>How about the guy whose hands were cut off when he tried to smuggle fuel across the border that wasn't closed?
What? I've never been anywhere near the Nepali border, but have spent enough time in India to know that it's not lawless anarchy. I'll have to ask you for a source on this please.
Yes, they 'can' soak up $1T of liquidity the way I 'can' lock myself into my house and set it on fire. Common sense suggests they will never actually do so.
Any aspirational luxury good does that to an extent. I suppose it's all about how people see you and treat you when you wear expensive clothes and Breitlings.
But there already is legislation in place to deal with problem 2. Antitrust law exists and has been successfully used in the past. If the political will is created it could be used just as well against the ISP duopoly. Problem 1 on the other hand is a brand new problem that is peculiar to the medium of the internet. Unless the legal framework for it is laid down as early as possible, the service will always be vulnerable to political agendas. Simply put, net neutrality legislation is essential for the future of the internet, while shitty competition is a temporary problem that can be solved.
We're already seeing progress (albeit very minor progress) in solving problem 2. The entry of Google Fiber in the market is more significant than most people realize, because it shows that companies that rely on efficient internet service for their revenue are willing to expand into ISP roles in order to ensure reach to customers. Who's to say that Apple, a massive corporation with deep pockets that lives and breathes user experience, won't invest in ensuring that their customers have the best experience with the internet possible?
Call me optimistic, but I don't think the ISP duopoly in is going to last forever. The stakes are just too high for other large companies to not enter into the field. Eventually, I believe we'll see a bunch of walled gardens ISPs instead of the current duopoly, with Apple, Google and maybe even someone like Facebook acting as ISPs for their own subset of customers. When that does happen, we need to make sure that the playing field for all websites stays level and independent of economic or political interests. Strict net neutrality laws are exactly what we need in a situation like that.
The average Joe on the street never directly interacted with nor was directly affected by Dennis Ritchie's work. Since the greater population had never heard of him, they weren't going to be as emotionally affected by his passing. Popular media knew which way the wind was blowing and decided to devote more time and energy to mourning Jobs, because they need their pageviews.
That's not to say the Ritchie wasn't mourned by the people he most closely associated with. My university's CS department held a one minute silence before morning lectures the day after he died. I'm sure other CS people around the world did something similar too. But Ritchie was simply not a global celebrity the way Jobs was, so you can't expect them to be remembered the same way.
>No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information.
But that would only make sense if Wikipedia created some sort of insurmountable barrier for newer, better information. It doesn't. Newer, better information can reach people through Wikipedia with just as much ease (provided it fits Wiki's publishing standards) as it would through any other platform.
For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia and other similar open and free general knowledge sources can (and perhaps should) be regarded as a public good. We don't complain that the government's monopoly on building public roads closes out competition to 'newer, better roads'. We recognize that these roads are vital public infrastructure. Platforms like Wikipedia should be no different.
We do (and did) complain about Microsoft giving its browser away for free; in the end, we got lucky that there was a well-funded nonprofit (Mozilla) and another monopolistic company (Google) willing to put in the massive investment to compete in that market, but it took years.
Similarly, I may happen to trust Wikipedia itself, but the tactics it is using are very abusable to keep a for-profit's inferior loss-leader product on top.
But my contention is that Wikipedia should be regarded as fundamentally different from Microsoft or Google. They are not trying to compete with other encyclopedias. Why would they? They have nothing to gain by beating the competition. They are not making monetary profits. They are not paying to get themselves this advantage.
Suppose an NGO decided to provide expensive vaccines to children in Africa for free and enlisted the help of a local delivery company to ensure the vaccines reach as many people as possible, would you accuse them of trying to out-compete drug companies?
Why is Wikipedia different from this? They too are trying to provide an essential service (information) to people who could not afford it under normal circumstances. They are doing so without expectations of profit. Their tactics are in no way similar to those of Microsoft, purely because they are not competing in a market economy.
Wikipedia creates an enormous barrier to better information due to its size and scope, and its co-dependent relationship with Google.
In many cases Wikipedia's information is substandard when compared to other sources, both in presentation and content. The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video.
For example, many people prefer to use imdb for movie information (which is also free to the end user), but it comes lower than Wikipedia on many search results. There have also been several recent studies that say Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.
So giving free access to Wikipedia, over other sites is not actually in the public good at all. The answer is more competition.
IMDB does have better quality information about their niche topic, but their layout sucks. Outside their niche topic, their information sucks. Trying to get even basic information about animals, major religions, or non-entertainer public figures, and IMDB is just plain awful.
As for video, both IMDB and wikipedia 'pop up' a box in which to play video, independent of the parent page layout; they don't seem to differ in that respect, and IMDB is a specialist site that's all about video.
There have also been several recent studies that say Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.
As opposed to...? Online medical literature in general is noted to suck, even the specialist websites. Even paid professionals - my housemate returned from the doctor two days ago after a norovirus scare... and the doctor claimed the incubation period before symptoms was 2 weeks... when it's actually 1-2 days.
Anyway, Wikipedia is a generalist site - basically you're arguing that it's not as good as specialist sites, so to free up access to information, all that better info should be free, hence all (useful) sites (effectively) should be free. I'm not sure that's going to go down well with ISPs.
> As opposed to...? Online medical literature in general is noted to suck, even the specialist websites. Even paid professionals - my housemate returned from the doctor two days ago after a norovirus scare... and the doctor claimed the incubation period before symptoms was 2 weeks... when it's actually 1-2 days.
Now get some good quality evidence - something like a Cochrane review or NICE guidance - and try to edit those medical pages.
> Wikipedia creates an enormous barrier to better information due to its size and scope, and its co-dependent relationship with Google.
Too silly to address.
> Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a DIY medical textbook. If you see dangerous information please feel free to edit it out — Wikipedia emphatically does not give medical advice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Medical_disclaimer).
> The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video.
New-ish media viewer allows video playback fullscreen or inline, it's no youtube but unclear in which way you consider this useless.
> So giving free access to Wikipedia, over other sites is not actually in the public good at all. The answer is more competition.
Firstly Wikipedia Zero does not preclude, and indeed hasn't precluded, Facebook zero etc. Regarding competition, you know Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA right? You and everyone else has a right to fork the entire project, along with the mediawiki software...
>Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a DIY medical textbook. Wikipedia emphatically does not give medical advice.
That disclaimer (hidden in the terms and conditions section) does not change the fact that many people do use Wikipedia for medical information. Each page that contains medical content should have its own disclaimer stating that the information contained in it has not been checked by doctors for accuracy and could have been changed by anyone at any time and could be incorrect. As this article points out [1]:
They discovered that 90% of the entries made statements that contradicted latest medical research. Lead author Dr Robert Hasty, of the Wallace School of Osteopathic Medicine in North Carolina, said: "While Wikipedia is a convenient tool for conducting research, from a public health standpoint patients should not use it as a primary resource because those articles do not go through the same peer-review process as medical journals."
>If you see dangerous information please feel free to edit it out
But how would I know if it's dangerous? I'm not a doctor. Your comment encapsulates the problem. You are asking me, a non-trained person, to make medical judgments on behalf of others.
When Google chooses Wikipedia pages to be the top result for medical queries, instead of peer-reviewed information then that is an enormous barrier to entry.
I think you are completely misunderstanding the purpose of Wikipedia Zero if those are the use cases you're showing me. It is not meant for people to get information about movies and watch videos. It is meant to give them some basic level of information about the world around them. No other online resource has the breadth and variety of Wikipedia.
> There have also been several recent studies that say Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.
Nobody is going to use Wikipedia to diagnose diseases. But suppose I live in a country with a cholera problem and search for 'chronic diarrhea' on the web. Wikipedia will be able to point me to a few probable causes, and will give me some primary hints about what I'm supposed to do.
If there isn't a doctor nearby to tell me this, and there isn't a public library with a medical encyclopedia nearby, and I can't afford a PC with internet access, how else am I supposed to find out?
Is that such a bad thing really? Wikipedia already has a terrible reputation in research and academics, most people simply refuse to accept any information off it because "anyone can edit it."
Insisting on verifiability is a necessary evil if Wikipedia wants to have even a modicum of credibility. Maybe the standards are far too stringent, but verifiability is tangible, and the 'truth' isn't.
Wikipedia will never, ever be accepted by the academic community, no matter what kind of rules are implemented, als long as it stays a wiki.
And once one accepts that one can drop this stupid principle. For me it seems the only reason it exists is to pander the academic community. But it's a hopeless and one sided love.
It does not improve quality, it does not improve credibility, the best thing about it that is produces funny feedback loops.
What other system would you propose that would ensure that articles are as uniformly objective and factual as possible? It's all right to claim that anyone should be allowed to edit an article, but the fact is that internet communities have consistently shown that without extremely heavy-handed moderation to uphold standards, they can quickly devolve into echo chambers where only one opinion or one set of facts is heard.
Articles about NBA players are not a good example of this, but I can easily think of plenty of other topics which would involve extremely loud and opinionated fringe communities who are very motivated to broadcast their views to the world. I can't think of any way to limit the influence of these communities except by insisting that every article have impeccable sources.
The cost of this insistence on sources is that sometimes utterly obvious edits may be reverted unless they can be properly sourced, but I think it is an acceptable price for maintaining consistent standards of quality across the wiki.
Also, I don't agree that the system only exists to pander to academia. Every encyclopedia in the world has standards of quality to which their articles must conform. The only difference between these other encyclopedias and Wikipedia is the speed with which they are updated.
Now I don't know about you, but I don't go to Wikipedia to get the latest news. I go there to learn stuff with the belief that this stuff will be correct. I don't care if players' teams are updated hours instead of seconds after a trade. I care much more about whether this information is correct. Verifiability builds trust, and I don't see how Wikipedia could continue to exist without it.
What? I've never been anywhere near the Nepali border, but have spent enough time in India to know that it's not lawless anarchy. I'll have to ask you for a source on this please.