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Rogue editors started a competing Wikipedia that's only about roads
- ghaff 3y agoI mean, it makes sense. There's an incredible rabbit's hole of detail on certain topics that probably doesn't belong on what purports to be a general purpose encyclopedia. Honestly a lot of mathematics etc. that is more or less worthless to people who aren't already experts in the area could probably use their own space too.
- whatshisface 3y agoI don't understand why something being worthless to you makes it inappropriate to have on an encyclopedia we both read.
- lavajava 3y agoI think the difficulty arises from finding a balance between a baseline that appeals to a general audience and an extensive repository for expert reference. Sifting through large Wikis can be daunting and discourage viewership. There is even an acronym for this: TL;DR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long%3B_didn%27t_read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long%3B_didn%2...
- kortilla 3y agoWikipedia supports more than one article. It’s dumb to not have related articles about specific details.
- ghaff 3y agoAt some point, a general purpose reference can get overwhelmed by specialized minutiae. I'm generally in the inclusionist camp with respect to Wikipedia, but I also don't think it's really an appropriate vessel for all of possible human knowledge. Which implies there is some line. So an article on the Big Dig is probably appropriate but not the blow by blow history of some country road.
- im3w1l 3y agoHiding irrelevant details from people that don't care about them is just a UI-puzzle that should be possible to solve imho.
- ghaff 3y agoJust a simple matter of programming. And now you're asking for an algorithm to decide what you can see and not see.
- whatshisface 3y agoHow about the people who click on "homeomorphism" see an article on homeomorphisms and the people who click on "Route 48" see an article on Route 48?
- thfuran 3y agoIs the article on route 48 meant to be a 500,000 word treatise on its history including every work order involved in its construction and maintenance as well as discussion of the procurement process for the paints used for its lines, or can some of that maybe be elided? Would you expect the article on homeomorphisms to include a list of every homeomorphism every described, suggested, defined, or posited?
- whatshisface 3y agoWikipedia has a couple of devices to solve this organizational problem: "full article" links that appear at the top of sections, and "list of X" pages. So in your examples, you'd have a three-sentence "History" section on the Route 48 page, with a link to the full article on the history of Route 48 at the top. For your second example, there would be a "see also" section at the bottom of the article, including a hyperlink to "List of Homeomorphisms."
- advisedwang 3y agoRisks of too much low interest data in wikipedia include: * Not enough interest to update wiki when the subject changes; then wiki becomes out of date and unreliable. * Too few eyeballs allows false information to be added (accidentally or intentionally) * Becomes harder to do wiki-wide changes (of course it's inevitably too large for manual wiki-wide changes, but you can imagine more articles means more corner cases will be hit that will get automation mistakes or require more complex automation. Think info-boxes used in novel ways etc)
- whatshisface 3y agoThe first two are arguments against letting an individual write a single article about a unique topic, not against allowing a vibrant community of people with special interests document them in a public reference. The third could be solved by only deleting pages that use the wiki language in unmaintainable ways.
- bawolff 3y agoA lot of making a high quality resource comes down to editing. Making sure you don't just include what you need but also remove what you don't. It is impossible to satisfy everyone, which is why i think it is a good thing to separate out to different resources when different groups want different things.
- whatshisface 3y agoDeleting text from a page I can understand, but the context of this discussion is the deletion of thousands of pages.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoIt's more the Wikipedia leadership that would have to be convinced. And looking at it that way, is it safe for all human knowledge to be gatekept by a single group?
- vvillena 3y agoA lot of that content that is deemed "not Wikipedia worthy" ends up in Fandom, a for-profit wiki host also started by Jimmy Wales.
- flomo 3y agoYeah, I'm a 'roadgeek' and I thought many of the highway pages were overly verbose trivia. Long route descriptions clearly just taken from a map, random citations about ditch work in 2014 etc. Very little history or substance.
- Waterluvian 3y agoIf anyone wants to produce digital work about anything, there should be a home for that. Perhaps it doesn’t belong in Wikipedia, but maybe there’s like a “Wikipedia Open” sibling website that clearly communicates a lower standard of quality, relevance, curation, but generally ignores those requirements. Where I can write up my grandma’s cookie recipe without having to manage my own website. “I think this is relevant. Here you go, world. Do with it what you may.”
- tomjakubowski 3y agoYou're free to add grandma's recipe to Wikibook's Cookbook. https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents
- Waterluvian 3y agoOooh this is exactly what’s on my mind. Awesome.
- tomjakubowski 3y agoWikibooks is a looser environment than Wikipedia for sure. I think you could probably start a book about anything there.
- bawolff 3y agoThat sounds like everything2 https://everything2.com/ https://everything2.com/
- ghaff 3y agoYou can create your own website.
- nemomarx 3y agoWe already see this with niche things like gaming fandom details (every pokemon used to have a wiki page for a bit, but now that's all properly handled by Bulbapedia) so I wonder why we haven't seen it for more serious topics before? Math, Engineering, CS could all benefit from a good wiki, I'd think.
- dosshell 3y agoOne problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page. I think wikibooks is a good initiativ to solve this, and could be powerful when combined with a normal wiki.
- bee_rider 3y agoI’m sure it is totally impossible because figuring out where to start (what’s “obvious” to the reader), but a wiki that also has some sort of graph and could work out the dependencies for a given theorem, what you need to know to understand it, and then a couple applications (for examples) could be really useful. Automatic custom textbook on one specific topic.
- jjmarr 3y agoLook up Abstract Wikipedia. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia It's more or less Wikipedia but the articles are created using natural language generation on a functional programming base. The main goal is to generate content in any language from a common underlying structure, but one could also try recursive explanations of a given topic in that framework as well.
- armchairhacker 3y ago> One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page. Case in point, nLab: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage For instance, https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/homotopy+type+theory https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/homotopy+type+theory Although this is partly inevitable because the content is really abstract, I know there are more approachable ways to define “monad” than https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad
- arjie 3y agoThis is a great idea, I think. Mediawiki is very good about allowing multiple sites and since interwiki links are bundled in you can just link Wikipedia pages like they’re local to the wiki. I actually use Mediawiki for my blog.
- _aleph2c_ 3y agoIf you think this is interesting, see what happens when you try and edit the page of Susan Gerbic; the leader of the Guerilla Skeptics. She runs a gang of over 150 Wikipedia members who have taken over 1500+ articles. They are like the deletionist described in the article, but operate as an open conspiracy advancing an atheist-materialist point of view. They actively recruit new members, run them through extensive training about the Wikipedia ecosystem and how to dominate it as a team.
- jumelles 3y agohttps://www.wired.com/story/guerrilla-wikipedia-editors-who-combat-conspiracy-theories/ https://www.wired.com/story/guerrilla-wikipedia-editors-who-... They seem to defend against conspiracy theories and falsehoods. Why are you calling them a "gang"? What are the "dominating"? Why is this bad?
- _aleph2c_ 3y agoThat article was written in 2018, since then they have been trashing on a retired admiral: Timothy Gallaudet. They have been disparaging David Grusch, who spoke under oath to the American congress and have undone the work of Nobel laureates trying to edit pages about physics. And yes, they are dominating, a team of editors will beat out an individual contributor on Wikipedia. I don't really care about their position, but they are an open conspiracy, and it's an interesting story.
- bloopernova 3y agoReminds me of Everything2. It started as a freeform text linking site, where nodes (pages) could be linked just like a wiki these days. It was written by some of the slashdot crew, back around 2000. The site grew and attracted a fun crowd who really liked the freeform wiki-like interface. Unfortunately some of the admins wanted to compete with Wikipedia, so the fun, frivolous stuff was discouraged over purely factual nodes. This meant that some people stopped contributing. I left around that time. https://everything2.com/ https://everything2.com/ Huh it's still going! It must be 25 years old now, not a bad achievement.
- thoughtFrame 3y agoThat's interesting, because I checked out everything2 last year to see what I had missed out on, and found it a nice place with poetry and personal essays. Maybe at some point their culture changed again?
- bloopernova 3y agoIt's entirely possible! I left sometime in the mid 2000s, so there's certainly a lot of time for cultures to have changed significantly even multiple times.
- creatonez 3y ago> Maybe at some point their culture changed again? Supposedly Tumblr has done the same. They crashed and burned so hard that they actually came out of the ordeal with a reverse eternal September effect, where miraculously most people act respectfully towards each other and are not just trying to exploit the platform.
- unwind 3y agoFounded (as "Everything1") in 1998 according to the other site.
- bloopernova 3y agoOh right! Yeah I completely forgot about its initial incarnation being named that. It was definitely a new frontier where we thought anything was possible. Just being able to easily link between nodes/pages was a very cool feature back then.
- layer8 3y agoJust to be pedantic: They started a separate wiki (that isn’t really in competition with Wikipedia), not a “competing Wikipedia” (which is the name of a specific wiki).
- john-radio 3y agoAnd while we're being pedantic: > The dispute came down to some of Wikipedia’s most sacred tenants. Anyone can edit Wikipedia... Tenets!
- dtgriscom 3y agoPerhaps it was quickly fixed, but it says "tenets" now.
- aqme28 3y agoRight. If it's a field that Wikipedia refuses to engage in, then by definition it can't be a competitor.
- layer8 3y agoAARoads is not a competitor to Wikipedia because it doesn’t try to be a general-purpose encyclopedia. Similar to how HN is not a Reddit competitor. They have different goals and thus complement each other.
- RheingoldRiver 3y agoI mean...this is precisely what's supposed to happen when you have a niche interest? And this is a better situation for them anyway because now they can use some structured data extension (SMW, Cargo,* WikiBase, DPL) specifically tailored to their needs and create a lot more advanced querying/filtering features that are super usable by the average person rather than requiring you to know SPARQL. Wikipedia doesn't support SMW or Cargo (for good reason) but on specific-subject wikis that aren't literally the scale of Wikipedia one of these is pretty much a must-have if the admins are tech-savvy enough to make good use of them. (My recommendation is Cargo but either can work) *no relationship to the Rust package manager, it's a SQL wrapper for MediaWiki I would say the headline here if anything is, "WikiMedia doesn't support niche-interest wikis that run alongside Wikipedia" and instead make you either self-host or use a farm (Fandom, Miraheze, Wiki.gg, etc).
- labster 3y agoI wish that was the headline, because then Miraheze would be notable enough to get an article on Wikipedia. At this point those of us on the board would even like bad press over no press at all. Shameless plug: miraheze.org offers free, ad-free wikis offered by a charitable foundation.
- epivosism 3y agoI recently have been thinking about UGC site in general, and it seems like they generally go two ways: 1. Allow most legal content to be uploaded and control distribution with algos YouTube, Roblox, Twitter, Tinder, Flickr, Insta, FB, TikTok. This lets users practice and test things without risk to their work or account. 2. Sites that try to "keep the db clean" by nuking stuff they think is "bad" by some criteria. Sites like this: Wikipedia, most big subreddits Type 2 sites can be unsustainable because they tend to make new users feel judged, and don't give them the chance to iterate and improve their work until it's more ready to be shared and useful to a broader audience. You just find your content nuked, or removed from the subreddit, or downvoted a ton, often with a dismissive or aggressive comment. This is NOT the way to grow and survive as a company over a long period of time Obviously, there is no necessity to keep the db full of only high quality items. As the scope and number of niches a site covers, it's not possible to maintain that. On the other hand, using algos lets you do interactive tests with content, directly testing against various audiences to see if they like it, without having to do editorial work yourself. Of course, there has to be some limit - articles for every pokemon, or every version of every pokemon, etc at some point it does get too far. The thing for me is coming in and seeing your content completely deleted.
- itishappy 3y agoI may be missing your point, but Wikipedia and most big subreddits have proven quite effective at growing and surviving. I'd also suggest a major distinction between type 1 and type 2 sites are a focus on creation vs consumption. There's a lot more consumers than producers and, depending on your goals, it might improve the experience for more users by deleting the content of some.
- epivosism 3y agoI have heard the editor count at Wikipedia has been shrinking for years. Might have been wrong though
- yorwba 3y agoMonthly active editor count peaked in 2007 and then started declining, but has been quite stable since about 2014: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/active-editors/normal|line|all|(page_type)~content|monthly https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/...
- ginko 3y agoI still think Wikipedia's focus on significance was a historic mistake. At the very least there should have been an "extended" Wikipedia+ that strived to include all human knowledge no matter how trivial. Not having this meant for-profit companies like Wikia (now fandom.com) could take over much of that space, pervasive tracking and ads included.
- chriskanan 3y agoI 100% agree. They also apply rules inconsistently, where the handful of times I've tried to make an article on well-known scientists (h-index 70+) years ago, the editors rejected it despite some secondary sources. On the other hand there are many articles being created by some editor on scientists who have almost no track record. Wikipedia is already one of the best data sources for training LLMs, and if they were less stringent, it could even be a better resource.
- yreg 3y agoThis is the system working as intended. It's great that they are putting their original research on AARoads. Wikipedia can quote the noteworthy parts.
- classichasclass 3y agoWould they? Wouldn't that be "original research"?
- JKCalhoun 3y agoYeah, agree. Wikipedia's rules are being used as a club and it's too bad. We get it that people will abuse Wikipedia and it must suck to cull all of the ephemera people submit (not the best word for it but the only one that comes to my mind). But I think rules should allow for nuance. Perhaps Wikipedia should have allowed a kind of sub-Wikipedia: a sort of parallel wikipedia that deals in topics more akin to Urban Dictionary entries. Sort it's entries to the bottom of the search results, serve up a light yellow background for sub-pedia pages to make it clear these are not conforming articles. But it seems to me like a generally bad idea to be a ruthless gatekeeper for the enthusiastic and motivated contributors out there.
- joshuahutt 3y ago> Perhaps Wikipedia should have allowed a kind of sub-Wikipedia: a sort of parallel wikipedia that deals in topics more akin to Urban Dictionary entries. It's an interesting idea. I imagine a sort of "Official" and "Unofficial" modes. You could flip a switch and see the articles and edits that didn't pass muster. That way, the ideas and info wouldn't be lost/censored, but wouldn't get to claim they're "formally accepted."
- ENGNR 3y agoI kind of like that it's a different org adjacent to the old one, rather than a subsidiary. "Wiki" was always supposed to be software for thousands of various boards on different topics with no hierarchy, it makes sense that some topics would branch out of Wikipedia into their own Wiki's
- Macha 3y agoTheir name might get them in trouble with the AA, a UK and Ireland insurance company who has products such as AA Roadwatch. Other than that potential future problem, this is pretty much the system working as intended, and they're following the path led by sites such as Wookiepedia.
- bobthepanda 3y agoI feel like if there were to be a problem, it would be with the American AAA instead, which is probably more similar given that it offers roadside assistance and other road services.
- jkaplowitz 3y agoThe site these former Wikipedia editors are joining has existed since 2000, is primarily US-focused, and is named after two people in the US with first names beginning with A: https://www.aaroads.com/about/ https://www.aaroads.com/about/ So this new migration shouldn't affect that site's legal risk from the UK and Ireland company, which seems pretty low anyway given that context.
- timthorn 3y agoIt's sad that you describe the AA as an insurance company - you're not wrong, but that throws the contrast between today's AA and its venerable past into sharp relief.
- none_to_remain 3y ago[flagged]
- dtgriscom 3y ago/s? Wikipedia has plenty of money these days.
- Dylan16807 3y agoAre you honestly unsure whether it's sarcasm? It's hard for me to imagine how.
- KTibow 3y agoI find Wikipedia's frontend more enjoyable than AARoads. It's understandable as the community of editors probably wasn't as technical as some other communities, but it feels a bit slow, there's no search, and there are a number of broken links.
- notatoad 3y agoIt makes sense that the consumption side of the site isn’t as good, since super-niche sites like this are more for the benefit of the writers than the readers. The value and enjoyment is in collecting the information, not retrieving it. And that might sound like a criticism, but it’s really not. Niche interest sites where people spend their time collecting a huge level of detail on a topic few care about are awesome, and I love them. Just realistically, they’re not there for the readers.
- stock_toaster 3y agoAre you talking about the main site landing page? I found the link to the actual wiki[1] in the nav header. [1]: https://wiki.aaroads.com https://wiki.aaroads.com
- KTibow 3y agoAh, that's much better. It's still confusing that they're separated.
- Sharlin 3y agoIsn’t "a competing Wikipedia that’s only about X" just called… a wiki?
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- ern 3y agoWikipedia seems to have a growing contingent of editors from countries like India, the Phillipines and Sri Lanka who edit topics that seemingly have little to do with those countries. To establish their credentials, they get involved in arcane areas like Articles for Deletion or other areas that you’d expect would be of more interest to experienced editors. Now everyone has the right to edit anything on Wikipedia, but it’s starting to feel like paid editors have gained a foothold.
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- quickthrower2 3y agoIs it reasonable to expect Wikipedia to index all the things? A road that has never been written about. Openstreetmap is a seperate entity, and that makes perfect sense. So is Github. Do you need an article for every file in the Linux kernel too?
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- thih9 3y agoThe title seems a stretch; an encyclopedia about roads is hardly competing with Wikipedia. In fact that was the point, Wikipedia didn’t want that content in the first place.
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- thih9 3y agoWhat’s the point of not allowing that content on Wikipedia? I get that some topics are less important or have lower quality sources, but the cost of adding them seems relatively low. Personally I would enjoy seeing all kinds of fandom articles on Wikipedia, roads included.
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- exitb 3y agoSomething that I see on OpenStreetMap - someone gets motivated and maps a neighborhood in an incredible detail down to the last tree, bench and trashcan, but not motivated enough to actually update the changes over the years, leading to the map being wrong and untrustworthy.
- tomcam 3y agoI’m getting on in years and am deeply disappointed I was never characterized as a rogue in public
- starkparker 3y agoI'll point back to a previous comment where AARoads came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37957549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37957549 It's very G/O Media-clickbaity to call this "going rogue". The editors aren't subverting anything. This isn't the first and won't be the last fork of a Wikipedia community over the increasingly tightened, deletionism-favoring screws of notability and sourcing policies. The only people "going rogue" are the organized groups on Wikipedia moving across wildly different topics in order to hammer them all into one uniform shape that serves nobody as well as it had or could. EDIT: The Gizmodo article doesn't link to the US Roads group's own rationale for leaving, which fills in some gaps from the rather low-content article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roads/Newsletter/Issues/Volume10/Issue01 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roa... > Since August 2022, our project has faced several external challenges that made several members question the viability of editing on Wikipedia in ways that Covid-19 didn't. The notability of highway articles in general became a focus of New Page Patrollers. Additionally, the ability to continue using maps as sources was called into question. Since then, we initiated an RfC to clarify if there was support for long-standing citation practices, namely could we continue to cite maps as sources in our articles? The results of that RfC were mixed. While chatting amongst ourselves online, it became clear that continuing to hope that another RfC or deletion discussion would go our way was an exercise in futility. In the background to all of this, other categories of articles were on the chopping block. First it was articles on Olympic athletes, and then it was cricket and area code articles.
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- racked 3y agoDutch speakers have enjoyed such a wiki for a long time already: WegenWiki https://www.wegenwiki.nl/Hoofdpagina https://www.wegenwiki.nl/Hoofdpagina The UK's got SABRE: https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Pag...