akolbe

33 ms·

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by akolbe 4y ago
Note that the fundraising banners are currently only shown to a small percentage of readers – these are the October pre-tests : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W... The actual fundraiser w
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by akolbe 4y ago
Also related, in the Signpost, Wikipedia's community newspaper: Special report: "Wikipedia's independence" or "Wikimedia's pile of dosh"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipe
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by akolbe 4y ago
For financial data see Wikipedia itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... The Twitter thread mak
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If you use Wikipedia you've seen pop-ups like this and like me may have donated(threadreaderapp.com)
4 points by akolbe 4y ago|1 comments
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by akolbe 4y ago
Turandot is an opera by Puccini; the word is of Persian origin, and the Wikipedia article I linked extensively discusses how Puccini intended for the title to be pronounced in Italian. Cf. https://medicine-opera.com/2008&#x2
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by akolbe 4y ago
I'm intrigued now. :) Was it Turandot? That's one where the pronunciation is controversial, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turandot#Origin_and_pronunciat...
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NPP: Still heaven or hell for new users – and for the reviewers(en.wikipedia.org)
1 points by akolbe 4y ago|1 comments
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by akolbe 4y ago
Hmm ... there are English pronunciations of foreign words that are considered correct in English, even though they differ from the way the words are pronounced in their original language. In other words, the mispronunciations have become th
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by akolbe 4y ago
It was you who introduced the topic of government backing above ... that just triggered my memory. Never mind.
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by akolbe 4y ago
The Wikimedia Foundation does not edit Wikipedia. So what I said above has got little to do with the information quality on the level of an individual article. I still find it interesting though that the organisation attracts so many politi
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by akolbe 4y ago
Each of the above is true and verifiable by the links posted. You can make of it what you will.
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by akolbe 4y ago
I get where you're coming from but it's not really practical. (For a start, how to decide which user is a first-time user, if there even is such a thing today?) What I will say is that for a while the Wikimedia Foundation was trum
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by akolbe 4y ago
Yeah, it's a valid comparison. I will let you in on a secret: I have a full 1990s' Britannica set in my home, about three metres from my desk. I consult it maybe four or five times a year, and the Britannica website maybe another
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by akolbe 4y ago
How about "desert"? Wikipedia's "desert" article said for almost a year that the mean winter temperature in cold deserts, such as those found in Greenland and Antarctica, is typically between +4 and –2 °C. False inf
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by akolbe 4y ago
Perhaps so, but why choose the 1970 edition, rather than one from the 1990s, or the current online one? At any rate, here is a quote from a BBC journalist: "In the Wikipedia gullibility stakes, no one is infallible. That means any jour
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by akolbe 4y ago
The former Wikimedia CEO (she left in 2021) is now on the Atlantic Council and currently serves on the US Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/expert/katherine-maher/
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by akolbe 4y ago
Well, on the same page (which is an essay, not a policy) you have: " Never use self-published sources as third-party sources about any living people, except for claims by the author about themself. This holds even if the author of the
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by akolbe 4y ago
Well, for a particular set of fairly obscure science articles. It's quite different in the social sciences, for example. What people don't appreciate is that Wikipedia has very different strengths and weaknesses to Britannica. Bri
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by akolbe 4y ago
Tides holds well over $100 million in Wikimedia/Wikipedia donations by now in an Endowment – and they have never once published an audited financial report for the incomings and outgoings of this Endowment fund: https://en.w
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by akolbe 4y ago
To be fair, they did and do. Every page contains a link at the bottom to a "Disclaimer", the first two paragraphs of which read as follows: "Wikipedia is an online open-content collaborative encyclopedia; that is, a voluntary
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by akolbe 4y ago
Well, to be fair, the books in question aren't exactly high-brow material. But I've even seen University Press books get tripped up by Wikipedia. See the "Coati" example on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org&
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by akolbe 4y ago
Quite. Note rising executive salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim... Latest financial report: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wi
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by akolbe 4y ago
Well, blogs generally aren't acceptable sources to cite in Wikipedia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Blog Press sources do often have minor or major inaccuracies which can then get perpetuated in Wikipedia.
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by akolbe 4y ago
"The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic." – Kozierok's First Law
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by akolbe 4y ago
Exactly. That's why the world thinks an "Alan MacMasters" invented the electric toaster. That particular hoax lasted ten years and spread far and wide: https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wiki
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by akolbe 4y ago
Donate to the Internet Archive instead. Performs a vital service for Wikipedia, archiving sources before they disappear off the internet, so you can still verify Wikipedia content when the cited source is gone. Start donating to Wikipedia a
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How readers assess Wikipedia's trustworthiness, and how they could in the future(en.wikipedia.org)
4 points by akolbe 4y ago|0 comments
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Removing watermarks, copyright signs and cigarettes from photos(en.wikipedia.org)
24 points by akolbe 4y ago|3 comments
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The ACLU and the NSA may soon square off in the Supreme Court – over Wikipedia(grid.news)
4 points by akolbe 4y ago|0 comments
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One of the Best-Preserved Dinosaurs of All Time Found in Canada(extremetech.com)
2 points by akolbe 4y ago|1 comments

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