Wikipedia Sucks!

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstrac ... nouncement

As you can imagine, this work will require a lot of software development, and a lot of cooperation among Wikimedians. In order to make this effort possible, Denny will join the Foundation as a staff member in July and lead this initiative. You may know Denny as the creator of Wikidata, a long-time community member, a former staff member at Wikimedia Deutschland, and a former Trustee at the Wikimedia Foundation [2]. We are very excited that Denny will bring his skills and expertise to work on this project alongside the Foundation’s product, technology, and community liaison teams.

Denny is well-connected to "fail upwards"...being a Google employee, a bigshot (the first-ever admin) in the Croatian language Wikipedia, and such.....

And in May-June 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation installed a Google employee, Denny Vrandečić, on its Board of Trustees.

On 8 April 2016 he resigned, in great disgust. [19] "There were constant and continuous attacks against me, as being merely Google’s mole on the Board, even of the election being bought by Google. I would not have minded these attacks so much - if I would have had the feeling that my input to the Board, based on my skills and experiences, would have been particularly valuable, or if I would have had the feeling of getting anything done while being on the Board. As it is, neither was the case."

There was an announcement months ago about this "projectthing". Neowin ran the story today, as did this blogger--and no one else did, that I can find. Have YOU ever heard of the Neowin tech blog?

Hacker News had a thread today. The nerds mutter. Note that "bawolff" showed up to blubber that Google and Wikimedia are NOT "very close partners". He happens to be one of Wikipedia's insiders, an admin on Wikinews (lol) and other WMF sites.

Wikidata has already been a giant shitshow. (Prove me wrong, link to three major software projects using Wikidata that are not top-secret and not controlled by the WMF. Other than Google's use of their data, of course!)

It's not difficult enough to edit that now they want people to write in pseudocode!

Kumioko wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 03, 2020 4:31 pm

It's not difficult enough to edit that now they want people to write in pseudocode!

So I've heard. Did they ever publish a decent user's guide to writing this code for Mediawiki pages? I have yet to see one. There's some broken/vague instructions for adding "language links" on the "official Wikidata page". They are dropping the ball on documentation---as usual.

But there IS a list of users you're supposed to consult for help with Wikidata. It includes some of Wikipedia's provably worst people: Jdforrester, John Vandenberg, Andy Mabbett, Roy Chen, Chris McKenna. I would not ask THOSE people for the time of day. (Why in the fuck does Forrester always end up with his nose buried in the ass of whomever is running the latest WMF "big idea"? Does no one in that madhouse remember the "Visual Editor"?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikidata

I'm with you on not trusting those people. Forrester's is worse than worthless.

A week later and there's almost no media coverage of this "major WMF announcement", not even in the tech press. They blew it again.

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 03, 2020 3:16 am

link to three major software projects using Wikidata that are not top-secret and not controlled by the WMF. Other than Google's use of their data, of course!)[/b]

Can you link to three that are, Eric? Truly puzzled by this whole qiki-straction operation.

sashi wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:41 pm

Can you link to three that are, Eric? Truly puzzled by this whole qiki-straction operation.

Nope. And tried. Although SEO professionals are "quite fond" of it....but not forthcoming on exactly what they're doing.

https://www.semrush.com/blog/seo-profes ... -wikidata/
https://searchengineland.com/wikidata-101-241844
https://searchengineland.com/leveraging ... ult-219706

I remember that Semrush is very close to Dulles International, because I had insane levels of activity from their bots shortly after I published my original open letter to ArbCom on my site. (Kumioko, as I recall, helped me to understand who Semrush was in the first place.)

The coincidence of my being banned from en.wp just as this Abstract Wikipedia thing gets going is not entirely lost on me. Perhaps this is a new higher grade of junk in development?

I should hasten to add that a June --> November ban basically is more likely just a presidential election period ban. Already banned from the last century (ok 88 years) of American Politics, I can only surmise that something bigger was at play. I remember learning from you that Neutrality had done a lot of work on the El Cid entry, which may help explain just how many pixels were deployed over Snoog's conjugation woes at Reconquista. (Neutrality is still citing those two edits as evidence of my through-going baditude 4 years later...)

The "abstractor of quintessence" project does interest me and contrary to projects like MoveCom, my request to join the mailing list wasn't (I don't think) silently rejected.

sashi wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 13, 2020 2:45 am

I remember that Semrush is very close to Dulles International, because I had insane levels of activity from their bots shortly after I published my original open letter to ArbCom on my site. (Kumioko, as I recall, helped me to understand who Semrush was in the first place.)

We didn't look into them for the book wiki, but damn they are now an IMPORTANT player in the SEO business. And now I'm wondering how much they paid Jimbo--their advertising prominently mentions that JImbo-affiliated shitshow Quora as a major customer.

Also wonder how much they paid Luthium to create and pwn their WP article.

Kumioko wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 04, 2020 10:44 am

I'm with you on not trusting those people. Forrester's is worse than worthless.

Is there ANYONE at the WMF who isn't?

Here's an example of just how incompetent there whole dev team is:
The WMF spent nearly 90 MILLION DOLLARS on software development in 2022 and they are nearly functioning: there tech is outdated 30 years, thousands of severe unaddressed issues on phabricator, even the simplest feature requests get rejected because they “don’t have the resources to do it” and it just gets worse and worse.

The Blender foundation spends 2,000,000 million euro on software dev and yet they, in just a few years, have gone from making obscure software that few people used, to industry-leading advanced software that is probably 50x than MediaWiki.

Sources:
[WMF] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... Report.pdf
[Blender] https://download.blender.org/institute/ ... 021-v1.pdf