5 ms·

> The big surprise on the Web was that ads alone would pay for so much Another huge surprise was that people would create so much content (including really goo

> The big surprise on the Web was that ads alone would pay for so much Another huge surprise was that people would create so much content (including really good content) for free. Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge, in hundreds of languages, thousands of times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica, that was created by random people and experts around the world almost entirely without payment. Of course I'm talking about Wikipedia above, but that's just one of thousands of outstanding Web resources that people created for free. I can just imagine the people's reactions 15 years ago: Why would anyone do that for free? Wouldn't the government shut it down? Who would pay to run the servers? Anything anyone would write for free would be garbage. You might get a few random people to write, but no subject-matter expert is going to waste their time.

et-al 10y ago
> Another huge surprise was that people would create so much good content for free. Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge.. This wasn't too much of a leap for me. Microsoft Encarta shifted its information from CDs to the internet. And when you think about the whole premise of the internet, it was a tool for researches to share information. Remember all the university hosted sites packed with information? Now give all these people an easier place to publish their information while also reaching a wider audience. One of my favorite pages from this era is probably this tide chart by someone at University of Nevada, Reno: http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/edc/tides/2016/sfgg_fr16.html http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/edc/tides/2016/sfgg_fr16.htm... And Stanford CS guys publishing their outdoor excursions: http://theory.stanford.edu/~rvg/arroyo/ http://theory.stanford.edu/~rvg/arroyo/
mikekchar 10y ago
I think for people in the free software community it was a bit more obvious. Before the internet became ubiquitous we already had random professionals creating world class software for free. For me, the biggest surprise is actually the opposite. I'm amazed at how well the music industry has managed to maintain a grasp on the popular music industry even though the tools to create and distribute music are essentially free. Although, I think it can't last to be honest. Already I watch more Youtube than TV and I don't think I'm alone (though admittedly I don't watch much of either).
dingaling 10y ago
> Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge Wikipedia is far, far short of the total of 'all human knowledge'. It's probably a good primer for the type of information that consitutes such knowledge but it's barely skin-deep. Even the British Library, for all its faults, holds magnitudes more information; it adds three million items every year, which is half as many as Wikipedia has total articles.
- derefr 10y ago
  Words, surely; information, I'm not as sure about. I would wonder how much content an entire library truly holds if you were to try to abridge all its books together into one tome with every redundant statement stripped out, such that each fact or idea was only elucidated once, in one way.
  - CJefferson 10y ago
    I can pick a couple of mathematics books off my shelf, where less than 5% of their content is on wikipedia -- wikipedia is good for topics which many people understand, but in my experience gets very bad for more difficult topics. This partly makes sense, they are difficult to write about, and difficult to read without being an expert so is wikipedia even the right place?
    - dTal 10y ago
      In my perfect fantasy world Wikipedia articles would be so well-written that as you delved further into a niche field, they seamlessly segue into textbook chapters.
    - balabaster 10y ago
      The problem with this is the way that Wikipedia is moderated. You get moderators who take it upon themselves to be God of a section and don't let anything through that doesn't meet with their views. There are many anecdotes scattered around the internet of experts with first hand knowledge of a topic and they can't get their expertise included because some moderator or group of moderators think they know better and censor the information from ever seeing the light of day.
derefr 10y ago
> Anything anyone would write for free would be garbage. I think you would need to clarify to the person that there are just as many volunteer editors as there are volunteer writers. And then, perhaps, take them through a thought-experiment where fifty people are, in parallel, handed a copy of something and asked to mark it up for spelling and grammar errors. Even if they're all amateurs, the union of their annotations is likely to asymptotically approach (or even exceed) the results of a professional editor. Copyediting is actually uniquely suited for this sort of thing; it's, as they say, an embarrassingly parallel problem. (Structural and content editing not-so-much, and Wikipedia indeed has deficits in those areas.)

et-al 10y ago

> Another huge surprise was that people would create so much good content for free. Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge.. This wasn't too much of a leap for me. Microsoft Encarta shifted its information from CDs to the internet. And when you think about the whole premise of the internet, it was a tool for researches to share information. Remember all the university hosted sites packed with information? Now give all these people an easier place to publish their information while also reaching a wider audience. One of my favorite pages from this era is probably this tide chart by someone at University of Nevada, Reno: http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/edc/tides/2016/sfgg_fr16.html http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/edc/tides/2016/sfgg_fr16.htm... And Stanford CS guys publishing their outdoor excursions: http://theory.stanford.edu/~rvg/arroyo/ http://theory.stanford.edu/~rvg/arroyo/

mikekchar 10y ago

I think for people in the free software community it was a bit more obvious. Before the internet became ubiquitous we already had random professionals creating world class software for free. For me, the biggest surprise is actually the opposite. I'm amazed at how well the music industry has managed to maintain a grasp on the popular music industry even though the tools to create and distribute music are essentially free. Although, I think it can't last to be honest. Already I watch more Youtube than TV and I don't think I'm alone (though admittedly I don't watch much of either).

dingaling 10y ago

> Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge Wikipedia is far, far short of the total of 'all human knowledge'. It's probably a good primer for the type of information that consitutes such knowledge but it's barely skin-deep. Even the British Library, for all its faults, holds magnitudes more information; it adds three million items every year, which is half as many as Wikipedia has total articles.

derefr 10y ago
Words, surely; information, I'm not as sure about. I would wonder how much content an entire library truly holds if you were to try to abridge all its books together into one tome with every redundant statement stripped out, such that each fact or idea was only elucidated once, in one way.
- CJefferson 10y ago
  I can pick a couple of mathematics books off my shelf, where less than 5% of their content is on wikipedia -- wikipedia is good for topics which many people understand, but in my experience gets very bad for more difficult topics. This partly makes sense, they are difficult to write about, and difficult to read without being an expert so is wikipedia even the right place?
  - dTal 10y ago
    In my perfect fantasy world Wikipedia articles would be so well-written that as you delved further into a niche field, they seamlessly segue into textbook chapters.
  - balabaster 10y ago
    The problem with this is the way that Wikipedia is moderated. You get moderators who take it upon themselves to be God of a section and don't let anything through that doesn't meet with their views. There are many anecdotes scattered around the internet of experts with first hand knowledge of a topic and they can't get their expertise included because some moderator or group of moderators think they know better and censor the information from ever seeing the light of day.

derefr 10y ago

> Anything anyone would write for free would be garbage. I think you would need to clarify to the person that there are just as many volunteer editors as there are volunteer writers. And then, perhaps, take them through a thought-experiment where fifty people are, in parallel, handed a copy of something and asked to mark it up for spelling and grammar errors. Even if they're all amateurs, the union of their annotations is likely to asymptotically approach (or even exceed) the results of a professional editor. Copyediting is actually uniquely suited for this sort of thing; it's, as they say, an embarrassingly parallel problem. (Structural and content editing not-so-much, and Wikipedia indeed has deficits in those areas.)