Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Wikipedia

There are several organisations that provide services and apps which I use and that are free from advertising. In order to provide these services they rely on input from users (testing, reporting bugs, contributing code, etc.) and user donations.

Every so often I kick in a small donation to Talk Morgan , LibreOffice, Mozilla Foundation, and some others including Wikipedia.

I think that Wikipedia, from humble beginnings and sometimes dubious content, has become a reliable source of information which we all use. In fact if we see something that is not quite correct we even have the opportunity to edit entries (changes are subject to review to ensure reliability).

Just at the moment Wikipedia are calling for donations. Certainly this has little to do directly with TM however Wikipedia is often used as a source of information for posts made on TM.

If anyone feels like contributing a donation may be made at https://donate.wikimedia.org/

Well said Peter: every year I pay £20.00 to Wiki, I'd hate to see it commercialised.

Same here.
I make a small donation each year to them.

It is helpful to have a generic external source but I still don't 100|% trust anything on the web.
Other than remarks about morgans occasionally leaking.

Yes, I make an annual donation to Wikipedia, I use it every day and it's a fantastic resource. I know that some people see it as untrustworthy because anyone can edit it, but I see that as it's greatest strength. For every idiot out there putting out nonsense, there are hundreds of thousands of eagle-eyed editors getting rid of the weasel words and making sure that claims have proper citations to original sources. The 'no original information' rule is a very good one and ensures that the information contained has been reviewed and referenced properly.

You've reminded me it's time to top-up TM again

Yes coincidently there are only two sites I regularly give a modest donation to

Wikipedia and this forum

I once did give a small one off donation to The Fender Rhodes website as it gave me some great info for refurbing my piano

What is the "No original information" rule?

Wikipedia's team once refused to correct an error I had drawn to their attention. It was nothing of great importance, but I found the attitude strange.

It sounds to me like no "original thoughts" are allowed only established reference sources to be used, which doesn't sound very forward thinking to me I don't use Wikid so I could well be off the mark here.

It means that you cannot make a claim on Wikipedia that is unsupported by an already-published legitimate source. It does have a downside, I had a similar experience to Peter in that I have had corrections rejected by editors because although I knew a piece of information to be incorrect, I could not provide a citation to prove that my version was any more accurate.

The upside is that it immediately filters out all the nonsense claims that otherwise people would tend to make. Wikipedia tries to be a rigorous body of academic standard work and the editors will go to great lengths to ensure that this remains the case. It can be very interesting to read the discussion page behind an article to see how this process works in practice.