6 ms·

And it is super arbitrary. There is a joke I made over 10 years ago making fun of a friend and it is still up (totally not giving it away as then it will be del

by SEJeff 8y ago

And it is super arbitrary. There is a joke I made over 10 years ago making fun of a friend and it is still up (totally not giving it away as then it will be deleted). The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme.

ardy42 8y ago
> The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme. Of course, there's no way they could formally audit every article. They're heavily reliant of some rando noticing something fishy in an obscure article and bringing it to their attention.
- Retric 8y ago
  Wikipedia is still small enough to see every article reviewed. They don’t largely becase they funnel funding into other unrelated projects.
  - circlefavshape 8y ago
    You're wrong on both counts here - nobody gets funded to review articles (it's done by volunteers), and there are nearly 6 million articles in English alone
    - Retric 8y ago
      Saying they don’t do something does not mean they can’t do something. 6 million / 30 minutes per article every 5 years at 15$ per hour ~= 9 million per year. Wikipedia pulled in 55 million in 2017 from North America making this a major but affordable expenditure.
      - circlefavshape 8y ago
        The Wikimedia Foundation is not wikipedia. Paying people to edit would be a fundamental change in the ethos of the whole movement
        Retric 8y ago
        Wikipedia’s fund us banners go to Wikimedia, which then spends a small fraction of that on Wikipedia. Calling them separate is at best a shell game, but more realistically actively deceptive. Allowing public edits is different from not paying editors. They can have a small staff of super users which only revert or remove content while remaining a Wiki.
        circlefavshape 8y ago
        > Calling them separate is at best a shell game, but more realistically actively deceptive. It's neither. The volunteer community is wikipedia, and the foundation exists to serve it, not the other way around. If the foundation paid staff members to edit there would be uproar in the community
        Retric 8y ago
        Your right and left hands are not separate organisms. Also, if every volunteer quit tomorrow the website could still function, even if just by disabling edits until they employ enough people to review them. So, it’s clearly not the volunteers that are most critical.
dorfsmay 8y ago
Or somebody makes one top 40 song and has a long article including which highscool they went yo, but a university professor who wrote a language like Clojure, used by thousands of companies, isn't notable enough!
- paradoxparalax 8y ago
  What can make us less sad is that quality of people who notes the Professor is also important, not only quantity. There was a fun story I can't find here on HN right now (Algolia is pretty good to search now , but Im out of coffee), On how the guys who make OpenBSD(If I recall) use/used(not clear) CVS instead of GIT to filter out people they didn't ultimately wished to have the attention from.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

by SEJeff 8y ago

ardy42 8y ago

> The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme. Of course, there's no way they could formally audit every article. They're heavily reliant of some rando noticing something fishy in an obscure article and bringing it to their attention.

Retric 8y ago
Wikipedia is still small enough to see every article reviewed. They don’t largely becase they funnel funding into other unrelated projects.
- circlefavshape 8y ago
  You're wrong on both counts here - nobody gets funded to review articles (it's done by volunteers), and there are nearly 6 million articles in English alone
  - Retric 8y ago
    Saying they don’t do something does not mean they can’t do something. 6 million / 30 minutes per article every 5 years at 15$ per hour ~= 9 million per year. Wikipedia pulled in 55 million in 2017 from North America making this a major but affordable expenditure.
    - circlefavshape 8y ago
      The Wikimedia Foundation is not wikipedia. Paying people to edit would be a fundamental change in the ethos of the whole movement
      - Retric 8y ago
        Wikipedia’s fund us banners go to Wikimedia, which then spends a small fraction of that on Wikipedia. Calling them separate is at best a shell game, but more realistically actively deceptive. Allowing public edits is different from not paying editors. They can have a small staff of super users which only revert or remove content while remaining a Wiki.
        circlefavshape 8y ago
        > Calling them separate is at best a shell game, but more realistically actively deceptive. It's neither. The volunteer community is wikipedia, and the foundation exists to serve it, not the other way around. If the foundation paid staff members to edit there would be uproar in the community
        Retric 8y ago
        Your right and left hands are not separate organisms. Also, if every volunteer quit tomorrow the website could still function, even if just by disabling edits until they employ enough people to review them. So, it’s clearly not the volunteers that are most critical.

dorfsmay 8y ago

Or somebody makes one top 40 song and has a long article including which highscool they went yo, but a university professor who wrote a language like Clojure, used by thousands of companies, isn't notable enough!

paradoxparalax 8y ago
What can make us less sad is that quality of people who notes the Professor is also important, not only quantity. There was a fun story I can't find here on HN right now (Algolia is pretty good to search now , but Im out of coffee), On how the guys who make OpenBSD(If I recall) use/used(not clear) CVS instead of GIT to filter out people they didn't ultimately wished to have the attention from.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]