Wikipediocracy

Ismail

WIkipedia is used so much because it is free and can be looked at anywhere with access to the internet, not because believe it is accurate. I'm reminded of a remark by a critic back in 2006, "Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really care about the quality of your food,...

Ismail

The reason I quoted from that particular review so extensively is to illustrate the approach Kaalakaa takes. When you look at his edits you see that when he removes information (usually with the justification that the sources are too old or biased) it is almost always information that puts Muhammad...

Ismail

One of the reasons this rewrite was apparently desperately necessary is that newer sources should be used because as Kaalakaa keeps reminding us WP:AGEMATTERS. Of these newer sources three seem to be particularly deserving of taking center stage. The first is "Rodinson 2021". It doesn't get much mo...

Ismail

I'not sure I would describe Jobst as an expert on this topic. He is a YouTuber who primarily creates videos about video game world records. However, his attempt to get to the bottom of this issue was thorough, and he did interview an actual expert who has written a book about typing world records (...

Ismail

One of the terms associated with encyclopedias is "reference work." If I pick up a print encyclopedia and read its article on, say, Joseph Stalin, I can mention that article's contents to others and they can read it themselves. Obviously there's the downside that the content can be outdated, but the...

Ismail

I'm unsure if any "reliable sources" (other than propaganda produced by the CCP) say Mao was not terrible. Wikipedia acknowledges the Armenian Genocide, treating the Turkish government's denials as historical whitewashing. Philip Short's Mao: The Man Who Made China and Ross Terrill's Mao: A Biograp...

Ismail

I know this thread hasn't been replied to in two months, but I actually remember looking at the front page of Wikinews years ago and finding its front page content... a bit peculiar: https://i.imgur.com/4er9Bik.jpg I don't know how usual that sort of stuff was or is, but on July 24, 2012 in real lif...

Ismail

I'd add that the sentence shouldn't have been in the article whether his work was superseded or not. "His editions will remain for some time to come the standard Masoretic text" implies he died rather recently, which was the case in 1901 but not over a hundred years later. So not only was the result...

Ismail

I've written two long articles on Wikipedia concerning subjects whose online coverage is pretty much nil. I'd say I "created content" in the sense of bringing together all sorts of sources that hitherto haven't been brought together, doing so without engaging in "original research" or "synthesis." M...

Ismail

Poetlister wrote:
sparkzilla wrote:There is actually a Scots Wikipedia, which is one of the most embarrassing things I have ever seen.
Yes, it's totally a bad joke. No true Scotsman speaks like that.

Could be stranger: http://ang.wikipedia.org/

Ismail

I recall looking at old ideology-tinged debates on archived talk pages and occasionally being amused by the comments on them. Like this: "I'm sure the Sandinistas would be overjoyed to know that a guy with a devotional picture of Ronald Reagan illustrating his homepage will be writing their Wikipedi...

Ismail

PetersV, who one can find in the archives, was/is an example of an editor who can't seem to keep his own politics out of articles: "I trust you are referring to individuals such as Antyufeyev and his Baltic OMON thugs imported by Viktors Alksnis—who in no way represent the hopes and aspirations of T...

Ismail

There's always this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... y_incident

Ismail

What encyclopedias generally did when they came across an ongoing controversial event that had just emerged shortly before said encyclopedias were to be published and printed was to either not mention it (particularly if it concerns a person) or give it a brief mention at the end of an article (e.g....

Ismail

I think that there's the image Wikipedia likes to project about itself, and the reality. The image is everyone working together in harmony: professors, students, those with a niche interest in a subject, and those who just want to "help out." They all discuss what is to be done on an article's talk ...

Ismail

I'm not a fan of the new font since it feels "wider" to me, on my monitor.

Then again 95% of web redesigns in my experience tend to be worse than what they replaced.

Ismail

Not a "bad article", just a very pointless one: Department Of Peace . [...] Appears to be one of those articles that WPers want because it suits their political interests, not because it's a "useful item" to anyone else. If Dennis Kucinich had not brought this idea up in 2001 and kept it alive in C...

Ismail

I think the "liberal-conservative" thing only applies to US politics and subjects connected to them, like the pages on abortion, homosexuality, evolution, etc. Articles on Cold War subjects tend to have conservatives duking it out with leftists, while liberals occupy a middle position. Articles on M...

Ismail

"Sowell had initially chosen Columbia University to study under George Stigler (who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Economics). When he learned that Stigler had moved to the University of Chicago..." with "Brady McGarry" on the second mention of Stigler's name. What's interesting is that the...

Ismail

I was reading the Thomas Sowell article and came across the following sentence: "Sowell, whose autobiography describes his serious study of Brady McGarry, opposes Marxism, providing a critique in his book Marxism: Philosophy and Economics ." I proceeded to search for this "Brady McGarry" online and ...

Ismail

One interesting thing about focusing on an article like this is how it usually draws one or two of WP's kooks or activists out of the woodwork and exposes them to the light of day. I bet there are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles or topic areas like this that are currently owned by one or tw...

Ismail

Speaking of Facebook... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24608499 The idea of Facebook issuing a blanket ban had, however, concerned some freedom-of-speech campaigners who had suggested it was the responsibility of parents - not the company - to protect children on the internet. However, the Fre...

Ismail

I'd imagine a big problem with Wikipedias in non-democratic countries is that the people editing the political and history articles would either have to be pro-regime or those living in exile and thus almost certainly hateful of the regime. There doesn't seem to be a lot of room to maneuver in place...

Ismail

I'm aware that there's little incentive to make featured articles on famous subjects, it ties in to one of the major flaws of Wikipedia, namely that anyone can edit it and thus one must be constantly on the lookout in order to maintain the "purity" of the article they boosted to featured status, jus...

Ismail

The subject of the article seems more worthy of a "did you know" mention than featured article status, though. A lot of "featured articles" are on niche subjects that someone fixated could easily write about and which usually don't require a whole lot of detail to cover. A better idea would have bee...

Ismail

Today's featured article Le Quang Tung is interesting for other reasons. It doesn't strike me as particularly good, but will leave that alone. If you look at the edit history you will see there were six edits between January and October 15. Since it went on the main page there have been 21 edits, a...

Ismail

I think it's interesting that there's more fuss about what images an article has than the actual text of the article. Any "inroads of theocracy" would be contained in how Muhammad's life and religious views are described, not if the article has or does not have a European portrayal of him in Hell or...

Ismail

I just noticed that the forum was SA. Something Awful is not a great place to hang out, let alone someone with a fragile mental state. The FYAD portion isn't, but the rest of SA is basically a normal Internet forum. Wikipedia is partly a hacker / troll playground, cleverly disguised to look like an...

Ismail

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Stepchildren Normal encyclopedia: "This episode had an interracial kiss, the first Americans cared about, and thus represented a notable step in eroding racist taboos on TV." Wikipedia: The episode features a kiss between James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Lt....

Ismail

It's always interesting how people like this can't seem to understand why their actions are wrong. For instance: The reason for my arrest was somewhat unrelated to this. It involved a burnt CD which contained heterosexual porn which some teenage boys who had been in my apartment asserted that they h...

Ismail

Wikipedia is useful for fast answers to the mundane questions of daily life: "What year did Adam West Batman debut?" "What was the population of Los Angeles in 1900?" "What other movies was she in?" It is also, frequently but not always, a decent first stop for further investigation: short history ...

Ismail

I think the reason Christian Science gets attacked like this on Wikipedia is because of the common view that they let children die from diseases and illnesses that were difficult to treat 100 years ago but are no danger to anyone getting an antibiotic today, on the basis that taking antibiotics and ...

Ismail

Wait. So... you think that people support diacritics because ... they're "anti-Americun!". Really? And you were just accusing others of making "sweeping generalizations"? Are you freakin' serious? Actually, don't even bother answering that. It's just too stupid to be true. Tarc once argued that peo...

Ismail

We are all Albanians because of Wikipedia.

... or something like that.

Ismail

But the whole world reads Wikipedia. The decisions admins make affect the real lives of hundreds of millions of people. As a class, they're quite powerful. Are you seriously telling me that they should wield that much power without bearing any personal responsibility for it? This. Wikipediocracy is...

Ismail

Of course, the Russian Wiki would do the converse thing. I don't think the Soviets would allow for a Russian Wiki, they'd already have the (far superior) Great Soviet Encyclopedia and would have little interest in "encyclopedias" anyone could edit, both for professional and political reasons. :D Co...

Ismail

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_records#Articles List of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition monsters is currently the largest article on Wikipedia. How does that stand up to George Washington and Optimus Prime? Somebody needs to add a measly 4k bytes to that article to put it ...

Ismail

This is simple identity politics. Sub-groups want to "claim" famous people to give their movement more recognizability and a sense of legitimacy. "Hey look at Sally Ride and what she accomplished as a gay astronaut!" This is a particularly pitched battle fought in the Jewish BLPs, determining how p...

Ismail

The big problem is that there's basically reliable sources, it's just opinions and on-the-ground reports by various people. This is just one of many cases where time is needed, academic analyses and books published, etc. before any serious article can be made.

Ismail

The problem is that crowdsourcing assumes you have volunteers, and that volunteers will naturally work in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. The sad fact is that people rarely do things for free, and in a disinterested way. Reminds me of an old WikiWatch quote: This is the big problem with pur...

Ismail

I don't see what's wrong with calling a country by its official name What's the official name of a bilingual country, smartass? Assuming this is a serious question just for fun, whatever the government decides is its official name to be used in international affairs, like every other government. If...

Ismail

I'm pretty sure the BBC called Kampuchea "Cambodia" in 1976-1989 as well. It's a news network, that tends to happen because most English-speaking people would identify more with the former name. Yet in more "academic" settings (i.e. in encyclopedias) there was no hesitation in calling it Kampuchea. ...

Ismail

If people refer to Ivory Coast (as most people do), then that's how it's referred to in the English language. I guess the opinion of established authorities doesn't count, if Joe Schmoe calls it "Ivory Coast" then that's clearly what it is, much like the USSR was "Russia" and Kampuchea was "Cambodi...

Ismail

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Epirus_Liberation_Front The article is focused on the WWII-era group. Albania's Captives (a reference to Greeks in Albania) by Pyrrhus J. Ruches is given in every single case a claim is made except for a mention of James Petiffer whose only value here is noting ...

Ismail

So in re-reading some of the Ivory Coast stuff, I really don't get why some are having such a kitty over it. We're not re-defining or forcing another country to change its name, its just the English Wikipedia using the...wait for it...English translation of the name. That is all. The English transl...

Ismail

but griping that the article title being changed amounts to a derecognition of the official name is ill-informed nonsense. There's a rather large difference. The official name of a country is something like the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, or the People's Republic of China, or the Democratic P...

Ismail

Some newspapers use Calcutta instead of Kolkata. It does not change the fact that Kolkata is the preferred name in general, just like Kampuchea was more common in official works than in newspapers, a number of which still called the country Cambodia. This has nothing to do with imperialism or coloni...

Ismail

People push things like "Côte d'Ivoire" out of a sense of white colonists' guilt that Western society is supposed to feel towards Africa, as well as giving themselves an air of sophistication as Orwell noted above. This is asinine. Get back to me when Germany gets moved to Bundesrepublik Deutschlan...

Ismail

People push things like "Côte d'Ivoire" out of a sense of white colonists' guilt that Western society is supposed to feel towards Africa, as well as giving themselves an air of sophistication as Orwell noted above. This is asinine. The government itself made it clear in the 80's that its official n...

Ismail

There's a reason why both international and national news is run by highly coordinated news networks and syndicates.

Also, apparently the last news to be updated in Asia is from May and concerns... Pakistani treatment of Twitter.

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