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Wikipedia Open Source The Internet

The English Language Wikipedia Just Had Its Billionth Edit (vice.com) 43

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Just after 1 A.M. on January 12, a prolific Wikiepdian edited the entry for the album Death Breathing. The small edit was the addition of a hyperlink and it was the billionth edit done to the English language Wikipedia. "The article on the album Death Breathing was amended by Wikipedian Ser Amantio di Nicolao, one of over 3.9 million edits done by the Wikipedian with the highest edit count other than bots," said a note in Wikimedia-l, a listserv that documents various Wikimedia matters. Wikipedia relies on volunteers who constantly assess, edit, and argue over the specifics of the information in its vast online encyclopedia. Every edit is catalogued, tagged, and assigned a unique URL when it's pushed through. The Death Breathing edit secured the billionth. "Pedants may be aware that this is only the thousand million since the move to MediaWiki software and not all of the hundreds of thousands of previous edits have since been reloaded," the notice said. "So if we could work out the true counts since edit one it probably came one, maybe two days earlier."

"I don't have the exact numbers but there were definitely many edits made that aren't recorded in the current system," Wikiepdian "The Cunctator" told Motherboard in an email. "Many of the UseModWiki edits were reintegrated with the history but there is a lacuna that covers my peak of editing in about August 2001 to February 2002 (I was the primary editor of September 11 related content). I don't know if the edit count reflects deleted edits or edits on deleted pages. One point that isn't made enough when discussing Wikipedia is how much of Google's wealth is built on its abuse of Wikipedia copyleft. But Death Breathing got the edit with the thousand million counter."
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The English Language Wikipedia Just Had Its Billionth Edit

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  • Which anime page was it?

  • of people who's lives are so empty they're duty in life is guarding a wikipedia page and woe betide the outsider that steps on the one of territory of one of the cabals. Especially the modern politics cabal. Many of the Admins and mods are also completely insane too and are basically there to get into political catfights. For example I've seen one of the actual (employees) basically for years spends his time openly taunting contributors doing things like literally replying 'Cool story bro' everytime people
    • They could easily support the site with ads - cheapskates like me who use an ad blocker were never going to pay for their content anyway! Enough with their guilt trip.

      Of particular annoyance is flagging something for deletion because moderators deem it of insignificant notability. Stuff those guys, is Jimmy running out of disk space? If it was sufficiently notable for me to be interested in reading the page then I don't need a self-righteous banner telling me I shouldn't be reading it because it isn't notab

      • Yeah that shits me too. They claim to want to be the holders of the entirety of human knowledge then they go and delete bits that aren't "notable". To whom, they don't say.
      • Stuff those guys, is Jimmy running out of disk space?

        Disk space probably isn't a problem, but the number of volunteers is. If there were ten times as many pages would that be spreading the available labor too thinly to counteract the forces of entropy (good faith people with poor language skills, editors riding hobby horses, vandals, etc.)? Also the quality might go way down with a load of half-assed pages if it was really hard to delete them.

        If it was sufficiently notable for me to be interested in reading the page then I don't need a self-righteous banner telling me I shouldn't be reading it because it isn't notable.

        So they should delete pages more quickly and then you'd never see the banner! <g>

        • Wikipedia already has craploads of terrible articles. Here's an example of one with numerous errors and omissions:

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]

          • Only ten edits in two years, and a talk page that was last updated in March 2018. Perhaps that is evidence that there are too few people to support the existing 6.2 million pages.
            • And how does having less pages make free volunteers "support existing pages"? Does it make less costly??

              • I think we should all move back to encyclopedia Britannica... Hurray!
            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Stagnation is a problem that affects many sites, e.g. Stack Overflow is a wasteland now, full of outdated and wrong information that nobody can be bothered to fix, and outright hostility to new users.

              Sometimes I see a typo on Wikipedia and try to fix it, but then realize they block my VPN endpoint's IP address and move on.

              • by Anonymous Coward

                Sometimes I see a typo on Wikipedia and try to fix it, but then realize they block my VPN endpoint's IP address and move on.

                You could try requesting an account [wikipedia.org] and see how that works out.

  • by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @07:01PM (#60966034)

    The reversion of that edit.

  • No one gives a fuck over how many times a page was edited, reverted, edited again, etc.

    Wikipedia is still shit; run by sock puppets and insecure people.

    It had the potential to be great but was destroyed by politics, ego, and greed.

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      ... It had the potential to be great but was destroyed by politics, ego, and greed.

      Which is to say, it was accessible to the random idiots on the internet.

      • It's like many Open Sores communities: administered and moderated by zealots. I use the fruits of their labours and lurk on their forums. But, after some efforts to contribute were met with their sanctimonious shit, I stay well away from the head of the beast.

    • by Zack ( 44 )

      Once upon a time they had a “neutral point of view” policy. They dropped it so that editors could insert their own point of view. This ruined Wikipedia [breitbart.com].

      It's incredibly sad to watch a once beautiful thing turn into such a steaming pile of biased crap. At this point I just assume any page about anything political isn't even close to telling the whole truth; the rest of the entries are starting to become suspect as well.

  • Quite amazing.... considering they reject valid, accurate edits (as has been my experience).

    Wonder how many of those edits actually survived.

  • And 1/3 of it is emacs versus vi edit battles.

  • I've always wondered why they haven't implemented a meta moderation system to try contain the narcissists that plague Wikipedia.

    • I've always wondered why they haven't implemented a meta moderation system to try contain the narcissists

      Jimmy Wales feels at home with them.

  • Wikipedia has such a brief period of being really good, but for the last 5 or so years they have become just another propaganda outlet of the status quo.

  • I use Wikipedia in conjunction with the map for planning my weekends and vacations. I employ this webpage for this: http://enetplanet.com/geo_wiki... [enetplanet.com]

    I click on the map and after a second the geo-markers of corresponding Wikipedia articles appear on the map; the OpenStreetMap in this case. It is possible to select language version of Wikipedia and the radius around the click.

    About the same functionality but for the Google map is available by this link: https://ausleuchtung.ch/map_wi... [ausleuchtung.ch]

    Basically it a
  • But half the edits were political activists reversing each others' spin.

Where there's a will, there's an Inheritance Tax.

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