20th anniversary thread

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20th anniversary thread

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Jan 11, 2021 2:26 am

Because January 15th is the "official" 20th anniversary of Wikipedia. Which, please recall, was the work of Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz, and had damn little to do with Jimbo. Five years later, Jimbo started lying to the press about the beginnings, and had loads of support from his WP insider crew. You won't see any of THAT in the 20th-anniversary coverage.

The Economist: "The other tech giant Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher"
Note that there is no author given.
Wikipedia’s value and influence are hard to compute. Its revenues come from charitable grants and donations from its users. “Wikipedia is an example of what I like to call ‘digital dark matter’,” says Shane Greenstein, an economist at Harvard who has studied the site closely. Like parenting and housework, contributing to it is a valuable service that, because it is unpaid, remains mostly invisible to standard economic tools.

A few researchers have tried to guess. One study in 2018 estimated that American consumers put a value of about $150 a year on Wikipedia. If true, the site would be worth around $42bn a year in America alone. Then add indirect benefits. Many firms use Wikipedia in profitable ways. Amazon and Apple rely on it to allow Alexa and Siri, their voice assistants, to answer factual questions. Google uses it to populate the “fact boxes” that often accompany searches based on factual questions. Facebook has started to do something similar. This drives traffic to Wikipedia from those keen to learn more. AI language models of the sort employed by Google or Facebook need huge collections of text on which to train. Wikipedia fits the bill nicely.
And yet they continue to pathetically beg for donations, right on the front page. And once again, that 2005 Nature study is being waved around as "proof" of WP "magic". This is a really smooth stretching of the truth:
Yet despite a string of notable embarrassments—and its own disclaimer that “Wikipedia is not a reliable source”—it is, on the whole, fairly accurate. An investigation by Nature in 2005 compared the site with “Britannica”, and found little difference in the number of errors that experts could find in a typical article. Other studies, conducted since, have mostly endorsed that conclusion.
The "other studies" I've seen have been all over the place in this area. Ultimately all you can really say is that Wikipedia has good content and bad content. And some areas are biased as hell (look at the Kazakh-language WP sometime).

And there's another Economist article, claiming that the editor decline since 2007 has stabilized. Give how erratic their statistical analyses have been lately, this could be true or false. Ask a WMF employee and you'll get nothing but cult talk.

"Wikipedia has transformed knowledge – so why is it still looked down on?" in The Telegraph. Sorry, behind paywall.

You are going to see more crap like this for the next couple of weeks. Although it's likely to be buried by the Trump-related insanity in media coverage. Much of which you will find reflected on Wikipedia. I could go on like this for dozens of pages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... p%27s_hair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... handshakes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... omination)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... omination)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... ting_video

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Re: 20th anniversary thread

Post by badmachine » Mon Jan 11, 2021 8:19 pm

ericbarbour wrote:
Mon Jan 11, 2021 2:26 am
"Wikipedia has transformed knowledge – so why is it still looked down on?" in The Telegraph. Sorry, behind paywall.
Here's a link to the article at Archive.is: https://archive.is/PUbvI

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Re: 20th anniversary thread

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Jan 12, 2021 8:57 am

badmachine wrote:
Mon Jan 11, 2021 8:19 pm
Here's a link to the article at Archive.is: https://archive.is/PUbvI
Thanks and I can already see one stupid factual error:
In 2015 the US talk show host and comedian Stephen Colbert coined “truthiness”, one of history’s more chilling buzzwords.
That was in 2005. I remember because I saw that episode when it first ran--in 2005. Done.
more or less as an afterthought, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001
You mean Ben Kovitz.
Yes, its coverage is lumpy, idiosyncratic, often pernickety, and not terribly well written. But it’s accurate to a fault, extensive beyond all imagining, and energetically policed. (Wikipedia nixes toxic user content within minutes. Why can’t YouTube? Why can’t Twitter?)
"Accurate to a fault"? This asshole has obviously never seen this forum.
Contributor Heather Ford, a South African open source activist, reckons it’s not its creators that will eventually ruin Wikipedia but its readers – specifically, data aggregation giants such as Google, Amazon and Apple, which fillet Wikipedia content and disseminate it through search engines like Chrome and personal assistants such as Alexa and Siri. They have turned Wikipedia into the internet’s go-to source of ground truth, inflating its importance to an unsustainable level.
That happened more than ten years ago, when the damn thing started to decline.

As I suspected: Simon Ings, the author of this poorly written near-hagiography, has a Wikipedia bio. Rather short and undetailed. Written by the usual random-appearing gang of nobodies. Lucky him, no obvious paid editing (although "Bruce1ee" makes me a bit suspicious and I don't mean because he's an obsessed Henry Cow fanboy).

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Re: 20th anniversary thread

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Jan 14, 2021 8:13 pm

ho hum just another asslicking job

https://onezero.medium.com/an-oral-hist ... 672eea57d2
It is not perfect. There is trolling. There are vandals. There is bullying of “newbies” by editors. And there are imposters who edit not for the greater good but to serve the greed, vanity, or ambition of self-interested (sometimes paying) parties. And, yes, there are many, many weak and thinly sourced articles (only about 40,000 out of the site’s 6 million entries meet the higher standard of being “good articles”). There is also a gender imbalance within the domain of Wikipedia — in English Wikipedia, more than 80% of editors are men and just 18% of biographies are about women.
Then he promptly sucks up to Ward Cunningham, to Maher, to Jimbo, to Andy Lih. Larry Sanger is well down the list.

Wales must be getting old. Or perhaps 15 years of verbal abuse for that "Sole Founder" routine had an effect.
Jimmy Wales: Larry deserves more credit than he normally gets. He was instrumental in the early days. I always feel like people want to make a controversy where there shouldn’t be one.
FUUUUUUCK YOU, sir.
Katherine Maher: What we always say [about ads] is, “Never say never… But no.”
I see they shut off the banner ads (BEGGING FOR MONEY) today. Wonder why. :evil:

and once again, the 2005 Nature study is waved about.
Wales credits Tim Shell for having come up with the separate “Talk” page so that editors can converse on an adjoining page behind an article.
No mention of the hundreds of kilobytes of crap about Ayn Rand and her "philosophy" that Shell posted on Wikipedia about a month after it started.

Since Steve "Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao" Pruitt is now the "top editor" and Koavf is b&, perchance I should add Pruitt's chunky little ass to the book wiki. Even though he has an article. I could write another whole book just about Pruitt's politically rancid and stabby-back way of handling Wikipedia disputes.

Tom Roston doesn't have a WP biography yet, although some of his past writings are used as references. I predict that, in return for writing a suck-up piece for the wiki-assholes, he will "magically" receive a BLP soon.

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Re: 20th anniversary thread

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Jan 15, 2021 9:15 pm

The Ringer ran a more balanced item concentrating on trivia

https://www.theringer.com/2021/1/15/222 ... unny-pages
Twenty years ago this Friday, January 15, the internet changed forever. Wikipedia went live, gifting the world with a cavern of endless information, both helpful and potentially questionable. The ease with which you can look up Hannibal’s Retreat is matched only by the ease with which you can look up what happened in the season premiere of Hannibal—and you have Wikipedia to thank for that.
how much you wanna bet someone on the admin IRC channel is talking about "punishing" the Ringer somehow? This also ran today....
https://www.theringer.com/2021/1/15/222 ... -edit-wars
As amusing as protracted, petty edit wars are, there’s a drawback to the drama: It may drive editors away. Wikipedia’s number of edits and number of editors (active and otherwise) peaked in 2007 and then steadily declined for several years before plateauing around 2014. The editorial ranks have rebounded a bit lately, thanks in part to a pandemic-prompted surge, but only about 40,000 editors are active on English Wikipedia in any given month, a pittance compared to the nearly 900 million devices that visit the site over the same span of time, generating close to 10 billion page views.

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Re: 20th anniversary thread

Post by Strelnikov » Fri Jan 15, 2021 10:28 pm

"Over One Billion Edits" they crow.

How many of those were by machine?
Attachments
Screenshot 2021-01-15 at 2.15.19 PM.png
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Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: 20th anniversary thread

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Jan 16, 2021 4:11 am

Strelnikov wrote:
Fri Jan 15, 2021 10:28 pm
"Over One Billion Edits" they crow.
How many of those were by machine?
No one knows. No one at the WMF or from the "inside crowd" will discuss it.
I would not be surprised if 80% were bot edits. Maybe more.

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Re: 20th anniversary thread

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Jan 16, 2021 10:43 pm

The media buttlicking and Jimblowing reaches a crescendo.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... niversary/
https://time.com/5930061/wikipedia-birthday/
https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/wi ... -edit.html
https://www.cnet.com/news/20-years-on-w ... formation/
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2021 ... e-for-good

Inevitably the Guardian coverage repeats outright lies and distortions about Wales's role.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ter-future

The Columbia Journalism Review practically orders journalists to help WP. How many times have I said that journalism has become far too dependent on WP for easy, quick fact checks?
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/wikipedia-i ... better.php

No shit:
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-a ... -game-rpg/

Axios has the best short summary (whoever wrote this should be controlling Wikipedia itself)
https://www.axios.com/wikipedia-20-year ... 4a848.html

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Re: 20th anniversary thread

Post by Strelnikov » Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:50 pm

"The Columbia Journalism Review practically orders journalists to help WP. How many times have I said that journalism has become far too dependent on WP for easy, quick fact checks?"

That's the trick, where do you go when you have a deadline to meet? There are no competing encyclopedias anymore! The English speaking world fucked itself out of knowledge! Yes, there is Encyclopedia Britannica the website, but that doesn't have the granular depth of certain Wiki articles and it seems aimed at grade-schoolers. There should be an Associated Press factbook, but there isn't; all you get is an AP stylebook. Those CIA World Factbooks? What if it is about an event and not a country?

This is the same thing we see with small-scale journalism.....there is a giant need for a small-town/neighborhood press in parts of America, but nobody funding it, so nobody knows what is going on, and TV follows the written press. You can blame Google (I do) but you can also blame Congress in the Gingrich era, when they stopped looking outward (Newt killed the future-technologies committee) and decided that "privatization is better" so they handed the Internet off to corporate people and they helped destroy the "market ecosystem" small newspapers existed in. Now it is so bad that the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Los Angeles Times are owned by the same idiot billionaire*, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the transplant surgeon who invented Paclitaxel aka "Abraxane" the chemotherapy drug. He has no background in running newspapers, but he had to park his money somewhere. No word if the buyout screwed up Ted Rall's libel lawsuit with Tribune Publishing (aka "Tronc, inc." - that was a dumb name!) when they owned the LA Times and backed the LAPD over their own employee (Rall).

Wikipedia needs real, paid editors to keep it from falling apart, and the Feds need to dish out start-up funds for non-profit small newspapers in blighted, media-less areas. Most of it would be online, with small weekly print runs for subscribers because the newspaper vending machine/"automatic kiosk" model has fallen apart.

___________

* Not the first moron to own the "Yoo-Tee"; the hotel guy "Papa" Doug Manchester had the paper in his grubby hands from 2011 to 2015. The Copleys owned it before that, when it was just the San Diego Union; it merged with the San Diego Evening Tribune in 1992. Lots of ink has been spilled at the San Diego Reader by Matt Potter and others running through how deep the ties were between Helen Copley and Richard Nixon, and Wikipedia will tell you that the Copley News Service was used as a CIA front in Central and South America (probably true, the Reader's Digest was used by the CIA for propaganda purposes and to give cover jobs for undercover agents, why not James Copley's outfit?) Wikipedia also points out allegations of FBI COINTELPRO (though they don't call it COINTELPRO) spying on the student left during the 1960s-1970s, using FBI agents working as journalists or journalists suborned into being Fibbie spooks.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: 20th anniversary thread

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Jan 18, 2021 9:30 pm

Strelnikov wrote:
Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:50 pm
Now it is so bad that the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Los Angeles Times are owned by the same idiot billionaire*, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the transplant surgeon who invented Paclitaxel aka "Abraxane" the chemotherapy drug. He has no background in running newspapers, but he had to park his money somewhere.
Inevitably his bio shows signs of paid editing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... serandolph

Sir, you may be the only person to call him an "idiot billionaire". Someone with his history normally would not be called an "idiot", but Soon-Shiong got so filthy rich so quickly that there HAS to be some dirty tricks behind it. Most developers of cancer drugs don't end up owing major newspapers and exotic-battery manufacturers.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8a-H62ogf8

Stop talking about it and SELL ME ONE.

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