Wikipedia Edits Around the World 85
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."
Just who is doing all these edits? (Score:1)
Mouth breathing, mother's basement dwelling, introverted, narcissistic losers.
Hardly (Score:1)
How can it be the repository for the world's knowledge when they are constantly deleting things?
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Oh, shut up.
Like anyone cares about your band.
Re:Hardly (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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"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.
Just because the WikiPedia overlords delete it doesn't make the content untrue.
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I get "my page" trimmed down annually by the nameless-trimlords at wikimedia foundation.
After they reduce-me, I usually just give up.
Its like they want to see how convicted I am.
They must improve on their moderation.
Have a trim at it here. [wikipedia.org]
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> You can't possibly suggest that wikipedia shouldn't delete ANYTHING.
Well... 3TB harddrives and ranking functionalities aside... Wikipedia is 99% in the hands of what netizens call "Super-Aspergers" or "Controlfreaks" because it attracts such people with it's very nature and how it works.
"Super-Aspergers" are great in maintaining knowledge like (e.g.) laws where every sentence has a number.
They suck at maintaining knowledge that emotional or historical value like (e.g.) articles about websites that had
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Because we DO have 3TB harddrives we DESERVE "a raw dump of data."
Was that ever the goal of wikipedia though? They have had rules concerning relevance since I heard about it. That implies the goal was not "all information."
If you want an "all inclusive wiki" that will err more on the side of too much information rather than too much deleted information, and will be more secure against deletion abuses, then by all means, make your own wikipedia.
The old man murray example is an abuse, yes, fine. There are going to be abuses no matter what. NO MATTER WHAT. And wik
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In WP:SPEAK, "Sum of all the world's knowladge" means, effectively, around 3 million articles. That's it. That, according to Wikipedia, is as much information about the world as is deemed worthy of note.
Pretty bleak world view when you think about it.
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Qualitative data over quantitative data (Score:4, Insightful)
How many of those edits are reverting vandalism?
Furthermore, how many of those edits are overwriting legitimate, accurate content that the all-knowing editors deem to be "unsuitable" for article inclusion?
I could imagine that these numbers are quite padded by the bureaucracy and drama that engulfs the Wikiworld.
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Depends on the category. As a random example, in the Jane Roberts topics, they banned the guy who did a life study of the texts in favor of broader, more general articles.
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And of course, userboxes. Userbox edits probably make up the rest of them
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How many of those edits are reverting vandalism?
I know that the vast majority of my edits are vandalism reversion, but I would bet that of the 4.5 edits per second mentioned in the summary, probably 3 of those are pure vandalism.
Furthermore, how many of those edits are overwriting legitimate, accurate content that the all-knowing editors deem to be "unsuitable" for article inclusion?
Funny, the "suitability" guidelines are quite simple, and generally not subjectively applied.
No bright line rule for reliable sources (Score:2)
Funny, the "suitability" guidelines are quite simple
Not to me they aren't. There is no bright line rule for what makes a "reliable" source. When I asked on (I think it was) Wikipedia talk:Identifying reliable sources for some help on clarifying the rule for how a source is deemed to have established a reputation for fact-checking, I got accused of trolling.
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How many of those edits are by butt-hurt cry babies upset that their special snowflake got deleted?
You know, since you want to break it down and all
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...legitimate, accurate content that the all-knowing editors...
Dr. Original Research Troll, I presume ?
Chinese (Score:1)
The Chinese edits were interesting. Mostly from Taiwan ....
The English edits look pretty much balanced between the English speaking countries - I don't see as a huge difference between the US, UK and Australia as I do between China and Taiwan.
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Maybe a common anonymiser in China uses Taiwan servers?
Edit pirates? (Score:2, Funny)
I like how the second map has a significant number of edits coming from the geographical coordinates zero degrees north/south by zero degrees east/west. I guess geolocation by IP doesn't work perfectly. Or there's a very busy boat somewhere.
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On the same vein, there's a seems to be an edit war going happening right now over the entry for Vodka in the Russian Wikipedia. The hostilities have completely engulfed an unmapped Siberian outpost.
the French... (Score:2)
Northern Canada (Score:3)
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there's Churchill, Manitoba.... but it's a little off from there. couple hundred K anyway.
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Greetings Professor Falken
A strange game. [blogspot.com]
The only winning move is
not to play. [blogspot.com]
Multiple languages. (Score:2)
Needless to say, there are many Wikipedias dedicated to each language. Think how much richer each entry would be if all that time and energy was concentrated into the one or maybe two languages. That always makes me sad.
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No hablo Engles, you insensitive clod...
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Oh, and which language would that be ? You are not supposing that everyone has English as a mother tongue, are you ? Esperanto maybe ?
On the contrary, Wikipedia can now double as a wonderful dictionary for some specialized vocabulary (math notions, proper nouns, etc.) by looking at the interwiki links.
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English?? Now why ever would I think of using that language out of the hundreds that happen to exist? Surely that would be incredibly biased of me?
Seriously, many countries are using English now as their second language, so I'll admit that seems the sensible choice here. However, my point was a unified language that we can all use universally. Sure, Esperanto can fit that bill, though obviously it lacks the momentum that, I don't know, say.... English perhaps?,... has gotten so far.
To be fair, I always thin
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Okay that can be the second language for now then.
Chinese is not a language (Score:2)
a unified language that we can all use universally ... English perhaps?
1.6 billion Chinese beg to differ
Chinese is not a language but a group of related languages using mostly the same logograms and syntax. Which Chinese language are you talking about? Mandarin? Cantonese? Taiwanese? If there were more speakers of Mandarin alone throughout the industrialized world than speakers of English, I might be more inclined to learn Mandarin.
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Well on that note I have to agree. There's certainly a lot of bloat in the English language, perhaps even more so than C++ or Windows. I'm hoping the english language will naturally evolve out of the slight mess its in, as it's already evolved a great deal so far.
However, there is a lot to be said for a common standard. I would love to use base 12 or 16 over base 10, but it would be awful if almost every country used a different number base. That's a greater 'crime' in many ways than a universally used albe
toki! (Score:2)
A new language without redundant rules
Redundancy helps with error detection and correction.
complicated exceptions to this rules, without idiotic and pointless silent letters, and without words that have the same spelling but have different meaning.
Would you prefer Toki Pona, a language with fewer than 150 words that relies on heavy compounding?
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English as a second language is good enough to do business, maybe not to write articles and discuss philosophy.
See, English is not my mother tongue (bonus point if you can guess from my writing where I come from). I have a decent English, can read without any problem, but it is much more cumbersome and slow for me to write in English than in my native language. Don't think that the Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Chinese contributors to Wikipedia would contribute the same amount if they had to write in E
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I don't think you understood the gist of my post. The goal should be to eventually unify the languages, generally, not just on Wikipedia. Of course that'll mean adding to new words etc. to each one. Obviously, that's going to be a heck of an undertaking, and they each currently have their advantages and disadvantages.
Standards are good things, and promote easier cooperation and sharing of culture.
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I for one think that the race to "one world" is great in many ways--but there a lot of losses along the way to uniformity. As a fellow nerd, I should think you would appreciate the beauty of non-conformity.
Take care, chau.
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Yeah, the losses would concern me. We'd have to be careful - so that maybe the unified language borrows lots of these subtle words/concepts that aren't otherwise fully catered for.
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On the contrary, Wikipedia can now double as a wonderful dictionary for some specialized vocabulary (math notions, proper nouns, etc.) by looking at the interwiki links.
I second that. I use wikipedia a lot to translate words from Dutch to English. If I look the dutch word up I can check whether it's the right explanation, so I'll get the correct translation once I change languages.
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I agree. From now on, Wikipedia should only be in French and Japanese.
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Sound choices!
(Sniff...)
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Think how much richer each entry would be if all that time and energy was concentrated into the one or maybe two languages. That always makes me sad.
Nah; that would make most of the world a lot poorer. It would only mean shutting down the wikipedia sites for all the "minor" languages. It would probably add nothing at all to the English wikipedia, and very little to the French or Chinese versions (whichever was allowed to continue alongside English). This would be a major loss of knowledge to most of the world's population.
The minor-language editions have probably added more value for their speakers than the English-language edition has for us Engl
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I'm thinking more of the major languages here, or of the cases where I see an article in two different languages, and they're both really different, and better (or worse) in different ways. I always think it would be nice to combine the best features of both, and have the wisdom of both articles merged to make a 'super' article.
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Not to mention all the inherent inaccuracy of natural languages, their countless possibilities for subtle bias and misrepresentation, as well as the potential to misread some when there are none and thereby trigger an edit war...
Yes, you're absolutely right - we need One True Wikipedia, and it should be written in Lojban. ~
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Yes, delete them all except for the Standard Chinese and the Hindi ones.
Simpl' Pedia (Score:1)
I notice that many of the edits to Simple Wikipedia originate in the American South. Just sayin'.
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While I'd like to think ALL of it is trolling, I don't have that much faith in humanity.
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I often read simple Wikipedia myself, sometimes brevity and reduced jargon make a challenging topic easier to digest. Sometimes not :). [wikipedia.org]
Conservapedia is somewhat schizophrenic to read. Setting up an article with a "Conservative" bias, has shown that Conservatives have a more diverse rainbow of opinion than any other political group. Not that they would be happy to be described with those terms.
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The entirety of conservapedia is trollish.
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I would expect that is because there are more non-native English speakers in the South - such as Mexican expats.
Surprised? (Score:2)
Map seems to show technologically advanced nations around major population centers make the most wikipedia edits. Surprised? After awhile they all look the same.
Canada? (Score:1)
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Lawyers will destroy wikipedia (Score:1)
The summary is shilled. (Score:2)
Clearly not an objective statement.
There may be a lot of articles on Wikipedia. However, the average quality is not high, and it certainly must never ever be treated as a repository of knowledge. It is nothing of the kind.
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 th
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Re:The summary is shilled. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. ;-)
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If you want an example article, instead of Evolution, try Fractal Antenna. The namesake company is working hard to keep it pure propaganda, removing all critiCism of fractals, and all mention of competing companies. Check the talk page, look at the edit history, and trace route those IP addresses... Administrators have been repeatedly notified, the vandals have patience to wait anyone out, and the money and vested interest in keeping it biased.
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Why then should anyone EVER trust ANY page on wikipedia?
Because they can verify [wikipedia.org] the reliable sources [wikipedia.org] that all good articles have.
14th February - random? (Score:1)
I'd be far more interested to see a screenshot of deletions rather than edits, if only to find out exactly who is committing the annoying, unnecessary and downright malicious deletions of interesting scientific articles but leaving the FUD about D-list celebrities.