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Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

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598 points leotravis10 | 8 comments | 04 Sep 25 15:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.049s | source | bottom
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bawolff ◴[04 Sep 25 16:49 UTC] No.45129304[source]▶
There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet.

And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.

But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.

The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.

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mdp2021 ◴[04 Sep 25 17:07 UTC] No.45129539[source]▶
It's a miracle that the model of voluntary contribution from random agents and imperfect overview partially worked.

The science that could emerge by studying the phenomenon could constitute a milestone.

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1. e3bc54b2 ◴[04 Sep 25 18:16 UTC] No.45130399[source]▶
The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.
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2. IAmBroom ◴[04 Sep 25 18:26 UTC] No.45130531[source]▶
Clever. I had to read that repeatedly to get it.

Cf: The difference between theory and practice is: "Practice works, in theory."

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3. alpaca128 ◴[04 Sep 25 20:16 UTC] No.45131764[source]▶
I heard it as "in theory, theory and practice are the same"
replies(1): >>45134237 #
4. Kim_Bruning ◴[04 Sep 25 21:26 UTC] No.45132399[source]▶
Uh.. <raises hand> I might be one of the few people who actually knows a bunch of the theory on why wikipedia works (properly). I had to do a bunch of research while working on wikipedia mediation and policies stuff, a long time ago.

I never got around to writing it all out though. Bits of it can be found in old policy discussions on bold-reverse-discuss, consensus, and etc.

I guess the first thing to realize is that wikipedia is split into a lot of pages, and n_editors for most pages in the long tail is very very low, so most definitely below n_dunbar[]; and really can be edited almost the same way wikipeida used to be back in 2002. At the same time a small number of pages above n_dunbar get the most attention and are the most messy to deal with.

Aaron Swartz actually did a bunch of research into some of the base statistics too, and he DID publish stuff online... let me look that up...

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/

and especially * http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (note I'm using lossely in empirical sense, where an online page might have a much lower actual limit than 150)

5. SlowTao ◴[04 Sep 25 21:27 UTC] No.45132404[source]▶
I have heard the same thing from Grid based electrical engineers. The grids fails in theory but works in practice.
6. Izkata ◴[05 Sep 25 01:42 UTC] No.45134237{3}[source]▶
I've heard that style too, with the addendum "in practice, not".
7. knowitnone2 ◴[05 Sep 25 03:30 UTC] No.45134751[source]▶
Same with Communism. It works in practice, in theory, it can never work. /s
8. gnerd00 ◴[05 Sep 25 03:44 UTC] No.45134803[source]▶
"In theory, theory is ninety percent of practice; in practice, theory is ten percent of practice"