Wikipedia Rolls Out Mobile Editing For All Users 55
An anonymous reader writes "Wikipedia today announced it has launched support for editing content on your mobile device. The first version of mobile editing, which requires a Wikimedia account, is available right now. 'For our first release, our primary goal was to create a fast, intuitive editing experience for new users and experienced editors alike, while still sticking with markup editing for now,' Wikimedia's Juliusz Gonera explained. 'We started simple so we could observe our users' needs and expectations.'"
markup should remain (Score:2, Interesting)
Their markup language is quite simple to understand, and its existence provides a useful desire and intelligence floor on people editing pages. If people can't even be bothered to read how it works, that's probably well correlated with crap contributions. I'm sure it's not a perfect correlation, but it's a lot better than nothing, and prevents it from descending to AOL levels of stupidity. For whatever problems it has - and it has many, including internal political ones - wikipedia is a pretty damn good
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I'm sure the markup language will always remain an option for those who want to use it. It definitely should.
However even if you are proficient with it, editing pages can be hard as it's sometimes simply too hard to see what you are doing. Just browse through the source of page "Linux" [wikipedia.org] for example. Especially due to long citation definitions, some of the chapters are quite jarring to see. Here WYSIWYG comes to rescue.
Re: Just say NO to citations. (Score:2)
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Given that a citation can be found to back up any claim, they have no real value. Time and time again we have seen two or more opposing set of "facts" presented, each with so-called "high quality" citations to back them up. All that these citations prove are that all citations are worthless!
That's bullshit. Whenever there are, for example, two or more contradictory conjectutes in a scientific field, you end up having two or more "facts" being presented in the respective encyclopedia. Except that, you know, they are not facts, they are claims. It's perfectly valid to say in an encyclopedia that person X in field Y says Z (preferably adding person X's reasons for saying that) if person X is respected in the field.
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You need to start a competitor that doesn't require citations. I realise it'll have to start small, but given your obviously correct ideas its superiority will shine through.
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Wikitext is the most awful thing ever. It is barely computable. It provably can't be put into EBNF. Large chunks of it are literally defined as "whatever the PCRE lib in PHP happens to do". It is so horrible it has literally delayed a proper visual editor for Wikipedia by several years. We now have a visual editor that barely works after a huge amount of money and resources have been poured in. The only reason it hasn't been thrown away is that we have ten billion words of legacy content that has to keep wo
Needs and expectations (Score:1)
1. A list of watched pages
2. A big red button marked 'Revert edits'
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Nah, it has the same flaws it always had - broken system, corrupt admins, and no chance that good edits will ever survive.
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Watched pages - so you can declare ownership and instantly revert any changes made.
Well erm (Score:1, Informative)
Considering trying to shillpedia is a waste of time to begin with, i cant recall a single edit on any one article i ever attempt to add to or correct mistake that wasnt reverted in 12 seconds by one guy who has claimed sole ownership of every article about a particular subject.
For example the article for creedence clearwater revival has a list of all their concerts, the problem? one of their biggest european concert dates and the location was not there. So i add it, 2 minutes later, its gone. Matter of fact
Re:Well erm (Score:4, Insightful)
I had an edit revoked when I removed some info about the small town I live in. It said it was devastated by fire in the 1927, but there was never a fire of any kind. I was told I need a citation. A citation of something that didn't happen, nice..
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I had an edit revoked when I removed some info about the small town I live in. It said it was devastated by fire in the 1927, but there was never a fire of any kind. I was told I need a citation. A citation of something that didn't happen, nice..
Or being asked to find a citation for the claim "most of the compact fluorescents sold on the retail market have a color temperature of 2700K". I mean... it's not that I can find a research publication tailored to just address a common daily fact like that.
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There probably isn't specific research on it, but you could get sales figures from a major retailer of these lamps. Anyway I don't think that's true. It's actually relatively hard to get warm 2700K CFLs, at least here in Australia. The 4200K "cool white" and 5000K "day white" lamps are far easier to find on shelves.
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I think we need to commission a study on global sales patterns for different CFL colour temperatures. Think we can get a government grant with travel allowance to to conduct the research?
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I had an edit revoked when I removed some info about the small town I live in. It said it was devastated by fire in the 1927, but there was never a fire of any kind. I was told I need a citation. A citation of something that didn't happen, nice..
Couldn't you have just in turn asked for a citation of the fire happening?
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What is the name of the town? I'd like to look at the article. Usually if a citation is required for claims that something didn't happen it's because there is already a supposedly reliable citation saying that it did happen. You might have better luck busting the original citation.
Of course it's equally like that it's just an asshat editor. Without knowing which article you are talking about it's impossible to know.
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You should have just added a "citation needed" tag. That would have alerted readers to be skeptical of the assertion.
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Considering trying to shillpedia is a waste of time to begin with, i cant recall a single edit on any one article i ever attempt to add to or correct mistake that wasnt reverted in 12 seconds by one guy who has claimed sole ownership of every article about a particular subject.
Actually I've found the English Wikipedia to be much more relaxed than my native Finnish edition, on which the snipers seem to be always on watch. Don't know how it is in other languages.
But you are right that the general atmosphere of Wikipedia gives a bit of a unwelcoming taste to some random guy trying contributing for the first time.
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Most of my edits now on wikipedia remain unreverted as I always include at least one good cite, doesn't help for /. though.
Indeed, for /. it is quite the opposite. ;) The more crazy, completely unverified facts you can pull, the better.
Diffs please (Score:4, Interesting)
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A lot of people complain on Slashdot about perceived violations of the WP:OWN policy on Wikipedia. Yet I rarely if ever see links to diffs of edits that got reverted by an editor accused of exerting undue control over an article's text.
Diffs, or it didn't unhappen?
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Try finding out that Roger Schlafly, white supremacist, and his white supremacist friends are practicing ownership of the articles on Phyllis Schlafly and Eagle Forum (white supremacist website).
Roger Schlafly is Phyllis Schlafly's son; his brother founded "conservapedia."
Look it up. User:Schlafly on Wikipedia.
And they let this go on.
Re: Diffs please (Score:2)
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Take a look at the article on nuclear power. Massive edit wars with industry shills who are determined to put their spin on the article.
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It depends. There are certainly people with an agenda, or the just deranged, on wikipedia as indeed there are here on /.
They need something more robust to deal with the problem, like voting or moderation, not just a 'talk' page.
Having said that, I've contributed a little, mostly on obscure technical subjects that I know about, and have not been too bothered.
Biggist gripe is the editing system for citations and stuff, especially for the kind of non-expert user that wiki needs to grow.
Re: Well erm (Score:2)
Misbehavior in multiple articles (Score:2)
anyways why would i bother going through a drawn out diplomatic process to add 7 words to an article?
Consider that these misbehaving editors are likely misbehaving just as much on other articles. If "going through a drawn out diplomatic process" stops these editors from camping articles, they'll stop camping not only the article that you're editing but also other articles that they had been camping. Then edits to the other articles that these editors had been camping will be more likely to go through.
Great.... (Score:3)
Keyboards are blue in the tooth (Score:2)
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> (Without such a keyboard, I agree with you.)
So you agree with him 99% !
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How does a mobile device paired to a Bluetooth keyboard suck for editing text?
At that point we might as well using a small laptop, and have no need to specialized mobile editing tools.
Re: Keyboards are blue in the tooth (Score:2)
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Agreed. All the important edits that I've made, were from a desktop where I could properly research and cite my changes. I could only see this being useful for minor edits and for people in poorer countries that only have smartphones. However, people that can only afford to get online with a smartphone, will probably have more urgent issues than editing Wikipedia. I've also seen quite a bit of vandalism from highschool addresses. Making it easier for bored teenagers in class to graffiti Wikipedia may not b
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Editors will be able to continue edit wars 24/7 from any location. For an MMORPG where the goal is to control as many articles as possible and mould them to your design this is a great improvement.
LOL (Score:2)
OMG WTF?!?!? :-D [citatin ndded]
Great. (Score:1)
Say hello to more drunken updates (Score:3)