跳转至正文

维基百科

来自维基语录
维基百科，任何人都可以编辑的自由百科全书。
想象一个世界，在这个世界里，星球上的每个人都被赋予获取所有人类知识的自由途径。 这就是我们正在做的事情。
英语维基百科2001–2023年活跃编辑者

维基百科是一个自由内容、多语种的在线百科全书，由志愿者社区通过开放协作模式编写和维护，使用基于维基的编辑系统。 贡献者，也被称为编辑者，被称为维基人。 维基百科是有史以来最大和最多人阅读的参考作品。

语录

[编辑]

2000年代

[编辑]

2000

[编辑]
一个维基百科App的视图，维基百科的官方应用程序。 任何用户都可以安装维基百科，并且在此之前，您可以安装维基百科App来免费下载维基百科，为此，用户需要访问
https://github.com/wikimedia/wikipedia-ios
或者访问 https://github.com/wikimedia/apps-win8-wikipedia

2001

[编辑]
  • 目前我工作过度，[Nupedia]项目在某种程度上因此受到影响……我没有时间为[“通用和其他”]中列出的文章找到首席评论员。 问题是，很难在这些主题中找到*专家*。
  • 增加一点功能到Nupedia怎么样？……“Wiki”，发音为\wee'-kee\，源自波利尼西亚语，"wikiwiki"，但它的意思是，一个非常开放、非常公开可编辑的网页系列。……我可以创建一个页面……任何其他人（是的，绝对任何其他人）都可以随意更改它。……在创建的页面上，我可以链接到任何其他页面，当然，任何人都可以链接到我的页面。 该项目被宣传和追求为公共资源。 有一些公布的建议或规则。……就Nupedia使用wiki而言，这是开发内容的终极“开放”和简单的格式。 我们偶尔会讨论更简单、更开放的项目来替代或补充Nupedia。……[它]可以成为一个可以收集更多更改和评论的地方……内容可以根据开放内容许可进行许可。 在Nupedia wiki的首页上，我们将绝对明确地说明这是一个实验……
  • 那是2001年1月的一个寒冷的夜晚。 我在大学的计算机实验室值班……
起初，我对那里的条目和讨论感到有些害怕。 当时的主要贡献者是Jimbo、Larry和w:Josh Grosse。 “Pedia”大约有700 (!)条目，并且仍然使用奇怪的驼峰命名法，这使得链接看起来像w:PortugaL或w:PolanD。 潜伏了一段时间后，我很快弄清楚了这个项目的目的，并得出结论“我喜欢这个！”。
接下来是逐渐变成w:Wikipediholic的正常症状。 我花大量空闲时间创建条目、编辑和交叉链接。 我目睹了项目随着其越来越受欢迎（slashdotting等）而逐渐和波浪式地发展。 在夏季，作为一家中型波兰金融机构的分析师的艰苦工作让我远离了一段时间。 我在九月中旬回到了。 我打算尽可能地停留，或者直到我的电缆调制解调器坏掉为止。
  • ……为什么有两个网站，或者两部百科全书？ 我对它们的印象是，维基百科是“普通人”的百科全书，而Nupedia是为大学精英准备的。 我曾考虑为[Nupedia]撰写文章，但我觉得自己不会受到欢迎，因为我只是一个为公司沟通学读了两年课程的大学毕业生。
  • 在为Nupedia工作了一年多之后，拉里提出了使用Wiki软件来创建一个专门为像你（和我！）这样对过程感到害怕和厌倦（对不起，Nupedia！）的人们准备的单独项目。 事实证明，维基百科在某些方面取得了更大的成功……维基百科的主要优点是它很有趣且令人上瘾。
  • 维基不起作用，如果人们不勇敢。 你必须走出去并做出那些改变，纠正那些语法，添加那些事实，使那些语言精确等等。 没关系。 每个人都期望如此。 所以你永远不应该问，“为什么这些页面没有被校对？” 令人惊讶的是，一切都会顺利进行。 它确实需要一些礼貌，但它有效。 你会看到的。

2002

[编辑]
  • 拉里·桑格于2002年3月1日辞职。 他甚至不会以志愿者的身份留下。 该项目现在不再有领导者（或者说，现在每个人都是领导者）。
  • 参与贡献的门槛非常低，如果说有精英在掌舵，那么恕我直言，我们的精英与为《百科全书》等著作做出贡献的领先的知识分子相比，似乎相形见绌。……自由百科全书运动……似乎并没有朝着由世界一流的思想家、学者和科学家领导的方向发展……基本上，维基百科是自由百科全书运动中剩下的唯一游戏。

2003

[编辑]
  • 维基百科，也许是网络上最能体现慷慨精神的典范之一，刚刚达到10万篇文章的里程碑，距离它第二次生日仅一周时间。……维基百科如此引人入胜的地方——也是这篇文章如此难以完成的原因——在于一切之间的大量链接。你读一篇条目，不知不觉中就会阅读关于安妮·博林或意大利猎犬的内容。但更重要的是，任何人都可以添加、编辑条目，甚至创建新的条目。
  • 这些[维基百科]文章的当前版本不一定是处理它的最佳方式；我认为他们应该尽可能地讨论*并驳斥*种族主义观念，将它们置于适当的背景下，这样当某个孩子听到“种族主义”或“逆向种族主义”然后将其在维基百科上搜索时，他们会看到对一些人思考和表达方式的理性、中立的解释——这样他们就会_理解_为什么应该否定这些想法。……从人类的恶行中可以吸取教训。
  • 即使是种族主义者也有言论自由的权利。但是，维基百科上不行。……维基百科的政策，甚至法语维基百科，不受法国法律的约束。雅虎屈服于法国的审查努力，因为他们是一家拥有众多在法国业务利益的大公司。我们没有这个问题。……无论如何，维基百科上的任何文章都不应直接反驳或直接支持任何有争议的道德原则声明，例如世界人权宣言。这不符合NPOV（中立观点），也不是我们的使命。……你正确地不容忍这种类型的句子。……但是，不是因为法国法律！而是因为NPOV。
  • 这听起来可能像是一场灾难的配方，但结果令人印象深刻。虽然该网站的13万多篇文章中许多仍然是正在进行中的工作，但其中许多内容丰富、简洁、精炼。……令人惊讶的是，我们在维基百科上花费的时间没有发现任何垃圾条目或破坏行为。……少数文章似乎有些过时，我们遇到了一些红色链接或蓝色链接，这些链接指向单句占位符。但总的来说，这些条目有用且周到。

2004

[编辑]
  • 无论维基百科的文章在某个时刻达到何种程度的可靠性，它永远向着无知或半文盲的篡改者敞开。
  • 访问维基百科以了解某个主题，确认某个事实的用户，更像是访问公共厕所的游客。它可能明显肮脏，所以他知道要非常小心，或者它可能看起来相当干净，所以他可能会陷入虚假的安心感。他绝对不知道在他之前谁使用了这些设施。

2006

[编辑]
如果我想说他没有，那是我的权利，现在，感谢维基百科——它也是一个事实。~史蒂芬·科尔伯特关于乔治·华盛顿拥有奴隶的问题
  • 我持一种乐观的态度，基于对[维基百科的竞争对手]的不同理解：不是传统的专业制作的百科全书，而是遍布网络，声称包含对地球上每个主题的答案，未经证实且通常无法证实的大量网站。与这个标准相比，维基百科是一个巨大的成功。
  • 不知为何，那些花费40年时间学习关于例如伯罗奔尼撒战争的一切知识——并且确实，推进人类知识体的人们——会因为兰迪在博伊西听到某个地方说，挥舞着剑的骷髅参与其中，而他们的贡献被编辑掉而感到恼火。当他们被礼貌地要求与兰迪进行讨论，直到剑骷髅理论可以被纳入文章而不做出判断时，他们会变得更加愤怒。
  • 维基百科的承诺绝不仅仅是解放人类知识——通过协作过程纳入所有知识，并通过互联网与所有人自由分享知识。这是一个激进的流行思想。
    • 经济学人 (2006年4月20日)
  • 当我三月份访问[佛罗里达州圣彼得堡]的办公室时，墙壁是空的，家具破旧不堪。如果再加一盆枯萎的植物，这套房就可以通过成为研究生休息室了。
  • 如果我想说他没有，那是我的权利，现在，感谢维基百科——它也是一个事实。
  • 维基百科的开放性不是一个错误；它是其成功的源泉。一个专注的社区会解决官方领导人甚至不知道存在的问题。与此同时，他们的志愿服务在很大程度上消除了关于谁应该担任什么职位的内斗。……维基百科最大的问题出现在它偏离这条道路的时候，当它赋予一些人官方头衔并指定任务时。每当发生这种情况，实际工作就会减慢，争吵就会加速。但这是一个容易犯的错误，所以它会一次又一次地发生。

2007

[编辑]
哈耶克关于价格理论的工作是我思考如何管理维基百科项目的核心。……一个人不能理解我对维基百科的想法，而不理解哈耶克。~吉米·威尔士
但是，这样一个多中心甚至无政府的系统，由独立行动并出于自身原因的编辑组成，如何产生如此有用的资源？答案追溯到哈耶克启发的项目。因为编辑从他们的贡献中获得心理满足和实际用途，所以该项目已经发展到包括保障项目发展朝着积极方向前进的保障措施——朝着广泛、准确的文章，这些文章依赖于可靠、可验证的来源。~ 迪克·克拉克
  • 霍夫施塔特：条目中充满了不准确之处，这让我感到沮丧。
    所罗门：那就修改它吧。
    霍夫施塔特：第二天有人会把它改回去。
  • 维基百科是前所未有的最佳事物。世界上任何人都可以撰写关于任何主题的任何内容，所以你就能知道你获得的是最好的信息。
  • 你绝对不能将带有商业动机的东西放入维基百科。承认它也好不到哪里去；这仍然是一种犯罪。维基百科人和博主会猛烈攻击，他们应该得到他们应得的。
  • 你建立了一个如此棒的网站，人们将信息发送到世界各地，但你却没有任何收入！这简直是一种不符合美国精神的活动！
  • 关于维基百科有很多负面评价，它是互联网上访问量第九大的网站。批评者认为，任何人都可以编辑的百科全书容易出现无休止的错误。自2001年维基百科创建以来，怀疑论者一直提出此类批评。……虽然威尔士为维基百科设想的最终目标尚未实现，但维基百科的广度和实用性是毋庸置疑的。那些不相信用户生成的百科全书能够与由专家撰写并由专业编辑组织的大型传统百科全书竞争的人，无疑在2006年《自然》杂志发表的一篇文章中感到震惊，该文章将维基百科与著名的《百科全书》进行了比较。《文章得出结论，维基百科的文章在准确性和完整性方面与较旧的纸质百科全书相当。
  • 但是，这样一个多中心——甚至无政府主义——的系统，由独立行动并出于自身原因的编辑组成，如何产生如此有用的资源？答案可以追溯到该项目的哈耶克灵感。因为编辑从他们的贡献中获得心理满足和实际效用，所以该项目已经发展到包括保障措施，以帮助确保项目的开发朝着积极的方向发展——朝着广泛、准确的文章，这些文章依赖于可靠、可验证的来源。
    • 迪克·克拉克，在“维基百科有什么用？”，《Mises Daily》（2007年9月19日）
  • 人们可以非常恰当地将维基百科系统描述为指导项目开发的方式，类似于一种普通法系统。百科全书具有基本政策——维基百科的宪法法律——这些政策要求文章从中立的角度撰写，使用可验证的来源，并且不包含原创研究。……每当编辑在每个文章附带的“讨论”页面上就内容争议发生分歧时，都会有许多争议解决选项可用。
    • 迪克·克拉克，在“维基百科有什么用？”，《Mises Daily》（2007年9月19日）
  • 维基百科对市场动态的反映最容易观察到许多人认为该项目最薄弱的领域：流量很少的晦涩文章。在关于三流车库乐队和其他兴趣有限主题的文章中，人们通常会发现事实和拼写错误比那些关于“英格兰”或“巴里·邦兹”等热门文章中多得多。对后两种主题的信息需求量更大，这意味着会有更多的人会仔细检查那些需求量大的文章是否存在错误。由于维基百科对任何人开放，因此有理由认为吸引更多潜在编辑的文章质量会更高。与其说是一种失败，不如说这是维基百科高效配置资源的一个很好的证明。
    • 迪克·克拉克，在“维基百科有什么用？”，《Mises Daily》（2007年9月19日）
  • 海啸文章经过充分研究且内容详尽，只有在两个地方略有不准确。根据我的判断，科学维基百科的文章几乎总是好的。
  • 马丁·路德的文章内容丰富且写得很好。有人真的对路德很感兴趣，并且阅读了一些教会历史。我为引用来源和图片加分。
  • 对“腌制”条目没有什么可补充的了。我认为它包含了所有重要的信息。我经常在维基百科上查找食品化学方面的信息。有时你会发现你甚至没有想到的东西。

2008

[编辑]
  • 我认为维基百科包含的文化信息比世界上任何其他地方都多，而且是前所未有的。
    • 泰勒·考文，“文化经济学领域的最新革命”，发表于《文化经济学杂志》（2008年），32，第266页，DOI 10.1007/s10824-008-9074-y
  • 维基百科在某种程度上是一个复仇网站。那些擅长激怒和惹恼他人的（如[唐]墨菲）是这种待遇的主要目标。这并非什么高深的科学，各位。……随着被选为[维基百科]目标所需的“令人厌恶”程度不断下降，问题就变成了，它会下降到什么程度？
  • 维基百科版本的现实已经成为垄断。它的创作者的所有偏见和无知也被强加了。
  • 这个词“民主”被经常使用，通常带有积极的含义，即“权力归于人民，而不是一些专断的统治者”。维基百科确实是民主的。然而，与国家民主不同，投票中51%的支持率并不一定能战胜维基百科的反对者。因此，如果“民主”一词带有“一人一票”意识形态的含义，那么维基百科根本不是民主的。而且维基百科不是民主的，这是一件好事。

2009

[编辑]
据说航空理论认为蜂鸟不应该能够飞行。同样，一个有用的、严肃的参考作品能够从数千名“普通”互联网用户的贡献中产生，其中许多人没有学术资格，直到最近才会被认为是荒谬的。~ 约翰·诺顿
  • 该项目的倡导者认为，如果他们承认存在问题，那么问题在于维基百科各个条目的质量参差不齐。解决方案显而易见：编辑们致力于改进不太成功的条目，并删除明显不合格的条目。
    实际上，维基百科的问题比其内容堆积如山的垃圾更根本。科学和学习追求真理，而维基百科重视共识。维基百科没有办法在不同的主张之间进行仲裁，除了有多少人支持一种立场而不是另一种立场。这种精神对学习的进步是致命的。思想通过检验来完善；科学方法预设审查、实验和冲突。
  • 即使是维基百科的创始人，在他们开始这个项目时，也不知道它会取得什么成就。他们挖了一个洞来寻找水，却发现了石油。
  • 我们现在看到的是社交网络而不是语义网络的大量涌现，并且有人提出使用维基百科，即世界上最大的分层信息集合，作为语义网络所需的本体的自下而上的输入。
  • 唯一的解决方案是关闭[维基百科]并将其抛向四面八方。认为专家不重要，但加拿大12岁的孩子在地下室里却重要，这简直是无法容忍的。……任何匿名的混蛋有什么资格写关于我，然后称之为百科全书式的？这个项目从上到下都失败了。没有办法修复。

2010年代

[编辑]

2010

[编辑]
所以我终于屈服并捐赠了捐款给维基百科。这一点也不麻烦，而且感觉很好。……根据经济学对什么是经济理性的定义，这种捐赠方式并不合理。 维基百科是免费的，无论我是否捐款，它都会在那里。米塞斯学院也是如此。如果我们只关心商业交换，我完全有动机使用免费商品而从不付款。在搭便车中没有危害，对吧？米塞斯本人对理性有更广泛的看法。他说所有行动都是从行动者的角度来看是理性的。我很高兴接受这个想法。如果我们将资本主义定义为仅基于合同的商业交换，那么这种捐赠行为就不是严格意义上的资本主义行为。但如果我们把资本主义看作是社会中以私有财产关系为特征的自愿部门，那么这种微型捐赠就是其中的一部分。~ 杰弗里·A·塔克
  • 维基百科是独一无二的。迄今为止，没有其他大众市场或主题广泛的维基百科取得过有意义的成功。即使是维基媒体的其他维基项目，其活跃度也远不如维基百科。如果成功的维基百科是罕见的，那么维基百科可能是一百万分之一的闪电，一些独特的因素在这种情况下成功了，但这些情况不太可能重现。如果是这样，维基百科的稀有性也可能凸显其脆弱性。
    • 埃里克·戈德曼，《维基百科的劳动力挤压及其后果》，《电信与高科技杂志》，第8卷，第157页 (2010)
  • 有很多网络喷子、跟踪狂和精神病患者在维基百科和其他维基媒体项目中游荡，寻找要骚扰、跟踪和以其他方式毁掉人们生活的人（其中一些人因其活动已被捕）……你最终会说一些会让你暴露身份的话，跟踪狂会找到它……我决定做我自己，永远不要隐藏我的个性，始终如一，但要对我认为不重要的细节使用虚假信息：年龄、地点、职业等。
  • 1. 维基百科没有治理结构。这是一个丛林法则之地。2. 维基百科不尊重人和他们的作品。人们在维基百科上被当作垃圾对待。3. 考虑到维基百科上的议程推动街头团伙，维基百科不能被信任提供准确的信息。4. 维基百科污染了互联网，并削弱了学术研究。它淹没并污染了互联网上的搜索引擎，并用糟糕的学术研究、诽谤和大胆的恐吓和流氓行为取代了良好的学术研究和诚实的辩论。5. 维基百科需要受到诽谤、责任、诽谤和版权法的约束。6. 维基百科应该取消其501c3身份。
  • 当我写作时，我每天会咨询维基百科30-40次，因为它真的很有帮助。当我写作时，我不记得有人出生在6世纪还是7世纪；或者“戈德曼”中有多少个n……几年前，你可能需要花费很多时间来解决这类问题。
  • 在我们的圆桌讨论中，一位听众评论说，网络原本应该提供一个民主的空间，在这个空间里，任何声音或经验都不会被边缘化或忽视。然而，维基百科的内容存在巨大的空白，这部分是由于贡献者们的兴趣和知识造成的： “超过80%的男性，超过65%的单身人士，超过85%的人没有孩子，大约70%的人年龄在30岁以下。” 尽管维基百科拥有数千篇详细、研究充分、引用充分的学术文章，例如它的，但关于虚构地点（如中土世界）的条目可能比关于真实地点（如非洲国家）的条目更详细。
  • 两家以色列团体设立了维基百科编辑培训课程，旨在“展示另一面”，跨越边界和文化，由代表犹太定居者运动的Yesha Council，以及右翼的Israel Sheli（我的以色列）运动完成。 Yesha Council的负责人纳夫塔利·贝内特说：“我们不想改变维基百科，也不想把它变成一个宣传工具。” 根据Israel Sheli的阿耶莱特·沙克德的说法，问题在于，在线上，支持以色列的活动人士的数量远远少于支持巴勒斯坦的声音。 2008年，秘密计划编辑维基百科的鹰派亲以色列观察组织Camera的成员被管理员禁止进入该网站。与此同时，Yesha正在建立一个信息任务组，以通过在Facebook和YouTube等网站上发布内容来参与新媒体，并声称拥有12,000名活跃成员，每月还有多达100名新成员加入。“事实证明，这项活动非常受欢迎，”贝内特说。“以色列公众对自己在国外被描绘的方式感到沮丧。”

  • 所以我终于屈服了，捐赠了捐款给维基百科。这一点也不麻烦，而且感觉很好。现在我有一种我作为这个我每天使用的设备的局部所有者——某种利益相关者的感觉。……捐赠像这样可能会让人上瘾。…… 按照新古典经济学对构成经济理性的定义的说法，这样捐赠并不符合理性。 维基百科是免费的，无论我是否捐赠，它都会在那里。同样也可以说。如果所有我们关心的是商业交换，我完全有动机使用免费商品而从不付费。在中没有危害，对吧？

    米塞斯本人对理性的看法更为广泛。他说，所有行动都从行动者的角度来看是理性的。我很高兴接受这个想法。如果将资本主义定义为仅基于合同的商业交换，那么这种捐赠不是严格意义上的资本主义行为。但是，如果我们把资本主义看作是社会中以私有财产关系为特征的自愿部门，那么这种微型捐赠就是其中的一部分。

  • 维基百科对于许多用户来说，是网络上获取信息的首要网站……目前，维基百科收录了超过290万篇英语文章，共有1300万篇不同语言的文章……维基百科是互联网上搜索量第二大的网站，仅次于谷歌。
  • 正如维基百科创始人吉姆·威尔士在2005年透露的那样，维基百科所有编辑的50%是由仅0.7%的用户完成的；75%的文章是由不足2%的用户群体撰写的。这些数字表明，活跃的维基百科社区比你想象的要小得多。因此，这个活跃的群体有点以自我为中心，并不总是能够容纳新的或休闲用户。

2011

[编辑]
  • 学术界对维基百科信息的可靠性的担忧可能永远无法完全消除，但这从来都不是维基百科的基本目标。更快地添加和更新信息，以及让更多人参与，始终被认为是任何在条目初步发布时出现的错误所值得的补偿。维基百科，就像卡斯塔利亚一样，是一个有缺陷的理想，但就目前而言，它会一直存在。
  • 直观地说[学生]正在将维基百科作为这些[新]工具之一使用，为他们早期认真研究阶段提供新的信息过滤层。因此，维基百科作为通往下一层学术资源的桥梁的作用越来越强。
  • 它在晦涩的流行文化角落上可以非常出色，但在主流问题上却非常薄弱。
    • 蒂莫西·加顿·阿什，“我们已经看到了美国的恶语相向。现在让我们向维基百科致敬，它是全球文明的美国先驱”，卫报，(2011年1月12日)
  • 维基百科所代表的这种社会生产已经从一个可笑的乌托邦转变为一个实际的现实。这是维基百科给予我们的最大礼物——一个实际乌托邦的愿景，它使我们能够利用我们自身更具社交性、人性化的方面来实现有效的集体行动。
  • 维基百科强调了一个进化论的教训：我们一直以来，作为一个物种，合作比单打独斗走得更远。……过去，合作最好的群体寿命更长，生育更多孩子——我们继承了这些倾向。群体会通过社会压力纠正骗子（那些不分享信息或商品的人）。因此，维基百科就像人类社会本性的电子版，充满了持续的争论和纠正。
  • 生成无限数量的虚假“客观”句子，用令人痛苦的拼凑英语，即使最终它成为我们整个宇宙的博尔赫斯式模仿，也不是值得庆祝的原因。……我更喜欢以前的互联网。错误有味道，有激情，有透明的目的。
  • 维基百科人思考他们所做事情的基本缺陷在于，他们完全沉迷于规则和程序，以及相互争论细枝末节和赚取积分，正如之前所建议的那样，它就像一个伟大的在线游戏。用户——假定的受众——几乎没有被考虑。
  • 权威并非总是正确的个人或机构——根本不存在这样的存在。权威是指拥有降低出错可能性的流程，使其达到可接受水平的个人或机构。……我认为这才是维基百科进入第二个十年时真正值得庆祝的地方。它采用了过去500年来最好的想法之一——同行评审——并极大地扩展了其运作范围，从而改变了权威的配置方式。
  • 维基百科与其他编辑创作产品之间的区别在于，维基百科人不是专业人士，他们只需要贡献他们所知道的。每个人都将自己的一点信息带到桌子上。如果他们不在桌子旁，我们就无法受益于他们的贡献。
  • 在过去的十年里，维基百科每天都在变得更好，因为有人——数百万的人——决定让它变得更好。……维基百科最好被理解为不是一个拥有组织的产物，而是一种活动，它留下了一个百科全书作为其结果。
  • 观看色情内容[...]就像浏览维基百科页面。你搜索特定的事物、特定的感觉、特定的结果，而你找到的正是你所寻找的。
  • 维基百科是一个适逢其时的想法，在一个信息驱动的网络上，其用户们迫不及待地想要摆脱专业知识的缓慢运作或专有内容的成本：一部由匿名用户撰写的免费百科全书，他们声称致力于追求“公正”的观点。……在实践中，由于政治和社会偏见轻易地战胜了利他主义，维基百科已经偏离了这些乌托邦式的想法。……找到维基百科偏见的例子并不困难。只需比较那些从事相同工作但立场相反的人物条目即可。

2012

[编辑]
  • 但百科全书声誉上的污点不仅仅在于陈述的错误，还在于其党派性和非百科全书的性质……如果维基百科想要实现其作为可靠百科全书来源的承诺，它将从关于我的文章中删除此类以及所有类似句子。最多，它可以将我用作它被其过于党派的合作者欺骗的一个例子。说到这些合作者：附带我页面的历史页面永远证明，一些维基百科合作者想要对我造成最大的伤害，这种态度与百科全书的工作不相容。维基百科不应该解雇他们并删除他们所写的一切吗？当然，他们仍然可以撰写博客和专栏文章，最好以他们的全名发表，但他们已经证明自己不是百科全书的权威……
    • Koenraad Elst，《论证的印度教徒》(2012)
  • 我们不希望维基百科仅仅像《不列颠百科全书》那样准确：我们希望它有55倍于《不列颠百科全书》的条目，公正地呈现有争议的辩论，并反映最新的学术研究，所有这些都由志愿者编辑和监督。
  • 尽管完全由志愿者组成的军队负责，维基百科——严格来说，它不是新闻网站——正在赶上传统媒体。官方结果会在运动员完成比赛后的数小时，有时甚至数分钟内传到维基百科页面上。凭借全天候工作的专业编辑，维基百科页面正在成为比传统报道更快、更精简、更受欢迎的替代方案。
  • 维基百科，如你所知，是一部虚假的百科全书。它是一种被发明出来的东西。而我们都去使用它。迈克尔·萨维奇的条目——我有一个人不断试图纠正真相。但是苏联人，也就是共产主义者，自由派，民主党人，至少有九十九个人攻击我的网站，每次他进行更正时。例如，当他重新输入迈克尔·萨维奇单枪阻止了迪拜港口交易时？他们把它拿掉了。他们不想让任何人知道。换句话说，他们修改我的历史，就像苏联人对他们想要摧毁的个人所做的那样。现在你明白为什么我不能上任何电视台了。为什么迈克尔·萨维奇在美国除了数百万听众之外还是一个默默无闻的人。以及为什么这个节目在互联网和广播中排名第二。以及为什么我有六本连续畅销书。因为真相不知何故正在传开。但我警告你关于维基百科。如果维基百科不阻止这九十九个民主自由派苏联人修改真实的事情，那么你如何能依赖一个如此虚假的网站？你不能。你不能！但我不能每天都战斗，你明白吗？
  • 维基百科人[...]充当事实上的主题审核员，他们往往会带有偏见并且经常古怪。……文章通常是用过于聪明的年轻男性的心态编辑的，[这]描述了许多维基百科人。

2013

[编辑]
  • 我竭力避免的网站是维基百科，因为对于许多主题来说，我发现它是一个错误信息的宝库。我甚至没有想阅读我自己的维基百科条目。
  • 对于任何信息，都有必要追溯到原始来源，不幸的是，在线出版物并不总是如此。这也适用于维基百科，它认为报纸和杂志是可靠的来源。在我的例子中，它最初发表在一本杂志上，然后在维基百科上说我父亲是一名司机，但是，虽然我对司机绝对没有任何意见，但我的父亲是一名俄语翻译。
Serena Danna 的采访，Corriere.it，2013年6月23日
  • It all started one night when writer Amanda Filipacchi was browsing through Wikipedia and noticed an absence of women under the category "American novelists." At first, she thought the female writers being moved off the page were not important enough to be on it. But then she discovered some obscure male novelists were still listed, while some well-known women were not.
  • Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today, some 2,500 are generally considered endangered. ...less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide. ... To summarize a key result of this study...: No wikipedia, no ascent.
  • It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade.

2014

[edit]
  • Dealing with the Wikipedians is like walking into a mental hospital: the floors are carpeted, the walls are nicely padded, but you know there's a pretty good chance at any given moment one of the inmates will pick up a knife.
    • Anonymous Wiki-PR client, cited by Judith-Newman in Wikipedia-Mania, New York Times (9 January 2014)
  • Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals - that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse".
  • ...when I used to teach kids, there was a fierce debate between teachers on the pro versus the anti Wikipedia side, and I always came down very strongly on the pro side, and I told my students if they were researching something for me – like Wikipedia is totally OK. Copy and pasting from Wikipedia is not, but there is no place to get a better overview from things. ... it all depends on what do you need, and if you just want to check some quick fact about something, Wikipedia is totally reliable. Now there's reasons why you can't cite it as a source, but ignoring that for the time being, Wikipedia for a huge number of people's needs is totally fine. ... the thing that is disturbing is the number times that that source link does not go anywhere, or, I have found some times where the context of the source link says something that is completely contrary to the feeling that you got from the Wikipedia page itself ...
  • You'd be amazed at the number of times I've been with top professors in the field and I've asked them a question and they've said, 'I'm not too sure about that, let me check', and gone straight to Wikipedia.
  • With such a massive amount of rules and regulations to adhere to, how is it not absolutely deterring for newcomers to join Wikipedia? Most likely, because they do not even know these rules exist. Counter-intuitive as it may sound, in spite of all the regulations, it is perfectly fine and acceptable to just use common sense when editing Wikipedia, relying on one's best judgment on how to make it a better encyclopedia. In fact, one of the Wikipedia policies goes even further and states that “If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it,” and one of the five pillars of Wikipedia claims that “Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. Their principles and spirit matter more than their literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making an exception.” In a similar spirit, there is a rule stating that instruction creep should be avoided and that pettifogging is not welcome. One policy, which describes what Wikipedia is not, insists that Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy.
  • Whether or not Wikipedia has managed to attain the authority level of traditional encyclopaedias, it has undoubtedly become a model of what the collaborative Internet community can and cannot do.
    • The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, "Wikipedia", Encyclopædia Britannica, (28 October 2014)
  • Most have simply washed their hands of the problem, claiming that the bigotry or bias on Wikipedia is just an unfortunate side-effect that we have to accept. But this is not a trivial unintended consequence of an open source system; bias goes against the very principle of Wikipedia and must be addressed. I have to deal with this bias and misinformation every time a journalist interviews me and references my Wikipedia article. I need to spend the first 30 minutes of interviews to correct all the misleading information from my Wikipedia article... Most of the skeptic editors on my article believe me to be a very dangerous man — and believe that it is Wikipedia's responsibility to warn the world of how dangerous my ideas are.
  • The prime agent of this change is a development that nobody (save perhaps Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) would have predicted.[1] It is called Wikipedia—an online encyclopedia collectively produced and edited by 'amateurs' who have created what is effectively the greatest reference work the world has yet produced.
Footnote:
  1. ↑ “Most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing.” Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts (Pan, 1992)
  • John Naughton in: From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: Disruptive Innovation in the Age of the Internet, Quercus, 2012, Chapter 3, page 65
"Encyclopedia Frown" (Dec 11, 2014)
[edit]

David Auerbach, "Encyclopedia Frown", Slate, (Dec 11, 2014)

  • Beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucratic as a Kafka story. And it can be particularly unwelcoming to women.
  • The problem instead stems from the fact that administrators and longtime editors have developed a fortress mentality in which they see new editors as dangerous intruders who will wreck their beautiful encyclopedia, and thus antagonize and even persecute them.
  • We can learn a lot from Wikipedia about Internet governance and collective knowledge-building. It’s ultimately up to the site’s editors to choose to learn to temper their fortress mentality, get more outside eyes and ears, listen to the most moderate and reflective among them, and perhaps even entertain the idea that they might sometimes be wrong. Wikipedia’s future may depend on it.
  • Wikipedia is amazing. But it’s become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess.
  • Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.”

2015

[edit]
  • And then there's Wikipedia – astroturf's dream come true. Billed as the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the reality can't be more different. Anonymous Wikipedia editors control and co-opt pages on behalf of special interests. They forbid and reverse edits that go against their agenda. They skew and delete information, in blatant violation of Wikipedia's own established policies, with impunity – always superior to the poor schleps who actually believe anyone can edit Wikipedia, only to discover they're barred from correcting even the simplest factual inaccuracies. Try adding a footnoted fact, or correcting a factual error on one of these monitored Wikipedia pages, then poof! Sometimes within a matter of seconds you'll find your edit is reversed.
  • Could the pressure from mobile, and the internal tensions, tear Wikipedia apart? A world without it seems unimaginable, but consider the fate of other online communities. ... The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes – the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in – and to design a mobile-oriented editing environment. ... The worst scenario is an end to Wikipedia, not with a bang but with a whimper: a long, slow decline in participation, accuracy and usefulness that is not quite dramatic enough to jolt the community into making meaningful reforms. No effort in history has gotten so much information at so little cost into the hands of so many – a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence of profit and owners. In an age of Internet giants, this most selfless of websites is worth saving.
  • When Wikipedia launched, it raised immediate concerns about the sanctity of accreditation – could knowledge be created by amateurs? But its steady rise in utility meant that, in time, nearly everyone made their peace with it – some more happily than others.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation has gotten far off track. Every year, it builds its campaign around a budget many millions larger than the year before.
  • If you're selling to customers that you're familiar and competent with new media, and you can't manage something like Wikipedia, that's a failure.
  • It is clear that our deep state is obsessed with controlling information and moulding it to fit its narrative. On Wikipedia, a number of 'users' and 'editors' have been planted to ensure that only Pakistan's official stance or the Nazaria-e-Pakistan [ideology of Pakistan] is reflected in the pages on Pakistan. Consequently, the pages on Pakistan's history read like a secondary school Pakistan Studies textbook... All alternative views on Pakistan's constitution, role of religion and federalism are stifled by this group...If one were to venture a guess it would be that these manipulators of the Pakistani narrative on sites like Wikipedia and others are operating out of some nondescript building in Islamabad's G sectors [where Pakistani intelligence agencies are located].

2016

[edit]
In India and Nigeria, over 75% of participants said they had never heard of Wikipedia. ~ Zachary McCune (Wikimedia Foundation)
  • For a website with no paid writing staff that is still overcoming an out-of-date reputation for inaccuracy, Wikipedia punches above its weight. ...it is especially powerful in an election season: On the day of the 2012 election, Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's entries alone were read 1.6 million times. [...] you can see a virtual version of the presidential race playing out every day.
  • It turns out there are people, typically they're probably unemployed kids with student debt you know that are stuck in their parents' basement with Cheetos stains on their t-shirts that haven't been able to get their first job so what they do is they play games to see how long they can edit Wikipedia pages in order to have games with their friends all around the world. So my advice to you is, if you do have a Wikipedia page, check it once in a while...
  • ... what Wikipedia and Facebook teach us is that social models of content curation and collaboration do scale. ...organisations will increasingly need to crowd-source a lot of their meta-data. ... In other words, [organisations] will need to build a Corporate Data Catalogue that looks and feels a lot like Wikipedia, but which borrows the “like” and “share” concepts from Facebook.
  • Wikipedia is the most comprehensive compendium of up-to-date knowledge assembled at gargantuan scale almost entirely by volunteers. It works, too, because they form a huge community that for reasons of camaraderie, rivalry, vanity, purity and sometimes just deep suspicion constantly monitor and vet one another's work. There are flaws in the process, but each entry is a living organism that matures and self-corrects over time.
  • About a decade ago I migrated into community work from a non-community background. This is the guide I wish I had read back then. When I say community work, I am talking about stuff like Wikipedia: large distributed groups of people doing something together, usually online, often unpaid. Usually international, often nerdy, often (but not always) FLOSS or FLOSS-adjacent.
  • ...people have talked about open politics and things like that, and its really hard sometimes to say that yes, you can apply the same principles in some other areas... So, obviously open source in science is making a comeback. Science was there first. But then science ended up by being pretty closed with very expensive journals and some of that going on. And open source is making a comeback in science with things like arXiv and open journals. Wikipedia changed the world too. ... So there are other examples. I am sure there are more to come. ... It is up to you guys to make them.
  • Like many university lecturers, I used to warn my own students off using Wikipedia (as pointless an injunction as telling them not to use Google, or not to leave their essay to the last minute). I finally gave up doing so about three years ago,...
  • Two years before Wikipedia, I had the dream, the vision, of a free encyclopedia written by volunteers in all the languages of the world. This inspiration came to me from watching the growth of free software, open-source software, as most people know it. And watching programmers coming together and giving away their work for free online.
  • Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That's opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. ... Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests.

2017

[edit]
As the originator of [the neutrality policy,] I completely despair of persuading Wikipedians of the error of their ways. ~ Larry Sanger
  • The researchers [...] found that the Wikipedia entries were written at a much higher reading level compared with the medication guides and well above the average consumer reading level, which could contribute to patient misunderstanding of medication information. ... The study authors conclude that as the public use of Wikipedia increases, the need for health care professionals and the pharmaceutical industry to actively educate and provide reliable resources to patients remains important.
  • Page views of Wikipedia are immense compared with views of primary literature articles. As a result, if you edit a page to include results from your research, your audience will likely expand by at least an order of magnitude.
  • For the record the Daily Mail banned all its journalists from using Wikipedia as a sole source in 2014 because of its unreliability.
  • Wikipedians this week added greatly to the amusement of the internet after around 40 contributors loftily declared that the Daily Mail was not a reliable source for citations. Much public hilarity ensued – for the reason that The Mail and Wikipedia are really far more alike than either would care to admit. ... Both can resemble a real chamber of horrors.
  • However clumsy the Youth Parliament's approach to Wikipedia may be, it's still an improvement on a government order issued by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev last August, when he established a working group to study the creation of an all new Russian-engineered Wikipedia clone.
  • False information is being disseminated at a far greater rate when it seems to have been vetted by a brand name and Wikipedia's branding is global. It would be ideal if a more credible site like Encyclopedia Britannica or a useful news site like Reuters could be granted the “zero-rate” – but those sites [...] do [not] have the same foundational interest in spreading their content without financial gain that Wikipedia has.
  • I fear we are moving beyond a natural skepticism regarding expert claims to the death of the ideal of expertise itself: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, teachers and students, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those with achievement in an area and those with none.
  • Despite being an American-born site, its popularity and utility have expanded around the world since its foundation in 2001.
  • The cyber age has tremendous potential, as indicated by Wikipedia. But if it bypasses space and time where there's just this obsession with the present – this neglect of our heritage and history – then our world will change.
  • The online crowd-sourced encyclopedia is perceived as increasingly trustworthy, [...] with immediate impacts on scientific literacy.
  • Wikipedia, like other new, non-commercial information technologies, can be used to open new public spaces for [indigenous] languages, and gradually recover the ground lost to more dominant languages. ... However, the representation of indigenous languages on the platform is very low,... [In Latin America indigenous communities speak 420 different languages.] To date, only four official indigenous-language versions are represented: Quechua ..., Náhuatl ..., Aymara ... and Guaraní.

2018

[edit]
  • Wikipedia is basically a format in which people who hate you can go into your ... , I don't even know what you call these, into the search of your name, and then there I have a profile of sorts, into my profiler page, and poison it. ... "Views on political issues, groups and politicians" – [...] what happened between 2009 and 2017? Well, doesn't matter. ... What was my context for [calling Bernie Sanders a "radical Marxist who believes in violence"]? They don't even discuss it, the shooting in Alexandria. ... [That paragraph] is all mickey mouse stuff. It is cut and paste cherry picking. ... I've written about [progressivism] in great length, but not a word in my "political views". ... Who has a section on "controversial views"? It is as if it is written by Media Matters. ... "Levin compared supporters of the Affordable Care Act to Nazi brown shirts." ... No I didn't! Completely taken out of context! ... If you want to know about me, you should go as far away from the Wikipedia page as possible... ... What they're supposed to do, if they're a responsible organisation, is to get the basic information on me [...] and lock it so that miscreants and malcontents can't abuse and post it. ... Very, very dishonest information in there. ... The book reviews are scores positive, maybe one or two negative by leftists and so forth. You would have no idea reading their comments about my books on Wikipedia.
  • Facebook's introduction of a new feature that uses [Wikipedia] to combat “fake news” [...] poses arguably the greatest test in years to the volunteer-run online encyclopedia, constituting a massive threat to the internet's largest and ostensibly most trusted source of free knowledge. ... It also highlights the risks posed by Facebook's efforts to seemingly outsource its problems to the online encyclopedia. Indeed, Wikipedia has struggled to defend its standards in the face of its new role as the internet's “good cop.” As more and more tech giants like Facebook and YouTube make use of its content, a new influx of users has flooded the website [–] not all of them well intentioned.
  • I'd argue that Wikipedia's biggest asset is its willingness as a community and website to “delete.” It's that simple. If there's bad information, or info that's just useless, Wikipedia's regulatory system has the ability to discard it.
  • Communities of so-called “amateur experts” linked together by shared interests are the bread and butter of Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia actively encourages editors to congregate in “projects” and “portals” covering hundreds of articles that all fall under a single broad topic. ... So while it's easy to lament the dangers of the Wikipedia gun lobby, it is important to remember that groups with competing worldviews are what fuel the crowdsourced encyclopedia – where the question of what is true is always secondary to the question of what the community of different users can agree on as being true.
  • When [people] get their information not from us – but [...] through something like Siri or [...] Alexa – that opportunity to either contribute back as an editor is broken, and that opportunity to contribute, to donate is also broken.
  • On January 2, 2018, MBH participant published statistics on peak views of Russian Wikipedia articles in 2017.
Each article of the free encyclopedia is visited almost evenly from day to day. Smooth fluctuations are associated with the total traffic to Wikipedia, as well as various global cycles, for example, calendar - annual, weekly and others.
  • ... Wikipedia is just one type of online community, which appeals to a fairly narrow (geeky, combative male) demographic. And, importantly, it doesn't appeal to many other demographics. ... if, as inevitably happens in such a place, some people get impatient and upset at [the] unfair treatment, they must tolerate the passive-aggressive condescension of the basement-dwellers who inform them, apparently with no awareness of the ironies involved, that courtesy is an absolute requirement.
  • ... independent bloggers Markus Fiedler and Dirk Pohlmann have found [that Wikipedia's] 'freely editable' model definitely doesn't mean an absence of censorship and biased political activism. ...the online encyclopedia is home to a major edit war where corrections are constantly added, information removed, and value judgements made to fit a specific narrative. ... [An inner circle of manipulators] are referees and players combined into one.
  • ...Wikipedia has forced academics to re-examine how they validate sources. We should have been doing that all along. We should have been approaching an Encyclopaedia Britannica article with a certain level of distrust and questioning: What are the biases of people writing this? What are they leaving out? What communities are not included in this conversation?
  • [Wikipedia] is therefore a reflection of the world's biases more than it is a cause of them. ... If journalists, book publishers, scientific researchers, curators, academics, grant-makers and prize-awarding committees don't recognize the work of women, Wikipedia's editors have little foundation on which to build. ... We may not be able to change how society values women, but we can change how women are seen, and ensure that they are seen to begin with.
  • ... debilitating factors – such as excessive bickering and poorly worded arguments – have led to about one-third of RfCs [i.e. Request for Comment deliberation processes] going unresolved. ... the experience of participants and the length of a discussion are strongly predictive of the timely closure of an RfC.
  • Medical images and articles found on Wikipedia may help patients better understand their radiology reports, ... And despite both internal and external metrics concluding Wikipedia's health information to be variable in quality, but continually improving, the authors believe the website's detailed information could pair well with the lay-definitions housed within the PORTER [i.e. Patient-Oriented Radiology Reporter] glossary.
  • The magnitude of [Wikipedia's visitor] numbers piqued the interest of Matthew Kock, website manager of the prestigious British Museum in London. "I looked at how many Rosetta Stone page views there were on Wikipedia... That is perhaps our iconic object, and five times as many people go to the Wikipedia article [...] as to ours." This realization inspired him to propose a novel idea to British Museum administrators – invite a Wikipedia contributor into the institution as the first ever "Wikipedian in Residence" to serve as a liaison within the Museum. Despite his fears about proposing collaboration with unknown and uncredentialled Wikipedia volunteers, [...] he met with enthusiastic interest from numerous departments at the museum.
    • Andrew Lih in “Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge”, American Library Association, (29 November 2018), p. 9

2019

[edit]
  • Science Wikipedia pages aren't just for non-experts. Physicists – researchers, professors, and students – use Wikipedia daily. When I need the transition temperature for a Bose-Einstein condensate (prefactor and all), or when I want to learn about the details of an unfamiliar quantum algorithm, Wikipedia is my first stop. ... Despite [this], it is rare for professional physicists to contribute, in part because there are few, if any, professional incentives to do so. ... only a small fraction [of them] have edited even a single Wikipedia page.
  • Like other social media platforms, Wikipedia has evolved into an echo chamber where the user is presented with only one type of content instead of being shown a balanced narrative. This disinformation is powerful since the articles are written in an academic style and users do not see other sources that disagree with the article.... Some editors of Wikipedia are failed academics with demonic energy who wish to conquer anonymously what they were unable to do in their normal careers. And spending much of their working life editing Wikipedia articles and by the use of multiple anonymous handles they have obtained administrative status which entitles them to block opposing views. The anonymous persona of the editors and the low stakes have made Wikipedia politics much more vicious than real politics.
  • Wikipedia is not going anywhere. It's definitely part of everyone's life. But the question of accuracy is one of the most important aspects of it. ... Our purpose here is not to evaluate whether Wikipedia is good or bad. ... It's not so much about warning people about what Wikipedia is. It's about showing what it is. ... Librarians are interested in trying to broaden our community's education with information in general, be it digital or otherwise.
  • Wikipedians in residence (WIR) have been around since at least 2010, with the first one hired by the British Museum in the U.K. Since then, other museums as well as universities, archives, libraries, art galleries and health organizations, have followed suit with a total of 165 WIRs hired worldwide. According to the Wikimedia Foundation [...], right now 65 WIRs are actively working — and registered — with the foundation.
  • Indeed, Fram seemed like the perfect test case for a new kind of enforcement from the foundation – a prolific user whose bad behavior warranted a severe sanction short of a lifetime ban. But as is the case in so many enforcement decisions on social platforms, the ban created more questions than it answered.
  • The real cause of the Fram flare-up wasn't the sudden overreach by the foundation, but the community's own laissez-faire attitude about toxic users. ... The community is currently blaming the foundation for their own mess, in my opinion, which was caused by our abject failure to develop procedures to enforce civility without Foundation intervention.
  • The Commissioner sees the ongoing blocking of access to Wikipedia as forming part of a broader pattern of undue restrictions on the right to receive and impart information on the internet, and more generally as an illustration of the disproportionately heavy-handed approach currently prevailing in Turkey to any content or information the Turkish authorities consider offensive. ... Commissioner Mijatovic concludes that the way Turkish administrative authorities and courts routinely have recourse to internet blocking is unacceptable in a democratic society and not compatible with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights which protects freedom of expression. ... The systemic nature of the problem requires far-reaching measures, including the complete overhaul of the relevant Turkish legislation.

2020s

[edit]

2020

[edit]
History is written by the victor, except on wikipedia
  • [Wikipedia comprises millions of articles that are in constant need of edits to reflect new information. That can involve article expansions, major rewrites, or more routine modifications such as updating numbers, dates, names, and locations. Currently, humans across the globe volunteer their time to make these edits.] It would be beneficial to automatically modify exact portions of the articles, with little to no human intervention.
  • [I have not seen a single practical use-case to convince me to integrate cryptocurrencies or blockchain into the platform. To reward content creators and editors with digital assets] is a really bad idea. ... By integrating cryptocurrencies, Wikipedia would be taking a step back by making it easier for people and companies to pay for the content they want on the platform. Creating a mechanism where you effectively authenticate that type of behavior ... isn't going to help with the quality of Wikipedia at all. ... To say to them, you're going to have to pay or put money at risk in order to edit Wikipedia is completely insane.
  • If it is a mistake to keep comparing Wikipedia to Britannica, it is another kind of category error to judge Wikipedia against its peers in the internet's top 10. Wikipedia ought to serve as a model for many forms of social endeavor online, but its lessons do not translate readily into the commercial sphere. It is a noncommercial enterprise, with no investors or shareholders to appease, no financial imperative to grow or die, and no standing to maintain in the arms race to amass data and attain AI supremacy at all costs. At Jimmy Wales' wedding, one of the maids of honor toasted him as the sole internet mogul who wasn't a billionaire.
  • The site has helped its fellow tech behemoths, though, especially with the march of AI. Wikipedia's liberal content licenses and vast information hoard have allowed developers to train neural networks much more quickly, cheaply, and widely than proprietary data sets ever could have. When you ask Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa a question, Wikipedia helps provide the answer. When you Google a famous person or place, Wikipedia often informs the “knowledge panel” that appears alongside your search results.
    These tools were made possible by a project called Wikidata, the next ambitious step toward realizing the age-old dream of creating a “World Brain.” ... As platforms like Google and Alexa work to provide instant answers to random questions, Wikidata will be one of the key architectures that link the world's information together...
  • Why do Wikipedians perform these millions of hours of labor, some expended on a giant straw goat, without pay? Because they don't experience them as labor. “It's a misconception people work for free,” Wales told the site Hacker Noon in 2018. “They have fun for free.” A 2011 survey of more than 5,000 Wikipedia contributors listed “It's fun” as one of the primary reasons they edited the site.
  • I can't tell you what the cause of the bias on Wikipedia is, I can only tell you that it's really obvious now. It used to be quite obvious, like even 10 years ago it was already pretty obvious 10 years ago. Now it's just embarrassing.
  • There is a massive irony in the fact that Wikipedia is so extremely biased: it was started by someone who cares unusually deeply about neutrality (me), who developed and defended its neutrality policy at great length.
    Man makes plans, and God laughs.
    • Larry Sanger, Tweet on (Sep 3, 2020)

2021

[edit]

  • Even the common perception that Wikipedia provides a level playing field on which humanity can freely share all its knowledge is a pretense. The reality is that while all such digital structures behave like free and unrestricted systems, they are in fact controlled by gamification algorithms at the hands of those who own and operate them. Very few people grasp the profound deception of the system.
    • Malhotra, R., “Artificial intelligence and the future of power: 5 battlegrounds”, New Delhi:Rupa, 2021.
  • [the infiltration had threatened the] very foundations of Wikipedia.
  • This case is unprecedented in scope
  • [the foundation had been investigating the infiltration of Chinese-language Wikipedia for nearly a year. But this summer] credible threats [to volunteers' safety had] led us to prioritise rapid response

2022

[edit]
Editing Wikipedia from a bomb shelter is difficult. To be honest, covering the is not our main now. People are mainly trying to put in place their plan B, either by to a safer place, by joining the army, or by joining organizations. ~ Mykola Kozlenko
  • Like many other knowledge spaces, Wikipedia has a problem: it lacks visual representation, especially when it comes to notable figures who belong to the global majority, including Black, Indigenous, and people of color. To change that, we are starting a new initiative in collaboration with Behance and AfroCROWD: Discover #WikiUnseen

2023

[edit]
  • Every day, millions of people gather on Wikipedia to fight over the facts displayed. Wikipedia doesn’t just preserve the some 22.14 GB worth of text displayed on its pages, it’s also preserving years of edits and arguments about how those words were written. Every page on the site is argued over, fussed about, and tweaked constantly. All those discussions are here, and can be pored over.
    Running an ad-free website where millions of people gather every day to discuss facts and update scores of pages is a monumental task. It’s incredible that Wikipedia doesn’t often go down and has few technical problems. Most of the time, Wikipedia works without issue. The same is not true for X, formerly Twitter.
    And where does the money go? The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that publishes its financial records that are routinely audited by third parties. Every year, it publishes portions of this financial audit for the public. According to its 2022 report, it received about $160 million in donations. It spent $88 million of this on salaries and wages for its employees, $2.7 million on internet hosting, and about $1.2 million on travel. It’s very easy to see these reports with a cursory search. A community note on Musk’s own post says as much.
  • The civic tech expert Ed Saperia used as his parable the difference between Wikipedia and Facebook. Jimmy Wales’s big experiment, which started life in 1999 as Nupedia, has created an open-source collection of human knowledge in hundreds of languages that is essentially trustworthy. If a mistake creeps in through the gates of human generosity, it gets corrected in the same way. If malicious actors try to slander their foes, the punishment is not cancellation, but more like lifelong ridicule, which is proportionate, given how long a slanderous person is likely to carry on doing ridiculous things. In other words, it is the best of humanity, all natural desire to help each other with cross-pollinated knowledge concentrated in one place.
    Facebook, for brevity, takes the same raw material – all the people in the world – and finds the worst in it. Facebook manages to winkle out things we didn’t know we were capable of – levels of vitriol, gullibility and hysteria – in between a scare ad for dark politics and a mesmerising video of five types of mince baked around a kilo of cheese. (I am paraphrasing a bit; I don’t think civic tech gurus dwell much on the cheese.)
“Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth” (Published July 18, 2023, updated July 21, 2023)
[edit]

Jon Gertner, “Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth”, The New York Times, (Published July 18, 2023, updated July 21, 2023)

Without Wikipedia, generative A.I. wouldn’t exist. ~ Nicholas Vincent
For a popular article that might have thousands of contributors, “Wikipedia is literally the most accurate form of information ever created by humans,” Amy Bruckman, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told me. But Wikipedia’s short articles can sometimes be hit or miss. “They could be total garbage,” says Bruckman, who is the author of the recent book “Should You Believe Wikipedia?”
Jesse Dodge, a computer scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, told me that Wikipedia might now make up between 3 and 5 percent of the scraped data an L.L.M. uses for its training. “Wikipedia going forward will forever be super valuable,” Dodge points out, “because it’s one of the largest well-curated data sets out there.” There is generally a link, he adds, between the quality of data a model trains on and the accuracy and coherence of its responses.
Reagle told me that the recent debates over A.I. recall for him the early days of Wikipedia, when its quality was unflatteringly compared to that of other encyclopedias. “It served as a proxy in this larger culture war about information and knowledge and quality and authority and legitimacy. So I take a sort of similar model to thinking about ChatGPT, which is going to improve. Just like Wikipedia is not perfect, it’s not perfect — it’s never going to be perfect — but what is the relative value given the other information that’s out there?”
While Wikipedia’s licensing policy lets anyone tap its knowledge and text — to “reuse and remix” it however they might like — it does have several conditions. These include the requirements that users must “share alike,” meaning any information they do something with must subsequently be made readily available, and that users must give credit and attribution to Wikipedia contributors. Mixing Wikipedia’s corpus into a chatbot model that gives answers to queries without explaining the sourcing may thus violate Wikipedia’s terms of use, two people in the open-source software community told me.
  • The new A.I. chatbots have typically swallowed Wikipedia’s corpus, too. Embedded deep within their responses to queries is Wikipedia data and Wikipedia text, knowledge that has been compiled over years of work by human contributors. While estimates of its influence can vary, Wikipedia is probably the most important single source in the training of A.I. models. “Without Wikipedia, generative A.I. wouldn’t exist,” says Nicholas Vincent, who will be joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia this month and who has studied how Wikipedia helps support Google searches and other information businesses.
    Yet as bots like ChatGPT become increasingly popular and sophisticated, Vincent and some of his colleagues wonder what will happen if Wikipedia, out-flanked by A.I. that has cannibalized it, suffers from disuse and dereliction. In such a future, a “Death of Wikipedia” outcome is perhaps not so far-fetched. A computer intelligence — it might not need to be as good as Wikipedia, merely good enough — is plugged into the web and seizes the opportunity to summarize source materials and news articles instantly, the way humans now do with argument and deliberation.
  • How Wikipedia uses bots and how bots use Wikipedia are extremely different, however. For years it has been clear that fledgling A.I. systems were being trained on the site’s articles, as part of the process whereby engineers “scrape” the web to create enormous data sets for that purpose. In the early days of these models, about a decade ago, Wikipedia represented a large percentage of the scraped data used to train machines. The encyclopedia was crucial not only because it’s free and accessible, but also because it contains a mother lode of facts and so much of its material is consistently formatted.
    In more recent years, as so-called Large Language Models, or L.L.M.s, increased in size and functionality — these are the models that power chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard — they began to take in far larger amounts of information. In some cases, their meals added up to well over a trillion words. The sources included not just Wikipedia but also Google’s patent database, government documents, Reddit’s Q. and A. corpus, books from online libraries and vast numbers of news articles on the web. But while Wikipedia’s contribution in terms of overall volume is shrinking — and even as tech companies have stopped disclosing what data sets go into their A.I. models — it remains one of the largest single sources for L.L.M.s. Jesse Dodge, a computer scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, told me that Wikipedia might now make up between 3 and 5 percent of the scraped data an L.L.M. uses for its training. “Wikipedia going forward will forever be super valuable,” Dodge points out, “because it’s one of the largest well-curated data sets out there.” There is generally a link, he adds, between the quality of data a model trains on and the accuracy and coherence of its responses.
  • Wikipedia’s fundamental goal is to spread knowledge as broadly and freely as possible, by whatever means. About 10 years ago, when site administrators focused on how Google was using Wikipedia, they were in a situation that presaged the advent of A.I. chatbots. Google’s search engine was able, at the top of its query results, to present Wikipedians’ work to users all over the world, giving the encyclopedia far greater reach than before — an apparent virtue. In 2017, three academic computer scientists, Connor McMahon, Isaac Johnson and Brent Hecht, conducted an experiment that tested how random users would react if just part of the contributions made to Google’s search results by Wikipedia were removed. The academics perceived an “extensive interdependence”: Wikipedia makes Google a “significantly better” search engine for many queries, and Wikipedia, in turn, gets most of its traffic from Google.
  • Aaron Halfaker, who led the machine-learning research team at the Wikimedia Foundation for several years (and who now works for Microsoft), told me that search-engine summaries at least offer users links and and a way to click back to Wikipedia. The responses from large language models can resemble an information smoothie that goes down easy but contains mysterious ingredients. “The ability to generate an answer has fundamentally shifted,” he says, noting that in a ChatGPT answer there is “literally no citation, and no grounding in the literature as to where that information came from.” He contrasts it with the Google or Bing search engines: “This is different. This is way more powerful than what we had before.”
  • Wikipedia’s most devoted supporters will readily acknowledge that it has plenty of flaws. The Wikimedia Foundation estimates that its English-language site has about 40,000 active editors — meaning they make at least five edits a month to the encyclopedia. According to recent data from the Wikimedia Foundation, about 80 percent of that cohort is male, and about 75 percent of those from the United States are white, which has led to some gender and racial gaps in Wikipedia’s coverage. And lingering doubts about reliability remain. For a popular article that might have thousands of contributors, “Wikipedia is literally the most accurate form of information ever created by humans,” Amy Bruckman, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told me. But Wikipedia’s short articles can sometimes be hit or miss. “They could be total garbage,” says Bruckman, who is the author of the recent book “Should You Believe Wikipedia?”
  • Within the Wikipedia community, there is a cautious sense of hope that A.I., if managed right, will help the organization improve rather than crash. Selena Deckelmann, the chief tech officer, expresses that perspective most optimistically. “What we’ve proven over 22 years now is: We have a volunteer model that is sustainable,” she told me. “I would say there are some threats to it. Is it an insurmountable threat? I don’t think so.” The longtime Wikipedia editor who wrote “Death of Wikipedia” told me that he feels there is a case to be made for a good outcome in the coming years, even if the longer term seems far less certain. The Wikimedia plug-in is the first significant move toward protecting its future. Projects are also in the works to use recent advances in A.I. internally. Albon says that he and his colleagues are in the process of adapting A.I. models that are “off the shelf” — essentially models that have been made available by researchers for anyone to freely customize — so that Wikipedia’s editors can use them for their work. One focus is to have A.I. models aid new volunteers, say, with step-by-step chatbot instructions as they begin working on new articles, a process that involves many rules and protocols and often alienates Wikipedia’s newcomers.
    Leila Zia, the head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation, told me that her team was likewise working on tools that could help the encyclopedia by predicting, for example, whether a new article or edit would be overruled. Or, she said, perhaps a contributor “doesn’t know how to use citations” — in that case, another tool would indicate that. I asked whether it could help Wikipedia entries maintain a neutral point of view as they were writing. “Absolutely,” she says.
  • Three years ago, in anticipation of Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary, Joseph Reagle, a professor at Northeastern University, wrote a historical essay exploring how the death of the site had been predicted again and again. Wikipedia has nevertheless found ways to adapt and endure. Reagle told me that the recent debates over A.I. recall for him the early days of Wikipedia, when its quality was unflatteringly compared to that of other encyclopedias. “It served as a proxy in this larger culture war about information and knowledge and quality and authority and legitimacy. So I take a sort of similar model to thinking about ChatGPT, which is going to improve. Just like Wikipedia is not perfect, it’s not perfect — it’s never going to be perfect — but what is the relative value given the other information that’s out there?”
  • While Wikipedia’s licensing policy lets anyone tap its knowledge and text — to “reuse and remix” it however they might like — it does have several conditions. These include the requirements that users must “share alike,” meaning any information they do something with must subsequently be made readily available, and that users must give credit and attribution to Wikipedia contributors. Mixing Wikipedia’s corpus into a chatbot model that gives answers to queries without explaining the sourcing may thus violate Wikipedia’s terms of use, two people in the open-source software community told me. It is now a topic of conversation inside the Wikimedia community whether some legal recourse exists.
    Data providers may be able to exert other kinds of leverage as well. In April, Reddit announced that it would not make its corpus available for scraping by big tech companies without compensation. It seems very unlikely that the Wikimedia Foundation could issue the same dictum and close its sites off — an action that Nicholas Vincent has called a “data strike” — because its terms of service are more open. But the foundation could make arguments in the name of fairness and appeal to firms to pay for its A.P.I., just as Google does now. It could further insist that chatbots give Wikipedia prominent attribution and offer citations in their answers, something Selena Deckelmann told me the foundation is discussing with various firms. Vincent says that A.I. companies would be foolhardy to try to build a global encyclopedia themselves, with individual contractors. Instead, he told me, “there might be an intermediary stage here where Wikipedia says, ‘Hey, look at how important we’ve been to you.’”
  • Without ingesting the growing millions of Wikipedia pages or vacuuming up Reddit arguments about plot twists in “The Bear,” new L.L.M.s can’t be adequately trained. In fact, no one I spoke with in the tech community seemed to know if it would even be possible to build a good A.I. model without Wikipedia.

2024

[edit]
  • We love the amount of support — from the trainings to the course guides to the assistance available via email. With the use of Wikipedia, students are thinking critically about the knowledge gaps and inequities found in public information sources and resources — and they work to improve these conditions with each assignment.
    It's great that students get to see the impact of their work so quickly too, as the number of page views grows far faster than the number of scholars and colleagues who may otherwise read their published work.
  • Wikipedia’s articles about history and religion have real-life impact on the world. What people read on Wikipedia shapes the opinions they form about politics, social justice and so forth. Therefore we need to make sure Wikipedia gets it right, and this project is going to help that goal.
  • If you know how to navigate the site, Wikipedia is a uniquely transparent knowledge-sharing platform. So students get to see how the articles are developed in ways that are typically black-boxed in academia’s peer-review process or in what happens in the office of news media organizations. This makes it a great learning opportunity for identifying how bias can shape Wikipedia content, and for practicing how to intervene in those processes.

2025

[edit]
  • I'm a passionate believer in what Wikipedia does. I tell people over and over again, Wikipedia is where facts are going to live. Wikipedia is a critically important platform, because it's built on lifting up reliable sources, something which is getting harder and harder to find. Wikimedia New York City is a great resource for the New York City community to both learn about Wikipedia and learning how to contribute to Wikipedia. It's one of the places where anyone can access free knowledge that's trustworthy. And that's increasingly rare in today's world.
  • When you choose to become an editor, it’s because you’re passionate about an issue or you’re passionate about making sure that knowledge exists and it’s free for people to use, you don’t get paid to do this, and you didn’t sign up to be attacked.
  • If you meet three Wikipedia editors, you’d feel better about the long-standing stamina of Wikipedia, like, if you see all these editors, you’re just like, Oh, these are the people who are trying to make sure that Wikipedia is going to remain not just intact, but that we’re going to keep telling this evolving story of the internet.
  • We’ve been fighting off attacks of one kind or another for twenty years, almost.
  • Wikipedia is so ironic. We wanted to give a voice to the voiceless, but what emerged was one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history.

See also

[edit]
[edit]
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
Find more information on Wikipedia by searching Wikiquote's sister projects
Encyclopedia articles from Wikipedia
Dictionary definitions from Wiktionary
Textbooks from Wikibooks
Source texts from Wikisource
Images and media from Commons
News stories from Wikinews
Learning resources from Wikiversity
从"https://wikiquote.cn/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia&oldid=3841117"检索
© 2026 wikiquote.cn. Text is translated from wikiquote.org under the CC BY-SA 4.0 License.