Wikipedia + the talk pages is closer to an ideal encyclopedia.
One of the major criticism of Wikipedia is that it preempts the possibility of having multiple encyclopedias, and thus multiple points of view. But, once you consider the talk pages, you not only restore the multiple points of view, but you also get to witness the contests between them. In that way, at least, this is better than having multiple encyclopedias.
My ideal encyclopedia does not have hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the important differences between en dash, em dash, minus and hyphen.
And this is about punctuation. Imagine what it's like on actually contentious issues - Balkans wars, various islands claimed by more than one territory. Etc.
I happen to be a typophile; so, those discussions are interesting to me.
On the other hand, those are probably just examples of bike shedding[1]. The various talk pages on the Balkan Wars articles range from about 9,000 to 15,000 words, for instance.
Of course, another aspect of encyclopedias is that they organize a body of information; while the main page may force a structure of some kind, talk pages tend to go all over the place. But agreed that they add much needed facts and POVs beyond the one wikipedia "way" on the main page.
Agreed, but that implies that people haven't given up on trying to get facts or information into pages that are managed nefariously. To me it feels like the talk sections have been dying off. So many things at wikipedia have become advertorials.
Wikipedia is actually pretty bad, try following up on any of the references. If they're web references, the chances of it being a 404 page are almost 100% in my experience. Not to mention the editors being almost all white men and the opaque process that limits most "non-male" topics: http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/wikipedia-college-classes-...
> For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created."
Wikipedia is no substitute for a real subject encyclopedia.
Wikipedia may have problems, but I'm not sure how this particular issue is a mark against it. Wikipedia's editorial resources aren't limited in the same way as a traditional publication. It's not like curtailing "frivolous" subjects will result in better quality "serious" articles: the people who write Star Wars articles are not going to take up medieval history if you prevent them from editing their favorite subjects.
My primary annoyance when reading Wikipedia is when authors will generalize the opinion of two or three cited sources into something like "...many scholars believe X." At that point they're lending more credence to a statement than is actually attributable. In reality, it's more like "three people in the world think that X." It's probably not always done intentionally, but it's really quite sneaky how isolated opinions or viewpoints can gain acceptance as facts simply by how they're presented.
Ever wondered about all the things that this group of "many scholars" have concluded? Check out this Google Search:
The serious purpose of having a little (a lot) of everything in one place. For free. For everyone. In any language.
A kid in India can hop from physiology, to psychology, to medicine, to anthropology, to geography, to history, to economics, to... Do you get the point?
I guess we shoould just plug wikipedia off and stick a giant banner that says "Wikipedia is not sufficient for scientific inquiry, so we closed it. Go buy Thomson Web of Science."
I'm sure Maadhav in India will be very happy and rest assured that no incomplete information is on the Internet.
We're talking about two different audiences. To kids or adult novices to a topic, it's fine as a brief introduction in exactly the same way a Cracked.com or Mental Floss article. It's infotainment, which doesn't imply that the information is wrong, just shallow and not necessarily written by someone well-versed and informed about the topic.
Information that's either true or completely made up is usually true. So if they say "the population of X is Y", or something like that, I'll trust them.
Something I never understood. When referencing a "real" encyclopedia you have to include the revision number thus if information changes in later revisions your citation remains intact. Wikipedia is exactly the same. When you cite Wikipedia you should include the revision number so that if it changes (as it frequently does) you haven't lost the text referenced. Could higher change frequency provide higher mis-information? Sure but a "real" encyclopedia has the same problem (maybe at a smaller scale) So in either case you have to either pay someone to fact check (like most encyclopedia companies do and could easily be done for Wikipedia) and/or do the fact check yourself. The later being the core at Wikipedia culture^[citation needed].
The same article points out that the editors-to-articles ratio has been rapidly falling from 2007 to 2014 (it bounced back a little this year, but it's too early to say if it isn't just a fluke).
Something similar happened when a Google Street View image of a chap being 'seen to' by a prostitute soared in popularity a few years ago in my home town. The name of the street was, for a few hours, known as 'handjob ally'.
I was being sarcastic about the view of many that Google and other commercial maps must be better just because they are commercial. OSM is not without its own share of vandalism, but it is rare and usually hidden somewhere.
Yeah, it makes me sad how people actually enjoy feeding a proprietary data silo instead of providing their knowledge to everyone for free in open projects.
Best is in the eye of beholder. As for amount of detail, accuracy, speed of updates and speed of response to such vandalism, OSM seems much better to me (at least judging by its European coverage, don't know how good it's in your location). No Street View? That's acceptable for me.
In Britain and France, OSM is very good. In NL and DE, it is amazing. In the US, it is okay.
It sort of depends on the user community that edits it. OSM is used heavily by the cycling community who want to put all the off-road cycle paths and so on onto the map. And it's used by hikers and wheelchair users and a bunch of other subcommunities who want to make it good for them.
In the US, there isn't such a big community of fanatical cyclists and so on, so less need for alternatives to commercial maps like Google and Apple.
Do you essentially have to be a Google employee to do this? I remember a few years ago when I annotated some custom maps, but no one ever saw my annotations publicly. Also my annotations were running routes and forest trails that weren't marked on maps at the time.
I submitted a fix to google maps, where they were forcing people to detour around a perfectly straight section of rural highway because it was marked as impassable.
Imagine my surprise when I got an email ONE YEAR LATER saying "your revision has been accepted!"
I submitted a fix to google maps where a bus stop in my neighborhood was missing. About 6 months later I got an email saying "for technical reasons we cannot fix this."
All the other apps that show bus stops have the stop.
I just don't use google maps for transportation stuff. City Mapper is my goto app for that.
I wish Apple would do the obvious thing and allow 3rd party apps to send public transport data directly to the official Maps app, via a new extension point. That way, if you have the right apps, everything would always be up to date, and maybe you'd even be able to see things like real-time bus and subway markers if your public transit apps supported tracking! Google has some amazing technology, but their web-based infrastructure simply would not allow them to create a decentralized system like this — whereas it's right in Apple's wheelhouse.
It used to be that due to licensing and data pipeline issues refreshing the maps from origin sources was a huge effort and all fixes had to be submitted "upstream" for inclusion, which took forever.
Since Google switched to their own maps data sources and improved their software, inclusion time for fixes improved dramatically.
i had the same experience with two different roads in chicago area where it would avoid a simple overpass on 55, instead advising to take exit, go around in a longer route and come back to 55. Only in the east / North bound direction.
Another one in Schamburg where it thought a left turn was not allowed at a big intersection.
both were corrected on my report, but after a year or so
Just to give a different experience: a spur was recently added to a walking path near my house, bridging a stream and connecting to a road that you couldn't get to that way before. I reported it to Google (not even with coordinates, just saying there was a spur connecting to this road) and they updated it within days.
Not trying to invalidate these other experiences at all, and my own may not be representative, but apparently they can move fast at least sometimes.
I complained for years that a bunch of Seattle POIs were transposed to Kirkland. If you were on the east side of Lake Washington and asked for a route to the Seattle Federal Building, it would take you to a residential neighborhood near downtown Kirkland.
I filed that as a bug and it sat for years without correction.
I have a feeling some vector image conversion software was involved in the process, especially after seeing that Skype logo. He didn't draw these manually.
"Update: A Google spokesperson got back to us, explaining that the image is likely a result of a user abusing Map Maker, the tool that allows everyone to contribute to Google Maps. "Even though edits are moderated, occasionally the odd inaccurate or cheeky edit may slip through our system," he said in a statement to Mashable. "We've been made aware of the issue and are working on getting it removed.""
Have you ever worked for a large company before? There's nothing management loves more than access controls. There are whole software products available, like Confluence, that do nothing but take good open source offerings like various wikis and make it so management has to set permissions for every user for every page to do anything at all. Then whenever you need to make a change it takes a week of meetings to get edit permission for the needed page...
Confluence is awesome, we use it in our company and every user can edit every page (that's how it's set out of the box!). This works great for us and our size.
To bash on Confluence just because your management has set restrictive policies seems a bit unfair.
Why would you expect every random employee to have the necessary access to expedite such a change?
It's 5 AM in Mountain View, they probably have to get someone out of bed. Also, I imagine they would like to figure out where it came from, which may or may not complicate the removal, who knows.
Seriously? I work at not so small tech company and here one of the managers/director/vp will take a call and the engineer will patch the changes. The call is specially easy is such obvious example of what should be done.
Just for fun speculation. What if someone realized that Google is scraping/using his data. Then he decided to put in a "honeytoken" to check this assumption and at the same time pull a prank on Google. Once he realized that his assumption was correct, he published the coordinates -- as a mini revenge.
Of course this is just some idle speculation, but I have seen honeytoken entries in printed dictionaries for example.
For one thing, it doesn't looked like Google/Android did this at all. As others have said, it looks like someone has falsely contributed to the map and got past the review. Such an examples is pointed out by andrea_s here[1] (it is around the same area as the original link).
If it were believed that this was an official work by Android, I bet the comments would be much different. However, as it does not look official, the comments in this article cannot be compared to the comments on an article relating to what you describe.
Google published it. Whether it was a paid employee or volunteer vandal doesn't really make the organization look worse or better.
(Personally, I don't see any reason to be outraged about it, and wouldn't be surprised if they don't see this as a reason to even bother about their review process. If it is a volunteer they will ban them, if it is an employee they will hopefully explain that they don't get to make a similar error of judgement again, or perhaps fire them.)
and there is a Skype logo too http://goo.gl/jOk19o and a happy face http://goo.gl/Z4AHB6
It looks like a user had enough reputation to add things without review.
Though my excuse at least is that "Apple is known for their massive review process and locking down of everything - this can only be intentional" if it was Apple.
It's more an expectation from the company - I wouldn't even be fully surprised if it was a cheeky Google employee who did it. Would probably get laughs as PR frowns and makes the map team remove it.
They're very common in Belgium (Western Europe) as well, though most people who use them have no idea of the origin. They just thinks it looks rebellious.
I find those stickers extremely annoying, since they conflict with how I know and love the Calvin character.
Some of them are sort of funny, but others don't come even close (imo): peeing on speed limit signs (amount of deaths due to speeding is not laughable), peeing on the police (sure some minority migh be assholes but the majority I have met really do want to help people - and yeah they also enforce speed limits which, even though I completely understand how nice it feels to go insanely fast, are there for a reason) etc.
Southern Europe (mostly around Catalonia) has a similar curiosity which has after 100s of years become a tradition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caganer
I wonder which cultural oddities today will be commonly accepted 100 years from now, or whether the globalization will eventually homogenize such local customs, so instead of "memes" living locally for 100s of years they get global exposure and die out within a month.
To me this looks like one crowd sourced editor (the one drawing the Android) getting frustrated with another (the one drawing a bunch of complete nonsense) and doing something outlandish to bring attention to the area.
I don't think so. Map Maker is mostly moderated by the community, so Google might not have had any doing in this. Could have been one guy with multiple accounts doing legitimate edits for a long time just so he can do this once.
One can only hope that if this was intentionally done by an employee, they would be punished and possibly let go. This sort of thing is childish, unnecessary, and has no place in a professional organization.
What's wrong with a little bit of fun? Who's getting harmed here? How could this possibly have offended you enough that you'd hope someone would get fired over it?
It's not a matter of me being offended (I'm not), I would just hope the company I worked for wouldn't stand for something as vulgar, primitive, and blatantly aggressive toward a competitor as this in a public, flagship product.
It's just a doodle with an insulting theme that is as old as humanity. Vulgar, primitive and blatantly aggressive are words I would rather complain about in advertising or patent lawsuits.
childish? That is open for discussion.. unnecessary? Definitely.
funny? Again open for discussion, but I'm in the yes-camp for this one (even though I don't own Android nor Apple products - or maybe that just is the reason). There's enough sadness and evil in the world already, some harmless fun from time to time won't exactly make it a better place but hey, a smile is better than nothing.
The White House responded to comments and inquiries with funny gifs. Now some random google employee can't put one measly harmless little easter egg somewhere in their product that says "Hah, take that, Competitor!"? We need to fire _all_ the videogame designers then. All of them. Across the entire industry.
At best, this is a digital-urine covered Easter egg. At worst, it's a tasteless prank that will likely have repercussions for it's creator. And the level of effort required to complete this is unequal to it's hilariousness, so if nothing else, I find it likely whomever is responsible for this wastes a bunch of other time and resources in similar, unproductive, disrespectful avenues.
I harken this is paying homage to those tacky stickers of Calvin having a piss on Ford and Chevy emblems that we all knew someone with in high-school. Eventually, we are supposed to outgrow these immature micro-aggressions and graduate to being loving, compassionate, contributing members of our communities.
It's sad, really, when jokes like this are glorified instead of recognized for what they are – one person's only creative outlet for their inability to cope with being a misfit where they are.
Actually it serves a very useful purpose. It demonstrates that Google Map Maker quality is highly unknown, that there essentially is no review process.
At least OpenStreetMap is honest and upfront and doesn't pretend there is a quality assurance team.
Do you have to make it personal and insult your opponents?
EDIT: I cannot conceive a possible reason why this comment is down-voted. Penalizing well meaning and polite discourse is counter intuitive... in the universe I live.
You can spent hours making a very large effigy of your rival depicted as a phallus with gold trim and rubies: being a work of art doesn't make it any less unprofessional.
In what way could this be construed as trolling? If OP had linked to some fake google maps imitation (https://maps.google.fake.com), I could see your point - but this is live on the real Google Maps. I would argue that it is interesting, regardless of how it got there.
