Hopefully they realize it's not healthy for Wikipedia in long term and make a course correction.
No idea how they work internally but probably some kind of mentoring program would be in order. There's no way someone relatively new will learn all their quirks that have been developed in the past decade and too many people on the internet expect you to know everything already to be worth a shit to them.
There is a mentoring program and I'm a part of it. Unfortunately, a lot of the accounts going through it very blatantly aren't there to actually make a good Wikipedia article on something, but to instead promote themselves or their company.
I think long-term retention is more the problem. There's plenty of new editors that show up to do something, but they don't care about being an editor on broader subjects long-term.
There's attempts to retain interest more through things like editathons on specific topics, such as with the Women in Red group, that have seen a decent amount of success.
I used to be an editor, and an admin. Quite a prolific one, in fact. I eventually quit (not really "officially", I just gradually ran down my frequency of editing until I eventually realized I just wasn't any more) because editing Wikipedia was no longer fun. And as far as I could tell, that was deliberate and as-designed.
Rules, rules, rules. No articles on quirky topics for the sake of quirky topics. Strict limits on pop culture. Articles for Deletion became a death sentence, arguing felt like trying to be a lawyer in a court that had already ruled against you and was just making things official. Just a tiring slog to produce something I wasn't terribly interested in any more.
Not really sure what the solution is, if there even is one. Wikipedia seems to be what it wants to be, now. I am a bit saddened because what it used to be was fun, but I've moved on. I'm glad Wikipedia still exists and has been useful to a great many people over the years.
I mean, is it surprising that a project aimed at becoming a proper encyclopedia would become stricter on content and raise the standards over time?
Which makes complete sense for pop culture stuff and especially things like Trivia sections that try to be added to a bunch of articles, adding things in like appearances of a historical subject in any and every manga that features them and any TV episode. That's not really something that's needed.
Nope, not surprising, which is why I figure it's as-designed.
That's not really something that's needed.
Well, is it? If the problem is that no new editors are joining then perhaps something that new editors would enjoy working on is needed.
If Wikipedia is fine with continuing to get greyer and greyer, ossifying into a "proper" and "serious" encyclopedia, then that's fine I guess. If new blood is needed, on the other hand, maybe look at things that would attract it and consider that as something that's needed.
It's not like Wikipedia can offer a wage increase.
Wikipedia is already a proper encyclopedia, as has been the case six years ago. Pop culture sections are still allowed, they’re just restricted to reliably sourced entries to prevent being disproportionally long and having shaky entries that are a stretch
Yes, those are all things I said in my comment already. I think they are the main reason for the lack of new blood.
If you don't think the lack of new blood is a problem, then that's all fine. If the lack of new blood is a problem, then maybe those things need to be reevaluated.
Wiki Jr. A Wikipedia dedicated to kids culture. Kids contribute and edit, have a mentor, put it on college applications. When they turn 18 can migrate account to real Wikipedia.
Possibly, though Wikipedia and all of its related projects have an 18+ requirement. Likely because of copyright issues, as under 18 year olds legally can't give up a share-alike license on the content they make.
I know it’s a joke, but the world isn’t super black and white. Kids want to help, by nature. My family owned a business when I was underage. I wanted to help and did little little things, but not allowed to help customers. When I was old enough I got hired for real and paid for it. By then I knew most things and was a good contributor, and learned a lot about balancing ledgers and counting registers, etc.
I also was manager at a young age after I moved out and went to other things, because I had experience already!
This isn’t to say I’m for child labor. Just that, for centuries kids have helped out and learned things by being a part of stuff. Blocking that off complete until they are 18 isn’t benefiting them either. Just to be clear though, the thought of kids working in meat plants and such; sickens me. 😷
I’m only pointing out the world isn’t black and white, and that perhaps there are in-between places which can benefit youths.
How have they “basically shut the door” in new admins? There has been three new admins in the last three months and there is currently an ongoing request for adminship which has a 100% support rate
That doesn't mean they've "shut the door", especially when you consider how much Wikipedia activity has declined since 2006. To see if they've shut the door you should look at the overall RfA success rate, not quantity
Indeed. I’ve got a chiropractor in my family, and I actively avoid talking to them about their work because I’ve always been convinced that it causes more harm than good. I think they finally got the hint after the 1000th time I refused their offer of an adjustment. They do some genuinely bizarre stuff beyond the standard adjustments, and talk about it like it’s proven science.
“Testing” for allergies or nutritional deficiencies by holding a sample up to your forehead and then applying downward pressure to your outstretched arms to “determine” sensitivity. Weird stuff like that.
Edit: I believe it’s called Applied Kinesiology, but that just makes it sound legit. Which it’s not.
The core tenet of chiropractics is that “life force” flows through the spine and “blocks” in that is what causes diseases/pains.
Most people think they are some kind of spine experts, while in reality it is nothing like that and more like concepts of Chi and meridians.
The thing is, a lot of chiros don’t delve into that crap, because it’s such obvious bullshit, but some do and will tell you in all sincerity that cracking that L6-8 might just kill your cancer.
Yes, an ai model is tuned to produce text that humans like is going to be liked more than a website that people contribute to in order to document knowledge on a subject.
In other news, ice cream, which is created to be enjoyed by people, is preferred over kale.
Chocolate bloom can be repaired by melting the chocolate down, stirring it, then pouring it into a mould and allowing it to cool, bringing the sugar or fat back into the solution.
Yeah, ain’t nobody got time for that. It’ll melt while i eat it anyways.
It’s mostly a concern if you’re going to sell or gift them. I did this for some time, considering to do it again this Easter - it’s laborious but a nice way to get some quick cash.
I… may or may not have done this with bonbons in the past, and then sold the failures as “gourmet chocolate”. It doesn’t work for chocolate eggs because people want them glossy.
Then the ones that I’m planning for my family will get some drawings in white chocolate, so if those get some bloom I’m leaving them as is.
No, I usually make them a week or so before Easter. However if you screw the tempering up it blooms just like if you stored it for years, and given my humid city it’s really easy to screw it up with condensation water due to the double boiler. (You don’t want to heat the chocolate directly. Seriously. Burnt chocolate is as awful as non-burnt chocolate is delicious.)
The expansion of the Internet has witnessed a resurgence of the gift economy, especially in the technology sector. Engineers, scientists, and software developers create open-source software projects. The Linux kernel and the GNU operating system are prototypical examples of the gift economy’s prominence in the technology sector and its active role in using permissive free software and copyleft licenses, which allow free reuse of software and knowledge.
Essentially the line of thought is that open source software is an example of mutual aid and the gift economy.
I’d personally prefer 12 months with 30 days each, a 6-day week (makes for even rotations in shifts, 4 on 2 off), and an inter-calary week of 5 to 6 days at the new year.
If we’re going for broke on this I’d also want to convert to the dozenal system over decimal, as 12 is more easily divisible by smaller numbers which means easier division for numbers we use more often (like 3 or 4), which means that ¼ would be 0.3 and ⅓ would be 0.4.
I would say that at the very least we could adjust February by taking a day from July and August and the extra day every four years could be added inbetween them as a “monthless” day in the middle of the summer.
A dozenal system is more difficult in multiplication. Decimal: 10^7 =10000000, 10^8=100000000, 10^9=1000000000, etc.
Dozenal: 12^7= 35831808, 12^8=429981696, 12^9=5159780352.
Gets very messy very quick.
Since we can count to “10” (12) on one hand, we can use the other hand to count sets of “10”, bringing us up to “100” (144). With decimal, we’re stuck at 20, and that’s only if we’re wearing sandals.
If you’re pointing to the last phalange on both hands, that would be “110” (156) though wouldn’t it. Since it would be “10” x “10” + “10”.
We could also use this method to count to 100 in base-10 using only the first 10 phalanges of the hand.
In dozenal (duodecimal), 6+6= a dozen, but we write “dozen” as “10”. A dozen dozen is not 144; it is “100”. 3 dozen is not 36; 3 dozen is “30”.
We would have two additional digits between 9 and “10”.
We would have to rewrite our multiplication table entirely. 2 * 6=10. 3 * 6=16. 4 * 6=20. But, when we do memorize the new table, it is just as consistent and functional as our decimal system.
you can still use your fingers. it’s how we got our standard of time. Back then they counted the joints in our fingers minus thumb. 4 sets of 3 for our four fingers and 3 joints per finger. Then 5 sets of 12 to make 60. as they would use the fingers on the other hand to track how many times they counted to 12.
You still get to count on your fingers. You use your thumb to count each bone in your 4 fingers to get up to 12. (“10” in the new system). Then you have the option to either continue with your other hand up to 24, or use it as an abacus, keeping your place while you count up to 144 (“100”).
I’d like to find a way to sync the lunar cycle and solar cycles since the earth’s, moon’s, and revolutions around the sun are soooo close (5 days off) plus it’d make sense to keep in theme with the Babylonian-esque base-60 system (where 60 is readily divided and a factor of 360 days, 12 months, 30 days, etc).
I had a roommate for a semester in college who essentially lived on a 40 hour schedule. He’d stay awake for 24 hours straight, then sleep for 16 hours. Not sure if he managed to pass any of his classes that year.
Libertarians will tell you that even this isn’t cause for government regulation and that the market will weed out the bad businesses by not buying their product.
That’s because the market is babies and they’d all be dead, Jim!
If you have heard the word “intersectionality” but didn’t know what it meant, this gives us a good example.
Feminists will say that women are not treated fairly overall, BUT if you’re a white woman, you might actually have it better than a black man. And if you’re an extremely wealthy white woman, you might even have it better than most men. All the factors combine.
It also works in reverse. Basically a gay black woman might not feel anything in common with Mrs. Walton, despite them both being women, and might easily see her as an oppressor.
Class, race, gender, sexual orientation… those are the dimensions that intersect in all of us. I’m sure there are more. Religion used to be more significant, I think. Ability. Age, perhaps. In some countries there’s a concept of caste. Maybe education level and country/city are also involved but those are not the big ones.
It just seems that class is the factor with the most effect. Also most factors are kardinal and limited, e.g. white>asian>latin>black in bigoted society. But wealth is continous and you could always be more wealthy. So it doesnt stop at being a billionaire, you could always be a 10billionaire or a 50billionaire and it will still make a difference.
Worth mentioning that wealth and class are technically two different things that happen to usually coincide. In the US the connection is nearly 1:1, but in some places like the UK there is quite a history of high class people struggling with wealth and marrying wealthy people in order to combine their wealth/class. I mention this specifically because “caste” is really just another form of class. It’s a form of class tied more to duty/work and less directly to wealth.
I saw a post once about how discrimination law doesn’t recognise combinations… so a company was found not guilty of discrimination against a black woman because they employ lots of white women as secretaries and black men as labourers, and were therefore ‘diverse’.
The single biggest difference in the treatment there is, is based on wealth: in other words, one’s wealth is the single biggest factor for discriminatory treatment there is.
Anybody genuinelly wanting to end the unfairness of descrimination on things which people did not choose would be focusing most efforts (not all, but the largest fraction) on ending or at least reducing that which is the largest and most impactful discrimination there is (and which is often a pathway through which other kinds of discrimination end up affecting people: i.e. a group is marginalized on some visible trait, so many more in it are poor, and then most of the actual suffering comes from the differentiated treatment dependening on wealth).
Instead, “strangelly”, in those countries with voting systems that enforce power dupolies, the mainstream “left”-side party (which alternates in power with the “right”-side party) will at most loudly rage against a few other discriminations, never against wealth discrimination.
I agree that class is incredibly important and yet has a chronic problem getting recognized. The American class system is more flexible and mobile than its European forebears but it’s still there. Wealth buys access to better schools, safer streets, more lenient judges, etc.
Race is also huge in America and a lot of people insist on burying it, too. Their belief is that even talking about it is racist - they still believe in the fantasy of “not seeing race,” where most of us have recognized that the true goal is for everyone to be able to have a distinct racial and cultural identity but not be penalized for it. Not for everyone to be stripped of it all and treated as blank.
Some people say race overrides all. Some people say class overrides all. Intersectionality says that they both matter, and that an extremely wealthy gay black man won’t have the same treatment as Mrs. Walton.
It’s more than acceptance, its saying its the little imperfections that make something even more endearing than if they were perfect. A bit of wabi-sabi gives character, or makes things feel less sterile, or more natural. Perfection can be less pleasant than imperfection. Not always, I want my airplane engines made perfectly. But something like handmade clay plates and bowls with wabi-sabi are great.
Huh, it’s got some similarities to the Persian flaw, thinking about it. The intentional inclusion of an error in Persian rugs as perfection is for God alone. Imperfection is human.
FYI, one could also interpret Cindy Crawfords’ nævus as wabi-sabi. Also we find slight asymmetry more pleasing for the eye. E.g. pictures of faces which are built up by mirroring one half appear as artificial. The scroll of a violin is also slightly asymmetrical.
These all sound like the same kind of aesthetic as ‘hand crafted’ where you can tell someone put on the finishing touches or details in a way that matched the materials or is a tiny bit uneven.
That’s sounds like the intro scene from The Fight Club, where the narrator talks about paying extra for handmade cups because they have little imperfections that make them unique.
I’ve had conversations with people about “how can you love the news so much? It’s so negative and depressing!”
The best I’ve explained it is first and foremost you need to understand and appreciate we are a deeply flawed creature and there’s a beauty in that. How could someone not love life for that? I am in a dingy alley having a tea right now I can smell garbage, I can hear the drone of the city around me, everything is stained. But if I look up the sky is beautiful and blue, cute girls are walking by, someone is smoking a flavoured cigar.
If you’re unwilling to appreciate it all, you will struggle on appreciating any of it. Happiness is what you make of the world around you and if you are not willing to be happy inside no external event will change that.
Well. 4 MB was a bit of a stretch. I remember buying a RAM upgrade to 8 MB to get it to run decently. Cost me 200 DM on top of the 200 for the Windows upgrade. It was a huge leap compared to Windows 3.1, though. And this stuff just was a lot more expensive back in the day.
• no streaming/subscription fees
• no ads
• rocks have very wide adoption rates
• cave art can last thousands of years without power
• content is auto-saved without a dvr
• cave art programming is tangible, tv programming is not
I don’t need insurance, I don’t need no parkin space
and if you try to clamp my horse he’ll kick you in the face
I don’t pay no tax, fuck NCT
you’ll arrive in style if you ride with me
32 bit hacked and kludged onto a 16 bit system that was still MS-DOS at the core. It was a mess. A highly unstable "wonder how it's even working" mess. The "lol Windows always bluescreens" memes came from this era because of this. The switch to NT and pure 32 bit from boot to desktop for consumer OSes with Windows XP made the stability issues mostly a thing of history unless you had bad drivers or hardware.
And then starting with Vista, Windows went to 64 bit. It was a complete rewrite of Windows and is way more stable because it requires every driver to be signed by Microsoft. You can disable the signed driver requirement, but then you’re risking stability.
It was a whole new kernel. They didn’t rewrite every single utility, but the kernel was a rewrite along with things like diskpart and the boot loader. The core of the OS. They also dumped all of the old 16 bit legacy apps.
I would like to see a source for that. I know they rewrote critical subsystems (like the audio and video stack), but the whole kernel? I don’t think so.
This might come as a shock to you, but Windows 95 isn’t even an operating system. It’s a GUI shell that runs on DOS, which is a 16 bit operating system. There is no Windows 95 kernel.
It’s a bit more complex than that. Intel CPUs (to this day) boot in real mode, which is what DOS is using. In this mode, the system only has access to 640k of RAM. Windows 95 and later switch the processor to protected mode, where the system gets access to all of the RAM and also to memory protection features, so processes can’t real and write each other’s memory. However, in this mode it’s impossible to run real mode code, such as the one provided by DOS.
DOS games had a trick where they briefly switched back to real mode to execute DOS functions (mostly reading and writing to disk) and then back to protected mode, but I don’t think that Windows 95 did that.
Also, the part no one ever brings up: No per-program volume control. Ugh. That was so actively irritating until they finally added it (was it in XP? or not until 7?)
No per-program volume control was entirely the fault of whatever program you were using, not Windows. The Windows audio API supported global and application-level volume from the beginning with Windows 95 (even Windows 3.1 had it). Even if Windows 95 had not had application-level volume control, a developer could have implemented it for their application since they were composing the audio data sent to the API for playback (in other words, they could have just attenuated all the sample values to a lower volume).
This was a weird and gripping tale of a user who can’t stand being not an admin. Why they would dox themselves as the person that earned a previous super-duper ban is bewildering.
Wikipedia is one of the best, if not the best, free and open internet information sources. I’m not surprised that people are going to go after it like Musk has been.
Everyone arguing dumb things here because of a dumb title. Pronounce = how it phonetically sounds, Nickname = alternative or shortened name. They are not synonyms :)
en.wikipedia.org
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