must have sounded for the Panda engineers to pitch to Sergey and Larry that they wanted to replace all those highly monetized websites with Wikipedia?
Matt Cutts commented that "with Panda, Google took a big enough revenue hit via some partners that Google actually needed to disclose Panda as a material impact on an earnings call. But I believe it was the right decision to launch Panda, both for the long-term trust of our users and for a better ecosystem for publishers."
“Google Panda is a major change to Google's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", in particular "content farms", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.”
* ensured that the code (HTML and CSS, only basic non-AJAX, JavaScript) was standards-compliant (at the time, XHTML [1] was “the big thing”)
* implemented basic usability guidelines as advocated by Jakob Nielsen [2] in his Alertbox newsletter and
* followed Mark Pilgrim’s suggestions in his Dive Into Accessibility
Carrying out the above and simply focussing on quality content was enough to rank highly in Google’s search engine results and I never had the need nor inclination to do any research into SEO. Back then the mantra in the web development books was that “content is king” – and Google reflected this philosophy. Sadly, the Web has changed a lot in the intervening years.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_consu...
3. https://web.archive.org/web/20110927131211/http://diveintoac...
For context, this is the type of content that Mahalo was producing to try to game SEO:
IIRC, those videos are pretty famous because the pretty girl was not actually any good at mixing drinks:
https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a30172952/viral-ol...
> JaNee Nyberg Once Made the World’s Worst Old Fashioned. Jim Beam Just Gave Her a Shot at Redemption.
> The world’s worst Old Fashioned was made on a quiet summer morning in 2010, in a dot com startup’s shoddily decorated conference room in Santa Monica. Mahalo.com had hired JaNee Nyberg to host a series of 50 cocktail tutorial videos that they would then upload to their YouTube channel. In the series’ most infamous video, the actress, model, and part-time bartender slops together an Old Fashioned using no bitters, a giant orange wedge, a ton of ice, and an entire pint glass of bourbon. Now, everyone makes an Old Fashioned a little bit differently—here’s Esquire’s official recipe—but Nyberg’s way was definitely wrong and totally hilarious.
Here's that video: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xfhhjf
compare with this video on the same drink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTKC9Ht4Erg
the guy explains why he does things the way he does them and why you might do it differently depending on your tastes. unlike the first, this video manages to be more informative than simply reading its script as text.
https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-pag...
Deep interlinking - originally it used software called UseModWiki, which would automatically make a link if a page name existed for the word you just used.
subdomains - if you want to make a separate site for each language, that is the onvious way to do it
good content- why would anyone intentionally want to make a site with shitty content unless you are making $$$ off it (and wikipedia wasnt)
There's been and still is plenty of controversy regarding both the Wikimedia Foundation and its relationship to the community of volunteers. In fact I'd say the whole thing's kind of rotten, because of many complicated issues.
Maybe this will be the hidden drawback of the current work to improve talk pages -- all the wikidrama will become more visible to the world!
Wikipedia drama generally seems to happen less often and affect fewer “big” personalities and their money, than say Youtube and Google giving their content creators whiplash over whatever the new policy change is.
That's because Wikimedia Foundation is quietly focusing on the tech and keeping the site up and running while mostly letting the community govern itself.
The few times the Foundation tried to override the community, it didn't go well.
Where is this content? It sounds like you’re alluding to something obvious but I honestly have no idea, and would like to know where to find it if it does exist.
The same way you learn to "trust" anything, including Wikipedia - by verifying sources.
I love Wikipedia, but I don't blindly assume it to be the ground truth in anything (if such truth even exists), especially in the "long-tail" of subject matter.
Scattered all over the web.
I do agree with that point, that for most topics there exists better quality content elsewhere. But finding it and verifying, that it is not made up, is the reason I also use mainly wikipedia first for researching a new topic. And then proceed to more detailed pages, sometimes linked in wikipedia.
Here's a list of links:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/ncish/
https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile-group/mental-health/pr...
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/guidance...
The best way to find out about these is to speak to someone who works in suicide prevention, so that would be people working for local authority suicide prevention partnership boards (they can have different names in different areas), or people working for NCISH or MASH or ONS, or people on Twitter. But if you can't do that you can sort of get some of the information from Wikipedia. It's a struggle though because the page is a poorly laid out mishmash of information, mostly written by people who don't understand the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_Kingdom
By the way, I think Google and its easily-gamed algorithms that rewarded regurgitated content and mega-sites is more to “blame” here than Wikipedia itself for how it went down.
The way Wikipedia should work is by sourcing verifiable facts from reputable sources, and copyright violations are not allowed. I don't understand to what are you referring with "high quality, accessibly-written off-line content"? Britannica isn't high-quality and journalism isn't written by experts in the field.
Wikipedia is a fascinating story of well earned success and growth without the reigns of vc dominating its trajectory. I imagine they have had a lot of tricky decision making. I’m curious what their process has been (as someone who uses Wikipedia but really doesn’t know things are running behind the scenes).
However, the Foundation is very hands-off about the content of wikis, which tend to run on "consensus"[0] with the editing-community for that wiki. That establishes the policies for the wiki, and often influences the technical decision-making for specific wikis. Also, the Foundation writes mediawiki extensions for a bunch of non-core behavior, but the individual wiki communities take a strong hand in whether they're enabled for that wiki. It's why the WYSIWYG editing environment (VisualEditor) is so inconsistently available between wikis, for instance.
Some wiki communities have a fairly fraught relationship with the Foundation, generally if they feel like they're being pushed into things. There have been controversies about things like the Foundation banning abusive users project-wide, or Foundation employees editing wikis from their staff-affiliated accounts. It's generally very inside-baseball though, and if you're outside the community it's hard to hear about.
The conscious choice to leave the money on the table is exactly the same. Instead of optimizing for cash value which is just a proxy for real value, wikipedia optimized for quality encyclopedic knowledge distribution.
My point is - you could very much do very well back in those days regardless of your content quality (which consequently trended down and gave rise to content farms). It's only in the last 10 years (and particularly starting in 2014 based on my experience with my own content) that the content quality became a true proxy for ranking, and vice versa.
As a side note, these days, you still have SEO conferences, but the stuff you learn there is so diversified that people have started calling it content marketing and other names. The perhaps most useful gathering is SEOktoberfest, it's invite only and they admit only 30 attendees. Never been there, but I've heard it's worth the six grand that it costs to get in as a first-time attendee (I am not affiliated with it in any shape or form).
These days, there still are a fair number of mostly low quality content farms. But there's also high quality content marketing. The latter still definitely is aware of things like page views, how far people read through an article, what type of headlines seem to be most effective, and so forth. It starts with good content that readers are interested in though.
That guy who wants to run ads on it sounds like a really evil person: he doesn’t get it that Wikipedia changed the world already, it doesn’t need to do ,,more good’’.
Do I remember wrong? because I remember they (the Wikipedia organization) were going to run ads at some point but it was strongly rejected by the community. I think there was even some fork because of that.
Variously since then I have gone deep into some fringe but important-to-some topic and found hard-to-find sources. I've found it effective to collect and present this information in Wikipedia pages.
Like a few months ago I made the page for the Aircraft Reactor Experiment [1], the world's first molten salt-fueled nuclear reactor, built and operated with intent to make nuclear-powered long-range aircraft. I'm pretty proud of the page, and go back to use it somewhat regularly. Having the platform of Wikipedia inspires me to go the slight extra mile in personal research in a way that can be used by everyone.
Thanks Wikipedia, for existing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment
I'm from Germany (2nd biggest Wikipedia) and proud to say 50%+ of my school and university education would not have been possible with excellent articles in BOTH english and german language. Often the english one was great, but the german one better (think WWII topics, german cars, ...) and vice versa (most of the cases hehe). And: it might be a good pointer for learning a language as well, reading about stuff you deeply care about.
Thanks also Wikipedia.
We need (more) people like you.
It's generally more of a problem with people. In part this is because notability is so context-dependent. Every professor at a college or professional football player or senior executive at a large company is notable at some level. Most restaurants have been reviewed once or twice somewhere. But the amount of publicly available information about many of these things is probably fairly limited, especially from third parties.
It was pretty fresh when I was in college and I remember my professors all being pretty explicit about not using it as a source. Thought I had figured out the world’s biggest life hack when I started using the sources listed on Wikipedia as my sources for papers.
Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from it to be well worth the trade-off
You should point them at some of the studies that show Wikipedia is more accurate than Encyclopedia Brittanica.
https://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response....
Wikipedia is riddled with far more and far deeper types of errors, I do edit Wikipedia daily but am quite disillusioned with it. Even articles on major topics can include made-up paragraphs that no one notices for years, errors caused by an editor's misunderstanding of what the source is actually saying, and errors that slowly accumulate through various editors' well meaning copy-editing.
It's good for surface level stuff. The apolitical superficial knowledge is where wikipedia excels.
> I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not to be trusted.
In terms of depth and breadth of knowledge of topics, it is sorely lacking. And it is highly untrustworthy when it comes to anything remotely political/historical/economic/etc - which are ultimately all political.
> Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from it to be well worth the trade-off
Definitely. It has it's uses like everything. But it is extremely flawed.
Almost like its trying to be an encyclopedia or something ;)
If you go to wikipedia looking for a university level course in something, im not sure why you would expect that.
As far as quality... its not perfect, but that's still a relative measure. Its generally significantly better than its competition in my experience.
There are also groups of Wikipedia "editors" who coordinate off-wiki to influence its workings. (Sock-puppeting and meat-puppeting)
Even if we disregarded all the malicious actors, harmful incompetence is rampant on Wikipedia.
And I was just talking about the English Wikipedia here, there are many "small" Wikipedias which are much much worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Falun_Gong#James_R._Lewis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
This is just an example of the issue of Wikipedia processes being too vulnerable to abuse, in contrast to the rose-tinted glasses view that most HN commenters view Wikipedia.
The obvious reason for this in this case is that people interested in contributing to articles about the Falun Gong are mostly already followers of Falun Gong. Stuff like this is all around Wikipedia. A related issue that I already indicated in another comment here is how most well-meaning contributors very soon learn to keep off certain controversial or well guarded pages, because it's simply not enjoyable to constantly fight over the content. The fact is: resolving disputes takes much time and usually the party with more time on their hands and more "meat-puppets" and allies wins. Also, making enemies from among the "editors" is both unpleasant and inconvenient for possible future efforts on Wikipedia.
One other reason for this is that discussion threads on Wikipedia can become incredibly large and involved very quickly. Typically a comment on Wikipedia will reference "diffs", which are changes elsewhere on Wikipedia (each with their own context and possibly requiring domain knowledge to understand them), or they can reference actual off-Wiki sources (e.g., a published book). Then someone else will respond to that comment with references to other stuff, and soon it is simply not manageable to keep track of everything. Everyone only has a fixed amount of free time and attention span, so very often things which shouldn't be taken at face value are taken at face value. On the other hand, meticulously checking something argued in bad faith expends time that could have been spent elsewhere. Walls of text and deep chains of references will scare a proportion of people outright before even engaging the discussion.
Another reason is that the assumption of good faith on part of the contributors is deeply embedded in Wikipedia. Not assuming good faith is actually forbidden on Wikipedia, and this is enforced. This might sound like a good idea (maybe it even is a good idea, it's hard to say), but in effect it just adds to the complicated minefield of vague rules breaking which can get one sanctioned on WP, but it isn't clear it actually does anything to improve the (low) standards of discourse on Wikipedia.
Apart from the rule that everybody has to assume good faith, the Wikipedia processes themselves are built on the assumption of good faith: the idea with Wikipedia is that everyone can talk out the differences in their opinions to establish "consensus",[N0] but malicious people can be severely disruptive in a discussion without doing anything that would cause them to be punished in any way on Wikipedia. E.g., someone makes a misleading comment (perhaps by taking things out of context, perhaps by exploiting some subtle semantics) and now people have to respond to them, which can take much more effort than it takes to make those comments. And there are accounts which do this all the time.
Another (smaller, perhaps) issue, which is actually fixable with better tech, is that although Wikipedia discussion threads usually logically have a tree structure, in actuality it's all unstructured Wiki-markup. This means that it's possible for the tree structure to become malformed, causing the discussions to become even less readable. Even if everything is structured correctly, it's often difficult to tell where does a comment end without reading it in its entirety, which is again caused by the lack of structure in the comments, every Talk page is just a single blob of Wiki-markup editable by any participant.
Thus, if you want to disrupt Wikipedia, the real way forward is not vandalism, it's arguing in bad faith with inpenetrable walls of text while being "civil". Bonus points for finding comrades to help you in a concerted effort.
Changing anything can be a tremendous effort on Wikipedia, but trying to change something while being opposed by an organized (off-wiki) and vigilant group, especially if they are malicious... I fear the whole project simply does/will not scale because of this. Organized groups will sadly keep their control of some topics/pages, and my fear is this situation will only get worse as Wikipedia's scope increases.
[N0] What consensus actually means on Wikipedia is another issue entirely, and it's often completely abitrary - whoever happens to "close" the Request for Comments (RfC - the process used for "determining consensus" on Wikipedia) can effectively create the "consensus" themselves.
Saying it’s “extremely flawed” is like saying Superman is weak because he’s vulnerable to Kryptonite.
It is still valuable for the scientific topics and I would not call that superficial at all, but you need to be very critical of anything that goes further than that. And actually even for the scientific topics you need to be aware if PR is involved with the article, because then you have to take anything with a grain of salt as well.
I'm glad I was proven wrong.
* Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory.
* Wikipedia is the worst source of information, except for all the others.
* Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel a little bit optimistic about human nature.
You can list all the philosophical, technical, or economic reasons you want (and surely those are important to consider) but in my mind the community of real, living humans with (yes) opinions but that have recourse and clarity to correct those is invaluable. I have never seen a community with such professionalism and due diligence (almost every single troll edit I have seen is immediately reverted) as Wikipedia editors.
There is also something to be said about the “culture” where trolling is not rewarded. By and large, vandalizing Wikipedia is not “cool,” people don’t rejoice for it because I think everyone feels at least a little bit of attachment or debt to Wikipedia. It’s helped us all learn more than we probably ever could before and been there through schoolwork, essays, reference reading, and general curiosity. It’s such a special corner of the Internet and I think “replicating aspects of it” won’t work, at least not the way you want. Wikipedia is a holistic being, it’s a community of people, yet also a resource, and even a culture, so any similar project needs to do the genuinely hard, slow, and boring work (something Wikipedia embraces - that most of the process is routine grammatical fixes, meta cleanup, rewriting, etc. over genuinely adding increasingly more information) of cultivating those higher standards and community outreach.
The end-result is often OK, but often jumbled and confusing, and it often feels like getting taught a subject by someone who's just a year or two ahead of you. You definitely feel you can learn something, but the person teaching you doesn't necessarily have very good command of the material themselves.
It's position in society is also weird. It has authority, but that authority can be abused. I once ran into a Wikipedian who had been busy for several years promoting a religious philosophy in a little neglected corner of Wikipedia, by gluing together little disconnected fragments to make a build up the wiki page for it. It was definitely badly done original research, but he successfully tapped the authority of Wikipedia.
Start here.
* There's a variant on design patterns which you can call Community Patterns.
* Some patterns are software design patterns
* Some patterns describe Agile software development.
* Some patterns describe how to run a wiki (and why)
* Wikipedia originally adopted these patterns and extended them for its own policy.
See also: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks
If you want a long thoughtful writeup, check this text by Aaron Swartz
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads
That's some baseline sources off the top of my head. There's a lot more written about this. It seems like there are several concepts working together that a lot of people find un-intuitive.
* In the main, human beings are honest. In fact mathematics predicts it must be so. (Game theory)
* Humans "automagically" cooperate if their numbers are small (under Dunbar's number), but fail to do so over that number.
* If you can keep the number of cooperating people under control, you can take advantage of this.
* Conversely, if something needs attention, the ability to rapidly recruit them to the point needing attention is paramount (see eg. smart mobs)
Partly by accident, partly by design, wiki engines exploit the above 3 elements. At first approximation, as long as >>51% of users are honest, the wiki will continue to function. The measured value on operational wikis is something like 60-80%.
Or is the concern not around how content is submitted but more around how disputes are resolved?
For every person with a deep insight in a subject, there are fifty people who think they have a deep insight, and it is hard to tell the difference from the outside.
My concern was not that nobody would contribute, but that the wrong people would contribute.
Also "neutral point of view" is impossible, as any writer knows.
It is surprising and amazing the Wikipedia works so well. Although I'm sure they use a lot of resources on combating trolls and manipulation.
If it’s hard to tell the difference from the outside, how do we know which one we got?
But for most subjects, rumours of objective truth’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
(Objective truth being another thing that doesn’t exist in theory but does in practice).
And you're right. It's never been entirely clear why Wikipedia succeeded vs. others although there are various theories.[1] Certainly there have been failures: Goggle Knol and, at this point I think it's fair to say, Quora.
[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/10/the-contribution-conundrum...
As I said: this putative explanation predicts we would have all sorts of great free things that we don't have, e.g., free reliable news, free trustworthy product reviews, good documentation for python libraries, etc., etc. Yes, it's possible to tell a bunch of just-so stories, but the number of free parameters you need always exceeds the amount of data explained.
Open source already existed and was thriving so I’m still not getting why there was any doubt. Seems like it would have just been FUD from the encyclopedia industry and people who didn’t know about open source.
That said, i dont think tax revenue supported infrastructure is really the definition of communism either.
There could be a useful transferable lesson here. Any endeavour which has a really big risk attached to it (here, the risk of vandalism) can still be a success if you deploy sufficient mitigations, countermeasures and vigilance against that risk.
* Wikipedia works in theory, but not in practice (as soon as you scratch the surface). - The problem is that there are many good pages, but that just lulls one out of the necessary skepticism.
* Try the Wikipedia sources that are hopefully on the bottom of each page instead. Also search on Stack Exchange and Reddit for book recommendations.
* Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel pessimistic about the state of disinformation and propaganda
EDIT: my comment is definitely more substantive and thoughtful than the one it is responding to, so I would appreciate if the downvoters could likewise reply to this comment, in addition to down-voting it.
I should have simply said that all three points are completely unsubstantiated.
In a room of other Wikipedia donators, maybe 1/3 of the people there didn't know that the information was entirely community driven, and when they learned, a handful of didn't think it was a good idea!
It just shows how much Wikipedia is just taken for granted, when in reality so so much effort goes in to keeping it free, ad free, open, and accessible to everyone.
Maybe because it's not entirely community driven. It is somewhat community driven.
But also, unless you have a much better understanding than me, it is community driven. Even those who have some official capacity at Wikipedia only got there through countless hours of being a good community member
Of course, lay "editors" contribute a huge amount of text, but that's not the "driving" part.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli...
Here's a 2015 essay that sets out to debunk the above 2017 source.
The reason it can be used to debunk the 2017 study is because said study is working with an old idea that already existed in 2006.
Aaron Swartz posits that at the very least you should not discount the importance of the long tail.
thats not a debunking
I was skeptical at the same time - it was an experiment, not a revelation. I used to tell people, 'I don't know how Wikipedia could work, but it seems to'. I'd apply 'The Cathedral and the Bizarre' concept to it, and 'with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow' (even though those ideas were intended for open source software).
The 'wisdom of the crowds' depends on good faith from the members of the crowd. Otherwise you get the manipulation of the crowds and propaganda of the faux crowds. One serious concern I had was that, if economics predicts human behavior to some extent, Wikipedia could be a victim of its own success: The more readers and influence it had, the more likely people would try to use that power. I first saw it happening in 2006, in the page on the Duke University lacrosse team's sexual assault case. Many editors clearly engaged in rewriting history in order to advocate for the lacrosse players; many had names clearly asserting affinity for Duke U., such as 'bluedevil'. That seizure of power was highly disturbing; has Wikipedia developed better means to prevent it now?
Of course, the focus on using the 'wisdom of the crowds' to manipulate has shifted to other platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. I stopped using Wikipedia years ago, other than to lookup basic facts that have little significance to me. I use Britannica (or other expert sources), which IMHO is very good and often very well written. While there is some benefit to 'wisdom of the crowds', I never know if that's what I'm getting at Wikipedia. As for the expert approach,
In matters of science, the authority of thousands is not worth the humble reasoning of one single person.
In general Wikipedia does have mechanisms to deal with this sort of thing, but admins don't always catch on early enough.
So either there is a massive conspiracy, or those editors were perhaps not as unreasonable as the previous poster makes them out to be.
I'm not convinced that it works, but regardless, 'not early enough' is effectively not at all. It's like the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft - Netscape and others were long out of business. 'Justice delayed is justice denied.'
The comment below by arp242 demonstrates it: There was a massive campaign on the lacrosse players' behalf and if the campaign succeeds, it becomes circular: That becomes the truth that arp242 believes.
There's no evidence that the accusations were false (last I knew), they were just never brought to court; she never had her day in court. (What was the defense so worried about?). You know what they tell victims like the person allegedly raped: 'Nobody will believe you. You're nothing, we're powerful. We can do whatever we want to you.'. Duke University is a powerful institution; some of the lacrosse players parents were Beltway PR consultants, IIRC. Their position was all over the news; the U.S. Attorney General took a position in a local county DA's sexual assault case of no other merit but its publicity. People in power (and on HN) identify with Duke students, not strippers. What will a stripper do in the face of that? Call up her friends in the CNN newsroom? Look at the things DAs do and never get disbarred. What it takes is bringing charges against the powerful. Wikipedia was part of that.
This is quite the comment; do you need evidence to prove someone's innocence? Last I checked, this isn't really how the legal system works. This does let some crimes go unpunished, which is terrible, but the alternative is much worse.
If you want to claim that the disbarment of Nifong was done for political reasons then you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than some vague story about "the university is powerful" and "Beltway influence". Among other things, he withheld DNA evidence and lied about the facts of the case. Even Nifong himself agreed that disbarment was an appropriate judgement.
> This is quite the comment; do you need evidence to prove someone's innocence?
I didn't say whether they were innocent or guilty; you can see above what I said. As the charges and evidence were never heard in a public forum, we don't know much about them.
I think the rest of the parent comment reinforces my view about the power of the communications machine aligned against one woman with few resources and a local DA.
This is what I find fascinating about the project. We’re more interested in reading a secondary source compiled by random people, than the actual primary source! I think it says a lot about the nice interface it has.
The Mt Pleasant site talks about the frequency (but not date) of meetings from the parks and recreation department, while Wikipedia actually has the location and the reasons why the town is notable.
For data you always want to go to the guy for whom the data he's giving you is the thing he does.
As an experiment I tried to get some fairly innocuous numbers into participation in Australia sport.
There is a big survey done in Australia, the Ausplay survey:
https://www.clearinghouseforsport.gov.au/
They have extensive tables on adult participation.
Two editors would not let this data into the sport in Australia article. The reason was fairly obvious, it shows that soccer/football is the most played team sport in Australia. Roy Morgan, a statistical agency also had similar figures. Some Australians don't like the fact that soccer/football is by far the most played team sport in Australia according to to the Ausplay Survey and Roy Morgan.
There was much time spent in the talk pages spent asking these two what would be acceptable for quoting these sporting statistics. The answer was nothing.
If you can't get fairly unobjectionable material like that into wikipedia what else is being blocked?
As can be expected when you're told that "the reason was fairly obvious" and that reason is somewhat nefarious, that reason is not the one given by anybody involved. Instead, people took issue with the methodology used to gather the data.
(I have no idea if that criticism is legitimate, nor do I have any other horse in this race, nor do I care the least bit about the popularity of horse racing in Australia which, yes, happens to be part of that debate.)
They didn't care about that.
I will note that the existing participation section of that article states that soccer has a higher participation rate than any other team sport amongst males (netball being higher for females), so it's extremely clearly that editors aren't objecting to the tables' inclusions on that claim alone, given that it's made in the article either way.
In Australia there are quite a few people who view soccer as 'wogball' and a foreign sport. Just as in the US some view soccer as not being American.
Oh, and always read talk pages.
The most interesting thing of these differences is that they're saying the same thing,but the agenda is clear in that saying the same thing is more positive or negative depending on the language.
Russian > Gab is an English-speaking social network . Gab is described as being tolerant of different patriotic groups [5] and a safe haven for communities that would be restricted or blocked on other social networks [6] . The Gab groups can be characterized as patriotic, white supremacist and alternative right [5] . The site allows each user to forward a message to 3000 other users, which are called "gebs" [7] . It has been revealed that Gab is generally a favorite platform for people with conservative, libertarian , patriotic views. [8]
English > Gab is an American alt-tech social networking service known for its far-right and extremist userbase.[3][4][5][6] Widely described as a haven for extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right, it has attracted users and groups who have been banned from other social networks.[7][8][18] Gab claims to promote free speech and individual liberty, though these statements have been criticized as being a shield for its alt-right and extremist ecosystem.[16][19][20] Antisemitism is prominent among the site's content, and the company itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary on Twitter.[22][23][24] Researchers have written that Gab has been "repeatedly linked to radicalization leading to real-world violent events".[25]
Really interesting how language and national propaganda propagates through stuff like this.
Don’t get me wrong, I support the cause of Taiwanese independence, but facts are facts. I also think that the Basque Country should be independent, and yet it would be factually incorrect to claim that it’s a country.
If you define "country" as being an entity recognised as a country by some percentage of other countries, then sure, you'd exclude Taiwan. But Wikipedia worked out pretty quickly that this is a terrible definition when a thousand microstates all recognised each other but didn't recognise any "actual countries", and then claimed that Belgium no longer existed. So instead they use a policy of "does this geopolitical entity operate in the way that humans typically understand countries to operate". Taiwan passes that check.
That being said, I imagine that if for the US the issue is so important as to repeatedly send their warships all the way to the South China Sea for it, trying to exercise some influence over the content of a wiki page would be quite a low-hanging fruit in comparison.
Read the wiki page on hunter biden.
Are you also upset that they don't have a section on the Earth page saying the world might be flat?
[0] https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/wikipedia-part-one
"the sky is green" , is obviously not likely to be accepted by many people.
'In his science fiction story foobarbaz written in 2002, John Smith asked: What if people said "The Sky Is Green"?' In this case, we can agree that the story is written, we can look it up in the library. (I made up the title in this case).
NPOV and consensus intersect here: Consensus is reached when no-one disagrees, and NPOV is defined as a point of view that no one could possibly disagree with.
On a serious note, this is very well put. It's the nature of language to lean toward a direction.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wikipedia-paid-editing-pr-fac...
No, it will tend towards the side of those who has the most admin rights and most time for reverts. They will have no interest in neutrality
[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/reading/total...
Try running any org with a Like and Follower count based reward system and check what surfaces and who pays a prices.
I think moderation tooling got better over the years: being able to revert edits quickly, tracking users/IPs known for vandalism, locking articles, reporting someone etc.
The ability to vandalise is actually an essential part of Wikipedia's success, in my opinion. Most users will not continue to vandalise and some will become valuable editors after seeing how easy it is to contribute and that their changes make a real and instant difference.
I ask because it’s become increasingly obvious that articles are changed to fit the contemporary zeitgeist. Writers that died a century ago are recast into different people, depending on the popular ideology of the day. The choice of acceptable sources is also pretty disappointing. This problem is unique to the internet and doesn’t exist with hardback encyclopedias; one can still buy a hardback set of Britannica circa 1900.
Once 2050 comes around, I’d like to be able to read the 2010 version of Wikipedia, not the one deemed acceptable by the powers that be.
The full dumps include old versions of articles but there are also old dumps available at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/archive/
But there were other collaborative Internet encyclopedia projects that didn't do so well. Benjamin Mako Hill has a paper exploring what made Wikipedia succeed while the rest failed:
I've carefully studied all three definitions of "scale" my dictionary offers up, and come to the conclusion that this sentence either means absolutely nothing ("It is big because it is big"), or something really strange ("Wikipedia grew because of its plate-like skin coverings").
(But of course, we all know that Wikipedia is run by the lizard people with the aforementioned plate-like skin coverings.)
But maybe that's a trick question!
Rather: What does Wikipedia consider to be its pool of editors?
But I think of Wikipedia as having always existed.
Funny how memory works.
Also, I've lived longer with Wikipedia than without.
I guess I'm getting old.
I thought "yeah right, who's going to write an article on like pope pius x and cheerios. nice project but not happening"
It was the second time I had seen a wiki, the first was on vim.org where I changed something in 2001 or so because I just didn't believe the concept was real.
I think I get in on the ground of a bunch of things but I'm just incredulous and not enthusiastic about them. Like all those bitcoins I didn't care about...
It's a problem I should probably work on. I should be more excited about things. Just have to figure out how to get there.
Not anyone could edit the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Ford was researching earth for 15 years and an editor cut his submission down to "mostly harmless"...
> https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ford_Prefect#Work_on_the...
I continue to be blown away by Wikipedia, and the fact that it not only works but continually gets better over time. Hats off to Wikipedia management and the fact they have stayed true to their mission.
Please remember to continue to support them, through donations or any other means that you can!
This is what I'm getting at: I tried to present some criticism of Wikipedia in this discussion. However, a lot of my comments are kind of vague because I failed to give specific examples. Consider why this is so:
Discussing a specific example would require both some (sometimes rare) knowledge of the subject at hand and knowledge of the arcane processes through which a Wikipedia is governed and through which the disputes are resolved.
This means that I would need to invest a lot of time explaining everything for someone to be able to understand the example, but, on the other hand, almost nobody (if not perhaps already a Wikipedian and familiar with the subject matter) would be willing to invest enough time to really understand the example and all the connected issues anyway.
Thus substantial criticism of Wikipedia and its processes never gets to the public at large. I think that even most of Wikipedia's contributors hold little understanding of how Wikipedia actually works (socially) because the majority are very casual. And don't get me started on the incompetent contributors who meddle with articles and topics that they don't know enough about.
Another issue is that Wikipedians probably won't want to associate their Wikipedia identity with their HN identity (and similar).
That's certainly a criticism i haven't heard before. I suppose in a way its true - wikipedia has its own culture, norms, etc, both written and unwritten, which can be hard to penetrate for an outsider (i would argue that WMF also struggles with that). But i think any large online community is going to have that. Heck, actual anthropologists have written actual books on the culture of debian, i dont see why wikipedia would be any less complicated.
> Another issue is that Wikipedians probably won't want to associate their Wikipedia identity with their HN identity (and similar).
And that is an issue because? [For the record my wikipedia username is the same as my HN username, and i know other people for which that is also true]
Nothing beats its rabbit hole and its barebone-but-focused interface. It does not replace any in-depth source of any topic you want to learn, of course.
There simply was none. And it is a huge amount of work to try and as far as I know, mainly those people try this in seriousnes (and some success), who are not happy with wikipedia because they don't like alternative facts. So I think I have seen alt-right and esoteric wikipedia clones somewhere, but for some reason they have not wide success.
- really simple and short article
- expanded version of the same article
- even more expanded version
- ...
The benefit would be faster learning.
The initial levels would be clearly marked that they contain simplifications to the point of being half-truths and the version that is 100% "honest" would be also clearly marked. (For the cases when the truth is so complex that it becomes clearly anti-educational. I don't mean controversial/political topics.)
I rarely use such strong, ostensibly hyperbolic language without sarcasm, but I couldn't be more sincere and genuine with that statement.
It exemplifies the information age, and the "purpose" of the internet - networked information transfer. The design is simple and usable to an almost miraculous degree. The distributed sourcing of information with mind-blowing moderation is pioneering and of upmost respectability.
Its ability to endure through the onslaught of addictive capitalist pressures and sheer ethical reasonableness is something very special, resisting ads for the sake and benefit of humanity, I almost want to cry just writing about it.
I could say so much more, but what I want to get to is - Thank you Wikipedia. You have changed countless lives and spread unthinkable knowledge to unfathomable futures. Hard to believe it's only been 20 years, I can't imagine a universe without you.
Please donate if you use Wikipedia. The world needs it.
I’m guessing it is one of the first things set up on Mars :)
It's not very big if you leave out all the pictures. I've got it all on my phone.
Agree though that on the rare occasion I skim an article falling within one of my areas of expertise, I'm usually left very disappointed, puzzled about the mindset of editors seeing themselves nevertheless as domain experts going by the authoritative tone of Wikipedia articles.
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect makes me then appreciate articles out of my area of expertise again. That, and the fact that most sites when read in EU greet you with annoying cookie dialogs, something I wish search engines would indicate in advance in order for me to spare me visiting it (a turning away effect I wish was studied and quantified somewhere as it vastly changed my browsing habits).
It, however, remains excellent for technical knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_Capitol_pro...
It cites 462 sources and the parts I read are at least as objective as any news outlet.
I know that Wikipedia editors lean left. I'd be interested to see examples of this bias in Wiki entries though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
Under known for it says, “Known for JavaScript, opposition to same-sex marriage”
Really? I’m as gay as they come but this just gives me scarlet letter vibes. I sincerely doubt people know this guy for his work opposing ssm (of which there wasn’t any, he was just opposed to it back in the day). People do know firefox, brave, mozilla etc though. In the talk page it is clear there are a couple editors with a vendetta against this guy or something.
Maybe an example of personal bias more than a left/right thing but I still found it kinda weird.
Based on the 50 minutes of raw footage I've seen, a description of "mostly peaceful" wouldn't be too far off.
Please substantiate your unfair attack.
Also: there's a typo in your comment. First word should be "Its", and not "It's".
Citation needed.
Some further reading : https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/gni8t5/using_wi...
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/02/kamala-harris-wikipedia/
https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/hk6eo3/kamala_ha... (check other discussions also)
I hope that gives a good starting point.
PS: I don't have a horse in this race, I just know my trust in wikipedia was shaken.
And would you treat different events differently? Would you have to wait, for instance, for classified documents to be released so that you could say you have the bigger picture?
I question if prohibition is really the right way to go. Wikipedia proved to be effective long term. Let them keep doing what is working. Maybe just warn the reader the subject or event is recent or currently developing and let the reader decide for himself whether to use that information or not.
It’s no secret the current content creators lean towards one side of the isle.
https://accountablejournalism.org/ethics-codes/guidelines-on...
https://accountablejournalism.org/ethics-codes/guidelines-on...
I use wikipedia several times daily and find the information to be super useful and seemingly accurate. I find the wikipedia information on chemicals and plants to be super useful.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-...
and I've always felt a strong pro-establishment bias on political matters. I can't say I'm an expert on Wikipedia in any way, but I wish the Wikimedia foundation as an organization would get some critical press coverage - at least as much as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple etc (which is not enough).
That’s pretty minor, but it is the main point about Wikipedia that I wish were better (I know, I’m free to help out...).
* Politics (and similar stuff) can creep into any topic
* It takes a lot of effort to verify a Wikipedia article and assess neutral point of view and other stuff. My point is that you won't know that you're reading a biased or hoax article while you're reading it.
I would definitely consider contributing and donating to an effort that opened up it's content and moderation further.
I'm not sure what the fix is for these issues, but it does mean that I seek out opposing perspectives elsewhere when I read articles that concern such topics. It'll probably always be important for readers to seek multiple perspectives, including ones they disagree with, instead of blindly trusting Wikipedia to be correct. After all, it is written by humans.
Where it might get “extreme” is on niche topics that few people care about. For example I remember some articles associated with the whole “audiophile” scene were claiming some silly things without much evidence behind them, but that’s pretty innocuous in my view.
From a quick Google search, I was able to find other articles that draw this distinction clearly (example https://spectator.us/whats-wrong-cultural-marxism/). However, the Wikipedia article doesn't draw this distinction well, and it seems intent on casting the phrase "Cultural Marxism" as racist, and so it features the worst interpretation of it. It sources articles that are also written primarily to repudiate right-wing political figures or intellectuals like Jordan Peterson. The related debate and edit wars are apparent when you look at the "Talk" page for this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cultural_Marxism_conspira.... Note that the Talk page mentions the article is controversial, is in dispute, that there have been attempts to recruit editors to change the article, there have been circular sources introduced, and so forth.
That's just one example, but if you dig deep enough into any topic that has a left- and right- perspective and a Wikipedia article, you'll find the same. Wikipedia is, in my view, developing a US-centric English-centric left-leaning bias. All that said, I still love Wikipedia and will continue to use it everyday. I just worry that like all human-centric institutions, it is itself a target, a theater of battle in the on-going ideological wars.
Both are terms that are generally used to disparage views of others. Except for the new 'Neoliberal' clique who are centre left most people described as Neoliberals don't describe themselves that way. Just as what many right of centre would term as 'Cultural Marxists' wouldn't describe themselves that way.
That's quite different from referring to the other side of a debate on sexuality as 'Cultural Marxism', despite Marx having had zero interest in sexuality, many self-proclaimed Marxist states having conservative policies on it and few people on that side of the debate having any interest in Marx. At best, you could argue right wingers describing their culture war opponents as Marxists are trying to invoke the spirit of Joe McCarthy rather than Lyndon LaRouche's ridiculous Frankfurt School conspiracy theory and literal Nazi origins of the term.
Scholarly analysis of the conspiracy theory has concluded that it has no basis in fact and is not based on any actual intellectual tendency.[5][7]
The problem is real as I've mentioned elsewhere, but it's overwhelmingly a sourcing problem. There simply aren't many sources about non-Western or traditionalist (as opposed to modern/progressive) worldviews.
Have you tried to remedy this by editing any of those articles and backing up your edits with a solid factual argument?
Specifically en.wikipedia.org has a western (US/UK sphere of influence) worldview.
This is because en.wikipedia is/can be edited by everyone who speaks English: not just the USA, not just regular English speaking countries, but also all those countries that teach children English as a second language, (and a not insignificant smattering of people who learn English outside of school too)
When you compare countries around the world, The United States of America is said to lean rather right of center.
Thus from a US perspective you would expect en.wikipedia to appear to indeed be a bit on the left.
(this is not a comprehensive answer, but it does cover a lot of the ground)
I'm not sure that this is the case. Maybe with respect to English-speaking countries, the U.S. leans more capitalistic which some people would call "right". But U.S. society/worldview is nonetheless far more liberal, socially progressive and open to diverse views than most countries around the world.
These notes are almost always useless for two reasons:
1. They are never detailed enough to do anything with.
2. They usually assume massive amounts of prior audience knowledge. To the point where said audience wouldn't need the website.
So they have the unique distinction of being useless to both beginners and expert audiences (quite the feat if you think about.) In the end after you've realized whatever article you're reading is useless (mostly all of them) you'll leave and do what you should have done in the first place: your own research.
I really do wish there was a way to block results in Google. Wikipedia and it's merry band of 13-yo editors would be the first to go.
In general an encyclopedia helps you solve the search paradox (That is: You can't find anything unless you already know something about it).
* If you use it to find information about things you are already very familiar with, you'll be disappointed.
* If you use it directly as a source for things you are not familiar with, you will be mislead.
However, if you use your encyclopedia (Britannica , Wikipedia, Encarta) as a jumping off point to find search terms and sources, you'll find it to be most useful indeed.
In short, an encyclopedia is more like a richer dictionary, rather than a primary source of truth. (it isn't called a tertiary source for nothing!)
Now you'll have to find something else to rant about on the Internet.