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Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. Most of its most popular pages are biographies, and other news-based pages. Many of Wikipedia's problems come from the ex

Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. Most of its most popular pages are biographies, and other news-based pages. Many of Wikipedia's problems come from the expectation that a single type of software and presentation can work for different types of data that has different audiences. As for accuracy and neutrality: Bias and PV pushing is a direct result of the wiki system, and its objective of creating long-form articles. The desire to create the perfect article is part of the problem, because much of the data does not suit an article format. The problem is compounded by the wiki software, which encourages bias, by allowing the most powerful group to determine what happens on the page. It also give too much power to incumbent groups, who can veto changes too easily. On my site, the pages are built up news event by news event leading to a far more neutral and unbiased view of events. Compare these two pages [1][2]. The Wikipedia page, including its title, is completely biased to the viewpoint of the most powerful group on the page (I'll let you guess who they are). The Newslines page, which is neither "entertainment" or "dumbed down", is simply a catalogue of the news events. Each news event comprises only the factual information extracted from (often biased) source articles. In the Wikipedia page the desire to build the perfect article leads inevitably to POV pushing, as editors veto the work of opposing editors. In an ideal system that may result in some kind of balance, but Wikipedia is far from ideal - every page's content is determined by the most powerful editors on that page. However, in the Newslines page, there is no article, so such POV pushing is not as easy. The end result is that the analysis of the events is left up to the reader, not the editor. A further advantage of atomizing the events on a page is that they can be sorted and filtered (using buttons at the top of the page), something that is completely impossible on a Wikipedia page. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_That_Weight) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_Th... [2] http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=ASC http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=ASC

chris_wot 10y ago
What news pages are you referring to? The only ones I'm aware of are in the Wikipedia space, which is not considered to be the actual content but meta. Your site is interesting and definitely a different take to Wikipedia, but ironically it's often longer than the long form Wikipedia articles. But I do like it - and actually I might even use it :-) It also doesn't cover broad topics that aren't news based. I don't know how you could use your site to cover Zoroastrianism, Jesus, Trigonometry, C++, the word "the", or psychoanalysis. You are covering two different things that have overlap. I see a lot of validity in your project, but it doesn't cater to all topics - what it does do well is cover news well! Better than most sites I've seen actually.
- sparkzilla 10y ago
  Thank you for the compliment, I appreciate it. When I first started the project I was trying to find my way and, even though I didn't make the site to compete with Wikipedia, I found myself comparing the site to Wikipedia due to the similarities in output, and the differences in the way the site was constructed. I found it quite fascinating that two different software systems could create similar results. But after a while I found the comparisons restrictive. One one hand, as you say, the Newslines format doesn't deal with the kind of articles you mention. I think those kind of articles have traditionally worked fairly well on Wikipedia, but many other kinds of articles, especially news-based (although there are others e.g. medical articles) don't fit very well. Many Wikipedians don't understand that boundary. On the other hand, the format I am working on can do much more than Wikipedia, so I've generally left those comparisons behind now, and am looking forward to the next benchmark.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    If I may make a suggestion: if Wikipedia people are criticising you, I'd ignore them. In fact, I'd say that you are a completely different mechanism that is trying to achieve similar things to Wikipedia. Wikipedia pretty much nullified the Encyclopedia Britannica's claim that they were competing with them and trying to put them out of business by merely stating that they weren't in competition and that they would use them for sourcing information. I'd run the same technique - there's no real need to compete and the market is big enough for both you and Wikipedia.
    - sparkzilla 10y ago
      I agree. No point in fighting yesterday's battles.

chris_wot 10y ago

What news pages are you referring to? The only ones I'm aware of are in the Wikipedia space, which is not considered to be the actual content but meta. Your site is interesting and definitely a different take to Wikipedia, but ironically it's often longer than the long form Wikipedia articles. But I do like it - and actually I might even use it :-) It also doesn't cover broad topics that aren't news based. I don't know how you could use your site to cover Zoroastrianism, Jesus, Trigonometry, C++, the word "the", or psychoanalysis. You are covering two different things that have overlap. I see a lot of validity in your project, but it doesn't cater to all topics - what it does do well is cover news well! Better than most sites I've seen actually.

sparkzilla 10y ago
Thank you for the compliment, I appreciate it. When I first started the project I was trying to find my way and, even though I didn't make the site to compete with Wikipedia, I found myself comparing the site to Wikipedia due to the similarities in output, and the differences in the way the site was constructed. I found it quite fascinating that two different software systems could create similar results. But after a while I found the comparisons restrictive. One one hand, as you say, the Newslines format doesn't deal with the kind of articles you mention. I think those kind of articles have traditionally worked fairly well on Wikipedia, but many other kinds of articles, especially news-based (although there are others e.g. medical articles) don't fit very well. Many Wikipedians don't understand that boundary. On the other hand, the format I am working on can do much more than Wikipedia, so I've generally left those comparisons behind now, and am looking forward to the next benchmark.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  If I may make a suggestion: if Wikipedia people are criticising you, I'd ignore them. In fact, I'd say that you are a completely different mechanism that is trying to achieve similar things to Wikipedia. Wikipedia pretty much nullified the Encyclopedia Britannica's claim that they were competing with them and trying to put them out of business by merely stating that they weren't in competition and that they would use them for sourcing information. I'd run the same technique - there's no real need to compete and the market is big enough for both you and Wikipedia.
  - sparkzilla 10y ago
    I agree. No point in fighting yesterday's battles.