Tag: Wikipedia

Liked Wikipedia is swimming in money—why is it begging people to donate? by Andreas KolbeAndreas Kolbe (dailydot.com)

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the non-profit that owns Wikipedia and other volunteer-written websites, is about to reach its 10-year goal of creating a $100 million endowment five years earlier than it planned. Its total funds, which have risen by about $200 million over the past five years, now stand at around $300 million. Its revenue has risen every year. In just the first nine months of its current financial year, it has raked in $142 million in donations according to an internal document—and already obliterated its previous annual record.

Liked The Shaky Ground Truths of Wikipedia by KC Cole (WIRED)

What happens to ground truth when so many roads lead back to the same source? Monocultures cause problems. The Irish potato famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people happened in large part because farmers came to depend on a single vulnerable strain. If bananas vanish from supermarket shelves, you can blame it on the breeding of a single variation—easier to grow and harvest but with no ability to survive disease. The SolarWinds software breach wouldn’t have caused so much damage had it not been so widely and deeply embedded in, according to some sources, almost all Fortune 500 companies, the US Treasury Department, and even Homeland Security.

Bookmarked Webring History: Social Media Before Social Media (Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet.)

How the webring became the grassroots tool of choice for sharing content online in the ‘90s. The concept was social media before media was social.

Ernie Smith provides a history associated with webrings.

Structurally, a webring has many parallels to the modern-day Twitter quote-tweet chain, a Russian nesting doll of sorts in which you’re encouraged to keep clicking on the tweets being quoted, with no end in sight. Depending on what you’re up to at the time, it’s a novel, entertaining, somewhat curated experience.

Smith discusses the pioneering work of Sage Weil, as well as the association with Bomis, the website that led to the development of Wikipedia.

In some ways, Wikipedia’s success as a concept benefited from the same feedback-loop dynamics that a webring does. It’s a site that rewards clicking, and becomes more valuable the further down the rabbit hole you go. It becomes like a game, almost. That, in its own way, is a dynamic that Wikipedia borrowed from Bomis and other webring-driven networks.

This is a useful piece alongside Charlie Owen’s more technical examination.

Liked Just Add Wikipedia! by mikecaulfield (siftingthroughtheoutbreak.wordpress.com)

So if we didn’t know Vox already, what would we do? I’m going to show you a move called “Just add Wikipedia”.

So we come up here and we hover, and we see the Vox link and follow it to the site. But rather than read the site we immediately do this — we go up to the search bar and strip off everything after the domain and type space plus wikipedia and hit return.

Bookmarked 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan – Wikipedia (en.m.wikipedia.org)

The 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan was a road and rail transport plan for Melbourne, the state capital of Victoria, Australia, instituted by Henry Bolte’s state government. Most prominently, the plan recommended the provision of an extensive freeway network, much of which has since been built.

The Victorian Government has announced the development of a tram to Rowville. I have long followed these on and off again project, having grown up in the outer suburbs. I remember talking to someone about the electrification of the Melton line, I did not realise that such plans were proposed 50 years ago:

1969 Rail Proposal

It is intriguing to think about this about what it might look like in the future. Some talk about fluidity of public transport in the future, will this put a stop to things such as train lines. Time will tell.

Liked How to improve Wikipedia citations with Hypothesis direct links (Jon Udell)

Wikipedia aims to be verifiable. Every statement of fact should be supported by a reliable source that the reader can check. Citations in Wikipedia typically refer to online documents accessible at URLs. But with the advent of standard web annotation we can do better. We can add citations to Wikipedia that refer precisely to statements that support Wikipedia articles.