Aussie Tech-Focused Wiki Launched 155
daria42 writes "Wikipedia's great for some things — like looking up the in-depth history of 4chan, for example — but not great for others, such as finding out the micro-history of the technology sector in certain countries. That's why Australian technology publication Delimiter has launched a public wiki site purely focused on the Australian technology sector — its personalities, issues, companies, and events. Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small wikis should be created for certain verticals."
Advantage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Put the word "Wikipedia" in quotes like me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Aussie Tech-Focused Wikipedia Launched
No, it wasn't. Some business in Australia unconnected with the Wikimedia crowd decided to put up their own wiki (running MediaWiki, like half of the other wikis out there). Good for them.
Why didn't Slashdot cover it when Penny Arcade got their own Wikipedia [wikia.com] ? Oh wait, it was because that didn't happen, the same way Australia didn't get their own Wikipedia for technology.
Anyhow, if someone's going to give the Land Down Under their own honest-to-goodness Wikipedia wiki, I think it should be about ways to get rid of invasive species. Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else?
Of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:broken into thousands of subdomains? (Score:1, Insightful)
But isn't the internet really just thousands of sub domains? And it's useful right? Even the Wikipedia folks seem to think that it is okay to have many sources of "fact" see also links aka references at the end of each Wikipedia entry. Is this a Wikipedia issue or just a problem with somebody else calling their user create collection of "facts" a wiki? I like Wikipedia and appreciate when people add to it but refuse to limit myself when people choose to maintain their own website(s) even ones that happen to be structured as wikis.
Re:Advantage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever tried to create or edit articles in Wikipedia?
I've had dentist visits which were less painful.
I've dealt with powerhungry asshole admins in fps games who were more understanding.
I've dealt with complex series of rules (i.e. United States Tax Code) which are easier to circumnavigate than Wikipedia's ego-driven drivel.
And my edits were on non-mainstream articles.
WTF are you on about? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia doesn't want full depth coverage of specific areas. Once they wanted to contain the "sum of human knowledge" (including catch rates for pokemon) but these days they want to be an online encyclopaedia based on reputable sources. They encourage you to go off and make your own wiki if you want to have deep coverage of a particular area.
For example the article on 4chan contains superficial background information. There is another entire wiki dedicated to the full history of 4chan and the memes it generates. The wikipedia article focuses on Project Chanology and /b/ because that is probably what got 4chan the most press coverage (which is what wikipedia admins like to base articles on, but hardly covers all knowledge of a subject).
Wikipedia wants you to write encyclopedia articles. They don't just want an infodump of "non-encyclopaedic" information. If you do the latter they will tell you to take you "non-notable fancruft" to another wiki.
Re:Advantage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Advantage? (Score:1, Insightful)
No, and yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably would have been roughly as effective to publish an article in a major mag or popular blog saying "Hey, we need more coverage in wikipedia, please contribute."
Why is this worse? Because the small wikis don't have the infrastructure. Financial, technical, and human resources- the volunteers who have spent years figuring out the best available way to do stuff, Etc. etc.
On the plus side, something relatively obscure gets shuffled off into its own wiki. I only wish the same could be said of all the extensive articles on various fictional universes...
Re:hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Not notable (Score:4, Insightful)
There's also the fact that wikipedia removes anything "not notable." What is "not notable" is usually whatever a bunch of wikipedia bureaucrats decide. Wikipedia, being run by your traditional fatnerd, is more likely to label this sort of stuff as "not notable" as opposed to something they would find notable (like the made-up histories of individual Final Fantasy characters or the stats of pokemon characters).
Well, of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small Wikis should be created for certain verticals.
Wikipedia aims to be a general encyclopedia, larger and more thorough than any print encyclopedia to be sure, but it's still a general reference. Of course more specific references should be created. It's not like this is a new idea: search Amazon for books titled Encyclopedia of... and you'll find thousands, many (though probably not most) of which are serious scholarly works.
Excepting mathematics and the sciences, which are arguably applicable to the whole of human experience in one way or another, practically every other area of human knowledge has a highly specialized audience to one degree or another. Every last possible detail about pre-1947 aircraft engines, for example, might be of great interest to aerospace historians and engineers, but it's probably not of much interest to anyone else. Or an encyclopedic reference to every last town in Ohio might be hugely interesting to Ohioans and genealogists, and at least occasionally significant to broader research, but again, of limited interest to the general public. Unless Wikipedia (and its donors) are prepared to maintain a comprehensive reference to the entire body of human knowledge, specialist references are unavoidable.
Finally, the quality of the articles in those specialist references might be higher than in Wikipedia. Every field has sloppy researchers and trolls, of course, but a relatively specialized field probably has a smaller proportion of both than would be attracted to a general reference, within certain limits, e.g., one could reasonably expect a wiki devoted to quaternions to have better writers and fewer trolls than AbortionPedia.
Re:Advantage? (Score:1, Insightful)
My fetishes (Score:1, Insightful)
I find wikiporono.org [wikiporno.org] more helpful than wikipedias porn portal.
I want a sum-of-all-knowledge-opedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
I want a wiki that contains a coredump of all human knowledge, notable or not. I'd get stuck in even worse wikiloops.
You know about some obscure film that was a knockoff of batman produced by 2 Chileans and a Russian in Azerbaijan in 1974?
BRING IT ON. I want to know the life story of the three producer/director/actors as well. What the name of their third cat was. What brand of cigarettes they smoked. Everything is notable.
Re:Australia? (Score:2, Insightful)
8 Pages, and 3 of them are test entries, and two are one-liners. Extremely slow news day? :\
Re:Wikipedia would have much better coverage (Score:2, Insightful)
Wikipedia would have this, and lots of other content, if there wasn't those guys who are known as The Deletionists who pretty much delete every article which isn't controversial mess. Non-controversial topics don't have many people keeping a close eye on them, and when they get flagged for deletion, nobody really notices that before too late.
"Australian technology, what's that? Never heard, DELETE!"
I just found that there's a Wikipedia entry deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] despite the fact that this clearly isn't what you would normally consider encyclopedic material. I wonder why the deletionists didn't delete it.