17 ms·
Wikipedia is up (2001)
- truth_ 5y ago(2001)
- vimoveremacs 5y agostill damn cool tho
- Egidius 5y agoIt’s fantastic to see the impact Wikipedia still has. Jimmy Wales and his team can be proud of what they have achieved.
- karaterobot 5y agoI was in library school around this time (a couple years later, actually), and I remember that Wikipedia was a hot topic: can it be trusted, and why is the answer "no"? Bucking that trend somewhat, I was in the cautiously optimistic camp. By that time it was already more useful to me than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and getting better all the time. The trajectory was clear. It seems like, of all the exciting things from the early web, Wikipedia has been one of the only things that actually panned out the way it was intended. It didn't get commercialized, but it didn't go broke either. It didn't become a cesspool, or try to consume all of my attention. It just does the thing it's supposed to do. If there was a fire on the internet, and I could only save one website, it would be you Wikipedia.
- ghaff 5y agoYeah. While there are plenty of things to criticize, in general, it works. And a number of different approaches to a crowdsourced encyclopedia, e.g. Google Knol, have clearly not worked. There are big incentives to game anything like this--see also Quora.
- _joel 5y agoIndeed, it's no Yahoo Answers (RIP)
- kiba 5y agoQuora degrades because you're trying to fit a business model into a square hole where it won't fit. Maybe not every project should be a commercial enterprise.
- ghaff 5y agoQuora also degrades because as soon as you have a popular site that individuals can push unfiltered content to, the scammers, spammers, or just people with positions/products to push show up. It's pretty clear that moderation (both community and admins) are a pretty important part of a popular crowdsourced site. (Not that I disagree with your point as well.)
- guerrilla 5y agoIs quora so bad? I usually use it for little questions before I ask something on stackexchange and it seems to work fine enough...
- ghaff 5y agoThere's a lot of dross on there. Every now and then a search will lead me to a useful answer but it was a much more interesting site when it started out. More active interesting people and fewer worthless or scammy questions and answers.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoAnd for some reason they seem to actively merge only tangentially-related questions and answers. I often see answers that have nothing to do with the question.
- TNorthover 5y ago
- convery 5y agoWorth noting that the whole "can it be trusted" mainly revolves around political or otherwise controversial topics. Where entire pages can switch from "freedom fighter helping the world" to "literally Hitler" overnight with news articles/interviews being blacklisted for not being reliable while sourcing random blog-posts. For a good example, check the edit history of the Gamergate page, well known editors even got banned for wanting accuracy rather than pushing narratives.
- harles 5y agoI have to imagine it’s an order of magnitude better than the old encyclopedias, even for controversial articles.
- veddox 5y agoI‘m guessing you haven‘t used too many „real“ encyclopedias? The quality of writing on those was very high. In terms of readability, understandability, and reliability, I find the average print article to be significantly better than your average Wikipedia article. Their big downsides being, of course, that they were not as exhaustive on any given topic as Wikipedia is (though this actually helped with the understandability), and they were quickly out of date (especially as they were too expensive to replace every few years).
- ghaff 5y agoOne of the things that traditional encyclopedias (as well as a given book/magazine/etc.) have is a very clear view of the persona that they're writing for. With Wikipedia, this differs considerably from article to article depending upon the topic. With respect to many technical topics, especially in areas like math and physics, Wikipedia articles often dive right into equations and many articles are largely incomprehensible to anyone not already familiar with the subject matter.
- notahacker 5y agoAnd on the flip side, there are other technical topics where large parts of the article are written by people unschooled in the subject citing magazine and news articles which are online rather than the field's core texts which aren't...
- stefan_ 5y agoHas it? Wikipedia is primarily edited by an insulated, slowly dying clique of mostly ignorant people who would rather nothing be written at all than a domain expert outsider article. Meanwhile, the foundation is some sort of self-perpetuating money vacuum expanding at a great rate while expenditures for actually running Wikipedia is stagnant, if anything getting cheaper. It turns out a wishy-washy NGO save the world mission is a lot more exciting than the daily struggle of community building, and with the foundation all these do-gooders don't even have to forgo the competitive salary. Obviously a bit exaggerated, but there is a lot of truth here.
- caturopath 5y agoCan you tell me a couple large, human-made things you do like?
- coliveira 5y agoI could be much worse, corporations could have taken over.
- pilingual 5y agoWikipedia is absolutely in need of disrupting. If that happens, it should be done very thoughtfully. https://www.wired.com/2007/08/wiki-tracker/ https://www.wired.com/2007/08/wiki-tracker/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190410141316/old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190410141316/old.ycombinator.c... (Item #23)
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoi would save scihub too.
- bionade24 5y agoAnd wikibooks. I think they're are actually multiple websites, so if I had to decide, it would be web.archive.org. Yes, this would mean nearly all internet sites, but without CGI backends.
- fumblebee 5y agoAFAIK a large part of why it hasn't yet been corrupted has been the total lack of greed on behalf of founder Jimmy Wales. Kudos to you, Jimmy (and team). Keep up the great work.
- billiam 5y agoThat's basically it. Naked Greed and convincing yourself that monetizing a thing you think you invented but which invariably turns out to be people's attention is always good in and of itself. I've been in or inside lots of wonderful things created as the Internet has evolved, and almost all end up this way.
- respondo2134 5y agoHe's extracted a pretty good life from wikipedia, but nothing compared to your typical SV start-up founder would demand, so I'm totally OK with this.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y agoOh it's definitely been corrupted: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ Note the article is written by the same guy who wrote the email in the original post.
- caturopath 5y agoYeah, it's difficult to remember just how audacious an idea Wikipedia was. Even as an earlyish contributor, I thought it was an impossible dream. It has turned out to be a really great tool.
- pfarrell 5y agoI always liked the quip: Wikipedia works well in practice, just not in theory.
- young_unixer 5y agoIt still can't be trusted for articles related to politics, specially if you're reading it in a language different from English.
- ChrisKnott 5y agoCan you post some examples?
- gpcr1949 5y agohttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Site-wide_administrator_abuse_and_WP:PILLARS_violations_on_the_Croatian_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Site-wi...
- Const-me 5y agoThere’s an ongoing war in Europe since 2014, between Russia and Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War The fact is well-established, the article has more than 600 sources. Russian Wikipedia doesn’t have such article. They only have “military conflict in eastern Ukraine” https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B6%D1%91%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1%82_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B5_%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%8B https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83... That article does not list Russia on the right panel under “belligerents” section. Many sections simply tell official Russian version. When it does tell some bits of truth it uses wordings like “allegedly” and “according to Ukrainian side”. The “casualties and losses” section only contains losses on Ukrainian side.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- paulz_ 5y agoA few months ago Tyler Cowen had Jimmy Wales on the Conversations with Tyler podcast[0]. He spends some time talking about why he thinks Wikipedia turned out the way it did and avoid some of the potential traps you pointed out. Really enjoyed listening to it and made me think a lot of about structure of organizations. [0] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/
- ClosedPistachio 5y agoIn a similar way, an interview with departing CEO Katherine Maher on the Why Is This Happening? podcast. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9wb2RjYXN0ZmVlZHMubmJjbmV3cy5jb20vd2l0aA/episode/Yjg2MGY0NDAtOWNjNS00OWVmLTg3MDUtMWNhOTkxMzk1NTdm?ep=14 https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9wb2RjYXN0ZmVlZHM...
- la_fayette 5y agoOpenstreetmap fits IMHO also into this category. Personally, if I could save one website, I might choose OSM ;)
- tkgally 5y agoI love both Wikipedia and OSM, but my own desert island website would be the Internet Archive.
- chris_wot 5y agoIf you think it isn’t a cesspool, do t go to the admin’s Noticeboard, and certainly do not change categories.
- lucasnortj 5y agoit is absolutely riddled with falsehoods and most articles are written by people who know nothing about the topics. It is a garbage site
- jll29 5y ago> If there was a fire on the internet, and I could only save one website, it would be you Wikipedia. Well said, I concur, and I'm borrowing your quote for my fortunes file.
- valyagolev 5y agoThe moment the question is “which resource can I unreservedly trust”, you’re already duped. Encyclopedias are written and edited by real people, with real agendas, and no collaboration or editorial model will get rid of those. There’s a difference in “how exactly should I not trust this or that resource” though.
- jvanderbot 5y agoOp said useful, as intended, worthy of saving. Not trusted without reservations. No need to strawman.
- valyagolev 5y agoHe quoted people discussing that very question
- stjohnswarts 5y agoYeah I knew it wasn't a legit "cite" but it was a good entrance to rabbit hole from.
- mclide 5y agoWikipedia articles related to politics should have warning labels about bias and potential disinformation when linked from google/twitter/facebook. Entrenched activist admins and editors sabotage its ability to self-correct entries towards a neutral point of view.
- phyzome 5y agoMmm, it's still best taken with a small pile of salt. If you spend much time editing in any topic area, you will quickly find a few editors with a lot of time on their hands and a particular bone to pick. These people can be exhausting and tend to get their way, so particular biases don't get corrected. It's still "the world according to people with the most free time (and sometimes strong opinions)". Which mostly works out, but... yeah. Keep that salt handy.
- zinckiwi 5y agoIf there was a fire on the internet, and I could only save one website, it would be Hamster Dance. But if I could save two the other one would be Wikipedia.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- _joel 5y ago.. and lo, countless hours were lost going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole.
- macksd 5y agoThere are much worse ways to lose hours than in Wikipedia. A lot of my general knowledge comes from constantly looking up topics I encounter on Wikipedia. Try a new dish at a restaurant? I look it up. Interesting origin story and nutritional information.
- cpach 5y agoIndeed! I also use it a lot to discover new music. And geography! I hated geography in school. After school my interest in geography has increased sharply. Wikipedia and Google Maps are indispensable for that kind of stuff.
- accraze 5y agoInteresting, can you go into more detail about how you discover new music? I used to use Discogs quite a bit, but I think there is more potential for "discoverability" on Wikipedia in some sense.
- respondo2134 5y agoGlobal productivity loss not experienced since the release of Doom
- kiba 5y agoI found google doesn't lead me to wikipedia as often anymore. Also wikipedia is kinda stagnant in quality. These are of course, my own personal experience. Still a very useful resources whenever I want to learn about a given subject.
- uncletammy 5y ago> I found google doesn't lead me to wikipedia as often anymore. Ive also noticed this. Wikipedia used to always be in the first few results for any Google search I made. It was amazing becauase it was frequently the exact thing I was trying to find. Now I have to add 'wiki' to the search terms or it wont even show up in the first page.
- adventured 5y agoIt got to the point where over half of all Google search results were producing Wikipedia as the top result. No doubt they noticed and made some targeted adjustments to subtly downrank Wikipedia. Which might be a good thing if it leads to other quality sites getting more traffic.
- cpach 5y agoFairly often I simply go to https://en.wikipedia.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/ and type my query in the search box there instead of googling it.
- whoooooo123 5y agoI recommend setting a search keyword in your browser so you can eg just type "w hacker news" in the address bar to be taken to the Wikipedia page for hacker news. I use this shortcut dozens of times per day.
- cpach 5y agoDoes Google Chrome support that?
- marban 5y agoHaving enough disk-space to install all Encarta CDs your grandpa "borrowed" from the office: Priceless.
- aruggirello 5y agoYou can download zim files with all Wikipedia content (for offline browsing via Kiwix) here: http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/ http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/
- Ayesh 5y agoSaving a click, the download size of all content in English is ~82GB, compressed.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoThat's... Actually pretty small? Probably compresses well, but still.
- cpach 5y agoTaking into account that it’s just text, I consider it huge.
- chronogram 5y agoI’d rather download only featured or featured+good articles.
- xNeil 5y agoWikipedia is one of, if not the best thing(s) to happen to the internet. It achieved basically what the internet's aim was: to democratize information. Even when I have to learn something, ANYTHING, I'll go to Wikipedia, after which I read the sources of the article for in depth research. And while I dislike their political articles a lot, the science, math, history and arts articles are genuinely incredible to read.
- rvnx 5y agoInformation is like internet. It should be organized, but decentralized. Wikipedia is a place of ultra-centralization where a handful of influential contributors have most of the power and will enforce the content they want using administrative processes (or arbitrary locking of pages) until you give up. Otherwise don't be disappointed the day you disagree with the Wikipedian "neutral" point of view.
- respondo2134 5y agoThe internet is neither of these in its current implementation. It is a highly centralized but self-healing network with no organization above the oeprational level, itself built on centralized adherence to rules. Asking for organzation built on top of this to be decentralized is a weird expectation.
- ohuf 5y agoIt's still way better than the old times when lexica were a thing and you needed a printing press to convey knowledge.
- shamilatesoglu 5y ago> Wikipedia is a place of ultra-centralization where a handful of influential contributors have most of the power and will enforce the content they want using administrative processes (or arbitrary locking of pages) until you give up. I have also came to a realization of this when I saw a number of politically motivated powerful contributors vandalizing a calm and mature page about an old historical topic by introducing irrelevant if not made up content. They locked the page immediately after because "there was a threat of vandalism", ironically. It was really unsettling to see it as it unfolded. I've defended Wikipedia fiercely, about how it's a reliable source because "you can see the sources that are cited" etc. But it is not always a reliable source for ordinary people. It only takes some determined powerful contributor to mess up. It is a great tool nevertheless, but it really is centralized.
- gumby 5y agoA nice idea, but depends on the good will of other people. A fatal flaw. And encyclopedias depend on experts to sift through the dross and figure out what’s worth it. That costs mone. This wiki may fill up with articles about star trek episodes but who’s going to take the time to write about hard biology topics or medieval history? Also: English only. There are other languages you know!
- leoh 5y agoAnd traditional encyclopedias don't require the good will of others?
- wpietri 5y agoIS this a reproduction of a critique from 2001? Because suggesting something that has been around 20 years has a "fatal flaw" is perplexing to me. When exactly will this fatality happen? It's also absurd to say it's English-only. There are currently 18 Wikipedia languages with more than 1m articles: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#1_000_000+_articles https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#1_000_000... The notion that it would fill up with poorly sourced fan garbage is also woefully out of date. That's what fan wikis are for. A good example here is the "Endor Holocaust", the fan-generated notion that when the Death Star was blown up the material would have rained down on Endor and wrecked the ecosystem. That was removed from Wikipedia a little over 15 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Endor_Holocaust&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Endor_Holocaust&a...
- gumby 5y agoThis is a contextual comment from the date of the 2001 post. Obviously those criticisms have mostly (and in some case completely) proven false. A cautionary point on the criticism (and enthusiasm) of contemporary inventions — in any age.
- sedatk 5y agoWhat doesn't depend on the good will of other people?
- 5y ago
- maxcan 5y agoAh yes, the day a few softcore porn peddlers decided to create the greatest repository of knowledge in all of human history. One thing I love about the internet.. Yes, I'm aware of the flaws and criticisms of wikipedia but I stand by my assessment.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- uncletammy 5y ago> Ah yes, the day a few softcore porn peddlers decided to create the greatest repository of knowledge in all of human history. TIL : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomis Although I lived through these events, I was far too busy optimizing my MySpace profile to notice.
- poisonborz 5y agoSomeone prove me wrong, but I think of Wikipedia as one, if not the largest cooperation of human beings on a very specific project. Most of the criticism it recieves is true, but it's a wonder that it could remain, and even grow in the state like it is. I wish more organisational involvement would happen on the editorial level - companies, governments, or education. I wish academia wouldn't despise it. There is so much untapped potential still.
- rossdavidh 5y agoI think that the fact that so many of those organizations haven't (in the past) jumped onto it, is probably part of why Wikipedia turned out as well as it did. It's run by those who mostly care about Wikipedia, rather than some other organization. But as to your first point: definitely. It is the equivalent of the Library at Alexandria in ancient times; a step function rise in the information actually available to people.
- marcodiego 5y agoI agree. It is something I often say: "Wikipedia is probably the biggest collaborative project in human history."
- cpach 5y agoYep. Wikipedia and Linux are true marvels of collaboration.
- rvnx 5y ago150+ million USD is spent per year by the organization while most of the work is done by volunteers. Quite a serious money-making engine.
- zamadatix 5y agoYou're a bit off on the number (maybe you were thinking net assets?). For those curious of the breakdown https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Statistical_analysis_of_Wikimedia_Foundation_financial_reports https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Statistical_analysis_of_Wiki...
- superasn 5y agoSpeaking as someone who has absolutely no knowledge of how Wikipedia is run.. what is the biggest expense? Is it the hosting, bandwidth, or maybe HR.. I mean the stuff that takes the lion's share of this $150M?
- h_anna_h 5y ago"Hosting wikipedia accounts for roughly 2% of their total expenses" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26056276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26056276 The links in the post explain where the stuff is spent.
- superasn 5y agoThat was super informative.. thanks! Only 2% is insane - I was thinking a lot lot more!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alfonsodev 5y agojust curious, is the css missing, or was released like that ?
- lucasnortj 5y agoWikipedia is absolute garbage, that people take it seriously shows how doomed humanity is.
- rattray 5y agoVery fun browsing the links… one of my favorite is [the article](https://web.archive.org/web/20010409192226/http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Larry_Sanger https://web.archive.org/web/20010409192226/http://www.wikipe...) on Larry Sanger, who's listed as co-creator of Wikipedia and CEO of Nupedia, a predecessor project. To be honest I hadn't heard of him before. A fun quote: > Presently living in Las Vegas for a few months and then it's on to Russia for a few more months; possibly Ireland after that… Larry can move around like this because he works online. You should be envious. He would be if he weren't he. And here's the less flavorful [Jimbo Wales article](https://web.archive.org/web/20010412200157/http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Jimbo_Wales https://web.archive.org/web/20010412200157/http://www.wikipe...), in which he mentions this in the comment thread: > [druglady.com is] my mom and dad's pharmacy. I made a website for her. It's on the same machine as wikipedia. That will probably change soon, as we are rearranging things. > I have many websites.
- rattray 5y agoVery impressive how much they did before launch: 6,000 articles, several languages, many features (flexible categorization themes, even!), etc.
- rahulsingh789 5y ago???
- grensley 5y ago> Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes. What a perfectly phrased ask. How can you read "Humor me." and NOT add an article?
- rvba 5y agoCan someone explain to me the recent trend to add long quotes in Wikipedia articles? Very often the article starts with a concise definition, some additional explanations and then it has some random long quotation. For example some random critic's opinion about a book. Those quotes often do not provide much information - a concise text would simply be better. I have a feeling that the idea is to make Wikipedia easier to use, when in reality it becomes harder to use In fact those quotes often look like a hidden vehicle to try to promote the quoted person (if person X was quoted, but person Y was not quoted, then you could come to a conclusion that X is more important).
- ChrisArchitect 5y agorelated then from today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27097494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27097494 obviously a ton of wayback links could share
- ChrisArchitect 5y agohere is the post where the idea of making a wiki was proposed 7 days earlier https://web.archive.org/web/20030414014355/http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/2001-January/000676.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030414014355/http://www.nupedi... "Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not." Good idea Larry.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]