Tendo City

I am so confused...

:psyduck:

They redesigned the site today or perhaps yesterday, and the search box moved from the upper left, right under the Wikipedia logo, to the upper right corner. I keep trying to click on the wrong part of the screen now... it's irritating and confusing. I want the searchbox to go back to where it was. :)

I did that too and then got pissed and just used google.

I heart google so bad. Bless their pocket-filled souls.

Gosh darn this freaking bullpoop!

You can switch back to one of the other styles, yunno. Or just cope and learn.

Are you quoting LL?

I hate this too! Once upon a time I would click on the Wiki bookmark link in the bottom left of my screen, then enter my Wiki search query to the immediate right of where the link opened. But now, I click the favourite link and have to move my cursor all the way over to the upper corner to type in my query! Also, when using Opera, pasting text and clicking the search icon gives you a result of "null" which is totally useless, so like lazy I'm just using Google - I'm pasting-and-going and clicking on the Wiki link whenever it comes up. It's a real pain in the ass!

Quote:You can switch back to one of the other styles, yunno.

That would involve me creating an account with Wikipedia though!

My bookmark takes me to the main page, so the search bar I'm used to is right under the puzzle globe where it's always been :)

Fun fact: One of the letters on the Wikipedia Globe is a Klingon character.

How can y'all be complaining about Wikipedia's new layout and not google's redesign? It happened a week or two ago and I'm still not used to it. Argh, it's just so ugly. They needed to keep the simplistic design they had. Less is more.

Web search sites like Google and Yahoo auto-select the search box, so you don't have to go over and click on it to start typing. Wikipedia doesn't do that, and hence my complaint that they moved the box.

(I like Yahoo more than Google... well, apart for image or video searches, Google is far better at those. But for text search, I search Yahoo first. But that's not the point here, both do the same thing as far as their search boxes go.)

LOL I totally agree ABF, when I went to Wiki and saw that it had moved I was irked.

This proves one thing at least, we loves us some Wikipedia on a daily basis. I spent months contributing and researching for wiki pages and then I felt kida let down because I never heard people talk about it, some people i know didn't know what wikipedia is (they were french canadian AND a woman, double whammy) but it looks like most of the people here are all hooked on wiki.

I haven't noticed the google redesign, i'm on a powermac G4. Which means everything is surreal.

Definitely, Wikipedia is awesome. Not always accurate, but awesome.

On the subject of my last post though, they could fix the problem by having it auto-select the searchbox when you load the page, like search engines do... that would be nice. Oh well...

If we the People can petition to get Betty White on SNL, we can petition Wikipedia to revert to its former way. WHO'S WITH ME!?

Sacred Jellybean Wrote:How can y'all be complaining about Wikipedia's new layout and not google's redesign? It happened a week or two ago and I'm still not used to it. Argh, it's just so ugly. They needed to keep the simplistic design they had. Less is more.

If you're referring to that iGoogle nonsense, you can switch back to the old view. Should be a link at the top right that says "Classic Home".

A Black Falcon Wrote:Definitely, Wikipedia is awesome. Not always accurate, but awesome.

Let me stop you right there.

Popular opinion would have you believe as such, but Wikipedia is actually quite accurate, more so than any dusty encyclopedia you could find on a library shelf (and certainly more up-to-date). The whole theory that since everyone can edit it, that means the jackasses can too. Yes, they can. And they can spend an hour editing an entire article and laughing about it, but I guarantee it'll be noticed and fixed within minutes, if not seconds. Not only does WP have tons of staff and volunteers monitoring the pages, they have bots looking for edits and reverting them automatically if they're too drastic. For every vandal who's out to ruin the website, unsuccessfully, there are also experts and truly knowledgeably people with data and facts that they can source to better expand the mass of information that is constantly evolving and free. I know I'm guilty several times a week of thinking of or hearing about something obscure, and i can instantly log on to Wikipedia and learn anything I could want to know about it (in case your curious, todays was Lake Agassiz)

Wikipedia is far, far more accurate than most people give it credit for, and it bugs me when people say it's unreliable.

As for the search bar. It's a wonderful and amazing service that's given to us for free, encompassing more knowledge than any human could ever hope to learn. I think you can learn to move your mouse to the top right instead of the middle left. Count your blessings if that's the most pressing matter on your mind.

EdenMaster Wrote:Let me stop you right there.

Popular opinion would have you believe as such, but Wikipedia is actually quite accurate, more so than any dusty encyclopedia you could find on a library shelf (and certainly more up-to-date). The whole theory that since everyone can edit it, that means the jackasses can too. Yes, they can. And they can spend an hour editing an entire article and laughing about it, but I guarantee it'll be noticed and fixed within minutes, if not seconds. Not only does WP have tons of staff and volunteers monitoring the pages, they have bots looking for edits and reverting them automatically if they're too drastic. For every vandal who's out to ruin the website, unsuccessfully, there are also experts and truly knowledgeably people with data and facts that they can source to better expand the mass of information that is constantly evolving and free. I know I'm guilty several times a week of thinking of or hearing about something obscure, and i can instantly log on to Wikipedia and learn anything I could want to know about it (in case your curious, todays was Lake Agassiz)

Wikipedia is far, far more accurate than most people give it credit for, and it bugs me when people say it's unreliable.

I'm not talking about vandals, I'm talking about things that are there but are wrong. And such things are there, and not just a few.

I said that based on the many times I've seen errors myself on the site... don't believe their older videogame release dates for instance! And that's just one example. Sorry, the site has many errors.

I mean, sure, other things aren't entirely reliable either (for older videogame release dates in the US or Europe, there really are no truly reliable sources a lot of the time), but that doesn't mean that Wikipedia should be let off the hook just because other encyclopedias may also have as many errors...

A Black Falcon Wrote:I'm not talking about vandals, I'm talking about things that are there but are wrong. And such things are there, and not just a few.

I said that based on the many times I've seen errors myself on the site... don't believe their older videogame release dates for instance! And that's just one example. Sorry, the site has many errors.

I mean, sure, other things aren't entirely reliable either (for older videogame release dates in the US or Europe, there really are no truly reliable sources a lot of the time), but that doesn't mean that Wikipedia should be let off the hook just because other encyclopedias may also have as many errors...

Apologies. I thought you were referring to factual errors of things of consequence. Regardless, are you fixing said errors if you find them? That's part of the reason anyone can edit it, you know. You don't even need to register.

Here's another example. There's a thread on Sega-16 over the struggles someone went through on Wikipedia trying to get the site to accept changes to the Sega Genesis sales figures... the numbers Wikipedia had were wrong. The prob are no "right" numbers, because Sega never really released much sales data for its systems, so a LOT of guesswork is involved necessarily... but it definitely wasn't 29 million, that number is far too low.

Thanks to some work from me and several other people (Pimpuigi being the one who compiled it and worked at getting it on Wikipedia), a new estimate of 40 million was estimated at. I think that one might be slightly high, but it's the best we can do...

But, would Wikipedia accept it? For a while the estimate was changed to the new number, but someone kept changing it back. Finally a "compromise" was reached. This is what it says now.

Quote:^ a b Some sources have claimed 29 Million units sold,[4][dated info] noting that 14 Million were sold in North America.[4][dated info] However, there are updated specific sales numbers for the United States totaling 20 Million.[5] This presents a disparity in the sales numbers. In addition to that, Tec Toy has sold 2 Million units of their own Mega Drives (as of August 31, 2005,)[6] Majesco has sold 2 Million units of their Mega Drives,[6] and Sega has sold 1 Million units of their Sega Nomad.[7]

How awesome, the old number is still there even though it is certainly wrong -- someone just refuses to allow it to be removed.

My point is, just because someone has more accurate information than what's on the site doesn't mean that the change will actually be allowed, unfortunately. It all depends on the whims of the people with more authority to make edits.

(And yes, darnit, things like this or release dates matters! How are you supposed to know when things happened if you don't know when they were released, or exactly how well a system did if you have no idea how many systems it sold? It is quite obvious to me that things like this matter and are of consequence... I am of course a history major. Things like this do matter.)

As far as video game minutiae goes, I don't think it quite stacks up to the necessity of having accurate data as, say, the death tolls of a war.

Sourced data always wins. If they have a page that says one thing, and you come at them with your own original research estimates with nothing to back it up, then yes you lose, good day sir. If you do have sources, and they conflict with other sources, then the "compromise" of saying there is dispute over the numbers and giving both seems very reasonable.

EdenMaster Wrote:As far as video game minutiae goes, I don't think it quite stacks up to the necessity of having accurate data as, say, the death tolls of a war.

Finding accurate numbers for any older war is also quite difficult, to impossible, but there at least you know that anything will be a guess... they put numbers in anyway though, even if they really are guesses. Are they all accurate though? Almost certainly not. Of course we can't know the exact numbers, of course, so just like here (but, yes, in something more 'important'), you just have to do the best guess you can with the partial information you have.

Quote:Sourced data always wins. If they have a page that says one thing, and you come at them with your own original research estimates with nothing to back it up, then yes you lose, good day sir. If you do have sources, and they conflict with other sources, then the "compromise" of saying there is dispute over the numbers and giving both seems very reasonable.

Hah, the "29 million" number was said in a source all right, but in the same line as "14 million Genesises", while other, more believable sources said "20 million Genesises". Sure sounds like an accurate number to me. Rolleyes

Shouldn't the plural be Genesii?

Quote:Not always accurate, but awesome.

Quote:that doesn't mean that Wikipedia should be let off the hook just because other encyclopedias may also have as many errors...

/recursive wtf loop.

Oh my God

Ryan, help

Get me out.

Oh my God

Ryan, help

Get me out.

Oh my God

Ryan, help

Get me Out.

Oh my God

Ryan, help

Get me out.

Oh my God

Ryan, help

Get me out.

Oh my God

Ryan, help

Get me Out.

Oh my God

Ryan, help

Get me out.

Oh my God

Ryan, help

Get me out.

Oh my God

Ryan, help

Get me Out.

Oh my God....... I tried to comment on what a recursive wtf loop is and suddenly I was stuck in an ABF flavored mobius strip. I kept wanting to paint or draw republicans and my knees were exploding.... now everything smells like Hawaiian punch.... I feel so violated.

EdenMaster Wrote:Shouldn't the plural be Genesii?

Hah, I've never really been sure what the plural of "Genesis" is... :)

Weltall Wrote:/recursive wtf loop.

What, exactly, is the problem there? Confused

I don't understand the logic of pointing out Wikipedia's incomplete accuracy and, shortly after, admitting that it's at least as accurate as any alternative.

Well, one thing would be that at least print encyclopedias have the excuse that at some point they have to say "this is done, this is what's printing now"... with a web one you don't have that excuse, it can always be improved. Also it includes huge amounts of stuff that no print encyclopedia would, so the amount of places they can make errors in is so great... I mean, all the videogame, movie, anime, etc. details Wikipedia has... no normal encyclopedia would have that stuff. They are opening themselves to errors by having it because of all the fuzzy stuff like so many older videogame release dates and such (and there are many more examples than that), but having something is more important than having nothing, obviously, so they have it. I agree it should be there, but the accuracy...

Of course, plenty of "normal" encyclopedia topics have errors or wrong information too, but as I said no encyclopedia is perfect...

And really, I didn't say that Wikipedia is a bad source. I do think it's probably slightly less credible than a print encyclopedia, currently, even if you just look at the non-popular culture elements (such as the history articles there, many of which I have read), but that is changing with time I think. Right now Wikipedia is not a widely accepted good source in academia, but I'm sure it eventually will be in some way... part of that's just that a lot of professors aren't big internet users and don't trust anything there, or don't understand it at all I think. :) But of course, part of that's also that anyone can edit it, so people think of that as being somehow less authoritative, even if that's really only partially true (sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more, I think).

Anyway, nothing will ever be perfect of course, there are so many things that we don't know for sure about and have to make educated guesses about. And they do try to sometimes cover the legitimate controversies about facts, like the different interpretations of what happened to vanished languages or peoples or things like that. You may or may not find great depth on those subjects though, because of contributor interest often the things like anime show character listings will have much more information and depth in them than many articles about things that matter a lot more... but oh well, that can't be helped really, it's an all-volunteer organization not focusing on academia as its main source of information.

I guess the question is, where are the errors and how important are they, in comparison between Wikipedia and traditional sources... I think there have been studies on this before, but don't remember them right now. I'll have to look that up.

Really, Wikipedia's a fascinating site, and a very interesting experiment that it's interesting to follow and see improve over time. I like it. I just don't trust everything I read there. But the problem I talked about in my last few posts, about the changes only sticking if certain people with the ability to remove them approve, is an issue. Sure, most of the time the stuff they remove should be gone. But, like with the Genesis numbers example, that is not always the case. If they really cared so much about accuracy you'd think that they wouldn't have ended up with the note as it is now... and I know that's not the only such example, there certainly are others. Of course someone has to make the decisions, though, so there are no easy answers here, only questions... :)

I fuck with wikipedia entries all the time, I made the entry for "Catholics" redirect to "self-hatred", but then I was banned. I turned the entry for scientology in to a subtle plot synopsis for Avatar and for a while I added the word 'penis' randomly to entries. Like "Several of these bird types are penis, though their relatives are blah blah" or "Abraham Lincoln's penis was 6 foot 4 inches tall" and it was on there for weeks before someone finally caught it.

As long as the data is cited it really doesn't matter, but it helps to check the websites it directs to. This was years ago, but I remember reading about the spanish civil war and there was a horrible mistake on it that the children were put in to death camps (the children and elderly were evacuated and protected). But it wasn't on there long. I rarely see mistakes any more, the grammar nazi's on wiki usually catch improper data before anyone and flag it for the scholars to find. Then the philosophers add in the commentary of what is believed or otherwise alluded to but never factually proven. The religious entries are the worst though... but now instead of arguing over the content, they argue over how much content to add finding a happy medium of "the less we say, the better". The entry for Jesus is just hilarious, it reads like a mad-lib.

edit - does anyone here remember all the arguments about whether or not "Christ" was actually his last name? And how his real name isn't even known but one use of his names that was found means it was loosely translated to "Joshua"? I put a thing at the end that said "...but "Josh" just didn't have the same ring to it." and I got chewed out. Aparrently you cant brighten someone's day with a little eduTAINMENT.

That really isn't so funny. That's annoying.

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