Clickbait: Predictions about the future that were wrong?

Because no one else is doing it--not even the media.
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suckadmin
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Clickbait: Predictions about the future that were wrong?

Post by suckadmin » Fri May 12, 2017 2:15 pm

I'm not sure if Tech Crunch's prediction was entirely off the mark.. at least in regards to wikipedia the quality/accuracy of content is questionable?
http://www.grunge.com/59287/things-peop ... t-content/

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Re: Clickbait: Predictions about the future that were wrong?

Post by Flip Flopped » Fri May 12, 2017 5:35 pm

suckadmin wrote:I'm not sure if Tech Crunch's prediction was entirely off the mark.. at least in regards to wikipedia the quality/accuracy of content is questionable?
http://www.grunge.com/59287/things-peop ... t-content/
There was a huge decline in Wikipedia editing which the former CEO Sue Gardner documented in what was called "the Oh-Shit! slide." That decline appears to have leveled off now. What hasn't been appreciated is that paid editors for people, corporations, etc. have been editing Wikipedia reliably to bias articles in the favor of people they work for. Much of the "encyclopedia" content is in a sorry state, but the more popular articles are less crappy. Wikipedia works by pitting editors against each other so advocacy tag-teams are constantly battling over their favored topics. In many ways framing the issue as about laziness was the worst part of the prediction.

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Re: Clickbait: Predictions about the future that were wrong?

Post by ericbarbour » Sat May 13, 2017 11:01 pm

Flip Flopped wrote:There was a huge decline in Wikipedia editing which the former CEO Sue Gardner documented in what was called "the Oh-Shit! slide." That decline appears to have leveled off now. What hasn't been appreciated is that paid editors for people, corporations, etc. have been editing Wikipedia reliably to bias articles in the favor of people they work for. Much of the "encyclopedia" content is in a sorry state, but the more popular articles are less crappy. Wikipedia works by pitting editors against each other so advocacy tag-teams are constantly battling over their favored topics. In many ways framing the issue as about laziness was the worst part of the prediction.

Correct; and when they realized editing really WAS declining, they encouraged bot operators to write bots (many undocumented) to autogenerate articles. Gotta keep those stats up so they can keep begging for money and to cover up the reality of Wikipedia's senile phase. Editing bottomed out in 2014 and started to rise slightly; I seriously doubt that is "proof" that they are attracting new editors. English Wikipedia is mostly controlled by bots now.

https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/EditsRevertsEN.htm

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