Wikipedia’s resident shipwreck aficionado | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia’s resident shipwreck aficionado

blog.wikimedia.org

83 pointsThe_ed1728 comments

The Vasamuseet (the Vasa Museum) is one of the most awesome museums I have ever been to. Also the War Museum, which is also in Stockholm. If you ever get to Sweden, those two are certainly worth a visit. If you can only go to one, definitely make it the Vasa, but if you like museums, you will really enjoy both.

This. The Vasa museum exceeded my expectations more than any other tourist attraction I have ever visited.

Likewise. People frequently told me to go see the Vasa and I rather expected it to be something like the Mary Rose; historically interesting but the bare shell of part of the hull of a boat. Basically some wet wood.

When I went inside the museum in Stockholm and saw the ship my reaction was essentially "OMG that's f'ing HUGE!" so it really is worth making time to see it.

Reading this thread of comments make me feel like an idiot.

I live in Stockholm and curiously enough – if I read the map correctly – I'm even very close to where the Vasa sank. My favorite means of transport into central Stockholm is via ferry. One of the stops is a very short walk from the Vasa museum. It takes me probably all of 30 minutes door-to-door to get there.

I love museums. I love history. I love anything maritime. One of my favorite museum visits when i lived in London was the national maritime museum in Greenwich.

Alas, I've never been to the Vasa museum.

Fortunately, it's an easy problem to solve – I'll go next week. Thanks for (unintentionally) kicking me into gear, much obliged!

I lived in Los Angeles for more than five years before accidentally seeing the Hollywood sign. (The Vasa is much better.)

Oh, I am jealous of what you will experience when you go next week!

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I've lived in London for about 20 years and really must get around to visiting St Paul's Cathedral one of these days :)

Not only is it huge, it has lots of ornaments (figures, carvings), was originally painted colorfully, and best of all: the Swedes built the museum around the wreck, so that you've got access on five(?) levels and can get pretty close.

Yes, all of this is stuff that surprised me - I'd also add that the smell of the thing is an intimate part of the experience; you're in no doubt that this spent a lot of time in a marine environment :)

Thanks for sharing that tip! By the War Museum, do you mean the Army Museum? I was not able to find the war museum with some quick googling.

http://www.armemuseum.se/languages/english/

Yes! Sorry. I have always called it the "war museum" because that's what my wife's grandfather called it when we went. But yes, it's the Army Museum. And speaking as someone that was in the infantry for many years and deployed on many combat tours, I highly recommend it. It is a fascinating look at warfare through the ages.

Has Wikipedia ever pursued the idea of giving scholarships on important articles?

Seems they're perpetually short of funds, but a "funded by X" tag at the bottom and some branding of the effort might make a go of it. And Wikipedia seems weaker on the "History of the Roman Empire" type of articles that you need to spend time in dead-tree libraries to do correctly.

... sad to say, history majors who didn't go into law aren't exactly expensive.

I was on an ABA panel discussion once that debated whether lawyers should contribute to Wikipedia. The irony is that while lawyers use wikipedia for all sorts of things, experienced lawyers rarely contribute. (Wikipedia's legal pages are full of inaccuracies inserted by well-meaning but naive law students.) The thought was to have certain articles written and maintained by lawyers, or an ABA committee, with perhaps an ABA logo attached. The problem was that as soon as anyone else makes an edit, that badge of respectability is meaningless. An article curated by an expert also runs contrary to the purpose of a wiki.

I would caution against many of these articles so dominated by a single person. They may be great. They may be 100% accurate and full of lots of interesting detail, but they do not necessarily have a broad base to support their upkeep once that one person moves on. I've also seen some rather messy arguments where the original author takes subsequent edits very personally. There is advantage to not allowing one person or group to become too attached to a particular article.

I really think that Wikipedia needs a "Golden" overlay; The ability to select to see the last revision marked as good by some 'authority' instead of the 'live' version by default. This would be a good mix of the benefits of a wiki, and the assurances of authority.

Not exactly what you're seeking, but you should look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles

Ya, but at some point that turns wikipedia into encarta. The power of wiki is the ability for the crowd's opinion to dominate. But where the crowd is just plain wrong on a subject the expert must swim again against the tide. They end up lecturing to a bunch of people who really don't want a lecture.

Say "I'm a fighter pilot" and you can edit the F-15's page to your hearts content. But "I'm a lawyer with 40 years constitutional law experience" means nothing if you plan on contributing to anything on the "landmark decisions" list. That is the domain of law review students and their pet cases.

I cannot count the number of times I've found myself typing out half a lecture's worth of information in reply to an online article, only to delete the entire thing before posting it. Certain subjects just cannot be taught in a public forum. That's why lawyers discuss such things in special schools and private email lists. (Email lists are like 90+% of what the ABA does.)

Did no one raise the possibility of having informative articles on ABA's website? They could/would then be sourced by Wikipedia authors.

This really is the way to go. Wikipedia is to a large extent simply a detailed 'index' to the best content available online and in paper form. As such it's a great starting place, but the authoritative material should be on reputable sites - and creating that material can be carefully curated by credentialed experts. If it's done well then links from Wikipedia will come, or can be added, and are unlikely to be deleted.

My original point was that I believe Wikipedia has a strong bias towards the best content available online and that they're weaker when potential content is only available in paper form. Which I suppose speaks to the ongoing OCR / paper -> digital backend effort to mass digitize legacy books and present them in a accessible manner.

I'll admit I'm basing this opinion only on my usage of Wikipedia and noting some glaring gaps or lack of depth in niche historical articles.

> Seems they're perpetually short of funds, but

Not really. In 2015 the Wikimedia Foundation made 76 M$ in support and revenue, and spent 53 M$. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/0b/Audit... p5

(In fact, I don't really understand why their donation campaigns are so obtrusive, given that they could afford to receive 30% less even with their current level of spending. I guess it is understandable that they want to receive as much support as they can, but I wonder whether it really serves their long-term interests, as it probably sends the wrong signal.)

> a "funded by X" tag at the bottom

Wikimedia doesn't allow ads on its properties (which I think is very important), and I would say that advertising donors on articles would be against that goal. (Think about what happens when an article gets edited in a way that isn't approved by the advertised donor.)

Maybe they want to grow an endowment fund which will enable them to live off the interest generated so they don't have to rely on donations in the future.

Yeah, it's on the Foundation's plan. [0]

0: https://15.wikipedia.org/endowment.html

Depending on who you are, you might be surprised by how not far that goes. It doesn't get you that many people or services in 2016, where we feel lucky as individual people to get a place to live for half a million bucks.

But yeah, it would be possible to do something pretty crazy like 500 40k scholarships though, which is a super interesting idea. The cost of the beauracracy to administer them would suck pretty hard though.

Well, (English) Wikipedia have an extension to make revisions of certain pages appear only after review. It's only targeted on several articles, and its main purpose is to suppress vandalism. See more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes

I don't know anything about scholarships, but Wikipedia definitely partners with universities to help train people to edit Wikipedia and improve the rate of Scholars contributing, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_Edinbu...

> Has Wikipedia ever pursued the idea of giving scholarships on important articles?

Why? Is there any evidence it's not currently working?

Seems like a false premise.

How would there be evidence that a certain class of articles don't exist on Wikipedia?

I thought Wikipedia was strongly against original research and will delete it from articles if it's put in?

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