Wikipediocracy

sparkzilla

It doesn't matter how much she self-promotes as a feminist, Gardner was an utter failure at bringing more women into Wikipedia.

sparkzilla

My post regarding actual sexism by Wales and Gardner: http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-a ... wikipedia/

sparkzilla

Jbhunley wrote:
Newsline is so very cool! --Jbh

Thanks. Lots more coming soon.

sparkzilla

This highlights a form of bias surrounding how news updates are handled, and the fact-checking process. In WP you would replace the text that said the chairs were thrown, and add a new source. The flip side to this is that it's fairly easy to hide or suppress news that doesn't suit your POV. To find...

sparkzilla

I should have said "minimally biased". The point is that we take procedural measures to actively reduce bias.

sparkzilla

Well considering we've been creating such non-biased pages on Newslines for a couple of years now, using non-experts, I'll have to disagree with you. Sifting factual information from bias is not as hard as you think. For example, let's check these two headlines: Fox News: Heroic Donald Trump slams C...

sparkzilla

It requires surprisingly little training to be able to select facts out of biased sources. Analysing them requires more knowledge, if the aim is to create an article, but there are other ways to present information. One of Wikipedia's main problems is that there is no hierarchy of expertise.

sparkzilla

It was fundamentally flawed because Larry misunderstood that the basic function of Wikipedia -- finding and adding sources -- does not need to be done by experts. Analysing those sources *may* require expertise in certain areas (medicine) but for most pop-culture topics and news-based topics very li...

sparkzilla

Here you go...

Donate to Wikipedia or the puppy gets it.jpg

sparkzilla

Is that the place that handles Jimbo's divorces? You'd think with the amount of work he gives them they wouldn't need to beg for cash.

sparkzilla

You're full of the typical self-righteousness of the abuser of power. In my case, I had already promised not to continue to invite people to discuss with people who did not understand why their contributions were being deleted about why Wikipedia was a poor place to deal with news, compared to Newsl...

sparkzilla

If you want to play cop and scold the bad guys anyone you don't like with an air of authority, what other website gives you the ability to do so like Wikipedia? Fixed that for you. I recall you banning me when there was consensus not to, but I'll be gracious and say it was the software that let you...

sparkzilla

Anonymous Poster: You will have less stress when you understand that anarchy is not a bug, but the main feature of Wikipedia. Right now you still believe that Wikipedia needs to be fixed, and that someone can fix it. You're missing the point. Wikipedia is perfect for those who are inside the system....

sparkzilla

Johnny Au wrote:It would be good if the WMF releases its full list of expenses to the public. After all, it is supposed to be transparent.

It does, in the annual financial report.

sparkzilla

"Wikipedian" is not a number but a state of mind.

sparkzilla

I didn't say I had proof. I said I had a theory that is borne out by observation. The actual numbers need to be measured, but they are there, and someone will do it one day. In a wiki, it takes an increasing amount of time to improve an article, yet the amount of time is limited. We all know this fr...

sparkzilla

If anything, the odds are against a truly crowd sourced model ever being anything more than mediocre. Mediocrity is not an inherent feature of all crowdsourcing systems, but is particularly true of Wikipedia due to its flat structure and lack of editorial leadership. The real beauty of Wikipedia is...

sparkzilla

Well, I'm working on it, but in principle it's very simple: It takes a non-linear amount of time to improve the quality of a document, while the time that can be put into it (the number of people essentially) is linear. Therefore, the average quality of all documents is limited. Observationally, thi...

sparkzilla

No, it's my other theme: statistically it's impossible to create a high-quality documents using a wiki.

sparkzilla

It would never have been great. It can only be adequate.

sparkzilla

We used to pay $1 per post. We changed to a revenue-share system, which should, in the long term, allow contributors to make much more than that. Contributors get a split of 45% of the revenues on any newsline, depending on the amount of their contribution. You can see each person's contributions in...

sparkzilla

I know you're being sardonic, but there's a huge discussion about The Daily Mail not being a reliable source on the site (I can't find it with a quick Google search).

sparkzilla

The problem is not that many Wikipedia topics clear the bar for newsworthiness, it's that the line between newsworthiness and notability is completely arbitrary and it changes from article to article, depending on who has the most power on the page. I've mentioned before how I got into a weeks-long ...

sparkzilla

The general standard for newsworthiness is: if it is a newspaper then we run it. You can add your daughter's, and your sister's, dance concert if you like, but generally we steer people towards more standard news and historical items. I have added news about my kid's school for example. There are so...

sparkzilla

We actually fill a space between daily news, Wikipedia, Google search, and YouTube. So we can be described in various ways: a crowdsourced news site; a Wikipedia for news; a news search engine; a YouTube that's filtered by date. We collect both current and past news events and organize them into tim...

sparkzilla

They get paid from the ad revenue, although none have reached the threshold yet because we just started getting lots of page views in the past few weeks.

sparkzilla

Because everything is crowdsourced our expenses are basically my salary plus hosting fees. I still intend to make good on our bet.

sparkzilla

Ross McPherson wrote:
Jim wrote: I'm not for... hating it.
You don’t hate it? You lack imagination.

Pity is a more appropriate emotion.

sparkzilla

Good. As I said above, we will have about a million page views this month. We have also worked out how to subvert the Google-Wikipedia nexus, creating a system that allows the reader to completely bypass those two sites to get information. More on that later...

sparkzilla

Once its governance is fixed, then many other problems can be fixed, such as reducing libel in BLPs, countering systemic bias (which is the second largest problem on Wikipedia and is the one most apparent to most people), and significantly reducing vandalism (by making every page have pending chang...

sparkzilla

I particularly like the part where Wales insists on no more programming. That was they key point that the project's course was set. If Wales had, instead, said, 'let's keep improving this software," then the site would not be in the state it is in today. It's a pity the interview did not ask more ab...

sparkzilla

There seems to be a ceiling to quality, though: in 2005, I did not rank any of the articles as being of "high quality"; today, there still aren't any that I would consider to be of high quality, even by the relaxed standards of 2005. By current standards, none of the original articles ranks above "...

sparkzilla

At any moment I expect to be sent to wiki re-education camp, where I will be forced to wear a Doritos-stained T-shirt, and pray with other basement dwellers towards a picture of Almighty Jimbo, while reciting "Do not disturb the Hivemind".

sparkzilla

I've been having a discussion with some folks over at the "Corporate Representatives from Ethical Wikipedia Engagement" Facebook Group. Yes, such a group does exist! Here's how it has gone so far... [Link to the 5 million articles post] Phil Gomes: Awesome milestone no matter how you slice it. Mark ...

sparkzilla

This number can only be regarded as an achievement if article quality is also measured. Sure, there are a great many adequate articles, but there are also a great many that are poor. By Wikipedia's own reckoning only 4600 articles are at featured status and around 23,000 are good. Out of 5 million t...

sparkzilla

And Doritos, don't forget the Doritos.

sparkzilla

Libertarian In Name Only. He publicly supports certain Libertarian principles while being the "constitutional monarch" of a site that eschews them completely.

sparkzilla

Poetlister wrote:
sparkzilla wrote:Jimbo's a liberal too.
I thought you'd deny that he's the head of a social media company.

I was thinking about it.

thekohser wrote:When he needs money, he is. Otherwise, a fairly conservative libertarian.

LINO

sparkzilla

Jimbo's a liberal too.

sparkzilla

The boy got a trip to the whitehouse and a scholarship, left-leaning rags reinforced their "mulsims are persecuted" narrative, right-leaning rags reinforced their "liberal media lies" narrative, and both got a bunch of clicks out of it. Everyone won and all it cost was a teeny bit of truth. I don't...

sparkzilla

They don't give a flying fuck about solving the Gender Gap. That's a lie. It doesn't matter if they care or not. They are not in the position to be able to fix it, because the problem is created at in the wiki itself, and who is going to change that? Everything at the higher level is just window dr...

sparkzilla

I don't want to mess with your boilerplate too much, but you do know that Gardner hasn't been at the top of the project now for quite some time, right? Yes, I know that. But she still speaks for Wikipedia (notably on the recent 60 Minutes article) and is indicative of the problem: that the people l...

sparkzilla

The Gender Gap problem cannot be fixed easily because it is a direct result of two things 1) the wiki software itself, which entrenches power into the existing users, who are overwhelmingly male and 2) the people at the very top of the project (Wales and Gardner particularly) don't understand the pr...

sparkzilla

None of this is surprising. What do you expect when there is no editor and no publisher. 20 editors on a page do not give cohesive results.

sparkzilla

Jimbo himself once admitted that he made a few edits as an unknown account to see how he would be treated as a "newby". What he found was he was treated poorly and he quickly understood why so many people do a few edits and then leave. This sounds like a challenge. Maybe we should all try this and ...

sparkzilla

Poetlister wrote:I must disagree there. You need to know enough to sort out the wheat from the huge volumes of chaff in tabloids, fanzines and dubious websites.

Not a high bar.

sparkzilla

The question of impermanence is relevant to Wikipedia, because it is not an archive, but a system of competing POVs. It reflects what the most powerful group on the page say happened, rather than what actually happened. As time goes on the pages are updated to suit the most current power group, whic...

sparkzilla

What you really need are experienced community managers from World of Warcraft or some other MMO who are skilled at handling hundreds of whiny babies at the same time while keeping them coming back to the game. This. For the vast majority of additions to the site, especially news and pop culture, n...

sparkzilla

If you are interested in Mishima or Japanese history, you may find the story interesting. Mishima was an incredible talent, and his turn to Emperor worship and his attempted coup was IMHO a watershed moment in Japan's history. The screenplay got a write up in The Sunday Times , but despite some inte...

sparkzilla

I've actually written a couple of scripts . Maybe I could run with this and get a big break in Hollywood. Jimbo frantically paces around the room. JIMBO: Damn him! He says that even if we use this (makes air quotes) "wiki" software it will never become an encyclopedia! SANGER: Rest your weary brow J...

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