Gregory's Server
@gleick Elon Musk is a psychopathic idiot... who happens to be completely right about #Wikipedia.
Many parts of Wikipedia are ideological echo chambers with no connection to reality, and could not possibly be any farther away from being the impartial, scientific, politically neutral source of information that it claims to be.
The only information on Wikipedia that can perhaps be trusted to some degree is information that is entirely removed from any and all politics. As soon as politics touches upon a topic, forget about impartial information on Wikipedia, because there is a serious risk that you will be presented with high-quality, convincing propaganda.
That means: Anything related to history, biographies of people who ever had any kind of political controversy about them (i.e. not only politicians), descriptions of political ideologies and viewpoints, world conflicts, anything related to sociology and psychology... Even parts of IT, like when it comes to the GNU/Linux naming controversy and the like.
On top of that, many of the donations to "Wikipedia" do not in fact go to Wikipedia at all.
You are donating to Wikimedia Foundation, which uses part of the donations to run and develop the servers of Wikipedia and related sites and infrastructure (like mediawiki.org), but a lot of the funds go to various political projects instead.
The editors on Wikipedia are unpaid (which also makes them unaccountable to some degree) and even the software, MediaWiki, is developed to a large extent by Free Software developers who are unpaid.
I intend to soon add some information to mediawiki.org on how to host a highly efficient MesiaWiki server using nothing but Nginx for front-end caching, and nobody is going to pay me for doing that. (I host a wiki with millions of visitors per day.)
Many parts of Wikipedia are ideological echo chambers with no connection to reality, and could not possibly be any farther away from being the impartial, scientific, politically neutral source of information that it claims to be.
The only information on Wikipedia that can perhaps be trusted to some degree is information that is entirely removed from any and all politics. As soon as politics touches upon a topic, forget about impartial information on Wikipedia, because there is a serious risk that you will be presented with high-quality, convincing propaganda.
That means: Anything related to history, biographies of people who ever had any kind of political controversy about them (i.e. not only politicians), descriptions of political ideologies and viewpoints, world conflicts, anything related to sociology and psychology... Even parts of IT, like when it comes to the GNU/Linux naming controversy and the like.
On top of that, many of the donations to "Wikipedia" do not in fact go to Wikipedia at all.
You are donating to Wikimedia Foundation, which uses part of the donations to run and develop the servers of Wikipedia and related sites and infrastructure (like mediawiki.org), but a lot of the funds go to various political projects instead.
The editors on Wikipedia are unpaid (which also makes them unaccountable to some degree) and even the software, MediaWiki, is developed to a large extent by Free Software developers who are unpaid.
I intend to soon add some information to mediawiki.org on how to host a highly efficient MesiaWiki server using nothing but Nginx for front-end caching, and nobody is going to pay me for doing that. (I host a wiki with millions of visitors per day.)