💾 Archived View for dioskouroi.xyz › thread › 29416207 captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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The article asks Wales: "Worried about the accuracy of Wiki?"
His reply: "We make it as good as we possibly can, but we know it isn’t perfect. On the other hand, it’s pretty good."
Well, people need to understand that the Wikimedia Foundation – which Jimmy Wales founded and still is a board member of today – is a _platform provider_, just like YouTube or Twitter. As such, they don't really impact the quality of the content directly. That is all done by unpaid volunteers.
By the way, there was a thread on the Wikimedia Foundation's wealth and the Wikipedia fundraising banners yesterday. (I think it's safe to assume that this homely WSJ piece coming out on the same day the fundraising banners went up on Wikipedia wasn't entirely a coincidence.)
See
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402716
and
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
for more Wikipedia financial info.
Just yesterday, someone posted on Twitter:
"I'm never sure when is a good time to share that I made up a person on Wikipedia sixteen years ago and he is still there"
https://twitter.com/aobate/status/1466101687773503493
The biography still exists today (though probably not for much longer, so here is an archive link as well):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Farrow
It reads:
---o0o---
Dr. William Henry Farrow (20 June 1805? – 17 November 1876) was a physician born and trained in England. Farrow practiced in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario. He is most notable for providing one of the first detailed descriptions of synesthesia.[1] Farrow reported the details of the illness, (in this case temporary) in an article published in the Lower Canada Journal of Medicine.[2]
Footnotes
1. New, Chester (1929). Lord Durham. Oxford University Press. pp. 374–376.
2. "An Analysis of Confusion Occurring between the Senses". The Lower Canada Journal of Medicine. The Medical Society of Lower Canada. 12: 56–62. September 1838.
---o0o---
It's always worth remembering that Wikipedia has _different sorts_ of quality problems from conventional encyclopedias.
Its quality control system, for example, is not systematic or methodical, but completely haphazard, because everything is done by volunteers. And volunteers volunteer for what they _feel_ like doing.
Here's a few more historical "quality issues":
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...
Also: "The greatest movie that never was"
https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/wikipedia-hoax-yuri-gadyuk...
A one-room schoolhouse--what a concept. I leave this essay here, on a low-comment HN thread, a similar method by which I found it several years ago on another post about older schooling methods:
https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
"From the start in 2001, I envisioned Wikipedia as a company with just one employee who did coding. The rest would be handled by those who volunteered to write and edit entries and monitor them."
A lot of poetic licence here, given that Wikipedia was Larry Sanger's idea and the Wikimedia Foundation was not established until 2003 ... and today has over 500 paid staff.
Thanks for the link.
So was I. So what?