Today I had to do a small presentation about OpenSource for a university course. Slides are online. I did not invest much time, hopefully I will have more time in July for writing the document. But from my impression my presentations was one of the better ones (At least I had slides, I didn’t read everything from paper and I didn’t overrun much). And I really have to bang my head on the desk, when students, who have been studying for at least three years, state in a presentation on the topic “Economy and Internet Regulation” that everyone should buy at amazon.com. No matter how bad the presentations were, I bet 90% of the students will pass the course.
Courses at the IGW are such a waste of time and resources.
Author: arved
Did Wikipedia fail?
Horst is guilty of preventing me from doing university stuff. He wrote a grumpy rant about the shortcomings of Wikipedia.
Horst claims: Wikipedia generates noise, not knowledge. Previous encyclopedias were well-researched and contained precise information that could be trusted to be correct. Wikipedia, on the other hand, contains a large amount of errors, omissions and superfluous trivia.
I wrote several long comments trying to correct his picture of Wikipedia, among others
What happens if there is a bug in your Brockhaus? There is no easy way, you as a reader and maybe expert in one special field can correct it. You have to wait for the next edition before the readers get the fixed version.
What happens if you read a “random hit” from Google and notice a bug? Often it is not easy to find a contact address of the author, and even if there is a contact information, there is no gurantee this bug will ever be fixed.
There is no easy way to tell the world that this information is wrong.
The Wikipedia contributors believe that n+1 eyes find more bugs than n eyes.
I 100% agree with you, that an encylopedia is about trust. To help your decision about the trust of a Wikipedia article, you can also look at the whole history. If a fact has survived more than 100 edits, i would trust it more than one that has been added only recently. (One feature I am still missing in Wikipedia is a “cvs annotate” like functionality)
What happens if you read a “random hit” from Google and notice a bug? Often it is not easy to find a contact address of the author, and even if there is a contact information, there is no gurantee this bug will ever be fixed.
There is no easy way to tell the world that this information is wrong.
The Wikipedia contributors believe that n+1 eyes find more bugs than n eyes.
I 100% agree with you, that an encylopedia is about trust. To help your decision about the trust of a Wikipedia article, you can also look at the whole history. If a fact has survived more than 100 edits, i would trust it more than one that has been added only recently. (One feature I am still missing in Wikipedia is a “cvs annotate” like functionality)
Another comment from myself, about linking in Wikipedia.
I noticed that the linking inside Wikipedia is a lot better than in the WWW (even better than in Weblogs), so it is very easy to browse from one article to the next one. I think the reason is the well defined naming scheme, which allows linking to articles that don’t exist at the time the article was written
I really should do more research on this topic and write a longer article in the summer holidays.
A very pessimistic follow up from Horst:
The good thing about it — giving everybody who visits the opportunity to share their knowledge — turned into a bad thing because there are just too many people out there who are feeling compelled to share their lack of knowledge.
The good thing about it — giving everybody who visits the opportunity to share their knowledge — turned into a bad thing because there are just too many people out there who are feeling compelled to share their lack of knowledge.
This could be generalized to apply to the Internet or Publishing. And I really hope that this is not the future.
On the german Wikipedia Mailinglist there is currently a similar discussion on how to ensure the quality.
If you are a wikipedia contributor, I would really like to know, if you can confirm Horst’s claim that the quality of your contributions was decreased by the follow-up edits?
Update 2004-06-03: Horsts article is making a lot of noise in the german Blogosphere. Some articles and comments are interesting to read:
- Mathias Schindler – Why wikipedia sucks less than TROTW*
- Der Schockwellenreiter – Scheffredakteur!? We don’t need no stinky Scheffredakteur!
- IT&W – Das Web im Web
( *Wow*, Although I don’t understand the popularity and the general philosophy behind Schockwellenreiter and IT&W, this is the first time i link to them. The advantage of popular blogs are the many and high quality comments.)
Back from .de
Last weekend I visited Frankfurt. Nice weather, 25�C and i got a sunburn while watching the skyscrapers from the roof of Maintower, the second highest building in Frankfurt. My camera was nearly confiscated when i took a picture of the security checks at Maintower entrance. Luckily I was able to persuade them that I deleted the picture.
So here are two pictures:
You can find more and better pictures especially of the skyscrapers on Rob’s site.
Back in Vienna, it is raining again. So the best weather for starting the final part of this term. I will start learning Math immediately after writing this blog entry, so don’t expect much in the next two weeks.
Nearly Gone
Just came back from eating Kebap at Vienna’s most famous turkish restaurant Kent.
I will leave for .de in around 7 hours. So don’t expect something to read before Monday evening.
Towelday
Via Horst: Tomorrow….
Comment Spam Flood
Today someone dumped half of the fortunefile into my blog, so i decided to do some basic spam fighting. I renamed mt-comments.cgi and forced preview of comments. I did not yet install the MT-Blacklist plugin and there are some other strategies to fight spam.
Syndication, Bloggers favorite toy II
Yesterday I discovered XML::RAI. RAI stands for “RSS Abstraction Interface”. It greatly simplifies my rssfetch script.
I also discovered the 2RSS.com Atom2RSS converter, which is very useful for blogs that only offer Atom feeds and RSSreaders that don’t support Atom. Of course I am planning to support Atom in my RSS script and/or add an Atom feed to my blog, but this requires more time to read more about the Atom spec.
Syndication, Bloggers favorite toy
I should do university stuff, as my time will be limited next week, because my parents are visiting Vienna from Monday to Friday.
But i spent a few hours on the next version of rssfetch. It now works with the latest XML::RSS::Parser. The main drawback, it currently does not parse the FreeBSD feed, because the feed is broken, will hopefully be resolved soon as I submitted PR 67042.
Additional Josef just told me that hrs is reworking the feed generation, as he wants add a feed for Security Advisories to the FreeBSD Blog^WWebsite.
If you can read this…
If you can read this, the blog was successfully migrated to another server running apache 2.0.
Yeah, it looks like you can. I think I have fixed everything, but if you find a broken link, please report.
The upgrading took of course longer than planned, Although the apache config of 2.0 is similar to 1.3, the default configuration changed in some subtle ways, e.g. the automatic display of README files does not work anymore per default and the php4-Module does not automatical register the .php extension.
And although this website is only the blog, it already requires a dozen perl modules installed and several ugly php scripts with absolute paths etc.
Donation
If you are one of those companies that keep spamming my blog, you might want to consider clement’s idea :-):
12:11 <@sheepkill> FreeBSD newsflash: enlargeUrpenis.com donates v1agr@ to FreeBSD Fundation