schnurrito

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I am too young for that, but I do remember discovering the concept of wikis and finding it amazing that websites could now be written by their audience.

A fairly dead concept by now, nowadays the entire rest of the Internet is more interesting than wikis.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (6 children)

We used to think that if we had user-generated content, we would all be immune to governments, corporations and other powerful actors spreading propaganda because we would get our information from each other, not them.

Turns out: governments, corporations, other powerful actors are perfectly capable of paying "users" to "generate content" and not even disclose this.

The Internet used to be an exciting development, now it's just like, yeah it exists, so what.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

It still gives better results than DDG for many queries.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Or it's great because something interesting is about to happen. If I had a time machine I would travel to 1989 to see the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Join us now and share the software, you'll be free hackers, you'll be free~🎵🎵🎵

I think what people like is that IntelliJ and PyCharm have FOSS community editions.

[–] [email protected] 81 points 6 months ago (11 children)

Messages that people post on Stack Exchange sites are literally licensed CC-BY-SA, the whole point of which is to enable them to be shared and used by anyone for any purpose. One of the purposes of such a license is to make sure knowledge is preserved by allowing everyone to make and share copies.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

12! is a really high number tho

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

The Internet is so big nowadays that you pretty much need to have some kind of algorithm. A list of all websites in "the right category" would have way too many items in it most of which would be useless. We live in an attention economy: lots of people want as many people as possible to pay attention to them, but everyone's attention is obviously limited.

No I don't know how to fix this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I used to not understand it either. Now I understand that for normal people, it is an RSS reader where you just get notified when the sources you follow have something to say. For celebrities and organizations it is an advertising platform where they can remind their followers of their existence and tell them what they are doing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I am saying that if there are so many people wanting to write (and influence public opinion) about a topic that you have to go into endless arguments what the article should say, then there is no reason why it has to be "quick" that the article gets published with whatever new ideas anyone has had.

As it is now, Wikipedia is what we have and I am not saying you shouldn't read it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I'm familiar enough with Wikipedia to know that, yeah. I am also familiar enough with Wikipedia to know that there are topic areas (such as Israel/Palestine and the Holocaust in Poland on the English-language version) where the shortcomings of the wiki system are completely evident. Once you have to restrict editing to users with more than 500 edits and make special rules how to handle sourcing, it's clear that the wiki just isn't a suitable mechanism: if there are so many people wanting to write about a topic that you have to do that, then why not abandon the wiki concept altogether?

The greatest success story of the wiki principle isn't Wikipedia, nor any other Wikimedia project. The greatest success story of the wiki principle is OpenStreetMap, which does limit itself to objective facts and is used not just by people, but also organizations. I work as a software developer and I've encountered usages of OpenStreetMap data many times, but of anything on Wikimedia projects? Wikipedia is great for teenagers to get an overview of the world, but everyone who actually needs the information in it has better sources for it anyway.

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