What I found interesting was that they made a big deal about them doing in-depth reporting to find the list of protected pages (hmm), and that Wikipedia is this very small community with 10 guys writing every article from scratch to Featured status. Deco 06:46, 18 June 2006 (UTC) Because it's already on Wikipedia? As someone once said, this is the world's biggest and most persistant MMORPG/ Soap opera/ Novel.- Loren 06:50, 18 June 2006 (UTC) contribs) 14:03, 19 June 2006 (UTC) I have to wonder, if people are so eager to gobble up just a few details of Wikipedia's functioning, why doesn't Jimbo write a book or something that goes in depth about the history, community, and functionality of Wikipedia? I bet it could be a hit.Although failing to note that the figures were US-only was a mistake, you have to admit that Nielsen//NetRatings didn't exactly make it obvious. CalJW 06:38, 18 June 2006 (UTC) Well, better than quoting Alexa, which is pretty much irredeemably contaminated by selection bias. For consistency, information establishment figures who dismiss Wikipedia for unreliability really ought to call for the closure of the whole media, not to mention the closure of all those bookshops that sell error-strewn books (some booksellers don't check every page before they offer them for sale you know), and the termination of the whole of American academia for systematic liberal bias. CalJW 06:34, 18 June 2006 (UTC) Reading that again, it's still means it's pretty bad.
I hate my village wikipedia free#
But apart from that and the misleading headlines, it's a that rare thing, an article about Wikipedia free of egregious or comical errors and misunderstandings. only stats as if they are global stats, which is par for the course for the average American, but not good enough for the NYT. So there isn't actually any "news" here it must be a slow news day for this to make the front page. And, as the Times notes themselves, these protection policies affect only a tiny number of articles compared to the over a million which exist. The full-protection of articles (which is more of an imposition on the "anyone can edit" concept) has been around for years, since pretty much the beginning of the project. The change to allow semi-protection of articles (which is what the headline is apparently referring to) was made months ago, and is only a minor "speed bump" in the way of anybody who wishes to edit one of the affected articles. It's nice to have the project so prominently featured, and may cause another surge in the site's popularity statistics, but the headline is rather misleading it implies that there's been a recent change in Wikipedia policy that drastically alters its traditional openness, when in fact no such thing has happened. Deco 12:16, 17 June 2006 (UTC) See also here for Jimbo's response. It's also interesting to me to see a popular article describing the concepts - familiar to us but not the world - of revert wars, the core community, and semiprotection. Despite the highly misleading title ("revises"?), this peer into the inner workings of Wikipedia will help dispel the oversimplified image of Wikipedia as a free-for-all that puts anarchy over quality. Apparently they've just started to notice page protection. We've been featured in the New York Times: Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy.