7 ms·
It's slightly funny that all the people complaining about the Wikipedia here, what they are really showing is that Wikipedia still works, and it is doing it as
by shaky-carrousel 5y ago
It's slightly funny that all the people complaining about the Wikipedia here, what they are really showing is that Wikipedia still works, and it is doing it as intended.
- tptacek 5y agoI struggle with how to describe it. Is it the most successful project in the history of the Internet? Probably! "Modern intellectual history"? Ew. But: maybe? We're blasé about it because we've lived with it for so long. But it's truly an amazing thing.
- hooande 5y agoI'm going to say one of the most valuable creations of humanity, period. People compare it to an encyclopedia, but I had encyclopedias as a kid and wikipedia covers way more information in an order of magnitude more detail. Even compared to say, the Library of Congress, it has 1) multiple authors per article 2) intense scrutiny over disputed information and 3) hyperlinks to primary sources If I had to restart civilization from scratch, a copy of wikipedia would be the #1 thing I would want.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Jiro 5y agoIt's "working as intended" in the sense that its rules are being followed. The problem is that the rules are only there because we want Wikipedia to actually be useful as a source of knowledge, and the rules which demand removing this information have failed at this larger goal.
- akvadrako 5y agoAgreed. Wikipedia would be much better without notability requirements, etc.
- psyc 5y agoThat’s how it was for the first few years, and it was glorious. Something of immense value (to inclusionists) was surely lost. The deletionists traded it all away for credit in the straight world.
- archon1410 5y agomany wikis with that premise have been created, Everipedia is the latest that comes to mind. of course they all have failed one way or the other. the comments seem to want something even more radical—a wiki without verifiability requirements. why that would be a very bad idea is immediately obvious.
- davidgerard 5y agoMany, many attempts have been made to make a Wikipedia without this requirement. None have gained any traction. Perhaps the experiment has been done, and it isn't better?
- psyc 5y agoWikipedia itself was in practice a Wikipedia without this requirement for years, and it gained all of the traction before the deletionistas won their war and rewrote history. I know this because I was working in Microsoft’s Education Products Group during that time (aka Encarta) and Wikipedia completely ended us. What Wikipedia had not gained was serious credibility - i.e. professors were forbidding their students to cite it. How hard do you think we tried to use that to our PR advantage to save our product and the whole org? It didn’t make any difference.
- tptacek 5y agoWhat's the time period you're thinking about? I was somewhat intensely involved with Wikipedia back in 2007, and "deletionism" was so ingrained into the site that it was a joke to talk about it. You'd have to be telling us that Wikipedia didn't expand or improve at all in the last (does math) 15 years. Sounds like an extraordinary claim.
- davidgerard 5y agoAlso, notice how vanishingly few give checkable examples, and when they do their example is often bad.