The sum of all human knowledge?, What does that mean? Options Rating

[guy]

How much useless drivel comes under that wonderful phrase "The sum of all human knowledge"?

If I did short articles on everyone in the British Civil Service Yearbook (a very reputable source, listing a few thousand relatively senior civil servants), would I be applauded? Would I be blocked as a troll?

If I started articles on all the side streets in my area, lovingly listing all the houses and the lamp-posts and the telephone junction boxes, how long before they were all put up for quick deletion?

Actually, looking at some of the junk that is on Wikipedia, including articles on every finalist on the various Pop Idols round the world, maybe I'll start researching the histories of individual London buses. I suppose the names of the articles would be the buses' registration numbers.

[blissyu2]

Once again, you've hit on another major flaw in Wikipedia. The flaw isn't that they are aiming to include everything - the flaw is that they are inconsistent and non transparent with what they are trying to do.

I for one love to look up obscure things in Wikipedia, and I think that is where it really shines. Including bits and pieces that you would never have known about, or cared about, is something very interesting. Sure, why not have every pop star or idol finalist have their own article? Why not have an article on every contestant in every Survivor episode? Or indeed everyone who has ever appeared on TV? They actually have an article on every South Park and Spongebob Squarepants episode, as well as additional articles on extra bits for specific bits of interest. They were thinking of doing the same for Red Dwarf, but to this stage they haven't yet done it. Of course, they could do it for Star Trek and Doctor Who episodes too, except that I think there would be simply too many articles then.

Why not include every person who has ever stood for federal office in any country? They are all public figures. All people who you'd be interested to find out about. And why not every catch phrase or quirk? Why not?

There is the space issue of course. It costs Wikipedia hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain the current amount of space, so what would happen if they actually went ahead and included all of these obscure things? It might cost them too much. But beyond that, why not?

The thing is that most people who use Wikipedia, as well as most people who edit it, would love for Wikipedia to have more articles on more obscure articles. Jimbo wants it to as well. But some Wikipedians really seriously don't, and they bully people on Articles for Deletion, to get rid of as many articles as they can. In effect, there is a body who decide whether an article is kept or deleted. And this group, most of the time, are neither administrators nor are they related to Jimbo. These people are power trippers like Zoe and Splash, who are scared of actual people, so they leave their bullying to AfD voting, and then harass people on their talk pages. And since most articles aren't kept or deleted for any logical reason, you get a whole higgledy piggledy way of doing things. They don't even aim for democracy with it. They aim for whatever they feel like, they being the group with the power.

[Daniel Brandt]

...maybe I'll start researching the histories of individual London buses. I suppose the names of the articles would be the buses' registration numbers.

You'll qualify for an adminship if you do this. Look at User:Geni:

As of dec 22 I've been an admin for 1 year (other than a break of a little over an hour). For the most part it has been fun. During that time I've carried out 1630 deletions, 231 blocks and 23 page protections.... One of my main aims on wikipedia is to make sure there is an article for every canal listed in the Canals of the United Kingdom article.

He's a student in the United Kingdom, John Doe #20 on Hivemind. On January 17 he took time out from his canal work to fix my bio. I tried to change "frequent commentator regarding privacy issues on the World Wide Web" to "frequent commentator regarding privacy and accountability issues on the World Wide Web." He reverted me twice for NOR (no original research), saying that "someone else needs to publish this before we can use it." How bizarre it this?

Someone ought to try and fix that again. In its current form you just have to change the word "privacy" in the first sentence to "accountability" and change "specializes in monitoring privacy violations on the web" to "specializes in accountability issues." Change footnote 2 so that it refers to this thread. Since footnote 2 refers to something that no longer exists, it shouldn't be there anyway.

Or if you prefer the "Drinking Jimmy's Kool-aid" title of the other thread, take the quotes off and repeat the title in the footnote. Some people may even click on it with a title like that. (For the 30 seconds that it lasts, that is.)

But there's no logical reason why a reference to this thread shouldn't last. There's a citation on the Wikipedia_Watch article pointing to me ("Everyman") on Slashdot. What's more flaky than a post on crazy Slashdot that doesn't even use my real name?

[blissyu2]

Except that wikipediareview.com is in the spam blacklist, and hence can't be linked from Wikipedia.

Otherwise, well, its been published now, so isn't original research anymore. And if they consider you to be notable enough for your own article, then therefore anything you publish is also notable.

[Daniel Brandt]

Except that wikipediareview.com is in the spam blacklist, and hence can't be linked from Wikipedia.

Spam blacklist? I'm jealous. Maybe I'll write a program a few days from now that redirects visitors coming from any page at wikipedia.org, and into my Wikipedia-Watch home page, straight to wikipediareview.com.

SlimVirgin has been leaving her slime on the Wikipedia_Watch page at Wikipedia today, so it's denuded already anyway. And if the search-engine rankings for the home page get messed up due to the change, that's okay too. It's the hivemind page where I want the ranking, and that will stay the same.

[Selina]

They'll add all your links to the spam blacklist too if you link to us, no doubt.

Actually that's a great idea, they'll feel they can't link to you anymore and so can't provide sources

[blissyu2]

Yes, very good idea. Then they'll be left with the choice of removing it from the spam blacklist (i.e. admitting they were wrong) or else deleting your article (i.e. admitting they were wrong). Wonder if they'll figure out some way to get around it without looking like nitwits.

[Daniel Brandt]

That was easy. Just three lines in the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://en.wikipedia.org.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ http://wikipediareview.com/ [R=301,L]

It turns out that in the third line, the "^$" represents a blank because the begin and end markers have nothing inside. This was the only way I could identify the index.html file exclusively, which Apache logs as just a "/". But this leading slash is assumed, apparently, in the rewrite rule, so you need a blank. Nothing else I tried worked.

If you want all of your files linked to your site from Wikipedia redirected to WR, then that's done with ^(.*)$

This script only responds to links directly from wikipedia.org to the home page of the site where the .htaccess file is located. If you put the wikipedia-watch.org into your address bar so that you lose the referrer, then you'll be fine. Or if you find yourself anywhere on wikipedia-watch.org you'll be fine, because you've already lost the wikipedia.org referrer if you ever had it. For example, you can link to hivemind.html from wikipedia.org and you notice no effects whatsoever from this script. Then if you go to the home page from the link at the bottom of the hivemind page, you've already lost the wikipedia.org referrer and you are fine. So everyone at Wikipedia who wants to link to my site should link to my hivemind page but not the home page.

If my home page is already in your browser's cache, the redirect doesn't work even if you are coming from wikipedia.org.

[Lir]

Omg, a super-duper 'notable' person, none other than Mr. Daniel Brandt (an authentic privacy expert), has gone out of his way to redirect his website to this one; omg, how fascinating, how notable, I guess an article should be made about this forum -- inquiring minds want to learn more!

[Selina]

betcha SlimVirgin and Raul are gonna go on a happy little censorship spree now for the benefit of you Brandt how nice

SlimVirgin's a bit obsessed about you to be honest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Brandt...&oldid=48050564

[Donny]

There is the space issue of course. It costs Wikipedia hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain the current amount of space, so what would happen if they actually went ahead and included all of these obscure things? It might cost them too much. But beyond that, why not?

Eh? Hundreds of thousands of dollars is complete nonsense. The total size of the Wikipedia text database is about 18 gigabytes, which can be stored on a relatively small hard disc drive. I bought a PC for about $400 US which would easily contain the whole of Wikipedia. What they are paying for is processors to serve the bandwidth and process the PHP/MySQL software that Wikipedia runs on.

[blissyu2]

So when are the redirects going to start? Only for references from Wikipedia of course.

[Daniel Brandt]

It's not like there's much traffic involved. In the 18 hours today before the redirects started, the wikipedia-watch.org clicks from wikipedia.org were like this:

0023 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
0016 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Brandt
0015 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Watch
0002 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Wikipedia

Grand total: 56

No one visits Wikipedia to click on anti-Wikipedia stuff. They must be looking either for Britney Spears or the sum of all human knowledge. The admins probably won't notice anything is amiss until their local browser cache expires.

[Golbez]

No one visits Wikipedia to click on anti-Wikipedia stuff. They must be looking either for Britney Spears or the sum of all human knowledge. The admins probably won't notice anything is amiss until their local browser cache expires.

Sometimes the admins are reading your forum.

Sometimes the admins don't care.

[Lir]

It's a social club.

Its kind of a new-age techno-cult.

[blissyu2]

It works for wikipedia-watch.org, but not for the hivemind sub page. Hmm.

[Daniel Brandt]

It works for wikipedia-watch.org, but not for the hivemind sub page. Hmm.

Which is what I wanted.

I'm trying to get more exposure for my Hivemind page. I added a new box on top the other day, about The Wikipedia-Watch Accountability Project (W-WAP). I think a lot of anonymous admins should see this.

Yesterday SlimVirgin trashed a very nice screen shot of the old Hivemind page. It was available in three sizes on the Wikipedia_Watch article page. The largest was the original screen size. Something like the first four or five entries were there, and nothing was blocked out.

You'll never see a screenshot like that again on Wikipedia, because SlimVirgin deleted it on these grounds: "deleting screenshot containing alleged personal details, which may not be published on Wikipedia without the consent of the subjects." SlimVirgin's name is number two, right under Jimmy's.

But now with the new box on top of the page, I'm hopeful that someone can do another screen shot that cuts off just below Jimmy's name. That way SlimVirgin will have no grounds for deleting it again. Folks will see the box, and also see the new caption on that cartoon. Cutting it off between Jimmy and SlimVirgin's entries will make it just about the right size for a screen shot.

I'm also ticked off about the Google_Watch article. It has those two links I hate -- Salon and Watch-watch -- and a paragraph on each. Eloquence added a really dumb "conspiracy" link to piss me off months ago. Just thinking about this ticks me off all over again. I think I'll do the Google_Watch redirect later today. Guess how many referrals I get to Google-Watch.org from that page at Wikipedia? About 8 per day. And how many total visitors to the Google-Watch home page do I get per day? About 2500.

Who needs this abuse from Wikipedia? Why am I putting up with it?

[Selina]

Admins read this forum all the time, they can't get enough of it Especially Fat Virgin

[blissyu2]

Guess how many referrals I get to Google-Watch.org from that page at Wikipedia? About 8 per day. And how many total visitors to the Google-Watch home page do I get per day? About 2500.

Who needs this abuse from Wikipedia? Why am I putting up with it?

8 vs 2500? So where or how do they find you?

Admins read this forum all the time, they can't get enough of it Especially Fat Virgin

This is why we made all of these secret members-only forums, to tempt them to register. Its so terribly rude for them to read it and not contribute.