The numbers track the order that the cells were executed in. So, strictly speaking, you need the numbers to be able to reproduce the output of the notebook's author. However, I think it's bad practice and pretty uncommon to publish a notebook where you need to execute the cells out of order. So most of the time the numbers aren't useful.
A similar thing happened in the last place I lived, a small town in the Northwest Territories, Canada. The indigenous people in the area (called the Tlicho) were able to take over some of the governance of their land from the Canadian government, including mineral rights. It is a pretty significant amount of land too, about 100km x 200km. To make the case they had to map which land was included in their territory and demonstrate that their use of it goes back a long time. So they sent out their elders and professional map makers on canoe trips along their traditional hunting routes. The map makers collected gps data and associated it with stories from the elders and artifacts they found along the way, which built a compelling case for the land claim.
I've often thought it would be cool to build a fairer ride hailing app that gives drivers more autonomy. The driver buys the app as a one time purchase, they get to set their own prices, and there is more transparency between buyer and seller. There could be a simple bidding process where users request a ride, drivers make an offer, and the user accepts one based on price, how far away the driver is, and their reviews. Basically the app would be more light-weight and be more like a marketplace.
Sounds great until you realize 1. riders would only use the app if they could sort by 'price,' 2. drivers would therefore have to constantly change their rates to reflect what those in the area are charging at a given time/supply/demand level, so.. 3. in order to do this effectively without creating massive unexpected price swings for both drivers & riders, you'd end up automating this 'bidding' system and hey whaddya know, you just built Uber again!
Genuinely curious about this - why would the price swings in this case be worse than with uber? With enough drivers, I would expect prices to reach an equilibrium that depends on time of day/day of week, with highly rated drivers charging more. And even if the price swings were larger than uber's, wouldn't the prices be more optimal since they would be set by individual actors with more local info about the cost of providing the service?
While Uber and Lyft raise prices in periods of high demand, they also subsidize rides in periods of low demand to keep a consistent quality of service. You'd have a hard time getting a network as reliable as Uber and Lyft without that subsidy.
It's not uncommon to see Uber retain 75% of the fee collected these days. The subsidies are much lower and less frequent than you are probably expecting. In Los Angeles, you are talking about 1.1-2.0 subsidy on base rates in the same areas with base rates for the driver being .72/mi and .11/min.
That sounds like a great idea, the only point I'd make is that a one time purchase model wouldn't work because you'd have ongoing costs (transaction fees for payments, records you legally have to keep, etc.).
I want to make this and include a multi-level marketing network model so drivers are additionally incentivized for recruiting and retaining halfway decent drivers. Herbalife for transport!
In Ukraine we have a taxi app where user selects price he's willing to pay and waits for drivers. He can increase the price if no drivers take an offer.
That’s basically what SideCar was, as drivers could set their own rates, and passengers could choose from a number of offers based on total price, quality, driver rating, and time until pickup.
SideCar closed in late 2014 though :-/ (And there was a recurring cut paid to SC.)
I disagree with your sentiment. Rural living and small-scale farming can be very inexpensive compared to city living, and easily supported by a remote tech worker salary or the part-time work clord mentions. Yes you need capital to get started, but this can be much less than buying a house in an urban area. I think the tech industry would be a much better place if more people chose to work remotely to improve their quality of life.
Great article. In Canada a lot of people don't know about the injustices the government has inflicted on the Inuit and other indigenous people. It's all conveniently left out of the school history curriculum.
While it is hardly "left out" (it has, in fact, been a massive national discussion for at least two decades), it also suffers from the classic folly of considering history where one side is assumed to act under only the worst motives, and the other under only the best.
Reality is, as always, much more nuanced. Right now many aboriginal communities in Canada are like third world nations, with overwhelming rates of substance abuse, etc. The government keeps pouring billions and billions in, and has given in to every demand (self-governance, no accountability), but the result is something that is absolutely shameful for a first-world nation. Racism is always blamed, while Canada's largest city is more than 50% visible minorities, many prospering.
Trying to maintain a "traditional" lifestyle in the modern world is not sustainable. The world doesn't stop because a people's hang on a grievance from many years ago.
I have lived in Toronto for all of my life. I cannot ever recall meeting an Aboriginal person, except once as a teenager. I was working retail, and they provided their ID card when they wanted me to not charge sales tax. They didn’t fit my stereotype of what I thought they should look like, so it’s entitely possible I’ve met more without knowing it.
Just because Toronto and many Canadian cities are multicultural doesn’t automatically make us not racist. I have some friends that share my skin colour that moved to Calgary, and they have some pretty negative attitudes towards Aboriginal people.
I love Canada and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. But we’re far from perfect.
No doubt. This example however, is low on the injustice scale, 87 people once and has been "described as a humanitarian gesture to save the lives of starving native people".
Well, that was how the government described it initially. More recently they've admitted wrongdoing and apologized. I think it's more likely they were trying to assert sovereignty in the high arctic using people they knew would stand a good chance of surviving there.
Why not both. To me this seems like the gov found a mutually beneficial opportunity and acted upon it. I'm not absolving the gov of all wrongdoing, but in this case I feel the issues were more in the execution rather than the concept or intentions.
It's not both because the threats that the displaced people faced after the move were far more severe than those faced before the move. Also, instead of keeping the families together they were dispersed into multiple groups without being informed beforehand. That is _not_ a sign of trying to help combat overpopulation, and _is_ a sign of asserting sovereignty over the land.
Yep, it requires n^2 moves for even boards while odd boards require less moves (no formula found yet). Using a computer, I found, by brute force, that the 5x5 can be solved in 8 moves at most, the problem quickly becomes intractable for 7x7 and above. It looks like this might be NP hard according to another post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27436275/how-can-i-furthe...
Something that struck me is: almost half of the country would disagree with you (the more conservative half). A lot of the American public believes what Kalanick said to be very true when it comes to low-ish income people complaining about what wealthier people do to them.
In my experience, it isn't the wealthy who think the poor are lazy/irresponsible-- it's the working poor and the lower middle class. The "more conservative half" of the country isn't particularly the wealthier half of the country. Speculating as to why that is would probably overflow this comments section.
I know a lot of well off programmers who absolutely believe that the only reason anyone isn't a well off programmer is laziness and poor character. Don't know how you're making your class divisions, but I certainly wouldn't call them lower middle class or below.
Many lower-middle-class Americans look down on the poor because they see themselves on equal footing, and believe that "If I can work two jobs and make ends meet, so could s/he if s/he had the work ethic."
The most arrogant programmers I know seem to think the exact opposite: that they are among the elite few graced with the gift of true programming intuition. (Not true.) They don't think the poor are lazy, they think the poor are helpless and un-talented.
It's absolutely a true statement, and it is absolutely and completely an inappropriate tone for the CEO of a company to take toward someone that just got fucked over by his company's changing policies, after his company pushed people into taking out loans they can't realistically afford.
It's like Taleb's stuff about skin in the game--Kalanick pushed the risk of his business model onto drivers like this one while keeping the upside for himself. When the driver got screwed by Kalanick's pricing changes, he comes back with technicalities and finally blames the guy for not taking responsibility. Talk about projection!
That's the reason why this is disrespectful to the driver. Kalanick minimizes his loss and refuses to take any responsibility for it himself, despite the fact that the only real mistake the driver made was trusting Uber.
So many (seemingly) intractable issues in contemporary life regress back to the question of personal responsibility.
It's a difficult thing to push back on, because even those of us most sympathetic a complex-systems based understanding of inequality don't want to completely give up on the value of personal responsibility, as to do so would be to tacitly give up the belief in free will. But if we grant that each individual does have some degree of agency and responsibility, then the libertarian side immediately points to any number of self made/rags to riches individuals and says "So? Stop complaining and do that!". But why can't they admit that it's an issue of degrees?
Sure, you have some agency in improving your situation, but if you're born less advantaged the systemic factors arrayed against you make it significantly harder to leverage your agency to improve your lot. Just because some lucky few do rise from rags to riches doesn't mean that a winner take most, predatory lottery system will create the best outcome for the most.
Is it a failure of human probabilistic intuition? Or is it a more malicious effort to control and frame the debate, pushed by those who benefit from the unequal system? Probably both.
Dunno if you're being /s or not but there are myriad serious answers, most of them pointing back to the elevation of predatory capitalism to an quasi-religious ideology, often intermixed with judaeo-christian symbolism and messaging.
...and the "other half" (as if there are only two perspectives) scapegoat just as handily: corporations, racist people, sexist people, homophobic people, Russian hackers, Fox News, the bourgeois, disloyal white women, people who "vote against their interests", patriotic people, spiritual people, uneducated people, cherry-picked structural injustice, and pretty much anything that doesn't support their preconceived notions of the world.
I'm frankly tired of people seeing problems and immediately outgrouping others, attaching blame, and spewing hate. This will continue to be a disease in our culture until people can learn to understand and disagree and live and let live.
For many progressives I know, those things are blamed indeed, but for society's problems, not their own. There's a real difference there, deriving from the difference in political philosophy. Broadly speaking, the left believes that if you address structural social issues, individuals will eventually have paths to succeed. The right believes that if everyone focuses on the problems they themselves experience, society will eventually improve. Either ethic can be applied in the extreme with disastrous results.
> ...those things are blamed indeed, but for society's problems, not their own.
That's a good point in some cases. But in many cases that doesn't hold. Meryl Streep outgrouped popular, middle American, and "lowbrow" culture(s) when ranting about how they impact on her job. Gay marriage and abortion views are certainly personal complaints as well as social ones. Distaste for spiritual people typically stems from a personal grudge more than a dry academic philosophy about the social impact of disagreements about metaphysical reality or something. How about bikes versus cars disputes in urban areas? Or disagreements about Bay Area rent?
I can come up with more examples. I think there's a "I'm just being the rational one here" type of cognitive dissonance from basically all perspectives. Even that attitude holds the seeds for outgrouping (those irrational people!).
>Most people out there would rather blame someone else for their problems than take personal responsibility.
And why not? There are 8 billion people out there, and one of you. And tons of people who came before the person was even born and shaped the place one was born in, were responsible for their childhood, designed their education programs etc. And of course others are in power and shape policy.
Who is more likely to have created/sustain the situations affecting someone? Themselves or the tons of others?
Out of curiousity, what do you think could have caused the driver to go bankrupt? It sounds like he bought an expensive, UberBlack-eligible car, intending to pay for it with his fares, but the fares were reduced and now he can't make the payments. How common is that scenario amongst Uber drivers?
If Uber drivers are, in fact, independent contractors, then they have some responsibility to determine whether the business they're engaged in is a profitable one, and to judge the risk involved. It seems like it would be very easy to underestimate both the costs and the risk.
it's not just the fare reduction, it's also the loss in business as customers stopped using UberBlack in favor of UberX.
Having driven for Uber and Lyft for a year and a half (even during the "good years") - the rate of new hires was most definitely a major concern and there were definitely rocky times. I was lucky to be able to mitigate this by moving to San Francisco from San Diego. While in San Diego I saw my take go down from ~$1200/wk to something like $800/wk, then back up to $1200-1600/wk when I moved to SF, and then back down to about $800 by the time I finished.
Personally I approached it as an exercise in entrepreneurship, a deep study in the dynamics of real-time economics, and an opportunity to vastly improve my "people skills" in addition to making more money than a PhD postdoc in biochemistry... So a success in all fronts, personally, but also I knew when to quit.
Recognizing that you may not have been the prototypical Uber driver, I'm curious what kind of research/ evaluation (if any) you did before/ while driving for them re: the financial prospect. How much did you "take home" after gas, repairs, taxes, etc...? Did you have an estimate of that beforehand?
My suspicion is that many people who begin driving for Uber overestimate their net earnings and underestimate their deferred expenses e.g. vehicle depreciation and maintenance. If Uber knows this and is taking advantage (with new-driver bonuses, etc...), they're essentially a multi-level marketing company.
I didn't do a formal estimate beforehand. by feeling, I underestimated my net earnings. Take home was probably somewhere in the 50/yr range. Keep in mind that I didn't "buy a new car" - I drove with my own car that I'd had since 2010. The whole thing put on about 100k miles; but the car is still running more or less fine, a year and a half later.
If something's true, does it really matter if it insults someone?
Driver buys a $97k car, goes bankrupt because as it turns out buying a super expensive car that you obviously can't afford is a dumb idea, then decides to blame someone else for his poor decision making.
I don't think it was unreasonable to consider a $97K car as a business expenditure was such a bad idea. Let's say you get a 5-year loan, liberally that's about $30k a year, which is more than covered by the cost and business that Uber (UberBlack) was generating at the time; Until of course the volume of UberBlack got eaten into by the presence of UberX on top of fare cuts.
Making the correct short-term business decision without fully understanding the long-term market forces in that domain, can still be a bad long-term decision.
It is the business owner's (investor's) responsibility to understand and plan for the long-term. Not planning for the long-term is exactly what happened here. I do not believe this man should have been disrespected, however, his decision to buy a car he could not afford, was his own and was objectively a bad decision.
Do you know the story of the grasshopper and the ants[0]? Regardless of who is controlling the weather (in our case, Uber). Its the grasshopper's fault for not storing food for the winter.
So you're saying making sound decisions regarding driving for Uber requires good economic skills, long-term planning capabilities aswell as insider information regarding Uber's policy ?
This sounds like an unrealistic expectation. One would argue Uber was either disloyal or disillusioned if they rely on such people to advance their business.
> Not faulting the driver for making an uneducated investment, that is unreasonable.
The interesting part happens when you understand that it is impossible to make an educated decision to become a Uber driver without having a relation of trust between Uber and drivers (because otherwise you would need insider information about Uber's business innovations, to get fixed pricing agreement for a given duration, which Uber will never do, etc).
Then, you don't fault Uber for being "flexible to market forces", you may fault them for engaging in deceptive business, just like you would blame a multi level marketing scheme. And when you specifically look at Uber's strategy to mislead potential drivers, there's tons of telling stuff.
In that light, you can still blame the drivers for making bad decisions (discussing the reality of Homo œconomicus would drive us out of scope). But you must also fault Uber for maliciously luring their drivers in a scheme that is not sustainable for them.
Uber could have remained a premium cab company with a fancy app, but everything start-up is rated on growth numbers, not profit, and definitely not on profit of drivers.
If not for abusing growth, it would have not raised funding and would have likely failed.
What business incentive would they have to be a black car app, if they can make more money by expanding into UberX? Not to mention, if they had remained a black car app, they might have gone out of business.
Uber is a business, not a charity. They exist to maximize profits. If you understand that point, then you see why your point is irrelevant.
Also, what the heck does it mean to "abuse growth"?
If I had to guess, abusing growth means taking advantage of the fact that a lot of investors use growth as a core metric in their decision-making process. Thus, Uber optimising for growth over any other "more reasonable" option, just to obtain funding.
Even if that's true, the CEO is the right person to make a complaint to. Or do you think the cab driver should get an economics degree and acquire a fine understanding of market forces?
It is a truth; however here it is being misapplied I believe. Failure to accept responsibility for failings is a sign of neuroticism... Trump has it; so does Kalanick it would appear from these reports (and all others).
In reality it is necessary for growth (and for leadership) to accept responsibility for things. In medicine, every layer up the chain is responsible for the actions of those below; i have encountered many situations where a senior accepts and owns responsibility for a failing or mistake even though that mistake was performed by a junior doctor/nurse. Blame culture is toxic; ownership therapeutic as it leads to growth. In the situation you quote above, it is ironic.
And you're talking to someone who works for you (though you bend over backwards to say they don't so you can avoid being responsible for them) and earns a tiny, tiny fraction of what you earn.
In 2012 I wrote my first Wikipedia article on the 50-person startup I was working for at the time. I didn't include anything overly self-promoting, just the basic facts and referenced some news articles. My article was immediately nominated for deletion and a number of community members accused me of being a "single purpose account", i.e. not interested in contributing, just advertising. Needless to say I did not go on to create/edit more articles after a welcome like that.
A couple of editors did come to my defence. I got the impression there was a lot of internal conflict about this sort of thing.
I think they have a point in that case. You didn't have any interest in contributing until you had a startup you needed to promote. Also, unless your startup is notable it's not supposed to have an article.
"If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list... If a topic does not meet these criteria but still has some verifiable facts, it might be useful to discuss it within another article."
However, from my experience in CAD, Wikipedia's notability and importance ratings are strongly skewed towards open-source and against commercial systems.
No disrespect meant to the FreeCAD folks, but that is definitely back-to-front! The article on Solidworks lists 165,000 companies using the product as of 2013. How is that low-importance?
The skew tends to be even worse against enterprise class systems.
Those importance ratings are utterly unimportant. In the vast majority of cases, they are just the opinion of a single editor who looked at the article for 10 seconds, and they only affect how the article is listed in some automated report that nobody ever looks at.
> You didn't have any interest in contributing until you had a startup you needed to promote.
That's one explanation of the facts but it's not the only one. Any new user is likely to start out by contributing on topics close to them - places they've worked, technologies they've worked with, etc.
If employees aren't allowed to make articles on their employers then that's that. But treating a new account differently than an old one is just assuming bad faith.
I actually had been contributing small edits for grammar anonymously for a while, and was interested in getting more involved in Wikipedia. My intention wasn't to promote my employer, I just thought it met the notability requirements.
Additionally, "referenced some news articles" is not sufficient for notability because most startup coverage is PR [1]. Unfortunately, when you get genuine independent journalism, it is also not positive coverage (e.g. Theranos, Magic Leap).
The community of wikimedia and wikipedia is pretty bad with this. I've seen articles locked, then marked for deletion, so you can't add more information to make it 'article-worthy'. They then say that its not 'against the guidelines', as the ultimate excuse.
Mediawiki is supposed to also be a communicative platform on these problems, but it really fails its goal there with its talk pages, when these problems really stem from a lack of centralized community and being able to easily talk about and resolve these issues. Typically, you'l get referenced to IRC or another talk page, where your issue will not be resolved and will probably take forever to be responded to.
Overall, I've ditched working with Mediawiki or anything wikimedia. They don't show caring to actually invest in open platforms and software that others can use, they're just interested in making their own projects popular. Some of the core devs are actually really good at what they do, the problem is that the framework now needs a big revamp for it to be usable outside of the wikipedia environment properly, something wikimedia will not invest in.
If they want to show good faith in freedom of information, they would make their software into components and allow other projects to use them, especially the actual wiki markup processor. This would allow people to integrate wiki functionality into fundamentally better frameworks to maintain, like Drupal 8, or design their own frameworks that internally use the packages maintained in mediawiki.
You say they're "bad" at this, but another word you could use is "consistent", and you could follow that up by suggesting that there's a coherent criteria used for what's deleted, but that nerds have a really hard time understanding it.
To wit: Wikipedia not at all concerned about storage space, but they are concerned very much about the amount of time they'll need to spend policing articles to make sure that things that wind up preferentially at the top of Google search result pages aren't full of advertising spam, lies, and cruft. Every article they add increases that burden. A reasonable line to draw in the sand is "we're only going to allow articles that make a clear statement of why their topic is notable, and for which an ordinary, disinterested editor could verify all the facts by following cited sources."
Mediawiki is made for Wikipedia, it is not software that can be well used outside of the environment. I know, because I've invested a lot of time into trying to make it so educators and communities could start their own wiki's, and what I've found is that its way too complex to expect anyone other than a sysadmin to maintain, and way too hard for users to learn wiki markup and extensions to use it in any decent way in templates. Add ontop the amount of work you need to do to just get Lua (An actual .php extension), Visual editor (Giant node.js project), or the math extension (another big node.js project) in, and you're looking at a massive amount of work that could break at any time. This is because its direction is not for individual installs, it is meant to be in an environment of sysadmins, consistent maintenance, and those who develop the framework.
Wikipedia is also not that 'open'. What you edit has to fit specific guidelines, and of course get past the moderators to be approved. It also misses the point of freedom of information, because there's tons of info out there that people want to put out, but doesn't fit the scheme of Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia visions is: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.", and thats what I'm criticizing Wikimedia and its projects for not upholding.
If you want truly open communication, go to 4chan. It's a cesspool, which is fine for people that like that, but it's much further away from being 'information for everyone'. Claiming that WP isn't open because they want a basic level of quality is just grinding an axe - WP has informed a far greater number of humans to a far higher level of quality than all the ^chans put together.
> I know, because I've invested a lot of time into trying to make it so educators and communities could start their own wiki's
And yet MediaWiki is sprayed in wikis all over the internet. I've set it up as well. Yes, learning the full markup isn't trivial, but the basic stuff is. And I'm not sure how it's "not open" simply because it has a learning curve. Does this mean Vim is not open? Emacs? Apache? OpenBSD? The Vim GUI sucks, because it's outside it's expected environment of a terminal - does that also mean it's "not open"?
If you want an example of open software that is designed specifically 'for the punters', look at Gnome 3... where you're pretty locked down and can't do much (cue complaints then about 'freedom'), but there's no learning curve. LibreOffice is made for general consumption and still gets complaints about being difficult to use from the punters - and even then, if you want to use the more advanced features, there's a learning curve.
Complex software has a learning curve, and hiding that learning curve is really difficult. Apple 'solved' this by simply removing functionality and configurability (again, cue complaints about losing freedom). If Apple made a wiki, you wouldn't even have the choice of adding that maths plugin. Hell, you probably wouldn't even be able to skin it.
> it is meant to be in an environment of sysadmins
It's a heavyweight engine that you're wanting to put lots of heavyweight stuff on. That's what they're designing for, and it has some warts, but it works. It's daft to complain that the engine primarily written by a non-profit for one of the top 5 websites isn't written as a one-click install feather-light application.
Basically you're holding WP to an impossible standard and complaining that they don't measure up.
>If you want truly open communication, go to 4chan.
Its not about open communications, its the fact that information has to fit the criteria Wikipedia deems necessary, and that does not fit a lot of information out there. For example, a group of proffessionals in building design want to create an educational site on how to get started digitally, what software, the theories and factors in play when creating a building, fueled by their real-life experience and education over time. That is not something you can put on Wikipedia. You can put some of the theory, but ultimately experience is lost in translation or deleted due to no sources.
>Claiming that WP isn't open because they want a basic level of quality is just grinding an axe
Its not open in anywhere near what their vision states. Its open for sourced information and whatever various mods will allow. Which, is fine if thats how they want it to be, but to claim its an open platform for information is false.
>WP has informed a far greater number of humans to a far higher level of quality than all the ^chans put together.
I am not advocating that Wikipedia just be an open book to write whatever you want, but that its platform does not support much outside of sourced info, which is a category of information, not the sum of all information, and leaves out a lot of other information that doesn't fit its guidelines.
>Yes, learning the full markup isn't trivial, but the basic stuff is. And I'm not sure how it's "not open" simply because it has a learning curve.
Making a wiki has very little to do with the basic markup, and a lot more to do with designing templates and organizing how your data is formatted and presented, and that is what mediawiki fails to do in a manner that is accessible. Difficulty does reduce accessibility, which infact does reduce its openness. If it were simpler and well documented, searchable, then there would be a lot more writers. A lot of the problems can be solved by having a markup language that also acts like a programming language, being able to work with variables and inputs and do transforms on them, much like an actual templating language.
The learning curve of Libreoffice or other programs of that nature is a false equivalence. Adding a graph in Libreoffice takes a few clicks of the dropdowns, maybe a few tries of adding in info. Adding in a graph into mediawiki requires you to find an extension, install that, learn its syntax, and god forbid you add it into a template dynamically, learn how to get data variables from wiki markup. It is significantly more work and understanding of tech.
>Complex software has a learning curve, and hiding that learning curve is really difficult.
Yes, it is, but it is possible, if the software were designed for being used outside of the wikipedia environment more, similiar to frameworks like Drupal 8 or Wordpress are, it would be much more maintainable and learnable. Understand that wikitext is just a small small part of a mediawiki environment, and even thats enough to bar entry for many people.
>It's a heavyweight engine that you're wanting to put lots of heavyweight stuff on. That's what they're designing for, and it has some warts, but it works.
Its an old engine that is very integrated into itself with a lot of tech debt that hasn't been paid back. They are designing for that, not for creating a framework that best suits accessible, editable, presentable information.
>It's daft to complain that the engine primarily written by a non-profit for one of the top 5 websites isn't written as a one-click install feather-light application.
Wikimedia does not claim the Mediawiki is made for WP and shouldn't be used outside of it. I claim that, but thats not how it should be.
An application being 'heavy' has nothing to do with its maintainability or usability to the end user. Arguably, Wordpress is much heavier, yet has a built-in auto updater, plugins and theme installer, and is quite easy to setup.
>Basically you're holding WP to an impossible standard and complaining that they don't measure up.
I'm holding /Wikimedia/ to the standard they've set for themselves, with expectations much lower than that, and still it doesn't hold up, because they are not actually doing what their vision is, they're just making their own product where information has to fit their guidelines. You can argue that Wikimedia is a non-profit, or the software is complex, or whatever you'd like, but the reality is that there is a significant amount of information that will never be passed into the internet space because good platforms for it don't exist yet.
How many 50-person companies do you think have existed, globally, since 2001?
Lets just make some very rough estimates. Sweden with a population of 10 million creates an average of 36 500 new companies per year. Let say than 5% reach at some point 50 employees, which would result in 180 Wikipedia articles per million population per year. There is 7.4 billion people in the world, so that is 180 * 1000 * 7.4 * 16, which would be a bit over 21 million Wikipedia articles that only covers new 50-person and bigger companies (not including companies created before 2001).
The people who accused you of "single purpose account" were of course in the fault since they should have assumed good-faith, but I can't generally disagree with the notion that a 50-person startup might need more than employees to be notable enough for a encyclopedia.
The assumption that the world creates 50 person companies at the same rate as Sweden is not likely.
Company listings are actually often really useful on wikipedia, there can be some outside info that is far better than what the company itself has and if there are suspect things about the company wikipedia can link to them as well.
Wikipedia at one point deleted the article on Atlasssian because 'it wasn't notable'.
I said "very rough estimates" since indeed the world average is unlikely to be exactly the same as Sweden. But even if we reduce the global rate to 10% of Sweden (fair?), it is still 2 million articles and would cover half the current size of english Wikipedia.
Usefulness of non-notible articles is often discussed in Wikipedia. One side generally argue that any article that is useful should be included. The idea that notability is the criteria and not usefulness is an interesting discussion, and part of the deletionism versus inclusionism controversy.
I hate this argument. Wikipedia is not some storage bound book shipped out to people. There should be no limit on articles as long as the content is verifiable by contributors.
You might say, "but the disambiguation page will get big." well, that's a technical problem that can be fixed. I can search for something on Google and find it easily even though it contains far more than Wikipedia.
And I hate that argument too. There are long-term costs for maintaining any page on wikipedia, because there's always people out there looking to insert troll content or provide biased information for a specifically-targeted search term.
I'd estimate the typical page on Wikipedia has 0-1 people actively looking after it. And some of these articles are extremely popular (but noncontroversial) people/places/things. Wikipedia is full of articles which are "done" but still suck.
So you cannot look at a volunteer project and determine the storage costs are negligible, no problem, because that's very obviously not the main challenge.
> There are long-term costs for maintaining any page on wikipedia, because there's always people out there looking to insert troll content or provide biased information for a specifically-targeted search term.
But these costs do not scale on a per-page basis; rather, they scale based on the number of trolls. I don't think the number of pages meaningfully changes the amount of effort "trolls" put into "trolling"; meanwhile, automated tools like watchlists allow you to keep an eye on an unlimited number of pages.
It should be much easier to automate anti-"trolling" tools on fringe pages which get very few edits - e.g. automatically adding newly-created or rarely-edited pages to a watchlist.
Finally, it doesn't look like wikipedia has a great editor retention policy if the problem was really combating trolls; There seems to have been an assumption of bad faith on the count of GP - if he is really a "PR shill", then no skin off their back - if they're paid to do it, they'll keep trying, becoming a "troll". However, if he was to be a legitimate editor, blaming them from starting in their own topic of interest(even if it was self-promotion) doesn't seem like a good way to retain them as a long-term editor.
Low-level trolling has almost zero cost on wikipedia, you don't even need an account. Especially for articles that are largely politically uncontroversial and "done". So they probably catch most of the vandals, and use their process to stop maybe the top 20% of political kooks. But when some random adds dubious information to a long-tail article, it can hang around for years.
Moderators are voting to remove pages that have validated data. That's idiotic because it's more work than leaving the article be in a locked state.
I would rather have a bunch of articles that are locked rather than deleted by some moderator that thinks they are defending the glory of worthy human knowledge.
In Sweden, the current proportion of companies greater than 50 people is closer to 0.5%. Since many companies close before reaching this size, the rate attaining that size is much lower by another factor of 10. So, your numbers exaggerate the amount by at least 100x on this basis, not to mention the huge portion of the world population which is not living in advanced economies with high rates of corporate formation.
