One “very senior Wikimedian,” we are told, “came to think of the project as a ‘city built by Asperger’s.’ ”
If you get the paywall, it’s readable at http://archive.today/R2rnW
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And yet… it’s orders of magnitude better than anything that came before it, and nobody’s found a better way to do it.
Do you mean print encyclopedias? If so, heavy disagree.
Less errors, more content, more up to date, more accessible. That said, I’ll admit the smell of a rarely opened tome is missed.
I doubt the number of errors is significantly different. The horrible mistakes I’ve had to correct on WP suggest otherwise, even if that’s just anecdotal.
Sometimes, less is more. I don’t think we really need trivia from the film set of the Infinity War or whatever. Selecting the most relevant material is an art in itself. A scholarly monograph might be used to dump info; an encyclopedia has to make sense of it for the layman.
Up to date, mostly yes (unless the editors get their info from outdated sources, which does happen), and accessible, definitely.
I do agree that condensing an encyclopedia to a limited size and keeping the most significant information was a very difficult art that was performed admirably by the old encyclopaedias.
I however think it’s an art that would be innappropriate and harmful if applied to Wikipedia.
Just because you can condense the information doesn’t mean you should. Encyclopaedias are not for reading through, so limited length was an artificial limitation imposed by the printed format not for any good reason.
I’m sure there’s articles that go on a bit about irrelevant minutia, and they should be trimmed, but that’s an article specific flaw.
FWIW I think I misremembered the accuracy point, looks like most studies have put it similar or slightly lower accuracy. Citation needed I guess.
Sometime, less is more, but not for an encyclopedia, which is, by definition, literally supposed to contain all knowledge. The previous encyclopedias were limited by their volume, as they must be physical, but not Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia wins 100% on this front.
but not for an encyclopedia, which is, by definition, literally supposed to contain all knowledge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia#Etymology
The word encyclopedia comes from the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία,[13] transliterated enkúklios paideía ‘general education’, from enkúklios (ἐγκύκλιος) ‘circular, recurrent, required regularly, general’[5][14] and paideía (παιδεία) ‘education, rearing of a child’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a social network, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, an instruction manual, nor a collection of source documents or media files, although some of its fellow Wikimedia projects are.
(emphasis mine)
We have limited time in our lives. “Everything” can be the goal of a library collection. An encyclopedia gets the important gist of the “everything” in a practically readable and understandable format, and directs you to other places where you can learn more if needed. A balance has to be struck. Sadly, I guess Wikipedia has become a symbol of all knowledge on the web, since most other places are so dogshit and uninformative, that we can now expect or demand it to do beyond what an encyclopedia should normally do.
I don’t think this is the gotcha you think it is. You posted the etymology which is the origin of the word but not the modern definition.
Def.: Encyclopedia -
Emphasis is mine.
That’s not really in agreement with your understanding of the encyclopedias either, I’d say. Encyclopedias contain [an unspecified amount of] information on all branches of knowledge. The branches are all of them, yes, but the exact amount of information provided from each subtopic of each branch is not necessarily endless. As the quoted “pillar” says.
what are their advantages over wikipedia?
Being written by professionals, each article written by a single person with an editor controlling their work – these two things lead to far better written text, more consistently organised material cross-article, with a good selection of the most relevant information in each article. Wikipedia is amateurs dumping all sorts of info (which they don’t always even understand properly) that they come across elsewhere online onto the site, and even the “deletionists” can’t really contain this tendency. Carefully written articles with a head and tail are rare and largely products of individuals who really know their shit, but that meticulous type of work is inevitably diluted in the overall landscape of the site.
Note: I’m a fairly regular Wikipedia editor. It’s useful and fun.* But when I need some non-trivial info in fields I’m somewhat adept in, I prefer skipping Wikipedia.
* Although WP in some smaller languages isn’t, some versions are actively harmful due to the amount of misinformation or propaganda, and I would vote for deleting them entirely, including my own contributions. I don’t think there’s any print encyclopedia so hopelessly bad that I’d throw it into the fire. But this is kind of outside the frame of discussion, I admit.
That control is usually about political correctness as defined by the organization making the encyclopedia in question. People often say Britannica is good, no fucking way, those people have just forgotten how miserable it is compared to Wikipedia.
It isn’t. Yes, political control exists and has shaped encyclopedias (it has also shaped Wikipedia). The editorship however mainly has to focus on keeping stuff consistent and meaningful for the reader. You have to have no real involvment with scholarly writing if you think just letting random scholars write whatever they think is important will lead to a good encyclopedia.
To put it more concretely, I’ve read extensive editorial notes by the editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia from 1950s/60s, i.e. a govt project in an authoritarian country - the editor was an avowed Marxist and it was no secret, yet his notes were absolutely leading the project in the right direction, he was insistent on critically revising the inherited nationalist political narratives, pruning lots of rhetorical fluff and nonsense, “saying it like it is”. It had its bias (pro-Yugoslavian, pro-communist), and it was pretty clear about it, you know where to expect it if you don’t like it, and frankly the critical stance was justified. The second edition from 1980s actually caused controversies because lots of powerful people disliked it interfering with their own nationalist narratives. Even in an authoritarian country you can’t keep everything under control. The encyclopedia is to this day a treasure trove of valuable information that the existing Wikipedias of ex-Yugoslavian countries can only lick the balls of (in part because they are or have until recently been managed by illiterate fascists, as is the case for Croatian and Serbian WPs).
Sounds like the only real problem is all those jackass “deletionists”…
If an article is so niche no one ever looks at it, then it eats up zero bandwidth. Just the data storage for a small text file.
Nothing should ever be deleted, there’s no fucking benefit to that
If they weren’t acting up, then activity dying down wouldn’t matter
It’s the biggest repository of human knowledge ever, it existing and being freely accessible to the planet is massive.
But if they stop keep deleting “niche” content from Wikipedia, then people won’t have to use Fandom instead.
You know, the commercial, ad infested wiki that was also founded by a Wikipedia co-founder.
I don’t like Fandom as a commercial platform any more than you do, but in-universe topics for niche fandoms simply don’t belong on Wikipedia; they would make it harder for editors to focus copyediting time on articles that matter far more to most people.
There are nonprofit wiki farm alternatives to Fandom that are a better solution to that problem.
Just the data storage for a small text file.
That’s not true. It’s an entry in a database. That means it has to be indexed for search, and counted for “all pages where…” types of queries. It has to be replicated between database shards. You scale up your number of records, and you start hitting database, application, and operating system limits.
If non-notable articles were never deleted, millions of people and companies would create articles about themselves for promotion.
A genuine question: Is a Wikipedia article supposed to be written from an objective perspective?
Yes; all content must be written from a neutral point of view.
Self promotion is a different rule that exists. Also, their threshold for what constitutes ‘notability’ is ridiculously arbitrary and bureaucratic, or at least it was in the past. I doubt it’s changed.
It’s notable if there are reliable sources about it. If there are no reliable sources about it, you wouldn’t be able to write much about the topic anyway. Unless you conduct your original research.
In theory. I’ve seen firsthand the number of arguments about what constitutes notability and reliable sources. It’s not for nothing that this is the biggest divide among Wikipedia editors.
So? If the information they provide is accurate, what’s the big deal?
Because an encyclopedia with millions of promotional articles would lose not only its objectivity, but also crater the standard of quality of the average Wikipedia article.
The Cebuano Wikipedia is the poster child of a project expanding beyond its scope: millions of articles generated by a bot with no one there to edit them after they’re created.
For example this interesting article
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Exocortex&oldid=813869381
was deleted with the reason “mostly unsourced speculation/science-fiction”.That reason is correct, though.
It’s the biggest repository of human knowledge ever
Internet Archive and Libgen are incomparably bigger.
I mean, a municipal dump contains arguably many more printed words than Wikipedia, but that doesn’t mean it contains more information, nor is it easily cataloged for access.
I’m noticing a pattern of you reducing arguments down to meaningless and out-of-context metrics in this entire comment section.
Have you actually ever used Libgen and Internet Archive (its book collection specifically)?
Yes. Libgen.whatever is a russian-operated “free” library.
I can find José Saramago books there, but no info on the author himself.
Are you trying to compare libgen with Wikipedia? They don’t really serve the same purpose.
“free” library
Pirate library. I don’t think this aspect has to be downplayed.
I can find José Saramago books there, but no info on the author himself.
You can find his biographies, criticism, analyses, the very sources that Wikipedia is using.
They don’t serve the same purpose, correct. But as far “repositories of knowledge” go (the phrase that kicked off this sub-discussion), they count as such, and they are massive, I have no doubt they’re bigger than WP. English Wikipedia has 7 million articles while Anna’s Archive (which mirrors Libgen and a big part of Internet Archive - but far from all of it!) says it has 70 million books and 200 million articles. Cut the number in half, or even in third due to duplicates if you want, to get a more realistic number, it’s still bigger.
Pirate library
Sure, yes. Acknowledged.
It is true that the referenced information is present in libgen, but it is not succinctly summarized for consumption, and that is the function Wikipedia fulfills for most users.
I can understand the pitfalls of allowing updates from the public, but I think it’s widely accepted that Wikipedia does more good than bad.
It’s really difficult to understand your point of view on this, especially when you indulge in semantics arguments.
but it is not succinctly summarized for consumption, and that is the function Wikipedia fulfills for most users
You may have noticed that this is precisely what I’ve disagreed on with two other users in this thread, who claimed that Wikipedia should contain as much information as possible. I agree with you, it is good to have an encyclopedia that summarises the most important, and directs towards further materials for further deeper study.
Again, the point I disagreed on with the other poster is simply on what’s the “biggest repository of human knowledge ever”. You seem to agree that the shadow libraries are bigger, and that settles it, we don’t have to disagree further. Being the biggest repository does not, of course, mean that it should be the only repository, that others are bad, or whatever else. Different repositories can fulfill different roles in the sharing of knowledge.
I can understand the pitfalls of allowing updates from the public, but I think it’s widely accepted that Wikipedia does more good than bad.
I don’t think I disagreed with the latter point, except when I mentioned the smaller borderline fascist wikis somewhere ITT. When it comes to English and some other large WPs I definitely don’t disagree.
Maybe you’re just supposing that we disagree on something when we really don’t, so you can’t lead the discussion to the point where we’d finally clearly disagree. I provided some criticism of Wikipedia, that doesn’t mean I think it’s bad wholesale. Wikipedia is complicated. I’ve spent quite a while editing it, as well as using traditional encyclopedias. I just negatively reacted to some comments in this thread, the harsh dismissal of traditional encyclopedias, and the somewhat overrated view of Wikipedia.
The reason I down voted you is you’re ignoring duplicative information…
And mainly because instead of asking questions to learn, you just went off with a halfbaked thought and presented it like it was fact.
Do better
I certainly ignored “duplicative information”, because I don’t even know what those words are supposed to mean.
You haven’t asked any questions either, you made up a claim and are now seemingly very insulted when an obvious correction is pointed out. Those two sites contain hundreds upon hundreds of thosands of entire books, entire encyclopedias, and god knows how many scientific articles, inevitably way more stuff than Wikipedia. Every Wikipedia editor should have them open in a tab while editing ready to verify the existing sources and look for new ones.
because I don’t even know what those words are supposed to mean.
How many websites about Pokemon do you think are archived?
How much of that info is duplicative (meaning it exists multiple times)?
If 2 gigs of data all says charmander evolves into charazard, why is that worth more than a single text string saying it once?
You haven’t asked any questions either
I already understand it…
You don’t even know what “duplicative” means, and were too lazy to even look it up, you just wanted to argue about how your opinion matters more than facts.
marked by duplication
With no context I didn’t know what you might have meant by “duplicative information”. Now it makes sense, apparently you think Internet Archive is just Wayback Machine, with its archived duplicate Pokemon websites. Which is comically false, try to dial down your arrogance. Perhaps you could have asked questions about whether I really think Internet Archive’s collection of Pokemon sites contains more knowledge than Wikipedia, or maybe something else:
What did they do with the books after they scanned them?
Made them free to access and download, if the book is in the public domain or under a Creative Commons license. Allowed limited access if copyrighted (through some weirdly legal solution where they technically “loan” the book to you while you view it in your browser), although that option has been partly limited in the recent years due to lawsuits by book publishers.
Congrats bud.
You kept going long enough I’ll never try to clarify anything for you again, every single reply you make to one of my comments from here on out will not receive any further clarification and you’ll always believe it’s 100% correct.
It won’t be, but I won’t see it to tell you that anymore.
So you win, enjoy it.
Edit:
2-0 bud!
Apparently I blocked your original account already, the streak continues
I’ll never try to clarify anything for you again,
As if you tried to clarify anything up until this point anyway 🤣
TL;DR: This is largely a review/summary of The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke
Great article OP! First time I’d heard Wikipedia was in decline. I can’t see it ever going away.
Yes, the readership is not doing well. It won’t go away any time soon, but one day it might end up a ghost town. If everything develops linearly, which it might not.
Wikipedia is and has always been shit. It’s where institutions go to write down their propaganda so it sounds authoritative. In fact it’s the precursor to AI in that sense. It’s credentialism all the way down. If something is said somewhere by anyone, then it becomes a source. Unless that source is not
approved ofinstalled by the powers that let wikipedia gracefully host its websites.If a page regarding a political or historical event isn’t under constant scrutiny, state actors and “trolls” will gradually alter it until it says nothing conclusive at all. Everything must be up in the air, everything must be “neutral” (when language itself is political…)
Also think about the incentives. You’re a government. You have people working full time to redact history. You CAN and you WILL threaten people who write the wrong version of history. This is not even hidden, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Wikipedia–U.S._government_conflicts
They can see it happening, they can document it happening, and they can’t do shit to change it because they’re not a peer to peer project. Like the fediverse for that matter, it’s all vulnerable to the same exact “a guy in a suit rang your doorbell because the server is on your premises” tactic.
So in conclusion, believing that “wikipedia good” and “AI bad” is an incredibly naive way to understand the world. Read up on Wittgenstein and Sapir-Whorf and tell me how this isn’t literally their theories being implemented.
its only shit if you use it as a source/citation, which it is not a SOURCE at all. academia does not allow wikipedia to be cited. you can use the links it provides to actual sources, or you can search it yourself.
its most severely data-deficient and outdated on plant/animal diversity/phylogentics. because people arnt spending time skimming or reading recent science papers and adding to the site.
Just quickly skimming the article you linked, I’m not seeing evidence that wikipedia is “shit”, just that there have been many attempts by governments and other powerful people to influence its content, which shouldn’t be surprising to anyone given how popular it is. Are there examples you could point to of those attempts being successful? (Including particular examples you want to highlight in that article; again I only skimmed it on a small screen.)
It also seems strange to link to a wikipedia article to support the claim that wikipedia is shit.
The way it’s usually treated by laymen, as here, Sapir-Whorf theory is pseudoscience, and you’re not even really talking about language but about information. As for Wittgenstein, you’re grossly banalising his work.
This is not even hidden
Yeah. Really makes you think…
