I know it's fairly obvious that most people here love the website, but I seriously love it because you could look up anything on it. I could see why people would choose the entire Wiki Media as their own true website, because you could learn so much from it. Come on AnonTalk, let's so some love for Wikipedia.

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Apart from wiki-goons that would rather spend every second of their day nitpicking and editing articles for punctuation and the like (especially articles about their favorite Star Wars characters and such), wikipedia is a marvel. Its original intent was to be some sort of… receptacle and archive of all human knowledge available, on all topics - constantly updated by the best and brightest in their field, completetely accurate and wholly free and accessible to anyone.

However, the truth is a bit less utopic. Articles are constantly being edited by corporations with stakes in PR, political activists are trying to sneak inaccuracies and blatant lies in their competitor's articles, etc. etc.

All in all, the underlying idea of wikipedia is nothing short of brilliant (and has actually been around for decades, long before the internet was invented). I'm sure its implementation will improve in the future still.

One last important point is accuracy of information reliant to source. That is- wikipedia is controlled by open-source proponents who, as of now, have more to gain by staying neutral than by selling themselves out to the highest bidder. As long as our information is in the "right hands", this can keep working.
The moment wikipedia falls under, say, Rupert Murdoch's control, none of that neutrality will be left and it will be just another site on the web.

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@57,327

Doesn't Wikipedia have bots that restart the articles though? Because I tried to delete an entire article just to see what would happen and when I came back, the article was back to the way it was without any signs of being touched. I tried this with a small quick edit and then just deleted everything on the page to a white background.

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> Rupert Murdoch
I do not know who that is, but instead of asking here. I'm just going to look him up on Wikipedia.

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@57,328

Yes, they have both automated systems to check on edits and several teams of moderators who review all changes in articles.
Even then it is not impossible to influence content. For instance, several companies involved in vivisection or other animal-testing research (for example Huntington in England) managed to omit that information from their articles on wikipedia. Most likely they "have someone on the inside". It's not THAT hard to become a wikipedia editor, so I imagine that these types of companies and associations pay very close attention to what information is available about them, and to ways they can tailor that information to their own needs.

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> Editing of Wikipedia

> On August 15, 2007 it was revealed that somebody with an IP address linked to EA had made changes to its Wikipedia entry.[43][44] The changes made included erasing Trip Hawkins as founder of the company and adding a paragraph emphasizing the work of former CEO, Larry Probst, attempts to remove information regarding the infamous EA Spouse scandal, which involved the poor treatment of workers and several paragraphs under criticism were removed. [43]

> An EA spokesperson told GamesIndustry.biz that "EA sometimes updates websites with info about the company, games and employees. For example, EA has sent a correction to Yahoo Finance when they had misspelled the name of an EA executive." While not specifically addressing the controversial changes, EA's spokesperson explained that "Many companies routinely post updates on websites like Wikipedia to ensure accuracy of their own corporate information." [45] It did not, however, address the specifics of the changes.

Is this something you were talking about? I found this on the EA article of all places.

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@57,335

Yes, that is a very good example of how influential parties can skew public information (not just on wikipedia) to suit their needs.
This is about minor things that companies try to hide because it influences their reputation.
But it can also be used to hide important knowledge from the public. That is why it's scary.

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I love reading about old movies, games, and places on Wiki.

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@57,377

> Wiki.

Wikipedia is not the only wiki. Wikipedia was not the first wiki. Stop calling Wikipedia simply "Wiki". It's retarded.

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@57,378

And the Chan isn't the only chan but is understood as Chan. So stop your nitpicking.

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@57,382

Wrong. But it's off-topic anyway, so we're not gonna discuss it here…

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