Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia 140
blastboy writes By pretty much any logic, Wikipedia shouldn't work: A vast website, built on the labor of volunteers, with very few tangible rewards and a fairly weird hierarchy. From the article: "The stewards would prefer to go unnoticed. Only one has ever had any real fame—Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales served as a steward from 2006 to 2009. They operate above the fray, giving and taking user privileges and intervening in matters that lower-ranking editors can’t handle. You can summon them for emergencies in the Wikimedia Stewards IRC chat room by typing '!steward.' Their secrecy has a certain irony, given the very public product they manage, but perhaps it’s emblematic of Wikimedia as a whole. When your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge,' hierarchies become a necessary evil."
I have a friend that is a Steward and wrote a book (Score:4, Informative)
While focused on an academic audience of organizational scholars, I have a friend who was a Steward and has written an ethnographic book about Wikipedia:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/searc... [amazon.com]
If you are more interested in accessible information he's also written an editorial regarding Wikipedia for Slate:
http://www.slate.com/articles/... [slate.com]
egalite fraternite liberte (Score:1)
Wikipedia shows that productive non-market egalitarian collaboration on a very wide scale is possible.
Peace to huts! War to palaces!
Stewards are usually like janitors* (Score:2, Interesting)
At least on the English Wikipedia. There are a few times when actually make decisions, but by and large they are just the "key-holders" and implement decisions made by the community or by higher-up functionaries.
* Yes I know, it's the administrators who are usually considered the janitors on the Wiki.
Re:Stewards are usually like janitors* (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact they're more or less prohibited from doing anything except janitorial work. For example they have the power to make someone into an administrator, but they are only supposed to do so in response to each Wikipedia's own community process deciding on it. Each wiki has its own process where you can request to become administrator, people can comment on the request, and there is some decision-making process. If the outcome is "yeah, make this person an administrator", then one of the stewards is supposed to make that person an admin. If they decided to just take some other person who hadn't been approved by the German Wikipedia, and turn them into an admin on the German Wikipedia, they'd quickly lose their own "steward" bit.
How do you even know these are the 36 people?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Citation Needed or GTFO
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Here, have a citation from the very source: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki... [wikimedia.org]
Re:How do you even know these are the 36 people?! (Score:4, Funny)
Wikipedia is not a reliable source. [wikipedia.org]
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Wikimedia is not Wikipedia.
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What's better?
1. A site which uses a meta-moderation system to bury unpopular opinion and hike dogma, or:
2. A site which collects and collates multiple sources on the same subject and attempts to arrive at a consensus to which the majority agree based on positive discussion? ...I know which I'd pick.
What's wrong with hierarchy? (Score:2, Informative)
We keep acting like it is a bad thing, but it does have value. Well-organized hierarchies and react quickly. I would fully expect Wikipedia to be run by a well-organized group. Otherwise it wouldn't be as consistent as it is. Frankly, it is a bit of a miracle just how high the quality is across the board.
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The problem occurs when this is misused and it can always be in a organisation where one party has more control over decisions than others.
Not just due to difference in interest of two parties, most common misuse is where this extra control is used to increase existing control itself thereby increasing
power gap further.
Re:What's wrong with hierarchy? (Score:5, Insightful)
A better system is one where each has ultimate control over their view into wikipedia. Censorship should be at the client, not the server. Each viewer can customize the view to their heart's desire, without infringing on anyone else's right to free speech. Technology provides us the tools to implement such customization of views (i.e. slashdot comment threshold settings, etc.).
Great, just what an encyclopedia of facts needs: a way for readers to filter it to present the reality they want to see. Why don't they just subscribe to blogs if they only want to view things they agree with?
Saying hierarchies are necessary is saying some people have to be controlled. Why, though?
Because some people are tremendous assholes. See also, laws, prisons.
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Well, someone hell bent on protecting and defending his little private version of "reality" will do so, no matter what any encyclopedia will say. For reference, see religion. It's not like there has ever been any amount of proof that some people couldn't wish away by putting the fingers in their ears and yelling "lalalala, I can't hear you!"
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Well, someone hell bent on protecting and defending his little private version of "reality" will do so,
So? Why would it be "better" for Wikipedia to be changed to facilitate that.
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I think it's less that "letting people warp what the encyclopedia looks like to them to fit their preconceptions" is a good idea, than that "letting people warp what's in the encyclopedia to fit their preconceptions" is a bad one.
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Well, someone hell bent on protecting and defending his little private version of "reality" will do so, no matter what any encyclopedia will say. For reference, see religion. It's not like there has ever been any amount of proof that some people couldn't wish away by putting the fingers in their ears and yelling "lalalala, I can't hear you!"
Rather than "religion", you should say "fundamentalists" - not all religious are fundamentalist, and not are fundamentalists are religious. Some religions (such as mine) state that all truth, whether divinely revealed or arrived at through empirical or rational means, ultimately come from the same source and cannot conflict. If they appear to do so, then your understanding of one or the other must be in error.
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Re:What's wrong with hierarchy? (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree. In order to be accurate you need to "censor" speech. Wikipedia has positioned itself as a reliable source of information. Even with a moderation system similar to slashtot's, the user would have no way to verify what speech on Wikipedia is accurate and it would quickly become useless. It works on slashdot because we realize that the user comments are just that, comments and we don't take them for accurate information. That system breaks completely in an encyclopedia replacement where errors and misinformation needs to be kept to a minimum.
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It's pretty easy to verify what speech on Wikipedia is accurate. All information should be verifiable by checking a reliable source. If you find information in Wikipedia where no source is given and you think it may be incorrect, put in a [citation needed] tag. If no one adds a citation, anyone is free to remove the information.
Of course, many people who bitch about Wikipedia and how it doesn't work complain that their edits were undone, often because they added information without a reliable source for ver
Re:What's wrong with hierarchy? (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue I've run into is that sometimes there simply isn't a "reliable source" other than people that are intimately familiar with the topic at hand because the written information is under an NDA or otherwise inaccessible. In my particular case, it dealt with the monorail system at Disney World - I worked there for years, was a trainer on the system, and know a fair bit about the internals of the trains and control/signalling system, as does any other driver with any experience. However, Disney and Bombardier are pretty strict about controlling the availability of any official detailed printed/electronic documentation, so in the end I ended up just giving up and letting the incorrect information that was in the article and the half-assed "citations" stay there because the only authoritative citations were in documentation that was unavailable to the public, and I got to the point where I just didn't care anymore whether Jimmy presented bogus info while claiming it was accurate.
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Oh, it gets better. I'm "not qualified" to edit a certain set of topics in software architecture because--get this--I'm a maintainer of the official documentation for one of the most popular/widespread implementations. And therefore POV. Or something.
Re: What's wrong with hierarchy? (Score:2)
It's pretty obvious why an encyclopedia wants to work that way.
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So I'm going to sabotage the official docs--and thereby lose my job--just so I can score cheap points on Wikipedia? Yeah, that makes lots of sense.
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Or you know, just don't insist on being the contributor to an article about things you can't be a contributor to?
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"I'll bet you're great fun at parties."
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I should explain further by adding that
(a) You're a tool.
(b) I didn't "insist" on anything. I was blocked from editing a couple of pages that I'd maintained for several years, without prior warning, by someone whom I suspect was connected with a competitor, over an alleged "conflict of interest" that I don't actually have, based on the odd notion that the fact that I work for a given company would automatically make me a shill for that company. Having never made a secret of my day job (it's in my user profi
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So I'm going to sabotage the official docs--and thereby lose my job--just so I can score cheap points on Wikipedia? Yeah, that makes lots of sense.
Words have meanings, and their construction has important ramifications for how your comments may be interpreted?
The point is that you're the original source of truth about a thing. That makes you the primary source. Wikipedia and all encyclopedia's don't deal in primary sources. For an obvious example as to why, consider the various reasons people are discouraged from authoring wikipedia entries about themselves. The general rate of defacement that comes from Congressional IPs is a good example.
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I am an author and editor by trade, have been one for close to 20 years now, and I know how encyclopaedias are supposed to work, thanks very much.
I am not the primary source; one vendor's online documentation is one but not the only primary source.
The fact that I also help maintain one set of vendor documentation (amongst many sources I've cited) is an altogether different issue, and it is not an issue that was ever actually raised.
And the fact you assume I "must" be doing something wrong with no evidence t
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The thing to do in that case is rather preversely set up your own website with the information on then cite that.
The other side of it is that you know you're a reliable source of information on the topic. The thing is how does anyone else know? As far as anyone knows you're some random guy from the internet who says he knows stuff. Unfortunately the internet is FULL of nutters who think they know stuff but don't. Sadly the nuttiness makes them all the louder.
I'm not saying you're one of those. In fact I'm p
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I had thought of that then, and I'm sure plenty of people do just that. It just wasn't a big enough deal for me to go to the effort.
Unfortunately the internet is FULL of nutters who think they know stuff but don't. Sadly the nuttiness makes them all the louder.
Big time, and the guy that decided to go full-on edit war with me was one of those. It really reinforced my understanding tha
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Wikipedia has positioned itself as a reliable source of information.
It was my understanding that wikipedia was attempting to position itself as a reliable source of references.
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Yes, some do. [wikipedia.org]
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That's because "someone else" usually just doesn't know how to behave.
Thank god there is a hierarchy and thank god it's relatively transparent. You can go bend their ear if you've got a beef and you can have a real-time record of your interaction with them. As long as there is transparency, hierarchies are what makes human beings human and keeps assholes from spoiling things for everyone else (see "Gamergate Cont
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If you are reading this, I recommend visiting the Talk page for the "Gamergate Controversy" wiki page. Just read down the page to see how accommodating the editors have been to the pro-GG side.
The major complaint you hear from #GamerGate is that they are outraged that the comments section of a YouTube video is not considered to be a "Reliable Source" of information.
Check for yourself to see if you agree with this AC that there is a "forced narrative" which states that a move
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You never even looked at the entry, did you?
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A better system is one where each has ultimate control over their view into wikipedia. Censorship should be at the client, not the server.
Wikipedia already has that. You can download a copy of it offline and modify your own local copy to anything you like.
For all you know, millions of people have already been editing their own private Wikipedia encyclopedia, and you would be none of the wiser, because you would never see the changes merged back into the main branch on the server.
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am doing this right now, actually, I intend to use it as an information backbone, merge in my own stuff and wikilink the shit out of it.
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Depends on your perspective.
For just about all large groups of people to function cohesively, they need some sort of system. Systems where managers keep the functioning from stagnating is common because such systems generally work (yes, good managers do exist). Think of it as a team with different roles.
Your perspective seems to be that management roles are higher in a hierarchy, and that the higher ranking can force their will upon the lower ranking. If that's all the experience you've had, then I reall
Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia (Poorly) (Score:5, Insightful)
And because nobody pays attention to the stewards, they're not held accountable.
Re:Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia (Poorly) (Score:5, Interesting)
And because nobody pays attention to the stewards, they're not held accountable.
To play devil's advocate: the fact that they're doing their jobs commendably well is possibly the reason nobody pays attention to them. So by that, they ARE held accountable. They just measure up pretty well under that accounting, so nobody complains about them (with the obvious notable exceptions).
It's kind of like saying "and because nobody pays attention to the janitors at my workplace, they're not held accountable." You'd better bet that if things started going missing or the mess started to build up, people would pay attention pretty quickly.
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Possibly the reason nobody pays attention to them is that they are good at not being seen, not being acknowledged, and coordinate in private to suppress dissent and present a common front. It's always "wikipedia is against you", not "the steward is against you".
Re:Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia (Poorly) (Score:5, Interesting)
Held accountable for what? This total free resource I can use with no strings attached, all the while when these guys have to deal with and moderate with various personalities and entities constantly trying to pervert Wikipedia from its mission.
To me Wikipedia is a marvel to behold, a shining bastion of how not-to-be Facebook. I’m constantly amazed at the vitriol they endure when one or two contentious pages gets messed up by some self-aggrandizing a**hole. Nobody seems to stop or look at the literally millions of technical pages which get used on an everyday basis to solve real world problems – but instead focus on whether Justin Beber, Ron Paul, the Koch Brothers, or Monsanto are given a fair shake in their writeups.
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not only that... you can also download the entire content for offline use (ENwiki text runs 40GB or so, images runs half a Terabyte not including thumbnails). Incidentally, anyone know how long it'd take to integrate ENwiki on a dual core 1.6 netbook with 1GB of RAM?
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The real marvel of Wikipedia is that it has managed to thrive despite its editors.
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"Held accountable for what? This total free resource I can use with no strings attached"
Have you noticed something? Wikia is wikipedia's sister project, but it is for profit, unlike Wikipedia. Wikia has an immensely high google rating. If you make a wiki about a specific topic on your own site, spend a long time building it up, some random person making a wikia wiki with the same name will easily outrank you in google searches.
If your project started out on wikia, woe to you. You can come in, but you can ne
Not what it once was (Score:1)
Whether it's the inevitability of your contribution being superseded and "overriden" eventually, or your efforts being reverted instantly (on controversial topics where the editor has an existing predisposition), one really should go into it knowing that their addition will likely be discarded one way or another.
For me personally, that means finding other venues in which to attempt to contribute--Slashdot's historical sister site Everything2, regardless of Wikipedia ultimately "winning" in popularity, actua
Which one? (Score:1)
From TFA:
Which Wikimedia/Wikipedia shouldn't exist? The mythical, idealized one - or the actual, real one? The two actually have very little to do with each other.
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The two actually have very little to do with each other.
They have in common all that matters for the point being made, which is that it's surprising that unpaid, unorganised contributors can make something worthwhile, even in the face of vandals/trolls, and on a limited budget.
Wikipedia's imperfections are not relevant here.
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Not only are they not relevant here, but they compare very well to traditionally respected organizations like Encyclopedia Britannica.
I actually believe you're more likely to find bias and agenda at EB than at Wikipedia, which is rather amazing considering Wiki is free and crowd-sourced.
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my mother still has her copy of the 1972 EB - 32 volumes of it in red hardcover. As a kid I'd sit there and read them cover to cover (don't ask). The *isms just bleeding out of those pages boggles the mind. Volumes 1 and 2 of the New World Children's Encyclopedia (which she also has) is even scarier.
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I knew I couldn't be the only one. I liked the smell of the leather binding. Our set was the revised 14th edition when it was put out by the University of Chicago. It's one of the reasons I knew I wanted to go there even when I was 9 years old. That and because my parents had this cool book about Enrico Fermi (we were an Italian-American household) and I could imagine his nuclear reactor under the Stagg Field bleachers. Those books were lov
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Count me in as a charter member of the "Weird Kids Club" as well. It's sad that more kids didn't then and don't now have more of a passion for learning just for its own sake.
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Wiki hype (Score:5, Interesting)
>"...your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge'"...
Hah. If I could only count the number of factually correct pages that have disappeared over the years for failure to be "relevant" or "sufficiently important" or whatever metric they use, I'd be counting pretty damn high. Care about a regionally famous indie band from the mid 90's to the point that you'll carefully assemble what little information is out there about them? Too bad, gone in a blink, as if archive.org were complete and searchable for that stuff.
I've just never understood why something true should be excluded there.
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>"...your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge'"...
Hah. If I could only count the number of factually correct pages that have disappeared over the years for failure to be "relevant" or "sufficiently important" or whatever metric they use, I'd be counting pretty damn high. Care about a regionally famous indie band from the mid 90's to the point that you'll carefully assemble what little information is out there about them? Too bad, gone in a blink, as if archive.org were complete and searchable for that stuff.
I've just never understood why something true should be excluded there.
While it would be nice to have information about everything, those that are paying the bills for storage, replication and transmission have decided that there has to be a line somewhere or the data set gets too large. While I wish there were no line I do understand why one might exist.
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4.5 million pages, 40GB data set (just text), hell my PHONE has space for that.
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There's more than just text and you forgot to include transmission, replication, off-site backups and updates. I'm not saying it's undoable, but it does take resources and those resources are donated to the public good so limitations are present.
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I deliberately didn't include anything but the single tier current text dataset because that's all that concerns me at the minute. I'm not bothered with images or any of the other media.
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Fair enough, but you are but one user of the service and we should probably look at why they have their policy from their perspective rather than one user's.
Because ot would be "the internet", not an encyclo (Score:2)
> I've just never understood why something true should be excluded there.
If anyone can post anything and nothing is excluded, you end up with the internet.
They are trying to build an encyclopedia, not the internet. Most of the comments on this page are true, but they don't belong in an encyclopedia.
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All content that is of no political or economic importance, they would rather see on Wikia. Wikia is for profit, they can make money off your work there. That is, in a nutshell, why wikipedia is deletionist.
On wikipedia proper, the only reward they get is being able to control narratives. Wikipedia policies give plenty of wiggle room to include and exclude certain facts and frame things to one side's benefit, especially if you're an insider in their culture, know how to play their game. Thus, controversial
So what does not work? (Score:3)
Time and again people surface to tell us just how unjust Wikipedia's editing is, how unfair their Stewards are, how biased and whatnot it is... While staying deliberately vague and nonsensical. Point to an article that is biased, unjust and wrong and let's see it for ourselves or STFU!
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And even if a biased, unjust and wrong article were to exist, I could find out who the editors were and when revisions were made and watch the behind-the-scenes process in the Talk page.
I don't really mind the possibility of bias, as long as it's out on the table for discussion and open to correction. I don't recall any other encyclopedia having a Talk page.
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Citation needed.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
Have a look at the talk page.
Regardless of what you think of the subject, the article is clearly biased. Read the thread under ''What about these studies then ?''
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Problem with 'Studies' is that PR=B$ agencies manufacture very cheap studies. Get a few corrupt qualified people pretty much at the bottom end of their profession and get them to put their name to a corrupted study where the results and conclusion where well know prior to the cheapest possible study being done or even just pretending to have been done. Stink tanks about full of psychopaths paid to prepare lies to be fed to corporate mass media.
Re:So what does not work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia's "No original research" policy is second in asininity only to its "let's delete articles because we can" policy.
Re:So what does not work? (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing I hate most is the "consensus" obsession. It leads to -- and I've seen this even though I rarely contribute -- people just making shit up about Wikipedia policies to support their positions and claiming it's "consensus". A lot of it comes down to who has groupthink on their side and, even more troublingly, who can bluff and bluster the best.
Wikipedia's community is toxic. I'm amazed the results are as good as they are, and it saddens me that the site could probably be so much better if it were better managed.
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Groupthink, peer review, a rose by a different name...
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I think what they mean by "No original research" is reflected in their mission to be a reference of references - where if something needs to be verified the buck doesn't stop at wikipedia. The citation trail stops elsewhere. This might not appeal to a lot of people who really want just one stop for information (to satisfy their utter laziness) and mistakenly rely on wikipedia to be that one stop, so they vent their frustrations at the wrong people (wikipedia) when they get told on forums such as this that "
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I can see where it comes from. It was born of good intentions. But see my other comment http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org] for why I think it (along with the effectively sadist-run deletion policy) needs to go.
Re the deletion BS: I wouldn't even care about that so much now that we have DeletionPedia if they would just TURN OVER ALL THE DELETED PAGES TO DELETIONPEDIA so they can be preserved THERE if Wikipedia doesn't want them. No excuse for not doing this unless they actually want to CENSOR the pages ins
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Selective enforcement is the name of the game. For just about anything disagreeable, you can find a rule to banish from wikipedia - as long as you know the game and have the clout.
Re:So what does not work? (Score:5, Interesting)
In theory, yes, that might be a good thing. Still of dubious value in my opinion -- information is information; I don't care whether it's been officially published or is on arXiv as long as it's correct -- but maybe.
In practice, this happens:
Editor: "The dataflow machine concept [1] suffered from several fatal flaws [2][3], including an inability to efficiently broadcast parallel tokens [4]. MIT continued researching dataflow machines [5][6][7] long after most other researchers had stopped."
Asshole (probably an MIT fanboy): "DELETING the last sentence because it's ORIGINAL RESEARCH!!111one."
Editor: "WTF it's a widely known fact that this is true and you can look at the published research and see that the last publications on classical dataflow machines to verify it."
Asshole: "But it's ORIGINAL RESEARCH(!!11ONE!) because YOU HAD TO LOOK IT UP IT WASN'T WRITTEN DOWN SOMEWHERE ELSE."
Editor: "But that's idiotic. It's true; that's all that matters. And it's important to note this, because it could have implications for researchers studying potentially unhealthy research cultures--"
Asshole: "Okay so now you HATE MIT too you're BIASED and should stop editing any articles about MIT!"
Asshole Administrator: "Reverting page to last revision by Asshole. No original research, Editor. Take some time to cool off."
Who's right here? As a society, it's good to know and document that MIT had gotten so inbred in the 90s that it couldn't see that dataflow machines were a fool's errand even after other researchers could see it. And it's completely verifiable that MIT did, in fact, continue researching dataflow machines years after everyone else had realized they were a dead end and stopped. The article shouldn't say MIT had an inbred culture without a source for that -- that's close to an unverifiable opinion. But, MIT DID have an inbred culture in the late 80s, early 90s, and it's good to preserve the evidence of that. And Wikipedia's as good a place to survey dataflow machine literature as anywhere else. We need more well-written literature surveys. My vote is for the Editor. He didn't say anything biased, just stated the facts as they were and could easily be verified by anyone willing to look. He contributed to the article. And Asshole, aided by Asshole Administrator and Wikipedia's asshole NOR policy, scored a political victory to whitewash a rather sorry chapter in MIT's history.
This is a completely hypothetical example, btw. But stuff pretty much EXACTLY LIKE THAT happens on Wikipedia all the time. And it's a damn shame.
---linuxrocks123
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No, that does not happen all the time. Mostly it would go back to the editor original writes.
I see it all the time in the political sections I get tweets about.
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That's easy.
Wikipedia's idiotic "No Trivia" policy.
As they say "One man's trivia is another man's useless data."
Just because _you_ don't find the information useful does _not_ imply _no one_ finds the information interesting.
I _like_ knowing about cultural references, easter eggs, trivia, in movies, games, books, etc.
They don't meet notability requirements (Score:1)
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pretty much.That's what shits me about wikipedia.
When you navigate to a page and there's a header saying that the page is scheduled for deletion. Hello? I found the page useful and anyone else searching for information on the topic may also.
It's particularly annoying when a wikipedia article references another page. "examples of X are A, B and C". You navigate to B and it may or may not be there if some wiki-editor was in a bad mood.
Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia (Score:2)
From Wikipedia's Statement of Principles [wikipedia.org]:
Newcomers are always to be welcomed. There must be no cabal, there must be no elites, there must be no hierarchy or structure which gets in the way of this openness to newcomers.
Personally, I lost interest in contributing to it a few years ago when the sort of constructive, well intended stuff I had always contributed began to get reverted on a regular basis. I still contribute occasionally, but only things that are still unlikely to be reverted, that is, minor cleanups of articles that nobody (else) reads.
Re:Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Wikipedia is one we've seen with Communism, repeated over again.
Or as Animal Farm put it, "All animals are equal, just some are more equal than others".
We've seen it happen with Wikipedia - the statement you quoted pretty much says "everyone is equal", and we've seen it deteriorate to "everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others".
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The important part is the "...which gets in the way of this openness to newcomers". They're not saying there will be no hierarchy, just that it won't change the mission.
Yes, I noticed a marked improvement in the quality of articles around 2012. Though since you've left there hasn't been a single update
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I was just teasing. I figure anyone who takes the time to try to improve the entry for Direct-sequence spread spectrum deserves credit and thanks.
underestimated (Score:2)
There are more than 36 bullies on Wikipedia.
Heirarchy (Score:2)
Sounds like the Roman Catholic Church. Possibly without the sex.
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this is the internet. There is no sex. Unless you count those weird contortionists on Redtube.
Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces (Score:2)
By Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me... [t0.or.at]
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain st
What is this? (Score:2, Informative)
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Medium is like a crowd-sourced blog with no ads... what's the issue you have with it?
Of all the BS on Slashdot, this is much more akin to its roots of aggregating less-know tech articles.
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Medium is like a crowd-sourced blog with no ads... what's the issue you have with it?
Of all the BS on Slashdot, this is much more akin to its roots of aggregating less-know tech articles.
Ummm... No. Medium is not really "crowd-sourced". And it certainly has ads, it just doesn't have "obvious" advertising of products, rather the whole thing is to include lots of "native advertising". Or ... "product placement" if you prefer. I signed up for Medium a long time ago. I do like some of the stories - some are informative in that they prompt me to research deeper in some topics. But don't suffer from the illusion that this is some popular, organically grown blog site, with authors submitting
any logic? (Score:2)
No. Not by any logic. By a gut feeling and 'common' sense, then yes.
wikilluminati anyone? (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
now just drop in a tesla 'mysteries of the 3 6 9' and you've got a winner!
Re: (Score:1)
By all the evidence, it doesn't.
Utter pile of shitcuntitude & buttsnottery.
Such things also tend to work -- it's what our society is built upon.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I tried Wikipedia. Uploaded things like rare book covers. 100% public domain stuff. Had them deleted. Computer storage is infinite and free, but the powers that be at Wikipedia delete anything and everything that anyone contributes.
Computer storage is not free and infinite. If they delete anything and everything that anyone contributed, it would be an empty site, and it's not.
Re: (Score:2)
ok, now scale that up to a monolithic database that gets queried 50 million times a day and we'll see how long your thousand Dollars worth of hardware lasts.
Even Enterprise-grade hardware is prone to failure. I know from experience that it's a full time job for just one person doing just one thing in a large datacentre (and ten Terabytes is a large static dataset), that one thing being swapping out dead hard drives.
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yeah that's not the right place for rare book covers. Try archive.org or better yet, project gutenberg.
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Wikipedia is clear about not being a democracy (a statement that many Wikipedians seem to ignore) ... I don't want to be part of a system that pretends to be open but isn't.
Do i need to say more?
Re: (Score:2)
Probably, since that statements doesn't make any sense.
Re: (Score:2)
regarding your last comment: I certainly agree, although wikipedia does contain valid references which themselves can and should be cited where relevant, as wikipedia is intended as a starting point for research, not an endpoint. I might be mirroring wikipedia for my own use, but I am making sure (via dummy runs with small datasets) that links to citations are transferred intact. I'm giving it the extreme end of use case, merging my own dataset and running analysis on what's likely to end up approaching 100
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, facts don't agree with your view, therefore the mechanism for delivering them is broken, and certainly not your view.
Hard-left my ass.