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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-06-26/In the news

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In the news

In the news

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By Catherine Munro

Notable academic paper

The article "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past" was originally published in the Journal of American History (Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46), and was reprinted on the web at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

New York Times issues correction

On 21 June, The New York Times issued a correction to last week's front page Wikipedia story (see archived story).


The change was reflected in the new headline, "Growing Wikipedia Refines Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy", with "refines" substituted for the previous version that read "revises".

Overview article

The Independent published "New Media: Who are the real winners now we've all gone Wiki-crazy?", saying:

Search for Wikimedia CEO

In "Maybe they should look on Craigslist", the San Francisco Chronicle has noted the appointment of Brad Patrick as interim CEO for the Wikimedia Foundation while the search for a long-term candidate goes on (see archived story).

Internationalization

Corante's "Going Global" blog discusses "How Wikipedia Manages Multilingual Content Expectations", noting how the http://www.wikipedia.org portal specifies the number of articles per Wikipedia language.

Amusing mentions

  • A Globe and Mail columnist writes about having his test edits corrected "by an 11-year-old with a bowl cut and spectacles", in "Here come the Wikipedia police". The edit, a whimsical addition to the Human article, was reverted the following minute by PHDrillSergeant. PHDrill Sergeant, who signs as Porphyric Hemophiliac and is in reality 18 years old, also left the {{behave}} template on the talk page for the columnist's IP address, prompting the columnist's discovery that "Wikipedia, like MySpace, has homepages for its denizens."

Also this week: M.A.N.I.A. — Fair use — News and notes — Press coverage — Features and admins — B.R.I.O.N. — T.R.O.L.L.

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User:PHDrillSergeant has confirmed on his talk page that he is the "11-year-old with a bowl cut and spectacles". -- ALoan (Talk) 17:50, 26 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Another news article (missed)

Sam Vaknin, of Global Politician, wrote "The Six Sins of the Wikipedia". Decries our site with the now all too familiar catch-cry that Wikipedia must be about to implode and die because it is Just Too Unworkable, and lists the six "sins" of Wikipedia, which he says are:

  1. The Wikipedia is opaque and encourages recklessness
  2. The Wikipedia is anarchic, not democratic
  3. The Might is Right Editorial Principle
  4. Wikipedia is against real knowledge
  5. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia
  6. The Wikipedia is rife with libel and violations of copyrights

I responded at User:Ta bu shi da yu/Global Politician. - Ta bu shi da yu 07:35, 27 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ta bu shi da yu's done a much better job, but here's my short, quick reply. Wikipedia is far more transparent than a newspaper (you can see everyone who has ever edited an article and how it developed in the history) and transparency is only desirable in as much as it helps in completing our goal of creating an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is not supposed to be a democracy and we've never claimed to be a democracy. It's even stated as official policy that Wikipedia is not a democracy. We're building an encyclopedia, not a country. Is a newspaper a democracy? Do you hold elections? Do you have a right to a free trial when you're accused of eating all the donuts? 3 to 5 don't make much sense (especially 4) and we remove libel and copyvios as soon as we are aware of them. Copyright violations are almost exclusively done by anonymous or extremely new users making their first article. Also, The New York Times didn't shut down when it was discovered they plagiarised other newspapers. It fired the writer and moved on. We delete the content and warn the editor. If he or she continues, the account will be blocked indefinitely. -- Kjkolb 08:08, 28 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Bravo, that's a very good, succinct reply :-) Mine is just longer because I enjoy talking about Wikipedia and putting my thoughts on (wiki)paper. To be honest, I responded not so much because Sam Vaknin wrote the article (on his website he said I deleted the article on himself due to his complaints: actually, I wasn't aware that he was complaining about his article, I deleted it because it was basically a resume and had already been voted on deletion on AFD...) but mainly because we've all heard similar arguments to Sam's before and I like exploring how we are responding to the criticism and how we measure up. As it turns out, I think we do OK! - Ta bu shi da yu 15:06, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The Independent's article

The article states that "The most widely known wiki project is Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia that now contains nearly 40 million articles."

40 million? That can't be true. --TonyM ｷﾀ━( °∀° )━ｯ!! 11:24, 28 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Probably not, but in total (all languages) we're still getting pretty close to that I believe (someone may correct me, however). - Ta bu shi da yu 15:08, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think that figure is about an order of magnitude too large - i.e. the real number of articles is around 4 million (stats show about 3.4 million in January, with about 30% in :en, 10% in :de, 7% in :fr, 6% in :pl, 5% in :ja. The ratios don't seem to change too radically over time, so you can roughly triple :en to get the right number.). Charitably, adding an extra zero is a relatively easy typo to make. -- ALoan (Talk) 16:34, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]


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