←back to thread

Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

(www.theverge.com)
598 points leotravis10 | 1 comments | 04 Sep 25 15:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.265s | source
Show context
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.

replies(28): >>45129452 #>>45129539 #>>45130082 #>>45130452 #>>45130510 #>>45130655 #>>45130889 #>>45131753 #>>45132388 #>>45133857 #>>45134041 #>>45134322 #>>45134802 #>>45135047 #>>45135272 #>>45135426 #>>45135634 #>>45135865 #>>45135925 #>>45136197 #>>45136339 #>>45136658 #>>45137707 #>>45139242 #>>45140012 #>>45140417 #>>45140938 #>>45148201 #
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.

replies(4): >>45129902 #>>45130002 #>>45130399 #>>45131390 #
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.
replies(3): >>45130531 #>>45132399 #>>45134751 #
1. 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)