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Old Man Murray?
bluefoxicy
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Slashdot reported on this this morning. I'm still trying to figure out if this guy's notability is a result of "vocal minority" or actual serious contributions. What I'm getting from the vocal minority is that a lot of internet memes surrounding gaming came from here, and a lot of video game reviewers were inspired by this guy.
Anyone ever heard of this bloke?
Anyone ever heard of this bloke?
People call me Wood Man, 'cause I always got wood.
bluefoxicy on
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Edit: what was I thinking?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Pretty much.
Whatever do you mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipe-tan
They even created a fake image of the -Tan character in a fake visual novel, in another language. Think about what that level of creepy OCD dedication means, for a second. Aside from the fact that the person most likely needs to get laid. Preferably also not with someone who looks like a five year old child.
The sheer number of pictures on that page ought to creep you out. That's more then like ninety percent of their articles.
All that being said. The common belief held by many people in academia and certain professions/mentalities, that Wikipedia is somehow invalid as an information source, because anyone can contribute to it, is fucking stupid. Often by those same people's own rules. As Wikipedia often requires sourced information applicable to the article.
The last time I had a professor try to pull that crap on me, I made him pull up an article and actually read it all the way through. He got rather quiet when we got to the sources section of the page.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
There are much better grounds for doing so, like the fact that Wikimedia knowingly hired an academic fraud.
Wiki has that core too. Power trips and such. Ben Schumin seems just like the kind of failure who'd think this makes him a big man.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
When you combine this with people slighting OMM, I get cranky.
Edit: the Everything site personified everything annoying and pointless about the Internet to an even better degree than this.
The existence or content of that page doesn't actually say anything about Wikipedia administrators, though.
It exists.
What more do you need said about them? It's their turf. Their responsibility. That page has no academic value whatsoever. It was made by someone wanting to get in on the 'chan mentality, and anthromorphize a website.
Hell, given that it's a character invented for wikipedia, and it clearly has no relevance to the rest of the web-site (How many of you folks have seen that character pop up on other pages?), it was created solely, in a way, to justify the creation of that page.
That page is clique in an abstract form. It's a celebration of wikipedia in a creepy way. Something that is not professional at all.
It's been consumed by fanboys.
The amount of stupid shit that constantly crops up and is pretty much forced to stay because of said fanboys is immense. When Wiki first started out a person/place/thing had to have some serious notoriety or it would be deleted.
Now is not the case. For example. Chrono Break. A game that never existed. The Wiki page is basically "Square registered the Trademark so we aboslutely positively know this is teh sequel to Chrono Cros OMG". Try to remove the page. Watch them freak out.
Believe it or not, there are things on the internet that are interesting enough to want to look up on Wikipedia, even if they haven't been referenced on dead trees.
I don't think you understand how the "Wikipedia:" namespace works, or how much influence admins actually have over the contents of the site. There are all kinds of lame and embarrassing in-jokes and useless vanity projects in the WP: namespace, and the admins don't have the wherewithal to delete whatever page they want (in or out of article space) just because the page is dumb. If there are a number of active editors contributing to a WP project page, the admins can't junk it unless they get a consensus to do so from the broader community (or they get an order from the Wikimedia Foundation on high to get rid of it).
pleasepaypreacher.net
Then that's a failing from even higher up, then.
Either they need to put oversight in place to prevent stuff like the OMM delisting from happening (The ego of one man should not be able to erase an entire article from existence, and keep it that way.), or they need tighter controls over the community, with the proper oversight to keep those controls from being abused.
The 4chan mentality of free group-think is great. And has alot of advantages when it comes to diversifying information, but that same diversity can be a vulnerability as well. You have to make plans to counter that vulnerability, or you get issues like what happened with that article.
I hadn't even noticed that.
That's awful. And funny. And very awful. It's like a self perpetuating circle jerk. "This article exists because we made it so it could exist! Here's a source we made up (On a website that inherently can't really be sourced.) to make it be real!".
The discussion page is very disturbing, too. Apparently there was alot of "adult" tier lolicon on that page in the past. What we're seeing now is the images that weren't purged during some sort of anti lolicon sweep of wikipedia.
I can only imagine how many images there were before.
I cannot unsee Wikipe-tan, which somehow combines so many things I hate. Stupid, pointless, japanese loli-obsessed and needlessly hard to pronounce.
The fact it has not been burned into dust and the dust burned is evidence enough that Wiki has no right to delete anything.
Why I fear the ocean.
SteamID: devCharles
twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesewise
Ever seen a condo board at work? Same shit. And in tons of other places in life.
The people who take it way too seriously and/or love the power are, unfortunately, the only people who have or will make the time to grab hold of the thing.
I can't believe there's a list of animals with fraudulent diplomas on there.
And no list of animals with legitimate diplomas.
This blatant speciesism will not stand.
Of course though, the license allows anyone to take Wikipedia and fork it.. so they're just digging their own grave in regards to that.
It's also funny because the guy that recommended the OMM article for deletion was also criticized and poked fun at in OMM years ago. It was pretty much a drive by attempt at deletion that succeeded due to their stranger and stranger notability requirements.
Good. Not a fix for systematic corruption or anything, but good.
Why I fear the ocean.
Seems counter to the whole idea of an encyclopedia, frankly. They should be trying to gather and organize as much information as possible, not picking and choosing just because some things are more important than others. Are the few kilobytes of bandwidth and storage that all those "irrelevant" articles would take up really worth it?
Plus, you know, it's been infiltrated by a secret cabal of pedophiles. So there's that.
But when I'm doing research for a paper or something it's a great resource. I think when professors warn against it they're warning against citing a wikipedia page specifically, which of course you shouldn't do. You go to a wiki page to find sources. There are usually quite a few good ones.
It's just that Wikipedia, by virtue of being online, is more likely to be mistakenly utilized by students given that traditional encyclopedia are giant thick books contained in areas of a library that no-one visits.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Like, look!
http://www.schuminweb.com/schumin-web/journal/index.php#1369
He has a post comparing the six different proposed upholstery covers for DC metro trains. And knows the train numbers. If DCist or Curbed did it, it would be cool. This is just lame.
Before Wikipedia, there were tons of places to learn about Louis Pasteur or other shit that you'd expect to show up in history books.
What Wikipedia brought to the table, among many other things, was a huge reference for shit that doesn't make it into history books. Not at all or sometimes just not for awhile. It's great because it's got tons of date entries on "trivia" and "minutia" and such that's happening right now or very recently in our culture. Things you could never search for before period.
The breadth of it's indepth coverage on usually ignored stuff is probably it's best point.
Because, goddamn: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lando_Calrissian
I mean, just compare your link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lando_Calrissian
Wikipedia has what you'd expect and want, a shorter but informative summary. Wookiepedia, land of the insane, has every minute detail for the crazy Star Wars fan that cares about every minute detail. Wikipedia has enough of a summary for anyone just wanting to find out roughly what the character of Lando did in movie X or book Y.
The problem arises when you (by which I mean the community of editors) defend one set of information to the death (e.g. each individual Pokemon's entry) and happily delete other stuff you don't like as much (e.g. videogame humour sites). Have both or neither.
The SA examples are typical scenarios of this, but there are others. Conspiracy theory based articles are extremely prominent, even though most of them have conflicting information, poor sourcing and factually dubious results. Attempt to delete them though under the policies set out by Wikipedia and you're hit by a group of people who will argue for the article based on rather dubious explanations for why it should exist.
The OMM deletion is an example of moderation bias run amock. The person involved just needed to scheme long enough to perform the action, get a group together to majority vote for deletion, and then away it goes. Luckily in this scenario it has caught the attention of the media and has been put back together again, but there are plenty of situations where this doesn't occur and frankly good articles are put in the bin.
Don't get me wrong, there is good in Wikipedia. Their Science and Technology sections are all well organised and strictly moderated to make sure factual data is properly conveyed and referenced, but once you sink a little deeper into the pool you find how much of a mess Wikipedia really is. There are, for instance, sections of their own ruleset that stop them from deleting pages in relation to schools and education, even if that page has zero to no information on it, or is repeatedly vandalised, or offers no data whatsoever.
Wikipedia relies so much on the community of the Net, but sometimes said community is not of good stature.