4 ms·

Hah. I remember joining it to write a bunch of stuff about a game, which immediately got removed. I of course immediately left. What is with these "encycloped

Hah. I remember joining it to write a bunch of stuff about a game, which immediately got removed. I of course immediately left. What is with these "encyclopedias of everything" that don't want frivolous information?

contravariant 3y ago
Easy, if you want an encyclopedia that contains truly everything you can just use the library of babel.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  Sure, if you move the goalpost from "information" to "has letters".
ethbr1 3y ago
Humankind's inherent love of rules and order? >> “I don’t have a problem with roads,” Zeleny said. “There are lots of obscure subjects on Wikipedia, but you have to follow the guidelines. People see Wikipedia as a joke. They think it’s not serious. I’ve taken great, great pains to make sure articles are well written, well researched, and well cited.” Or maybe more precisely, people's desire to believe the thing they're volunteering vast amounts of their personal time to matters and is serious, and because it's serious there should be rules.
- Cipater 3y ago
  I agree that people contributing to Wikipedia should take it seriously. I also believe that Wikipedia is important and the work contributers do there matters. Your comment makes it sound like you disagree.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    I think it's unreasonable to treat people's volunteer efforts lightly. Nobody gives massive amount of personal time to something they don't really care about. But that also leads to myoptic views of projects in super-volunteers, where the intent of the project to users gets lost in performance of the rules. I'm not sure this is a solveable problem for volunteer-based projects though. There are only so many people willing to donate time, and you have to keep them happy.
err4nt 3y ago
My wikipedia editing experience was similar, crazy to think that it was almost 20 years ago. Me and some friends contributed our honest-best to some articles relating to language dialects we spoke, and minerals we liked - the stuff we could nerd out about a tiny bit more than whatever was on Wikipedia at the time, and so we added our paragraphs. In all cases the changes were reverted, and we actually made an enemy with a wikipedia editor who if I recall was an army vet and science teacher, and personally 'babysat' the articles about minerals, and would allow no changes to his articles. I think it would be cool if there was something that saved all contributions, even deleted ones, and made it easy to explore all of them. I know Wikipedia has a diff history but that's not the right interface to bring all that to the surface. Looking forward to the next collaborative scrapbook to start up so I can participate in good faith and have some good fun :D

contravariant 3y ago

Easy, if you want an encyclopedia that contains truly everything you can just use the library of babel.

Dylan16807 3y ago
Sure, if you move the goalpost from "information" to "has letters".

ethbr1 3y ago

Humankind's inherent love of rules and order? >> “I don’t have a problem with roads,” Zeleny said. “There are lots of obscure subjects on Wikipedia, but you have to follow the guidelines. People see Wikipedia as a joke. They think it’s not serious. I’ve taken great, great pains to make sure articles are well written, well researched, and well cited.” Or maybe more precisely, people's desire to believe the thing they're volunteering vast amounts of their personal time to matters and is serious, and because it's serious there should be rules.

Cipater 3y ago
I agree that people contributing to Wikipedia should take it seriously. I also believe that Wikipedia is important and the work contributers do there matters. Your comment makes it sound like you disagree.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  I think it's unreasonable to treat people's volunteer efforts lightly. Nobody gives massive amount of personal time to something they don't really care about. But that also leads to myoptic views of projects in super-volunteers, where the intent of the project to users gets lost in performance of the rules. I'm not sure this is a solveable problem for volunteer-based projects though. There are only so many people willing to donate time, and you have to keep them happy.

err4nt 3y ago

My wikipedia editing experience was similar, crazy to think that it was almost 20 years ago. Me and some friends contributed our honest-best to some articles relating to language dialects we spoke, and minerals we liked - the stuff we could nerd out about a tiny bit more than whatever was on Wikipedia at the time, and so we added our paragraphs. In all cases the changes were reverted, and we actually made an enemy with a wikipedia editor who if I recall was an army vet and science teacher, and personally 'babysat' the articles about minerals, and would allow no changes to his articles. I think it would be cool if there was something that saved all contributions, even deleted ones, and made it easy to explore all of them. I know Wikipedia has a diff history but that's not the right interface to bring all that to the surface. Looking forward to the next collaborative scrapbook to start up so I can participate in good faith and have some good fun :D