OpenBSD Journal

Wikipedia coverage...

Contributed by marco on from the wiki-wiki dept.

This interesting link was pointed out to undeadly: I'm sure it isn't news that OpenBSD has an excellent and informative entry in Wikipedia, but I was pleasantly surprised to go to Wikipedia's main page and find the entry was 'Today's featured article'. Wikipedia has become a wonderful resource and, I think, one of the finest destinations on the internet. This is great (albeit very temporary) visibility for OpenBSD reaching the internet-savy but "non-geek" crowd. Who knows how many bored slackers will click on it?

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (24.226.124.161) on

    A fine OS not only deserves, but demands a good wikipedia page, and OpenBSD's wikipedia page is one of the best I've seen.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.213.240) on

      It is the first time I've seen *any* operating system as a featured article. My hat is off to the page author(s) ... this is worth dropping them a buck or two!

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.213.240) on

        That is, dropping Wikipedia a buck or two ... I'm sure the author of the page wasn't looking for money =)

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (70.27.15.123) on

          Don't. They do not need the money. They've thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars away already. You are paying for them to throw more hardware at their hidiously shitty code because its so slow, and for Jimbo to go on whoring cruises.

      2. By Nate (65.95.124.63) on

        Windows XP and 2000 have both been frontpaged.

    2. By ZupaDupa (212.149.208.117) zupadupa@gmail.com on

      There was a rumour yesterday that the Wikipedia/Wikimedia server were under attack. I received no further information, so I have no guarantee of this being the case. But if it was, maybe they put OpenBSD on the front page because of this attack, to make people aware (and address their own awarness) of a secure alternative...

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.213.240) on

        Wikipedia was down for awhile yesterday to be sure, although I had not heard why personally. Network attacks are pretty low to start -- attacking a project like Wikipedia is just sad.

      2. By Nate (65.95.124.63) on

        No, OpenBSD was destined for the front page for more than a month now, the exact date was set like a week and a half ago.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (128.151.93.185) on

    A lot of the Wikipedia articles on software topics are full of crap. Just look at any article about Macs. Rampant fanboyism.

    OpenBSD's article, though, is pretty good. A few editors in particular (whose names escape me, but probably read undeadly!) put a lot of work into rewriting it in the last few months.

    Comments
    1. By Nate (65.95.124.63) on

      Pretty easy to spot em, they're the ones doing stuff other than reverts and vandalism in the history.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.213.240) on

      I was just poking through the 'MacIntosh' entry. It seemed reasonably balanced to me ... admittedly I nodded off about a 1/3 of the way through. What struck you as 'fanboyism'?

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (128.151.93.185) on

        I think the existence of "WikiProject Macintosh" is a good example of what I find objectionable. The group consists of self-described Mac enthusiasts, which means they are prone to non-neutrality. But what irks me is that I have witnessed some of the editors who participate in that group making edits that are careless on technical grounds, poorly researched, ignoring relevant history, etc.

        Many wikipedia articles on computing are, sadly, little more than "pop" pieces, written by people who might as well have wandered off from Slashdot. Above all, clearly not written by programmers. I try to improve errors as I see them but sometimes there are just too many. But there's a lot of good material too; if I want to look up a particular algorithm I can often find a good synopsis of it on wikipedia.

        I've actually noticed that about a lot of things on wikipedia. For example, there's a lot of really good information about linguistics; but for every correct bit of information there are really inaccurate IPA transcriptions of non-English languages and random nonsense written by somebody who thinks they know what they're talking about.

        And you want to correct it, but as soon as you correct 1 error, you find 10 more, and you realize that it'd be an uphill battle even if you had all the time in the world.

    3. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

      Nothing wrong with Fanboyism

  3. By Nate (65.95.124.63) on

    The Command Line, a self proclaimed cranky hacker blog, has put up a podcast touching on the OpenBSD project getting 10 grand from the Mozilla Foundation. You can listen to it here.

    It's at 9:26 into the 42:35 long podcast, not worth downloading, but still good to know the folks out there in Internetland are still talking about the money issue.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (84.188.232.187) on

    Request: Help to "improve" the Article about PF (german Site) on Wikipedia.

    http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pf

    Also an english Entry would be great!

    In fact I`m not that good writer because I`m not that Wikifriend at all.
    So please help to improve and also create (for other languages) the PF-Article.

    Comments
  5. By Anonymous Coward (65.34.16.170) on

    way cool

    Comments

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