Bitcoin Forum

There is no bounty here (at the moment)

Wikipedia awards the status of Featured (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles) and Good (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles) to the best articles it contains. Good articles have the recognition of them being of high quality, while Featured articles are the best ones. If an article is on the Featured category, it gets to appear on Wikipedia's front-page for some time, which means great exposure.

In the English Wikipedia, there are about 11,564 Good articles (0.32%) and about 3,214 Featured ones (0.09%). So improving the Bitcoin article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin) to the point that is is categorized as Good, and eventually as Featured, will mean great exposure for Bitcoin.

So, how would you improve the Bitcoin article? What does it lack? What does need to be extended? After we improve its content, eventually, we could start a bounty on the Wikipedia Reward board (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reward_board) so that one or more veteran Wikipedia editors do the last improvements and get the article through the community process of Good (or Featured) article voting and approval.

This is not something that can be done overnight. At the moment, it'd be nice to hear your comments about the current status of the article and its needs. I'll dedicate some time myself to improve the article, and help from anyone is welcome!

This is an incredibly hard project.

The 3,214 articles that are featured, and 11,564 good articles tell you just how difficult it is. Remember, there are 3 million articles on wikipedia.

Agreed. It is, however, possible to offer Wikipedia editors rewards for doing work, like bringing an article to good article or featured article status. There's currently a reward of 23 BTC for translating the English Wikipedia Bitcoin article (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Reward_board#Translate_Bitcoin_to_any_language), and this approach does seem to work (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Reward_board#Arado_Ar_E.381).

Anarcho-capitalism made it to 'featured' status: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism. We ought to be able to get Bitcoin there too!

Actually, the question is not how hard is getting to Good or Featured (yet) but, how would you improve the current article?

As I said in the other thread the article is a bit messy as of now. It contains a lot of repetitions and the technology isn't explained very well imo. I don't think you get a very good understanding of what exactly a block is for instance, what it is that makes the system work and what it is that makes it secure. And tech isn't explained in very much detail. For instance: what encryption algorithms are used?

I also think that the article needs to push the economic aspects a bit more. Maybe even putting the 'Economics' block above the 'Technology' block. Right now my feeling from reading the article is that Bitcoin is all about people mining for coins and the use of bitcoins for trade being only second nature. Which might be true as of now to some extent but not the purpose of Bitcoin as a whole.

I've tried to change some of this for my Swedish article but it's hard when most of the sources used is about the tech. Hopefully this will change over time as Bitcoin matures and finds a larger user base.

Edit: Someone just commented on my translation that the lead paragraph doesn't explain the purpose of Bitcoin very well. This may also be true for the English article.

EDIT: Just be brave and edit the main article! I'll be watching and correcting anything that needs Wikipedia experience, so don't be afraid to make mistakes!

Making a "good" wikipedia article is far from easy.

I doubt the bitcoin article will be rated "good" any time soon.

Yeah, that's just a long-term goal, something in the horizon to motivate the step-by-step improvement of the article ;)

That claim needs a source that verifies that Wei Dai's b-money proposal was originally published on Cipherpunks mailing list in 1998. Anyone got a link to a verifiable source that can back this claim?

This claim needs citation. Satoshi cites Wei Dai in its Bitcoin paper, but not Szabo. So the citation is specially needed in order to back that Bitcoin is implementation-of/similar-to/inspired-by Nick Szabo's Bitgold.

Apparently, it was never actually "published" on Cypherpunks mailing list, just announced there. (Technically it was published on my "home page", as we used to say.) The original announcement can be retrieved from http://cryptome.org/cpunks/cpunks-92-98.zip, which is an archive of the list from 1992-1998. There are also two papers in Google Scholar that cite the 1998 b-money article (without mentioning Cypherpunks):

http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf
http://cs.uccs.edu/~cs591/securityEngineering/jikzi-cpw.pdf

Here's the Cypherpunks post/announcement:

From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:07:43 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: PipeNet 1.1 and b-money
Message-ID: <19981126153349.A12001@eskimo.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



I've discovered some attacks against the original PipeNet design. The new
protocol, PipeNet 1.1, should fix the weaknesses. PipeNet 1.1 uses layered
sequence numbers and MACs. This prevents a collusion between a receiver
and a subset of switches from tracing the caller by modifying or swaping
packets and then watching for garbage.

A description of PipeNet 1.1 is available at
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai.

Also available there is a description of b-money, a new protocol for
monetary exchange and contract enforcement for pseudonyms.

Please direct all follow-up discussion of these protocols to cypherpunks.

What's the correct capitalization? Capitalized "Bitcoin" when talking about the system or software, and "bitcoin" when using as a unit of currency?

Yes. I also support renaming the current client to wxBitcoin to avoid confusion...

That just makes it sweeter when it eventually happens.

Actually there are currently 3 things called Bitcoin:

• Bitcoin the client
• Bitcoin the currency unit
• Bitcoin the communication protocol

The article needs a clear distinction :D

It's true that the first paragraph doesn't clearly state the purpose of Bitcoin. That might leave a couple of users quite perplexed :)

We need to restructure the original English article.

However, before I sit and think about it, I created a direct translation from the English page to create a Finnish version. In the current situation, there is no idea about how European Union might react to the existence of such currencies, so we must wait and see until further localization can be properly done. But the page now exists at http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin and basically contains the same pics and graphics as the english version.

I was, to be truthful, motivated by the 23 BTC translation award. Does anyone have excess btc to throw around? :) In that case, I receive donations at 1Dc97a2UDP4aUeTsynRFpNe9i4v7rqrJJy

I created a thread on that already if you'd like to discuss the topic.

Then, check that thread: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4599.msg84623#msg84623 ;)