On nerdfighters and wikis

[jayhenry]

[Terryfic]

[jayhenry]

[flwright]

You are one fine explainator, Jay. I'm still a bit troubled by the standards for notable (what's the required eyeball count?), and perhaps even reliable (NYT, yes, mostly, except for Judith Miller and Jayson Blair, Fox hardly ever).

But, Wiki needs standards and there is a lot of Wiki which should be deleted.

Bro 2.0 happened to fall into the noticed but not notable enough category. LG15 was there about this time last year, I think, and went through a big deletion battle. Only when Bree became part of the "mainstream new media(ie, exposed)" was she accepted into the Wiki pantheon. Unfortunately too, for the brothers, their entry was fanwanked into awful.

The evolution of Blue Whale is amazing, thanks for the link.

[curiousgeorge]

Exalt for Jay!

Thanks for the post, it was enlightening. As an aside, I seem to increasingly use Wikipedia at work and amazed at the breadth of it's scope. It is truly staggering. I think it holds tremendous promise to improve it's depth (credibility) as it evolves and I find that process fascinating.

Oh, and a big WORD on Fox News FLW.

[Terryfic]

My gut reaction to whenever someone wants to delete or remove a topic from Wikipedia is why? what does it matter, it isn't a print encyclopedia, no one is gonna throw out their back trying to lift it. But you make an excellent point that if pages are created on 'unreliable' information (be it true or not) there is the danger of propagating slander. Wikipedia is not a place for original research, there are, to my knowledge, no bodies regulating it as there are the press and print publishing. I fully agree with giving the people the ability to collect and organize facts that have been proven by a 3rd party, but once you allow them to add their own facts without question... well that will lead to true truthiness.

Would I rather see a page on Brotherhood 2.0, sure. But for now I think having a paragraph about it on John Green's page is more then enough.

I have been very slow to accept Web 2.0 as something that will work, and if you look at it over a short period of time with all the fighting, vandalizing, and politics it is amazing anything other then total garbage is produced. But when you step a little further back and look at the evolution (errr... intelligent design actually makes more sense here, but I still not going to use it ) of the Blue Whale page you see something almost akin to nature. Like how a hunk of carbon over time turns into a diamond.

What I find most interesting about Web 2.0, and in particular Wikipedia is what is people's motivations. My very elementary knowledge of psychoanalysis tells me that people are largely drive by very selfish motives, they do things for the betterment of themselves. Wikipedia is the total opposite of that, people spend lots of time working on something they can never gain from nor even receive any credit for.

As far as the Alexia graph, their figures are always very skewed towards non-tech savvy people. Thus there may in fact be more of a divide between traditional information sources and Wiki ones. But we should keep in mind that although people are reading wikipedia they are not currently believing it. At least according to the study referenced in the article I post the other day in the KM section. It stated that only 2% of the UK population thought of wikipedia as a trusted source.

Oh, and I'm glad you liked my picture. I'm pretty proud of it myself.

[jayhenry]

[wilycoyote100]

Like a number of other internet phenomena (You Tube, email, Google, online buying, Yahoo news,) I can't remember how I functioned before Wikipedia.
Case in point: was just watching the Russian version of War and Peace at the start of the battle of Borodino. Paused the VHS (that's right), popped up Wikipedia, found out it is considered the single bloodiest battle (for a day) in history. Took 30 seconds, greatly enhanced my appreciation of the film version. Don't how many times a day that happens now.....