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Wikipedia != Authoritative?
Frozen North writes "Recently, this article in the Syracuse Post-Standard caused a stir by dismissing Wikipedia as an authoritative source, and even suggesting that it was a little deceptive by looking too much like a "real" encyclopedia. Techdirt suggested an experiment: insert bogus information into Wikipedia, and see how long it takes for the mistake to be removed. Well, I did that experiment, and the results weren't good: five errors inserted over five days, all of which lasted until I removed them myself at the end of the experiment."
And they removed it. Tarts.
What part of it wasn't true? I hate Wiki-willy-wavers. Go and get a real job.
why would you keep it surprising? it's a website everyone can submit to, you should treat it like websites you don't trust.
that doesn't mean they're not good for finding information however, you just have to check it from somewhere else as well(which is easier if you know what you should check too).
(real encyclopedias have errors in them too sometimes, encarta as one)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Seriously... do you believe everything you read on the internet?
It's a publicly editable encyclopedia. By now, people should realize that there are many kiddies out there who have nothing better to do than to screw with others.
There seems to be a disturbing trend. If you try to include information in Wiki entries about people or events that add perspective to them that are seemingly unpopular but still true, those additions will get deleted and you will get a message to the effect your account will be deleted if you do that again.
The fact that you can put in bogus information and no one cares does not suprise me.
And how much are people paying to use the site?
Oh ya its free. And not a bad quick referance.
M
I tend to find that the more academic or obscure a topic the higher the quality of the page is.
"Wikipedia, she explains, takes the idea of open source one step too far for most of us."
What the hell does that mean, "too far"?
WBG Links
www.wbglinks.net
WBG Links
www.wbglinks.net
Worse, it's subject to the biases of whoever writes the article. I've seen some pretty bad stuff, horribly biased, passed off as a real encyclopedia author. It also sucks that people around here tend to insert Wikipedia links, thus inferring that they're somehow authoritative in any way. They're not.
Wikipedia != encyclopedia.
Wikipedia == blog
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Ok, I can imagine this post will be redundant in about 5 seconds, but why on earth would you consider a publicly editable web encyclopedia to be authorative in the first place? This is the Internet, not all you read is true.
Grab an article out of a "real" encyclopedia, and compare it to the Wikipedia article. Do they factually match?
I would be very interested in the results.
Oftentimes, Wikipedia articles are updates the same day that events happen. This is one advantage over *any* "real" encyclopedia.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
If you try looking for something that isn't directly related to technology the information is sparse. Try, for instance, "permian period". You'll find a rather sketchy description, if compared to a traditional ecyclopaedia, like the Britannica.
I remember seeing this story originally on Boing Boing, and the author, Frozen North, leaves some facts out that his site covers. However, his submission is a bit of flamebait.
Alex Halavais did the same experiment, changing 13 things, and all of those were changed. He did most of them over the course of the same day from the same IP, so they got caught.
Wikipedia is a tool, nothing more. If you believe everything you read on the internet, well, you get it.
... I was taught by teachers and librarians not to rely on the printed encyclopedia (the only we kind we had back then, you young whippersnappers!) as an authoritative source, since all it contained, by its nature, was summary data which was easily outdated. I remember one teacher in high school even telling the class that anyone who cited an encyclopedia article in a paper would get an F. A bit drastic, maybe, but it got the point across: an encyclopedia is not supposed to be the be-all and end-all of research. It's a place to get a quick idea of a subject and ideas on how to learn more, a starting point for research in depth. In this role, Wikipedia performs admirably.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You should not post such information here!
With amount of people reading slashdot there's a possibility of many pranksters who didn't have any motivation to deface etc sites now have such motivation...
Be careful slashdit! May as well introduce the new slashdot effect.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Wikipedia got the Ars Electronica price for best initiative to share information in between communities. Oh man, i know some people here that will be pissed. http://www.aec.at
Hanging meat lasts longer !
You mean just because it's published on the internet doesn't mean it true?
Where am I gonna get the cold hard facts about the presidential campaign now?
..than any other news or reference source?
I read inaccurate news. I read mistakes in references. The only difference here is that it can be malicious.
I'm sure that just like every other reference sourc Wikpedia isn't perfect, but it's pretty damn cool.
At least it doesn't have a political stance like a news source does, by endorsing a point of view, or a candidate. That worries me more than some prankster inserting bad data.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
That the Wikipedia editors can pick and choose which additions they like and which they don't. If you mention, say for example, little known facts about someone or some event that might make them look bad to some people, don't be surprised it a Wiki editor reverses the entry and threatens you with all sorts of things.
The scientific philosopher Thomas Kuhn put forth a model of "scientific progress" where-- simply put-- once you get enough people to accept a theory as "true", it becomes the baseline for truth. The most common example of this is the slow progressive adaption of Newtonian Physics, and then of Einstein's Relativity: doubters are in abundance, until they are won over to the new paradigm.
WIkipedia, IMHO, is the epitomy of that concept: if you get enough people on the Internet to write a common text, and go to great lengths to democratize the process, then you will get the generally accepted "truth". Even scam busters like Snopes often resort to the line of reasoning "this sounds too much like an urban myth, therefore it's an urbam myth" variant on the same theme.
Don't get me wrong-- I love the WIkipedia. In my book, it's enough truth to get you through the day, and that's all I really need 98% of the time.
davejenkins.com |
Ok so I'm not daft enough to cite wikipedia in a paper, or make an important decision based on it's content. . .
. . . but the same applies to slashdot - and how many smart and knowledgeable people post here? how much do I learn even each week from reading posts on here
wikipedia is a messageboard, which means you can't cite from it, or use it as an authority. that doesn't mean it's not one of the most valuable learning tools on the net.
i'm trying to give up sigs.
For instance you know everything from the Bush administration is a lie. Easy and reliable.
I find Wikipedia to be most useful in the field in which traditional encyclopedias are weakest; pop culture.
There's thousands of pages in Wikipedia dealing with up-to-the-minute descriptions of cultural phenomena that won't make it into the Britannica for years, if ever.
Does Wikipedia claim to be "authoritative" anywhere? The Internet has led to a variety of totally new media over the last couple of decades. Perhaps we should treat an "open content encyclopedia" as something conceptually different from a "traditional encyclopedia", in the same way a blog is different from a paper diary or an e-mail is different from a "snail mail".
Each of these evolved from older print-based media, but each of them have a slightly different "dynamic".
It's blindingly obvious to anyone who has clicked the numerous "Edit" links on a Wikipedia page that Wikipedia is fundamentally different to a print-based Encyclopedia Britannica or Encarta. What this doesn't mean is that it's useless or pointless or should be discounted as a source. It should just be treated in an appropriate way given what it is.
Wikipedia is not alone in this. here is another one you should avoid if you wish to seek accurate information.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Wikipedia is taking a leaf out of Debian's book. There going to create a "stable" version of the wikipedia that isn't editable by everyone and only factual errors will be corrected in this stable version.
:)
Then users will have a choice between the bleeding edge and possibly factually incorrect or the stable
version that's had some kinda of audit done on it. Another straw man argument exposed for what it is
Simon.
Wikipedia has proven the concept, and I'm sure we'll see more and more advanced community-managed information sharing projects in the future. For example, adding a moderation system like /.'s would already be a huge step forward.
Peer Pressure
How many people actually looked at your entries before accepting these facts?
Also, if you dont know, you look it up. If I check encyclopedia britannica for info it's cause I dont know the answer. Most people looking for info are not in a position to rate the quality of the answer. And most people who have the answers are not going to go looking for the fun of fact checking.
You are right though. The system does seem to have some fatal flaws and might need some rethinking.
Keep in mind though that many "authoritative sources" often present myths as fact. I can think of three.
1)The NYT claiming that rockets cant work in space
2)History books claiming that the Civil War was fought over slavery
and
3)Newton getting hit in the head with an apple.
And the pages still haven't been updated! There have been no editors arriving at my door to make things right. How is that authoritative?
Wikipedia is an excellent reference... I often use it to get up to speed on a topic. Once I've learned a little, I go off and search other sites for more information. Wikipedia is an absolutely invaluable resource... the fact that some of the data might not be 100% goes with the territory. I use wikipedia almost every single day... our customers are from all over the country, and it's as simple as typing 'Wikipedia ' to bring up almanac information about them... including population, city, climate, ect.
For example, just now (at 10:13 EST) I entered a non-authoritative entry into the Wikipedia under the topic of Authority It's just a note at the bottom that says
"[Note: This comment in brackets is an unauthoritative comment that was added by an individual]"
Now my foolish edit is available to the whole world -- I didn't have to log in or anything. So gradually it gets fixed. Fortuneately I did not say anything that is untrue. However what about the poor student who wanders into the topic before it gets fixed -- at one point in time. I could never use this as a definitive resource until more protection is put in place to help guarantee the accuracy of the information. How do to that? I don't know .. but I'm sure the suggestions are coming in all the discussions here.
Despite the fact that Al writes newspaper articles which are reviewed by one or two other people and thinks these are unbiased truth, he thinks that wikipedia articles written and then reviewed by one or two other people are full of lies. Sure, if someone tries to sneak errors into wikipedia they can do it, just as someone could sneak errors into the newspaper or britannica if they wanted to.
The is a common misconception about what an encyclopedia is. It is not a place to cite as a source in a research paper, rather a place to get an overview of a subject. everything you find in an encyclopedia you need a source for before you can quote it in a paper, so in that sense it really doesn't matter if there are a couple of innacuracies because then you just can't find them in a primary source so that's it, end of story. The funny thing is Britannica and every other major encyclopedia has a huge disclaimer about how there is no guarantee of the accuracy of the information contained, yet Al continues to insist on it being gospel truth.
Lastly, for those who don't know, September 15th-20th is going to be one of the biggest moments in the history of Freedom. Wikipedia will hit 1 million articles, firefox 1.0 will be released, Adbusters starts their blackspot sneaker marketing blitz (which I don't necessarily agree with). In our country if you take a rich man, strip him ass naked and throw him in the middle of the woods, then in a week or two he will be relatively well off again. If you take a poor ignorant man and do the same then in a week or two he will be just as poor. Knowledge and social savvy is what separates the classes in the United States, not money itself. Information is a key foundation of knowledge. Wikipedia aims to bridge the information gap between the rich and poor, and if this Al Fasoldt guy can't see the good in that then there really isn't anything more that can be said for Wikipedia.
Most people probably aren't looking at articles about subjects where they'd recognize errors. An encyclopedia is for looking up things you don't know.
New article claims Linux is not an OS, but is merely a DOS shell.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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That's not to say that you won't find much valuable and accurate information at Wikipedia, however please be advised that Wikipedia CANNOT guarantee, in any way whatsoever, the validity of the information found here. It may recently have been changed, vandalized or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the particular area you are interested in learning about. We are working on ways to select and approve more trustable versions of articles, but still without warranty. The closest thing to this that currently exists is the Wikipedia:Featured articles process, but even the articles listed there may have been mercilessly edited shortly before you view them.
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The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Wikipedia is an excellent reference for physics and mathematics. If the experiment the author of this article were tried with hard core physics or mathematics articles, it would be caught out much faster.
It's retarded.
Unless its the government that is removing the data.
Regardless of what the data is, be it 'true' but meant to cause grief for the individual, or just
that he likes to watch 'WWF' on tv... its not censorship to edit the data in a public database.
As long as its in the private sector, be it commercial or by a private citizen, its NOT censorship..
Only the government must honor your right to speech. ( at least in my country. YMMV )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Traditional enclyclopedias have errors as well & users have little option to fix them--they certainly can't change them directly. They must write the publisher & hope their corrections make it into the next edition in a year.
The value of encyclopedias isn't that they are right about everything. It is that they cover so many topics in an easy-to-understand manner. If you need more in depth knowledge or need to ensure correctness, you really should be using some sources which are a little bit more primary--books or journal articles written on the specific subject you are looking into.
Everyone who rights for the wikipedia should therefore cite references where people could look for more info. Also, I don't think that one person entering 5 errors is that harmful--the quality level is still quite high. Either a lot of people would need to make small numbers of errors (which hasn't really happened--most people write on topics they know about) or one person would need to add many more errors. If this happened, it is much more likely that they would get caught--after noting an error, an editor would likely check that person's other contributions.
Anytime you have something that is both useful and free, and where it is competing with a paid product, you will always have the force of that paid product felt upon the free product.
Personally, I love Wikipedia. But this article is good in that it forces us to pay attention to the problem and try to fix it.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I tried this with the Internet once! I put up 5 pages containing bogus information over 5 days. I waited to see how long they would stay there. They weren't removed . . . EVER.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I also did this a while ago. I made a bogus change, and let it sit, intending to go back and fix it in a couple of days. Whoops! I forgot, and came back a few months later, and sure enough, the wrong information was still there.
The problem is that the quality of a reference is not derived from the number of people working on it, but on the expertise of those people. A single person can make a better encyclopedia than a million monkeys banging on keyboards.
This guy made some subtle changes and left them for a relatively short period of time... I'm unsurprised they weren't picked up. But over the long haul, SOMEONE would eventually notice and repair the errors.
:)
And the fact that only subtle errors can survive is a testament to the power of the wiki. Major errors will be noticed immediately and corrected, subtle errors may persist for a while, but really, by their very subtlety they are less damaging to wiki users.
Although, I run a wiki myself so perhaps I am biased
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
I don't see why any of the Internet advertisers haven't jumped on this "band-wageon" yet by inserting their own textual advertisements amongst the materials. This would be a great way to make quick/easy advertising dollars.
Sure, the advertisements would eventually be erased, but as long as they are seen by some people, they server their purpose.... and they can always be re-inserted
I just cannot see how this Wikipedia thing is secure. I cannot see how the "trust" option works in this scenario. You cannot even trust me (a Slashdot poster commenting on this story), to not insert random content into the Wikipedia for fun.
If there's something I don't understand about the safety of the Wikipedia technology then somebody please tell me. Maybe I'm getting all worked up over nothing. Thanks.
However, I read several dozen articles yesterday, mostly for topics I know a fair amount about, and found the site surprisingly accurate and informative and well written.
I wouldn't want to trust anything that is too far off the beaten path though ...
It is also arguably illegal in that it represents an unauthorised use of a computer system.
What is authoritative?
The opening line in the article says "... a few weeks ago ... my companion Dr. Gizmo ... urged [readers] to go to the Wikipedia Web site ... an online encyclopedia, for more information on computer history. The doctor and I had figured Wikipedia was a good independent source. "
Yet later in the article the author states: "From the home page:
"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written collaboratively by its readers. The site is a Wiki, meaning that anyone, including you, can also edit any article right now by clicking on the edit this page link that appears at the top of every Wikipedia article."
"
The quote was sent to them by a school librarian. So these journalist were incapable of reading the front page to determine the source of the information in the Wiki.
So my question is, who's validity is in question? The Wiki's or this paper's staff writer?
I see wikipedia as not just a dictionary, but a social experiment. One could place false information, but what is to gain? "Ooh, i'm so l33t I can put in anything I want just like anyone else." As great as it is I think it would better to follow this model: When people submit/edit a "definition", it shouldn't be updated right away, It should be looked at by a group of moderators. When you do a good job, you will be offered to moderate as well. In other words you build up your reputation. One can use public key authentication to do this.
With policy in mind, wikipedia is not authoritative in any sense - obviously. Who would think otherwise? Anyone can edit it. So, policy-wise, it is poor; but in "fact" it is extremely useful.
That said, it is one of the most useful web sites out there, so long as the reader keeps this in mind. There are some excellent articles that outshine commercial encyclopedias by orders of magnitude, and there are some crummy ones. Just what I expected. It's one of the most interesting and successful "open" projects out there; but no, I would not list it as a source on a serious research paper - but I would definitely use it as a starting point for learning about anything.
Wikipedia is pretty good for topics that are prominent and well-known, and decent for technical topics. For stuff that's more obscure, though...it's interesting to browse around but you definitely don't want to take it too seriously!
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
the wiki should be changed so that it requires a reference from non-registered members, sure this might cut down on posts but that and some other few code changes should also cut down on fake posts
If you are seriously interested in the truth, you have to go to original sources. Anything else is just someone's opinion. However, we don't have the time to fully research everything we want to know; so we use reference works. We have to evaluate the reliability of those works. Some facts that we get from those works will probably be accurate (the area of Greenland for instance). Some of the facts will be open to dispute depending on which work we get the facts from. (High school history texts are quite different depending on which country they are for.)
Personally, I like wiki. There are articles for subjects that I won't find in Britannica. However, I use wiki as a starting place to point me to more authoritative sources.
Anyway, if you are inclined to believe what you get from any media then I suggest that you read the works of Noam Chomsky. (me ducks and runs)
An article approval mechanism is under development and in testing at the test Wikipedia (you'll need to get an account to see it, mind you, and much of the user interface is currently in Finnish, but... :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
the system works because statistically, people don't try to be misleading for fun too often... and when they are it is usually on a subject that is highly debated and will be re-read/verified shortly...
1. The bogus information AL FASOLDT from the Syracuse Post-Standard inserted was totally trivial and so subtle it was meaningless. Put some pro-nazi text in an article about the third reich, or write naugty things about a current world leader, and then we'll dismiss wikipedia.
2. Anybody who relies on one source of information alone is taking a risk. Period.
3. Five days for somebody to detect unobtrusive trivia. Geez!
4. Wikipedia is a freely editable enzyclopedia. If you know that, you are warned. If you don't bother to find out before you delve in more deeply, you're a dodo. Like the guys who accept anything written in some paper at face value.
5. Copmared to some of the stuff I read in the regular media, Wikipedia is a paragon of correctness.
If you'll grant that there are more honest people than asshats in the world, then over long periods of time, the wiki will tend towards authoritativeness as intentional errors are weeded out. The majority of edits will be valuable.
Or perhaps you're more pessimistic than I am, with regard to human nature.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
There is a trade-off here.
Wikipedia allows more bogus information in but corrects it faster than does a typical "authoritative" encyclopedia.
Moreover, if a topic is particularly controversial, with conflicts of interest tainting the entry, you frequently have no indication of this fact in a normal encyclopedia. With Wikipedia the worst that happens is you get a lot of conflicting revisions in the history of edits which, itself, is meta-information that this entry requires more scrutiny from a variety of sources.
The unfortunate thing about Wikipedia is that it doesn't provide a clear metric of this meta-information as part of the presentation of the current article -- you have to go look for it.
Seastead this.
Do you mean not comprehensive as in having more entries than Britannia?
br/>Thinking before typing usually works.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
Nothing should be considered to be completely authoritative. Wikipedia, like anything else is compiled by people who have their own agendas and prejudices. Whilst I accept that there is more room for error in Wikipedia than conventional texts, I can easily imagine a situation where I could be found pointing out at great length to anyone who will listen that Britannica has got it wrong, and what do these idiots know anyway... (probably late at night)
:wq
Nupedia was an attempt at an online, 'open source', peer-reviewed encyclopedia. It closed down last year, and much of its content went into wikipedia.
More details at, you guessed it, wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia
From the article:
Nupedia was an online encyclopedia project founded in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its articles were licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, and were peer reviewed by experts. As of June 2003, it had 23 "complete" articles and 68 more in progress. Nupedia shut down on September 26, 2003, and much of its content has since been assimilated by Wikipedia.
The editorial process
Nupedia had a seven step editorial process, consisting of:
Assignment
Finding a lead reviewer
Lead review
Open review
Lead copyediting
Open copyediting
Final approval and markup
The bar to become a Nupedia contributor was relatively high, with the policy stating, "We wish editors to be true experts in their fields and (with few exceptions) possess Ph.D.'s."
Demonstrating that a malicious person can make errors that are not caught within a few days is a long, long way from demonstrating that there are substantially more errors than a paper encyclopedia. And since when is a paper encyclopedia supposed to be authoritative? Maybe for sixth-grade reports, but...
A lame article.
This is soo obvious.
Yet Wikipedia is an excelent *part* of a search.
The idea to put some sort of "Unverified" label on an article is just as unreliable.
An indicator by -how many individuals- it has been read / reviewed is probably the best you'll ever get.
And even then it's possible it'll only be a popularity contest.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
How is this different than social, political, and economic philosophy? We have a status quo because the human animal is resistant to changing world views and self-admission of being incorrect. I think this is yet another example where human nature remains unchanged in face of changing technology. The internet is just reflecting the way things have always been.
As an annoyed Wikipedian, I'd try to slashdot slashdot, but someone would just edit the page with the link and coralize it. :-(
Well... what do you know? Sheer genius. Mod the parent up, wouldya?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
...the problem is, if websites start using Wikipedia as their source, you suddenly have bogus information backed up by "semi-legitimate" websites. Suddenly it starts seeming rather plausible, particularly if it is the kind of information you wouldn't normally expect to find in a standard encyclopedia. Basicly, while not verified by a proper source, it would go unquestioned. And then often taken for truth.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The meaning of life is left as an exercise to the reader.
Which is quickly found by doing a google search.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Just add one good written article there. /. (s|c)hit-chat.
Instead of
I think Wikipedia is more a social experiment than anything, but I treat it as a generally valid information source as much as I would other things on the internet. You have to put some amount of trust in others when you use their research.
Yes, you could insert false information into a Wikipedia article, but what would be the incentive? If you don't know information there's no reason to falsify it; nobody's monitoring your Wikipedia contribution progress. "Hahaha, now that kid's paper is going to have inaccurate data" doesn't sound like a really fufilling prank to pull, particularly since you can't really see the results. If someone wanted to destroy a wiki's integrity I think his first instinct would be to erase the content.
Also, yes, anyone can edit a Wikipedia article, but it's just as easy also write a very professional sounding article and post it on a professional looking website and suddenly it's True. The way I see it, the internet on whole isn't extremely reliable unless you take for granted that nobody really wants to maliciously sabotage your research and other people know what they're talking about before they start writing papers about things.
Yes, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, but so can the internet itself. If the data you're trying to find are that important to you, you should probably check the library or get out there and do the research yourself.
JAWSchlech "The secret to success is knowing who to blame for your mistakes." - Despair.com
The tester introduced five subtle errors over five days in a database with over a million entries and because they weren't corrected in time periods of between 20 hours and five days, concludes "it would be very easy for subtle mistakes to sneak into Wikipedia, and go a very long time without being corrected." Wow.
A more accurate test, it would seem to me, would be to take articles of varying importance and, in fact, check the facts. (While you're at it, do the same for analogous articles in, say, Britannica.) The one problem with this is that checking facts is a very intense process, if you're serious about it.
Without having gone through this process, it would appear hard to say whether traditional publishers are any better at it than the volunteers who contribute to Wikipedia, except that over the past few years, I've grown to be as skeptical of traditional "authoritative" sources as I am of the morning newsprint.
I've worked in the publishing industry, and in my opinion, a number of publishers considered "authoritative" are living off the inertia of a time when sharp, intelligent people were cheap to hire, and one could afford to have encyclopedias checked by "armies" of worker bees.
Cheers...
Ah, but over that same period of time, how many people might have committed those falsehoods to memory, repeated it to their friends, or even republished it as fact somewhere else? (A textbook for example.)
It may never be corrected completely.
A few days ago I inserted this line in the Zell Miller's wiki bio: "In 2004 he sold his soul to the devil". I don't understand why it got changed to: On September 1, 2004, Miller gave the keynote address at the 2004 Republican National Convention ... do you?
You gave it only 5 days!? are you crazy? Print ecyclopedias can't change AT ALL! They have to send off correct material separetly, and that happens ONCE A YEAR!
Give it a year and then let me know what happens.
:T:R:A:N:S:
That may well be true; however, it would be equally naive to believe that a print encyclopaedia has perfect authority or presents an unbiased view. Ultimately, every human knowledge source is subject to error and bias, it's just that the academics commissioned by print media might be conveying theirs in a more fashion.
--
Try Nuggets, the question answering service for your mobile phone
when they announce that Bush has won the elections? How can we be sure that *any* information is true?
perception is reality
Why do we keep seeing stories on this stupid wikipedia? I looked at it a few times and found absolutely nothing worth reading, let alone accurate or useful. Can we please stop posting stories on this garbage?
Since it's on Wikipedia it has to be true!
I don't think that's how most people work, Wikipedia like many other dictionaries, books, or other information outlets is just one source for information. Personally I use it often to get more information about something and then use the information I gained by using Wikipedia to find find even more _specific_ information about the given subject somewhere else.
Should it not be possible to include bibliographies in entries? The entire Wiki might not be deemed authoritative in this way, but an entry with a decent bibliography might be considered valid on its own.
Of course, I'm not sure anyone has tried doing bibliographies in Wiki markup before; it may take some extension to the standard. Still, I don't think it would be a bad idea.
However, these problems are growing pains. Wikipedia is cool enough to attract a core of devotees who will counteract the worst trolls and vandals. The articles will slowly build up comprehensiveness (go add a few details to the 'permian' entry etc. if things are too sparse). Some articles have all the authority of a Brittania article, as they're written by an equivalent expert (or better, team). Some are just pure malarky and need help. It isn't always obvious, so cross-check. There is a reason encyclopedias are not acceptable for academic citations. They always need cross-references if being right is critical.
Most of us are simply looking for 'good enough' when we go to an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is shaping up nicely in this respect--give it a few more years and it will approach a commercial encyclopedia in comprehensiveness and accuracy. Its dynamic, public nature is its strength and weakness, you merely have to take it into account the same way you would consider how much CNN is fomenting propaganda or making a play for "balance" in any article they offer. Evaluating the veracity of anything is just life in the 21st C--an essential skill, a fundamental part of media literacy.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Thank god, that page's locked :)
I was looking for the rough chemical composition of petroleum jelly: Something like "CnH(2n+2) where n ~= 15." Instead, the article on Wikpedia discussed its medical applications and its use in anal sex. Its author was a medical professional whose primary interest was sex. I wanted an article written by a chemist with a primary interest in mixing deflagrants. I found the descrepency between what I sought and what I found amusing.
Maybe he should have tried changing this article.
I bet he would have been caught within the day.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
it has to be true...
The fact that an openly editable system can have false information put into it, doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know before. Of course false information CAN be added.
Also, 5 days is not a particularly long time for the errors to be caught. Anyone using the Wiki as a reference can expect the information is more likely to be accurate, the longer it has been in place. e.g., edited less than a year ago: could be right or wrong. 1-3 years: probably accurate. 3 years+: almost certainly accurate. (Depending on the popularity of the topic as well, of course.)
A better experiment would be to look up 5 topics that haven't been edited for at least a year and research all the statements made within. What percentage of false information existed within those 5 entries? THAT would be a relevant experiment.
-Colin.
The point being that the Wikipedia is pretty much organic in its structure - at any point in time it is changing in response to external input. The "immune system" itself is evolving as the editors encounter new infections and find ways to fight them. At the same time, the immune system fights poisoned data that found its way into the system - sometimes the response is sluggish - possibly because the immune system does not recognize it as an infection. My guess is that the immune system is overloaded and there arent enough corectly programmed phagocytes circulating around in the system (bet the editors over at Wikipedia never thpought they'd ever be called phagocytes!).
As an interesting aside, I noticed that as the complexity and interconnect between the articles in the wiki grows, so does the damage that a bad germ can do, on account of being linked back to from many places.
Does that mean the Wikipedia is worthless? Certainly not. As a quick and convenient starting point for starting a search, it is amazingly useful. Remember, most of us who do use the wiki today actually know a little about the subject we are looking up - we are usually looking for more detailed information. The kind that's hard to manufacture.
Sure, you need to cross-check the information in there with an independent source befiore betting your butt on it, but it tells you what to look for. Sure, it is almost worthless when the search term doesnt belong in a glossary of computing, gaming and communications terms, but I believe that will change. Everyone loves to be published! And those of us who contribute to it will keep a neighbourhood watch on the corpus of the wiki, if only to protect our sex-appeal...err...pride in having contributed to a reference work.
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
Before stating something is authoritative or not, you should definitely understand what authoritative means. It comes from authority, which involves a relation between two parties. Apart from the laws of nature, there is no such thing like a universal authority that applies to you and me.
So this story is all about Al Fasoldt who is reporting that some librerians do not consider Wikipedia as an authoritative source. Fine. What's the point? What's the surprise in there?
AFAIK, the Pravda newspaper hasn't been recongnized as an authoritative source by the US government and CNN isn't recognized as an authoritative source by the French government. Or Slashdot, or Rael website, or [North|South] Korea governement web site...No encyclopedy is authoritative to everybody. Does Kurdistan belongs to a country, which country rules over Kashmir, which country started the Mexico-USA war in the mid 1800s'? Take any place in the world where some people disagree about any topic and you can multiply examples. I personally think this is good that people do not recognize the same source as an authoritative source. I has to do with the freedom of thinking...
That's why different religions, languages, cultures and opinions exist.
I'd say that the harm done by small, intentionally introduced errors is overshadowed by the gigabytes of valuable content Wikipedia has to offer.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
I think anybody would find it difficult to find information on contemporary issues in an encyclopedia. Take for instance file sharing. Type bittorrent into wikipedia and you will find a multitude of useful links and information. That is the fundamental beauty of wikipedia, the topics that people find most relevant and important get addressed.
from merriam webster online /in-"sI-kl&-'pE-dE-&/
Main Entry: encyclopedia
Variant(s): also encyclopaedia
Function: noun
Etymology: Medieval Latin encyclopaedia course of general education, from Greek enkyklios + paideia education, child rearing, from paid-, pais child -- more at FEW
: a work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or treats comprehensively a particular branch of knowledge usually in articles arranged alphabetically often by subject
Britannica always knew their (traditional, dead tree) encyclopedia was aimed at kids, which is why it was always sold to parents AS A RESOURCE FOR THEIR CHILDREN.
The real problem here is using the same word, encyclopedia, to describe three utterly different things...
a/ traditional dead tree encyclopedia
b/ electronic (hyperlinked) encyclopedia on read only media
c/ wikipedia
Traditional dead tree stuff was of course read only, and absolute accuracy depended on many things, including cultural background and editorial integrity, as well as actual facts (where said facts were ascertainable) for example the traditional dead tree encyclopedias (that were all there was when I was attending school) would talk about a Christopher Columbus discovering America for our (English) Queen... no mention of him actually hailing from a smelly mediterrenean port or indeed Culumbia (or later New Amsterdam, etc (NY to you young punks)) and any entries about the East India Company will have similar cultural and editorial bias, non mention whatsoever will be made of the facts, that our (English) early trade envoy's gifts and personal manners were treated with richly deserved scorn... the silk brocade wearing maharaji using the proferred gifts of fine english tweed as animal blankets.
Being read only media, and being "authoritative" these complete fallacies presented as impartial facts.
Electronic encyclopedia such as Encarta are similarly read only, and similarly in the throes of cultural and editorial filtering, laid on top of any basic factual errors (such as the location of the normal locker observatory, to quote something close to home)
Wikipedia is completely different, it is not read only, it is not hampered by editorial policies or cultural prejudices.
Sure, this means assholes are free to enter bullshit as fact, but in just the same fashion as we are free to spoof an IP address or send out forged SYN packets, only the pond scum does it. Of course the pond scum will have every exuse in the book ranging from "I'm only doing it to test how good this is." to "Serves them right for not being as leet as me." however the underlying fact is the same, it is pond scum behaviour.
Pond scum behaviour is an inevitable part of the internet, it is never going to be stopped and it never should be attempted, because the co-operation of the sensible majority (especially the sensible majority with some real clout like sysadmins) have enough momentum and enough existing weapons of mass co-operation (eg usenet death threats for maladministered nntp servers) to keep the pond scum in the place that they themselves elect to live.
To blame wikipedia because some pond scum has the ability to make erroneous entries that are uncorrected in five whole days (wow, encarta still has errors that are fucking years old) in a FREE FUCKING RESOURCE is directly akin to blaming Tim B-L, Scott N, and the INN nntp server coding crew for usenet spam.
In short, such accusations are ONLY EVER MADE BY THE POND SCUM THEMSELVES.
There is of course a direct parallel to the rules of spammers (subscribe to the usenet abuse groups nanae etc if you don't know what I mean) which are
http://bruce.pennypacker.org/spamrules.html
No, the real test of the validity of Wikipedia is to choose a hot potato and compare the content with the "respected" outlets such as encarta and britannica, and see which one is actually living up to the TRUE ideal of an ENCYCLOpedia, which is to EDUCATE,
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
"Don't get me wrong-- I love the WIkipedia. In my book, it's enough truth to get you through the day, and that's all I really need 98% of the time."
It comes in handy during a moral/ethical/political I'm right, you're wrong debate on Slashdot.
http://www.syracuse.com/corrections/
Sure, my IP# is under suspicion right about now on Wikipedia, but there are a lot of IPs to go around. If my whole IP block gets blocked then I cannot edit anymore, however also many other innocent individuals are blocked from the service too.
What if an advertiser put an HTML link around his banners (or around his button [Click here to get XXX] ) that actually formulated a query string that wrote an advertising blurb into a Wikipedia page. The Wikipedia change would come from the unsuspecting user's IP# instead of the advertiser's IP range. (I haven't tried it, but between a querystring and data in a post operation, it may work). This would be almost impossible to stop by blocking IPs, because gradually most IP blocks would be banned and the Wikipedia would not be accessible anymore (for the most part).
I'm surprised I haven't heard about mal-ware that posts advertisements to Wikipedia pages yet, from the user's computer. Maybe it exists. Maybe it's coming.
And open source developers don't do it at all.
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
Wikipedia is currently working to reference all the facts on it. There is a project set up to do it also here Fact and Reference Check. Here is a quote:
There isn't any reason why every fact couldn't be referenced making Wikipedia one of the most authoritative sources of information ever created.
Hell, only a fool would accept a single source as authoritative. Wikipedia is great as a starting point, but then Googling is required to authoritatively ensure you're not passing along bogus info.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Nothing like editors trolling by proxy, posting an obviously stupid article.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
That's a copypaste job, by the way, from the page source... so all the URLs in the links are relative and point back to Slashdot. =b
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Wikipedia != Authoritative?
Recently, this article caused a bit of a stir from its casual dismissal of the wiki model, and even the implication that Wikipedia was perhaps being deceptive by appearing too authoritative. Some suggested an experiment: insert some mistakes into Wikipedia, and see how long it lasts. Alex Halavais actually performed the experiment, and found that all his errors were removed within hours.
Still, this doesn't bode well. I suppose the only thing worse than a slashdotting would be suggeting to a wide range of people that they go to Wikipedia and insert mistakes.
I have a better idea. Call up 5 local newspapers and report some stories, inserting 5 details that are provably false. I'll bet they do far worse than wikipedia in catching them.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The entire Wikipedia model depends on trust and goodwill. If you vandalize wikipedia, then someone will clean up after you. But it's still rude, even for an "experiment".
A Wikipedian put it this way the other day: In my neighborhood, people make a habit of picking up the trash. Please don't come and litter just to see if someone will pick it up.
So you know, like, be cool, huh?
WikiLove,
Jimbo Wales
Wikia
Al Fasoldt is right in part. We do need to critically analyze everything we read. He is, however, clearly fear-mongering when he singles out the Web, and Wikipedia in particular as especially untrustworthy.
As an american (I can't speak for anyone else), I am continually exposed to false information in TV and radio programs, books, magazines, casual conversation, and, yes, Al, on the Internet, and in the Wikipedia.
The ratio of fact to fiction in the Wikipedia will be higher than some sources of information, and lower than others. Likely, Al's readers are already familiar with the process of selecting one news source over another, as they chose his newspaper over his competitor's this morning, they must choose some TV and radio programs over others, etc.
The real discussion to be had here is on how, specifically, the Wikipedia process compares to the processes used to create and disseminate information by other sources. I'm not sure I can add much to that discussion, but I will say this -- When I see an error on the Wikipedia, I can amend it with a few mouse clicks and some typing. When I see an error in a textbook or in a newspaper or on TV, however, I can only send a letter to the editor, and hope that he sees fit to fix/acknowledge the error.
I mean, I make some fairly obscure references on a daily basis. Discussing Conan: Halls of Volta on the Apple //e, and Rambo: First Blood, Part 2 -- The Interactive Text Adventure. But this stuff is even better.
Layzie Bone? Magni? Empuries? The junction of U.S. highway 233 and state route 503? Bernice Johnson Reagon?
Hell, I just checked all of those just the other day. My ISP's cache must've screwed me. I'm calling Mothers Against ISP Caching, and telling them all about this situation.
In the meantime, how about making bogus entries for Palestine and Israel. Try that with Blowjob-Gate, and say the dress was red and actually had horse sperm on it. Or the Russkie hostage crisis, and say Muhammed al-Chechnya bin-Fritos al-Gomerpyle bin-bin-bin-al-Moses was the mastermind behind the Najaf crisis . See if any of that shit lasts a week, under ACTUAL SCRUTINY.
...being slashdotted ;) Well, I sure as hell won't be using Wikipedia for the next month. Thanks, Slashdot :D
I Didn't trust what I found the local BBS scene
I Didn't trust what I found the national BBS scene
I Didn't trust what I found on FidoNet
I Didn't trust what I found on UseNet
I Didn't trust what I found on Gopher
What I found on the Internet must be True!!!
Yes, on the Internet no one knows your a dog,
take this as a blow to critical thinking.
Libraries and Universities are not about dumping volumes of information inside. There are about dedicated and trained professionals with proven critical thinking skills and dedication to preserving true knowledge; keeping bad facts, poor quality books and outright fallicies and lies from entering the public body of knowledge.
Now as P.T. Barnum said "Now this way to the egress..."
The changes were:
Layzie Bone (biographical page). I inserted "born 1973", but a quick Google search reveals that he was born in 1977.
Magni, from norse mythology. I said that he was commonly depicted wielding an axe or a spear. In fact, Magni was the only person other than Thor himself who could lift Thor's hammer, and Magni is commonly associated with that weapon. Interestingly, the fact about Thor's Hammer is in the Wikipedia entry (though they call it by the proper name, Mjollnir), yet nobody seemed to notice the incongruity that a god whose special power is lifting a hammer would be depicted with an axe or a spear.
Empuries, a Mediterranean town, I made the site of sadly lost Greek ruins. The Greek ruins are true enough, but they aren't lost, sadly or otherwise. This travel site helpfully informs us that Empuries has "lots of free parking close to the ruins" as well as a cafe and a museum at the archeological site.
Philipsburg, PA, became located at the junction of U.S. highway 233 and state route 503. Not U.S. highway 322 and state route 504, as most maps show.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, while apparently a prolific author, never wrote Georgia in Song. In fact, Amazon lists no such book by any author.
I don't see this as a great experiment. Obviously, pages in the Wikipedia that get more traffic will be corrected more quickly. As far as I can tell, none of these are exactly hot topics. A better experiment might include adding mistakes to pages that are more likely to be read by lots of people and then figuring out a relationship between general interest/importance of the entry and time until correction.
Obviously, if you pick an entry that only one person has ever worked on or looked at (I exaggerate slightly), it won't be corrected quickly.
The changes that were made in the experiment were minor. They will eventually be corrected but how many people know and care at which junction lies Phillipsburg, PA?
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
I've contributed to a few wikis (including my own, of course), and I can tell you from experience that people who author pages tend to watch them like hawks for edits. That's why Mediawiki provides the "Watch Pages" feature, afterall.
But I agree with what you said... if the wiki is considered unauthoritative, then it is more likely that people will scrutinize and correct the content. But the problem is that eventually this behaviour will result in the belief that the wiki is authoritative. I guess the best thing to do is to continuously raise this issue in order to provoke people to be discerning with respect to the wiki content.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Wikipedia is in the middle of adding features that will allow automatic crossreferencing by contributitors. Here is a project page dealing with the issue:
Reference and Fact Check
Please report any additional copyright infringments to [[Wikipedia:Copyright problems]] (WP:CP for short), and give thanks to OCILLA (the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Hi,
/. post and one of your thoughts was "Hmm, let me try this", please come to the discussion into wikipedia and try to find/create an experimental situation which leads to results with any value.
I'm a wikipedian from de.wikipedia.org and I was very busy reading all the comments on various blogs during the last week. I emailed to the Syracuse Post-Standard guy (without reply) and to Sue Stagnitta, the librarian who started the whole debate. I read the comment from Alex and his experiment and the new one.
Well, my first reaction is to say "nonono, don't do this." but this is more complex.
Have you read Ed Felten's great blog entry on quality check on wikipedia?
Inserting errors is one part but I certainly prefer Felten's way: Take articles about topics you really know and look for errors. Collect these, feel free to correct them.
The next step would be to think of means of more sophisticated quality checks (hint: try to use the category scheme for a well distributed set of articles).
Wikipedia has to deal with various kinds of vandalism, ranging from people who can't believe that this wiki-thing lets them edit the articles to people who try to make wikipedia unusable.
However, I think that people who take time to make these experiments are everything but evil. It should be important to point out that this way might not be the best one to prove or disprove something.
If you read this
OHH COME ON!!
This guy makes some really trivial changes - a 233 to a 322, etc. And he's "dissapointed" that they weren't picked up in 48 hours. Give me a break!!
He changed five small tid-bits of information, five changes amongst the millions of words, and hundreds of thousands of articles. What does he expect? Does he think that there's a million people milling around checking every single little number or word, 24 hours a day?
Given a few months, chances are someone would have been looking for that information, cross-referenced it somewhere else, and then made the corrections.
What an idiot.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Look, think of this:
Every single Russian in the world believes (incorrectly, as it happens) that Russia has never attempted to wipe out the Ingushes (who live in Ingushetia, north of Chechnya, not like anyone cares).
Every single Ingush believes (correctly, as it happens) that the Russians have indeed done this repeatedly, which is why there are now only about 220,000 Ingushes alive.
There are at least 1,000 times as many Russians as Ingushes.
Now do you see why information in a publically editable repository tends to wind up inaccurate?
If the answer to the above question is 'no', you have difficulty with analytical thought.
PS I do not give a good gosh damn about either Russians or Ingushes, that's why I picked them as an example.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
If you'll grant that there are more honest people than asshats in the world,
I do.
then over long periods of time, the wiki will tend towards authoritativeness as intentional errors are weeded out. The majority of edits will be valuable.
I disagree. The reason is that unbiased people have much less reason to care. Who'd like to try to be the voice of "reason" negotiating between two biased sides, in a case where you by definition have no preference or inclination? Both sides are likely to claim you're taking sides, and neither is willing to accept anyone else's understanding of the truth. Why on earth would I want to stick my hand in such a hornet's nest?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
No rebuttles are ever needed to anything Al says; all one need do is show some of his past statements to discredit him. He has the perfect combination of stupidity, ignorance, and arrogance that makes for an inflamatory read every time he writes... and his phone-in radio show is even worse (reformat. Yep, reformat. Oh yeah, you probably need to reformat. Sure, defrag first, then reformat.) The phrase "The definition of an expert is any jerk who drops one more buzzword than you" was coined to describe this guy. Totally clueless, and won't admit it.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
The test as it is applied here is not a good test. The items added are obscure enough that the time was too short for them to get caught. The results can only be significative if the wrong information is left there for weeks or months.
The only conclusion is that obscure fake facts are not caught within a couple of hours/days.
Markus
I think that people are missing the point of the original article. Wikipedia fanboys need to calm down and consider what was written
The author was not trying to slander wikipedia.
He was doing some informal Q&A and the wikipedia came up wanting.
He then made some suggestions on how such errors may be avoided, or at least lessened in severity in the future. Wikipedia is good at cleaning up outright fraus and gross errors, but minor mistakes creep in easier. Procedures need to be modified to ward against such occurrences.
Saying wikipedia could be better is not the same as saying it is bad.
evanchik.net
Parent poster founded Wikipedia.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Those errors introduced in the experiment were incredibly minor though, like changing someone's date of birth by a few years. I'm not surprised they weren't picked up in four days.
I would lump "honest, but incorrect" individuals in with the "dishonest" and still expect to have a higher number of "honest and correct" contributors to the wiki. Most people don't contribute if they are unsure!
But anyway, try this argument on for size: Individual wiki articles (and even the facts contained within them) evolve, just as organisms do. Good, factual data has a higher fitness quotient than do errrors and misinformation. Over long periods of time, the wiki content will tend towards truth.
Now, we could get into a whole other debate about what is "true", but I think that for the purposes of the wiki, truth can only be defined as that which a majority of editors agree upon.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Actually... I think that Wikipedia is pretty adamant that Wikipedia is not a message board, and is an encyclopedia. Continue to take citation precautions, however.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Authority? Sure, it's bound to have spam posted to it and honest mistakes, but who cares?
I love Wikipedia and have become an author there. But the true beauty is the fact that it is a wiki. If you are reading something about Hindu gods you can go through 20 articles, following the links, and get a really good understanding of the subject.
It's the coolest. The in-line links work for it. At the very least it can turn you on to topics that you'd never dream of being interested in. Then you go out and get a book on the subject, an authoritative one, and edit the mistakes.
It's being community supported isn't it's weakness, it is the strength of Wikipedia. If you put in that Pete Rose is from Seattle, someone who knows better will fix it. It will only get better by bringing in more experts. Plus, it isn't that hard to fact check these days.
For instance the article on Lou Rawls is a stub. Lou, thankfully, has his own website with a full biography. I'd assume that his own bio is authoritative and the Wikipeida article can be fleshed out thanks to his page.
If you just want a listing of the American presidents, it's there. If you want to know something about a dead religion it's there (I love comparative religios studies personally).
But let's not forget the real beauty... it's all released under the GNU FDL. This way, if you want to copy it word for word you can. I use this often on my wiki to put articles in quickly that provide people's backgrounds etc.... It's a nice, free, quick (wiki=quick) reference.
Get your Unix fortune now!
In this experiment, the errors were only left in the encyclopedia for 5 days. I wonder how many people actually looked at the modified articles in those 5 days. Ten? A hundred? How many of them read with enough attention for the subtle facts that were changed to even register with them. I wouldn't expect these subtle changes to be noticed within such a short time span. I think it would be interesting to do a much longer experiment in which the debugging process would have a chance to occur. How long would it take for those errors to be found? A month? A year? Forover?
See the entry's talk page and you'll see that the entry is perfectly valid and SilentChris' edits devalued its encyclopaedic integrity.
This is a stupid article really. The "experiment" (and I use the term loosly) that was carried out was fundimentally flawed.
Firstly, the nature of an encyclopedia is that you go to a page to find out information. By adding details only, he made the information less likely to be casually confirmed by people who go there to find information, as the information would have to be quite rare, else they would have already been added.
Secondly, the amount of time that the misinformation was held up was quite small. Even the supposedly infallable brittania testers would be lucky to find one of the five deliberately planted "facts" in such a short time.
Thirdly, Wikipedia gets plenty of hits, but not that many! It's very possible that none of those pages were even looked at! Assuming hits were spread evenly amoung pages, an average page (which these certainly weren't, as I'll get to next) would get approx. 50 hits. Hits are obviously not spread evenly amoung pages, so we don't actually know how many times the pages were looked at! Also, since four out of the five articles are stubs, it's not very likely that they were read.
Forthly, none of the pages chosen had even been updated in the previous week, with the single exception of Bernice Johnson Reagon, which was updated two days beforehand. However, this article was given a mere 20 hours before the "fact" was removed!
Finally, the facts are all plausable, and close to the truth. Even someone who knows enough to dispute those facts would quite probably not pick them up on reading.
I hope I have projected the extreme rediculousness of this experiment. The article should go into the trash bin where it belongs.
(I'm Xmnemonic on Wikipedia.)
I changed the article to a truthful one and it was beaten down.
Oh please. You changed it to an anti-GNAA editorial sprinkled with slants. Your "truthful" details (as I and the vast majority of concerned Wikipedians believe), damaged that article. They weren't flat-out lies so to speak, but they changed the tone of the article for the worse, altering the version that survived a previous debate.
popularity contest for certain points of view.
I suppose it should be changed to a contest for only SilentCrs's point of view? Mass rule, mob rule, res publica ("rule of the people" i.e. republic, a very broad term): call it what you want. Yes it's a popularity contest of opinions, but does a better way exist? Mutual agreement among users is the best way as it leverages the minds and experiences of multiple people as opposed to those of an individual.
No, it's not perfect; but in the case of the GNAA article, it has worked admirably, and for the second time. Users have put aside their personal objections against the GNAA's activities and agreed upon an informative and unequivocal page. It is only you who has yet again disrupted this, with your personal crusade against the GNAA.
Just remember that Wikipedia is like any other site on the Internet and that you should keep these things in mind:
#1 Wikipedia is a Wiki that anyone can edit. You may find almost anything in it.
#2 Don't believe anything you read on the Internet, even this post.
#3 Some people may Astroturf Wikipedia.
#4 Don't rely on Wikipedia for 100% accuracy, use other sources as well.
#5 Wikipedia usually has links to other sources at the end of each article, so you can use it like a search engine to find out other web sites related to the Wikipedia subject.
#6 Slashdot is just as accurate as Wikipedia.
#7 Unlike an Encyclopedia, if you find an error in Wikipedia, you can become an editor and change/fix it. I wonder why the people who complain about Wikipedia don't try and do this?
#8 Anything written by humans will be inaccurate and not authoritive, esp if too many humans have a chance to add to or edit it.
#9 Some people edit the Wikipedia articles and then reference them from a forum to prove their points in a debate. If the mistakes or errors are found later, the Wikipedia article is changed, if not, well the astroturfer wins.
#10 Wikipedia generally gives you an idea of what other people think about the subject. It may or may not be accurate, but at least it gives you a general idea.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I'm such a liar, liar, liar my pants are on fi-re and I'm writtin' for the Neeeeww Yoooork Tiiiiiiimes! Yeah!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Don't vandalize Wikipedia.
SilentChris is a kuro5hin.org troll. trying to troll the trolls and failing it hard.
A wiki is editable by anyone. It is a communal effort to produce something.
By its nature, a wiki cannot be authoritative.
If you're looking for an authoritative answer for your question, you have to hire a licensed (source of authority) consultant.
That still does not guarantee that the answer you're going to get will be correct.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
There's a saying in open-source coding that with enough eyes all bugs are visible. The same is true of open-source writing. I think Wikipedia's main problem in terms of authoritativeness is that not enough people are reviewing it yet. I'd actually go further than that and assert that not enough people are writing for it, either. I just started seriously digging into and contributing to Wikipedia in the last few months (so, yes, I've been part of the problem), and I'm amazed at the number of topics that are still missing or just substubs. Not only esoteric humanities subjects that you'd expect to be lagging a bit, but even geek stuff that 1 thousand basement-dwellers must know better than I do. When someone like me can walk in the front door and find no information at all - correct or not - about topics that are common knowledge, it's premature to argue about its authoritativeness.
I gather there have been attempts to add adverts to wikipedia, but the higher the exposure of the advert, the more likely other wikipeadians are to notice, either through randomly trawling, looking at subjects of interest, or by watching particular articles. Every user has a watchlist, a list articles they can see the latest edits of. Once adverts get noticed, it seems likely that they will get deleted fairly quickly, if they are clear-cut ads. Sure, the advertiser can put the advert back, but that can get revert back as well. Also, there are pages for persistent vandals, so advertisers would have to be fairly cunning and subtle to avoid getting spotted. The more persistent ones get blocked, or banned eventually. Edits can get missed, and do in some cases, but they are likely to be on more obscure articles, that fewer people see, which aren't really likely to be worth much to advertisers. Also, advertisers would presumedly need to guarantee a certain level of exposure, which they can't do very well when there is a community of people trying to stop them.
That way all intentionally false statements about Darl McBride's mom can still stay up there and be modded +5 Funny!
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
No one is going to sue the author over this matter, and perhaps it's OK to introduce these errors as a kind of "test", but aside from that proviso I find it hard to believe that anyone can disagree with the statements in the parent post.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I only recently started tinkering with the Wikipedia, and in a few places found errors. Naturally, I fixed those. I contend that the experiment was of too brief a duration, or the errors introduced were obscure.
The success of the Wikipedia is that it is possible to correct errors when they are identified by whomever found the error. This is a great strength over closed encyclopedia.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
into the Apple Computer listing!
Funny enough, it reasons that the ratio of valid wikis to invalid wikis would be about the same as the ratio of honest people to asshats.
(ceterus parabus)
Fnord.
"Well, I did that experiment, and the results weren't good: five errors inserted over five days, all of which lasted until I removed them myself at the end of the experiment."
So after 5 days 100% of the errors was detected and removed?
...people perceive it with more respect than the rest of the pseudo-info on the WWW? How naive.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
Now EVERYONE will be performing that little experiment but some of them will forget to remove the mistakes or will leave them in intentionaly. So the Wikipedia will slowly turn into a piece of junk Just like the rest of the blog littered web.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
I wrote a fair sized paper last year comparing the majority of Christian religions and how they formed and how they differ on key issues. Frankly, it was hard to find concise, usable information anywhere else, but Wikipedia was more than helpful and by having half of my sources be from Wikipedia I pulled of an A with the Theology chair at a Catholic university. Go figure.
I am feeling fat and sassy
I would like to see an experiment (with cooperation from Wiki) where:
Chances are: if nobody read it, it can't be fixed. The error never "existed". If it was, how many people were "fooled" before it was fixed? My guess is that the corrector would be one of the people who received the incorrect information would be the same ones to fix it once they found out!
To err is human, but to forgive is beyond the scope of the Operating System...
Of course, for all their fact checking, formal encyclopedias aren't immune to the deliberate indertion of false information, as an editorial policy to use in evidence in plagiarism suits. If a rival encyclopedia also has that information, they've been plagiarising, and they'll be fscked when it gets to court and they have to explain where they got the inforamtion...
I believe the SF author Fred Saberhagen at some time had a day job working for the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and one of his Berserker stories has a man (an encyclopedia editor) on trial for his life for revealing the name and location of a colony world to a Berserker... but at his trial he reveals that the obscure colony world was one of the fictitious encyclopedia entries. ("The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron", published ca. 1973)
Did anyone else notice the irony of the librarian's statement about developing critical thinking skills and her statement that students are very surprised about the Wikipedia not being authoritative. Now, on a charitable read, she may be saying that she has her students check the authority of all sources in order to determine bias, etc., but I think she means that she only wants them to use "authoritative" sources.
Well, accepting authority as truth is actually the first impediment to critical thinking. Maybe the students should be learning critical thinking skills in a logic class instead of from a librarian? If she said she teaches them research skills, then fine, but that's not the same thing as critical thinking.
I never use the wikipedia as a final word on anything. It's just a nice, *free* place to *start* my research. Sometimes the content is totally useless and other times it's very helpful.
When I was growing up in the Syracuse area we used to call it the "Sub-Standard". Ah, good times.
Anyway, I'm sure "real" encyclopedias never contain any errors.
Here's the text from an old Onion article which seems relevant here http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/TheOnion /FactualErrorFound.html
Factual Error Found On Internet
LONGMONT, CO--The Information Age was dealt a stunning blow Monday, when a factual error was discovered on the Internet. The error was found on TedsUltimateBradyBunch.com, a Brady Bunch fan site that incorrectly listed the show's debut year as 1968, not 1969.
Caryn Wisniewski, a Pueblo, CO, legal secretary and diehard Brady Bunch fan, came across the mistake while searching for information about the show's first-season cast.
"When I first saw 1968 on the web page, I thought, 'Wow, apparently, all those Brady Bunch books I've read listing 1969 as the show's first year were wrong,'" Wisniewski told reporters at a press conference. "But even though I obviously trusted the Internet, I was still kind of puzzled. So I checked other Brady Bunch fan sites, and all of them said 1969. After a while, it slowly began to sink in that the World Wide Web might be tainted with unreliable information."
Following up on her suspicion, Wisniewski phoned her public library, the ABC television network, and the office of Brady Bunch producer Sherwood Schwartz--all of whom confirmed that "Ted's Ultimate Brady Bunch Site" was in error.
Attempts to contact the webmaster of "Ted's Ultimate Brady Bunch Site," identified as Ted Crewes of Naugatuck, CT, were unsuccessful. The page has been taken offline by its host, Cheaphost.net, which released a statement Tuesday.
"We at Cheaphost were deeply saddened and disturbed to learn that one of the millions of pages we host contained a factual discrepancy," the web-posted statement read. "Please be assured that we are doing everything within our power to ensure that nothing of the sort happens again. We will not rest until the Internet's once-sterling reputation as the world's leading source for 100 percent reliable information is restored."
Paul Boutin, senior editor of Wired, said the error is likely to have a profound effect on how the Internet is perceived.
"Will we ever fully trust the Web again?" Boutin asked. "We may well be witnessing the dawn of a new era of skepticism in which we no longer accept everything we read online at face value. But regardless of what the future holds, one thing is clear: The Internet's status as the world's definitive repository of incontrovertible fact has been jeopardized."
Peter Luyck, 30, a Dallas-area graphic designer and frequent Internet user, was crestfallen.
"If it happens once, it can happen again," Luyck said. "I shudder to think that, one dark day in the future, misinformation could again make its way online. In fact, it may already have. How do we know that trusted sites like the Drudge Report and Fucked Company are as accurate as we instinctively trust them to be? Can we blindly trust that SpideyRulez.com is correct in its reportage that the upcoming Spider-Man sequel will feature Christopher Walken as Dr. Octopus? Pandora is out of the box."
Though the Brady Bunch error is the first confirmed instance of false information on the Internet, scares have occurred in the past. In 1998, an e-mail sent to a woman in Warner Robins, GA, made an unverifiable claim that she could earn thousands of dollars from an initial $5 investment. The claim was never conclusively proven false, and no charges were filed.
- book: years
- article: months
- webpage: days
- weblog: hours
- forum post: minutes
- wiki: seconds
Go figure about the quality.Still, I think wikipedia is a great melting pot for a reliable encyclopedia.
Good point.
I'm not sure if you can really get a good idea of how self-maintaining Wikipedia is from this experiment. It seems to me that Wikipedia is mostly used by geeks, so the five entries he edited aren't ones that I would think would be read as often, as, say, an article on two's compliment numbers. Who's to say that some of these pages were even viewed by more than one or two people in the time he allowed for them to be fixed?
With that in mind, I'd rather seen an experiment that tries to determine how many times a page is viewed before it gets altered. I bet if one of the edits he had made were to introduce some sort of error into the database normalization page's explanation of third normal form, it would be a lot more likely to be noticed within two days.
Stil, shame on anyone who takes any encyclopedia or other reference book as unquestionable authority. Any collection of information that dense is going to be full of errors like made-up words and the like.
Think of all the damage done by the millions of people reacting to false information.
Then again, if Wikipedia did not exist, think of all the damage done by millions of people lacking information.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Wikipedia has already proved that encyclopedias can be created by the unwashed masses of the Bazaar.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Wikipedia is not paper.
Wikipedia is not a product.
Compare the article to its previous versions. It makes it so easy.
The discussions also contain a great deal of additional information about the article.
The Syracuse article was very poorly reasoned and presented. Nonetheless, it is true that allowing anyone to edit leads to a _certain_ kind of credibility degradation. The point of Wikipedia is that it allows a _certain_ kind of credibility enhancement that formal sources cannot offer. The credibility comes from the concept of many hands and eyeballs doing the work. You know, cathedral vs. bazaar--it's amazing how the analogy extends.
I've always used various websites for reference material when writing papers, but I won't do it anymore. I just got an F on my paper on ninjas.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
The way to authenticity is not through "authorities" but through peer review. Freud is a perfect example -- there's a reason why he published most of his stuff in books (which need merely to sell well) rather than in peer reviewed journals -- even in his own time most scientists realized that babblings about "penis envy" by the juvenile-minded Freud weren't science and couldn't have stood up to the peer review process. And the fact is Wikipedia is far closer to the scientific model of peer review than is Britannica.
Yah, I made a change to a page three times over as many days, making it more accomodating each time, and it got backed out within 15 minutes each time. It was too much work to come up with a wording that didn't upset whoever the "entry despot" was, so I gave up.
No shit.
These people are overreacting. The fact is that on average wikipedia IS trustworthy. The point of any encyclopedia is to get an overview of a topic or to find pointers to more authoritative sources, and wikipedia is excellent for this purpose. It's also excellent because readers know very well that they are receiving information that anyone can alter.
Like the others have said, the fact that someone can change minor details in articles is unimportant to the purpose of wikipedia. If you need authoritative information, get a primary source and get over it!
That's a good solution for half of the problem.
There's still the situation where people of good will can still disagree about facts. There are cases where the facts are subject to interpretation. How does one deal with these in a "Wikipedia-Stable"?
What we really need is a "Wikipedia-Stable-Annotated", where the "main text" of the document can not be changed, but a certain amount of commentary (in a sidebar, or in another typeface) can be added and edited. Of course there may still be cases where the commentary is itself controversial (It's not TomAHto, it's TomAYto! SEZ YOU!), but since it is presented commentary rather than primary content there should be less of a problem. For the cases where it remains an issue, a new page (eg, "ToAHto-TomAYto Controversy") can be created.
For that matter, this could be applied to Wikipedia as it is today. No need to wait for the New Wiki Order.
Your experiment highlights my long-held view of Wikipedia to the tee. Since we can not reccommend citing Wikipedia as a reliable source on any level (from 1st grade to PhD), what then is its purpose ? I think that Wikipedia provides a therapeutic effect for the people who regularly add or edit content on it and not much else. There are various forms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that produce this kind of behavior. Responsible educators and parents should show students why the Wikipedia is not an acceptable source of information on any level and disallow its use in any kind of formal research. There are many authoritative and peer-reviewed alternative sources of information on the net, some of them are even free. Check you local library homepage, or get an NYPL.org account.
I thinks it interesting to see how too much un-constrained freedom can create a power vacuum all-to-easily filled by those who seek to force their own views on others.
Tthe "entry despots" you talk about get away with it mainly because the entirety of Wikipedia is now too large for any single group of individuals to police, so they can enforce their will by making multiple reversions, thereby making the cost of altering "their" page so much more higher. Everyone else finds the exercise so annoying they can no longer be bothered.
In which case, the process becomes less of a dialogue to reach a mutual agreement and more of a battle of wills to see who is the most rabid.
I'm sorry but "googling it" doesn't count as "good research" Google can be as wrong as any Wikipedia article.
"However in a scientific paper this doesn't work because you would actually have to duplicate the experiment yourself, which many times isn't feasible."
"Google" for "scientific method" while your at it.
Things are better since Guttenberg, but the problem of control of the means of publishing granting undue "authority" still exists.
No, my argument is sound -- particularly given the nature of the Internet as the new Guttenberg revolution.
Seastead this.
He's been listed as vandalising the entry he talks about for some time now, several days.
>it's not black and white, you just need to use your own brain
Agreed, but the lack of a formal registration system and dependence on volunteers is going to hurt this project as it becomes more complex and more popular. I don't think the "open wiki" model scales so well as A LOT of wiki articles are full of disinformation and bias. Granted, most aren't, but there is a strong US-centric bias and some of us who have corrected disinformation only to see it reappear because of the citation of false facts makes me, at least, give up on contributing.
That said, the best advice is the line you just gave: always be skeptical about your sources. I think this is a postmodern idea, as this whole debate focuses on the assumption that britanica et al are infailable when in reality they have to deal with the exact same problems the wiki people have to deal with.
>like when reading a newspaper.
I would go as far as saying that people don't use their brain with the media. How many Americans still believe between the fictional connection between Saddam and 9/11?
The problem here is cultural and wikipedia is the symptom. People, in general, are not skeptical enough. There is way too much trust (this also applies to politics, religion, etc). Wiki readers know they are getting into something they can't trust unlike old media. The real catch (the real issue) is that old media is just as untrustworthy, if not more so because of ownership bias and other factors.
Every article also has available its complete history -- the first version that was posted, and every subsequent change. You can look at any version, you can compare any two versions, and you can see who made each change. An article that's been edited by many different people is more likely to be reliable than one that's the work of only a few. You access this information by clicking on "Page history", also in the menu to the left of the article.
Incidentally, the next link down under "Page history" is "What links here". If you're not satisfied with the article you found, you may get what you need from other Wikipedia articles that link to that article. Of course, often the first article you reach has useful links to other Wikipedia articles or to external websites. Failing that, you can post a question on the Reference Desk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_d esk.
Well, digital signatures have been around for quite a wile. I do not see any technical reason why
a 'well known' publication would not provide signed and immutable content on the web.
The question is this? How frequently do users who notice an error repair it - no often to be sure. The secondary issue is that the articles which were submitted were so obscure that they would likely not be of any use to the general public. Needless to say, if we're trying to create a FACTbook, we need people that will go and verify the information.
I mentioned this in another thread.
If you have two kinds of material on the page, entry and commentary, then the kinds of material that tends to be subject to these reversions can go in the commentary. I would think that the commentary would need to be closely associated with the material (that is, not hidden behind a link), but clearly distinguished by being in footnotes, sidebars, or in a subordinate typeface. There would be a definite limit to the size of the commantary (eg, 10 lines for small entries, no more than 10% of the lines for large eentries), larger comments would clearly need their own page with a link in the comments on the original page.
A lot of this can probably be done now, but it really should be done in a uniform manner and managed in the software.
Particularly in the social sciences -- such as economics -- peer review has been a poor maintainer of quality. In the social sciences, pro-Statist ideas dominate, while free-market ideas are systematically selected against (this is not a conspiracy, but it is simply a natural outcome of the way the system is set up, with State-funding etc). However, the problem isn't so severe in the natural sciences, where the issue of pro-State vs. free-market is marginal.
I agree, however, that Wikipedia has a better model.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
That's why we're having this discussion. If it weren't authoritative, we wouldn't be sitting here arguing about it.
The question is: should it be authoritative?
(And I think: Hell yes. It's done great, and will do even better. The Internet is primitive right now, and it's growing stronger. Wikipedia will follow suit.)
Webopedia is a real IT dictionary. I always wondered if it was related to wikipedia.com.
Take exactly the same article from Britannica and reword it. There's no violation of copyright there. Copyright only covers the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
PS: Copyright, patents, trademarks, tradesecrets are bullshit; costs of protecting some companies business models are socialized.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
than a regular encyclopedia? If there were an error in a traditional encyclopedia, I would bet it would take more than a few days for them to discover it, and they have people paid full time to do so.
Webopedia sorry about that.
Of course you can't trust it. Anything with such a lame and stupid sounding name as wiki can't be trusted. ;)
Seriously, though, you should never trust anything you read in any encyclopedia. Get the source of the information, and don't trust that either. See how well the info syncs up with various other sources on the subject. After that you might show some degree of trust in the statements.
Related to the fact that "anyone" can change an article -- if you are having an argument, er discussion, with an idiot and cite a wikipedia article as supporting evidence, the idiot can go edit the wikipedia article and make it say the opposite, here's an example of exactly that (only gets good at the end):
Latest Blu-Ray News
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Wikipedia has a "Neutral Point of View" whereas most enclyclopedias has a "Scientific Point of View".
This means that if you wanted to post an article on the creation of the universe according to the Big Bang theory, you SHOULD also include information saying that it's just a theory and maybe instead the universe was created by God's Word (Ancient Hebrew myth of creation) or perhaps it also sprung from the bodies of Titans (Ancient Greek myth of creation).
My impression is that the Wikipedia is pretty accurate in areas that attract people with real expertise. Even if some contributors have a bias or are ignorant or mistaken on certain points, after a while the article gets to be pretty good through collaborative editing. So it tends to be good on subjects that techies find interesting and are knowledgable about. The problematic areas are ones in which the contributors have an interest but lack real expertise. The collaborative editing process doesn't work very well here because there is no one involved who actually knows the subject, or the real experts are a small minority among the contributors and are not able to have much influence. Topics that are particularly likely to be problematic are those about which some geeks are enthusiastic but not truly knowledgable.
In my own area of linguistics, for example, I find that articles on formal topics, e.g. "context-free grammar", are generally good, while articles on historical linguistics are often pretty bad. This reflects the fact that techies tend to have real knowledge in areas related to formal linguistics, e.g. mathematics and computer science, while historical linguistics is a subject that lots of people find interesting but few really know much about.
I have been amazed with the wealth of knowledge stored in Wikipedia. Even useful information about vintage computers, which I though I can only find on specialized/club sites, can be found there.
And chemistry, physics and mathematics, there are a incredibly large number of topics in these areas. In fact, if I had to chose which part of the Internet I want to preserve, I would opt for Wikipedia any day.
Sigged!
My question is how would it's error rate compare to texts compiled by historians? History books contain many errors. I'm sure encyclopedias do too.
In the history books, two of the biggest errors is that Columbus discovered America and that everyone thought the world was flat before Columbus's arrival in the Americas.
The sad thing is that many of those texts contain intentional errors. History is written by the victors and screwed up by the politicians.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Here's the Britannica Online's discussion of libertarianism. Here's the Wikipedia discussion of libertarianism. Both encylopedia's mention Ayn Rand -- which is appropriate, given that her ideas overlap very much with libertarianism -- but do not mention that Rand was not and did not consider herself a libertarian. Wikipedia has a lengthy discussion of the topic, which I would consider a good introduction for a college-student; Britannica's introduction to the topic might suffice for a five-year old. In fact, Britannica's "discussion" of libertarianism is barely more informative than a dictionary-definition of libertarianism.
I have an old collection of Britannica's in my closet, collecting dust. I consider them a depricated tool that are only of use to children. To adults, they are barely more useful than dictionary-definitions, and one will find more comprehensive information from Wikipedia, or simply a well-informed web-search.
One individual, in a debate with me online, even claimed that since an economist (Murray Rothbard) wasn't mentioned in the Britannica, his work wasn't worth reading. This is the kind of idiocy that these biased depricated encylopedia's furnish. Childish thinking among adults. Encylopedia's, including Wikipedia, are a useful introduction to ideas. They do not cover all important ideas, and -- even Wikipedia, certainly Britannica -- offer depricated and flawed overviews of ideas, masking the complexity in a field.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
A common technique in AI to deal with learning is called simulated annealing. The idea is that early on, you want basics of a problem to be learned, and once those fundamentals are learned, the AI can start working on the fine points. If you "change" the AI too much, cause it to "learn" too strongly every time it makes a guess, it throws out a lot of what it has already learned. If it learns too slowly, it will take forever to solve a problem.
The solution is to make it learn quickly at the beginning and then slow down the rate of learning.
When Wikipedia was new, it had no data, and a tremendous amount of content that needed to be added. A "free add at any time to anything" policy was reasonable. Now, however, it has a large amount of existing good content that can be screwed up. It might be possible to force changes to long-standing entries in it be reviewed before the changes hit the page, for instance, or use some other mechanism to slow down the rate of change to portions of Wikipedia that are already in place.
May we never see th
Yeah this is actally a huge problem. I troll Wiki a lot and and am always inserting fake information. But not so fake that it's obvious but rather subtle stuff. Most of it is never removed.
Slashdot culture. Now I'm keeping up with the Natalie Portmans of this world, covered as they may be in hot grits, you insensitive clod. PS, *Portman is dying! Latest Netcraft survey...
The kind of people who trust wikipedia are basement-dwelling unwashed gnu hippies. If they get their information from wikipedia, its hardly surprising that they are so ill-informed
>> you just have to check it from somewhere else ...
And if I check wikipedia and find it is wrong, why should I trust it enough to ever come back?
More worrisome than the simple factual mistakes is the probability that people will deliberately inject biased and bigoted information into wikipedia to further their agenda, and that no one with the required skills, knowledge and judgment will notice and/or edit it.
Just because it touts itself as "open", there's no reason to use it if it can't be trusted. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for...
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Just look at the change history of Bush. I did a prank edit, and within the same minute it was removed by Shibboleth. So, even though Wikipedia might not be authoritative, now we know at least that it is Republican! Long live our dictator!
This is why I have been advocating a publication system for wikipedia for some time. To be fair many other people also are behind a publication system but many of them don't see the need for a complex peer-review process.
Wikipedia is an *extremely* valuable resource, in my opinion much better than any commercial encyclopedia (wikipedia has informative articles even in *very* obscure areas of mathematics), however, this puts the project at risk. Regardless of it's accuracy and review problems wikipedia will become a standard resource the same way a google search has become authoritative despite the many things it misses. This unfortunatly presents a huge risk to wikipedia.
So long as it is a small project frequented by a bunch of like minded people simple community checking is enough to deter vandals. At this level the only real vandalism is people trying to up their google rank, or posting insane creeds, and maybe one or two people making weird slashdot experiments. However, as it becomes a general resource very large interest groups (political parties, companies etc..) have a great deal to gain just by slanting the articles a certain way or cleverly removing small tidbits.
The only reasonable way to deal with this is to create a several tiered system, unvalidated pages, validated pages, and published pages. This would be supported by a user reputation system like karma on slashdot but more sophisticated. I realize that a system like this offends many wikipedian's notions that everything should be editable by anyone but I'm afraid that model simply DOESN'T WORK to bring wikipedia up to the next level. This solution tries to deviate the least from the normal paradigm and those who want can always browse the unvalidated pages.
So how would this work? Every time an anonymous user or a user with insufficent reputation submits an edit or article it enters a validation queue. Similar to the slashdot meta-moderation system any logged in user with sufficent reputation (or maybe selected randomly if we have a short queue and many users) is presented with a link on their screens asking them to validate the contribution. Contributions would NOT be fact checked on validation this is just a quick measure to defend against vandalism and other obvious screw ups. Since pages could be validated quite quickly there should *very rarely* be an difference between the validated and unvalidated pages so individuals could freely browse the validated version and edit these pages easily.
Any disagreements over validation could be sent up for more votes on the issue. Users gain reputation by having their edits validated (this can't increase your reputation over a small number to prevent spell-checking scripts). Users also gain reputation if they validate other pages correctly (their validation is supported by other votes on the matter). Long or significant components could also be rated by users if this was needed to further work the reputation system. Everyone sees where this is going of course. Now when the validated page gets to the point where it should replace the current published version a reputable user submits it for publication. This submission of course needs to be voted on by some number of sufficently reputable users to be published.
I know many people will object to such a heavy-handed system and accuse me of wanting to undo all that is good about a wiki. However, I think it is simply an unpleasent fact of life that we can't govern a large extensive community the way you can a small close community. It isn't an accident that small villages can get by on tacit consent and agreement but a nation needs a legal system. Wikipedia is making the transition from village to nation and if they want to maintain the quality of their product they need to transition themselves.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I don't get it ...
... published in 1998 and 2001, respectively).
I have found wikipedia to be profoundly useful. I'm not exaggerating; I use it almost daily, and it has proven to be immensely valuable. One of the neat things about it is that most pages have a list of references at the bottom, where you can go to learn more and/or to verify the facts presented in the article. If the purpose for which you are using the information is that important and/or sensitive, wold you trust a single dead tree source either? Or would you get a supporting reference?
The quantity, quality, and accessibility of the information that wikipedia provides is, as far as I know, unmatched; and appears to me to be at least as good as any dead tree reference, on average.
It also serves to aggregate information that is not collected together elsewhere; For example, this information is generally hard to find all in one place (the only other source that I know of that has as good an aggregation of this info is this book, or perhaps, this one
Which brings me to another point: wikipedia is more likely to be up-to-date; if you buy a book on, say, complexity theory, right now, going forward (from its publication date) it will lack information on current research; which is why wikipedia is an excellent supplement to many dead tree works (esp. technical ones).
Yeah, because modern encyclopedias aren't rife with errors.
The main advantages of Wikipedia lie in having more eyes and a certain "fruitcake balance" factor, if you will -- fruitcakes are likely to counter each other out until the post becomes reasonably balanced. Whereas, with print materials, there are ideological chokepoints, in a fashion.
-----------------------
You are what you think.
Information for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
Novices might say "anyone can edit", but it's not that simple - Jimbo Wales, who runs Wikipedia (and is an Ayn Rand fanatic) chose who the administrators are. They're people like Ed Poor, a Moonie who does nothing but change every article to a very right wing point of view when he's not removing any negative information about the Moonies.
It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the US State Department's web page, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the history of Colombia article.
Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wiki's out there such as InfoshopWiki which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wiki's like Disinfopedia which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.
Anyhow, I think this is just something I learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of InfoshopWiki.
Thats the whole beauty of wiki. You don't need to trust the latest version and rarely (or never?) does poisoning the article from the beginning occur.
Firefox &
There is no such thing as a "definitive" source of information, for several good reasons:
(1) History is written by the winners, so the only window we have into the past is often from the perspective of the victors. Whether or not history is true as we believe it to be is unproven and unprovable.
(2) Much of our knowledge is incomplete. The gaps are filled in with speculation or theory. New information is discovered and new theories are formed continually.
(3) Everyone is biased. In a very real way, each of us lives in his own world, with his own perspective, biases, and beliefs. So what is intrinsically "true" to one can be just as completely "false" to another.
(4) There are whole areas of knowledge about which we are completely ignorant. For example, before the 20th century, "quantum mechanics" was a completely unknown, completely unanticipated field of inquiry, one which has had totally unexpected consequences in many other areas.
(5) People often lie just to improve their status. There are many examples of accepted biographies (even autobiographies) being turned on their heads by later fact-checking or contradictory accounts.
(6) Experts often disagree about the causes or significance of data, especially experimental data. Contradictory theories may co-exist for decades before a majority agrees on one, and even then a vocal minority holding a completely opposing view may persist for many years, maybe even forever.
In a nutshell, most of what we call "knowledge" is simply a majority consensus about what constitutes "reality". Real, concrete "truths" are few and far between. The best we can sometimes hope for are "rules of thumb" that work well enough to get us through each day without being eaten or run over.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Yes, I've seen right-wing bias on Wikipedia, but it's always subject to correction.
At the Infoshop project you mention, I see from their guidelines (http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Guidelines ) that "liberal, ... pro-government, pro-hierarchy speech is prohibited" and "Anti-anarchist speech is prohibited." Interesting -- it seems there's a hierarchy in that someone has the power to prohibit me from saying things I might want to say. Do these guidelines constitute pro-hierarchy speech? If so, where do I file my complaint?
authoritative either. I have no doubt that Big Soviet Encyclopedia for example says Lenin was the best thing since sliced bread, and America is pure proletariate-oppressing evil. Would be interesting to see articles on Capitalism and Socialism there, too.
I'm finding Wikipedia authoritative enough. They also aren't afraid of dumping ALL of the facts at you, not just the politically "safe" part.
Wikipedia is a website editable by anyone with an internet connection. An encyclopedia is a printed book that is sold and created by a relatively small group of people who are paid to produce it. Given enough ink pens and white-out, an encyclopedia is just as editable, but who goes to the trouble?
Everybody's making the same basic mistake here in comparing one to the other.
It's a very dark ride.
It is doubtful whether Encyclopedia Britannica foreign versions maintain the same exacting standard. I also remember a curious incident of the Kerala consumer court banning the Malayalam translation of Encyclopaedia Britannica because of the profuse number of errors.
The underlying idea of wikipedia is TRUST. SHARING comes second.
No harm is done if you know more than you see in an article and you don't share. But if you purposely include false information... that's a Bad Thing[TM].
Experiments like descibed and similar are as UNETHICAL as tests on human subjects who don't know they are being experimented on. As much as they seem needed to prove a point sometimes, they create a precedent that can only cause harm.
Like others have stated, good luck finding non-traditional subjects in the Britannica. For example, the Britannica has nothing about the Millennium Falcon, but Wikipedia has about ten paragraphs on it. Therefore, with Wiki, someone's interests and knowledge and can be published and viewed by someone wanting to explore their knowledge on a niche subject.
Then again, if Wikipedia did not exist, think of all the damage done by millions of people lacking information.
I hope you are joking here? What is worse: not having the information, and looking for it somewhere else, or having wrong info that you trust? No Wikipedia bashing intended, but your statement doesn't hold.
Z
Copyright does not cover facts and ideas. Historical data on Lincoln's presidency is simply a bunch of facts, which cannot be covered by copyright. What libertarianism is is an idea, which is also a bunch of facts. You cannot copyright facts.
If I take an article from Britannica on Lincoln and list the ideas and facts that it's communicating, then write them in my own words, it is not in any way copyright violation (hence, re-writing what someone else wrote isn't copyright violation). Any assertion to the contrary is simply bullshit, made by someone who doesn't know wtf he is talking about. How you could assert the contrary is beyond me. It would make all research, books, and such impossible, as all works rely on previous works.
Typical idiotic lawyers, wanting to make a process wasteful and inefficient.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Obviously, what is researched is heavily influenced by State (as opposed to voluntary free-market) funding. State-funding cannot rationally allocate resources, due to the inability to perform economic calculation.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Dude, lay off the thesaurus for a while. I'm serious.
And yes, IAAEM (English Major.)
Just look at the rubbish filled article about "holocaust".
I think referrer filtering would block that attack.
-----------
100% pure freak
But it's not authoritative -- how could it be? There is by definition no authority associated with it, and that is Wikipedia's main feature.
Wikipedia is extremely useful, but one must always keep in mind that you're dealing with information that is not vouched for by any authoritative or semiauthoritative source -- just like the rest of the general Web pages you'll find. That doesn't mean it's wrong, that doesn't mean it's right, but it means that you need to keep your wits about you.
I've encountered people, for instance, who have stated that one of their hobbies is writing Wikipedia articles -- they'll do it on whatever subjects they wish. I've encountered people that asked other people questions so that they could write a Wikipedia article simply for the sake of doing it. I suppose that's fine, but it's hard to hear that out of one corner of someone's mouth and then have them tell me how authoritative it is with the other.
Wikipedia is good. It is not authoritative. It never was meant to be.
Your solution is to ask people to play fair? Please read Slashdot at -1 to see how that will work out.
I just read through the wikipedia article on Slashdot Culture and I find the Slashdot stereotypes section to be highly accurate!
* That Slashdotters are male
* That Slashdotters are single
* That male Slashdotters have poor social skills, particularly in relating to women
* That female Slashdotters are rare, non-existent, or in reality males hiding behind a feminine name
* That Slashdotters spend inordinate amounts of time in front of computers
* That Slashdotters have poor hygiene
* Most Slashdotters usually live with their parents (often expressed as "living in their mothers' basements")
I fit all seven of these, so it is obvious that Wikipedia is accurate!
What's hit Wikipedia now isn't a matter of technology or impartiality, it's simply a matter of how to run an online government. Any community has some organizing principles: mainstream information sources use a bureacracy/aristocracy of editors, fact-checkers, and writers. Scientific journals use limited democracy -- a few selected peers review articles for accuracy. Now, we have true democracy, in Wikipedia, where EVERYONE can review an article. All of this argument comes down to one thing: which system works best?
Try driving in the wrong lane five times in a week, and see if there's an accident. Sound dumb? Of course; but our traffic system is based on the idea that everybody do as good as they can, and don't intentionally try to fuck things up.
The same applies to wikipedia. Fix errors you see, watch the changelogs, and don't deliberately insert errors.
I know of a (proprietary) dictionary service that costs $50 a year - if people would spend time according to that amount on helping wikipedia, since they benefit from it, maybe quality would improve even more.
I view Wikipedia as a basic research tool; it's easier to doublecheck info after I read it, than it is to find it the first time.
But maybe it's time to revive the project that wikipedia spun off; but using wikipedia as a source. An "audited" wikipedia. (I'd still just use wikipedia.)
Wikipedia != Authoritative?
Duh!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The differences, there were a couple. Obviously, I didn't conduct the same identical experiment, but I did try to look like a legitimate contributor. The main difference I believe is that I made those changes in high traffic areas. It stands to reason, that the accuracy of wiki content will be directly proportional to the number of eyeballs looking at it. And obviously, if you introduce mistakes in an area that noone looks at (or that noone cares about), chances are -- it won't be corrected right away.
would you rather Wikipedia didn't exist?
I for one am immensely glad it does.
...it's learnt, not learned. :o)
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
If the wikipedia interface were to display, or mark on the actual page (perhaps adjacent to the text column) items which were recently/last few changed items. This would help people verify information, as they could more easily see what has changed.
It may have some lessor advantage where users seeking information can see where something has recently changed and is then perhaps less reliable not having gone through as much peer review and time on the site.
Well, there's a good reason why Wikipedia articles usually have hyperlinks to related web pages. You can have a look at these if you bother to check whether the article is accurate.
Score: i, Imaginary
Everything you read online must be true.
/ index.html
By the way, here's the talk page of the guy who did the later experiment:
"User talk:65.27.75.56
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
See http://www.frozennorth.org/C2011481421/E652809545
Yeah, you must be really proud of your vandalism, aren't you? RickK 21:50, Sep 5, 2004 (UTC)"
It couldn't possibly be because he thinks Wikipedia could actually USE any of the results of his experiment, could it? No, it must be because he's proud of his trickery. After all, he even brags about how he went back and corrected his inaccurate revisions. The gall of some people!
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
For many places there are more than one version of the history.
Afghanistan is a nice example. Ask different ethnic groups about afghanistan, the answers are radically diverse. who will you believe? Theyll just keep deleting their articles forever.
For really conflicting facts, there should be a way to enter two different versions. Readers could then either choose or read both, knowing that thats conflicting information. That way the Wikipedia can be a source of information from BOTH sides. I'd take such an encyclopaedia over Britannica anyday.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Misinformation is worse than no information. Even if the rate of mistakes in Wikipedia were comparable to Britannica (and where's the studies on this? where are the attempts to measure it?), if Wikipedia has more articles, it will have more misinformation in absolute terms, on more topics, and the more topics it has, the wider the number of people that will be misinformed by it.
Are you adequate?
Wikipedia is 1 source and anyone who uses it exclusively is a moron as all people who only take 1 source into account are either morons or very trusting. Let's take Hatshepsut for example.
The published historian Gardner claims that she was an overbearing mother who Thutmose III hated. For his proof he states the fact a lot of Hatshepsut's reliefs have been destroyed and replaced with other people and that this is obviously indicative of his pent up frustration and anger at her.
Gae Callendar (another published historian) says that this is completely false and that there's proof that the relief's were destroyed long after Thutmose III and that even if he DID do it, this was common practise amongst the Egyptian Pharoahs so it isn't indicative that he hated her, but was just following Egyptian tradition.
Gardner says that Hatshepsut wasn't a true Pharaoh because she didn't have enough military campaigns, Callendar says she was and that Gardner is just comparing her to the people that had the MOST military campaigns which is unfair and that she had more campaigns then other pharaohs and Gardner admits they're true Pharaohs.
Now I never read a book that laid out the information just as I did. I learnt all that by reading SEVERAL books. If I had only read 1 book I would have had an unbalanced viewpoint, such as the one evident in this page with the quote
I would say Wikiepdia is more authoritive on this subject as it says(Sidenote: I'm happy to say I helped start the correction of Hatshepsut's and Thutmose III's relationship. It originally said that Thutmose III did it, whereas I replaced that with some people believe he did it, others believe otherwise and then other people came along and fleshed out what I said with much more detail, this is NOT possible in encyclopedias, and often published books will contain one point of view, so I would say the fact anyone can edit it, IS a good thing. I personally believe in Callender's theories, but wikipedia has both).
ARG ARG I THINK FOX BIASED BECAUSE I LIBERAL DURRRR!
that's about the same level of intelligence as your post.
Hey, guys, Wikipedia is an on-going experiment.
The results are not in yet so why are you trying
to make a final judgement?
I personally find it very useful.
Check back on this issue in 5 years or so.
If it exists, it will probably still be on-going,
but you can compare where it is then with where
it is today, and then make a provisional judgement
just like in real life.
Encyclopedias are nothing like authoritative. It's not hard to find dubious
or even erroneous information in print encyclopedias, so I don't know why
Wikipedia would be any different. Encyclopedias are by their very nature
tertiary sources at best. You don't use them for in-depth research. That's
not what they're for. Encyclopedias give you an introduction to a topic, a
sweeping overview. They acquaint you with the basic themes and ideas of a
topic so that you know what you're looking for when you do further research.
Some of the worst articles in Wikipedia come from the 1911 Encylopedia
Britannica. For example, until a few months ago the Wikipedia article on
Abraham came from the 1911 EB, and it was a horrible mishmash of irrelevant
speculative non-NPOV drivel about the authorship of Genesis and sundry other
nonsense, with almost nothing about Abraham's relevance to Judaism,
Christianity, or Islam, and the information about the Genesis account was a
very poor synopsis indeed, nitpicking fine points in some sections and
glossing over major events and whole chapters in other places. The current
article on Wikipedia is imperfect, of course, but *much* better.
Also, I really don't see how the "experiment" is remotely fair, inserting
one error a day for five days and concluding the experiment on the sixth day.
Print encyclopedias aren't expected to find their errors in under two weeks
after the author first submits the article, are they?
I will readily concede that Wikipedia surely contains many errors and cannot
be considered really authoritative, but I would say that goes with the
territory of being an encyclopedia, and I don't see how it diminishes the
value of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, a tertiary source very useful for
quickly finding a general overview of almost any topic.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
States encourage the tragedy of the commons. Because nobody owns the resource -- whatever it may be -- over-use is encouraged. The only way in which States can use prices is because there is a partial free-market elsewhere (this is what the USSR did). It is rather like "playing house". You clearly don't understand our current mess of a medical system, which is no-longer insurance but rather pre-payment, which encourages constantly escalating prices. I'd suggest you search Mises.org for "medicare". For a solution, to the current mess, see A Four-Step Health-Care Solution by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. As for your hogwash about the State being more far-sighted than the free-market, see what the USSR and other States with lots of intervention did to their environment. When resources are not privately owned, they are not preserved and are not put to their best use. Regarding your confusion on economic calculation, I would suggest you read THE SPHERE OF ECONOMIC CALCULATION by Ludwig von Mises, and the chapter after it (page-by-page viewing of each chapter-section).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Someone who thinks that free-market economics is dominant among econimists is completely ignorant of reality. Free-market economics dominated more than a hundred years ago, when there was Carl Menger. Today, the Keynesians and supply-siders -- both serious interventionist schools -- dominate.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
In light of this new "research" The US Dept. of Homeland Security has announced Wikipedia will be shut down until such time as it can be made secure from false information terrorists.
Regards,
~Joshua Norton
I'm agnostic because I have no opinion on if there is a God. It just really makes no difference to me whatsoever. I admit there could be a God but I've seen no evidence to convince me of such. Likewise I've seen no evidence to convince me that there is no God. Therefore I take a detached wait and see stance until some facts come to me that will push me one way or the other. For that matter I'm not even sure what the definition of 'God' would be. Lacking a definitive definition for 'God' I see no way I can really prove if 'God' exists or not. My cat thinks it's a god fit to be worshipped. Does that mean God exists? Beats me. :)
An atheist is convinced that there is no God. Clearly the two are not the same thing.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
People do choose to die, so would not prove to a theist that their divine entity lacked omnipotence, let alone the ability to fly. Remember that Christians believe that Jesus died because he choose to, not because he lacked the power to save himself.
The "existance of evil" is often used as a proof of the non-existance of God, but it only "disproves" the existance of a omnipotents and omnibenevolent christian god. It cannot disprove any of the pagan gods who are not omnipotent (and frequently not omnibenevolent either).
In general it *is* very hard to prove a negative. I don't believe in unicorns, but I cannot prove they don't exist. If I checked every inch of earth and did not find them, it is still possible that they are living on mars, or
even another galaxy.
I have an idea. Why don't we inseminate a small amount of small pox into the population on the east coast and wait to see how long it takes health officials to determine and quarantine the problem. That we know exactly how far up shit creek we will be if the real thing happens - oh wait.
Just b/c it was not noticed does not mean it did not effect the system.
There are religions that are atheist.
Some sects of Buddhists and Hindus are atheist.
But they are religions as well.
It is very, very easy to have a religion with no gods.
The actual definition of "strong atheism" given by Wikipedia is "the lack of belief in any god or gods with the strong conviction that no gods exist". There is no requirement that the conviction be stronger than their belief in logic. In fact Wikipedia notes that many atheists conviction derives from The Problem of Evil, an apparent logical flaw in the theists position.
It is all to common that a poster will misstate a opponents position to strenthen their own (the strawman fallacy), but given that the penguinoid gave a obviously phony reference I can only assume it is a troll. I am just surprised so many people took it at face value.
...and the question won't earn you credit either.
Here's Google's thoughts on the meaning.
The example of Freud is particularly apt. Despite his widely accepted expertise at the time, his work and his opinions have since been roundly repudiated, and there is little of merit left to his name. Similar examples are legion. There would not even have been an entry in an "authoritative" encyclopedia for plate tectonics, the Cretaceous meteorite, or McClintock's transposons for many years after the important work has been done. Often progress waits for the incumbent authorities of the field to die.
Fields where current orthodoxy impedes progress include Alzheimer's research, biological interactions with varying electromagnetic fields and tiny currents, and fusion using electrically-accelerated nuclei producing energetic charged particles.
Authority is no guarantee of validity, although it may be promoted as, and easily be mistaken for one.
So the practice of not worshipping a god is chauvahnism.
And if the god is male, it's male chauvahnism.
(Yes, I know that it's spelled "chauvinism"; it's a joke.)
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
"ANYONE who takes into account only 1 source is a moron"
Can you quote (or point me to) a second source to confirm this "fact"? (If I accept your statement without taking into account other sources, then I am a moron. But wait, no, I won't accept that I am a moron until I check with other sources. But if I check with other sources, then I am no longer a moron. My head hurts.)
More use of watching topics could help with this problem. There's a watchlist, but adding RSS/Email notification when an article you're written/contributed to is changed would allow authors to keep stupid bugs out. More importantly, it would allow authors to keep more insidious false information out.
-Lars
"In this experiment, I painted graffiti on the walls of the local school. It's not plain vandalism, though, because I'm blogging about it. It was just to test the response times of the janitorial staff. I suggest you all try what I did to prove it for yourself."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Or possibly the unicorns are following you around so they're always behind you ;)
Sorry - I just get this funny picture of a guy looking over the entire world for some unicorns - and there's this huge heard of them tiptoeing around behind him and hiding behind the curtains each time he looks around...
Sorry... I think I'm over it now... Yes doctor I'll take my medication now...
my sig could kick your sig's arse...
Let me give you another data point too: Chinese litterature. In most Western encyclopedia I have encountered artices on China and its history/culture seems predominently written by maoists and post-maoists. Thus they do not write a word about Hong Lou Meng which is one of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese fiction as the Wikipedia rightfully puts it. Mao, however, did not like this book.
What about a couple of rules for Wikipedia content (dunno which are already in affect but the combination might stop the problem)...
* Each page must have at least one primary contact, who gets notified when changes are made (perhaps digests, each day/week).
* Check usage patterns for a page: if a page remains unchanged for a long period, and then a change is made, notify the primary contact. The theory being, that if it has remained unchanged for a long period, it's probably accurate.
Manta
How about adding an option of "Watch this entry" - so that anyone who cares about a specific entry/s can just enter an email address, and recieve an email containing the new changes or additions, whenver it is edited.
(or, of course, in a daily/weekly/etc digest form and so on)
- Nir
too old to remember username
too lazy to register
Contrary to the article and links mentioned, I have found the editing is usually( and surprisingly) quick at Wikipedia. All its depends is the type of article you wish to edit. If you have edited an article about your great grandmother who once fed Hitler some russian bear at her German Inn,no one would bother to edit it. If the information is not appropriate, it will usually be deleted. But editing information about Computer Science! Gosh!try the experiement and come for a bet! There are new things which have come up, wherein Wikipedia is having Featured Article( you can have it via email as well), which is carefully assembled/edited by the wikipedian community collaboratively. Check out the community portal as how the collaboration usually takes place. Wikipedia is a very good source to get started on any topic you wish. If you dont find it there,google for it and would you believe links which are returned as Authoritative, unless otherwise they are from NEC Citeseer or uspto.gov!!! :)
Senthil
As a result, most articles, including (I'd guess) every article of any importance, has at least one person watching it. Instead of the single "primary contact" that you suggested, there can be several people who are automatically notified of any change. I don't need to keep checking each article that I care about. If it sits there for months unchanged, then someone edits it, I'll know about it.
For a prominent and controversial article, you can bet that several Wikipedians of sharply conflicting views are ready to pounce on any change that biases the article against their side. For example, we get the occasional stupid insult inserted into the articles on Bush or Kerry. They're gone within minutes. (No, this is not a suggestion that you should do something stupid yourself, just to see if I'm right.)
Nir, see my reply to Munra. There's no option for an email report that I know of. You have to log in to Wikipedia to view your Watchlist. That's no imposition, because once you get hooked, you'll be logging in every day anyway.
Hey, moron, copyright doesn't cover facts. Period. End of discussion. Facts cannot be copyrighted. You can't copyright some historical data, or fact, such as the fact that Abraham Lincoln was a mercantalist, in the footsteps of Clay and Hamilton; or any other facts for that matter. I thought I was very clear on this. Maybe you should Google "copyright" to see what it covers. Only the expression of an idea can be copyrighted, not the idea itself. I'm sorry that you're so stupid. You've plainly invalidated your claims to be a lawyer.
The actual intangible idea may not be copyrighted.
Facts cannot be the basis for "derivative works". End of discussion. Going back to the original discussion of encyclopedias, reading one encylopedia entry on a topic, listing the facts, and writing them in your own words is not a "derivative work", you moron. Perhaps you are too stupid to understand this, but those "facts" werent' created by the person who wrote the encylopedia article. That person had to find them from somewhere else. If they can put those facts in an article, then so can anyone else. Your idiotic idea of what a "derivative work" is would make the original encylopedia articles impossible in the first place. Stupid fuck.
To be clear, the sequel to Gone with the Wind is a derivative work. Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State was not a derivative work of Human Action. Rothbard restated and reviewed many of the same economic facts. However, MES is not a derivative work of HA, as facts (nor ideas) cannot be copyrighted.
What a fucking moron. Next time, think before you talk, or shut the fuck up.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
While the Wikipedia effort may fall subject to criticism, you have to admit that they're certainly working hard for it
Check out my PHP Url Validator
We don't have to argue philosophically if Wikipedia can possibly be accurate. Pick an esoteric subject (or 20) you know a lot about, and check the entries. If there's anything there, you are almost guaranteed to learn more than you knew before and I defy you to find four factual errors, or two important factual errors, in your arbitrary selection of 20 articles.
You guys argue as long as you like about whether or not it's good - I've seen it, and it's good.
When you're ready to start arguing about how to make it better, let me know.
That from the beginning, I was referring to taking the ideas and facts in another Encylopedia, and writing them in your own work, while (if appropriate) omitting ones you deemed to be wrong, and adding other relevant facts (if the article was incomplete).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
That they call them "homicide bombers" when they are unsuccessful and only kill themselves.
Everybody understands what a suicide bomber is. They strap a bomb to themselves and blow themselves up, and it's clear that their attempt is to kill or injure others.
On the other hand, "homicide bomber" is a more vague term. Is the Unabomber a homicide bomber? He sent mail bombs that were meant to kill or injure. It sure sounds like one to me. But it's very different in that he didn't kill himself in the process.
Fox is pushing a political agenda by choosing an uncommonly used term instead of the accepted one, and the fact that their new term is more vague is a sign that they are hot aiming for accuracy but for a certain bias.
If you truly believe that Fox is less biased than the average news source, you're seriously misinformed. Think about it, if everybody but you seems to be a liberal... couldn't it be that you're actually a conservative?
Now, mainstream economists have committed many fallacies here, among them assuming that only actions pursuing profit-maximization are rational. This is such worthless non-sense that I won't discuss it any further.
On the necessarily rational nature of action, see Ludwig von Mises:
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen