Slashdot Mirror
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."
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
General disclaimer - Use Wikipedia at your own risk! - Wikipedia does not give medical advice - Wikipedia does not give legal opinions - Wikipedia contains spoilers and content you may find objectionable
WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY
Wikipedia is an online open-content encyclopedia, that is, a voluntary association of individuals and groups who are developing a common resource of human knowledge. Its structure allows any individual with an Internet connection and World Wide Web browser to alter the content found here. Therefore, please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by professionals who are knowledgeable in the particular areas of expertise necessary to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information about any subject in Wikipedia.
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.
None of the authors, contributors, sponsors, administrators, sysops, or anyone else connected with Wikipedia in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages.Please make sure that you understand that the information provided here is being provided free and gratuitously, and that no kind of agreement or contract is created between you and the owners or users of this site, the owners of the servers upon which it is housed, the individual Wikipedia contributors, any project administrators, sysops or anyone else who is in any way connected with this project or sister projects subject to your claims against them directly. You are being granted a limited license to copy anything from this site; it does not create or imply any contractual or extracontractual liability on the part of Wikipedia or any of its agents, members, organizers or other users.
Any of the trademarks, service marks, collective marks, design rights, personality rights or similar rights that are mentioned, used or cited in the articles of the Wikipedia encyclopedia are the property of their respective owners. Their use here does not imply that you may use them for any other purpose other than for the same or a similar informational use as contemplated by the original authors of these Wikipedia articles under the GFDL licensing scheme. Unless otherwise stated Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites are neither endorsed nor affiliated with any of the holders of any such rights and as such Wikipedia can not grant any rights to use any otherwise protected materials. Your use of any such or similar incorporeal property is at your own risk.
Please note that that the information found here may be in violation of the laws of the country or jurisdiction from where you are viewing this information. Wikipedia does not encourage the violation of any laws, but as this infor
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Worse than that, they keep articles they really shouldn't. I'm all for encyclopedic integrity but come on. I changed the article to a truthful one and it was beaten down. It's not a matter of what's "correct" encyclopedic-wise, but which a popularity contest for certain points of view.
Who modded this crap insightful? To censor is to remove "objectionable" speech, whatever that may be and whoever does it. The only relevant difference is whether it's a kind of censorship permitted by the law/constitution/whatever.
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."
You also say you add "perspective". If it's your perspective on the matter rather than some notable perspective, you may have run afoul of the no-original-research policy.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
No, Wikipedia has an extremely strict NPOV article. Besides, the GNAA article is useful for attracting trolls, lest they do damage elsewhere. Wikipedia is not paper. It can live with an article on the GNAA, or 150 articles on Pokemon, and survive just fine.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I think you violated the No Original Research policy and the "Auto-biography policy.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
Wikipedia entries are often entered by experts in that field
there is no verification of expertise of the wiki writers so it's more or less a "use at your own risk".
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.
It happened, it still happens, and articles that result from copy&pasted text are deleted. It's anyway an ongoing problem, see Wikipedia:Copyright problems.
See the entry's talk page and you'll see that the entry is perfectly valid and SilentChris' edits devalued its encyclopaedic integrity.
(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.
I have on the article Supply and demand. It is more complete and more accurate than Columbia Encyclopedia and World Book. It was roughly equivelent to Encyclopedia Britannica. Columbia Encyclopedia especially seem to be less accurate for economics articles than Wikipedia. I would recommend this experiment to anyone in an area that you are personally very knowledgeable.
Since you asked (or at least, you appeared to)...
Atheism: An explicit belief in the lack of existence of any god or supernatural power.
Agnosicism: To be in a position of uncertainty over the existence or lack thereof of any god or supernatural power.
And also relevant...
Secularism: An avoidance of the question of the existence of any god, in the belief that it is easier and/or better to live life without reference to religion.
Why?
The problem is that the less mainstream topics, and the little details, aren't being fact checked. The user base can grow astronomically and this problem won't go away.
I suppose it might, arguably, get worse as the potential number of vandals increases. That's not the sort of problem that interests me most when we talk about accuracy. It's the little things that even the educated among us might not remember, little dates in history and minutia, that are likely to be slightly off.
I think this is might be a largely solvable problem by employing volunteer fact checkers - something that could be a really fun job. But it's never going to be 100%, since you're trying to hit a moving target.
Where did you go to school??!?!? My teacher taught me that:
one should never cite sources in a paper from an encyclopedia
Who taught you this, if not a teacher?
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
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
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)
Wikipedia entries are often entered by experts in that field who have the best understanding of the subject. "Real" encyclopedia enties are written (as I understand it) by information researchers who are experts at researching information, not in the subjects of the fields they're writing about.
Actually, you're not entirely correct. While researchers may write some articles for "real" encyclopedias, I know a few professors who have been contacted by Brittanica to write articles specifically related to the domain of their work/knowledge.
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.
He's been listed as vandalising the entry he talks about for some time now, several days.
undecidedness about gods IS agnosticism.
Atheists don't believe in gods just like you don't believe that you are a part of the Matrix (TM) even though you can't prove that the Matrix doesn't exist.
Are some outlets of this trash slanted? Sure...a little. Fox is biased toward conservatives and CNN is biased toward liberals...but not to a HUGE degree on either side.
You're talking about the FOX News that begins broadcasts by counting down the number of days "until you get to re-elect George W. Bush". That's more than a little biased. That's criminal false advertising when they claim to be "fair and impartial".
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Can you prove there are no gods? Then you simply believe there is no god. Atheism is a belief system ad a religion with the self at the center. Everyone believes in something.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Freud by no means confined his writing to books. Sigmund Freud Bibliography
I've been watching for a few months now, and Wikipedia does remarkably well once problems are brought to the attention of the community. But there are hundreds of thousands of articles, so the project relies readers like you to report when you encounter obscure pages with non-obvious accuracy problems.
Fox News says: "We report, you decide." They report the number of days until Bush is reelected (or not). Bias? Where? And are you separating their COMMENTARY programs from their NEWS programs? Hmm? Riiiiiiight.
And as for AP, they put out a story than the crowd Boo'd when Bush sent well wishes to Clinton on his upcoming surgery and later *CORRECTED* the story, eliminating the bias. The crowd was *NOT*, EVER Boo-ing.
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).