akolbe

39 ms·

391.
by akolbe 4y ago
Maybe there is a case for moving much of it outside the US? Lots of staffers work remotely anyway.
392.
by akolbe 4y ago
The question to me is what donors are told. The Wikimedia Foundation built a $100 million endowment in five years, half the time it had budgeted: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais... It'
393.
by akolbe 4y ago
I guess you have to compare it to the salary of the donors who feel compelled by these heart-wrenching fundraising messages to donate. Here is a senior with $18 to his name promising to donate as soon as his social security check arrives:
394.
by akolbe 4y ago
Single-page: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1570072717931552770.html
395.
Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved(twitter.com)
276 points by akolbe 4y ago|244 comments
396.
by akolbe 4y ago
Wikipedia has a list of cases where this precise sequence of events occurred: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
397.
by akolbe 4y ago
I came across a case where a disgruntled former lodger added stuff like that to a woman academic's Wikipedia biography, citing purported court documents (alleged driving offences) that had never been the subject of a press report. The
398.
by akolbe 4y ago
Then there was the case of the man whose image was used for two years to illustrate the Wikipedia article on a serial killer. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgpnq/wikipedia-and-google-...
399.
by akolbe 4y ago
This one stayed for ten years: https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...
400.
by akolbe 4y ago
I remember that. :) And I remember buying a 1 Gigabyte hard disk for £1,000 ...
401.
by akolbe 4y ago
Most of the Wikimedia Foundation's revenue comes from small donations, and part of that is then funneled to the Endowment at the Tides Foundation – which has never to date published audited accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org
402.
by akolbe 4y ago
A friend of mine is a professor of medieval philsophy. He tried to contribute to Wikipedia for a while. He gave up in disgust. (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is also free, is much better for anything in that topic area.)
403.
by akolbe 4y ago
The "Why I hate Wikipedia" video was made by YouTuber and journalist J. J. McCullough. You wanna see something funny? This discussion is from 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio.
404.
by akolbe 4y ago
Nice double-entendre. Kudos.
405.
by akolbe 4y ago
I think it's a case of a million people trying, and 99% being reverted. Which sounds great, until you realise that it means ten thousand bits of nonsense aren't spotted. Case in point: https://www.dailydot.com/uncl
406.
by akolbe 4y ago
The "Why I hate Wikipedia" YouTube video discussed at the other thread you link was made by YouTuber and journalist J. J. McCullough. You wanna see something funny? This discussion is from 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org
407.
by akolbe 4y ago
Well, yes, after ten years, just as in the case of the toaster. And the translations of her Featured Article in three other Wikipedia language versions had STILL not been corrected last time I looked.
408.
by akolbe 4y ago
Ironically, the Cambridge University book uses the made-up "Brazlian aardvark" moniker copied from Wikipedia in a passage that reads as follows: "In the case of the Coati, for instance, also known as the Brazilian aardvark, B
409.
by akolbe 4y ago
> Journalists and academics can’t use it as a reference. Nor can students, though they can use Britannica. Lots of journalists do use it. That is why there is a bunch of BBC articles claiming that the electric toaster was invented by a S
410.
by akolbe 4y ago
"Kick-ass" (in use since 1970 according to Merriam) is a similar construction, though used as an adjective and not a noun. "Telltale" and "taleteller" are a case of both forms existing in parallel: https:&#x2F
411.
by akolbe 4y ago
There you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi... This has the entire edit history, going back to 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:List_of...
412.
Tweezers based on a crow's beak can outperform traditional ones(newscientist.com)
24 points by akolbe 4y ago|4 comments
413.
by akolbe 4y ago
Just saw another duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800972 (the latter one got flagged and yanked)
414.
by akolbe 4y ago
Usually, longstanding hoax articles are moved to a new location where they are clearly identfied as hoaxes. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi... This retains the editor history but h
415.
by akolbe 4y ago
Wikipedia is very well funded, but not, as this video might make you believe, by large donations from the likes of Google and Amazon. While these donate the occasional million, most of the Wikimedia Foundation's $160 million revenue co
416.
Crocodiles in the Sahara Desert: An Update of Distribution, Habitats and Status(ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
2 points by akolbe 4y ago|0 comments
417.
by akolbe 4y ago
Odd – this is a duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793535 I thought having two submissions of the same URL wasn't possible. (Not that the article doesn't deserve it; it is well worth reading.)
418.
by akolbe 4y ago
:) I know that because I've read the Foundation's tax returns and audited financial statements that the figures and discussions in Wikipedia are based on. See also: https://washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersec
419.
by akolbe 4y ago
I just looked at it on Google Street View. It needs a few more old trees, but a lot of it is quite charming.
420.
by akolbe 4y ago
The two people who changed it in the Poundbury article only changed it there, and nowhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poundbury&diff=11... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spe

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