Tag: Infogalactic

Infogalactic: Forkbot is go!

Rifleman and the Techstars are very pleased to report that the much-awaited dynamic forking tool is not only complete, not only tested, but is now operational. You can see the results here.

What this means is that Infogalactic will always be entirely up-to-date with Wikipedia across all five million+ pages, including the newest ones, except for those where the Infogalactic editors have improved upon specific pages.

This is probably the most significant step for The Planetary Knowledge Core since we first turned it on.

Open Brainstorm tonight

Just a reminder that if you want to know what Brainstorm is like, you have a chance to see for yourself tonight. We’ll be having an open Brainstorm about Infogalactic tonight at 7 PM Eastern. Rifleman and I will be talking about the latest additions to the project, what is currently in development, and what we plan to do next. You can register for it here.

The disruption continues

A reader comments:

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is on BBC1 flagship news program. Talking about Wikipedia’s new and revolutionary innovation, a news page on Wikipedia.

Where have I heard that before?

It’s interesting to see that both Twitter and Wikipedia are already having to play catch-up with to Gab and Infogalactic with regards to features. And the disruption of the two social media giants has barely begun.

We’ll be having an open Brainstorm about Infogalactic tomorrow evening at 7 PM Eastern. Rifleman and I will be talking about the latest additions to the project, what is currently in development, and what we plan to do next. You may have noticed some new ads, particularly if you happen to visit one of the 10,237 (video game) or (computer game) pages. (Before you helpfully “alert” us to anything, please note that pages such as World of Warcraft, which lack any such appellation, are not included in those, because the Wikimedia engine is woefully outdated.)

And, of course, you can always keep up on current world events with Infogalactic News. We got off track over the Easter holidays, but that will not happen again, as we will be adding more volunteer news editors soon.

The horror scenario

It’s interesting to see that the core concept of Infogalactic is Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s horror scenario:

I talk about the horror scenario of going to a candidate’s webpage and depending on who you were you get a different message and that is just marketing 101 for the political websites out there. So we need to rethink the way we have built society on top of the web.

But why shouldn’t people see what they prefer to see? Why should they be forced to see what Sir Tim, or the 512 Wikipedia admins want them to see?

How Wikipedia determines reliability

Even I didn’t realize things were this bad at Wikipedia:

In the modern world, bigoted oddballs who are over-familiar with the internet can wield tremendous power — and this potty-mouthed man is a case in point. For when he’s not posting obscene images or racist sentiments, Cockram is a regular editor of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, where (according to multiple posts on his Facebook feed) he operates under the alias ‘Hillbillyholiday’.

Last month, ‘Hillbillyholiday’ was the architect of a cynical PR stunt which saw this newspaper publicly smeared by damning its journalism ‘unreliable’. He and 52 like-minded anti-Press zealots, almost all of whom remain anonymous, collaborated in a vote which persuaded Wikipedia, the sixth most popular website in the world, that it ought to ban the Daily Mail.

The move by the online encyclopedia — which was founded in 2001 and has in a few short years become a hugely influential source of information — was revealed in the pages of the Left-wing Guardian newspaper. It reported that Wikipedia’s editors had decided, in a democratic ballot, that the Mail’s journalism cannot be trusted.

No statistics were offered in support of this claim, which, incidentally, came days before the Mail won Sports Newspaper Of The Year for an unprecedented fourth straight time, and was shortlisted for 15 awards at the British Press Awards, the news industry’s Oscars. (Indeed, as we shall see, the Mail has an enviable record on accuracy.)

Neither did Wikipedia, nor The Guardian, bother to shed much light on how this decision was reached. If they had, then it would have become apparent to readers that this supposed exercise in democracy took place in virtual secrecy, and that Wikipedia’s decision to censor the Mail — the only major news outlet on the face of the Earth to be so censored — was supported by a mere 53 of its editors, or 0.00018 per cent of the site’s 30 million total, plus five ‘administrators’.

Five thought police plus 53 editors is enough to permanently nuke a source for “reliability”. This fact alone is sufficient cause to justify, if not demand, the creation of Infogalactic.

Infogalactic: a new front page

It looks very much like the Wikipedia front page, but it is actually a very much-improved version that represents the first step towards replacing the Wikimedia engine with DONTPANIC. It also draws its news directly from the Infogalactic News page. Check it out!

On this day…
March 1
752 BC – Romulus, legendary first king of Rome, celebrates the first Roman triumph after his victory over the Caeninenses, following The Rape of the Sabine Women.
509 BC – Publius Valerius Publicola, Roman consul, celebrates the first triumph of the Roman Republic after his victory over the deposed king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus at the Battle of Silva Arsia.
1633 – Samuel de Champlain reclaims his role as commander of New France on behalf of Cardinal Richelieu.
1642 – Georgeana, Massachusetts (now known as York, Maine), becomes the first incorporated city in the United States.
1781 – The Continental Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation.
1815 – Napoleon returns to France from his banishment on Elba, start of the Hundred Days.
1932 – Charles Lindbergh’s son is kidnapped.

If you’ve got ideas for anything you’d prefer to see on the front page, make a suggestion in the comments below. Also, at the Brainstorm last night, we decided to kill the Rehash name for the coming Reddit-style addition, because lame. We haven’t settled on a new name yet.

Also, we’re still looking for more veteran Reddit mods to volunteer to run Infogalactic mods, so if you’re interested, get in touch.

The Techstars announced that Infogalactic News will be receiving a “last update” time and Dow, Gold, and EUR/USD tickers soon, and that we will be adding Infogalactic Tech, Infogalactic Nouvelles, and Infogalactic Nachtrichten pages once we finish the version 2 News Editor.

As always, if you want to get involved and support these efforts, please consider joining the Burn Unit. It is the nuclear fuel that powers Infogalactic.

Announcing INFOGALACTIC NEWS

Team Infogalactic is very pleased to announce INFOGALACTIC NEWS, a Drudge-style news aggregation site for the center-right reader. Infogalactic News features 11 news headlines and 36 featured columnists and news sites for fast, one-stop news updates. The site is curated by 14 IG News editors who will provide twice-daily regular updates, plus fast-response special updates for breaking news. We hope you will be find it to be worthy of bookmarking and visiting regularly.

You can reach it from here using the permanent link on the right sidebar near the top, under Day Trips. See the line Infogalactic | News.

One important feature, from the Alt-Tech perspective, is that all news links to mainstream news articles will automatically redirect to archive sites, thereby ensuring that the news stories are not retroactively altered, as so often happens. This feature has not been fully implemented yet, but will be in place by the end of the week. Other incipient features include tickers for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the EUR/USD exchange rate, and the price of gold. We also plan to allow people to select the font they prefer, and to provide links to Infogalactic pages related to the headline subjects.

The Drudge Report has traffic of 2.7 billion pageviews per month. Our goal is to hit 1 billion pageviews by the end of 2017. In this regard, it is interesting to note that in only four months, Infogalactic’s average daily traffic has already surpassed that of the 90k daily pageviews of this blog.

We have received a few requests for foreign language variants, which strikes us as a good idea, so if you’re interested, round up at least six fellow native speakers to serve as fellow news editors, then get in touch with us. Dread Ilk and VFM are vastly preferred to head up these foreign language sites.

Sidebar and site advertising is available for those who are interested, and, as always, if you’re interested in supporting these efforts to improve upon and replace the opposition media, please consider joining the Burn Unit.

Wikipedia bans Daily Mail

Yet another reason to prefer Infogalactic to Wikipedia: the latter’s heavily biased, increasingly inaccurate, ironically named “reliable source” standard:

Wikipedia editors have voted to ban the Daily Mail as a source for the website in all but exceptional circumstances after deeming the news group “generally unreliable”.

The move is highly unusual for the online encyclopaedia, which rarely puts in place a blanket ban on publications and which still allows links to sources such as Kremlin backed news organisation Russia Today, and Fox News, both of which have raised concern among editors.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia but does not control its editing processes, said in a statement that volunteer editors on English Wikipedia had discussed the reliability of the Mail since at least early 2015.

It said: “Based on the requests for comments section [on the reliable sources noticeboard], volunteer editors on English Wikipedia have come to a consensus that the Daily Mail is ‘generally unreliable and its use as a reference is to be generally prohibited, especially when other more reliable sources exist’.

“This means that the Daily Mail will generally not be referenced as a ‘reliable source’ on English Wikipedia, and volunteer editors are encouraged to change existing citations to the Daily Mail to another source deemed reliable by the community. This is consistent with how Wikipedia editors evaluate and use media outlets in general – with common sense and caution.”

Infogalactic has a vastly superior standard: truth. This sort of SJW thought-policing is why Infogalactic is eventually going to replace Wikipedia; it is only a matter of time. It’s particularly ironic that this article originally appeared in The Guardian, which has got to be the least reliable source among newspapers that one can hope to find since the demise of the Soviet Union.

Speaking of Infogalactic, it is soon going to launch Infogalactic News, a dynamic Drudge-style page that will be actively curated and update twice per day. It will feature 36 permalinks to sites and commenters that are mostly not available at Drudge, including this one, so we hope you’ll make it your primary news page. We need a few more news editors to round out the full week, so if you’re VFM and you want a regular turn at the wheel, email me with your VFM # in the subject and whether you prefer 12 midnight to 12 noon or 12 noon to 12 midnight, both EST. Each editor will be responsible for keeping the page up-to-date for one 12-hour period per week.

On a tangential note, full dynamic auto-forking will be also operational within a few weeks. And if you haven’t joined the Burn Unit yet, please consider doing so. We’ve been growing steadily, but once News and Forkbot go live, the traffic is going to explode, so we’ll need the Burn Unit to grow accordingly.

A more accurate knowledge core

We’ve added some important features to Infogalactic. First, you’ve probably noticed that it’s running considerably faster. While it’s still not quite as fast as Wikipedia, we’re obtaining our speed through significantly improved database efficiency rather than through gargantuan and expensive caching. Believe it or not, we’re actually using slightly fewer server-side resources than we were when it was running much more slowly. We’ll continue to add additional improvements, but they’ll tend to be more marginal as we’ve already addressed the biggest bottlenecks.

Second, dynamic forking is now operative in a limited capacity. We’re not turning anything on yet, but within a month or so, we’ll be keeping constantly up-to-date with Wikipedia on pages the Galaxians haven’t touched, and on pages that have been edited, manual dynamic forking will be at the disposal of certain active editors.

Third, we now have sidebar banners operative. Some of them may amuse you. Castalia authors should be sure to get their Infogalactic pages up now, as they will be provided with free sidebar banners for the books they publish with us.

And finally, another example of how Infogalactic is fundamentally more accurate than Wikipedia due to the latter’s insistence on unreliable Reliable Sources.

Robert Heinlein on Wikipedia

Heinlein became one of the first science-fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science-fiction novelists for many decades, and he, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are often considered the “Big Three” of science fiction authors.[5][6]

Robert Heinlein on Infogalactic


He was one of the first science fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science fiction novelists for many decades, and he, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are often erroneously considered to be the “Big Three” of science fiction authors.[5][6]. The original “Big Three” were actually Heinlein, Asimov, and A.E. van Vogt.[7]

This is what winning the cultural war looks like. Getting the facts straight one at a time.