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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."
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.
And how much are people paying to use the site?
Oh ya its free. And not a bad quick referance.
M
What the hell does that mean, "too far"?
"It's weird and scary and dangerous and a threat to my job, so I'm going to condemn it." Cf. Microsoft, MPAA, RIAA, buggy-whip makers.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
..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!!
Another straw man argument exposed for what it is
How can you call it a "straw man" when it's entirely accurate as an argument? The "stable" Wikipedia you mention does not yet exist, and therefore arguing that the article writer should have used it instead of the "bleeding edge" Wikipedia is silly.
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!
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...
I think the analogy of Wikipedia:Britannica::Open-source:Commercial::Linu x:Windows serves here-- if you want to *pay* for information, you can. If you want it free, you're going to get a best-effort, which in most cases, will be good enough.
If you're only using one source for your information, however, then you're not researching correctly.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
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
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
Precisely.
In news reporting it's known as the "Enquirer Effect"
The National Enquirer, Matt Drudge, or Faux News reports some half-baked erroneous bullshit.
The 'legitimate' news organizations pick it up and report it from there.
A week later it's common knowledge and accepted as absolute fact that Al Gore said he "invented the Internet."
After all, it's quoted in all those news stories, isn't it?
HAHAHA - dude, what about whole countries that distribute history books that are written to conform to the ruling parties doctrines?
This is to be expected.
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.
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.
There is no liberal or conservative media...it's a myth.
There is this thing called "The Media". It is like a shark. it feeds on anything and everything...including itself.
Where was the so-called "liberal" media when Clinton was going through all the sex scandal? On every channel, regardless of who it was...they were dragging out every dirty little detail about everything there was. Why? Why, ratings/money/cash.
"we got the bubble-headed bleach-blond who comes on at 5.
She can tell ya 'bout the plane crash with a gleem in her eye".
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. Why? If any of them air huge falsehoods, the OTHER news organizations jump all over it....more blood in the water...gotta feed that shark...gotta keep moving. So both "sides" walk a fine line...but their still both part of the same swimming shark out there.
To get to the bottom of something, you need to look at many different news, see where the "bullshit" is, filter it out and try to determine what is really going on...then double check with Reuters and the AP. But this is a lot of work and most people just sit zombie like in front of the tube waiting to be filled to the brim with fear.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
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.
Theists always say this and it is complete and utter tripe. It's in the basic definition: atheism. It's not a belief in 0 gods, it is a lack of belief in gods. Theists have a great difficulty in understanding the difference.
You can't accept that people don't have this belief, so try and make the lack of it a belief in itself which is absurd.
You don't need a belief system to not believe in something. Otherwise you'd need a special religion for each non-existant thing, i.e. the non-tooth fairy believers religion, the non-santa claus believers religion.
Just because lots of theists find it difficult to wrap their heads around the concept of not needing to believe in anything, they find a need to fit everything into a neat little belief box. As though they're embarrassed about having a belief system while an atheist doesn't.
>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.
> There is no liberal or conservative media...it's a myth.
Oh really?
Pray tell, why are Rupert Murdoch's, Mellon Scaifes's, and Rev Moon's papers/media are so far to the right they make Bob Dole blush?
Ownership bias is quite real. In other countries its very common to have a "liberal" paper and a "conservative" paper all of whom are open with their bias. At least here in the states the alternative weeklies don't shy away from the fact that they have a liberal bent, but Fox News and the Washington Times and others still play the "we're just newsmakers without an agenda" card. Which is highly disingenious and leads to more dangerous beliefs than "al gore invented the internet." How about the millions who believe Saddam had a hand in 9/11?
In fact, unlike traditional encyclopedias, wikipedia has both the manpower (all users, anyone who cares to contribute) and the room to provide exhaustive information.
Traditional encyclopedias are constrained in the amount of writers they can afford, the amount of research they can do and the amount of paper available for a single article. In a time where traditional encyclopedias are losing marketshare (thanks to internet, cdroms and other sources of information), cost savings are likely to put pressure on all three factors.
Wikipedia is a cumulative effort. If an article is not good, it can be fixed. If there are multiple views/interpretations on a topic, there is room to highlight both sides of the debate.
The longer the process goes on the better it becomes. Of course malicious people can insert information but sooner or later people will find out and fix it. You can put screening processes and peer reviews on wikipedia just like you can on a traditional encyclopedia.
Probably wikipedia's largest problem is not the process but the fact that it is accumulating information much faster than all other encyclopedias.
Now this guy has done something clever. He has made some small changes that would pass a first glance unless you already knew the facts. The problem is that he jumped to the wrong conclusion and never actually wondered how many people ever saw the changes. Since he only left the changes for 20 hours to max 5 days (!) and the articles do not exactly qualify as hot information, probably noone or at most a handful of people read the article. The changes obviously passed the vandalism procedures (for e.g. excessive changes in short periods of time) and nobody bothered to verify the information right away. The latter is actually the whole point of criticism. Wikipedia cannot be authorative because not all information is verified right away.
However, he misses the point. If brittanica has a mistake you might be tempted to write to the editor and maybe in a next edition it would be fixed. But most people probably don't. If you spot an error in wikipedia, you can just fix it. The more articles are referred to, the more authorative and informative they become. Especially the 'hot' articles on politics, famous people, etc are likely to be read, scrutinized and edited very often. Messing up 'empuries' is easy but try inserting false data under 'George Bush' and see how quickly that is corrected.
Jilles
Atheism cannot be a "religious" stance by definition:
No god or deity = not religious. It could be a state of belief, as opposed to a state of concept or idea (the chief difference between ideas and beliefs is that ideas change according to new empirical evidence, beliefs do not), but your attempt to equivocate the atheistic stance by purely semantic means does nothing to enhance the debate...it only muddies the waters of the debate.
I fully understand what you're saying here, but the definition I provided above clearly says that the set of deities must include at least one. Therefore your own statement here shows the fallacy of engaging in a semantic argument--you weren't able to write a short post without contradicting yourself.
I point this out because it's so easy to discuss philosohpical topics such as these and descend into an uninteresting semantic debate about what we ought to call things rather than what things are. If you reply to this post and insist that you're going to change the definition of the term religious or atheist to suit your needs, that does nothing to convince others of your point; though they may even choose to adopt your non-standard definitions, there's no way of ascertaining whether they've grasped your underlying point. The hope in most semantic attacks is that the change in wording will simply find its way into the subtext of future conversations and change people's minds that way. Sort of an underhanded approach, which is why I personally detest such attacks by language. Political correctness is a great example of what I'm talking about.
So, I'll address the point underlying all your wordplay...that might get us somewhere. Is it possible, do you think, that atheists might be divided into two categories: those that hold atheism as an idea and those that hold it as a belief? The idea atheists might very well hold that there is no god, but this is not incontrovertible fact...much in the way one "believes" in a scientific theory. For instance, I "believe" in Newton's model of gravity--but only insofar as it has been shown to correspond with nature. Should I need to move into the realm addressed by General Relativity, then I would not "believe" in Newton's model for that purpose. Do I think that Einstein's model is "true"? Well, no, of course not...the model hasn't shown that it corresponds exactly to reality in every situation (I'm not sure how it could meet such a high standard, either).
So, one might be atheistic in this sense. A subtle difference between a scientific theory and holding atheism in the same way, however, exists and must be addressed. And this difference is embodied by your statement:
This statement is absurd. It is silly to judge what someone would do or think in the presence of a condition that is simply impossible. In this case, "if he were given a logical proof that a god must exist" is the impossible condition. No one who has done any study of philosophy or religion would accept this as something that could actually come to pass--in other words, it is not in the set of things that could occur in this universe.
So, pinning your argument that atheism is a belief system much like religion on this statement is a major flaw in your reasoning. I might say your belief that hippogriffs do not exist is flawed because you are so prej
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
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.
However, he misses the point.
No, you Wikipedia disciples have missed the point. RANDOM ANONYMOUS INEXPERT people can alter the information in the "encyclopedia" at any time.
There is no Free or Open Source Software project that does this. They all have gatekeepers of some kind. Can you imagine how horrible the Linux kernel would be if random users could check in code without asking? What if random users with barely two weeks into an introductory programming class decided to hack on GNOME or KDE? Of course most errors (but not all) won't be subsequently pushed out to the rest of the users, because the compiler or the testers will throw them out. But Wikipedia isn't software. Mistakes in the information WILL get pushed out to the other users.
I don't expect my authoritative sources to be error free, but I do expect them to be authoritative. You cannot do that without restricting membership to authoritative sources.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!