Dealing with Wikipedia at a domain level.

[hutch--]

It seems to be roughly the difference between form and content, people of diverse technical expertise over time produced the content that once used to be very good in parts of Wikipedia but it became subject to a collection of imbeciles tearing around the place modifying pages that they did not even know how to read let alone edit, slapping tags that damaged the content and readability of many good pages and justifying their vandalism on the basis of form. In this context form was argued out of the circular and conflicting set of mechanical rules and the decisions of what stayed and what went was determined by a consensus fo ignorance between practitioners covering each other's arse.

I am much of the view that Wikipedia "jockeys" (those who endlessly edit without understanding the content) need to be shoved out the door until they get off their arse and learn how to write something useful. I have seen some of these imbeciles boasting on their own talk pages about how many pages they have deleted yet even if they were Einstein which clearly they are not, no-one has the range of expertise to edit or delete the range of pages that they trashed.

[DarkWolf]

Too many people have too many permisions to alter others work.

Not sure how they have any sort of hierarchy but the system is too flat with everyone having the ability to edit or move content. Not sure about wikipedia but in the Ubuntu wiki they also had the same power to delete. *EVERYONE* had this power. I don't think that wiki engines should give a PWK to the same people who probably are 13 year old script kiddies that play World of Warcraft in God mode (or DM whatever).


(PWK = Power Word, Kill ; Spell  From Dungeons And Dragons [In some contexts I have heard this used as an euphanism regarding how some people get banned or have their content deleted])

[Twister]

hutch,

I do not understand what the problem is with MASM's Wikipedia page. Unless they are calling Microsoft a butthead for creating it, then I .. well I just don't know. :eek


DarkWolf,

I laughed at the DnD reference.

[hutch--]

Its basically a problem of it being edited by people who don't know enough to make the edits. Technically Wikipedia is insignificant at a programming level as it has no demonstrated expertise and no quality control of its content. Would you allow someone to operate on you while they were reading the medical data from Wikipedia ?

[zemtex]

Its basically a problem of it being edited by people who don't know enough to make the edits. Technically Wikipedia is insignificant at a programming level as it has no demonstrated expertise and no quality control of its content. Would you allow someone to operate on you while they were reading the medical data from Wikipedia ?

This is not to disprove your point, your point is very good; BUT there are doctors who use wikipedia for quick reference. The reason they trust wikipedia is because they already have credible knowledge in the field, so they use wikipedia for quick "reminders", they dont need wikipedia as a trusted source, they use it as a reminder of what they already know to be true, so they are able to filter out useful data.

People who are not already doctors can not do that without corruption ofcourse  :naughty:

[Hugh Aguilar]

I'm currently engaged in an argument on Wikipedia if anybody is interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links/Noticeboard
See "slide-rule" at the bottom of the page.

My own experience with Wikipedia is that, if I don't know anything at all about a subject, Wikipedia is a good way to familiarize myself. This helps me to avoid making totally ignorant remarks in public and looking like an idiot. But I wouldn't pretend to have any knowledge (enough to pontificate to other people) without going beyond that to the websites that are specific to the subject. Wikipedia helps me to know if a subject is relevant to what I'm doing, and if it is worth my time to follow up on it (mostly in regard to algorithms).

The most valuable part of any Wikipedia article is almost always the external-links section at the bottom.

interesting comment about "virtual society"
we have one, of sorts, here as well
one of the first such societies i had experince with was yahoo games
primarily, i play euchre and spades - card games
but, i have also played their chess, pool, literati (like scrabble)

in these game rooms, they have "lobbies" where those not involved in games (and sometimes, those who are) may communicate
it's kind of like a kiosk bulletin board area or chat room - all players can see what anyone types instantly
yahoo has pretty much left these "places" unpoliced
it seems the absolute worst come out in some people - many people, in fact
swearing - name calling - you name it - lol
even some of the women could teach sailors how to talk
it is interesting to see how people treat each other, when there are no consequences to their actions
this is similar to what you are talking about - because there are no consequences for providing incorrect information
the yahoo game lobbies introduce an additional dynamic in that what is typed shows up instantly

I play Go at: http://www.gokgs.com/applet.jsp using the name Classic.

I like card games too, but only for live play, not on the internet.

As for those chat rooms, I ignore them completely --- it is all just nonsense.

This is an interesting book: "You are not a Gadget"

[hutch--]

Hugh,

It looks like you have been shafted by a common process in Wikipedia, a collection of vested interests that gang up on a non-compliant author and then get the help of their buddies as well. The failing as I see it and have experienced it on Wikipedia is quality control, any idiot who can type can edit a Wikipedia page and often good quality work from well qualified people ends up being defaced by others who know little or nothing about the topic they edit.

In programming terms Wikipedia is insignificant because it has no viable quality control. If you need decent technical reference, go to the source, not a second hand clapped out website that functions as a virtual reality game. Its unfortunate as there has been some very good technical work done on Wikipedia but time after time some imbecile who know almost nothing about the topic slap graffiti on the page according to some bullsh*t circular reasoning rule they trot out.

Do yourself a favour, post your work on a website you control and use a server block to ensure that Wikipedia cannot steal bandwidth from your site. If they want to sound like experts, let them do enough work to BE experts.  :bg

[Hugh Aguilar]

Do yourself a favour, post your work on a website you control and use a server block to ensure that Wikipedia cannot steal bandwidth from your site.

My software is on www.forth.org. I don't control that website. It is owned by Skip Carter of Taygeta Scientific. He is a long-time supporter of Forth and a generally good guy.

I agree that it is not worthwhile to post articles on Wikipedia because those articles can later be "edited" by people who don't know what they are talking about and/or are trying to impose their own agenda on the information. I'm just trying to get a link to my page included in their external-links section of the relevant article.

I don't understand what you mean by "steal bandwidth" from a site. Can you explain that? Are you talking about a "denial of service" attack? The Wikipedia editors may be bad at their job, but I don't think they are hacking into other people's sites. What are you talking about?

P.S. Merry Christmas everybody!

[dedndave]

stealing bandwidth - meaning other sites hot-link to your files and or content
they use links to your stuff on their site, even to display a picture, let's say
it's ok that they get the pic (one time), but they are getting "free" bandwidth from your site for their users

[DarkWolf]

It looks like you have been shafted by a common process in Wikipedia, a collection of vested interests that gang up on a non-compliant author and then get the help of their buddies as well. The failing as I see it and have experienced it on Wikipedia is quality control, any idiot who can type can edit a Wikipedia page and often good quality work from well qualified people ends up being defaced by others who know little or nothing about the topic they edit.

This is the same that occured to me at the Ubuntu Wiki.
To the best of my knowledge they have yet to do anyhting themselves. It still sits there locked in an ACL and they have no work to show for themselves. But of course they still want to edit my work direct everyone to their personal blogs, bad mouth me behind my back and they have the full support of two members of Canonical's Council (or whatever they call it).

Social Engineering.

[vanjast]

Gee.. Hutch, you must have really p...ed off those over at wiki, Masm32 doesn't even get a remote mention... (Fasm and Nasm get mentioned) :bg

[BogdanOntanu]

Neither does SOL_ASM :D but then again I am also "well known" to be against wiki :D

[dedndave]

http://wiki.osdev.org/MASM

[hutch--]

Van,  that result was with a little help from our friends AND I have a permanent server block against Wikipedia to ensure they cannot link to the masm32.com site. If they want to try and sound like experts, they need to get off their arse and learn enough to be experts. The Wikipedia idiot fringe are progressively trashing the MASM page so its the same comment as before, Wikipedia are insignificant in programming terms as they allow any idiot to modify existing pages.

[Hugh Aguilar]

Van,  that result was with a little help from our friends AND I have a permanent server block against Wikipedia to ensure they cannot link to the masm32.com site. If they want to try and sound like experts, they need to get off their arse and learn enough to be experts. The Wikipedia idiot fringe are progressively trashing the MASM page so its the same comment as before, Wikipedia are insignificant in programming terms as they allow any idiot to modify existing pages.

All of this talk about the MASM page on Wikipedia got me interested enough to go read it.

What is Wikipedia for? Is a page about MASM actually supposed to help somebody learn about MASM? That seems to be an unrealistic goal. It took me months to learn MASM/TASM, and I still don't know enough to claim expertise on the subject. Reading a Wikipedia article isn't even a baby step toward learning about the subject --- it is a waste of five minutes.

I think that Wikipedia is primarily used by high school students who are writing a report about some subject and need to fake-up some expertise on that subject, despite the fact that they know nothing about the subject. What possible good does it do to tell somebody about OFFSET and PTR and all that, if the guy doesn't already know assembly language? This kind of information is mostly used by students writing reports so that they can appear to have expert-level knowledge of assembly-language, despite the fact that they have never written an assembly-language program in their life and wouldn't know how to begin. They turn in their report and get an A (or a B if they have grammar and spelling errors) --- then they get on their skateboard and go to a party, and they forget all about pretending to be a MASM expert and all of that other foolishness that is required by their teachers.

Personally, my use of Wikipedia primarily involves reading about a subject that I know nothing about (usually some programming algorithm). If it looks interesting, then I go to the external-links section to obtain some real information. I don't expect to learn anything from the article itself, except a very general overview of what the subject is about --- the external-links section is the only really useful part of any article.

The sordid saga of my own edit-war continues! We have one editor (the guy who deleted my link) who describes machining of aluminum to be "arts and crafts." His name is "Dr.K" (as if he were a doctor!). The big-cheese editor (with the humorous name "WhatamIdoing") who is supposedly making some kind of decision has so far made these statements:
1.) "If a worse product [than your software] gets more exposure, then that doesn't actually matter to us. What we care about is whether our readers find the link useful or interesting."
2.) "My interest in slide rules has never managed to exceed ten minutes. Like at least 99.9% of the people in the world, I'll never care enough to even consider building one. In fact, so far, my interest hasn't even risen to the level of reading the entire Wikipedia article on the subject."

This is why I have come to believe that Wikipedia doesn't care about quality, but only cares about providing filler for high-school reports --- a lot of technicalish blather that the H.S. student can copy over to obtain the required number of lines of text so that a teacher (who knows nothing about the subject either) will be impressed and give the brave student an A so that he can get into a good college. BTW, "technicalish" is my own coined word --- how do you like it?