For the past year or so I've been wasting away my free time editing Wikipedia. I have found it to be quite fun and I like doing so, however Wikipedia has a plentitude of problems, which are only getting worse (centralization, censorship, shady donation business and more), so I want to find some other interesting projects, that I could contribute to. On Wikipedia I mostly edited computer science/otaku-related articles, since that is what I'm the most knowledgeable about. The purpose of this thread is NOT to compile a big list of Wikis, but rather to discuss what Wikis are particularly good to edit.
Some Wikis, that I can recall from the top of my mind are:
I like the Shikadi DOS Games Modding wiki. But updates from anyone are pretty infrequent because of the information being very niche and usually requiring a lot of personal research time.
There's also an adjacent Commander Keen wiki that's pretty much the place to go if you want to find Keen mods. But I only bother with reading that one, not editing.
the best way to use wikis is for trolling, terroediting is the best think to do
Some more Wikis I came across:
While the Thinkpad Wiki sounds in theory interesting, it is has two problems. One being, that you can't register yourself really, as long as you don't reveal your real name to the Admin, which I certainly won't do. Other than that, the Wiki itself is fine.
The SigID Wiki is very nice. You can edit without an account, but you may create one without any further problems. The Wiki itself is neatly organized and the signals are well documented. There seems to be an active, albeit small, community surrounding it too. I don't know much about Signals, so I can't really contribute besides minor editors like fixing spelling mistakes, but I might contribute more once I gained enough knowledge about it. Bonus points for using the Monobook theme.
There is also the DelphiGL Wiki, which is a German wiki concerning programming with OpenGL. It's quite old, but still helpful. You have to be part of their forum for a week and contribute, I think, at least 10 posts to be allowed to edit their forum. The obvious downside is the language barrier and, that it requires you to be part of their forum, but otherwise I don't see much issue with this. The articles seem to be written in a more laid-back and relaxed way with many jokes inbetween the pile of technical info.
Apparently there is a new /g/-Wiki at https://igwiki.lyci.de/wiki/Main_Page. I've been spending the whole noon looking for stuff to edit, albeit I'm not sure whether it's worth it, or whether it will die again. It's weird, because the old /g/-Wiki still exists and is still accessible, but they made a new one. I don't know if there was some technical issue or interpersonal issue, but it seems weird to me.
Touhou Wiki editor here, we'd love to have you, consider making the Discord account at some point - we won't bite
> Japan is an unhappy culture. The people are lonely and depressed, and the Internet is a release valve
This is probably the main reason why people come to textboards, imageboards, forums, instant messaging groups, and other online communication mediums.
The Japanese just have a higher percentage of lonely depressed people, but these kinds of people exist all over the world and they want a connection.
The average person who has a real social life doesn't feel the need to talk to strangers on the internet... unless he feels restricted by real life's social norms (i.e. he doesn't feel like he can be himself around other people, or he is a strange Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of person).
This is only slightly related but important to point out: the more "lonely and depressed" people use the internet as a release and immerse themselves in underground subcultures, the more they will feel different from the rest of the world and view themselves as outcasts or freaks.
https://www.wired.com/2008/05/mf-hiroyuki/
Source of the quote
Hiroyuki is a buffoon pundit, don't take ANYTHING he says seriously.
The internet isn’t an escape from loneliness and depression. Its the cause. What makes Western societies unique is that they have always taken the individual, the single person, as the basic unit of society. This individual is like an atom. It exists by itself and can make autonomous decisions. Whereas, in China, India etc. the self is always networked. A person is in part made up of the relations they have with others and they cannot exist as a full person without them e.g. the 5 relations of Confucius. Another feature of Western individualism is the distinction between an authentic self and an inauthentic public persona which is simply the image you present to others to seem professional, normal etc.
Computer tech is individualistic, everyone has a personal computer and the stuff on their hard drives and what they do online is private. Its not a shared activity, like sitting around the family hearth. The idea of the internet was that it would liberate people’s authentic self from their public persona, allowing them to be free. You don’t have to conform and can express your own individuality. You can see this clearly with imageboards and textboards e.g. the hostility to normalfags, transgenders who can separate their inner self from their body and act out in their ideal gender.
The side effect of this individualism is that it creates loneliness and stress. Its extremely unnatural to most human cultures. The internet atomizes people, creating loneliness. We then try to cure this loneliness by reaching out for social connection via the internet because its what we know best. The irony is that what we have is a big crowd where people are deprived of the tools to make meaningful connections. So we just wind up digging ourselves deeper and deeper. And since Western individualism has conquered every developed country, there’s no alternative.
> Another feature of Western individualism is the distinction between an authentic self and an inauthentic public persona which is simply the image you present to others to seem professional, normal etc.
The opposite. In Western society there is a focus on "being yourself" (a result of individualism), meaning making your public persona match your inner persona. In Japan the distinction between inner and outer persona that you mentioned in your post is a widely recognized phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honne_and_tatemae
I'm not sure why you turned this thread into a discussion about Western individualism vs Asian collectivism because it doesn't have much to do with that. Even the most collective Asians would be glad to step out of their public-facing personas, which is exactly why 2ch and anonymous internet boards took off in Japan in the first place.
Your response sounds a bit like its coming from someone who idealizes Japan and is searching for a way to make them the good ones and Westerners the bad ones. . .
>Your response sounds a bit like its coming from someone who idealizes Japan and is searching for a way to make them the good ones and Westerners the bad ones. . .
You mean the backwards? It sounds like the usual 4chan Japan bashing.
But more than anything, the posts you're making are just shit regurgiatetd from elsewhere.
No personal thoughs, just altering other people's already altered scripts.
>The opposite. In Western society there is a focus on "being yourself"
You're right. But that demand to be yourself is based on making a distinction between a true inner self and a false public persona. Its usually accepted that we have to put up a public face for professional reasons, but we're also told to be our authentic selves too. Seeing things in terms of Western individualism vs Asian collectivism is misguided. Yes, there are differences between America and Japan but both are liberal democratic states with liberal legal systems where the individual is taken to be the basic unit of society. If you look at American and Japanese pop culture, you'll see a "be your self" attitude everywhere. So you're right that it has very little to do with it. I use the "Western individualism" because I think this type of individualism has a Western history, in the Protestant Reformation, before it globalized.
I brought up individualism because I think its the cultural context that shaped the design of computers and the internet. In the 90s and 2000s, it was really believed that the internet would be a tool of freedom. It would allow people to express their true self without the masks they wear in public and without the budrens of a physical body with biological limits. As this technology has taken over more aspects of life, everything from shopping to sex, we experience less physical connection and more lonliness. We can't just turn the machine off and go outside because virtually everything is online now. The internet created mass social isolation and we wind up trying to solve this by reaching out over the internet. There's a tendency out there that says society was bad and we use the internet as an escape. This is only half true. We designed the internet to serve an ideological end and its created social problems that drive more chronic internet addiction.
>>7
Good points.
> We designed the internet to serve an ideological end and its created social problems that drive more chronic internet addiction.
I started out wanting to talk about how losers with no friends come to the internet for company. I'm glad you brought up these other points that I didn't think of.
Whenever I look through textboards - and sometimes when I look through small imageboards - I get a strange feeling of possibility. Like I'm browsing the internet for the first time again and I don't know what I could find, like everyone else is out there living fascinating lives that you can only catch a glimpse of through the screen. Like this format of discussion with other people over the internet is going to get really big one day, and I'm here on the ground floor. Like it's 20 years ago and I'm still young, technology still excites me, and I can do anything if I try hard enough.
And I know it's not true, I know the state of the wider web and the wider world. I know that most of your lives wouldn't really interest me if you were to share them on a social media site, or even on 4chan. But on a textboard everything somehow becomes special and mysterious again. The discussions and the in-jokes often make no sense to me, but they feel like they've got some special hidden meaning, some great secret that I could uncover - even when I can rationally deduce that a lot of them are just people being silly, an in-joke I don't get, no deeper than that.
Despite the fact most textboards move slowly, I always get a feeling like I've got to move fast to avoid missing out - unlike the rest of the web where it doesn't matter if I blink-and-miss-it because it's so uninteresting anyway. It's odd: I can discount nostalgia and I can discount textboards being new to me, but I can't get any closer to figuring out why they make me feel this way.
Do you have any ideas what it could be? Do textboards arouse any special emotion in you?
Since I've used them since the early days of places like world2ch, I feel a specific connection and nostalgia for them after so much time. I don't know why, but I don't try to think about it deeply. I like them and that's good enough for me. I guess that's all it really is...it's something you like. It's a combination of the unique specificity of what they are along with a degree of nostalgia. I know barely anyone is ever here to read this or any other extremely obscure textboard, but I still visit them very often.
Interestingly, I actually get a much similar feeling with old web forums. Either, the ones that were more or less text based or minimal with images, where the design looked very simple and the comments were often nested. I don't mean in the style of Reddit, since Reddit kind of cloned this...but what would have passed as a forum in maybe 1997. Or there's the ones with different board categories full of threads, usernames, avatars, post numbers, signatures and all that stuff. In a way they don't seem that old to me but I'm also old myself and that screws your perception of time up, so when I stumble upon some old obscure forum for something and it's full of threads and members from 1999 or 2002 or whatever, it's nostalgic to see that too.
They make me feel I'm home again
I'm the kind of person who reads every page on dead wikis, reads old websites top to bottom
Dead old feelings and thoughts, still living, trapped in time, but we can still look in
>Interestingly, I actually get a much similar feeling with old web forums. Either, the ones that were more or less text based or minimal with images, where the design looked very simple and the comments were often nested.
This makes me think of something like https://forums.bungie.org/story/
Is that the sort of forum you were talking about?
Follow up:
Once you talk to these mysterious people one-on-one and find out some details about them, they start to seem more human and the feeling of wonder wears off a little. But the anonymous style of textboards, and even forums where little personal information is shared, hides the human side of its users and allows us to see them as "timeless superhumans" of a secret society.
For example, I used to always be fascinated with ZUN in this way. How did he make his own game, which includes the programming, music, art, writing, etc.? It was a mystery to me and made me feel inferior in some ways. That was until I read an interview with him, where he described how he taught himself and was interested in video games. It made him more relatable.
(The link is note working. Replace the "th" in "thgarakuta" with "touhou" by yourself: en.thgarakuta.com/index_interview/zun_long_interview-en/)
Does anyone know what happened to Shii? I haven't heard much of him in a while. What was he doing last(what is he doing now?)
How does that article relate to him? Isn't he supposed to be done with academics at this age?
Is no one going to bring up that he converted to Islam?
I could explain why he did so, but that would spoil the fun.
>>4
He's a professor of Japanese religion now, teaches at some university in Boston last I checked.
>>6
grad student at a prestigious university in Rhode Island.
if you know that much, what's his name? is it one of those named in the article? I want to take a class under him lol
who is shii? lol
He's currently a PhD candidate at Brown University. He's an expert in Japanese religions focusing on the Meji period onward and does a lot of work on cults and new religions, religion and modernity etc. You can find his publications here. They are actually kind of interesting.
https://u-tokyo.academia.edu/AveryMorrow
>>8
He teaches at an Ivy League. Good luck getting in there. Its pretty impressive that Shii made it that far.
How do we know that shii's real name is Avery Morrow?
I've always seen people pointing out something about him (once a guy pasted a link to a fake gay wedding with his name in it lol) but I've so far never seen hard evidence of Shii == Avery Morrow.
He escaped to Feudal Japan
(Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20170503083521/http://world2ch.org/board/kareha.pl/1355249474/ reply 247)
Every time I find a new textboard, I keep seeing the same names over and over. "kuz", "heyuri", "4x13", and I sense a general atmosphere where everybody knows each other. I remember namefags in my day, but it's different from that because it feels like everybody knows each other even when they're posting anonymously.
>>14
erm as a quite avid user its pleasant to be a faggot outside of my faggot zone
they are the same people, you retard
it is called propaganda, children doing propaganda
they are children who want to make names for themselves
who is kuz? who is heyuri? 4x13 equals 52 i do not know
i do not know because i am not a child
>>12
Kills me that the few places that did have module/tracker boards are now dead-dead. I can't even think of one that's still around?
iiichan is gone, sovietrussia is gone. There might have been more but I can't remember them.
>>18
I unironically can do it on the textboard I'm making from scratch
But the board must be used and the style of the site should not make you throw up
>>19
make sure to seriously sanitize the uploads. who knows how many vulns the various tracker libs have.
4x13 is Tokiko who's been around forever...
writing style and (especially on imageboards) continuity of content make a user identifiable without a name being necessary
i spend a lot of time on 4chan /ck/ and its pretty easy to recognize a lot of the posters (mostly because theres so few) simply based off how they respond
typing style, prose, vocabulary, personality, and anecdotes all allow you to tell who made a post
even without having a name for them they still exist as an idea and can be recognized
writing style and (especially on imageboards) continuity of content make a user identifiable without a name being necessary
i spend a lot of time on 4chan /ck/ and its pretty easy to recognize a lot of the posters (mostly because theres so few) simply based off how they respond
typing style, prose, vocabulary, personality, and anecdotes all allow you to tell who made a post
even without having a name for them they still exist as an idea and can be recognized
Kind of a funny development.
Because think tanks, lobbying groups, and shady outlets who serve doners have been spamming imageboards for years now. Imageboards are extremely easy to manipulate if you have the time and money. They are filled with vitriolic losers and the mentally ill. As for religious stuff, I mean Futaba had a whole board dedicated to cults and paranormal stuff so that's nothing new. What is new are breeds of psycho Christians who seem to care more about culture wars issues than divinity and scripture. You can't have a conversation with these people about the Bible or theology because for them Christianity and tradition are just ways to rubberstamp their retarded political views. They aren't really religious.
>>22
This.
>I mean Futaba had a whole board dedicated to cults and paranormal stuff so that's nothing new.
Are you talking about the fortune telling board?
But that's a bad example anyway because it's one of the Futaba joke boards, just like the moai board, the Umehara general board etc.
>>31
I mean the shukyo board. Its still a bad example because its mostly focused on cults, Sokka Gakkai activities, Unification Church scandal etc. Japanese sites did have occult boards though. I'd say the anti-religious sentiment on most of the English language internet during the 2000s was unusual and limited to the Western and maybe Japanese internet. Its not something you see in other places. I'm glad that atheist phase is mostly over but the reactionary Christians you see on imageboards these days aren't genuinely religious at all. It's a larp.
>>32
I don't want to sound petulant but can't people just say role playing instead of ''larp''?
There's no live action element to be found in net posturing.
>>33
Unfortunately, with these types of culture warriors there often is a live action element to it. There's a type of person who shows up to mass and is surprised when the message espoused is moderate if political at all. They usually last a year, I don't know if they join a more traditionalist, sometimes wacky sect or if they just go back to shitposting online
I knew a guy who decided to roleplay as Christian and changed all his views to match with the biggest retards on Politically Incorrect, started joining local churches and was kicked out of all of them for his extremist views. He then killed a family member and went on to do some terror attack. The roleplaying does not always stop at the monitor. He was never a religious person. Probably mental illness.
Thats so bizarre...
God loves everyone in this thread doe
>Because think tanks, lobbying groups, and shady outlets who serve doners have been spamming imageboards for years now.
Over time I get more and more convinced internet culture is at least in part artificial. Even 2ch was allegedly being manipulated by the LDP
>>38
I have definitely forced a few big memes in my time. And that was me, doing it alone very casually without samefagging to prop it up. I guess they were good enough to stand on their own and get picked up after a while, which I am proud of. One could only imagine though, what could be done with a capable team of people. Online and out in the world. Need to be careful about what you see with your eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textboard
there was a brief edit war before an admin said no
Is there any reliable encyclopedia website to recommend, preferably a static website or a web1.0 website, I don’t like websites with too bloated scripts
Came here from the wikipedia talk page itself. lol.
>>34
I googled Encarta and was sent to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education which features an "AI-powered assistant". It's all over.
Also if there was really a web-based version of Encarta I bet it didn't have that cool maze game.
If you rely on a encyclopedia but are at wit's end with wikipedia, I'd unironically recommend supporting Britannica. I think that's the only realistic alternative in the English speaking world.
>>8
how is he having his fingers in every online community
kuz = the israel of the internet
>>38
kuz was rather active on here back in 2020 and 2021, before getting into a lot of ridiculous drama and thankfully leaving us in favor of the 'sharty.
>>40
obsessed status?
>>37
Oxford Reference gives you the individual entries to their reference books. Which is useful because a failing of Wikipedia is how broad it is. Do you want to know about gold in history, chemistry, religion, trade...?
If you know anyone with a UK library card you just enter the library card number and get access to the site. Then you're free to look up gold in the Oxford Dictionary of Dentistry.
This might sound a little weird, but is the userbase of this site how it used to be?
I ask because I came across it linked on the original 8chan, found it dead, and stupidly decided to post the link on various 8chan boards.
After that, the activity went up again. But I couldn't shake an uneasy feeling that I had done something wrong. I had heard that imageboards don't like large influxes of newcomers but (IIRC, it was so long ago) I wasn't quite sure if the same went for textboards, which were new to me at the time.
Ah well, I guess it comes with being young, autistic, and therefore uncomprehending of social norms.
Sorry to any oldfags that may see this and are bothered by what I did.
Evidence for oldfags being bothered:
- the list of sites at https://4-ch.net/iaa/kareha.pl/1439333638/ was deleted off pastebin
Evidence for oldfags not being bothered:
- when I asked about it on IIRC and another chan site connected to this one, they didn't seem to care
I found this website from some directory a couple of years ago and check it every few months. I really like the style and wish a site like this was more popular.
I had no idea this site existed when it was new and yet I have posted about shii before.
Similar to >>2, I have found this site somewhere a bunch of years ago. Being text-only is the sole attraction to me, don't care about 2channel.
bakayaro!!!! posting my sakuga textboard to a gaijin site!!! teme... fuzakeru ne!
I've been here a decade and I know users from here who have been around since 2006 and 2007. There's a good bit of continuity.
I have an idea to build an internet community for a topic, that interests me, but isn't discussed anywhere besides a subreddit and probably a handful of Discord and IRC servers. The thing is that I like anonymous message boards in principle and I prefer them, as a user, greatly over regular forums. The idea of anonymity rather than pseudonymity is just appealing to me on many levels. However, when it comes to being the administrator of such a place, it seems that a regular forum (something running Xenforo or phpBB for instance) has lower maintenance needs than an textboard/imageboard. It's not that I'm lazy, but I just don't want to deal with spammers, CSAM posters and all the kinds of annoying shit people do when they are not bound to an account. The kinds of spam that is a regular thing on most imageboard, yet on other forums, where you have to have a registered account to use, it's practically non-existent (at least in forums that are dedicated to hobbies and particular interests. While it makes spam practically non-existent, it probably also reduces the overall traffic by a lot, as nobody wants to make an account somewhere, when they could just not. I'm still not sure whether I should make this forum/message board at all, but assuming I am going to do this eventually, can any seasoned admins give me their two cents on whether a forum or anonymous textboard is preferable for a certain interest of mine? Personally I am inclined towards textboards, since that is what I have grown up with and what I think would be my preferred option if I were the user, nonetheless it's still a different thing from an administrators perspective.
Anonymity is great because nobody can become popular, well-known, or more important than somebody else. Many of the ills of the modern internet are there, because people put too much importance on their identity, a thing that is not there in anonymous places like here. This has the disadvantage that nobody knows anyone really, I suppose that's a thing you have to ponder, if that is really what you want. Such is my reasoning why I prefer anonymity, is that though worth the nonsense and cancer you have to deal with when being a site administrator? The spam that plaques this place is pissing me off, despite me not even having to care, just having to endure it as a user, so I doubt it will be any better when I run such a site myself.
Sounds like you're trying to appeal to a chunk of an already niche community.
Maybe ask what kind of site the fans of your thing are into?
You wanna appeal to them, not just to you.
And some people actually like that whole popularity thing.
Also, you're gonna have to deal with spam, accounts or not.
If you're not seeing spam, it's probably just efficient moderation.
Couldn't really say without knowing what your interest is and what its community is like. 1chan - .us not .net - was an example of an otherwise normal IB that required registration to post. Another thing would be all posts are anonymous but have to be manually mod approved which would quickly get tiring.
Forums more time consuming in creating, managing, and posting on. Text boards, not so much.
But even image and text boards are becoming dead and used less just like when forums were left behind and ditched.
>Maybe ask what kind of site the fans of your thing are into?
I don't know if I get your question correctly, but if you are asking what kind of site the people in the already-existing niche would be using, then probably a forum, since they are used to Reddit and I assume that is the closest to that. On the other hand, I would guess more people would start using it, when no account is needed.
>>3
>Couldn't really say without knowing what your interest is and what its community is like.
The whole shtick would a board for discussing collapse of civilization, mostly apolitical though, not unlike r/collapse, but maybe with a bit more quality-control (that's probably bold of me wanting quality when I probably won't get any traffic at all). Outside of Reddit there is practically no place to discuss this besides some quality-less, probably dead, and uninteresting Telegram groups and Discord chatrooms.
>>4
what about something where you register but the posts are anonymous to the readers? consider how chans already (ab)use the ip address as a rudimentary form of account. modern chans take things further. for example on kohlchan, after filling a captcha and doing a proof of work, you get a token code. effectively an account. replacing the fickle ip address with a token makes posting from proxies and darknets viable, actually enhancing technical anonymity.
>I don't know if I get your question correctly,
I wasn't really asking you a question at all. I was just suggesting that you ask them one.
That way instead of just guessing about what they'd be into, you get some opinions from the people that might end up posting there.
If they're all "anonymity is weird, I need names and identities and such" and you make an anonymous board, it's probably gonna be real quiet in there.