NYCPHP Meetup

[inforequest]

Greg Rundlett greg.rundlett-at-gmail.com |nyphp dev/internal group use| 
wrote:

> On 1/27/07, Kenneth Downs <ken at secdat.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>  Oh, well, enough of this ranting, I'm putting some intro material on 
>> the
>> Andromeda website today, and getting a new domain name, its only fun 
>> for so
>> long to beat up on somebody's work, much more fun to perfect your 
>> own....
>>
>
> Ken, you obviously have good RDBMS knowledge, I hope that the next
> time you discover such mistakes in wikipedia that you might just hit
> the 'edit' link and add your contributions for everyone's benefit.
> Then you could post a link to the NYPHP group about how the article on
> wikipedia *is* accurate and well-informed -- thanks to you.
>
I totaly support the concept of contributing to open source projects. 
But it is not equivalent to suggest someone take time to update wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a private venture no matter how you might convince yourself 
otherwise. It may not have monetized yet (neither has Craig's list, 
really) but it can and a number of recent actions by wikipedia's 
founders show that they are trying (wikisaria or whatever it is called, 
and more).

Wikipedia does not link out to the web as it could and IMHO should, and 
uses self-serving tactics behind the scenes (like nofollow attributes on 
links). Wikipedia is not run democratically as it has promoted in the 
past. Wikipedia has publicly expressed a desire to re-write web pages it 
finds so as to make them redundant, with the resulting wiki page set to 
assume authority on the topic. In my view that's neither benevolent nor 
fair. Just because it's technicaly not copying, the intent is clearly to 
copy and eliminate non-wiki informational pages relevance on the web.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant, but when you make that "so do 
something about it" response and also suggest you contribute freely to 
someone else's self-serving project, I need to speak up.

-=john andrews