

Wikipedia’s shame - edtechdev
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/wikipedias_shame/

======
revelation
Wikipedia is chock full of human bots that try to turn it into a relational
database or some kind of graph of human knowledge. Just look at all the
categories Hitler is in:

\- Suicides by firearm in Germany \- German founders of automobile
manufacturers \- Austrian anti-communists \- ...

Of course Wikipedia (or rather MediaWiki) is completely terrible for this
purpose. It's a completely unstructed raw text storage. You can find date A
cited on one page for event X, then go to the page on event X and find a
completely different date. It's all just text, and the human bots are
overwhelmed with keeping it synchronized.

Of course the human bots will be angry if you spit on them in some dead tree
op-ed thinking their valiant efforts toward reducing Wikipedias text to ever
smaller isolated atoms are hurting some political ideal.

(Of course the people over at Wikipedia have recognized that the problem is
insurmountable the way they are approaching it. They have created WikiData in
response: <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page>)

~~~
Svip
As someone who maintains the largest _Futurama_ wiki (albeit not as active
anymore, but I still host it), I can recognise the problems that Wikipedia is
faced with. Of course, at a much _much_ smaller scale, as we only have 3,000+
content pages (which is a lot for a _Futurama_ wiki).

And we have had to deal with the usefulness of indexing articles
appropriately. That is; giving them categories (and whether new categories is
going to help anyone). But since our wiki is so much smaller, we don't use
bots but do it by hand (although, we do have one bot to do some basic cleaning
up, but nothing truly intelligent).

And the issue isn't just with Wikipedia or our wiki; it's practically with
every wiki (even non-MediaWiki wikis). This has led to the creation of
Semantic MediaWiki, an extension that is supposed to maintain more rational
relationships of data and make it easier indexable.

But most wikis I've seen using Semantic MediaWiki, doesn't really look like a
content site, but rather a data site. Which is nice for the purpose, but it
makes you wonder if MediaWiki really was the right choice to begin with.

------
itafroma
Note this story is from almost a month ago (date stamp on the linked article
is April 29th). Previous discussions on Hacker News:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624163>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5663072>

------
lmm
As the article says, the parts of wikipedia that stay in the history tend to
eventually be corrected. The real worst behaviour occurs around articles where
even that history is expunged, e.g. those deleted for "non-notability".

~~~
greenyoda
The fact that Wikipedia expunges the history of deleted articles always made
me a bit uneasy; it seems like the editors want to escape accountability by
sending the articles down Orwell's "memory hole".[1]

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole>

~~~
canttestthis
Wikipedia admins (essentially community-elected moderators, there are
thousands of them) have the ability to access the history of deleted articles.
Articles are often deleted due to copyright violations, etc., so the history
is not shown to the public.

~~~
greenyoda
It makes sense to make removed copyrighted content inaccessible. However, that
doesn't mean you need to delete the entire history: just hide the part that
was copyrighted. And in any other case of deletion (e.g., "non-notability"),
the entire history could be retained.

~~~
canttestthis
Regardless, its not a memory hole.

------
smegel
Salon is just part of that cadre of circle-jerking, highly agended websites
(along with most of gawker and huffpost) that regularly fire cannonballs at
places like Reddit and Wikipedia that allow the kind of free expression and
thought they would rather suppress. At least Wikipedia airs its dirty laundry
for all to see, and on balance things generally work out OK.

~~~
luke_s
Actually, reading through the article it never seems 'circle-jerking' or a
'cannonball' fired at Wikipedia. The article explains what happened. It then
goes on to discuss how Wikipedia airs its dirty laundry and on balance things
generally work out OK - pretty much exactly what you said.

~~~
smegel
Try reading the article aga....oh never mind.

------
woodchuck64
Qworty's rant is rather entertaining and even a bit more persuasive than the
Salon article that quotes it. Oops.

------
andyl
Here comes a flame war. Hopefully some moderator will move drop this entry to
the bottom of this list.

