What are wikis?

and we're gonna talk about it really fast. Yeah. Well, first, let's uh, let's go into a little listener mail. This listen mail comes from Matt from Boulder, Colorado, and Matt says, Hey, guys, I'm a high school science teacher and have been involved in a huge battle for the past couple of years. Throughout the year, I assigned some research projects for my students nuclear energy, sources of energy, physics of musical instruments,

et cetera. And when the students go to the computer line up to find information for their projects, the first website they jumped to is Wikipedia. No matter how hard I try to drill into their heads, that is not a valid source of info. They still use it. Since you guys do lots of research, could you explain to all of your young listeners out there the dangers of Wikipedia?

Thanks Matt Well. I think, um, before we get into that, I think what we should do is talk about wikis because, um, you know, Wikipedia is sort of a love hate thing with a lot of people, and we'll get into the reasons why. But the wiki itself is a pretty useful tool. Um. You know, it's it's essentially what it is is. Um, it's a wiki. It's a web page. Yeah, it's a web page. And um, actually I kind of think of it as sort of a microcosm of the web, because

you're creating your own version of the Worldwide Web. Every time you create a page on a wiki, you can link it to the other pages on the wiki, and it could be on anything and everything. We'll tell you why. I got a great idea. Okay, let's uh just gonna take you right over here. Right, you see where I'm leading you, right to the machine over here. I'll get into the way back. Okay, there you go. All right,

I'm done, I'll get in all right. I'm setting this for nine and we're gonna travel through time and space because we're going to Hawaii. Oh man, smell that fresh air, not like Atlanta at all, cold cold Atlanta. And now we're in Hawaii, and and it's great because you know as soon as you step out of the time machine, they're waiting there with you know, decorative lace and the co couldnut drinks and its breast skirts and the sea turtles and the spam and the boys. Pardon me, I

need to get a big rock and break the time machine. Yeah. I don't want to go back either, all right. But the reason why I brought you here was to point out, well, there's one there's when you see the bus over there, you see what the name is on that bus. It's hard to be account from here. It says wiki because

I k I it means it's an expression for quick. Oh. That explains why I was going quickly right and so in n which would be of course today, because we took the way back machine word Cunningham, Uh, Cunningham Cunningham or cunning Ham if you prefer, I was pronouncing it the correct way. He um. He came up with this idea.

Now he was uh. He used his software developing skills and his web developing skills to create the first wiki, which was his way of creating an environment where a lot of people could share ideas and information in a in a collaborative way, um, without having to worry about everyone logging into a separate thing and then one person taking all of those different pieces and then incorporating them together.

That wastes a lot of time, you know, you have to rely on one person to take all the different pieces and and patch something together from them. So he created the first wiki. Uh. And then not that long afterward, the first public wiki, called the Portland's Pattern Repository shows up. And uh, Now Ward's wiki is still active. Yes, so you can actually even visit it. Um It's worldwide wiki, isn't it? Um? Actually? And I didn't write that down? Well,

we keep talking, all right, I'll keep talking. So here's Ward's idea is that he thinks that if he creates this sort of a web environment where anyone can come to the web environment and edit things or upload information, um, alter things that are already there. Maybe something is interesting but it's not really pertinent to that particular discussion, that should have its own page. They could create the page for that. They could link everything to each other. Um

and uh and it takes off. Yes, have you found it? I'm still looking cud grief too, Yes, okay, because it's from Cunningham and Cunningham Incorporated. Ah, there that makes sense. Two dot com. So this, this idea catches on and becomes a great way for people to collaborate and build information. Um and it could be the subject could be anything. There are a lot of companies that have wikis, including how stuff works. We have a wiki. We did We use to to keep check to see it right, Yeah,

you can't, but we can. That's that's the other thing is that wikies don't are not necessarily public. You might have to sign in in order to have access to a wiki. They're a great tool for people to use on their intranet where uh they could share information with one another and update that the item. Uh. You know, I have give access to every day employees to let them update the database rather than having to you know, have one person do that, which you know, as we

mentioned before, it takes a lot of time. Yeah, you might have things like company policies on there that might change over time, and or you might have uh, um, you know, other things like employee contact lists stuff like that where it makes it easy for someone to come in and make a make a change. Let's say that, um,

you've recently moved and you need to update your address. Well, instead of emailing one person who is the keeper of the list, it might be on a wiki where you can just go and log in and uh and make a quick change. We'll tell you what. Let's uh, I guess, we guess we have to go back. Well, it's also yeah, and we're in We're in Hawaii and there's a lot of sun. All right, let's get on in. Come on, let's go back to you. You are oil man. It's tough coming back anyway. You're going ahead and get out.

I'll come on, come on. We can't do that alright. So we have this web collaboration tool that various companies and organizations start using in order to build communal um information. Yes, sectors. I guess you could say. It's kind of hard to to put a your finger on it. Like you said, it is kind of like a miniature worldwide web. Um, yeah, it's it's it's funny because it's in a way it's

like a web page. Because wikis generally, especially software used specifically to create a wiki, something like media wiki, which is UM, the software used to build Wikipedia. UM. You can it's free for you to use. You can install it on your own website to use UM. It has markup in it to UM. The way you create and you know, add a link to copy on the page or or you know, add some information to the page is kind of similar to HTML. UM. It's it's not

exactly the same. But if you you know, want to uh add a link to copy, for example, you just UM, you know, put a tag around where the copy is and add the link in there and it's ready to go. And as a matter of fact, is a little simpler even then using HTML right, and you can host files and things on a on a server and links to

it through the wiki. So UM, but it's not exactly it's not exactly the same thing as the UH as the World Wide Web, and it's also not as uh, you know, real time is something like I don't know, Google Wave, where you have, you know, a wave going on and people can make changes to it at the same time. It's not and it does not date like that, though I would say that Google Wave definitely must have been in the developers Google Wave had to be inspired

by wikis. It's pretty clear, yeah it's wiki, Like, yeah, it's a it's definitely spawn of wiki. But now let's move on. Now that we kind of talked about what a wicki is and that it's, you know, a communally operated and maintained source of information of some sort, let's let's sort of segue into Wikipedia itself. Now, Wikipedia was the brainchild of a couple of different people, Jimmy Wales and Lawrence Singer Um, but it it kind of rose up out of the failure of another enterprise. That enterprise

was called nupedia right now. Nupedia was created back in two thousand and that was supposed to be an encyclopedia kind of resource, much like Wikipedia turned out to be. But the major difference was Nupedia was supposed to have expert written and peer reviewed articles in it, So we're talking about stuff that's written by people who are recognized as experts in whatever field it happens to be, and that it went everything was supposed to go through a

pretty rigorous review process. The problem with that is that it's slow. It takes a lot of time to generate that kind of content, to review it to make sure that everything is accurate, and then to upload. It's no, see, it's not wicky at all, it um it is. However, how certain sites like how stuff Works does things. Yes, you know, we we make sure that we'll all of our articles are we write our articles, we we research write them and then edit them before they ever go

up on the site, and they are reviewed. Um. For example, Jonathan gets you know, a certain amount of time to write an article, and then he gives it to me. Well, once I've had an opportunity to you know, make changes to that basically replace all the words in there with my own. Um. I almost made a spit take if I had time. That just right, you always take out

the word poopy. Um. Once I've had an opportunity to edit the article, we send it to another editor who has an opportunity to go through and make sure that everything is okay, that nothing stands out as uh uh, you know, being grammatically incorrect or having voice or having the wrong voice, or a flaw and logic or something um so, which you know does happen never in Jonathan's articles of Um, I never use logic, but well, we do that before it's even even published, and then we

have our publishing operations team take the article and actually put it on the website itself. And this does not happen in a span of twenty four hours. No, this is this process from the moment when someone gets an assignment to the moment when it goes up on the site. Can be usually it's right around two to three weeks generally, but it can be longer. I mean, we schedule things out well ahead of time in order to because we take that into account. Well, when new Pedia launched after

six months, do you know how many articles they published? Seven? Too many? You you you're, you're That numbers too high. Six months, six months, because the process was very rigorous. So they started to uh to think, you know, this project is gonna take a really long time to get off the ground. Maybe we should look at some alternatives

in the meantime. And that's when they started to think about creating a resource where anyone could come in and write an article about a particular subject, and anyone else could come in and edit that article and contribute his or her own information to that article. And that became the basis of Wikipedia. Well, that that should be really cool because they're all kinds of people who are not involved in projects projects like this, who probably have some

kind of expertise with the topics being explained. Right, So theoretically, uh, you know, I could be writing an article about, say, roller coasters, and a physicist mat might read that and say, oh no, no, You've got most of this right. But this one section on on inertial velocity is is wrong. Let me fix that for you. That should that should be a good thing, because that way it would be more accurate, and in most cases it is a good thing. The philosophy that this is based on is called the

wisdom of the crowd. So the idea being here that that if you think of Wikipedia as a resource that any human being could access and contribute to, then eventually, as an article develops over time, you should get the best information about that particular subject that is out there because the people who are doing the research, the people who really know what they're talking about, can contribute. So uh, over the long run, any particular articles should be the

best article that you could possibly find. There's some problems with this though, during the short run. One is that you can have someone post incorrect information a right Another is you can have someone with a personal agenda come in and post information that that presents a particular subject

in a good or bad light. Um, yeah, you know, I've I've actually had Laura Eats slugs problem with that because I've gone in and found information Wait a minute, that wasn't actually pertinent to the article right there in the middle, right, Laura, You're gross. I literally have you need to come to an article and in the middle of the copy was somebody essentially not not in the Internet sense, tagging the article with some slur against someone else that would have nothing to do with the article.

So vandalism is a problem. Yes, that would be factually inaccurate or intentionally factually inaccurate right now now, Because you have a community of users who are who are maintaining Wikipedia. Uh, most of the time these problems will be found pretty quickly,

relatively quickly and fixed. But if you have someone who's really determined to make a mess of things, that could be an issue for a while until they figure out a way of either banning that person or actually taking the article off from not not removing it from Wikipedia, but moving people's ability to edit that article. Changes might get kept on articles. We've seen that happen particularly with

individuals who are still alive. Anyone who's still alive, that that an article based on that person often will get frozen so that no one can can contribute to it. So that way, if someone does have a personal grudge against that that particular individual, they can't just go in there and and UH completely um ruined that person's reputation

through various slurs and insults. And these things are particularly um active in cases in which and at least ones I've seen politicians like last last year in the United or not last year, but two years ago now already um,

you know, the United States presidential elections. Basically anybody who was related to the candidates UH had to have their profiles for frozen to keep people from going in and you know, saying all kinds of things about them, you know, true and false things that it may not be pertinent to the actual entry. You know, everybody involved, so you know, it wasn't just one side, It was pretty much every side.

But we've seen this even through things that aren't even involved in politics, like corporations try to either um to censor information that that is harmful to that corporation, or to boost the corporation by including almost ad copy type stuff in their their articles. Yes, I'm sure that if you go to the entry for how Stuff works dot com you will find out that tech stuff is the best podcast offered by the site. I'm just saying, I don't know how that information would have gotten in there

if it is still there. But you know, it wasn't really there. No, I was just wondering being funny. You never trying to be funny. I was about to go back and look at the revision history. The revision history is actually one of the good things about Wikipedia that is very useful. The revision history keep track of all the changes that are made to an article. So if someone does go in and commit some sort of vandalism or you know, users notice something and they think it's

a little questionable, they can flag the article. Um It's easy enough to go back through the revision history and see when, uh that that change was put in and who did it, and to change it back if necessary, So they have a lot of protections there in place. UM. Now, let's kind of get into the whole reason about why you should not use Wikipedia as a source in things like schoolwork and why how stuff works. Dot Com does

not use Wikipedia. There are a couple of reasons. One is the malleable nature of Wikipedia that we've already mentioned is that you know, one, it's impossible to determine on on any particular day that the article you are reading is accurate and factual. Too, even if it is accurate and factual, that article may look totally different tomorrow. So if you cite an article but then the site disappears because someone's made an edit and has removed that part

of the article, your your source no longer exists. Yep. I mean you could go through the revision history and try and find it, but that starts getting really kind of complicated. Three, it's not a primary source. And Wikipedia actually spells this out if you go to Wikipedia and you read what Wikipedia is not. One of the things Wikipedia is not is a primary source. Now, what that means is that Wikipedia is not a place to publish

something for the very first time. You if you were to do a scientific study, you would not publish the findings of that study in Wikipedia before you published it anywhere else. You would have to have it published in a peer of view journal or some other format. Before you could reference it in Wikipedia, and you wouldn't be able to publish it if you put it in a peer of view journal. They would never like you put the entire full text of THEIA, but you could at

least reference the findings you could. Now that's I think that alone state is a reason why no one should use that in any kind of schoolwork or for house stuff works dot com. Just the fact that it's not a primary source um. Usually, whenever I have actually thinking back on it, I can't think of a single time I was a signed of paper where I was told that I could use anything other than primary sources. I

could only use primary sources. Now what that means is you can go to Wikipedia and look at the sources that Wikipedia used, the people who created that article, and track those back and see if those have merit um. In most cases you should find that they are coming from reputable sources. Once in a while, you might come across something that was written by you know, some Yahoo and then you you may not want to use that as a primary source. But that's that's another good example

for all students out there. I mean, Wikipedia is maybe just uh kind of like a cliffs notes thing. I don't like the idea of using it other than just to go to the bottom and look at the source list. Yeah, it's it's extremely useful as the source of primary sources, right, and it can also uh well, I wouldn't use it as uh a source for something that I wrote for publication. Um. It is useful to to give you an idea of

a concept. I mean if you have no if you're assigned to write of paper on something specific and you really don't have any understanding of it, you might use Wikipedia as an opportunity to learn a little bit about what to expect. When you're doing research on the topic. You can kind of do a little uh quick and dirty, well, you know, what is this thing about, and then once you have an idea of it, you might be able to go find some primary sources to give you authoritative

uh information. That's another good point. That another thing that they that Wikipedia and the Wikipedia is not folder or or article rather, um it states that Wikipedia is not meant for people who are experts in whatever particular field that article addresses. So in other words, if you're reading an article about electricity, you shouldn't have to be an electrician or someone with an events degree in physics in order to understand it. So, um, yeah, it is a

good introductory element. It's a good way of looking for primary sources, not necessarily the best if you want to cite something in an in a academic paper or what we do here at how stuff works. So I I've often I know that my criticism of Wikipedia in the past has come across as Wikipedia is a bad thing. I don't really think Wikipedia is a bad thing. I just think it's not. It's not entirely reliable now, and I think it's it's not really it's not really Wikipedia,

and it's not the organization behind Wikipedia. It's people who go in and mess with it, and people who go in to write articles that aren't, you know, factually accurate. Yeah. I I've seen articles on Wikipedia that We're just a joke,

and they were funny. But and and of course, the the community did the right thing and eventually took the page down, which um, I was sad about at the time, But at the same time I was like, well, if Wikipedia didn't take that page down, then the entire community becomes a joke, not just that page, because they said, well, look, we're we know this isn't real, but we're gonna let it slide. That's that's they can't be taken seriously if

they do that. So they made the right choice. But um, I will add to though that the uh that other people are starting to take this kind of thinking and apply it to their own products and services, like for example, Britannica dot com announced a while back now, um I guess it's probably a couple of years now, um that they were going to allow people to uh contribute to Britannic you know, Britannica online. And you're going, wait a minute, I mean, this is like the ultimate peer reviewed, high

end encyclopedia. Why would they do this, Well, they're not publishing changes before those changes are reviewed by an expert as well, so they are they have put in that that extra layer of well, hey, if you know something about this, please tell us, but we're going before we publish this, we're going to check it out and make

sure that it's accurate. And Jimmy Wales has suggested that the opposite might end up being used over at Wikipedia, where they might try and get experts for certain kinds of articles to review them and make sure everything is accurate. So In other other words, the two different encyclopedia are becoming more and more like each other, which is remarkable when you think about it. Um, there are other things you can use wikis for besides just an information source.

You know, people are using them to write novels, um and there be because they allow contributions, so you can have a collaborative novel. That's one of the more interesting um uses I've seen for wiki software. My favorite wiki was introduced to me today. Oh what is it? Dc Wilson of our our beloved Tracy. She sent me a link to ten word wiki. It's a wiki wiki that is sort of like an encyclopedia, but every single entry in the wiki is only ten words long, and many

of them are halarious. So I do recommend the tin word wiki if you want to kill an hour or two looking up. And of course, just like Wikipedia, it's a lot easier to find the pop culture reference stuff than anything else on there. Um that that is one other thing I did want to add, just really quickly. The the other danger of having a community oriented encyclopedia is that you're gonna get entries that uh that if you were to to judge the entry by the length,

how many words are in there. You would start to get the feeling that, um, certain pop culture items are far more important to us than say, the founding fathers of the United States of America. Then you do a search on the founding fathers and you might find articles that are a few, you know, two thousand to four

thousand words long. That's a pretty good long article. But then you look for optimist Prime and it has over seven thousand words, and you're thinking, wow, optimist Prime must have been really important if the Founding Fathers of America only warrant two to four thousand words. Yep, yep, Um, I mean there is more than meets the eye, So I guess there's that. Um. I realized that it's not probably technically a wicky, but one of my favorites. Um, well,

there's the Encyclopedia, which is which is quite entertaining. And you know, I like, uh, the Muppet wiki over at wikia dot com, which is a hosting site for many many wikies. Um, and uh, I don't know that it's technically a wicky, but everything to dot com is very very like a wiki. If it's not technically considered one, I don't think it's actually using one of the wiki platforms. But um, those have that that side has many humorous

uh topics written in there. And to say you would never use it as a resource, I mean maybe a resource for entertainment, but you know, people are using the top the concept you know of of user generated content in this environment to uh, you know, for all kinds of really good things. And it's just it's fast and easy to learn and jump in and contribute to. So you know, it's it's a neat idea. Yep. Well, Matt, I hope that answers your question. Uh. And and Matt's

students don't use Wikipedia as a prime source. It's not meant for that. Um. But that leads us to our second round of listener mail. This comes from Jamal from Delray Beach, Florida, and Jamal says, hey, there, Chris and Jonathan. My name is Jamal, and I just recently discovered the text of podcast and love it. My question is about computer processors and hard drives. Until recently, processors and drives were increasing in powering capacity at a near exponential rate.

Hard Drives are currently up to two terabytes and storage space and show no signs of slowing down. However, processors have stalled at around three point eight giga hurts and processing power. To skirt this limitation, CPU manufacturers are introducing dual core and quad core processors. I believe there is a scientific law that explains how a hard drive or CPU would increase in storage capacity or processing power exponentially.

My question is how do scientists and or manufacturers go about increasing hard drive storage space and maintain the small size of the hardware. And why have computer processors reached the ceiling of three point eight gigga hurts. I hope my question makes sense. I only revised it eight times. Love the show. And then he goes on to say that he remembered the scientific law as Moore's law. So Moore's law is not really a scientific law. It's more

of a self fulfilling prophecy and an observation UM. And the observation was that over a given amount of time, the number of transistors on a chip would double, And that given amount of time has changed over the years between twelve months to twenty four months, depending on when you're looking at it. UM. In general, the way these processing microprocess or plants go as they find new ways to create smaller transistors, and then that's that's called a tick round. The tick is when you find a new

way to create smaller transistors. And then the talk round would be ways of creating an architecture that maximizes the efficiency of those transistors. So TikTok, TikTok, and Uh, the Nehalem processor that Intel came out with was a tick round. The next one will be a talk around where they they maximize the potential of that. Uh, we're getting to a limit just because we're getting two transistors that are

so small that it's there. Another major breakthrough is going to have to happen in order to make transistors even smaller if we want to fit them on the same size chips that we've been using in the past. Um, the different cores are a way of kind of getting around that. That also requires that we go about a different way of programming. And if I'm not mistaken, there's a certain point at which the materials inside the processor gets so small that electrons begin to leak. Yeah. It

uses electron tunneling, which is a quantum physics concept. Yeah, and you can get around that using different materials can can limit electron tunneling UM, and it may end up being that the next step is to find uh something that is um is different from a transistor entirely, which sounds crazy, but then you think, well, before transistors, there

were vacuum tubes. It's not like it's unprecedented. It just would require something that we don't have enough knowledge of right now to to say this is gonna be it. So it may be that we hit a maybe not a plateau, but a much slower increase in power over the next few years. Doesn't necessarily mean More's law will totally go away. Because engineers are brilliant. They find neat

ways around problems. That's what they do, So uh, I would I wouldn't be surprised to see it stretch out a little longer UM, although I also have predicted the end of Moore's law just like every other gym list over the last twenty years. Well thanks a lot, Jamal. I hope that answers your question. If any of you have questions, write us our email addresses tex stuff at

how stuff works dot com. Chris and I always like to hear your comments, and uh go over to the website read some stuff about wiki's we got an article written there by the site founder Marshall Brain, so check that out and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the House stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the

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