Yves here. Established institutions like the New York Times trying to bring in new audiences/consumers often make pratfalls. The results too often look like a middle aged man or woman getting a trainer and some plastic surgery and pursuing younger…as in awfully young….lovers.
The Grey Lady’s efforts have often been mercenary, like driving out serious business reporters as they kept elevating Wall Street’s favorite promoter, Andrew Ross Sorkin. And some are head-scratchers, like “Who even thought it was worth the effort to rebrand ‘op ed’ because it wasn’t inclusive enough?” As in you had to be an old fart to recognize that it derived from “opposite the editorial page?” So in the interest of not making young people feel left out, we must also get rid of expressions like “spanner in the works” (from industrial sabotage and therefore exclusionary because presumes knowledge of history), “rein in” (because from horse riding and therefore aristocratic) and �
Yves here. It may seem odd for Michael Olenick, who has lambasted Wikipedia at NC and later at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, to suggest that a Wikipedia offspring, a heretofore half-hearted search engine project that he proposes calling Wikisearch, could serve as a badly-needed competitor for Google. But we live in a world of beauty contests between Cinderella’s ugly sisters.
It’s no secret that Google has become so terrible that it’s unusable for anything but shopping. Not only no more Boolean searches, but you can’t even to “Verbatim” and an exact date range at the same time. And these are supposed to be tech wunderkind?
Yves here. This is a greatly expanded and considerably broader follow-up to an article on Wikipedia by Michael Olenick early this year, Wikipedia: The Overlooked Monopoly. Here, Olenick debunks the idea that Wikipedia is impoverished by showing not only its level of funding but also digging into its sources, a considerable amount of which comes from Silicon Valley titans via intermediaries. He also shows how Wikipedia’s entries (and absence of them) are slanted to favor its tech backers.
There are no polls, but it is a safe guess that the general public thinks of Wikipedia, the ubiquitous online encyclopedia, as one more plucky non-governmental organization in which poorly remunerated, public-spirited scholars and savants struggle to bring enlightenment to an extensively unappreciative world. Feeding this soothing impression are comments by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales that the non-profit is “teetering forever on the edge of bankruptcy,” his assurance that Wikipedia is “
Yves here. Michael Olenick sent this piece on Wikipedia along, not just for it being of genuine interest but also as a mental health break from the Biden inauguration media saturation. So enjoy!
By Michael Olenick, a research fellow at INSEAD whose recent articles can be found at innowiki.org and Blue Ocean Thinking
You’ve never heard of Wikipedia’s Tim1965 or the countless others like him but they quietly affect your life and your perception of the world. Tim is a Wikipedia “editor” who brags, in bold, that on June 2, 2019, he made his 50,000th edit on Wikipedia. Just a few months later, on September 4, 2020, the Innowiki consortia I’m a part of got a front-row seat showing how lame that boast is and realized it highlights a serious but overlooked problem with Wikipedia.