Rogue editors started a competing Wikipedia that's only about roads
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Huh it's still going! It must be 25 years old now, not a bad achievement.
It was definitely a new frontier where we thought anything was possible. Just being able to easily link between nodes/pages was a very cool feature back then.
Supposedly Tumblr has done the same. They crashed and burned so hard that they actually came out of the ordeal with a reverse eternal September effect, where miraculously most people act respectfully towards each other and are not just trying to exploit the platform.
I of course immediately left.
What is with these "encyclopedias of everything" that don't want frivolous information?
>> “I don’t have a problem with roads,” Zeleny said. “There are lots of obscure subjects on Wikipedia, but you have to follow the guidelines. People see Wikipedia as a joke. They think it’s not serious. I’ve taken great, great pains to make sure articles are well written, well researched, and well cited.”
Or maybe more precisely, people's desire to believe the thing they're volunteering vast amounts of their personal time to matters and is serious, and because it's serious there should be rules.
I also believe that Wikipedia is important and the work contributers do there matters.
Your comment makes it sound like you disagree.
But that also leads to myoptic views of projects in super-volunteers, where the intent of the project to users gets lost in performance of the rules.
I'm not sure this is a solveable problem for volunteer-based projects though. There are only so many people willing to donate time, and you have to keep them happy.
I think it would be cool if there was something that saved all contributions, even deleted ones, and made it easy to explore all of them. I know Wikipedia has a diff history but that's not the right interface to bring all that to the surface.
Looking forward to the next collaborative scrapbook to start up so I can participate in good faith and have some good fun :D
We get it that people will abuse Wikipedia and it must suck to cull all of the ephemera people submit (not the best word for it but the only one that comes to my mind).
But I think rules should allow for nuance.
Perhaps Wikipedia should have allowed a kind of sub-Wikipedia: a sort of parallel wikipedia that deals in topics more akin to Urban Dictionary entries. Sort it's entries to the bottom of the search results, serve up a light yellow background for sub-pedia pages to make it clear these are not conforming articles. But it seems to me like a generally bad idea to be a ruthless gatekeeper for the enthusiastic and motivated contributors out there.
It's an interesting idea. I imagine a sort of "Official" and "Unofficial" modes. You could flip a switch and see the articles and edits that didn't pass muster.
That way, the ideas and info wouldn't be lost/censored, but wouldn't get to claim they're "formally accepted."
Those instances can serve as "incubators" for not sufficiently notable pages and then if they reach notability they can be transferred from the local "small" wiki to "big" wikipedia without losing any of the internal page information (like discussions or old revisions) or local context (still linking back to the "small" wiki).
That way you could have the default unlogged-in wikipedia which shows only the officially vetted pages but then also provide a "wider wikipedia" that includes pages that are of sufficient quality but not quite there yet. And then your local "small wikipedia" pages that don't meet the requirements to move up into the wider network yet.
This would maintain coherency between the wikis for the users who care while also allowing the core wikipedia admins and mods to focus their energy on maintaining a tight selection of well established, notable articles. And then users could choose how wide their wikipedia experience is.
Nowadays, Wikidata is playing that role already. Its concept of "notability" is flexible enough that labeled roads or individual Pokemons could handily fit there - if something is described to some minimal extent by a verifiable source, it can go in. Each Wikidata entry can contain links and "identifiers" that describe or refer to the same real-world entity in different namespaces, and you can use the Wikidata-specific browser extension Entity Explosion https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Entity_Explosion to seamlessly browse to other descriptions of any given entity as you browse the web. So the vetted "secondary" sources you're talking about don't even need to be wiki-specific, they can be practically anywhere on the web.
Of course, the person who writes the Wikipedia article should preferably not be the same person who wrote the article being cited.
A variant of this: you do the research, cite your findings with presumably reliable sources and post it somewhere like a personal blog. Wikipedia doesn't like directly linking to it [0], but if an editor writes the same content and cites the same sources, that's also OK, even though I'd argue that's plagiarism.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
If you want to help Wikipedia, feel free to write articles based on work that other people did in your field. Don't add any conclusions of your own. Let someone else write the articles on the research that was done by you.
I think that is a very reasonable tradeoff.
—-
> if an editor writes the same content and cites the same sources, that's also OK, even though I'd argue that's plagiarism.
An editor should not copy your blog post. They can describe whatever you wrote about and cite your blog post as a source. Or, they can go after the same original sources you have cited and write their own summarizing article (but not copy the blog post, and they also can't add any of their own conclusions).
That's my point: you've done the legwork, but you don't get credit for it, and as far as Wikipedia's policies are concerned, can't. They aren't supposed to cite your blog as a source, because it's self-published. I've seen many edits citing what I thought were well-researched entries get reverted because "it's a blog."
“I think this is relevant. Here you go, world. Do with it what you may.”
*no relationship to the Rust package manager, it's a SQL wrapper for MediaWiki
I would say the headline here if anything is, "WikiMedia doesn't support niche-interest wikis that run alongside Wikipedia" and instead make you either self-host or use a farm (Fandom, Miraheze, Wiki.gg, etc).
Shameless plug: miraheze.org offers free, ad-free wikis offered by a charitable foundation.
Not having this meant for-profit companies like Wikia (now fandom.com) could take over much of that space, pervasive tracking and ads included.
Wikipedia is already one of the best data sources for training LLMs, and if they were less stringent, it could even be a better resource.
And that might sound like a criticism, but it’s really not. Niche interest sites where people spend their time collecting a huge level of detail on a topic few care about are awesome, and I love them. Just realistically, they’re not there for the readers.
I think wikibooks is a good initiativ to solve this, and could be powerful when combined with a normal wiki.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia
It's more or less Wikipedia but the articles are created using natural language generation on a functional programming base. The main goal is to generate content in any language from a common underlying structure, but one could also try recursive explanations of a given topic in that framework as well.
Case in point, nLab: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage
For instance, https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/homotopy+type+theory
Although this is partly inevitable because the content is really abstract, I know there are more approachable ways to define “monad” than https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad
There is a project page advocating more accessible technical articles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_artic...
In some cases technical subjects just require some pretty steep prerequisite knowledge, but where possible it's nice to try to make them as accessible as can be done practically within the space constraint of a few introductory paragraphs. Usually that means trying to aim at least part of any article at approximately "1 level below" the level where students are expected to first encounter the topic in their formal study. (This isn't always accomplished, and feel free to complain on specific pages that fall far short.)
Writing for a extremely diverse audience with diverse needs is a hard problem. And more generally, writing well as a pseudonymous volunteer collective is really hard, and a lot of the volunteers just aren't very good writers. Then some topics are politicized, ...
How much time have you personally spent trying to make technical articles whose subjects you do know about more accessible to newcomers? If anyone reading this discussion has the chance, please try to chip away at this problem, even if it's just contributing to articles about e.g. high school or early undergraduate level topics – many of these are not accessible at the appropriate level. But if you are an expert about some tricky technical topic in e.g. computing or biology or mechanical engineering, go get involved in fixing it up.
Many of the english math entries seem to be written for math students (as in math program students, not students studying math).
I recommend Mathworld. Much much better.
When I was a kid, I was taught to reject Wikipedia as an academic source. I know I'm not the only one. Part of me wonders if their present moderation is influenced by that.
What ends up happening is people (including academics in published work) still use Wikipedia as a source, but just don't mention it. This is much worse than just citing Wikipedia, because it can lead to "citogenesis", whereby a claim that originated (without evidence) in Wikipedia is then given credibility by being republished elsewhere. Sorting out what happened later is a huge pain, and many examples slip through the cracks.
Overall, Wikipedia should be taken for what it is: a moderately inconsistent tertiary source written by pseudonymous volunteers some of whom are dispassionate world-class experts and others of whom are incompetent amateurs, ideologues, or trolls.
However, what I've found tracking down lots of Wikipedia claims over the years is that Wikipedia is on average no less reliable than many other kinds of sources that are taken more seriously, including paper encyclopedias and peer-reviewed journal articles (and don't get me started on newspaper articles). Every source and author should be carefully evaluated for credibility and read with at least some skepticism.
There are some specialized ones like https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo
That is what distinguishes Wikipedia from large language models or Google which'll say they have information on a given topic even if their sources are questionable. The value-add of Wikipedia is curation, and when the quality of one's outputs is a function of one's inputs, it's sometimes better to just not give an output when the input doesn't exist.
Which is, of course, completely ironic. Wikipedia's notability criterion depends heavily on books in some library stack that essentially no one will ever actually check or appearances in other print form that no one will check either.
I've found a couple of minor "folk histories" of things that appear to not have been true after looking at actual books (which may have not been actually accurate either though they seemed plausible).
Wikipedia has its own "Wikipedia Library", which is a system to allow active editors access to high-quality sources. But if it has to be resorting to Sci-Hub or libgen to check sources for Wikipedia, that's also a form of public service.
Sadly that happens, and it happens a lot more than most people realize. It's way too easy to fake a reputation on Wikipedia.
(There's a WP: page about this problem that I think gives it a name, but I can't find it right now.)
Aha, someone else mentioned it in these comments: "citogenesis", and it was indeed Randall Munroe's coining, and the meta page is
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_in...
So I feel like Wikipedia's rule don't necessarily make their content any more reliable. It just adds a step if you're looking to push some kind of biased/iffy opinion onto a page.
https://math.fandom.com/wiki/Math_Wiki https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Main_Page
And a few about engineering:
https://engineering.fandom.com/wiki/Engineering_Wiki
Plus a few about computer related topics:
https://dataengineering.wiki/Index
And various languages and frameworks have wikis too, like Python, PHP, WordPress, etc.
So there's definitely some interest in wikis outside of fandom topics. The Wiki listing pages on Wikipedia has at least 30% of the page listing wikis that don't involve a piece of media/fiction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis
I suspect the disparity is probably because hobbies and fandoms could mostly only communicate via the internet, and naturally went from fansites and hobby sites to wikis. Meanwhile more academic subjects have an audience who seem to be unsure of the value of these sorts of free resources.
Sadly quite a few wikis still use the service, and haven't gone independent yet.
Folks interested in open collaborative math content may find these interesting:
1. Allow most legal content to be uploaded and control distribution with algos
YouTube, Roblox, Twitter, Tinder, Flickr, Insta, FB, TikTok.
This lets users practice and test things without risk to their work or account.
2. Sites that try to "keep the db clean" by nuking stuff they think is "bad" by some criteria.
Sites like this: Wikipedia, most big subreddits
Type 2 sites can be unsustainable because they tend to make new users feel judged, and don't give them the chance to iterate and improve their work until it's more ready to be shared and useful to a broader audience. You just find your content nuked, or removed from the subreddit, or downvoted a ton, often with a dismissive or aggressive comment. This is NOT the way to grow and survive as a company over a long period of time
Obviously, there is no necessity to keep the db full of only high quality items. As the scope and number of niches a site covers, it's not possible to maintain that. On the other hand, using algos lets you do interactive tests with content, directly testing against various audiences to see if they like it, without having to do editorial work yourself.
Of course, there has to be some limit - articles for every pokemon, or every version of every pokemon, etc at some point it does get too far. The thing for me is coming in and seeing your content completely deleted.
I'd also suggest a major distinction between type 1 and type 2 sites are a focus on creation vs consumption. There's a lot more consumers than producers and, depending on your goals, it might improve the experience for more users by deleting the content of some.
Those are all assumptions and memories from working during that time period - possibly wrong, would look up if you disagree. But if you don't, then my conclusion would be that staying flat during a period like that - when you could have grown and supported a deep, new, persuasive trend of literacy, fact-based reasoning and understanding, education and compromise - is a huge failure.
Most of those new internet users are in Asia and do not use English as their primary language. If you look at editor counts of other Wikipedia editions; Hindi https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/hi.wikipedia.org/contributing/... , Indonesian https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/id.wikipedia.org/contributing/... , Thai https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/th.wikipedia.org/contributing/... , Persian https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/fa.wikipedia.org/contributing/... kept growing after the English Wikipedia saturated.
That depends on your criteria. If popularity and user engagement are the only important metrics, this is absolutely true.
If however, clarity of purpose and effective moderation are important, I would strongly disagree. From my experience, most big subreddits that used to fulfill a certain niche have devolved into primarily meta-posting and stealth (or not stealth at all) advertisement.
Of the exceptions to the above, many now just fill the exact same purpose. There are around 10 extremely large subreddits that regularly make the front page that are essentially just "look at this picture of something I have/something I saw" with no real boundary between them.
Reddit is fine but it's not really operable as a business enterprise unless you are fine with making a small tiny profit over long period of time.
Subreddits are a self solving problem over time. They grow big and shrink on their own merits and damage is self contained.
You really can’t have a site that’s a free-for-all because of spammers, griefers, racists, and other various forms of jerks.
Actually, treating censorship of those things as the default global level of censorship makes the difference between restrictive sites like Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet even more stark.
It's almost unimaginable that YouTube would remove a creators content simply because they thought the topic was irrelevant, or the quality too low. So I agree we can't have a true free for all online. But the distinction between the large group of UGC sites that really try to cultivate and protect their creators from those that don't is reflected in the popularity and growth rates of them all.
The problem on Wikipedia is less about having standards and more about having changing interpretations of fundamental standards re-classify large swaths of previously acceptable content as unacceptable.
The trend away from subject-specific notability and sourcing guidelines to applying one notability guideline generically to every subject, regardless of the intent in doing so, mostly just gives editors who like to delete things a whole new buffet of articles to tear through.
For me as an amateur contributor, though, even the normal experience was tough - suddenly I returned to find my content removed, with a short, aggressive note, left by what wasn't a committee, or a jury, but rather a single, annoyed and tired individual, who in his seniority was somehow justified in unilaterally acting alone to delete my work, without the careful attention to detail in documents, wording, and formality which helps make real-world justice palatable. The carelessness with which he wrote made it clear that at that site, I was to be considered a person of very little value at all.
To speak more clearly, that was the social/psychological effect of it - which left me without much motivation to continue! And I think that's a wide effect - if you compare a typical 1st-time wikipedia editing experience to the more successful UGC sites, it's pretty clear they all make some effort to shield users from that (if they can) and let them feel successful, even if they aren't yet. (I know from the inside of one of these places that users get mad at for removing their creations for copyright or other reasons, all of us on the inside hated potentially frustrating a creator, and admired them for trying over and over to create something.)
Moreover, from what I've heard, there used to be more freedom on wikipedia, so the argument that "it's always been that way" might not even work.
And another type 1: github
I actually use Mediawiki for my blog.
The UK's got SABRE: https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Pag...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long%3B_didn%2...
* Not enough interest to update wiki when the subject changes; then wiki becomes out of date and unreliable.
* Too few eyeballs allows false information to be added (accidentally or intentionally)
* Becomes harder to do wiki-wide changes (of course it's inevitably too large for manual wiki-wide changes, but you can imagine more articles means more corner cases will be hit that will get automation mistakes or require more complex automation. Think info-boxes used in novel ways etc)
The third could be solved by only deleting pages that use the wiki language in unmaintainable ways.
Other than that potential future problem, this is pretty much the system working as intended, and they're following the path led by sites such as Wookiepedia.
It's very G/O Media-clickbaity to call this "going rogue". The editors aren't subverting anything.
This isn't the first and won't be the last fork of a Wikipedia community over the increasingly tightened, deletionism-favoring screws of notability and sourcing policies. The only people "going rogue" are the organized groups on Wikipedia moving across wildly different topics in order to hammer them all into one uniform shape that serves nobody as well as it had or could.
EDIT: The Gizmodo article doesn't link to the US Roads group's own rationale for leaving, which fills in some gaps from the rather low-content article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roa...
> Since August 2022, our project has faced several external challenges that made several members question the viability of editing on Wikipedia in ways that Covid-19 didn't. The notability of highway articles in general became a focus of New Page Patrollers. Additionally, the ability to continue using maps as sources was called into question. Since then, we initiated an RfC to clarify if there was support for long-standing citation practices, namely could we continue to cite maps as sources in our articles? The results of that RfC were mixed. While chatting amongst ourselves online, it became clear that continuing to hope that another RfC or deletion discussion would go our way was an exercise in futility. In the background to all of this, other categories of articles were on the chopping block. First it was articles on Olympic athletes, and then it was cricket and area code articles.
They seem to defend against conspiracy theories and falsehoods. Why are you calling them a "gang"? What are the "dominating"? Why is this bad?
> The dispute came down to some of Wikipedia’s most sacred tenants. Anyone can edit Wikipedia...
Tenets!
To establish their credentials, they get involved in arcane areas like Articles for Deletion or other areas that you’d expect would be of more interest to experienced editors.
Now everyone has the right to edit anything on Wikipedia, but it’s starting to feel like paid editors have gained a foothold.