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Wikipedia is not always easy to navigate. These sites and apps make it easier to use.

When the clock ticked over into the 21st century, the web was just a toddler. It was walking, but it wasn't ready to write research papers...until Wikipedia arrived.

The site exploded in 2001, going from 600 articles in January to 3,900 by May. As of this writing, the Wikipedia: Size Comparisons page says the service is home to 5,336,928 articles in Englisha number that is in constant flux. In total, there are over 40 million pages in 293 languages.

Wikipedia is a phenomenon that helps casual web surfers and students alike. It's had its share of controversy but raises millions of dollars to keep the servers running (by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which also operates services like Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons).

That's not to say Wikipedia doesn't have issues ahead. As BoingBoing notes, certain entries face deletion due to what it calls "bureaucratic calcification" and an impending extinction event. And its pages, useful as they may be, are ugly.

Still, Wikipedia is not going anywhere; half a billion people use it every month, and more and more of them are doing so from mobile devices. Hopefully that will draw a new generation of editors to the site. Until then, there are ways to fix Wikipedia's woes. Read on for a few suggestions.

Let's start with what I think of as the Wikipedia KISS: Keep it Simple, Stupid. A little-known feature called Simple English Wikipedia shows a simplified version of an articlein reality, an entirely different article on the same topic, but written for the layman.

They actually exist as a separate Wikipedia (much like other languages do). You can access it at simple.wikipedia.org, but when you find a difficult-to-parse page on Wikipedia, the better trick is to look at the URL and replace the "en" between slashes with the word "simple." If a corresponding page exists on the Simple English version, you get it instantly. Try it with topics like Archaeology or Quantum mechanics. (The same trick works with any supported language; just replace the EN with the 2-letter code.)

Aesthetically, Wikipedia needs the most help. Its pages are designed to convey information in the most academic way, but it's not always pleasing to the eye. (That said, Wikipedia works on almost any Web browser, so keep that in mind.) Arguably, the best tool to fix that scholarly ugliness is the service Wikiwand. Install the extensions it offers for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari and you'll always default to the improved Wikiwand look whenever you search for or link to a Wikipedia page. It's all the same data, just presented in a more eye-pleasing manner. You can even customize the colors, fonts, and layout. The quick preview option lets you hover over article links and see what you may get next before you click.

Wikiwand offers an app for iOS, and you can get an early invite for the still-to-be-released Android version. The Simple English trick also works when you look at articles through Wikiwand. Or just select Simple English in the Language drop-down menu. You will see the occasional ad amidst the articles, but Wikiwand donates 30 percent of what it makes to the Wikimedia Foundation.

There are other browser extensions that improve the look of Wikipedia:

What Wikipedia access when you don't have internet? The Xowa open-source wiki application for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android will let you download the entirety of Wikipedia in any language you pick, or other Wikimedia sites like Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and more, all to your hard drive. Make sure it's a big drive; just the text of the full English Wikipedia will take up 30GB. It's a more than double that80GBwith the images. But put it on a flash drive and you can take it anywhere. Put it on your Android device and it's a veritable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Or, you know, connect those devices to the web.)

Want some fun ways to get access to interesting things on Wikipedia? Enjoy the schadenfreude that comes with reading [Citation Needed], a Tumblr blog that promises "The Best of Wikipedia's Worst Writing"; the title is a riff on the famous line you'll find in any Wikipedia article where editors decry opinion creep.

If you're interested in some nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes Wikipedia info, subscribe to the Weeklypedia, a newsletter listing the most edited articles and most active discussions on the site every week. And The Wiki Game is a game that lets you try to connect Wikipedia articles by clicking on the links therein to see how long it takes to get from article A to article B.

For a bit of humor that doesn't really have much to do with Wikipedia directly, go to Uncyclopedia, which is to Wikipedia what The Onion is to news. Then visit the Twitter account of TL;DR Wikipedia, a source of condensed articles reduced to their pithy best.

There is a parade of apps that make Wikipedia access on a mobile device a breeze, starting with Wikipedia's own app for iOS, Android, and Windows. An update to the iOS app last year simplified the navigation and improved the search, plus provided an "Explore feed" for people to get personalized content that always updates.

Other free options for mobile downloads include the aforementioned Wikiwand, plus Wikipanion, Articles, and Wikiamo, all for iOS. If you want to take Wikipedia entirely offline on mobile, Kiwixmade by the Swiss chapter of Wikimediais on iOS and Android. There are Android-only Kiwix versions for the Wikivoyage travel guide and Medical Wikipedia as well. And Endless is a unique iOS-only app that will bring you a random Wikipedia article whenever you open it.

If you eschew apps for mobile browser, then bookmark the mobile version of Wikipedia at en.m.wikipedia.org. It looks pretty great on a desktop, too.

Eric narrowly averted a career in food service when he began in tech publishing at Ziff-Davis over 20 years ago. He was on the founding staff of Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine (all defunct, and it's not his fault). He's the author of two novels, BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale"--Publishers' Weekly) and KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. He works from his home in Ithaca, NY. More

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The Best Tools to Improve Your Wikipedia Experience - PC Magazine

Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years, said a researcher. Some conflicts only ended when one or other bot was taken out of action. Photograph: Nicole Wilder/Syfy/NBCU/Getty Images

For many it is no more than the first port of call when a niggling question raises its head. Found on its pages are answers to mysteries from the fate of male anglerfish, the joys of dorodango, and the improbable death of Aeschylus.

But beneath the surface of Wikipedia lies a murky world of enduring conflict. A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years.

Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply bots, that are built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic housekeeping tasks.

In the early days, the bots were so rare they worked in isolation. But over time, the number deployed on the encyclopedia exploded with unexpected consequences. The more the bots came into contact with one another, the more they became locked in combat, undoing each others edits and changing the links they had added to other pages. Some conflicts only ended when one or other bot was taken out of action.

The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people, said Taha Yasseri, who worked on the study at the Oxford Internet Institute. Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years.

The findings emerged from a study that looked at bot-on-bot conflict in the first ten years of Wikipedias existence. The researchers at Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute in London examined the editing histories of pages in 13 different language editions and recorded when bots undid other bots changes.

They did not expect to find much. The bots are simple computer programs that are written to make the encyclopedia better. They are not intended to work against each other. We had very low expectations to see anything interesting. When you think about them they are very boring, said Yasseri. The very fact that we saw a lot of conflict among bots was a big surprise to us. They are good bots, they are based on good intentions, and they are based on same open source technology.

While some conflicts mirrored those found in society, such as the best names to use for contested territories, others were more intriguing. Describing their research in a paper entitled Even Good Bots Fight in the journal Plos One, the scientists reveal that among the most contested articles were pages on former president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, the Arabic language, Niels Bohr and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

One of the most intense battles played out between Xqbot and Darknessbot which fought over 3,629 different articles between 2009 and 2010. Over the period, Xqbot undid more than 2,000 edits made by Darknessbot, with Darknessbot retaliating by undoing more than 1,700 of Xqbots changes. The two clashed over pages on all sorts of topics, from Alexander of Greece and Banqiao district in Taiwan to Aston Villa football club.

Another bot named after Tachikoma, the artificial intelligence in the Japanese science fiction series Ghost in the Shell, had a two year running battle with Russbot. The two undid more than a thousand edits by the other on more than 3,000 articles ranging from Hillary Clintons 2008 presidential campaign to the demography of the UK.

The study found striking differences in the bot wars that played out on the various language editions of Wikipedia. German editions had the fewest bot fights, with bots undoing others edits on average only 24 times in a decade. But the story was different on the Portuguese Wikipedia, where bots undid the work of other bots on average 185 times in ten years. The English version saw bots meddling with each others changes on average 105 times a decade.

The findings show that even simple algorithms that are let loose on the internet can interact in unpredictable ways. In many cases, the bots came into conflict because they followed slightly different rules to one another.

Yasseri believes the work serves as an early warning to companies developing bots and more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools. An AI that works well in the lab might behave unpredictably in the wild. Take self-driving cars. A very simple thing thats often overlooked is that these will be used in different cultures and environments, said Yasseri. An automated car will behave differently on the German autobahn to how it will on the roads in Italy. The regulations are different, the laws are different, and the driving culture is very different, he said.

As more decisions, options and services come to depend on bots working properly together, harmonious cooperation will become increasingly important. As the authors note in their latest study: We know very little about the life and evolution of our digital minions.

Earlier this month, researchers at Googles DeepMind set AIs against one another to see if they would cooperate or fight. When the AIs were released on an apple-collecting game, the scientists found that the AIs cooperated while apples were plentiful, but as soon as supplies got short, they turned nasty. It is not the first time that AIs have run into trouble. In 2011, scientists in the US recorded a conversation between two chatbots. They bickered from the start and ended up arguing about God.

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Study reveals bot-on-bot editing wars raging on Wikipedia's pages - The Guardian

By Logan Stanley, Staff Writer February 23, 2017 Filed under News

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On Feb. 15, EWU Libraries hosted a Wikipedia editing event that tasked students, faculty and staff with the assignment of constructing an entry about the EWU fires into the websites database.

Referred to as an edit-a-thon, it is the second rendition of the event and is organized by EWUs Education Librarian, James Rosenzweig.

Its a chance for us to choose something about Easterns history that isnt covered on Wikipedia and to use the resources we have in the library, in our archives, special collections to add material to Wikipedia, Rosenzweig said, who has been an administrator at Wikipedia since August 2003.

This years selection was the Eastern fires that occurred in 1891, 1912 and 1977. Wikipedia has no articles on their site about the fires. Last year, the editing event produced an article on EWUs Red Reese, the coach who has won the most games in the history of EWU.

Those who chose to participate in editing were armed with laptops and supplemented with stacks of papers. Tables were designated for each fire. Scattered across the tables were printed newspaper articles sourced from microfilm: traditional scans of old newspapers, a few books written about EWU, maps of Cheney and State Normal School (EWUs former name) and meeting minutes from the Board of Trustees.

In all, Rosenzweig said we probably got 60-70 different unique resources.

With their laptops and newspaper articles, those editing scoured and poured over the information to add to each specific entry. Dates, times and locations were all checked to ensure accuracy of the new passage being put into Wikipedia.

The first fire that happened in 1891 burned down the entire university which consisted of one building and was then referred to as the State Normal School. The fire was reportedly caused when a leaking hydrant soaked a pile of lime next to the building.

The school was finally rebuilt, but then a portion, a main classroom and an office building, subsequently burned down in 1912. The cause is allegedly unknown but was speculated to be faulty wiring.

Rosenzweig said that after the first two fires, the state of Washington was unsure if they wanted to pay to rebuild the school. Quite literally, EWU came very close to ceasing to exist. Ultimately, the school was rebuilt.

The most recent fire, which happened in 1977, burned down the entire Old Fieldhouse. Rosenzweig said there was already a three sentence article on the 1977 fire, so their intentions were to add onto the existing material. As of now, all three fires have Wikipedia entries.

The turnout was stronger than last year, with more students already showing up in the first few hours of the event than the totality of the previous year, Rosenzweig said.

One of the participants was EWU graduate student Angel Rios, who has attended both editing events.

It was kind of fun to be in a room doing something Im so passionate about with people who arent necessarily studying history the same way I do, but theyre very interested in what is taking place in the history of the institution, Rios said.

Rios who is also the treasurer of Phi Alpha Theta, EWUs history club was encouraged to come to the event as an aspiring historian. She said she was sure there were more than two fires and wanted to find out for herself.

Looking ahead, the plan is to put on the edit-a-thon again next year, but the topic remains undecided, Rosenzweig said.

See original here:
Eastern Fires: A Wikipedia Editing - The Easterner

On March 14 at 4:00 p.m. Dr. Tim Wise will deliver the 2017 Last Lecture in Foundation Hall.

Biography:

Dr. Tim Wise is a professor of management and marketing and is the chair of the Department of Management, Marketing, and Information Systems. Dr. Wise was born in Panama City, Florida, but spent most of his youth in northwest Louisiana. He attended Louisiana Tech University where he earned a BA and an MA in education. After teaching in the public school system for two years, he returned to Louisiana Tech and earned an MBA and a DBA in business. His major was Management and his minors were Marketing and Industrial Psychology. He joined the faculty of Southern Arkansas University in 1993 as an Instructor of Marketing. He has taught a variety of classes but now teaches mostly organization theory, entrepreneurship, and strategic management courses. Dr. Wise has had a lifelong interest in written and visual storytelling and has been interested in theology and philosophy since his teens. He started a studio/publishing company, Professor Theophilus Emporium of Imagination, Inc., in 2002 and independently published his first novel, Intrepid Force, in 2003. In 2007, he enrolled part-time in the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is scheduled to receive an MDiv with a specialization in Christian Apologetics (a branch of theology and philosophy) in May 2017.

A reception to which all are invited will follow the lecture.

See the article here:
The Last Lecture - SAU

Second in a series

FREMONT - Sixteen-year-old Joni Holland is haunted by the memory of the night, about a year ago, when her younger sister attempted suicide.

The night before, she had done the same.

She felt horrible, wretched from the previous nights attempt, whenshe overdosed on pills.But Joni went downstairs with her mother, Darla Holland, to check on her sister. Nicole, then 14, was non-responsive.

She had overdosedon pills.Nobody knew what pills Nicole took, or how many. Or what they should do.

Nicole Holland, 14, of Fremont talks about the night she took pills and almost died from a suicide attempt.

Nicole had tried to contactthree friends before taking the pills, reaching one and telling her she was going to commit suicide.

But she didnt confide in her older sister.

That hurt the most because Ive always protected her when she was scared, Joni saidas she, Nicole, and Darla sat on a couch in their Fremont home. And it was like, I cant protect my baby sister. And thats the worst thing I ever went through my whole life, knowing that I could not be there for my baby sister and that I could not protect her and stop what was happening.

The impact of suicide or attempted suicide can be devastating on a persons family, loved ones and co-workers.

Tim Wise, site director of Fremonts Firelands Recovery and Counseling Services, said friends and loved ones feel guilty when someone they care about attempts or commits suicide.

They feel as though they should have recognized what was going on and helped prevent it.

The sad reality is, sometimes people dont share the pain of whats going on in their lives, Wise said.

Unanswered questions

A suicide, or an attempt, raises more questions than it answers.

Sitting with her daughters at their Fremont home, Darla Holland said that, as an adult, she gets depressed.

But shes never attempted suicide and cannot imagine burdening others with a suicide attempt.

Holland watched her youngest daughter, Nicole, go from being sleepy and disoriented to hallucinating and eventually non-responsive after swallowing the pills.

After her two daughters attempted to commit suicide, Darla Holland said she dumped out a lot of the pills in the household. There are no more cold medicines or antihistamines in the house, she said, only prescribed medications. (Photo: Molly Corfman/The News-Messenger)

She wasn't sure what Nicole had taken or how many pills her daughter had ingested.

So she assessed her for an hour, called poison control and then took her to the hospital.

Nicole said she just remembers waking up and being in wheelchair in the hospital. Someone asked her if she could walk and she said no,she didnt think she could move her legs. She was told she needed to walk, Nicole said.

Darla remembered that her daughter kept crawling out of bed at the hospital.

Joni said Nicole showed, non-verbally. that she knew her older sister was there.

Every time I touched her hand and said her name, she had looked at me with those big wide eyes and she looked at me lovingly and she knew who I was. Even though she was delusional, she knew who I was, Joni said.

Since Nicole's suicide attempt, the sisters and their mother say they've made changes in words they use to each other and how they speak and act.

Darla said she dumped out a lot of the pills in the household. There are no more cold medicines orantihistamines in the house, she said, onlyprescribed medications.

Its too high of a risk, Darla said.

Fremont Fire Chief David Foos lost one of his firefighters to suicide. "He and I were in contact every shift seeing how things were going," Foos recalled. (Photo: Molly Corfman/The News-Messenger)

Ripple effect

When someone commits suicide, law enforcement and emergency responders are often the first ones on the scene. They're the ones who have to give family members and loved ones the crushing news.

Fremont Fire Chief David Foos said people dont understand the deep impact and ripple effect a suicide has on immediate family and first responders.

You dont understand unless youve been through it, he said.

Fremont Police Det. Jason Kiddey said hes personally dealt with suicidal subjects and has been to a lot of suicide scenes. Within the past year, Kiddey said he responded to a suicide where a man took his life with a firearm.

It can stay with you over the years, he said.

Its tough for officers to give death notifications to family members under those circumstances, Kiddey said.

The family often demands to know why their loved one would end their lives.

Foos still thinks about the firefighter in his department and his cousin, a former Fremont police officer, who committed suicide. He also had a good friend commit suicide.

The circumstances were different and the suicides took place several years apart, but Foos knows the anniversaries of their deaths and has a hard time on those days.

With the three people he knew and had close ties to, Foos wishes they had reached out to him or somebody else for help.

If any one of them had said, Hey, I could use a hand, people would have been jumping up to help them, Foos said.

Assistant Fire Chief Dean Schneider got a frantic phone call from his mother one night. She said Schneiders uncle, who lived in Westlake, was in a Lowe's parking lot in Sandusky and had threatened to take his own life. Molly Corfman/The News-Messenger

An uncle's desperate act

Assistant Fire Chief Dean Schneider got a frantic phone call from his mother one night.She said Schneiders uncle, who lived in Westlake,was in a Lowe's parking lot in Sandusky and had threatened to take his own life.

The uncle used to stop in atthe Fremont Fire Departments central headquarters all the time, Schneider said, and never gave any indication that something was wrong.

Schneider's mothers called the Perkins Township Police Department about her brother in law, who ran into an outdoor storage shed when he saw police coming.

Before an officer could reach him, there was a loud bang. His uncle had committed suicide.

So my mom calls me back in tears, sobbing that Uncle Bruce is gone, Schneider said.

What Schneider knows of his uncles final hours is limited.

The uncle, who had four siblingsincluding Schneiders father,went to a funeral in Port Clinton, then made his own funeral arrangements for reasons never completely clear to the family, Schneider said.

Schneiders uncle returned to Westlake and had an argument with his wife about making the funeral arrangements.

He decided to drive to Sandusky, and stopped on the way to buy a gun at a gun store.He left a note on the seat of his car.

That was it, Schneider said.

Schneider said he doesnt know if his uncle had health issues.

When he came through Fremont, Uncle Bruce used to drop off spice samples at the fire department, Schneider said, and he and other firefighters used the spices for cookouts and barbecues.

It was rough on everybody, just because I think it was so unexpected. To my knowledge, my uncle never talked to anyone about it, Schneider said.

He and the rest of the family were left to cope with the questions of why.

dacarson@gannett.com 419-334-1046 Twitter@DanielCarson7

mcorfman@gannett.com 419-334-1052 Twitter: @mollycorfman

ABOUT THE SERIES

Although many people don't want to talk about it, suicides and attempted suicides are a grim reality and a growing problem in Sandusky and Ottawa counties. Hotlines receive desperate calls for help every day, and emergency responders are dealing with increasing numbers of people on the verge of taking their own lives.

For this three-part series, The News-Messenger spoke to dozens of residents, mental health officials and police officers to shine a light on the dark and often overlooked crisis of suicide.

Help with mental health/suicideissues

NAMI crisis hotline 800-826-1306

Mental Health & Recovery Board of Erie and Ottawa Counties- (419) 627-1908/1-800-627-4999

Mental Health& Recovery Services Board of Seneca, Sandusky and Wyandot Counties- (419) 448-0640

Continued here:
Loved ones left with questions - Fremont News Messenger