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Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

Wikipedia is a free content, multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through a model of open collaboration, using a wiki-based editing system. Individual contributors, also called editors, are known as Wikipedians. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history.

Quotes

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2000s

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2000

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A view of the Wikipedia App, the official app of Wikipedia. Any user can install Wikipedia, and you can install, before this, the Wikipedia App to download Wikipedia free and for this, a user need to go to
https://github.com/wikimedia/wikipedia-ios
or to https://github.com/wikimedia/apps-win8-wikipedia

2001

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  • At present I am overworked and the [Nupedia] project is suffering to some extent as a result... I just don't have the time to find lead reviewers for the articles listed [in "General and Other"]. The problem is that it is VERY difficult to find *specialists* on each of those topics.
  • It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. ..."Wiki," pronounced \wee'-kee\, derives from a Polynesian word, "wikiwiki," but what it means is a VERY open, VERY publicly-editable series of web pages. ... I can start a page ... Anyone else (yes, absolutely anyone else) can come along and make absolutely any changes to it that he wants to. ... On the page I create, I can link to any other pages, and of course anyone can link to mine. The project is billed and pursued as a public resource. There are a few announced suggestions or rules. ... As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. ... [It] can be a place where additional changes and commentary can be gleaned... The content can be licensed under an open content license. On the front page of the Nupedia wiki we'd make it ABSOLUTELY clear that this is experimental...
  • We wouldn't call it "the Nupedia wiki" though that's what it would be. ... On the "wikipedia" we would say that this is a supplementary project to Nupedia which operates entirely independently.
  • It was a cold Friday evening in January 2001. I was on duty in one of my uni's computer labs...
At first I was a bit intimidated about the entries and discussions, which I saw there. The main contributors at the time were Jimbo, Larry and w:Josh Grosse. The 'Pedia had ca. 700 (!) entries, and was still using the weird Camel Case format, which made links appear in the manner of w:PortugaL or w:PolanD. After a bit of lurking around I quickly figured out what the purpose of the project was, and came to the simple conclusion "Me likes thees!".
What followed were normal symptoms of my gradual turning into a w:Wikipediholic. I spent a large portion of my free time starting entries, editing, and cross-linking. I witnessed the project grow gradually and in waves as it became more popular (slashdotting, etc.). During the Summer, doing the hard job of an analyst at a medium-sized Polish financial institution kept me away for a while. I was back in mid-September. And I intend to stay for as long as I can, or until my cable modem dies on me.
  • ...why 2 sites, or 2 encyclopedias? My impression of them is Wikipedia is the "everyman's" encyclopedia and Nupedia is for the university elite. I looked at being a writer [for Nupedia] but I really felt I wouldn't be welcome since I'm just a college graduate of a two year program for corporate communications.
  • After a year or so of working on Nupedia, Larry had the idea to use Wiki software for a separate project specifically for people like you (and me!) who are intimidated and bored (sorry, Nupedia!) with the tedium of the process. As it turns out, Wikipedia is dramatically more successful on some measures, ... The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive.
  • Wikis don't work if people aren't bold. You've got to get out there and make those changes, correct that grammar, add those facts, make that language precise, etc., etc. It's OK. It's what everyone expects. So you should never ask, "Why aren't these pages copyedited?" Amazingly, it all works out. It does require some amount of politeness, but it works. You'll see.

2002

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  • Larry Sanger resigned on March 1st, 2002. He won't even stay as a volunteer. The project now no longer has a leader (or, put another way, everyone is a leader now).
  • Now that Larry Sanger is gone, Wikipedia's owners will have to watch whether the project manages the transition to effective self-regulation and step in if necessary.
  • The bar to contribution is very low, and if there is any elite in charge, then with all due respect [...], our elite would seem rather less than impressive compared to the leading members of the intelligentsia that contribute to the likes of Britannica. ... The free encyclopedia movement [...] doesn't seem to be travelling in the direction of being led by world-class thinkers, scholars, and scientists,... Basically, Wikipedia is the only game left in town as far as the free encyclopedia movement is concerned.

2003

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  • The Wikipedia, perhaps one of the greatest testaments to the generosity on the web, has just hit a milestone of 100,000 articles, a week after its second birthday. ... What makes the Wikipedia so compelling – and this article so hard to finish – is the way everything is so massively linked. You read one entry, and before you know it, you're reading up on Anne Boleyn or Italian greyhounds. But more than that, anyone can add to or edit an entry, or even create another one.
  • The current versions of these [Wikipedia] articles aren't necessarily the best way to handle it; I think they would do better to discuss *and debunk* racist notions as much as possible, putting them in the proper context so when some kid hears about "racialism" or "reverse racism" and then looks it up on Wikipedia they'll see a rational, neutral explanation of what makes some people think and speak that way – so they'll _understand_ why to discount those ideas. ... There are lessons to be learned from the evil that men do.
  • Even racists have the right to freedom of expression. But, not on wikipedia. ... The policies of wikipedia, even the French Wikipedia, aren't constrained by French law. Yahoo caved in to French censorship efforts because they are a large company with many business interests in France. We do not have that problem. ... Anyhow, no article in Wikipedia should ever directly contradict or directly support any controversial statement of moral principle such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That's not NPOV, and it's not our mission. ... You are right not to tolerate this kind of sentence. ... But, not becau[s]e of French law! Because of NPOV.
  • This may sound like a recipe for disaster, but the results are impressive. While many of the site's 130,000-plus articles are definitely works in progress, many are rich, concise, and polished. ... Surprisingly, our time spent on Wikipedia turned up no junk entries and no defacements. ... A few of the articles seemed a bit dated, and we came across many red links or blue links that led to single-sentence placeholders. But for the most part, the items were useful and thoughtful.

2004

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  • However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler.
  • The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.

2005

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2006

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If I want to say he didn't that's my right, and now, thanks to Wikipedia – it's also a fact. ~ Stephen Colbert on the ownership of slaves by George Washington
  • I take a half-full-glass view, based on a different understanding of what [Wikipedia's competition is]: not the traditional professionally produced encyclopedias, but the legions of sites that, springing up all over the Web, purport to contain answers, unverified and often unverifiable, to every topic on earth. Against that standard, Wikipedia is a resounding success.
  • For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War – and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge – get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.
  • Wikipedia's promise is nothing less than the liberation of human knowledge – both by incorporating all of it through the collaborative process, and by freely sharing it with everybody who has access to the internet. This is a radically popular idea.
    • The Economist (20 April 2006)
  • When I visited the offices [in St. Petersburg, Florida] in March, the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge.
  • If I want to say he didn't that's my right, and now, thanks to Wikipedia – it's also a fact.
  • In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter.
  • Wikipedia's openness isn't a mistake; it's the source of its success. A dedicated community solves problems that official leaders wouldn't even know were there. Meanwhile, their volunteerism largely eliminates infighting about who gets to be what. ... Wikipedia's biggest problems have come when it's strayed from this path, when it's given some people official titles and specified tasks. Whenever that happens, real work slows down and squabbling speeds up. But it's an easy mistake to make, so it gets made again and again.

2007

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Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project.  ...  one can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek. ~ Jimmy Wales
But how does such a polycentric – even anarchic – system, composed of editors acting independently and for their own reasons, result in such an utterly useful resource?  The answer goes back to the Hayekian inspiration for the project.  Because editors receive both psychological satisfaction and material usefulness from their contributions, the project has grown to include safeguards that help guarantee that the development of the project will move in a positive direction – towards broad, accurate articles that depend on reliable, verifiable sources. ~ Dick Clark
  • Hofstadter: The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me.
    Solomon: So fix it.
    Hofstadter: The next day someone will fix it back.
  • Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.
  • You just can't put something with commercial motive into Wikipedia. Admitting it is hardly better; it is still a crime. The Wikipedians and bloggers will attack hard and they will deserve what they get.
  • You set up this fantastic site, with people sending information all around the world, and you don't make any money of it! It's practically an un-American activity!
  • There are a lot of bad things said about Wikipedia, the ninth most-visited destination on the internet.  An encyclopedia that anyone can edit, critics argue, is one that is vulnerable to endless mistakes.  Such criticisms have been raised by skeptics since Wikipedia's creation in 2001.  ...  While that ultimate goal imagined by Wales for Wikipedia has not yet come to fruition, there is no questioning the breadth and usefulness of Wikipedia.  Those who refused to believe that a user-generated encyclopedia could compete with the monolithic, traditional encyclopedia written by experts and organized by professional editors, were no doubt shocked when Nature magazine published a 2006 article comparing Wikipedia to the well-known Encyclopedia Britannica.  The article concluded that Wikipedia articles were comparable in accuracy and thoroughness to those of the older, paper encyclopedia.
  • But how does such a polycentric – even anarchic – system, composed of editors acting independently and for their own reasons, result in such an utterly useful resource?  The answer goes back to the Hayekian inspiration for the project.  Because editors receive both psychological satisfaction and material usefulness from their contributions, the project has grown to include safeguards that help guarantee that the development of the project will move in a positive direction – towards broad, accurate articles that depend on reliable, verifiable sources.
    • Dick Clark, in "Wikipedia: What Is It Good For?," Mises Daily (19 September 2007)
  • One could very aptly describe the Wikipedia system for directing the development of the project as being a common law system of sorts.  The encyclopedia has basic policies – the constitutional law of Wikipedia – which require that articles be written from a neutral point of view, make use of verifiable sources, and include no original research.  ...  Whenever a content dispute does arise between editors on the "talk" pages that accompany each article, there are a host of dispute resolution options available.
    • Dick Clark, in "Wikipedia: What Is It Good For?," Mises Daily (19 September 2007)
  • Wikipedia's reflection of market dynamics is most easily observed in what many people view as the project's weakest areas: obscure articles that draw little traffic.  In articles about third-rate garage bands and other topics of limited interest, one will often find factual and typographical errors at a much higher rate than in high-traffic articles such as those on "England" or "Barry Bonds."  The much higher demand for information about the latter topics means that many more eyes will be combing those much-demanded articles for mistakes.  Since Wikipedia is open to correction by anyone, it stands to reason that the articles attracting more potential editors will be of a higher quality.  Rather than a failure, this is a great demonstration of Wikipedia's efficient allocation of resources.
    • Dick Clark, in "Wikipedia: What Is It Good For?," Mises Daily (19 September 2007)
  • The Tsunami article is well researched and extensive, only at two places a little inaccurate. The scientific Wikipedia articles are, according to my judgement, almost always good.
  • The article [Martin Luther] is ample and solidly written. Someone was really occupied with Luther and read some church histories. I give extra points for quoting from sources and the pictures.
  • There is nothing to add to that entry [Marinade]. In my view it contains all important information. I use Wikipedia often for food chemistry. Sometimes you find something you didn't even think about.

2008

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  • I think there's more information about culture in Wikipedia than anywhere else in the world, ever.
    • Tyler Cowen, "Why everything has changed: the recent revolution in cultural economics" in Journal of Cultural Economics (2008), 32, p. 266, DOI 10.1007/s10824-008-9074-y
  • Wikipedia is, at least to some extent, a revenge site. People (like [Don] Murphy) who have a knack for angering and upsetting others are primary targets for that sort of treatment. This is not rocket science, folks. ... As the level of perceived “obnoxiousness” required to make someone a [Wikipedia] target continues to drop, the question becomes, how far will it drop?
  • Wikipedia is so dangerous. You go online to look up the definition of eclampsia, and three hours later you find yourself reading this earnest explanation of tentacle porn in anime.
  • Wikipedia's version of reality has already become a monopoly. And all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators are imposed too.
  • Beware corporate executives posing as social visionaries. The hype may be about the fulfillment of human potential, but the reality is the exploitation of digital sharecropping.
  • This term "democratic" gets tossed around a lot, usually in a positive, "power to the people rather than some arbitrary ruler" sense.  By that meaning, Wikipedia is indeed democratic.  Yet, unlike a state democracy, 51% at the polls will not necessarily trump a Wikipedia adversary.  So in the sense that the word "democracy" comes loaded with a "one man, one vote" ideology, Wikipedia is not democratic at all.  And it is a good thing that Wikipedia isn't a democracy.

2009

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It's said that aeronautical theory says bumblebees ought not to be able to fly. Likewise, the idea that a useful, serious reference work could emerge from the contributions of thousands of "ordinary" internet users, many without scholarly qualifications, would until comparatively recently have been dismissed as absurd. ~ John Naughton
  • The project's advocates imagine that the problem, if they recognise one at all, lies in the variable quality of Wikipedia's individual entries. The solution is obvious: a process in which editors work on the less successful entries and remove the obviously unmerited ones.
    In reality, the problem is much more fundamental to Wikipedia than that much of its content is a pile of dross. Whereas science and learning pursue truth, Wikipedia prizes consensus. Wikipedia has no means of arbitrating between different claims, other than how many people side with one position rather than another. That ethos is fatal to the advancement of learning. Ideas are refined by being tested; scientific method presupposes scrutiny, experiment and conflict.
    • Oliver Kamm "Wikipedia is junk" The First Post: The Week (April 1, 2009)
    • The original title of the article was "Wikipedia is junk", but in the archived save it has become deformed to simply "Wikipedia".
  • It's said that aeronautical theory says bumblebees ought not to be able to fly. Likewise, the idea that a useful, serious reference work could emerge from the contributions of thousands of "ordinary" internet users, many without scholarly qualifications, would until comparatively recently have been dismissed as absurd.
  • Even the founders of Wikipedia had no clue when they started the project of what it would accomplish. They dug a hole to find water, and struck oil instead.
  • We now see the strong emergence of the Social Web instead of the Semantic Web, and a proposal has been made to use Wikipedia, the largest hierarchical collection of information in the world, as bottom-up input for the ontologies required to give shape to the Semantic Web.
  • The only solution is to shut [Wikipedia] down and scatter it to the four winds. The idea that experts don't matter but 12 year old Canadians in their basements do is beyond untenable. ... What gives any anonymous douchebag the qualifications to write about ME and then call it encyclopedic? The project has failed from the top down. There is no fixing.

2010s

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2010

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So I finally gave in and coughed up a donation for Wikipedia.  It was no trouble at all, and felt good.  ...  It's true that giving this way doesn't make rational sense according to a neoclassical idea of what constitutes economic rationality.  Wikipedia is free and it will be there whether I give or not.  The same might be said of the Mises Institute.  If all we cared about were commercial exchange, I have every incentive to use the free good and never pay.  There is no harm done in free riding, right?  Mises himself had a broader view of rationality.  He said that all actions are rational from the point of view of the actor.  I'm glad to embrace that idea.  Giving in this way is not strictly a capitalist act if you define capitalism as only commercial exchange based on contract.  But if we see capitalism as the voluntary sector of society characterized by private property relationships, this kind of micro-giving is part of that. ~ Jeffrey A. Tucker
  • Wikipedia is effectively one-of-a-kind. No other mass-market or topically broad wikis have had meaningful success to date. Even Wikimedia's other wiki projects are not nearly as active as Wikipedia. If successful wikis are rare, Wikipedia might be a one-in-a-million lightning strike — some unique combination of factors succeeded in this case, but those circumstances are unlikely to replicate. If so, Wikipedia's rarity might also highlight its fragility.
    • Eric Goldman, Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences, Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology, vol. 8, p. 157 (2010)
  • There are a number of trolls, stalkers, and psychopaths who wander around Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects looking for people to harass, stalk, and otherwise ruin the lives of (several have been arrested over their activities here) ... You will eventually say something that will lead back to you, and the stalkers will find it ... I decided to be myself, to never hide my personality, to always be who I am, but to utilize disinformation with regard to what I consider unimportant details: age, location, occupation, etc.
  • 1. Wikipedia has no governance to speak of. It's a land of jungle law. 2. Wikipedia has no respect for people and their works. People are treated on Wikipedia like s--t. 3. Wikipedia cannot be trusted for accurate information, considering the agenda-pushing street gangs of wiki. 4. Wikipedia pollutes the internet as well as diminishes scholarship. It floods and pollutes the search engines on the internet and pushes out good scholarship and honest debate in favor of bad scholarship, defamation, and bold face intimidation and thuggery. 5. Wikipedia needs to be brought under the rules of slander, liable [sic], defamation, and copyright laws. 6. Wikipedia should be stripped of its 501c3 status.
  • When I write, I consult Wikipedia 30–40 times a day, because it is really helpful. When I write, I don't remember if someone was born in the 6th century or the 7th; or maybe how many n's are in "Goldmann"... Just a few years ago, for this kind of thing you could waste a lot of time.
  • At our roundtable, an audience member commented that the web was supposed to offer a democratic space in which no voices or experiences would be marginalized or ignored. Yet the coverage on Wikipedia has huge gaps, partly because of the interests and knowledge of those who have hitherto been most drawn to contributing: "more than 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30." Although Wikipedia boasts thousands of detailed, well-researched, well-referenced articles on scholarly subjects, such as its Featured Articles, entries on fictional locations such as Middle-earth may be much more detailed than entries on real locations, such as countries in Africa.

  • So I finally gave in and coughed up a donation for Wikipedia.  It was no trouble at all, and felt good.  Now I have a sense that I'm a partial owner – a stakeholder of sorts – in this apparatus that I use every day.  ...  Giving like this can be habit forming.  ...  It's true that giving this way doesn't make rational sense according to a neoclassical idea of what constitutes economic rationality.  Wikipedia is free and it will be there whether I give or not.  The same might be said of the Mises Institute.  If all we cared about were commercial exchange, I have every incentive to use the free good and never pay.  There is no harm done in free riding, right?

    Mises himself had a broader view of rationality.  He said that all actions are rational from the point of view of the actor.  I'm glad to embrace that idea.  Giving in this way is not strictly a capitalist act if you define capitalism as only commercial exchange based on contract.  But if we see capitalism as the voluntary sector of society characterized by private property relationships, this kind of micro-giving is part of that.

  • Wikipedia is, for many users, the primary site for information on the Web ... At present, Wikipedia hosts more than 2.9 million English-language articles, with a total of 13 million articles available in more than 250 different languages ... Wikipedia is the second-most searched site on the Internet, behind only Google.
  • As Wikipedia founder Jim Wales revealed, back in 2005, 50 percent of all Wikipedia edits were made by just 0.7 percent of users; 75 percent of all articles were written by less than 2 percent of the user base. These numbers reveal that the active Wikipedia community is a lot smaller than you might think. It's understandable, then, for this active group to be somewhat self-centered, and not always accommodating to new or casual users.

2011

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  • Concerns among the academic community about the reliability of information from Wikipedia are unlikely to ever be fully alleviated, but this has never been Wikipedia's fundamental goal. Much greater speed in adding and updating information, and involvement of the many rather than the few, have always been seen as ample compensation for any inaccuracies that emerge in the initial posting of entries. Wikipedia, like Castalia, is a flawed ideal but it is, as far as can reasonably be predicted, here to stay.
  • Intuitively [students] are using Wikipedia as one of those [new] tools, creating a new layer of information-filtering to help orient them in the early stages of serious research. As a result, Wikipedia's role as a bridge to the next layer of academic resources is growing stronger.
  • It can be stunningly good on obscure corners of popular culture, and strikingly weak on mainstream matters.
    • Timothy Garton Ash, "We've seen America's vitriol. Now let's salute Wikipedia, a US pioneer of global civility", The Guardian, (12 January 2011)
  • The kind of social production that Wikipedia represents has turned from a laughable utopia to a practical reality. That's the biggest gift that Wikipedia has given to us – a vision of practical utopia that allows us to harness the more sociable, human aspects of who we are to effective collective action.
  • Wikipedia underscores an evolutionary lesson: We've always gotten farther as a species collaborating than going it alone. ... In the past, the groups that cooperated best lived longer and had more kids – and we inherited those tendencies. Groups would correct cheaters (people who didn't share info or goods) through social pressure. So Wikipedia is like humanity's social nature writ large electronically, complete with ongoing disputes and corrections.
  • The fundamental flaw in the way Wikipedians think about what they do is that they are entirely absorbed in rules and procedures and arguing fine points with one another and earning merit points; it has all the flavour, as has been suggested before, of a great online game. Users – the ostensible audience – are hardly considered.
  • An authority isn't a person or institution who is always right – ain't no such animal. An authority is a person or institution who has a process for lowering the likelihood that they are wrong to acceptably low levels. ... And this is what I think is really worth celebrating as Wikipedia begins its second decade. It took one of the best ideas of the last 500 years – peer review – and expanded its field of operation so dramatically that it changed the way authority is configured.
  • The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know. Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table. If they are not at the table, we don't benefit from their crumb.
  • Every single day for the last 10 years Wikipedia has got better because someone – several million someones in all – decided to make it better. ... Wikipedia is best understood not as a product with an organisation behind it, but as an activity that happens to leave an encyclopedia in its wake.
  • Wikipedia was an idea whose time had come on an information-driven net whose consumers couldn't wait for the slow workings of expertise or the cost of proprietary content: a free encyclopedia written by anonymous users supposedly striving for an “unbiased” perspective. ... Wikipedia in practice has strayed from these utopian ideas because of the ease with which political and social bias trumps altruism. ... Finding examples of Wikipedia's bias is not difficult. One need only compare the entries of figures who do the same thing but from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

2012

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  • But the blot on the encyclopedia's fair name is not just in the wrongness of the statement, but in its partisan and non-encyclopedic nature.... If Wikipedia wants to live up to its promise of being a reliable encyclopedic source, it will strike this and all sentences resembling it from its article on me. At most, it can use me as an example of how it was fooled by some of its all-too-partisan collaborators. Speaking of whom: the history page accompanying my page proves forever that some Wikipedia collaborators wanted to inflict on me the maximum harm possible, an attitude incompatible with work for an encyclopedia. Shouldn't Wikipedia fire them and wipe out everything they wrote? Of course they can still contribute blogs and columns, by preference under their own full names, but they have proven themselves not to be encyclopedic authorities...
    • Koenraad Elst, The Argumentative Hindu (2012)
  • We don't want Wikipedia to be just as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica: We want it to have 55 times as many entries, present contentious debates fairly, and reflect brand new scholarly research, all while being edited and overseen primarily by volunteers.
  • Despite being staffed entirely by an army of volunteers, Wikipedia – which is not, strictly speaking, a news site – is keeping pace with conventional media outlets. Official results make their way to athletes' Wikipedia pages within hours, and sometimes minutes, of their finish. With dedicated editors working 24/7, Wikipedia pages are proving to be faster, leaner and more popular alternatives to traditional reporting.
  • Wikipedia, as you well know, is a fraudulent encyclopedia. It's sort of invented. And we all go to it. The entry under Michael Savage – I have one person who keeps trying to correct the truth. But the soviets, that is the communists, that is the liberals, that is the democrats, have at least ninety-nine people who attack my site, every time he makes a correction. For example, when he reenters that Michael Savage single-handedly stopped the Dubai Ports Deal? They take it out of there. They don't want anyone to know it. In other words, they revise my history, the way the soviets did to individuals that they wanted to destroy in their country. Now you understand why I'm not allowed on any television station. Why Michael Savage is an unknown individual in America, except to its millions of listeners. And why this show is number two on the Internet and radio. And why I have six best sellers in a row. Because somehow the truth is getting out. But I'm warning you about Wikipedia. If Wikipedia doesn't stop these ninety-nine democrat liberal soviets from modifying things that are true, then how could you rely upon a website that's so fraudulent? You can't. You can't! But I can't fight every battle every day, you understand that?
  • Wikipedians [...] act as de facto topic moderators, they often end up being biased and frequently quirky. ... Articles are often edited with the sensibility of adolescent too-clever-by-half males[, which] describes a lot of Wikipedians.

2013

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  • It is partly a product of history, where we came from in the early days. We were really a child of the dot-com crash. There was no investment money. We were just a group of people on the internet trying to do something cool. A lot of the volunteers wanted to put it into the non-profit [Wikimedia Foundation] – made sense to me.
  • It all started one night when writer Amanda Filipacchi was browsing through Wikipedia and noticed an absence of women under the category "American novelists." At first, she thought the female writers being moved off the page were not important enough to be on it. But then she discovered some obscure male novelists were still listed, while some well-known women were not.
  • Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today, some 2,500 are generally considered endangered. ...less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide. ... To summarize a key result of this study...: No wikipedia, no ascent.
  • It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade.

2014

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  • Dealing with the Wikipedians is like walking into a mental hospital: the floors are carpeted, the walls are nicely padded, but you know there's a pretty good chance at any given moment one of the inmates will pick up a knife.
    • Anonymous Wiki-PR client, cited by Judith-Newman in Wikipedia-Mania, New York Times (9 January 2014)
  • Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals - that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse".
  • ...when I used to teach kids, there was a fierce debate between teachers on the pro versus the anti Wikipedia side, and I always came down very strongly on the pro side, and I told my students if they were researching something for me – like Wikipedia is totally OK. Copy and pasting from Wikipedia is not, but there is no place to get a better overview from things. ... it all depends on what do you need, and if you just want to check some quick fact about something, Wikipedia is totally reliable. Now there's reasons why you can't cite it as a source, but ignoring that for the time being, Wikipedia for a huge number of people's needs is totally fine. ... the thing that is disturbing is the number times that that source link does not go anywhere, or, I have found some times where the context of the source link says something that is completely contrary to the feeling that you got from the Wikipedia page itself ...
  • You'd be amazed at the number of times I've been with top professors in the field and I've asked them a question and they've said, 'I'm not too sure about that, let me check', and gone straight to Wikipedia.
  • With such a massive amount of rules and regulations to adhere to, how is it not absolutely deterring for newcomers to join Wikipedia? Most likely, because they do not even know these rules exist. Counter-intuitive as it may sound, in spite of all the regulations, it is perfectly fine and acceptable to just use common sense when editing Wikipedia, relying on one's best judgment on how to make it a better encyclopedia. In fact, one of the Wikipedia policies goes even further and states that “If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it,” and one of the five pillars of Wikipedia claims that “Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. Their principles and spirit matter more than their literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making an exception.” In a similar spirit, there is a rule stating that instruction creep should be avoided and that pettifogging is not welcome. One policy, which describes what Wikipedia is not, insists that Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy.
  • Whether or not Wikipedia has managed to attain the authority level of traditional encyclopaedias, it has undoubtedly become a model of what the collaborative Internet community can and cannot do.
    • The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, "Wikipedia", Encyclopædia Britannica, (28 October 2014)
  • Most have simply washed their hands of the problem, claiming that the bigotry or bias on Wikipedia is just an unfortunate side-effect that we have to accept. But this is not a trivial unintended consequence of an open source system; bias goes against the very principle of Wikipedia and must be addressed. I have to deal with this bias and misinformation every time a journalist interviews me and references my Wikipedia article. I need to spend the first 30 minutes of interviews to correct all the misleading information from my Wikipedia article... Most of the skeptic editors on my article believe me to be a very dangerous man — and believe that it is Wikipedia's responsibility to warn the world of how dangerous my ideas are.
  • The prime agent of this change is a development that nobody (save perhaps Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) would have predicted.[1] It is called Wikipedia—an online encyclopedia collectively produced and edited by 'amateurs' who have created what is effectively the greatest reference work the world has yet produced.
Footnote:
  1. ↑ “Most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing.” Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts (Pan, 1992)
  • John Naughton in: From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: Disruptive Innovation in the Age of the Internet, Quercus, 2012, Chapter 3, page 65
"Encyclopedia Frown" (Dec 11, 2014)
[edit]

David Auerbach, "Encyclopedia Frown", Slate, (Dec 11, 2014)

  • Beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucratic as a Kafka story. And it can be particularly unwelcoming to women.
  • The problem instead stems from the fact that administrators and longtime editors have developed a fortress mentality in which they see new editors as dangerous intruders who will wreck their beautiful encyclopedia, and thus antagonize and even persecute them.
  • We can learn a lot from Wikipedia about Internet governance and collective knowledge-building. It’s ultimately up to the site’s editors to choose to learn to temper their fortress mentality, get more outside eyes and ears, listen to the most moderate and reflective among them, and perhaps even entertain the idea that they might sometimes be wrong. Wikipedia’s future may depend on it.
  • Wikipedia is amazing. But it’s become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess.
  • Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.”

2015

[edit]
  • And then there's Wikipedia – astroturf's dream come true. Billed as the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the reality can't be more different. Anonymous Wikipedia editors control and co-opt pages on behalf of special interests. They forbid and reverse edits that go against their agenda. They skew and delete information, in blatant violation of Wikipedia's own established policies, with impunity – always superior to the poor schleps who actually believe anyone can edit Wikipedia, only to discover they're barred from correcting even the simplest factual inaccuracies. Try adding a footnoted fact, or correcting a factual error on one of these monitored Wikipedia pages, then poof! Sometimes within a matter of seconds you'll find your edit is reversed.
  • Could the pressure from mobile, and the internal tensions, tear Wikipedia apart? A world without it seems unimaginable, but consider the fate of other online communities. ... The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes – the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in – and to design a mobile-oriented editing environment. ... The worst scenario is an end to Wikipedia, not with a bang but with a whimper: a long, slow decline in participation, accuracy and usefulness that is not quite dramatic enough to jolt the community into making meaningful reforms. No effort in history has gotten so much information at so little cost into the hands of so many – a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence of profit and owners. In an age of Internet giants, this most selfless of websites is worth saving.
  • When Wikipedia launched, it raised immediate concerns about the sanctity of accreditation – could knowledge be created by amateurs? But its steady rise in utility meant that, in time, nearly everyone made their peace with it – some more happily than others.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation has gotten far off track. Every year, it builds its campaign around a budget many millions larger than the year before.
  • If you're selling to customers that you're familiar and competent with new media, and you can't manage something like Wikipedia, that's a failure.
  • It is clear that our deep state is obsessed with controlling information and moulding it to fit its narrative. On Wikipedia, a number of 'users' and 'editors' have been planted to ensure that only Pakistan's official stance or the Nazaria-e-Pakistan [ideology of Pakistan] is reflected in the pages on Pakistan. Consequently, the pages on Pakistan's history read like a secondary school Pakistan Studies textbook... All alternative views on Pakistan's constitution, role of religion and federalism are stifled by this group...If one were to venture a guess it would be that these manipulators of the Pakistani narrative on sites like Wikipedia and others are operating out of some nondescript building in Islamabad's G sectors [where Pakistani intelligence agencies are located].

2016

[edit]
In India and Nigeria, over 75% of participants said they had never heard of Wikipedia. ~ Zachary McCune (Wikimedia Foundation)
  • For a website with no paid writing staff that is still overcoming an out-of-date reputation for inaccuracy, Wikipedia punches above its weight. ...it is especially powerful in an election season: On the day of the 2012 election, Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's entries alone were read 1.6 million times. [...] you can see a virtual version of the presidential race playing out every day.
  • It turns out there are people, typically they're probably unemployed kids with student debt you know that are stuck in their parents' basement with Cheetos stains on their t-shirts that haven't been able to get their first job so what they do is they play games to see how long they can edit Wikipedia pages in order to have games with their friends all around the world. So my advice to you is, if you do have a Wikipedia page, check it once in a while...
  • ... what Wikipedia and Facebook teach us is that social models of content curation and collaboration do scale. ...organisations will increasingly need to crowd-source a lot of their meta-data. ... In other words, [organisations] will need to build a Corporate Data Catalogue that looks and feels a lot like Wikipedia, but which borrows the “like” and “share” concepts from Facebook.
  • Wikipedia is the most comprehensive compendium of up-to-date knowledge assembled at gargantuan scale almost entirely by volunteers. It works, too, because they form a huge community that for reasons of camaraderie, rivalry, vanity, purity and sometimes just deep suspicion constantly monitor and vet one another's work. There are flaws in the process, but each entry is a living organism that matures and self-corrects over time.
  • About a decade ago I migrated into community work from a non-community background. This is the guide I wish I had read back then. When I say community work, I am talking about stuff like Wikipedia: large distributed groups of people doing something together, usually online, often unpaid. Usually international, often nerdy, often (but not always) FLOSS or FLOSS-adjacent.
  • ...people have talked about open politics and things like that, and its really hard sometimes to say that yes, you can apply the same principles in some other areas... So, obviously open source in science is making a comeback. Science was there first. But then science ended up by being pretty closed with very expensive journals and some of that going on. And open source is making a comeback in science with things like arXiv and open journals. Wikipedia changed the world too. ... So there are other examples. I am sure there are more to come. ... It is up to you guys to make them.
  • Like many university lecturers, I used to warn my own students off using Wikipedia (as pointless an injunction as telling them not to use Google, or not to leave their essay to the last minute). I finally gave up doing so about three years ago,...
  • Two years before Wikipedia, I had the dream, the vision, of a free encyclopedia written by volunteers in all the languages of the world. This inspiration came to me from watching the growth of free software, open-source software, as most people know it. And watching programmers coming together and giving away their work for free online.
  • Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That's opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. ... Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests.

2017

[edit]
As the originator of [the neutrality policy,] I completely despair of persuading Wikipedians of the error of their ways. ~ Larry Sanger
  • The researchers [...] found that the Wikipedia entries were written at a much higher reading level compared with the medication guides and well above the average consumer reading level, which could contribute to patient misunderstanding of medication information. ... The study authors conclude that as the public use of Wikipedia increases, the need for health care professionals and the pharmaceutical industry to actively educate and provide reliable resources to patients remains important.
  • Page views of Wikipedia are immense compared with views of primary literature articles. As a result, if you edit a page to include results from your research, your audience will likely expand by at least an order of magnitude.
  • For the record the Daily Mail banned all its journalists from using Wikipedia as a sole source in 2014 because of its unreliability.
  • Wikipedians this week added greatly to the amusement of the internet after around 40 contributors loftily declared that the Daily Mail was not a reliable source for citations. Much public hilarity ensued – for the reason that The Mail and Wikipedia are really far more alike than either would care to admit. ... Both can resemble a real chamber of horrors.
  • However clumsy the Youth Parliament's approach to Wikipedia may be, it's still an improvement on a government order issued by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev last August, when he established a working group to study the creation of an all new Russian-engineered Wikipedia clone.
  • False information is being disseminated at a far greater rate when it seems to have been vetted by a brand name and Wikipedia's branding is global. It would be ideal if a more credible site like Encyclopedia Britannica or a useful news site like Reuters could be granted the “zero-rate” – but those sites [...] do [not] have the same foundational interest in spreading their content without financial gain that Wikipedia has.
  • I fear we are moving beyond a natural skepticism regarding expert claims to the death of the ideal of expertise itself: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, teachers and students, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those with achievement in an area and those with none.
  • Despite being an American-born site, its popularity and utility have expanded around the world since its foundation in 2001.
  • The cyber age has tremendous potential, as indicated by Wikipedia. But if it bypasses space and time where there's just this obsession with the present – this neglect of our heritage and history – then our world will change.
  • The online crowd-sourced encyclopedia is perceived as increasingly trustworthy, [...] with immediate impacts on scientific literacy.
  • Wikipedia, like other new, non-commercial information technologies, can be used to open new public spaces for [indigenous] languages, and gradually recover the ground lost to more dominant languages. ... However, the representation of indigenous languages on the platform is very low,... [In Latin America indigenous communities speak 420 different languages.] To date, only four official indigenous-language versions are represented: Quechua ..., Náhuatl ..., Aymara ... and Guaraní.

2018

[edit]
  • Wikipedia is basically a format in which people who hate you can go into your ... , I don't even know what you call these, into the search of your name, and then there I have a profile of sorts, into my profiler page, and poison it. ... "Views on political issues, groups and politicians" – [...] what happened between 2009 and 2017? Well, doesn't matter. ... What was my context for [calling Bernie Sanders a "radical Marxist who believes in violence"]? They don't even discuss it, the shooting in Alexandria. ... [That paragraph] is all mickey mouse stuff. It is cut and paste cherry picking. ... I've written about [progressivism] in great length, but not a word in my "political views". ... Who has a section on "controversial views"? It is as if it is written by Media Matters. ... "Levin compared supporters of the Affordable Care Act to Nazi brown shirts." ... No I didn't! Completely taken out of context! ... If you want to know about me, you should go as far away from the Wikipedia page as possible... ... What they're supposed to do, if they're a responsible organisation, is to get the basic information on me [...] and lock it so that miscreants and malcontents can't abuse and post it. ... Very, very dishonest information in there. ... The book reviews are scores positive, maybe one or two negative by leftists and so forth. You would have no idea reading their comments about my books on Wikipedia.
  • Facebook's introduction of a new feature that uses [Wikipedia] to combat “fake news” [...] poses arguably the greatest test in years to the volunteer-run online encyclopedia, constituting a massive threat to the internet's largest and ostensibly most trusted source of free knowledge. ... It also highlights the risks posed by Facebook's efforts to seemingly outsource its problems to the online encyclopedia. Indeed, Wikipedia has struggled to defend its standards in the face of its new role as the internet's “good cop.” As more and more tech giants like Facebook and YouTube make use of its content, a new influx of users has flooded the website [–] not all of them well intentioned.
  • I'd argue that Wikipedia's biggest asset is its willingness as a community and website to “delete.” It's that simple. If there's bad information, or info that's just useless, Wikipedia's regulatory system has the ability to discard it.
  • Communities of so-called “amateur experts” linked together by shared interests are the bread and butter of Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia actively encourages editors to congregate in “projects” and “portals” covering hundreds of articles that all fall under a single broad topic. ... So while it's easy to lament the dangers of the Wikipedia gun lobby, it is important to remember that groups with competing worldviews are what fuel the crowdsourced encyclopedia – where the question of what is true is always secondary to the question of what the community of different users can agree on as being true.
  • When [people] get their information not from us – but [...] through something like Siri or [...] Alexa – that opportunity to either contribute back as an editor is broken, and that opportunity to contribute, to donate is also broken.
  • On January 2, 2018, MBH participant published statistics on peak views of Russian Wikipedia articles in 2017.
Each article of the free encyclopedia is visited almost evenly from day to day. Smooth fluctuations are associated with the total traffic to Wikipedia, as well as various global cycles, for example, calendar - annual, weekly and others.
  • ... Wikipedia is just one type of online community, which appeals to a fairly narrow (geeky, combative male) demographic. And, importantly, it doesn't appeal to many other demographics. ... if, as inevitably happens in such a place, some people get impatient and upset at [the] unfair treatment, they must tolerate the passive-aggressive condescension of the basement-dwellers who inform them, apparently with no awareness of the ironies involved, that courtesy is an absolute requirement.
  • ... independent bloggers Markus Fiedler and Dirk Pohlmann have found [that Wikipedia's] 'freely editable' model definitely doesn't mean an absence of censorship and biased political activism. ...the online encyclopedia is home to a major edit war where corrections are constantly added, information removed, and value judgements made to fit a specific narrative. ... [An inner circle of manipulators] are referees and players combined into one.
  • ...Wikipedia has forced academics to re-examine how they validate sources. We should have been doing that all along. We should have been approaching an Encyclopaedia Britannica article with a certain level of distrust and questioning: What are the biases of people writing this? What are they leaving out? What communities are not included in this conversation?
  • [Wikipedia] is therefore a reflection of the world's biases more than it is a cause of them. ... If journalists, book publishers, scientific researchers, curators, academics, grant-makers and prize-awarding committees don't recognize the work of women, Wikipedia's editors have little foundation on which to build. ... We may not be able to change how society values women, but we can change how women are seen, and ensure that they are seen to begin with.
  • ... debilitating factors – such as excessive bickering and poorly worded arguments – have led to about one-third of RfCs [i.e. Request for Comment deliberation processes] going unresolved. ... the experience of participants and the length of a discussion are strongly predictive of the timely closure of an RfC.
  • Medical images and articles found on Wikipedia may help patients better understand their radiology reports, ... And despite both internal and external metrics concluding Wikipedia's health information to be variable in quality, but continually improving, the authors believe the website's detailed information could pair well with the lay-definitions housed within the PORTER [i.e. Patient-Oriented Radiology Reporter] glossary.
  • The magnitude of [Wikipedia's visitor] numbers piqued the interest of Matthew Kock, website manager of the prestigious British Museum in London. "I looked at how many Rosetta Stone page views there were on Wikipedia... That is perhaps our iconic object, and five times as many people go to the Wikipedia article [...] as to ours." This realization inspired him to propose a novel idea to British Museum administrators – invite a Wikipedia contributor into the institution as the first ever "Wikipedian in Residence" to serve as a liaison within the Museum. Despite his fears about proposing collaboration with unknown and uncredentialled Wikipedia volunteers, [...] he met with enthusiastic interest from numerous departments at the museum.
    • Andrew Lih in “Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge”, American Library Association, (29 November 2018), p. 9

2019

[edit]
  • Science Wikipedia pages aren't just for non-experts. Physicists – researchers, professors, and students – use Wikipedia daily. When I need the transition temperature for a Bose-Einstein condensate (prefactor and all), or when I want to learn about the details of an unfamiliar quantum algorithm, Wikipedia is my first stop. ... Despite [this], it is rare for professional physicists to contribute, in part because there are few, if any, professional incentives to do so. ... only a small fraction [of them] have edited even a single Wikipedia page.
  • Like other social media platforms, Wikipedia has evolved into an echo chamber where the user is presented with only one type of content instead of being shown a balanced narrative. This disinformation is powerful since the articles are written in an academic style and users do not see other sources that disagree with the article.... Some editors of Wikipedia are failed academics with demonic energy who wish to conquer anonymously what they were unable to do in their normal careers. And spending much of their working life editing Wikipedia articles and by the use of multiple anonymous handles they have obtained administrative status which entitles them to block opposing views. The anonymous persona of the editors and the low stakes have made Wikipedia politics much more vicious than real politics.
  • Wikipedia is not going anywhere. It's definitely part of everyone's life. But the question of accuracy is one of the most important aspects of it. ... Our purpose here is not to evaluate whether Wikipedia is good or bad. ... It's not so much about warning people about what Wikipedia is. It's about showing what it is. ... Librarians are interested in trying to broaden our community's education with information in general, be it digital or otherwise.
  • Whereas a true scientist, confronted with a glimpse of the unknown, would pursue the inexplicable, the Skeptics close their eyes and ears to anything that challenges their Newtonian world-view. Worse, armed with the formidable propaganda tool that is Wikipedia, they force their lack of curiosity on others, closing the lines of inquiry for millions who might otherwise be interested in pursuing some healing modality not fully explained by scientific orthodoxy.
  • Wikipedians in residence (WIR) have been around since at least 2010, with the first one hired by the British Museum in the U.K. Since then, other museums as well as universities, archives, libraries, art galleries and health organizations, have followed suit with a total of 165 WIRs hired worldwide. According to the Wikimedia Foundation [...], right now 65 WIRs are actively working — and registered — with the foundation.
  • Indeed, Fram seemed like the perfect test case for a new kind of enforcement from the foundation – a prolific user whose bad behavior warranted a severe sanction short of a lifetime ban. But as is the case in so many enforcement decisions on social platforms, the ban created more questions than it answered.
  • The real cause of the Fram flare-up wasn't the sudden overreach by the foundation, but the community's own laissez-faire attitude about toxic users. ... The community is currently blaming the foundation for their own mess, in my opinion, which was caused by our abject failure to develop procedures to enforce civility without Foundation intervention.
  • The Commissioner sees the ongoing blocking of access to Wikipedia as forming part of a broader pattern of undue restrictions on the right to receive and impart information on the internet, and more generally as an illustration of the disproportionately heavy-handed approach currently prevailing in Turkey to any content or information the Turkish authorities consider offensive. ... Commissioner Mijatovic concludes that the way Turkish administrative authorities and courts routinely have recourse to internet blocking is unacceptable in a democratic society and not compatible with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights which protects freedom of expression. ... The systemic nature of the problem requires far-reaching measures, including the complete overhaul of the relevant Turkish legislation.

2020s

[edit]

2020

[edit]
History is written by the victor, except on wikipedia
  • [Wikipedia comprises millions of articles that are in constant need of edits to reflect new information. That can involve article expansions, major rewrites, or more routine modifications such as updating numbers, dates, names, and locations. Currently, humans across the globe volunteer their time to make these edits.] It would be beneficial to automatically modify exact portions of the articles, with little to no human intervention.
  • History is written by the victors … except on Wikipedia haha
  • [I have not seen a single practical use-case to convince me to integrate cryptocurrencies or blockchain into the platform. To reward content creators and editors with digital assets] is a really bad idea. ... By integrating cryptocurrencies, Wikipedia would be taking a step back by making it easier for people and companies to pay for the content they want on the platform. Creating a mechanism where you effectively authenticate that type of behavior ... isn't going to help with the quality of Wikipedia at all. ... To say to them, you're going to have to pay or put money at risk in order to edit Wikipedia is completely insane.
  • If it is a mistake to keep comparing Wikipedia to Britannica, it is another kind of category error to judge Wikipedia against its peers in the internet's top 10. Wikipedia ought to serve as a model for many forms of social endeavor online, but its lessons do not translate readily into the commercial sphere. It is a noncommercial enterprise, with no investors or shareholders to appease, no financial imperative to grow or die, and no standing to maintain in the arms race to amass data and attain AI supremacy at all costs. At Jimmy Wales' wedding, one of the maids of honor toasted him as the sole internet mogul who wasn't a billionaire.
  • The site has helped its fellow tech behemoths, though, especially with the march of AI. Wikipedia's liberal content licenses and vast information hoard have allowed developers to train neural networks much more quickly, cheaply, and widely than proprietary data sets ever could have. When you ask Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa a question, Wikipedia helps provide the answer. When you Google a famous person or place, Wikipedia often informs the “knowledge panel” that appears alongside your search results.
    These tools were made possible by a project called Wikidata, the next ambitious step toward realizing the age-old dream of creating a “World Brain.” ... As platforms like Google and Alexa work to provide instant answers to random questions, Wikidata will be one of the key architectures that link the world's information together...
  • Why do Wikipedians perform these millions of hours of labor, some expended on a giant straw goat, without pay? Because they don't experience them as labor. “It's a misconception people work for free,” Wales told the site Hacker Noon in 2018. “They have fun for free.” A 2011 survey of more than 5,000 Wikipedia contributors listed “It's fun” as one of the primary reasons they edited the site.
  • I can't tell you what the cause of the bias on Wikipedia is, I can only tell you that it's really obvious now. It used to be quite obvious, like even 10 years ago it was already pretty obvious 10 years ago. Now it's just embarrassing.
  • There is a massive irony in the fact that Wikipedia is so extremely biased: it was started by someone who cares unusually deeply about neutrality (me), who developed and defended its neutrality policy at great length.
    Man makes plans, and God laughs.
    • Larry Sanger, Tweet on (Sep 3, 2020)

2021

[edit]

  • Even the common perception that Wikipedia provides a level playing field on which humanity can freely share all its knowledge is a pretense. The reality is that while all such digital structures behave like free and unrestricted systems, they are in fact controlled by gamification algorithms at the hands of those who own and operate them. Very few people grasp the profound deception of the system.
    • Malhotra, R., “Artificial intelligence and the future of power: 5 battlegrounds”, New Delhi:Rupa, 2021.
  • [the infiltration had threatened the] very foundations of Wikipedia.
  • This case is unprecedented in scope
  • [the foundation had been investigating the infiltration of Chinese-language Wikipedia for nearly a year. But this summer] credible threats [to volunteers' safety had] led us to prioritise rapid response

2022

[edit]
Editing Wikipedia from a bomb shelter is difficult. To be honest, covering the invasion is not our main priority now. People are mainly trying to put in place their plan B, either by evacuating to a safer place, by joining the army, or by joining volunteer organizations. ~ Mykola Kozlenko
  • Like many other knowledge spaces, Wikipedia has a problem: it lacks visual representation, especially when it comes to notable figures who belong to the global majority, including Black, Indigenous, and people of color. To change that, we are starting a new initiative in collaboration with Behance and AfroCROWD: Discover #WikiUnseen

2023

[edit]
  • Every day, millions of people gather on Wikipedia to fight over the facts displayed. Wikipedia doesn’t just preserve the some 22.14 GB worth of text displayed on its pages, it’s also preserving years of edits and arguments about how those words were written. Every page on the site is argued over, fussed about, and tweaked constantly. All those discussions are here, and can be pored over.
    Running an ad-free website where millions of people gather every day to discuss facts and update scores of pages is a monumental task. It’s incredible that Wikipedia doesn’t often go down and has few technical problems. Most of the time, Wikipedia works without issue. The same is not true for X, formerly Twitter.
    And where does the money go? The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that publishes its financial records that are routinely audited by third parties. Every year, it publishes portions of this financial audit for the public. According to its 2022 report, it received about $160 million in donations. It spent $88 million of this on salaries and wages for its employees, $2.7 million on internet hosting, and about $1.2 million on travel. It’s very easy to see these reports with a cursory search. A community note on Musk’s own post says as much.
  • The civic tech expert Ed Saperia used as his parable the difference between Wikipedia and Facebook. Jimmy Wales’s big experiment, which started life in 1999 as Nupedia, has created an open-source collection of human knowledge in hundreds of languages that is essentially trustworthy. If a mistake creeps in through the gates of human generosity, it gets corrected in the same way. If malicious actors try to slander their foes, the punishment is not cancellation, but more like lifelong ridicule, which is proportionate, given how long a slanderous person is likely to carry on doing ridiculous things. In other words, it is the best of humanity, all natural desire to help each other with cross-pollinated knowledge concentrated in one place.
    Facebook, for brevity, takes the same raw material – all the people in the world – and finds the worst in it. Facebook manages to winkle out things we didn’t know we were capable of – levels of vitriol, gullibility and hysteria – in between a scare ad for dark politics and a mesmerising video of five types of mince baked around a kilo of cheese. (I am paraphrasing a bit; I don’t think civic tech gurus dwell much on the cheese.)
“Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth” (Published July 18, 2023, updated July 21, 2023)
[edit]

Jon Gertner, “Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth”, The New York Times, (Published July 18, 2023, updated July 21, 2023)

Without Wikipedia, generative A.I. wouldn’t exist. ~ Nicholas Vincent
For a popular article that might have thousands of contributors, “Wikipedia is literally the most accurate form of information ever created by humans,” Amy Bruckman, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told me. But Wikipedia’s short articles can sometimes be hit or miss. “They could be total garbage,” says Bruckman, who is the author of the recent book “Should You Believe Wikipedia?”
Jesse Dodge, a computer scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, told me that Wikipedia might now make up between 3 and 5 percent of the scraped data an L.L.M. uses for its training. “Wikipedia going forward will forever be super valuable,” Dodge points out, “because it’s one of the largest well-curated data sets out there.” There is generally a link, he adds, between the quality of data a model trains on and the accuracy and coherence of its responses.
Reagle told me that the recent debates over A.I. recall for him the early days of Wikipedia, when its quality was unflatteringly compared to that of other encyclopedias. “It served as a proxy in this larger culture war about information and knowledge and quality and authority and legitimacy. So I take a sort of similar model to thinking about ChatGPT, which is going to improve. Just like Wikipedia is not perfect, it’s not perfect — it’s never going to be perfect — but what is the relative value given the other information that’s out there?”
While Wikipedia’s licensing policy lets anyone tap its knowledge and text — to “reuse and remix” it however they might like — it does have several conditions. These include the requirements that users must “share alike,” meaning any information they do something with must subsequently be made readily available, and that users must give credit and attribution to Wikipedia contributors. Mixing Wikipedia’s corpus into a chatbot model that gives answers to queries without explaining the sourcing may thus violate Wikipedia’s terms of use, two people in the open-source software community told me.
  • The new A.I. chatbots have typically swallowed Wikipedia’s corpus, too. Embedded deep within their responses to queries is Wikipedia data and Wikipedia text, knowledge that has been compiled over years of painstaking work by human contributors. While estimates of its influence can vary, Wikipedia is probably the most important single source in the training of A.I. models. “Without Wikipedia, generative A.I. wouldn’t exist,” says Nicholas Vincent, who will be joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia this month and who has studied how Wikipedia helps support Google searches and other information businesses.
    Yet as bots like ChatGPT become increasingly popular and sophisticated, Vincent and some of his colleagues wonder what will happen if Wikipedia, out-flanked by A.I. that has cannibalized it, suffers from disuse and dereliction. In such a future, a “Death of Wikipedia” outcome is perhaps not so far-fetched. A computer intelligence — it might not need to be as good as Wikipedia, merely good enough — is plugged into the web and seizes the opportunity to summarize source materials and news articles instantly, the way humans now do with argument and deliberation.
  • How Wikipedia uses bots and how bots use Wikipedia are extremely different, however. For years it has been clear that fledgling A.I. systems were being trained on the site’s articles, as part of the process whereby engineers “scrape” the web to create enormous data sets for that purpose. In the early days of these models, about a decade ago, Wikipedia represented a large percentage of the scraped data used to train machines. The encyclopedia was crucial not only because it’s free and accessible, but also because it contains a mother lode of facts and so much of its material is consistently formatted.
    In more recent years, as so-called Large Language Models, or L.L.M.s, increased in size and functionality — these are the models that power chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard — they began to take in far larger amounts of information. In some cases, their meals added up to well over a trillion words. The sources included not just Wikipedia but also Google’s patent database, government documents, Reddit’s Q. and A. corpus, books from online libraries and vast numbers of news articles on the web. But while Wikipedia’s contribution in terms of overall volume is shrinking — and even as tech companies have stopped disclosing what data sets go into their A.I. models — it remains one of the largest single sources for L.L.M.s. Jesse Dodge, a computer scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, told me that Wikipedia might now make up between 3 and 5 percent of the scraped data an L.L.M. uses for its training. “Wikipedia going forward will forever be super valuable,” Dodge points out, “because it’s one of the largest well-curated data sets out there.” There is generally a link, he adds, between the quality of data a model trains on and the accuracy and coherence of its responses.
  • Wikipedia’s fundamental goal is to spread knowledge as broadly and freely as possible, by whatever means. About 10 years ago, when site administrators focused on how Google was using Wikipedia, they were in a situation that presaged the advent of A.I. chatbots. Google’s search engine was able, at the top of its query results, to present Wikipedians’ work to users all over the world, giving the encyclopedia far greater reach than before — an apparent virtue. In 2017, three academic computer scientists, Connor McMahon, Isaac Johnson and Brent Hecht, conducted an experiment that tested how random users would react if just part of the contributions made to Google’s search results by Wikipedia were removed. The academics perceived an “extensive interdependence”: Wikipedia makes Google a “significantly better” search engine for many queries, and Wikipedia, in turn, gets most of its traffic from Google.
  • Aaron Halfaker, who led the machine-learning research team at the Wikimedia Foundation for several years (and who now works for Microsoft), told me that search-engine summaries at least offer users links and citations and a way to click back to Wikipedia. The responses from large language models can resemble an information smoothie that goes down easy but contains mysterious ingredients. “The ability to generate an answer has fundamentally shifted,” he says, noting that in a ChatGPT answer there is “literally no citation, and no grounding in the literature as to where that information came from.” He contrasts it with the Google or Bing search engines: “This is different. This is way more powerful than what we had before.”
  • Wikipedia’s most devoted supporters will readily acknowledge that it has plenty of flaws. The Wikimedia Foundation estimates that its English-language site has about 40,000 active editors — meaning they make at least five edits a month to the encyclopedia. According to recent data from the Wikimedia Foundation, about 80 percent of that cohort is male, and about 75 percent of those from the United States are white, which has led to some gender and racial gaps in Wikipedia’s coverage. And lingering doubts about reliability remain. For a popular article that might have thousands of contributors, “Wikipedia is literally the most accurate form of information ever created by humans,” Amy Bruckman, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told me. But Wikipedia’s short articles can sometimes be hit or miss. “They could be total garbage,” says Bruckman, who is the author of the recent book “Should You Believe Wikipedia?”
  • Within the Wikipedia community, there is a cautious sense of hope that A.I., if managed right, will help the organization improve rather than crash. Selena Deckelmann, the chief tech officer, expresses that perspective most optimistically. “What we’ve proven over 22 years now is: We have a volunteer model that is sustainable,” she told me. “I would say there are some threats to it. Is it an insurmountable threat? I don’t think so.” The longtime Wikipedia editor who wrote “Death of Wikipedia” told me that he feels there is a case to be made for a good outcome in the coming years, even if the longer term seems far less certain. The Wikimedia plug-in is the first significant move toward protecting its future. Projects are also in the works to use recent advances in A.I. internally. Albon says that he and his colleagues are in the process of adapting A.I. models that are “off the shelf” — essentially models that have been made available by researchers for anyone to freely customize — so that Wikipedia’s editors can use them for their work. One focus is to have A.I. models aid new volunteers, say, with step-by-step chatbot instructions as they begin working on new articles, a process that involves many rules and protocols and often alienates Wikipedia’s newcomers.
    Leila Zia, the head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation, told me that her team was likewise working on tools that could help the encyclopedia by predicting, for example, whether a new article or edit would be overruled. Or, she said, perhaps a contributor “doesn’t know how to use citations” — in that case, another tool would indicate that. I asked whether it could help Wikipedia entries maintain a neutral point of view as they were writing. “Absolutely,” she says.
  • Three years ago, in anticipation of Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary, Joseph Reagle, a professor at Northeastern University, wrote a historical essay exploring how the death of the site had been predicted again and again. Wikipedia has nevertheless found ways to adapt and endure. Reagle told me that the recent debates over A.I. recall for him the early days of Wikipedia, when its quality was unflatteringly compared to that of other encyclopedias. “It served as a proxy in this larger culture war about information and knowledge and quality and authority and legitimacy. So I take a sort of similar model to thinking about ChatGPT, which is going to improve. Just like Wikipedia is not perfect, it’s not perfect — it’s never going to be perfect — but what is the relative value given the other information that’s out there?”
  • While Wikipedia’s licensing policy lets anyone tap its knowledge and text — to “reuse and remix” it however they might like — it does have several conditions. These include the requirements that users must “share alike,” meaning any information they do something with must subsequently be made readily available, and that users must give credit and attribution to Wikipedia contributors. Mixing Wikipedia’s corpus into a chatbot model that gives answers to queries without explaining the sourcing may thus violate Wikipedia’s terms of use, two people in the open-source software community told me. It is now a topic of conversation inside the Wikimedia community whether some legal recourse exists.
    Data providers may be able to exert other kinds of leverage as well. In April, Reddit announced that it would not make its corpus available for scraping by big tech companies without compensation. It seems very unlikely that the Wikimedia Foundation could issue the same dictum and close its sites off — an action that Nicholas Vincent has called a “data strike” — because its terms of service are more open. But the foundation could make arguments in the name of fairness and appeal to firms to pay for its A.P.I., just as Google does now. It could further insist that chatbots give Wikipedia prominent attribution and offer citations in their answers, something Selena Deckelmann told me the foundation is discussing with various firms. Vincent says that A.I. companies would be foolhardy to try to build a global encyclopedia themselves, with individual contractors. Instead, he told me, “there might be an intermediary stage here where Wikipedia says, ‘Hey, look at how important we’ve been to you.’”
  • Without ingesting the growing millions of Wikipedia pages or vacuuming up Reddit arguments about plot twists in “The Bear,” new L.L.M.s can’t be adequately trained. In fact, no one I spoke with in the tech community seemed to know if it would even be possible to build a good A.I. model without Wikipedia.

2024

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  • We love the amount of support — from the trainings to the course guides to the assistance available via email. With the use of Wikipedia, students are thinking critically about the knowledge gaps and inequities found in public information sources and resources — and they work to improve these conditions with each assignment.
    It's great that students get to see the impact of their work so quickly too, as the number of page views grows far faster than the number of scholars and colleagues who may otherwise read their published work.
  • Wikipedia’s articles about history and religion have real-life impact on the world. What people read on Wikipedia shapes the opinions they form about politics, social justice and so forth. Therefore we need to make sure Wikipedia gets it right, and this project is going to help that goal.
  • If you know how to navigate the site, Wikipedia is a uniquely transparent knowledge-sharing platform. So students get to see how the articles are developed in ways that are typically black-boxed in academia’s peer-review process or in what happens in the office of news media organizations. This makes it a great learning opportunity for identifying how bias can shape Wikipedia content, and for practicing how to intervene in those processes.

See also

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