I was describing to someone how Wikipedia works:
"anyone can edit" etc.
He answered with this argument:
"Wikipedia is the triumph of the average person!
of the man in the street!)"
(average meaning: not good, not bad, just OK)
I asked "why?"
His explanation:
"Great brilliant works are built by individuals.
Groups of people can only create average works.
If someone writes something good in the wiki,
other average persons will intervene with his/her
work and turn it into an average work. If someone
writes something bad in the wiki, the others will
again turn it into something of average value.
with your system (meaning: Wikipedia's system)
you can be sure that you will never create
something too bad but also never something too
good. You can create only average articles."
The idea behind his argument was that Wikipedia
will be a good resource as long as it attracts
good cotnributors. but it will soon become an
average site/encyclopaedia because it allows
anyone to join the project and edit, and most
people are just average persons and not brilliant
writers.
Do you think it's true? and how can we answer
this argument?
--Optim
__________________________________
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On Sunday 28 July 2002 03:00 am, The Cunctator wrote:
> What are the articles this person has been changing?
For 66.108.155.126:
20:08 Jul 27, 2002 Computer
20:07 Jul 27, 2002 Exploit
20:07 Jul 27, 2002 AOL
20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Leet
20:03 Jul 27, 2002 Root
20:02 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:59 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:58 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Principle of least astonishment
19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:52 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music
19:51 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music
For 208.24.115.6:
20:20 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
For 141.157.232.26:
20:19 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
Most of these were complete replacements with discoherent statements.
Such as "TAP IS THE ABSOLUTE DEFINITION OF THE NOUN HACKER" for Hacker.
For the specifics follow http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist
and look at the contribs.
--mav
A Pebble Stone tossed on a beach can become a Tsunami at the other
part of the world.
You are that pebble, and I am that standing beside beach waithng
for that Tidal Wave to Crash. Quote of the day.
A Pebble Stone tossed on a beach can become a Tsunami at the other
part of the world.
You are that pebble, and I am that standing beside beach waithng
for that Tidal Wave to Crash.
If you were thinking of applying for a scholarship from either the
Wikimania Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, or Wikimedia Österreich,
the deadline is end of the day UTC this coming Monday. Don't miss it!
Katie
On 08/01/2014 17:37, Katie Chan wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2014 in London are now being
> accepted. Applications are open until the end of the day UTC on 17
> February.
>
> Wikimania 2014 scholarships is an award given to an individual to
> enable them to attend Wikimania in London from 6-10 August, 2014.
>
> Only a single type of scholarship will be available from the Wikimedia
> Foundation for Wikimania 2014. A Wikimedia Foundation scholarship will
> cover the cost of an individual's round-trip travel costs as arranged
> by the Wikimedia Foundation travel agency, shared accommodation as
> arranged by the Wikimedia Foundation, and registration for Wikimania.
>
> Applicants will be rated using a pre-determined selection process and
> selection criteria by the Scholarship Committee, who will determine
> which are successful. To learn more about Wikimania 2014 scholarships,
> please visit <https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships>.
>
> To apply for a scholarship, fill out the application form on
> <http://scholarships.wikimedia.org/apply>. It is highly recommended
> that applicants review all of the material on the Scholarships page
> and the associated FAQ before submitting an application.
>
> If you have any question, please contact
> <wikimania-scholarships(a)wikimedia.org> or leave a message on
> <https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scholarships>.
>
> Katie Chan
> Chair, Scholarship Committee
>
--
Katie Chan
Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
- Heinrich Heine
We have been doing some work at Galois that we would like to integrate
with the broader Wikimedia efforts. We were tasked with finding a way
to help improve user interface consistency, in a very general sense,
so we developed a tool called FiveUI to try and simplify the process
of manually evaluating user interface guidelines on HTML-based
interfaces. We're at the point now where our primary goal is to find
external users; and we're able to do some additional development to
help adapt the tool to fit these user's needs.
FiveUI takes sets of guidelines encoded in Javascript and runs them on
web sites. It works in either an interactive mode with a browser
extension in Chrome or Firefox, or in a "headless" batch mode, which
could be used in a continuous integration environment. Page elements
that do not conform to guidelines are flagged and reported.
We have applied this to Wikipedia by translating portions of the
Wikipedia Manual of Style into Javascript so that article content can
be checked for problems automatically. We have done the same thing
with a subset of the W3C WAI guidelines.
FiveUI is released under an Apache license and we hope that that will
enable the broadest set of uses.
We have already sent a message to the Wikimedia QA mailing list, but
were told that it is the volunteer community that generally takes
charge of enforcing the style guidelines.
The rest of this email goes into detail about how we think FiveUI
might be useful for Wikimedia, but if you want to go play with the
tool right away, you can find it on GitHub:
- http://galoisinc.github.io/FiveUI/
- and http://github.com/GaloisInc/FiveUI
Or the chrome store:
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/five-ui/bbccaefdcbnnkpmekjchefnhh…
The install instructions and getting started documentation are linked
from the first url above, or directly here:
- Install docs:
- http://galoisinc.github.io/FiveUI/manual/install.html
- Getting started:
- http://galoisinc.github.io/FiveUI/manual/gettingStarted.html
There are a collection of encoded guidelines available on GitHub as
well. These can be loaded by FiveUI to see some of the things it's
capable of--for example, we've implemented a subset of the W3C's WAI
guidelines here:
- WAI guidelines:
https://raw2.github.com/GaloisInc/FiveUI/master/guidelines/WCAG-1.0/conform…
The accessibility guidelines can help find issues such as missing alt
text, missing (or duplicate) labels, and assorted color issues amongst
a few others. We think these could be useful checks for the Mediawiki
development process; but there are probably other areas we aren't
familiar with that could have a greater impact--we'd like to hear
suggestions!
One area that would possibly be more visible is to integrate something
like FiveUI with the wiki page editing process. We've implemented
automated checks for a number of the guidelines in the Wikipedia
Manual of Style [1]. We imagine either a style checking bot using
these guidelines to mark pages for refinement, or even integrating
with the page preview process to point out possible violations of the
manual of style when editors submit content to the wiki.
We took the liberty of running these guidelines on a small set of
Wikipedia pages, and posted the results here:
- http://galoisinc.github.io/FiveUI/reports/wikipedia/20140107T2328Z/summary.…
The implementations are also available on github, in the 'guidelines'
directory, if you would like to use them to look at any pages in
particular, or if you would like to see how the rules were
implemented. The Manual of Style guidelines are described in more
detail here:
- http://galoisinc.github.io/FiveUI/manual/wikipediaGuidelines.html
Does this look like a technology that may be useful to you? Are there
different directions we could take with FiveUI that would better
solve problems you run into frequently?
I'm happy to answer any questions, give a screencast demo, brainstorm
ideas, etc.. let me know how I can help.
Thanks!
Jesse Hallett
Research & Development
Galois, Inc.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style