I, like almost every person at the time, heard about wikipedia and scoffed at it. And, in the early days,the quality was atrocious and the scope seemingly insurmountable. But wikipedia almost ever gets better, not worse, and the limitation that the books have to sit on a shelf makes wikipedia far more than an encyclopedia. It has evolved, through time, to be something few people ever imagined it could be.
People tend to be super critical of wikipedia but I think it could have been a whole lot worse. We are incredibly lucky that wikipedia isn't owned by some tech megacorp, it isn't loaded with spyware JS bogging it down, and it doesn't require an account to use.
> We are incredibly lucky that wikipedia isn't owned by some tech megacorp, it isn't loaded with spyware JS bogging it down, and it doesn't require an account to use.
There was Google's attempt in 2007 wih knol(0) - which many called an attempt at a Wikipedia killer. Agreed... We dodged a bullet.
Authors could also choose to include ads from Google's AdSense on their pages ... All contributors to the Knol project had to sign in with a Google account ... authors were also able to choose the CC-BY-NC-3.0 license (which prohibits commercial reuse) or traditional copyright protection instead.
I think the most fascinating thing is the bit about how people criticized google for placing knol results in more accessible spots on google search and the conflict of interest. This is exactly the same debate we are having over a decade later about AMP.
Their scheme is ranking by popular domain name. This, as a rule, makes shit content rise to the top. A debate about how bad this idea is shouldn't last long. That said, the question then becomes if google.com is worthy of this favoritism. It unquestionably qualifies here. So there is no-such-thing as placing knol in a more accessible spot. google.com is just a more popular website than wikipedia.
On IMDb it is only the rating system that is totally gamed, very warped. I usually look at the distribution of the individual User Review ratings. If they are mostly 10's and 1's the movie is usually crap (a large chunk of Hollywood 'blockbusters' are here), even though the aggregate rating is an 8+. Fairer distributions with 6, 7's and 8's and this might be worth watching. There can be spoilers in the review titles, though.
One thing that is fun to do after watching a totally crap movie - to make up for 2 wasted hours of your life - is read the 1-rated reviews. There is usually some brilliant sarcastic analysis there to make you laugh out loud.
They were hijacking every link on mobile a while ago and messing with my browser so bad.
Surely, there wasn't any "spyware js".
A small sticky donate button on bottom would have been better.
Wikipedia pages in general are fine because people constantly have to edit spammers out from them. They haven't done much to curb similar looking spam clearly distinct from content.
[Our super scale webhosting powers google services](superwebhosting.in) everywhere...I don't remember the times I had to remove it from the history of cloud providers, tech companies, web, https, etc.
