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Comment by csmatt | Hacker News Reader

Can we all take a second to appreciate what this man accomplished? Wikipedia's success relied on getting people to write about a variety of topics (aka be content generators) and others to read and fact check to provide a useful experience. It was crowdsourcing long before it was a buzzword and it's still working.

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It was crowdsourcing before it was a buzzword. Social too.

Wikipedia is arguably the internet's biggest achievement. Free. Valuable. Accurate. Up to Date. Volunteer run. Non Profit. Efficient. We can see the sausage being made.

It's really the gold standard for a website.

Free. Valuable. Accurate.

Two out of three ain't bad. I dispute "accurate" as a Wikipedian. I'm trying to fix some problems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFIXIT

with some articles that have been in appallingly bad shape for years. The last time I edited those articles, they were swiftly made worse by drive-by vandalism. I'll see what happens this time.

Let's just go with "accurate enough". 99% of Wikipedia's wealth is in its capacity for lifelong education and general reference (as an "exobrain"); no one claims it's a very reliable fact-checker.

I'm not sure it's that perfect. Try putting up a new page sometime and watch how quickly someone with zero domain knowledge will come and try to have it deleted, usually successfully.

To me, deletionist culture is Wikipedia's greatest flaw. If at least two people derive value from a page existing, and it meets all the other criteria, it should be allowed to stand.

He accomplished it pretty much entirely by accident. Jimmy Wales kept insisting that most of the content was contributed by a tiny clique of core editors, when in fact that wasn't true in the slightest - it was almost entirely reliant on contributions by outsiders who only edited a handful of articles. Not only that, he set policies based on that wrong assertion.

that is the really amazing thing about wikipedia.. it is still getting better!

(i keep trying to find some way to contribute, but apparently i know less about everything that i know about than someone else.. so i just donate)

If you're looking for ways to contribute, have you considered Wikidata? It's a new project, the environment is supposed to be very collegial and one of the goals is to enable people to make contributions without requiring too much time or subject matter knowledge.

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