Yeah, I'm an OLD HAND editor around Wiki.
I get REALLY irritated by Wikipedia vandalism.
I generally hate the decline in media and journalistic integrity and the rise of credulity.
Back int 1997 I was sitting working on some cgi scripting ideas for , you'll laugh hard, 'Client based targeted advertising' in the effort to A) use a server to track advertising clickthrough rates and B) increase the 'view rate' of ads and C) make ads less intrusive by showing items the user would be more interested in being notified about.
Just one of many guys seeing the idea at the time. Yahoo was rising, AOL was peaking, and a Google was just a really big number. NOW... eek.
Journalism is dying with each publication and everybody has a newsfeed and about 20% gives any credit to the source openly and advertising really hasn't gotten much better but if you believe that the clickbots are gone, you got another thing coming!
Did anyone see the REAL IPAD PROTOTYPE? If your a super uber geek and know real GUI design, then Roger Fidler might ring a bell. See this video. I saw it in 1999 at UMBC in an After Class discussion session.
articles.businessinsider.com/2011-04-26/tech/29960327_1_ipad-gawker-commercial-internetSteve Jobs just took a nosedive in the innovation space? Yeah.
I won't fault him for taking the Tablet idea DOWN first to the Smartphone, he took all his years of Tablet brainstorming and said "You know, frankly, this can be a better smartphone than a palm too, just using your thumb most of the time". I won't take that away from Steve. But the iPad, nah, he barely gets partial credit. Especially since it hasn't helped print media much at all.
The thing at first wasn't going to have a web browser, but, they snuck it in there and BOOM, out went the necessity of buying books on the thing!
Score one for the Retina Display which fulfills, truely, Fidler's vision for Print Media Resolution, no doubt. I still wish it were bigger, for ease of reading. Toshiba tried with that 13in monster, but, a bit tooo bulky.
BTW, I got my mom a Galaxy Note 10.1. I DO prefer a tablet with a stylus now, soo much easier to use and less fingerprinty.
But, what's bugging me is that it's so hard to make a good buck online when it was a goldmine. All of the 'it's free with advertising' junk has just conditioned everyone to not patronize the media establishments. If you bookmark 5 related sites, you'll get all of the news fit to print for free, I guarantee it. eBooks sell, but, eMagazines... not nearly so much.
So, back to Wiki:
I admire that they aren't even trying to make a buck. They, much like the IMDB for movies, have succeeded in providing a free information resource. WHY SCREW THIS UP!!! I mean, damn, I give them money and then VOLUNTEER time monitoring pages.
I give Wikipedia about $15 a year, did $100 a couple years ago when things were really going good. I know how much I use it. And, it's there, to use, but it's not to say you shouldn't have a Britannica too. You should have a REAL ENCYCLOPEDIA for the facts. Schools should encourage that, The Wikipedia is for the less fortunate around the world when it comes to fact finding, and as it seems, for these skirmishes of misinformation on things that barely matter in the scheme of things. I know I have had to roll back about 20 edits on pages I monitor (many wrestling based, some other tech stuff, etc). Like some idiot claiming that some japanese wrestler calls his shooting star press the Kobeashi Maru... Well, this isn't Star Trek, You ain't Spock, and he's not the Great Muta and just came lately, so, i don't care, it doesn't describe the move, u are rolled back. If you can add historical interest to the article, like.... "Popularized the world over by Ric Flair" or "Innovated by Chris Kanyon" or "Seen most when used by Yoshohiro Tajiri in the WWE as the Rope Hang Tarantula" then, sure, it should stay, but vandals born in 2000 who get on there and say "I"m going to say that we invented this in our backyard and tell the world about it"... ugh...
So goes it with "I have the scoop on the new Scooby Doo Movie: Scooby Doo and the Monster In My Pants"... yeah, i get real irritated at that one, almost more than the 10 year old who might not see 11 because he's stagediving off a tree onto bare earth to mimic a wrestler on steroids and vicadin just to get out of bed in the morning. At LEAST the little kids are trying to talk about something they did, just using the wrong medium. Vandals don't like someone else's little slice of fun. But i'm sure if we found their 'thang' , which I don't know what it is, and sabatoged it, they'd be all up in arms. So, if anyone ever finds out, i'll be the first to put rubbing liniment on their cod pieces or screw up all their fantasy sports stats.