User:Kku

Greetinx
I have been 'in' for more than 20 years now, going from excited fanatism to frustration and back again. I still tend to agree with the enthusiastic comments provided during the donation campaigns run previously.

Although I used to be more active in my native tongue, I drop by here more frequently, trying to push hyperlinking, internationalization, and contributing to things I feel fairly certain about (Jazz, biology, cybernetical issues, self-organization, others (see:user contributions)). I do hope the worst examples of germish / denglisch get cleaned up by somebody else after me...

Tools
Tools

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Toolforge_tools

Templates
Template_index/Cleanup

Overview

 * Portal:Contents
 * Statistics

Bots

 * Bots
 * https://www.technologyreview.com/s/524751/the-shadowy-world-of-wikipedias-editing-bots/

Visualization

 * https://tools.wmflabs.org/seealsology/ http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/seealsology/
 * http://wiki.polyfra.me/ - 3D!!
 * http://en.inforapid.org/ gone offline, unfortunately
 * http://www.wikimindmap.org/ - requires Adobe Flash and Javascript
 * http://xefer.com/WIKIPEDIA all roads lead to philosophy
 * http://wiki.polyfra.me/#
 * User:Kku/categorytree

https://listverse.com/2020/03/13/top-10-serious-problems-with-wikipedia/

Subpages
...possibly TODO...

My Wikisophy
Why WP keeps me fascinated and excited? Because it allows you to (learn how to) learn through teaching. I cannot think of a better way to structure my own thoughts than by writing them down and hyperlinking them. Usually, my understanding of a topic becomes rounded off only after going through a few cycles of reading, writing, linking - even if my starting information happens to be incomplete or faulty! Can there be a more satisfying moment than realizing that the relevant bits and pieces have fallen into place and you can see a lemma in its full context? For me, Wikipedia really is, not least, one gigantic mindmap (side remark: when will we see the "visual wiki" ?). I guess I would be hard pressed to name all the insights that WP has provided me with but they certainly amount to the number of my original contributions (whatever you might think about those). WP distinguishing feature - above all other knowledge repositories I know of - is its network structure. Simply no concept is left in murky solitude. And traditional paper browsing is replaced by one simple mouse click. What the WWW did for making information cross (political, geographical,...) boundaries, WP does for knowledge. -- Kku 12:34, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia: Wikid stuff. Pardon my wikicism. :-D

Misconceptions
https://xkcd.com/843/

Interesting and mostly timeless questions

 * relationship between hyped MapReduce and Divide and conquer algorithm, some insights may come from here
 * relationship between strange loops, self-reference, recursion and metacognition.

Blots on the landscape
A striking effect of the WP-philosophy "be bold" is remarkably the dilution of knowledge. Aspects of lemmata get scattered all across several articles and the essential keywords and definitions get hidden underneath lots of (correct but) redundant, sometimes annoyingly wordy contributions. There is no obvious justification for the plethora of distracting info-bits that dilute many articles apart from the fact that people obviously like writing better than tidying up behind them. On the other extreme rarely anybody seems to care about cleaning up lots of redundant stubs that usually owe their existence to a sloppy "one-click" attitude. I admit nourishing a strong feeling of dislike towards this aspect of WP. That was one of my motivations for the following suggestion:

Countering dilution
Could we slowly stabilize WP using simulated annealing? Quite a while ago, I suggested that a "cooling" process could be initiated by slowly raising the minimum amount of reference information for matured articles with software aids like combo-boxes for reference type, etc. on top or instead of the underused comment line. (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/25805) That should cool down at least vandals or scatterbrains... ;).

Male cow's excrements
WP appears to be infested with marketing and management zombies. One of the better (or rather: worst) examples of their murky subversion would be an article like this. Too ugly for words. And certainly not encyclopedic.

I don't care much for bingo in any form. Truly horrific inspirations for the latter might be found in almost anything containing

Spot them
This is good: http://www.trinitonian.com/2014/01/24/learn-your-crap-detection-skills-now/

Proliferation of pop
compare with
 * https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?language=en&project=wikipedia&depth=3&categories=mathematics&ns%5B0%5D=1&interface_language=en&active_tab=&doit=
 * https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?language=en&project=wikipedia&depth=3&categories=popular%20music&ns%5B0%5D=1&interface_language=en&active_tab=&doit=

Fictional worlds
Regarding the extraordinary number of fandom -related content, these have proven to be enormously useful:

Sturgeon's law notwithstanding.

Old longing
Sometimes, just to mention it in passing, sometimes, there was a time when I wished I had admin rights... just like back home in the old times. As I now failed to make it through a second round, mostly on the grounds that I was contributing "too little":

It's not the number of edits, I think, that counts. (...long, hollow echoing, faint sound of lukewarm wind from nowhere...)

You can consequently do the ugly cleansing yourself, after all. Have fun, admins and beaurocrats of the world.

...updated
"Undo" does most of what I longed for. I still positively hate to see pages go without the slightest chance for the humble non-admin to resurrect any of the deleted contents, though.

UsabiliWHAT?
Insightful. At least if you lean back and squint a little. http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853

de:Benutzer:Kkufr:Utilisateur:kku& es:Usuario:Kku