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Trying as hard as I could, I see no pages for the wikipedia/media budget for 2006 or for 2007. Could someone point me in the right direction or include it in the article? Thanks so much ! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.240.20.149 ( talk) 07:45, 3 January 2007 (UTC).
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005 this what your looking for? 71.220.22.34 01:23, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
I think it makes a lot more sense to say that Wikipedia was "created by" thousands of volunteers. Larry does deserve credit for his early work in Wikipedia, not as a founder, which he clearly was not, but stating it that way makes it sounds like Larry and I created the website... when the heavy lifting was done by other people, always. Particularly with respect to the core ideas that make up Wikipedia, they did not come from Larry (indeed, he stills argues against them!) but rather came mostly from people who argued with Larry... and won! ... in the early days. They should be acknowledged.-- Jimbo Wales 15:23, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
The page should have a trivia section, and one of the items in that section should be the name of the very first article on Wikipedia. If it's impossible to know what was the first, then that itself is an interesting bit of trivia. Who knows the answers? I don't. Interlingua talk email 15:31, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Is there one and where is it? I'm looking specifically for an index of editorial polls and the like. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Whoblitzell ( talk • contribs)
is this correct ? afaik the idea was about flagging content, the article says it is about flagging people.
"Wales also talked about creating "stable" or "static" pages for entries that are considered complete, to help people who want to cite them in published works. The plan being tested in Germany appears designed to root out mischief, as opposed to inaccuracies that may be harder to detect."
--source: linuxworld, first google hit after 10min of searching on wikipedias pages...-- ExpImp talk con 01:43, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
i have just registered with wikipedia and i am surprised that people are given so much freedom to edit stuff. you can edit almost every page of this website.i could go and edit the text above into rubbish and no one would care. can someone tell me what this is all about??? Electron8 21:25, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
We now have two large lists of statistics. One shows the amount of articles, and the other shows the amount of words. I have two problems with this: firstly, this causes readers to have to draw conclusions of their own. We should find some news articles that also highlight these two lists and explain more about it rather than just indiscriminately giving information and hoping that the reader will "figure it out". Secondly, why have two lists when you can have one table? I bet that there are bots that are constantly updating these lists, so perhaps some of the bots' owners could change them to put these statistics in one table? It really is not necessary to have two lists at this point. function msikma(const U, T : Float) : Float { to my page. } ; 07:08, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
On second thought, I feel that we do not need yet another list of wikis, this time sorted by number of words. It seems like it's an inaccurate way of measuring wiki size, and it also seems a bit verbose to the reader. For example, Dutch is a slightly longer language than English, since we have more words and colloquialisms to say all kinds of things. I design websites, and when I need to make a multi-language site, I always seem to notice the Dutch texts being about 1.4x as long as the English ones, which can at least partially be attributed to a different amount of words. Anyway, if anyone really, really, really liked the listing of wikis by number of words, then just revert my change, but please discuss it here as well. msikma ( user, talk) 22:00, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
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You can give the gift of knowledge by donating to the Wikimedia Foundation!
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its really shame to beg donations in top of every page —The preceding
unsigned comment was added by
202.41.72.100 (
talk)
10:35, 9 January 2007 (UTC).
Why have a Wikipedia page about Wikipedia??? It's stupid, "Hey, whats Wikipedia?" "I dunno, lets look up Wikipedia on Wikipedia." "There, thats what wikipedia is." Its stupid and a waste of space. SerpentsTail
I'm looking for precise technical informations and ressource pages about Wikipedia. I know that the content is free, but is there some sort of way to get the articles in a computer processible form? Like a giant file that has all the article contents in plain UTF-8 in it or something like that? How large would such a file be? 130.83.73.251 15:02, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Have they come up with the list of stuff/ servers they plan to buy with the donation(s) ? —The preceding
unsigned comment was added by
Kumarrrr (
talk •
contribs)
13:15, 12 January 2007 (UTC).
The Nature investigation wasn't a study, so I changed that. I did a cursory check of other "studies" and it seems one was done by a defunct website and the other wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal. This should most definitely be noted and repeatedly calling them "scientific studies" when they aren't peer reviewed is biased, since it's leaving it up to the Wikipedia editors as to whether or not it's scientific.
And of course, as stated in the todo/priority list (which hasn't seem to have been addressed yet), there's an obvious pro-Wikipedia bias in the Criticisms section. It basically attempts to debunk the minimal formal criticism listed.
Also, there is this: "However, it was also found that Wikipedia articles were generally of greater length (2.6 times as long as the Britannica equivalents, on average), and that thus its error per word ratio is lower."
This seems to have been quoted from the Wikinews article that was linked to. Who found this? If it was found by the person who wrote the Wikinews article, that's essentially original research. Wikimedia should never self-reference as a source for research. Nathan J. Yoder 07:03, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Do we know the average age of wikipedia users in en.wikipedia? Likewise for editors? Likewise for countries of provenance? Thanks. Politis 17:18, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
In a related point - I would love to see more statistics on how many average users contribute regularly. How are the number of edits split geographically and questions around that. Literature on Wikipedia is sorely lacking and Wikipedia administrators need to step up to provide more information about the "server side" of Wikipedia. varuag doos
Given that this site has been rated in the top 15 in terms of web traffic of all the websites in the world, the advertisement revenue potential for wikipedia is immense, and yet they choose not to post any ads.If the revenue would be by far enough that they would never need donations, why does the site choose not to sell ad space?is it just integrity? Rodrigue 17:43, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Im glad theres no ad's! Would you like stupid pop-ups like on every other website? -- ISeeDeadPixels 20:41, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
But seriously,it would generate alot of money,because wikipedia is one of the most popular website in the world [1],and that translates into very high advertissement rates, and besides never needing donations from people to keep the site running, the founders would really be very rich by now,but if it is about integrity, then I guess I understand why they wouldn't want all that money. Rodrigue 01:03, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
It would be really nice if they can use all the donated money to come up with some new features etc for the site. The preceding comment was added by Kumarrrr at 22:01 on 18 January 2007 (UTC), but was not signed. -- Jeff G. 22:41, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Could this be it? And if not so, what is it?
Way too many cites in this article are to wikipedia or other 'official' Wiki sites. Is this ok because of the nature of the article? It seems a bit odd to me. dreddnott 09:34, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
Surely this is just self promotion? I have seen othger articles about websites be delted as they are regarded as self-promotion. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Randomjack ( talk • contribs) 12:01, 23 January 2007 (UTC).
WillowW, it looks like you're going after point 4 of the to-do list, or something along those lines... which is great, especially as I just added it. Problem with removing subsections from the "criticism and controversy" section, though, is that they're about criticism, and responses to said criticism, and as such don't really belong elsewhere in the article. Also I'm not sure I like the look of the table-of-contents now that there are ten new sub-sections and sub-sub-sections. Perhaps it could be restructured into four or five? Any more than that and I think the article will start to get bloated again; the criticism section was too large before (it only needs to be a summary because of the much more detailed Criticism of Wikipedia, and I've spent the last couple of days trimming it down. It's still a little on the big side, but I think it's better) – Qxz 12:08, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
The Wikipedia article about Wikipedia is suffering from bias in the section about bias in Wikipedia. Figure that one out if you can – Qxz 16:10, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Guys,
Just a quick heads up, Australian national radio station Triple J at approximately 15:15 AEST, had a segment where the presenters ( Chris Taylor and Craig Reucassel) where discussing Wikipedia, in particular, how reliable it was as a reference source - they then suggested to the audience that they find the article " Wikipedia" then vandalize it. The comment was made as a joke, but you can be sure some people will act on it (this has already happened: 1 2 3 4.)
From memory, Triple J's broadcast is not heard in real-time around Australia, but rather, will be played in each time zone at 15:15 their time (eg. people in South Australia will hear it in about half an hour, Western Australia in about 1.5 hours etc) - so keep an eye out for vandalism. -- DWZ ( talk • email • contribs) 04:33, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
On the off chance that anyone was interested in why there was so much vandalism to Wikipedia from about 3:15 EST onwards, I was listening to Australia's Triple J and the radio jocks were actively encouraging people to vandalise it. - Ta bu shi da yu 08:25, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Sticking the results of that script thingy here so people can have a look at it. – Qxz 16:42, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic
javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.
{{fact}}
s.
Hi, perhaps we should agree on common principles before reverting one another.
Wikipedia is indeed an encyclopedia in the original Greek sense, since it offers instruction on an all-encompassing range of topics.
I believe that the Smellie quote is entirely appropriate, expressing in elegant wording the common frustration of all encyclopedians that their articles must be mere summaries. However, if our consensus is that it's tangential to the topic, it can of course be deleted, along with the rest of the paragraph.
The Buddhism v. Christianity article count in the Macropædia may be confirmed by counting. Its role in this paragraph is as evidence that traditional encyclopedias may give unequal coverage to equivalent topics. Any encyclopedia would do, though; if you'd care to count the articles in the World Book Encyclopedia, that's be just as good, of course.
Given that we do not know who Wikipedia's editors are, one must remain agnostic on whether they are experts or not; the data have simply not been collected, right? Therefore, the original version is less POV.
No book or person can claim to have absolute authority in scholarship. We do not live in the era of Moses, who came down from the mountain with tablets of stone engraved by the hand of God. Instead, we have imperfect authors, imperfect experiments and imperfect journal editors; every "truth" is contingent upon further data, and is established by the preponderance of evidence published in scholarly journals after critical review. A good example is the concept of aether (the medium of light) in physics, which was taken as certain (or nearly certain) in the latter half of the 19th century (see Chwolson's textbook of 1900, for example), but which was shown to be incorrect in the 20th century by experiment, after being demolished theoretically by Einstein. Even the brightest Nobel laureates can make mistakes (Linus Pauling and vitamin C — or the hree-helix structure of DNA?), and no source — not even the EB — has an intrinsic claim to the truth. The Nature study has shown the fallibility of the EB, no?
Do we agree on these principles? If not, how do we differ? I'm sure that, together, we can find a wording that satisfies your concerns for accuracy and fairness.
Hoping to reach a compromise, Willow 20:05, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi Bramlet, I've tried to address your concerns as follows. My intention with the Buddhism, etc. paragraph was not to maintain that WP was necessarily better, moerely that it need not follow the wishes of tis readers, since it didn't need to be bought; there's no need to ensure profitability, which I hope agree may introduce biases. I've added a sentence to clarify the intention.
I've also re-arranged the Smellie paragraph to state that WP cannot claim intrinsic authority as yet, since it lacks that "track record" you mention. However, I objected to your wording as being POV, almost as though you intended to cast WP in the most negative light possible.
I believe that the Nature study did establish — and the EB's editor agreed in his response — that the EB had contained errors, albeit small ones. To me, and I think to the scholarly community, those observations suggest that the EB is not perfect and that its assertions are more authoritative when they're backed up with references. However, of course it's true that the bulk of WP has a long way to go before reaching the level of EB, even if WP surpasses the EB on individual articles such as Photon or Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector.
We should maintain this discussion and not be hasty in our reversions. I vow, I'll make a sincere effort to address your concerns as best I can and, failing that, will recruit others to do what I cannot. Willow 21:13, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi Bramlet, I'm guessing that you're not a scientist, since there is a big difference between citing a person (including Nobel laureates) and citing a series of carefully controlled experiments that were carried out and independently reproduced in multiple laboratories. There have been all too many scandals in science when that protocol was not followed; a recent and illuminating example was Jan Hendrik Schön.
Re:the EB, I'm willing to admit my imperfections, but I have tried hard to be fair, as I hope that you'll admit. Likewise, you should be all the more sensitive to making the same mistake here. Our mutual goal on both sets of articles is not to demean the encyclopedias unnecessarily, but to calmly and neutrally point out both their strengths and weaknesses, without averting our gaze from either. You agree with that, right? Willow 21:49, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Re: the depth, breadth and referencing. It seems obvious from the overall growth of WP and from the growth of the WikiProjects that both the breadth and depth are increasing. The frequency of citations in increasing as well, judging from the number of citations provided on more recent featured articles compared to those promoted earlier. Are those statistics adequate?
I'm afraid that that seems POV to me. Are you willing to concede that WP might surpass the EB in at least some areas, perhaps those covered by its Featured Articles? For example, two of my FA's, Cyclol and Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector, aren't mentioned anywhere in the Britannica (check the EB index), and a third, Photon, covers its subject in much greater depth, supported by peer-reviewed citations rather than my paltry authority, than does the EB. Please don't misunderstand me; I'm not saying that WP matches the EB in most topics; on the contrary, it clearly falls short. But one shouldn't dismiss it out of hand, without providing evidence, simply because one cannot imagine that it could be reliable.
Re: the experiments, I merely wished to point out that the experimental data is what determines the prevailing model in science, not the authority of anyone. Even to use authority as an argument in science is considered to be a logical fallacy with formal name, ad vericundiam, if I recall correctly. Willow 22:39, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
As an outsider, I would agree that WP suffers from big problems. However, it is a very new enterprise, and EB is building on decades of effort and refinement. WP is still settling on rules and principles to organize itself. If you compare almost any article on WP with the version from 1 or 2 years ago, the improvements are manifestly obvious. WP often starts out with the bias of its initial editor in an article, and this slowly but inexorably changes in many cases. For example, a couple of years ago there was almost no Hindu content on WP. Now there is a tremendous volume. If you want to get an idea of what it is like, try writing an article on any aspect of Hinduism and see what response it engenders. You will be stunned, if you did not realize this before. The one Hindu article I attempted was met with a storm of "helping" hands, so that I was already archiving the talk page discussions after only a day or two. The volume of Hindu editors is phenomenal, and doing nothing but increasing. I suspect in 2 years Christianity will be dwarfed by articles on Hinduism. Chinese topics are more limited than they otherwise might be because of Chinese government restrictions on WP; if this was lifted, I suspect that Chinese articles would also be benefitting tremendously. If we waited for 100 years or so, and then compared EB and WP, how would they compare? I suspect that long before that, EB will incorporate some parts of the WP model into its development.
Advantages of WP model:
Disadvantages of WP model:
Anyway as bad as WP is (and anyone who has been on here for any length of time will admit it has problems in places), this is really a bit premature since the model is still evolving and adapting. And WP itself is changing drastically.-- Filll 21:42, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
I have removed some material, and may remove some more, that is simply speculation about the nature of the project, encyclopedias, or whatever. This is an encyclopedic article; it cannot contain original research. Saying that "Wikipedia may be such-and-such" does just this. If we can find an independent reliable source that says, "I think Wikipedia is such-and-such" then we can say "Some consider Wikipedia to be such-and-such" and cite that. That is all we can do. The only other thing we can do is state simple facts that aren't open to doubt — even then, they still need to be backed up by references, for example "Wikipedia has over 1.5 million articles", with a reference to an appropriate project page. This is one of our most important policies and one of our most important articles, so it's essential that we get this right – Qxz 22:40, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Just to state that more plainly, you cannot say "Statistics show that this-and-that" or "It is possible that this-and-that", unless somewhere on that line or in a footnote there you can point to the statistics in question, or a person who has says this-and-that. Without that, you simply cannot say it. (And when I say "point to the statistics in question", I don't mean suggest that the reader go and compile the statistics themselves, and see that they work out. Someone must have done this, and the results must be accessible, somewhere, as with any other source – Qxz 22:43, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
A good standard of fairness for this article seems to me the "NPR test". Can National Public Radio talk about itself with objectivity? If so, does it have to say only negative things about itself? My answers would be "yes" and "no", but others might think differently.
For this reason, I think it's fair to state that some people find it admirable that anonymous Wikipedians labor for no tangible reward. if I can find a reference, may I re-introduce that? I'd also like to include the Middlemarch quote, which expresses the sentiment better than we can, although I would defer to well-justified counter-arguments. Thanks! Willow 04:11, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Could be interesting don't cha think? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tonich03 ( talk • contribs) 17:55, 29 January 2007 (UTC).
Can someone add a section telling how the development of Wikipedia will usher in the end of days, personified by the Antichrist? Thanx. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.26.101.71 ( talk • contribs) at 20:16 on 30 January 2007 (UTC)
I originally was going to post this in the thread above, but with the advent of the ACID collaboration I thought I'd give it its own header. Can I issue a general plea for editors of this article to be very careful to avoid taking wiki-political positions in the text? I didn't go through who added what or when, and I don't intend to criticize the original writers (none of these are unreasonable on their face), but it's very easy to mistake one's own firm opinions for facts: here's just a couple of examples from the time of this post:
Opabinia regalis 06:30, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Chris' post below about "meta-commentary" might make the point better, but it was the first example above that made me think in 'wiki-political' terms. Even if it wasn't written as one, the contention that citations are required for verifiability purposes is an internal political position and aspects of it are often disputed (to what extent we should recognize a distinction between verifiable and verified, whether and to what extent common-knowledge facts should be cited and how, whether newly created and unreferenced but plausibly verifiable articles should be deleted, yadda yadda yadda). For the purposes of this article, statements of policy should probably be limited to what's in the "nutshells" to avoid the possibility of reflecting individual editors' interpretations. Also, more on related topics below (eventually). Opabinia regalis 04:18, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
OK, who just unprotected the page? Is this some kind of joke... unprotecting our second most popular page just because "more pairs of eyes" will be looking at it? It's heavily watched all the time — and still suffers from vandalism despite being semi-protected. Trust me, the presence of the ACID people isn't going to make much difference – Qxz 08:27, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 5 | ← | Archive 10 | Archive 11 | Archive 12 | Archive 13 | Archive 14 | Archive 15 |
Trying as hard as I could, I see no pages for the wikipedia/media budget for 2006 or for 2007. Could someone point me in the right direction or include it in the article? Thanks so much ! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.240.20.149 ( talk) 07:45, 3 January 2007 (UTC).
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005 this what your looking for? 71.220.22.34 01:23, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
I think it makes a lot more sense to say that Wikipedia was "created by" thousands of volunteers. Larry does deserve credit for his early work in Wikipedia, not as a founder, which he clearly was not, but stating it that way makes it sounds like Larry and I created the website... when the heavy lifting was done by other people, always. Particularly with respect to the core ideas that make up Wikipedia, they did not come from Larry (indeed, he stills argues against them!) but rather came mostly from people who argued with Larry... and won! ... in the early days. They should be acknowledged.-- Jimbo Wales 15:23, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
The page should have a trivia section, and one of the items in that section should be the name of the very first article on Wikipedia. If it's impossible to know what was the first, then that itself is an interesting bit of trivia. Who knows the answers? I don't. Interlingua talk email 15:31, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Is there one and where is it? I'm looking specifically for an index of editorial polls and the like. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Whoblitzell ( talk • contribs)
is this correct ? afaik the idea was about flagging content, the article says it is about flagging people.
"Wales also talked about creating "stable" or "static" pages for entries that are considered complete, to help people who want to cite them in published works. The plan being tested in Germany appears designed to root out mischief, as opposed to inaccuracies that may be harder to detect."
--source: linuxworld, first google hit after 10min of searching on wikipedias pages...-- ExpImp talk con 01:43, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
i have just registered with wikipedia and i am surprised that people are given so much freedom to edit stuff. you can edit almost every page of this website.i could go and edit the text above into rubbish and no one would care. can someone tell me what this is all about??? Electron8 21:25, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
We now have two large lists of statistics. One shows the amount of articles, and the other shows the amount of words. I have two problems with this: firstly, this causes readers to have to draw conclusions of their own. We should find some news articles that also highlight these two lists and explain more about it rather than just indiscriminately giving information and hoping that the reader will "figure it out". Secondly, why have two lists when you can have one table? I bet that there are bots that are constantly updating these lists, so perhaps some of the bots' owners could change them to put these statistics in one table? It really is not necessary to have two lists at this point. function msikma(const U, T : Float) : Float { to my page. } ; 07:08, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
On second thought, I feel that we do not need yet another list of wikis, this time sorted by number of words. It seems like it's an inaccurate way of measuring wiki size, and it also seems a bit verbose to the reader. For example, Dutch is a slightly longer language than English, since we have more words and colloquialisms to say all kinds of things. I design websites, and when I need to make a multi-language site, I always seem to notice the Dutch texts being about 1.4x as long as the English ones, which can at least partially be attributed to a different amount of words. Anyway, if anyone really, really, really liked the listing of wikis by number of words, then just revert my change, but please discuss it here as well. msikma ( user, talk) 22:00, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
remove or set aside that banner:
You can give the gift of knowledge by donating to the Wikimedia Foundation!
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its really shame to beg donations in top of every page —The preceding
unsigned comment was added by
202.41.72.100 (
talk)
10:35, 9 January 2007 (UTC).
Why have a Wikipedia page about Wikipedia??? It's stupid, "Hey, whats Wikipedia?" "I dunno, lets look up Wikipedia on Wikipedia." "There, thats what wikipedia is." Its stupid and a waste of space. SerpentsTail
I'm looking for precise technical informations and ressource pages about Wikipedia. I know that the content is free, but is there some sort of way to get the articles in a computer processible form? Like a giant file that has all the article contents in plain UTF-8 in it or something like that? How large would such a file be? 130.83.73.251 15:02, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Have they come up with the list of stuff/ servers they plan to buy with the donation(s) ? —The preceding
unsigned comment was added by
Kumarrrr (
talk •
contribs)
13:15, 12 January 2007 (UTC).
The Nature investigation wasn't a study, so I changed that. I did a cursory check of other "studies" and it seems one was done by a defunct website and the other wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal. This should most definitely be noted and repeatedly calling them "scientific studies" when they aren't peer reviewed is biased, since it's leaving it up to the Wikipedia editors as to whether or not it's scientific.
And of course, as stated in the todo/priority list (which hasn't seem to have been addressed yet), there's an obvious pro-Wikipedia bias in the Criticisms section. It basically attempts to debunk the minimal formal criticism listed.
Also, there is this: "However, it was also found that Wikipedia articles were generally of greater length (2.6 times as long as the Britannica equivalents, on average), and that thus its error per word ratio is lower."
This seems to have been quoted from the Wikinews article that was linked to. Who found this? If it was found by the person who wrote the Wikinews article, that's essentially original research. Wikimedia should never self-reference as a source for research. Nathan J. Yoder 07:03, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Do we know the average age of wikipedia users in en.wikipedia? Likewise for editors? Likewise for countries of provenance? Thanks. Politis 17:18, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
In a related point - I would love to see more statistics on how many average users contribute regularly. How are the number of edits split geographically and questions around that. Literature on Wikipedia is sorely lacking and Wikipedia administrators need to step up to provide more information about the "server side" of Wikipedia. varuag doos
Given that this site has been rated in the top 15 in terms of web traffic of all the websites in the world, the advertisement revenue potential for wikipedia is immense, and yet they choose not to post any ads.If the revenue would be by far enough that they would never need donations, why does the site choose not to sell ad space?is it just integrity? Rodrigue 17:43, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Im glad theres no ad's! Would you like stupid pop-ups like on every other website? -- ISeeDeadPixels 20:41, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
But seriously,it would generate alot of money,because wikipedia is one of the most popular website in the world [1],and that translates into very high advertissement rates, and besides never needing donations from people to keep the site running, the founders would really be very rich by now,but if it is about integrity, then I guess I understand why they wouldn't want all that money. Rodrigue 01:03, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
It would be really nice if they can use all the donated money to come up with some new features etc for the site. The preceding comment was added by Kumarrrr at 22:01 on 18 January 2007 (UTC), but was not signed. -- Jeff G. 22:41, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Could this be it? And if not so, what is it?
Way too many cites in this article are to wikipedia or other 'official' Wiki sites. Is this ok because of the nature of the article? It seems a bit odd to me. dreddnott 09:34, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
Surely this is just self promotion? I have seen othger articles about websites be delted as they are regarded as self-promotion. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Randomjack ( talk • contribs) 12:01, 23 January 2007 (UTC).
WillowW, it looks like you're going after point 4 of the to-do list, or something along those lines... which is great, especially as I just added it. Problem with removing subsections from the "criticism and controversy" section, though, is that they're about criticism, and responses to said criticism, and as such don't really belong elsewhere in the article. Also I'm not sure I like the look of the table-of-contents now that there are ten new sub-sections and sub-sub-sections. Perhaps it could be restructured into four or five? Any more than that and I think the article will start to get bloated again; the criticism section was too large before (it only needs to be a summary because of the much more detailed Criticism of Wikipedia, and I've spent the last couple of days trimming it down. It's still a little on the big side, but I think it's better) – Qxz 12:08, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
The Wikipedia article about Wikipedia is suffering from bias in the section about bias in Wikipedia. Figure that one out if you can – Qxz 16:10, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Guys,
Just a quick heads up, Australian national radio station Triple J at approximately 15:15 AEST, had a segment where the presenters ( Chris Taylor and Craig Reucassel) where discussing Wikipedia, in particular, how reliable it was as a reference source - they then suggested to the audience that they find the article " Wikipedia" then vandalize it. The comment was made as a joke, but you can be sure some people will act on it (this has already happened: 1 2 3 4.)
From memory, Triple J's broadcast is not heard in real-time around Australia, but rather, will be played in each time zone at 15:15 their time (eg. people in South Australia will hear it in about half an hour, Western Australia in about 1.5 hours etc) - so keep an eye out for vandalism. -- DWZ ( talk • email • contribs) 04:33, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
On the off chance that anyone was interested in why there was so much vandalism to Wikipedia from about 3:15 EST onwards, I was listening to Australia's Triple J and the radio jocks were actively encouraging people to vandalise it. - Ta bu shi da yu 08:25, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Sticking the results of that script thingy here so people can have a look at it. – Qxz 16:42, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic
javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.
{{fact}}
s.
Hi, perhaps we should agree on common principles before reverting one another.
Wikipedia is indeed an encyclopedia in the original Greek sense, since it offers instruction on an all-encompassing range of topics.
I believe that the Smellie quote is entirely appropriate, expressing in elegant wording the common frustration of all encyclopedians that their articles must be mere summaries. However, if our consensus is that it's tangential to the topic, it can of course be deleted, along with the rest of the paragraph.
The Buddhism v. Christianity article count in the Macropædia may be confirmed by counting. Its role in this paragraph is as evidence that traditional encyclopedias may give unequal coverage to equivalent topics. Any encyclopedia would do, though; if you'd care to count the articles in the World Book Encyclopedia, that's be just as good, of course.
Given that we do not know who Wikipedia's editors are, one must remain agnostic on whether they are experts or not; the data have simply not been collected, right? Therefore, the original version is less POV.
No book or person can claim to have absolute authority in scholarship. We do not live in the era of Moses, who came down from the mountain with tablets of stone engraved by the hand of God. Instead, we have imperfect authors, imperfect experiments and imperfect journal editors; every "truth" is contingent upon further data, and is established by the preponderance of evidence published in scholarly journals after critical review. A good example is the concept of aether (the medium of light) in physics, which was taken as certain (or nearly certain) in the latter half of the 19th century (see Chwolson's textbook of 1900, for example), but which was shown to be incorrect in the 20th century by experiment, after being demolished theoretically by Einstein. Even the brightest Nobel laureates can make mistakes (Linus Pauling and vitamin C — or the hree-helix structure of DNA?), and no source — not even the EB — has an intrinsic claim to the truth. The Nature study has shown the fallibility of the EB, no?
Do we agree on these principles? If not, how do we differ? I'm sure that, together, we can find a wording that satisfies your concerns for accuracy and fairness.
Hoping to reach a compromise, Willow 20:05, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi Bramlet, I've tried to address your concerns as follows. My intention with the Buddhism, etc. paragraph was not to maintain that WP was necessarily better, moerely that it need not follow the wishes of tis readers, since it didn't need to be bought; there's no need to ensure profitability, which I hope agree may introduce biases. I've added a sentence to clarify the intention.
I've also re-arranged the Smellie paragraph to state that WP cannot claim intrinsic authority as yet, since it lacks that "track record" you mention. However, I objected to your wording as being POV, almost as though you intended to cast WP in the most negative light possible.
I believe that the Nature study did establish — and the EB's editor agreed in his response — that the EB had contained errors, albeit small ones. To me, and I think to the scholarly community, those observations suggest that the EB is not perfect and that its assertions are more authoritative when they're backed up with references. However, of course it's true that the bulk of WP has a long way to go before reaching the level of EB, even if WP surpasses the EB on individual articles such as Photon or Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector.
We should maintain this discussion and not be hasty in our reversions. I vow, I'll make a sincere effort to address your concerns as best I can and, failing that, will recruit others to do what I cannot. Willow 21:13, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi Bramlet, I'm guessing that you're not a scientist, since there is a big difference between citing a person (including Nobel laureates) and citing a series of carefully controlled experiments that were carried out and independently reproduced in multiple laboratories. There have been all too many scandals in science when that protocol was not followed; a recent and illuminating example was Jan Hendrik Schön.
Re:the EB, I'm willing to admit my imperfections, but I have tried hard to be fair, as I hope that you'll admit. Likewise, you should be all the more sensitive to making the same mistake here. Our mutual goal on both sets of articles is not to demean the encyclopedias unnecessarily, but to calmly and neutrally point out both their strengths and weaknesses, without averting our gaze from either. You agree with that, right? Willow 21:49, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Re: the depth, breadth and referencing. It seems obvious from the overall growth of WP and from the growth of the WikiProjects that both the breadth and depth are increasing. The frequency of citations in increasing as well, judging from the number of citations provided on more recent featured articles compared to those promoted earlier. Are those statistics adequate?
I'm afraid that that seems POV to me. Are you willing to concede that WP might surpass the EB in at least some areas, perhaps those covered by its Featured Articles? For example, two of my FA's, Cyclol and Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector, aren't mentioned anywhere in the Britannica (check the EB index), and a third, Photon, covers its subject in much greater depth, supported by peer-reviewed citations rather than my paltry authority, than does the EB. Please don't misunderstand me; I'm not saying that WP matches the EB in most topics; on the contrary, it clearly falls short. But one shouldn't dismiss it out of hand, without providing evidence, simply because one cannot imagine that it could be reliable.
Re: the experiments, I merely wished to point out that the experimental data is what determines the prevailing model in science, not the authority of anyone. Even to use authority as an argument in science is considered to be a logical fallacy with formal name, ad vericundiam, if I recall correctly. Willow 22:39, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
As an outsider, I would agree that WP suffers from big problems. However, it is a very new enterprise, and EB is building on decades of effort and refinement. WP is still settling on rules and principles to organize itself. If you compare almost any article on WP with the version from 1 or 2 years ago, the improvements are manifestly obvious. WP often starts out with the bias of its initial editor in an article, and this slowly but inexorably changes in many cases. For example, a couple of years ago there was almost no Hindu content on WP. Now there is a tremendous volume. If you want to get an idea of what it is like, try writing an article on any aspect of Hinduism and see what response it engenders. You will be stunned, if you did not realize this before. The one Hindu article I attempted was met with a storm of "helping" hands, so that I was already archiving the talk page discussions after only a day or two. The volume of Hindu editors is phenomenal, and doing nothing but increasing. I suspect in 2 years Christianity will be dwarfed by articles on Hinduism. Chinese topics are more limited than they otherwise might be because of Chinese government restrictions on WP; if this was lifted, I suspect that Chinese articles would also be benefitting tremendously. If we waited for 100 years or so, and then compared EB and WP, how would they compare? I suspect that long before that, EB will incorporate some parts of the WP model into its development.
Advantages of WP model:
Disadvantages of WP model:
Anyway as bad as WP is (and anyone who has been on here for any length of time will admit it has problems in places), this is really a bit premature since the model is still evolving and adapting. And WP itself is changing drastically.-- Filll 21:42, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
I have removed some material, and may remove some more, that is simply speculation about the nature of the project, encyclopedias, or whatever. This is an encyclopedic article; it cannot contain original research. Saying that "Wikipedia may be such-and-such" does just this. If we can find an independent reliable source that says, "I think Wikipedia is such-and-such" then we can say "Some consider Wikipedia to be such-and-such" and cite that. That is all we can do. The only other thing we can do is state simple facts that aren't open to doubt — even then, they still need to be backed up by references, for example "Wikipedia has over 1.5 million articles", with a reference to an appropriate project page. This is one of our most important policies and one of our most important articles, so it's essential that we get this right – Qxz 22:40, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Just to state that more plainly, you cannot say "Statistics show that this-and-that" or "It is possible that this-and-that", unless somewhere on that line or in a footnote there you can point to the statistics in question, or a person who has says this-and-that. Without that, you simply cannot say it. (And when I say "point to the statistics in question", I don't mean suggest that the reader go and compile the statistics themselves, and see that they work out. Someone must have done this, and the results must be accessible, somewhere, as with any other source – Qxz 22:43, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
A good standard of fairness for this article seems to me the "NPR test". Can National Public Radio talk about itself with objectivity? If so, does it have to say only negative things about itself? My answers would be "yes" and "no", but others might think differently.
For this reason, I think it's fair to state that some people find it admirable that anonymous Wikipedians labor for no tangible reward. if I can find a reference, may I re-introduce that? I'd also like to include the Middlemarch quote, which expresses the sentiment better than we can, although I would defer to well-justified counter-arguments. Thanks! Willow 04:11, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Could be interesting don't cha think? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tonich03 ( talk • contribs) 17:55, 29 January 2007 (UTC).
Can someone add a section telling how the development of Wikipedia will usher in the end of days, personified by the Antichrist? Thanx. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.26.101.71 ( talk • contribs) at 20:16 on 30 January 2007 (UTC)
I originally was going to post this in the thread above, but with the advent of the ACID collaboration I thought I'd give it its own header. Can I issue a general plea for editors of this article to be very careful to avoid taking wiki-political positions in the text? I didn't go through who added what or when, and I don't intend to criticize the original writers (none of these are unreasonable on their face), but it's very easy to mistake one's own firm opinions for facts: here's just a couple of examples from the time of this post:
Opabinia regalis 06:30, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Chris' post below about "meta-commentary" might make the point better, but it was the first example above that made me think in 'wiki-political' terms. Even if it wasn't written as one, the contention that citations are required for verifiability purposes is an internal political position and aspects of it are often disputed (to what extent we should recognize a distinction between verifiable and verified, whether and to what extent common-knowledge facts should be cited and how, whether newly created and unreferenced but plausibly verifiable articles should be deleted, yadda yadda yadda). For the purposes of this article, statements of policy should probably be limited to what's in the "nutshells" to avoid the possibility of reflecting individual editors' interpretations. Also, more on related topics below (eventually). Opabinia regalis 04:18, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
OK, who just unprotected the page? Is this some kind of joke... unprotecting our second most popular page just because "more pairs of eyes" will be looking at it? It's heavily watched all the time — and still suffers from vandalism despite being semi-protected. Trust me, the presence of the ACID people isn't going to make much difference – Qxz 08:27, 31 January 2007 (UTC)