Wikipedia collapses threatening the very fabric of civilisation
Fount-of-dubious-knowledge Wikipedia has gone down around the world, prompting a Twitter frenzy from people struggling to remember how to open books. The anyone-can-try-to-edit encyclopaedia won't serve a page at all beyond a placeholder "error" message, but an announcement on the Wikimedia Foundation's site stated that servers …
This topic is closed for new posts.
I just got pages served without any formatting. Thought it was our dodgy internet connection to be honest :)
Same here a little while ago, but at least I now know wtf my preggers friend meant by Braxton Hicks. It'll be when Google goes down that the world will be proper shagged. The Almighty might even start the rapture at the google datacentres just to screw with our heads for teh lulz.
"It'll be when Google goes down that the world will be proper shagged"
I know people - and not just one or two - that don't know how to work the address bar of their browser other than to put in Google and then search for the site they want to go to.
/shakes head
NP
Google goes down, we'll all just use another search engine. Like all the other mugs, all I've got to do is go to google and type 'search engine' and............ DOH!
Re: "It'll be when Google goes down that the world will be proper shagged"
I feel your pain. This drives me mad too!
I'm in the UK.... the sun is shining....
THE END IS TRULY NIGH!.
Re: I'm in the UK.... the sun is shining....
... and we got our first gold in the showjumping for 6 decades!
I went to the library, it had DVDs, CDs, leaflets about benefits and STDs, banks of PCs and some magazines.
They sure have changed a lot since the last time I went to one! Though the hot librarian did use to make my mind wander.
Paris, STDs, …
The library is seen as some sort of mystical place that people go to to learn Important Stuff and librarians are there to help people find the books they need to learn the Important Stuff.
Yet, for as long as I can remember, they have mainly been used by old people to obtain crap books that have pictures of beaten-but-unbowed Victorian lasses on the front cover.
So you can watch movies but not find any useful knowledge. And the PCs are useless because they connect to Wikipedia.
You're confusing a lending library with a reference library. They are separate things.
@The Axe
The nearest reference library to me is an hours drive away. (And then an hour's drive back.) Most of us are dependent on little town libraries, and we count ourselves lucky if they haven't been shut.
Buy it on Kindle?
I fired up my Kindle and discovered I can apparently "buy a subscription to Wikipedia", which seemed a bit laughable considering the Kindle has a built-in Web browser, until I realised it may all be part of a cunning plan...
Really?
Our local one (East London) has a thriving kids' section, where the whippersnappers queue up to take out Horrid Henry, Harry Potter, The Gruffalo etc.
Oh...!. Benefits *AND* STDs
I read 'of' first parse.
<-- Icon for myself!
You can't have one without the other....
..."leaflets about benefits and STDs...."
@The Axe: "They are separate things"
Clearly you don't live in Winchester.
I went the the library. And had a Pizza Express meal there.
@Brewster's Angle Grinder
"The nearest reference library to me is an hours drive away. (And then an hour's drive back.) "
Have an unsarcastic beer on me.
I have no idea why that made me laugh as much as it did. Just something about it clarifying that the route and typical traffic conditions are the same in both directions.
"It's a 45 minute drive before the morning rush hour and only 1/2 hour back when the schools are off or after 9 at night. If I leave the car there, it's closer to 3 hours, unless I take the shortcut across the misty heathland..."
@Blofeld's Cat
"Has somebody typed "Wikipedia" into Wikipedia?"
O M G ! ! ! Divide by zero!!!!
Re: Uh ho...
:-) Reminds me of the Demitri Martin gag:
"I bought a new dictionary the other day. First thing I did was look up the word 'Dictionary'. It said 'You're an asshole'"
eventually wikipedia will be hosted torrently like, everybody hosts a few hundred articles that probably saves wikipedia a few million a year on servers and it's almost impossible to bring down. The most text pages will guarantee fast loading.
We've already got that
It's called The Internet. If someone could come up with a decent search engine we wouldn't have to put up with crap like WP.
Re: We've already got that
More, If people properly tagged their HTML, we wouldn't have to...
No sun over here, it's pouring with rain :( Quess I'll have to make up my own facts now
Sometimes Wikipedia is inaccurate....i wont believe i thing until i see a south park parody about it!
Mines the one with the Human cent-iPad in the pocket...
Hmm, I wonder how many people misunderstood the suggestions about going to their local library and instead used the computers there to try and get on to wikipedia rather than actually getting a book.
For sale...
...one copy of Encarta. I'll have to hunt for the disc in the boxes in the loft though.
I will never notice if it is gone - I consider it to be full of useless, ignorant, uniformed, inaccurate garbage.
All the searches I do now include -wikipedia.
As far as I'm concerned good riddance to bad rubbish.
@Moyra J. Bligh:
"I will never notice if it is gone - I consider it to be full of useless, ignorant, uniformed, inaccurate garbage."
That description would cover the entire World Wide Web, surely?
Sounds like you've never bothered to scroll down far enough to reach the 'references' section of articles.
exactly....
if nothing else it's a good place to start looking for more reliable sources..
It's actually quite good for...
...typing in the name of a movie and scrolling down to the subheading named "critical reception" - it loads fester than the other movie review websites, you can be in and out in less than 5 seconds if you just want to quickly know if something on Netflix sucks or not!
Re: It's actually quite good for...
Loads faster not loads fester - duh I FAIL lol Fitting considering the topic of discussion.
Re: Sean Timarco Baggaley
"That description would cover the entire World Wide Web, surely?"
As Slartibartfast said:
"The trouble with space is that it is so incredibly dull. There's so much of it and so little in it."
Substitute "space" for "internet" and you've got it!
Colin
Re: @Moyra J. Bligh:
"I will never notice if it is gone - I consider it to be full of useless, ignorant, uniformed, inaccurate garbage."
And so you turned to The Register then? It's all quality here.....
I've scrolled down - it's just more ignorant, inacurate useless garbage.
Re: Re: It's actually quite good for...
No, I think you had it right the first time.
Well, you consider wrong, sir.
Do you want to borrow a clog to throw in a combine harvester?
Most of it is correct. As higher percentage than you'll see correct on most fan sites or other free sites. And unlike those, Wiki includes links to sources, which other sites do not.
You know to check more than one source, and look for primary evidence, don't you? Wiki allows you to do that.
PLEASE
can we not have screenshots of random people's twitter status embedded in your stories. I have seen this elsewhere but thought I'd be safe on here. It might help internally to promote your strategy to humanise the channel flow and synergise your content sreams or some other bollocks but I DO NOT CARE WHAT RANDOM PEOPLE ON TWITTER THINK AND IF I DID I"D BE ON TWITTER NOT ON EL REG
Rip el reg gravestone icon
Re: PLEASE
Damn straight. If we want the brief rantings of random keyboard warriors we already have the comments section here on El Reg, no need to start embedding them into the articles themselves.
It's just an outage, people !
If it was something more permanent, then librarians and teachers all over the world would be dancing round burning effigies of Jimbo Wales and singing "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead".
Re: It's just an outage, people !
What makes you think teachers are any different to rest of the population, most of which is seemingly too lazy to do "proper" research?
Is it better to make a half-arsed attempt to learn something, or to dismiss it altogether because you can't be arsed going to the library?
Re: It's just an outage, people !
While I wouldn't verbatim quote stuff from wiki without verifying some of the references, the difference problem with a library is that it only carries the reference material somebody has pre-selected, may or may not be able to order other books from associate libraries, which may or may not arrive in a sensible time frame. Neither approach is perfect, but at least with the wiki references, it gives you a list of places to begin looking for more information.
This topic is closed for new posts.
