Wikipedia Edits Around the World

billlava writes "Wikipedia continues on its inexorable march toward becoming the repository for the world's knowledge — to the tune of four and a half edits a second. Just who is doing all these edits? And where do they live? Erik Zachte compiled data from a day in May 2011 into an interesting set of animations and maps to show update activity as it occurred during the day."

Re:Hardly

[interkin3tic]

"Knowledge" doesn't imply "a raw dump of data." There's some implication of important data being retained and trivial information, or untrue stuff, being weeded out. I've heard your brain dumps most incoming information, things like the sensation of your socks rubbing on your feet, but that obviously is your personal repository of knowledge. You can't possibly suggest that wikipedia shouldn't delete ANYTHING.

I'm aware there are examples of petty little people letting the power go to their head, deleting more information than they should, but that's an unavoidable abuse, just as it's unavoidable that there are going to be people who spam Wikipedia with trivial information (and then whine about it on slashdot). From my perspective, the information I search for on wiki is always there, so it's not suffering from deleting too much.

Re:The summary is shilled.

[jc42]

Here's what everyone needs to do... do what you rarely ever do -- go to any wikipedia page on a subject in which you are expert or very knowledgeable. In all likelihood, you will then realize that this page is riddled with errors, bad writing, glaring omissions, bias and probably other things too.

Actually, I've done that a number of times. What I found was more complex than that.

When I've looked at pages on highly technical topics, I've generally found that the information was quite accurate, and often fairly detailed. On the other hand, when I look up non-technical topics, I've usually found sketchier information, and a lot of opinion passing for fact.

Of course, in both cases, the information has usually been fairly basic. It's ok for a quick introduction, but for the real story, you have to start following links. That's about what I'd expect wikipedia to be: A useful first stop for topics that I know little about, with useful links if I want to learn more.

Actually, I tend to go to google first. This is because you have to guess the title fairly accurately for wikipedia, but for google, you only need to guess the keywords. Then you hope that something in the first few pages of ghits will actually be on the topic you want.

And if google shows a wikipedia link, I usually read it first.

(One of my favorite examples for wiki-skeptics is to suggest that they read the "Evolution" page. It has long been a very reasonable introduction to that tendentious topic, summarizing the scientific history, and giving links to both technical articles and religious pages that are relevant. I do wonder how often that page is vandalized, but the editors do a reasonably good job of keeping it stable. ;-)