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Ex-Britannica Editor Reviews Wikipedia
0-9a-f writes "Robert McHenry, one-time Editor in Chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, offers his thoughts on Wikipedia at Tech Central Station. While many Wikipedia zealots might discount his obvious bias outright, his broad argument is difficult to ignore. A million monkeys might eventually write Shakespeare, but how would they recognise it once they had?"
Robert McHenry asked "how would they recognize it once they had (Shakespeare)"
Simple. For each Shakespeare literature there would be another million monkeys reading and discussing the article. Thus you have a million writing monkeys and you would have maybe a million million reading monkeys; thus, the noise from the million million monkeys during discussion would drive the million monkeys.
foreach $monkeys(keys {%Shakespeare})
{
print "You\'ve got Shakespeare" if %shakespeare{$monkeys} = $It;
}
See the infinite monkey rule isn't good to apply as that rule doesn't facilitate feedback from the system.
I've been using Wikipedia almost exclusively as my encyclypedia for over a year now.
FTA:
The author says there are "no means to resolve" but I beg to differ. There is clearly a means to resolve these inconsistencies in that particular article! Edit it!! If he has found something wrong with the article, he should take a few minutes and correct it. Enough of that, and the article will go into dispute and moderators will resolve it. If this author is interested in Alexander Hamilton, he should watch that thread unfold using the Wikipedia tools to stay on top of it, making changes as he goes.
The nice part about a Wiki is that the changes are tracked, so the wiki on a whole is bigger than the page you are looking at. You can see how articles evolve, and where disputes may find fuel. Furthermore, this kind of thinking requires more depth than the printed page ever could.
When you are a dinosaur, you ought be extinct or you ought adapt, IMHO. Make way for the Humans! It's apparent to me that this author understands neither the concept nor the spirit of Wiki, and considering he is in the Encyclopedia business -- that is quite troubling, as it is mission critical for any field to understand new technologies as they unfold within that field.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Robert McHenry, one-time Editor in Chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, offers his thoughts on Wikipedia at Tech Central Station. While many Wikipedia zealots might discount his obvious bias outright, his broad argument is difficult to ignore.
Nah, the real Wikipedia zealots would just say that his statements need some NPOV'ing.
As an educator, Wikipedia needs to have impeccable credentials and support from leading educational institutions before I would recommend it to our teachers and students.
While many Wikipedia zealots might discount his obvious bias outright
Wikipedia is the most biased "reference" source out there. The Karl Rove ariticle basically made him out to be a reincarnated Goebbels. The problem of course is any editor with an agenda can ruin an article.
As for the facts, I've seen howlers in many mainstream encyclopedias. In the cases I know something about, I find wikipedia's standards quite good, and when there's an error I can at least go in there and correct it.
It's true I crosscheck anything I find there but I do that with other sources too. Never rely on a single source.
A million monkeys might eventually write Shakespeare, but how would they recognise it once they had?"
It's not a top-down society anymore. We don't need to be led. No thanks.
If the "monkeys" decide they like what they wrote, that's good enough -- it doesn't have to be Shakespeare. Experts, journalists, pundits, and cultural leaders don't matter anymore. Anyone can publish anything without asking for permission from the elite.
Elites should go get jobs and create something, rather than trading on their alleged celebrity and stature. Because no one cares anymore.
It's good.
If we examine the print versions of Britannica for the last ten years, how many entries will still be accurate? 90%? 70%? Even assuming that everybody on the Britannica staff is informed and literate, the document still decays more quickly than a Wiki-modeled document.
And as far as inaccurate information goes, I have a two word response for that: political blogs. Many people are perfectly happy to get their Important Information a blog by somebody who can't name their sources and who has no responsibility to be accurate. The modern measure of accuracy is simply a matter of how many people believe and repeat a statement.
So true! Thats like saying a million monkeys might write a great open-source operating system, but how would they recognise it once they had?
ermm.. wait...
This guy is just scared for his job and spreading FUD.
Wikipedia's process for moving from an idea to a collection of badly edited articles to a real encyclopedia is, at the risk of soundling like someone from the 90s, exactly the same as the process by which any community learns.
On an infinite timeline, Wikipedia is going to beat the snot out of anyone else--in about 200 years, it will have incorporated everything written before the 21st century into itself.
To speed it along on a realistic pace, the only things that can be done are either contributions or, *gasp*, donations specifically earmarked to hire fact-checkers and editors.
That it's implausible to suppose that a large community of contributors might eventually write an operating system that could challenge Windows in the market.
Of course, the comparison isn't completely accurate, since Linux and *BSD do have "gatekeepers", people like Linus and lieutenants, who at least in theory are vetting everything that makes it into the main kernel.
Nonetheless, it's not a million monkeys writing Wikipedia. Many are monkeys, but there are also lots of intelligent peope out there.
It's also naive to suppose that every "traditional" encyclopedia article has been completely free of error. (Just as naive as the assertion that Microsoft's quality control makes Windows free of security holes.)
Sure, Wikipedia isn't perfect. Sure, it's very easy to see how bad information can get in there (not even creep in, but stroll in through the front door and sit down). But if enough people are buying into it, it's also easy to see how the process can work. So far, by and large, it seems that it is working, even if not perfectly.
Given that (at least until various regulatory agencies and large intellectual property firms manage to codify their horror) the Internet allows everybody to be a "content producer", not just those who control the huge resources of a publishing company, it's only natural that there should be a sort of encyclopedia that allows each to contribute his own expertise without going through the priesthood of a encyclopedia editorial board. Will it make traditional encyclopedias obselete? Certiainly not, at least in the short term! But nor do the differences mean that something like Wikipedia shouldn't exist and that people searching for information should eschew it in favor of traditionally published encyclopedias.
The future (longer term) of encyclopedias will almost certainly look much more like Wikipedia than traditional encyclopedias. Perhaps they will have a "small" set of gatekeepers (a la Linux), but they are almost certainly going to be ready and willing to accept voluntary contributions and edits from all and sundry, just from the very raw point of view of efficiency and harnessing as diverse expertise as possible.
-Rob
"...the process allows Wikipedia to approach the truth asymptotically..."
This is perhaps the most compelling point made in the article, to me. Of course, the cynic's read into that statement is that Wikipedia will never get to the truth (see Asymptote). In some ways though, that's really a pretty undeniable truth about the Wikipedia system -- even if it is True today, some jackass can come in and make it Not True tomorrow. Even if it's Not True for only five minutes, if someone looks at it during that time and assumes it to be correct, the wiki has failed in some sense.
Don't get me wrong, I really love Wikipedia, but I think some of the points raised a very much deserving of further discussion -- if you can make a crofty old coot like this guy happy, it's probably going to be a pretty damn good [encylo|wiki]pedia.
From the article: "One person's "knowledge," unfortunately, may be another's ignorance."
Isn't that a reason why one or two persons writing and editing a "real" encyclopedia entry has just as much (if not more) of a chance of printing an incorrect statement than many people correcting each other?
Wikipedia is not a perfect approach, but neither is/was Britannica. I wouldn't take either as gospel truth if my life depended on the accuracy--but I might start at either source as a first place to look for general information. Alex.
My parents have Encyclopedia Britannica on the shelf at home and I'm pretty sure they got the info right on Alexander Hamilton. The article was probably fresh when these aging tomes were written.
I see no reference to President Nixon in these volumes, nor later ones. While Wikipedia may lack some details, I turn to it regularly. I imagine that an Encyclopedia written this century is a rare find.
Alan.
The monkeys can measure Wikipedia's success by how often it's cited in academic papers and used in classrooms. This is an indirect system of peer review by millions of content experts on the specific topics they are researching.
It's similar to Big Media and fact checking. If your CBS and throw out questionable evidence, there is an army of people with the time, motivation, and voice to prove you wrong.
I don't care if the editor is at CBS or Britannica, holding up to peer review is a more reliable test.
The word "bias" gets tossed around a little too much in American discourse these days. How, pray tell, might we honestly construe this man as biased?
It isn't "biased" to be educated or to have the experience necessary to provide a thoughtful and determinative analysis.
Indeed, this man's entire lifetime has been dedicated to editing a series of books whose entire modus operendi is to present information factually and to be explicitly aware of their own limitations. An encyclopaedia is by defination a reference work, a limited collection of reliable information that leads you to further study. That is the opposite of "biased", which is to present self-serving conclusions based on a self-serving assemblage of information.
One thing many Western societies lack right now (but, I would offer, America in particular), is widely accepted basis for producing legitimate knowledge. There are serious concerns with the Wikipedia as a source of authoritative information that exacerbate this problem, not address it.
I welcome this man's comments rather than condemn them.
Most critics think it is the last one that was worth anything.
He makes a great point. But equally valid points can be made for wiki.
I think the whole article resembles the "standard software" (i.e. Microsoft) vs "Open Source" (i.e. Linux) debate.
Sure, there are benefits to standardized (there may be a better word to validate my point), single point of support solutions. Many organizations choose standardized (like Microsoft) software for this very reason.
But the same, if not more, arguments can be made for Open Source. Sure, the "developemnt team" is varied and open, there is no single source of support. But, for the most part, the system is more secure and, with an entire community supporting it, the updates come out much faster.
This seems to me like an un-winnable argument. Like religion or politics, it is hard to point to a single point of fact that will make everyone see it "one way".
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
While his comments do have some merit, there is a very good reason why I "believe" in the system.
If you go there right now and research something, it's *very* high quality information.
In short, it's quite easy to see if the system works. Go to the site and check out the various articles; the content is quite good.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
I don't really get why some people get so upset over WIkipedia, and wants to defend ordinary encyclopedias as "more authoritative".
When it really matters, Wikipedia is of course not a primary source to go to. But then, neither are ordinary encyclopedias. When it _really_ matters, you go to the original research papers, subject-specific anthologies and conference proceedings. You will likely never see Encyclopedia Britannica referred to as an authority for an FDA application, for example, or for an envrionmental consequence analysis for some proposed industrial development.
What encyclopedias are good for, on the other hand, is to give a quick tour of and route into an area the reader isn't already familiar with. And since any deeper delving into the subject will require referencing a lot of other sources in any case, any smaller biases or omissions in this "portal text" isn't going to matter.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Whenever i look for something on Wikipedia i always forget to check who actually submitted the content and how it was moderated/edited. It's easy to think everything is true and correct, but you have to wonder.. Kinda like watching CNN and wondering why some things are reported slightly different from what i heard on BCC World Radio earlier that day.
Sample this!
funny I should come to Slashdot just after visiting Wikipedia.
You know what? "Azerbaijan" is listed in the "Countries in Europe" template (which goes down at the bottom of articles about European countries). Wikipedia has been up for several years now, yet the process is so flawed that Azerbaijan, a country not in Europe in any way either geographically, culturally or religiously, is still sitting in the Countries in Europe template (which several legitimate European countries are omitted). Hopeless. Utterly hopeless. From my experience with Wikipedia, if you tried to remove Azerbaijan from the list, you'd be outnumbered by a heap of American editors (who wouldn't even know what langauge is spoken in Azerbaijan) trying to reverse your 'vandalism'. There are just numerically too many people on Wikipedia who don't know what they're talking about.
His point is that its not good enough for anyone to trust. What if he didn't know anything about Hamilton? Could he trust the article as it was? Furthermore, what about subjects he has less expertise in? Basically, he's pointing out a fundemental flaw that he alone cannot correct. He might be able to fix Hamilton, but how can anyone trust that its correct? How does anyone know that an article has evolved into a trusted state?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If you believe in evolution wikipedia would work
Things will just happen by chance
If you believe in creationism wikipedia will not work
You need an intelligent design (do it this way and follow these methodologies) direction (write, build, this then this, don't do that) and command (when will this be done, stop wasting time on that).
I have never trusted wikipedia, one could be in a chat and claim some insane "fact" edit wikipedia, point their opponent to it as "proof and the opponent go there see the "proof". I know I know the old it will be changed be change back when some one sees it is wrong. That is Bull Shit; first it will be up there for a bit, maybe days, months, years? Maybe no one will see the bad information. Wikipedia is proof of the adage of the internet-information, misinformation, and disinformation.
Slightly irrelevant:
From TFA:
For decades, (following, we are probably meant to assume, some breakthrough research at a school of education somewhere) young students have been not merely encouraged but required to fill pages of their notebooks with writing. Not stories, nor essays, nor any other defined genre of writing; just writing.
And what is wrong with that? I am not an expert at teaching, but I think this practice is a useful one. Too many people go through life without being really able to express anything clearly. IF (that's a big if) used well, this can be used to channel a child's creative energies. While writing a diary (and a blog), I've seen my writing become more focused and less random.
In this time and age, maybe not writing alone, but students could be encouraged to record (audio/video) what they feel is relevant to their life, or photograph, or blog. YMMV, but this is better than having no evocative artifacts of your childhood.
In TFA, Henry critiques the Wikipedia on its methodology: "approaching truth asymptotically", and implies that such a methodology is unsound or flawed.
However, he never seemed to suggest a superior methodology. What does the EB use? Learned scholars? How are those scholars defined as "Learned"? Peer review, perhaps? Is not the entire academic process an asymptotic approach to the truth? I thought the whole point of the scientific method was to propose a "theory" on a given point, then have everyone whack away at it, and what we are left with is our best (closest) understanding of the truth.
Sure, the Alexander Hamilton article is screwed up. Sure, there is poor grammar, spelling errors, and goofy logic all over the wikipedia. But how good was the EB in its 5 year of publication? I bet they were publishing phrenology as a real science. Just think where the Wikipedia will be in 5 years, 10 years, 50 years...
Lastly, I bet that pompous jerk didn't even take the 3 minutes to correct the Alexander Hamilton article.
davejenkins.com |
(rim shot)
Yeah, right.
Indeed. If he had fixed it "instead of brewing up some fluff piece", "the world would be in a much better place" AND you wouldn't have entirely missed the point of his fluff piece.
I still remember the encyclopedia salesman that would set up in the mall. Heck, we even have a couple of very nice encyclopeidas in the house.
The problem is that information becomes dated very fast. Encyclopedias are useless for researching anything technology related, except as a historical snapshot. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, new countries were springing into existance faster than the maps could be printed. Revolutions happen, presidents change and information that was once 100% correct becomes stale or downright wrong as new things are discovered. (How much more have we learned about Mars in the past year?) Despite the problems, online encyclopedias are still the way to go, and I would value Wikipedia as a reference far more than the beautiful leather bound dead tree editions.
My parents have a 1930's vintage encyclopedia set that they picked up in a garage sale once. It is quite facinating to go through and read a snapshot of what was known and believed to be true at the time.
My rights don't need management.
I'm not sure I trust this "Britannica" thing. I wanna see it for myself. Does someone have a torrent?
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
In other words, a hundred ill-informed opinions are still worse than one well-informed one. And simply having more people contributing to a piece of work does not necessarily make it better.
Looking for political forums? Check out "The World Forum".
this is about the author's statements regarding the practice of "journaling" in schools: i feel sorry if any students out there receive no further feedback than the grade based on the amount they write in their journals. my wife is a high school english teacher, and i must say, she spends hours reading each journal in detail and writes pages of feedback as well as meeting with each student to discuss the ideas which pertain to literature or language. that's the idea behind it, and she (for one) practices what she preaches.
I believe that the Wikipedia approach works like evolution, that is what works stays and the other stuff goes or is edited. The end result will be a growing, more perfect Encyclopedia.
I will say one thing Wiki excels at over traditional resources is Science and Technology. For example: The Oort cloud, which is a theoretical source of comets, is often gospel in many lower level science and encyclopedia text books.
Britannica Article
Wiki Article
As you can see there is a major difference in the way the theory is presented. Britannica as science fact and Wiki as theory.
If he wants us to respect his "reliable" source, he'd do better to publicise it in some other way than aping a narked thirteen-year-old. Show your competition some respect, sir, if you want to be shown some yourself.
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
but instead of bitching about the inconsistencies in the Alexander Hamilton article, why doesn't he contribute? Raise the average, dammit!
[sig] 10 + 10 = 100 [/sig]
The printed book is to an illuminated manuscript.
'nough said.
Wikipedia is a community effort.
If we replace the word "community" with the word "committee" the problem is obvious.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
This guy is wrong. He espouses the philosophy that, in essence, a group of "educated" ("" because it just means they got a nice degree) white (probably, in the parlance of wiki) men can decide the truth better than anyone else. The author says it all right here:
One person's "knowledge," unfortunately, may be another's ignorance.
Using that logic, it only seems obvious to spread editorial control as widely as possible, to remove any individual biases. Case in point: would I trust an article in the Encyclopædia Britannica written by Robert McHenry about WikiPedia? No, because it would be littered with juvenile potty jokes.
"The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom."
I think he defeated his own argument...
But you don't get it. He has helped. He has identified weaknesses that few people have considered. He has brought his experience of editing encyclopedias in a commercial environment, where accuracy and adequate referencing is paramount, to the Wikipedia project - for free. The stupidest thing that could happen is if Wikipedians don't act on his comments and just whine "why didn't you fix the article".
OK. Imagine - he does what you ask. He fixes the article. The Wikipedia now has one fixed article and still has all the systemic problems it had ten minutes ago.
Wikipedia's main flaw is that many of the entries are written by people graduating from the world of Usenet, IMHO. These are people who have their own personal bugbears and are entrenched in their own opinions, having written them and debated them for so many years. They find it difficult to accept new evidence, or even sometimes just take a balanced look at their subject. Beyond this, the editors themselves have their shared percieved biases, which impact even how they view an articles "balance".
However this is nitpicking. Apart from this small problem on extremely contentious entries, or very obscure ones, Wikipedia is a valuable resource I have consulted often, and even supplied material for myself.
Wikipedia could solve its other problem, trust in an articles accuracy, by freezing certain pages once they have been comprehensively checked out. Of course there would be an unfreezing process by which new data could be added, but at least a frozen page would give you confidence some malicious user hadn't introduced subtle errors that slipped past notice.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.
It's not "unspecified." It's the belief that someone that knows about the topic will take it upon themselves to ensure accuracy and consistency in the work. Sure, we don't have their names and a legally binding contract that they'll do it, so it might be "faith", but it's about as much "faith" as a regular encyclopedia user has that the editors actually hired someone that knows what their writing about.
The Alexander Hamilton story is disturbing though. The fact that the article has become *less* acurate/well written over time is troubling. If there is one thing that might kill Wikipedia, it's if this "regression toward the mean" is vaild.
That said, I predict the probems with the article will be fixed by this evening. The real question is what stopped McHenry from fixing it himself. (Honest question - not a troll. Wikipedia needs to know what it takes to attract knowledgeble people, and induce them to make edits and corrections.)
Give it some time, and in the meanwhile: don't use it as a major source. Use it as a source of convenience. Chatting in IRC about something that doesn't matter? Go look it up in Wikipedia. Starting a project and want to get an overview of a topic? Go look it up in Wikipedia, and see if it fits with what you've found elsewhere.
And people who say "don't cite it in your research paper" are missing something: research paper? You're not supposed to be citing an encyclopedia anyway.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The author says there are "no means to resolve" but I beg to differ. There is clearly a means to resolve these inconsistencies in that particular article! Edit it!!
A reader can only edit an article reasonably if he knows where an answer can be found. The entire point of going to Wikipedia is to find answers, which implies that a reader has not yet found that which is needed to correct the article.
This is the fundamental problem with Wikipedia as a reliable information source: the "accumulation of accuracy" is based on circular logic. Readers will come looking for answers and then provide them. Further, since there is no measure of accuracy, it's not possible to know how accurate a given article may be. There cannot even be a general measure of accuracy, because it is inconsistent across the service and constantly changing.
Wikipedia is good for a quick smattering of information on some immediately-needed topic, I would never use it for serious research. The theory behind which it works is based on a logical fallacy, such that it can never achirve the noble dreams of its originators. It has its uses, but research isn't one of them.
From the article:
like everything else on the Wikipedia site, is editable, by anyone. How can you trust an artilce from Wikipedia? I can if I am an expert on the article at hand.
Accuracy requires peer review. A professor at MIT or a 14 year old at your local highschool are peers on Wikipedaia
There is a statistical "bias" for the more knowledgeable people editing more, because subject interest, knowledge and activity are correlated. The few vandals or ignoramuses hardly can destroy actively edited articles, because a number of good authors can easily cancel bad edits.
Articles with less activity can be bad or even destroyed without no one noticing for a long time. But it is usually easy for the reader to spot bad articles and ignore them. Actually, it is _good_ thing that no professional editing post-process masquerades bad content with correct language and layout. Note that even bad articles can have some good data, or pointers for further research, or just the right keywords for Google.
The bias of personal values of the active editors shows even in the best articles, sure. But that is true even for Encyclopedia Britannica, or any book.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
Democracy is a wonderful system, and widely applicable. However, when it comes to gathering and presenting ideas (including facts, which are the most basic kind of idea), democracy is probably a poor model. People who care about ideas are looking for the best ones (the most powerful, the clearest, etc.), not the most popular ones.
I would put more credence in the Wikipedia if it followed the kind of peer review model used in scientfic journals. Nothing is published unless it meets a high standard set by experts in the field. This approach has made science remarkably successful over the last few centuries, and I think it would probably work well for encyclopedias too.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
The same, unfortunately, is also true of Encyclopedia Britannica, or any other text crafted by the hand of man.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
First of all I am a Wikipeidan. Zealot is a POV term so I will not use that in my repsonse. First of all, the aritcle in question, Alexander Hamilton can be found here. This story has been discussed on the articles "talk" page. You will notice how the Brittanica editors objections have already been fixed.
Second of all I do not usually visit this site, due to all the POV and FUD spread here. I even put the article on the Slashdot trolling pheonomina on votes for deletion (although the massive amount of slashdotters voted to keep it). Slashdot is incompatible with Wiki in its philospohy.
As for are article count, we have almost 400,000 articles in the English version. But many of these are stubs (short articles) including over 2,000 "substubs" which are about a sentance long. These stubs are the only thing I don't like about Wikipedia, but I have expanded many and there is even a "stub expansion contest" going on at the moment. We also have the "collaboration of the week", where we take a stub and give it a week of extensive expansion by the community
Wikipedia has been controversial from the start. We thrive on being controversial. Vandals and trolls love it. But we also have a load of other people who love it, but they usually get blocked from editing by a sysop. See our replies to common objections page for an overview on common criticisms.
Wikipedia is a Wiki. Most of his criticisms are related to Wiki rather than the Encylopedia. Wikis can be change all the time. But we have tools such as "Recent changes" and "Watchlists" that helps us keep track of our articles. And of course, we do have really good articles, known as featured articles. Read some of the featured articles and you will be impressed.
But us at Wikipedia thrive on criticism of our articles, thats what talk pages are for, so you criticize articles can suggest improvements. I have two words for critics be bold and help Wikipedia.
Criticism aside, Wikipedia is a great resource and I love it. I met a load of great people on Wikipeidia, learnt a lot of cool stuff, I wrote about cool stuff! Best of Wikipeida is a lot more comprehensive. There is an article about my home town, the car I drive, the secondary school I went to the distribution of Linux I use. Can't find any of that stuff in the Britannica. So there you have it. Wikipedia is good and bad. Thats why we have NPOV of course.
From fellow Wikipedian Norm
Hey, Kids!! Let's Put On An Encyclopedia!!!
We can use my Dad's barn, and my Mom's Mac!
Susie, you can play piano and edit the Astronomy section!
Johnny, you can dance, do impressions, and handle the graphics!!
Little Dilbert, you can write songs, paint the set, and make sure that all articles having anything remotely to do with software development in general and open source in particular are represented far beyond their real-world significance!!
Milo, you collect the tickets and edit all the art-and-literature stuff.
Boy, won't we have fun?!
What would really be great would be a stronger citation practice in place at Wikipedia. Of course, that would require many journals and books to be available electronically (at least for research) and that seems too socialist for a lot of people. Imagine if the Library of Congress was indexed by google (or whoever.) I would imagine the Wikipedia's authority would increase exponentially! Maybe one day . . .
harmonious design
Now how in the hell am I supposed to trust this definition of Asymptote?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
That's what the Page History is for. It lists the people who have "used the facilities" before him. These names may be meaningless, but they can be investigated readily enough. The talk page may also contain notes from a debate about the article. What is truly untracable and unknowable is the authorship of J Random Webpage, which the user would presumably be using if not for Wikipedia.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
how long before someone cleans up that Hamilton article?
I looked at the article about twenty minutes after your post, and now it contains a footnote mention of the birth-year uncertainty, although it was hastily written with at least one typo.
Hmm... I just reloaded the page and the footnote has been cleaned up nicely.
bp
I found it particularily funny that the author complains about several "problems" in the wiki that he displays right in his own article.
For instance, he notes that he checked the history of the article he chose to examine. Then at the end claims "What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."
But that's just facts, even more disconcerting is the trust of his article, which he also contradicts.
After noting that the basic idea is that article will approach perfection after many edits, he questions why anyone would believe that. Well I believe it because I've seen it happen in the real world - people edit my articles and most of the time they do get better.
As his example he notes a single article in which 150 edits has resulted in what he considers a poor article (rightfully IMHO). But then he undermines his entire argument by NOT FIXING IT. So basically his complaint appears to be that since he's lazy, and that everone else must be too, that the wiki can't work.
Perhaps he should look up "irony".
I remember teachers in elementary school warning us not to depend on encyclopedias too much... and indeed finding them, as a [i]child[/i], far to limited and insubstantial to be of any use.
Encyclopedia articles are amazing at sucking the life out of subject matter, leaving you barely more informed than when you started and yet not wanting to know more, because you've just had the whole process of discovery spoiled for you.
You should never trust one source of information. Certainly not one so condensed, and not even necessarily written by experts in the field. In that sense, Wikipedia is a good complement to Britannica -- the more on-line encyclopedias the better.
Both 'pedias can suffer from bias and distortions that are based on the opinions and prevailing cultures of the authors. Wiki follows the whims and fads of the editing/contributing public and Britannica follows the whims of the academic elite. On the one hand, if enough an idea is "popular" and repeated enough, it becomes truth in a Wiki, regardless of the evidence to the contrary and regardless of the pedigree of that assessment. On the other hand, Britannica's funneling process means that the opinions of gatekeepers trump any dissent.
Neither approach is right or wrong. The Wiki approach provides too much power to mediocrity. The Britannica approach provides too much power to an academic elite.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
One of the most annoying things I find about Slashdot is the immediate reflexive response to regard an article as either 'for' or 'against' issue X. As soon as I saw that an old Brittanica writer had commented on Wikipedia I could guess the shape of the Slashdot debate, without even knowing what the Brittanica fellow had said.
I have read his comments, and as a not insignificant Wikipedia contributor, I have to say they're correct: he gets it. He does not regard Wikipedia as a useless adventure, but he does not trust (have ) that the collaborative process will necessarily produce excellent-quality articles.
I have to say I agree. I admire the idea that quality is a sought-after goal, but such efforts as the Collaboration of the Week succeed only because Wikipedians focus their attentions on a given article closely for a short period of time.
I have seen too many articles that are confusing and disorganized at a meta-level. A simple factual error invites itself to be corrected, and therefore will be corrected, but restructuring a whole article when you know someone may come along and violate your scheme tomorrow is a discouraging thing.
As well, too many articles on controversial subjects end up being a confusing mismash of argument against or for the point in question. This is particularly the case for recent controversial political figures. I'm happy all the information is there, but I will not believe that the collaborative process will naturally produce an article that covers the issue fairly.
I view the Wikipedia as analogous to a probabalistic algorithm in computer science (e.g. a probabalistic primality testing algorithm). Such an algorithm is true most of the time, and can be a hell of a lot faster than the always-true deterministic algorithm.
Those who criticize the algorithm's potential for falseness miss the fact that its nondeterminism gives it great power, but its proponents should never forget that it is not deterministic.
There are mechanisms for dealing with keeping nice articles nice which are currently being explored and programmed by the MediaWiki developers and which may be enabled as early as MediaWiki v1.4 (the next planned release). The main one, currently, is an article approval mechanism whereby articles can be marked as good or bad, right or wrong, completely comprehensive or mostly sketchy, brilliant prose or the work of a talentless hack. Versioning plans are not far behind.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
...of course, is that basically everything Mr. Brittanica pointed out about Hamilton has already been fixed on his article. Does an army of Brittanica editors fix Brittanica articles moments after someone points them out?
RadicalBender.com
The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.
My point is that no one really uses wikipedia for any serious research that requires confirmable references. At least, no one should be. But for the average user, who wants a quick glance, say, at what a Class AB Amplifier does, the wikipedia is a great source for some quick and fairly decent info. It might not be the best, it might not even be a 100% accurate, but hey, it's there when you need it. But if you're going to be a fool and actually take what's written there at face value, you deserve what's coming to you. Maybe you'll short the base and the collector and burn something...
The wikipedia can never be a perfect reference, even if it wants to. You can use it to it's fullest potential and your highest benefit if, and only if, you realise this.
StrayByte.Net
Wtf does Robert McHenry think he is? Here's a clue -- it's not monkeys posting to wikipedia. It's actual intelligent human beings, just like him. And if he's smart enough to recognize Shakespeare and edit Encyclopedia Britannica, imagine if we had a million Robert McHenrys editing the thing. Well, we're almost there, kids.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Funny thing about the Encyclopaedia Britannica: back during the antedeluvian period, before computers and back when this guy was running the show, I desperately wanted a set. But the salesman sold them like I was from Hicksville and he was selling me an Onega or Hambilton watch out of his coat. He simply would not tell me the selling price was until I'd heard his entire sales pitch. I walked.
I love wikipedia!
I am a research scientist and the material that can be found on wikipedia's website in the subjects of phyics and mathematics is vastly superior to anything the commercial encyclopedias have published. They seem to focus on creating material for high-school students, but their texts are largely useless for higher level physics and mathematics. They just don't have enough detail. This is where Wikipedia excels. Although Wikipedia's converage of physics and mathematics is often written in terms not familiar to a layman, there is often some part of the article that makes it understandable to those who are not involved in the fields of physics and mathematics.
Thumbs up to the guys at Wikipedia and to those who have contributed articles on mathematics and physics.
To see what Wikipedia is like I chose a single article, the biography of Alexander Hamilton. I chose that topic because I happen to know that there is a problem with his birth date, and how a reference work deals with that problem tells me something about its standards. The problem is this: While the day and month of Hamilton's birth are known, there is some uncertainty as to the year, whether it be 1755 or 1757. Hamilton himself used, and most contemporary biographers prefer, the latter year; a reference work ought at least to note the issue.
The Wikipedia article on Hamilton (as of November 4, 2004) uses the 1755 date without comment.
So click the edit button and fix it. I run across little stuff like that ofen in wikipedia, and I simply fix it. That's the idea.
This isn't a drawback of wikipedia, you're just not putting 2 and 2 together...
Do you have ESP?
Egads... now there is not only a footnote but an entire heading labeled "Uncertain date of birth." This new section repeats the footnote information partly with McHenry's own words. This isn't as well written as the footnote.
This is what happens when you let loose a bunch of Slashdotters on a Wikipedia article... most of them won't even read the entire article before commenting...
bp
To the anonymous coward's credit, this particular criticism isn't particularly new, though it has not been raised so visibly before. And there are already validation schemes and versioning systems being planned to prevent these issues which he has raised. They are not in place yet (the software for this has not yet been fully implemented, tested, and installed on Wikipedia proper) but they are coming.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Anyone who dislikes his style should look beyond it to the seriousness of what he's saying. One of the biggest problems of the web is the huge amount of misinformation it contains.
In this sense, the article can be applied to the web as a whole.
I do actually like wikipedia, but every time I read an article, I think, 'is this really true?' (especially when reading an article on Yasser Arafat). I suggest everyone else does likewise.
Of course, this applies to most of the media too. For example, as much as I'm against the war in Iraq, I felt that Fahrenheit 911 contained too much propaganda and not enough fact.
People can only make choices according to the information they have. If the information they have is mostly incorrect, then how free is their choice?
Every version of encyclopedia Britanica has changes, so clearly his arguement that there is no way to resolve wether the information is correct or not is mute relative to EB (or others). In particular, racist & sexist entries come to mind. I guess waiting years and spending hundreds of dollars on a new set of print is the clear winner.
Facts are hard to come by. He shows this himselve. The bit about the date of birth not being nailed down. Wikipedia gets it wrong but he admits that other reference books also get it wrong. Nothing new there then.
How many articles in the Britannica are wrong? Just because the person writing the article has a few titles does not mean they are correct.
There cannot be a totally accurate encyclopdia. Somethings we just don't know at the moment. Dinosaurs have changed an awfull lot. From cold-blooded lizards to caring parents and everything in between. While articles were written about the facts of cold-blooded lizards, crackpots were writing about them being warm-blooded. Now it is the crackpots who think they are cold-blooded.
A wiki has the unique capabiltie that the crackpots get their change to. Group think will moderate it until you get a sort of grey goo that will hopefully tell sorta the truth (we don't really know).
The best bet for the future would be a wiki like setup but with known sources. If I want to submit my data I have to submit my credentials. If data clearly conflicts then both pieces are mentioned allowing people to judge for themselves.
At the moment the wiki model is just as corrupt as the conventional model. Open to "experts" who just shout loud enough to be believed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Someone said that the value of wikipedia was that it learns in the same way that communities learn and that it asymptotically approaches the truth. While I realize that in specific carefully controlled instances this may be true, in general, communties don't learn, they cycle. By every measure of the global characteristics of a community we don't learn. We repeat the same mistakes of harrasment of minorities, surrender of freedoms, transplanting wars from one geographic location to another. What we (as individuals) see as learning or enlightenment is simply an upswing in the cycle. We are now facing the same racial issues, evolution issues, econmics issues that we have in the past. There may be minor changes in the practicality of things, but the general issues cycle. Reference books such as encycopedias serve as anchors against the cycle or rather calibration points. If the calibration points are allowed to float freely with the cycles of society, there can be no progress. In the 70s the prominent view of American history was that a bunch of enlightened men established a country with as much freedom as possible. Now there are many people who want to rewrite those articles saying that a bunch of hard-core Chirstian men founded a Christian country whose laws would be based on Christian beliefs even if there was no objective means of determining morality. I'm not saying who is correct here, I am saying that articles about these men would be rewritten over and over in wikipedia and as time passed it would become increasingly difficult to separate cultural whims from some idealistic objective truth. Truth is what the current community decides it is. There is no reason to assume that any article would asymtotically move in any direction. Just because we don't see how someone could change something we consider fundamental science now doesn't mean it won't change in the future. Getting community agreement on something does not mean it is true. Take all of the major scientific revolutions (Thomas Kuhn). Scientific revolution was not made in these cases because someone was able to PROVE something, it was made because the people disagreed eventaully died off or were out-marketed. It is a fallacy to assume that because an idividual researches a topic that he can't provide a better encyclopedia article than a community. If he holds his ground he may eventyally be able to change the world, if the work is constantly maleable he will not.
In the article, the author initially discusses attempts to develop an "Interpedia" in much the same way Wikipedia has eventually evolved. Nothing ever happened in that effort, besides universal agreement that Interpedia would eventually be better then Brittanica & an inability to actually start producing content (as opposed to mechanisms for dealing with content).
Reading the Slashdot comments here is very reminiscent of the Interpedia community. Just replace "content" with "accuracy" and it paints the picture very well. Wikipedia has to be more accurate than Brittanica because anyone can edit it. There's probably a good way to ensure accuracy in Wikipedia articles, and the author makes a pretty strong case that the current method is not it.
As the Interpedia goal was eventually realized with Wikipedia, Wikipedia's goal of accuracy will probably be met as well. But first someone has to start producing systematic accuracy.
My user page should be this link instead : Norm
For example - in the article mentioned, someone is sooner or later going to pony up that little piece of information that there *is* an inconsistency, and all will be resolved. Otherwise most people would consider it a typo, and edit it.
I never found Wikipedia to have any real problems with quality on topics that are well - factual and neutral. Basicly the three step prosess of write,edit,review works out just fine there. It is the clear and obvious bias in many articles that are destructive.
Per definition, people that are neutral to a subject aren't very interested in the topic. Those who edit are often the outliers, those with an axe to grind. The result? Edit-wars. And the neutrals really really don't want to continue to try to be the word of reason and being accused of taking sides.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just because a particular resource has support from education instituations doesn't mean they are error-free. You should be using these multiple resources to confirm your facts. You should be teaching your students to use all sources of information available to them and if your teaching them properly they'll be smart enough to piece it all together.
But hey, i'm not a teacher, i'm just a guy who graduated from university but was told by his 'teachers' that he'd be lucky to graduate from high school. (Actually they told my parents that...) I guess I get the last laugh tho because my salary after 6 years of working is higher than theirs will ever be. Maybe someday i'll give into my mom and send her a copy of my paystub so she can give it to all my former teachers.
The poster just shows the narrow mindedness of many teachers in our system.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
I wish Slashdot was a wiki, then I could get this right!
Norm.
But then the great thing about Wikis is that you CAN FIX ERRORS INSTANTLY!.
Those writing the Brittanica articles over the years have often been the best experts in their fields (and paid for their work). For example, Albert Einstein wrote the entry for Space-Time in 1926.
The article made some good points about the limits of writing by community. Wikipedia is an excellent resource -- but it is limited by the assumption that the truth will rise to the top.
The reviewer starts his review by a derisive review of some of the history involved, and procedes with the same, tired, old attacks.
I'd be far more interested in a review of some quantative measures of quality. For example, in comparison to britannica, how many topics are there articles on ? What is the average length of an article ? Choosing a random sampling of articles, rate them for completeness, accuracy, and readability.
That sort of information is arguable, but just another presentation of 'it doesn't use our process, so it can't be good' is tiresome.
-- Pat
The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred
I also wouldn't trust it not to gloss over important aspects of topics and to create the impression that a relatively unimportant aspect of a topic was more important than it really was by going into too much detail over it.
I could say the same for Wikipedia. Except that I haven't cracked open an encyclopedia in years whereas I use Wikipedia three or four times a week to look up a fact. Most of the time I don't go directly to the site, but search for the topic using google, and then click on the link to a wikipedia article that will show up. I know the link is worth clicking if it comes from wikipedia or one of the advertising supported 'mirrors'. I don't even mind the ads since I mostly browse with lynx anyway.
But I wouldn't feel super confident that what I read in a wikipedia article was the complete and total truth ( though most of the time it comes close ) until I had at least checked out a few other sources.
Sometimes, I used to start at the 'top level' of a subject in wikipedia that I wanted to learn about, and then click the links, going into as much depth as I felt like by clicking ever-deeper. The text was structured as an article, and the subjects that were links were in context. I loved this because it made learning about a subject in general easy. Now that wikipedia seems to have reorganised it's top levels by deleting the well written and informative top level articles and replacing them with information-barren alphabetic indexes, that sort of learning is not as easy, though it can still be done once you go a little deeper into the articles.
In my opinion, the alphabetic indexes should have been added to, wikipedia, but not replaced the top level articles which put the subtopics so nicely in context.
Let's just rewrite it.
See...things do get better with each edit.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Wouldn't it make sense for somebody to be hired to ensure the information on the Wiki is correct? As any encyclopaedia would have teams of researchers and proof-readers, shouldn't that apply to the "community" version as well?
In other words, why is an encyclopaedia so expensive? Is it because of all the work that went into compiling the information, or is it to print twenty thousand (or whatever) pages worth of books? If it's the former, then okay, Wikipedia has no chance of being a major influence, because researchers and specialists that require pay are unlikely to devote many hours to something free that might undercut the pay they get from their day jobs.
If, on the other hand, it's really about the printing and distribution costs, than why isn't there some big money being donated to the project to pay for researchers and contributors to add data? If I wanted to donate money to education, would it be better to buy one school a set of books, or to buy someone's time to make that information available to all schoools? I think the answer is clear. But then, that's maybe because I don't really have any money to give.
- Luke
People can still visit the Enclyclopedia Britannica website and get the "facts" if they choose (for a fee of course). There is also a CD/DVD-Rom that can be purchased for about $70, albeit every year to get updates. Encyclopedia makers are just like the music industry, in that there is a new market and a new business model is needed. Either you evolve or die.
Anyway, Wikiped is merely an "Everything" for dummies. A launching point. There is a reason why teachers require students to have more sources than just an encyclopedia.
Oh boy. Why is it that the typical Slashbot automatically latches onto the word "zealot" when they are trying to disparage the people they oppose? I wioll say that I use Wikipedia quite often and find it to be a great resource. However, I don't believe that it completely replaces other publications (encyclopedias or otherwise). It's just a really great starting point if you are curious about something. Where you go with it after that is completely up to you. But there seems to be this group of people who hate the idea of information being freely exchanged. Yes, there are errors in the information but this is much less frequent than those who oppose Wikipedia would have people believe. And even with the occasional error or editing war, the basic information allows you to make an informed decision on whether or not you actually have an interest in what you are reading about. If you decide that you do, then you can pursue that subject further either online or at your local public library. If Wikipedia gets you that far, then it's done its job.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The article makes a very good point. With Open Source, should it be "power to the people" or "power to the smart people"? While it may be altruistic to support the former, the reality is that just because someone makes a contribution, it doesn't mean the contribution is smart or useful. Even if a contribuiton is smart, it has to be smart in the view of the entire community before it gets incorportated.
Which is the major drawback of open source. How do you make sure the cream rises to the top in a society where you have a zillion contributions per day? Blog after blog on the net are filled with useless drivel from people of little brain, trying pathetically to make their little "mark" on the net. Some of these people have no clue how to write, yet the power exists for them to do so.
Which brings up another interesting discussion. We are moving more and more towards a society where those that are not experts have the same voice and can make the same impact on people as those that ARE experts. The net doesn't discriminate the quality of users before they are allowed to post.
The new powerful people are not the experts, not the regular contributers, but the people who decide which is which.
If you are caught vandalizing or trolling (putting false information in on purpose) you can get blocked from editing by a sys-op. These sys-ops ensure only quality editors can contribute. Bad information can be reverted. I suggest you vandalize Wikipedia and you will get caught because changes are recorded on the recent changes page and can be reviewed.
This is one of the reasons why Wikipeida is of higher quality and is more accurate than you think. Plus if you find a mistake you can fix it or drop a note in the talk page.
When you write an essay, you write a thesis paragraph, then you have paragraphs based on topic sentences which are in turn based on the thesis, and then you have a summary paragraph. You can usually gauge the bullshit level of a paper by flipping to the end and reading the summary paragraph. Allow me:
Actually, he does know who has used the facilities before him. He also knows what they wrote, and when. Looking at the page of recent changes (for example, for the encyclopedia britannica entry) tells you what has changed in this article and linked articles and when it happened. You know exactly who pissed where.
Since the summary of the article is based on a fallacy I suggest ignoring the whole thing, and tackling the problems in wikipedia without his advice. But, that's just my advice :) The whole think is snarky, with sentences like "creating an internal inconsistency that the reader has no means to resolve." Guess what? You can't trust a print encyclopedia either. If an encyclopedia is your only reference on a subject you don't have enough references. No means to resolve? Try your local library. If you don't have a local library, you might be very happy to have access to Wikipedia. If you do, then you can do your own checking, and use Wikipedia as a means to find out what to research.
I especially like (for a very sarcastic value of like) the following:
What. An. Ass. Luckily I have no journalistic reputation to maintain so I can say that. The fact is that the data is not lost, if someone mangles an entry in the Wikipedia it can be restored, and at some point I fully expect some of the articles to end up locked down and only editable by a select few or through a moderation process. The fact that Wikipedia isn't there yet is just a sign that there's more quasi-Darwinian process before it.
The fact is that the internet terrifies people whose livelihood depends on traditional publishing methods. It's a lot easier to sell a bunch of paper encyclopedias to smeone than a CDROM or access to a website because the consumer gets something tangible to display the value of the object. This article is simply a reflection of those fears. Nothing to see here, move along.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And this is the problem with using the internet for research.
Since when does the idea that a majority of people agree on something make it correct?
If so then the Earth is flat. We have only believed it is round for a short time, comparetivly speaking.
No reason I couldn't convince a room full of 2nd graders that 5+5=11. Since most of the minds in the room agree, does that make it correct? Maybe correct only in that room?
I can BS with the best of them. If I go on Wikipedia and write an article, but pull it from my netherregions, and you are not informed enough to recognize my attempt at BS, does that make it correct?
Or is Obi-Wan correct, 'Who is the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows?'
As a committed Wikipedian but a naturally pessimistic person, I have to agree with McHenry about most things. Wikipedia articles aren't necessarily accurate, and in my experience, they don't tend towards perfection either. Open editing is a process which allows a high rate of growth, but brings the price of variable quality. People constantly add their misconceptions, apply their idiosyncrasies and write articles based on speculation. This is balanced by further review and editing, but it might take months or even years before a misconception is noticed and corrected.
The big difference between McHenry and I is that he values accuracy, whereas I value information and knowledge. That's knowledge not just for the rich, not just for people who are able to buy conventional encyclopedias, but for everyone.
Everyone who reads Wikipedia should understand that it is not necessarily accurate. It would be nice if people would also understand that web pages, newspapers and conventional encyclopedias are also prone to bias and error. We should always be prepared to re-examine our beliefs. However if you're misled by an error in Britannica, at least you will have someone to blame.
He's obviously still pissed that they butchered his 'Weird Al' Yankovic article.
He did indeed fail to fix the wikipedia article, which is quite the point - the content is not updated by those who know best, merely by those who feel so inclined.
I have a real problem with Wikipedia, and for the matter, any sort of "bullshit of the masses" publishing scheme (a la Slashdot, or even Texas textbook cherrypicking):
;)
"Movements" typically flavor the final product, to the detriment of unbiased, reasoned analysis and explanation
For example, any mention of "creationism" has no place in a science text, but you see that pushed in around these parts. Too much time is given to science topics to "alternative theories," many of which have no rigor supporting them. But, someone saw a show somehwere, or read a blog, or whatever, and *poof* there it goes into the Wiki.
The real answer? *I* decide what's fit to include
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
First of all we don't have "zillions", we get around about 15,000 to 20,000 a day. We have tools such as watchlists and recent changes that tracts edits to the wiki. In a beta version of the next generation of the Wikipedia software there is a "edit reviewed" flag for edits so you know you can trust that edit. We also are working on a validation feature that will allow collaborative fact checking of an article, improving that articles credibillity.
Just because anyone can edit dosen't mean that the edit will stay. Bad edits get reverted while good ones stay. Wikipedia does have an elite society, known as the sys-ops. To become one you usually need to make around 2000 accurate contributions, not a easy feat, but these people are dedicated to maintaining the integrety of Wikipedia so you should look out for them. Prominent ones include Angela, RickK, The Anome and Maverick149.
There is more to you think than Wikis, thats why Wikipeida is more successful than you think it is!
That's funny
I am turning in a paper tomorrow that cites the wikipedia as a source. I suppose if I attended a less-crappy university, I might care.
I think that the information I used was accurate enough. It was about voting systems.
-------
Incite and flee.
I see tons of electronic encyclopedias for PC *or* Mac. But I have not found a single disc that supported PC *and* Mac. Nor have I found any that would work with Linux. It could be as simple as having a Java-based viewer for the database. Or even a huge stack of PDF volumes in alphabetical order that are all hyperlinked by a root PDF index.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Here is another concern. I just went to the Hamilton article, as I was fairly certain that it would be modified to address the issues that Mr. McHenry brought to light concerning Alexander Hamilton's birth date. I took a look at the footnote that had been entered next to Hamilton's birth date. It reads (at the moment):
...which goes to show, I suppose, that Wikipedia, however useful as a tool, is perhaps less than perfect.
This guy overlooked a lot. The very first thing that strikes me is his main argument: the idea of a "faith-based" encyclopedia. He essentially saying "trust us, the great Britannica, and not this lousy internet-created encyclopedia." But the matter still comes down to trust - bias can still come through, especially if the authors come from a single culture, facts can be incorrect, articles can still be written by someone with a shallow background in the subject. Really, there are two pros and cons to Wikipedia:
+ The number of authors of Wikipedia are far greater than those of Britannica. This allows for people most familiar with a certain topic to write on that topic.
- The focus of most encyclopedias is history. Unfortunately, the number of history experts on the Internet is probably pretty small.
+ Wikipedia (and the author of the article overlooked this) allows for not only public editing, but public discussion of the articles as well.
- Wikipedia allows public editing, which means that it is only as good as its meta-editors who look for malicious damage, but more importantly, look for cleverly placed misinformation.
People also need to realize that Wikipedia should act as a pointer rather than a source. If you are seriously searching for information, Wikipedia can act as an outline, which you can then "check off" and fill out. You probably don't want to use Britannica for this step either - go to secondary or primary sources. Essentially, I think Britannica is being made obsolete and he don't like it.
The author shows us the numerous changes of the Hamilton article and presents an incorrect date and poor writing as proof that Wikipedia is broken. He ignores the fact that the date was probably well discussed, and glosses another great feature of Wikipedia: the fact that he could go back and read those old articles in the first place.
He also clearly doesn't grasp the concept. The idea is not to write as much as you can no matter whether you are qualified or not, but rather to invite many people to write what they are qualified on. I've read many excellent articles (if short) on things like complexity theory that were very good. (Of course, this probably represents the educational bias of the authors - of course they'll know about computers.)
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
RTFA and cite your sources or prepare to get pwnd
It's a sifting of global consciousness on a certain level.
What does the average computer user think about, 'X'? You can get a pretty good idea with Wikkipedia. Then, because it's the internet and EVERYBODY should by now recognize that when doing research on the web, one needs to read a bunch of different websites on the same data they're exploring, research the owners of the website to see what their inborn bias is and what other things they have done, and then do a bunch of creative cross-referencing work. For some subjects, it provides and excellent starting point, but in the end, further research should always include more and wider explorations. The same must be said of any body of reference material, including Britannica.
And, of course, if you need the orthodox viewpoint written from Official Culture, spun to the tune of "Nothing to see here, citizen", then by all means, look up Britannica. (I particularly liked the difference between the two definitions for the word "Orthodox"; Note particularly, the first sentence on each; Wikki gives us an actual definition, whereas Britannica starts out by immediately telling us that Orthodox means, "True". The irony is downright chewable.)
"Orthodox"
"Chemtrail"
-FL
Wikipedia is and will be successful because, as a plain matter of everyday fact, we trust what folks tell us when they sound like they know what they are talking about. We may not file it away with those rare 'engraved-in-stone' tidbits of information that we have collected, but for the most part we are willing to pass it along; letting the listener know that it lies in the category of "I'm not sure, but i've heard..."
.edu and .gov citations it has pointed me to, and, as a mental category, I do for the most part trust that the information in the article reflects what I will find on that site.
To that end, perhaps Wikipedia's greatest value is in the external links to be found on the bottom, or even its categorization scheme, or links to works and quotes free to be used under fair-use. The Open Directory Project has largely failed due to corruption, but also because of one of it's inherent limitations: The ability to put the information in context.
Wikipedia deserves the benefit of the doubt. It has earned that. Mr. McHenry has failed to see the Internet as a phenomenon and cannot comprehend its future. He has failed to see our ability to filter through information and recognize when it may not be correct, and has not given any credit to our human ability and willingness to place information in mental categories of varying veracity.
I do not use Wikipedia as a citation in my college reports, but I do use the
These points are only the tip of the iceberg. The biggest point is that Wikipedia's success speaks for itself and the encyclopedia does not ask for nor require for us to defend it. Only those with a vested interest in profiting from the sale of information have need to worry.
en:user:Alterego
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Clearly Mr McHenry has a view on what an encyclopedia should be that doesn't fit the wiki model ; like many scholars, I bet he's a kind of "if it isn't printed, it doesn't exist" guy. But being printed is not a mark of accuracy either. In fact, the whole debate is biased (I believe), because he clearly seeks the TRUTH, but in the real world, save mathematics and "hard" sciences, there is no such thing as truth. I've long studied law sciences, and while it's relying on formal logic, for instance, law science seeks more RIGHT than TRUTH, and I think that in many fields of knowledge, there is an equivalent gap between truth and state-of-the-art knowledge. I'll stick with law science as a good example of how this gap can be bridged. At a certain level (international courts, for instance), while the decision is the poduct of a consensus, dissident opinions are reported as well. So what the majority feels is JUST in in plain sight, but the seeds of further evolution are not discarded. My feeling is that wikipedia due to its very nature should provide the same kind of tool ; a mainstream article, and possibly the contradiction, clearly labeled as such. Currently, through the revision process, there is a kind of "fight" among editors, anybody's opinion having the same value as other's (which is not bad, but confusing). Having a possibilty to "take side" would be a great plus.
Somewhere on the page, near the top, Wiki needs to have a rating of the article based on some sort of calculations and/or community rating. If a rating system is too hard to create, at least post some easy to read stats at the top of the article so the user can infer a confidence rating. How many versions has this article gone through? How many people are watching the page? When was the last version created? I know you can get some of this information elsewhere, but it needs to be condensed and put right on the front of the first page seen. Just some quick thoughts.
I don't know, but for what I payed for it (nothing) that entry on Alexander Hamilton is just fine. If people want to pay for higher quality information, so be it, no one is stopping them - but I don't know why they feel the need to complain about those who chose to except lower quality sources at a greatly reduced price.
It strikes me that this gentleman wouldn't be writing such a scatheing review of Wikipedia if he did not feel his job is threatened. If Wikipedia is really so bad, he shouldn't have anything to worry about. What he is really upset about, but can't say because it would smack of elitism, is that the public in general doesn't seem to notice or care about the higher editorial quality of print Encyclopedias.
For most people Wikipedia is just fine. And the price is right.
Friggin' commercial Encyclopedia writers, we can't trust them. Always destroying our community Encyclopedias.
Maybe it would be an idea to mark articles in the Wikipedia with an "Expert reviewed" flag. The wikipedia team could encourage trusted people with academic or other credentials to review articles - these articles could then be "locked" for further editing except if approved by an editor.
I know that this idea need some work but it might be a starting point for discussion (if the wikipedia team has not considered it already).
I imagine for a similar reason why people who bitch about their jeans falling apart don't grow their own cotton and make their own clothes.
They could, but they have another job, and they expect their clothing to fulfil its purpose without their having to worry about it.
Similarly, he wants to derive useful information from an article he reads, and not have to help make it useful. Division of labour, if you will: not everyone should have to be an editor.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
As much as I like Wikipedia and use if fairly often, I do recognize that it is not a definitive source of information. It's a great tool to find out about something quick, but like all reference materials, should be cross-checked and compared to others is you want to get yours facts straight.
But the whole idea of authoritative information is rather obtuse. When I was a kid, we had the World Book like most families. For years, by parents took the "yearbook" updates and once we actually put stickers in the main books to flag updates. But never once when writing a school report did I look in those year books for updated information or corrections--even though I had them at my fingertips. And even if the current update was considered authoritative when written, it might turn out to be wrong five minutes after the book was printed.
I think the ultimate question comes down to how accurate information needs to be for the task at hand, rather than a quest for the perfect answer. After all, using the McHenry's example, if we're looking to get an idea about who Alexander Hamilton was, do we really care about the exact year of his resignation. Very few of us do history for a living, although it is a fun hobby.
The comparisons between the creation content for Wikipedia, and the Open Source software development model are on the right track. However, if we make this comparison then we have to say that the Wikipedia is a very poorly run project.
If Wikipedia is Open Source software, then its public stable release is based on the current bleeding edge version in CVS, and anyone in the world can commit changes to this version. There is no Benevolent Dictator For Life, nor is there a Cabal of leadership who are trusted to review the submissions.
For Wikipedia to succeed, it must eventually apply the models open source software project management. The chaos that McHenry is noting is not appropriate for the public release of Wikipedia. Instead it should be held in the "unstable developement" release.
And yes, Wikipedia will need to modify these leadership methods to meet its specific needs. (As each OSS project has its own culture.)
In the long run I am very hopeful that this is were Wikipedia will evolve.
I use Wikipedia. I like Wikipedia. I have contributed money to Wikipedia. I think that Wikipedia has a long ways to go to become a quality reference source for readers like the Britannica.
Just type the following into google:
<Your topic here> site:wikipedia.org
That sounds good.
My car rolls on tires. If we replace the word "tire" with the word "badger" the problem is obvious. No wonder I use so much gas.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
(Now, granted, it's fair game to make fun of him for his spelling of encyclypedia.)
|/usr/games/fortune
The funny thing about (this particular instance) is that who really gives a crap whether it was 1755 or 1757? Really? Does it make any difference to anything at all? Jeez, just say he was born around 1756 and be done with it. This guy goes and picks this particular nit that doesn't even matter. It's not like it's a difference between feet and meters (thus causing us to crash into the infertile soil of Mars), it's two freaking years of someone born centuries ago. Alexander Hamilton didn't even care.
"Two fricking years, yeah, all of Wikipedia is crap." This guy needs a damn life.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
When I was in school, using any encyclopedia as a source was frowned upon or entirely disallowed. I think the author of this article has too high of an opinion of the value of his own work. Neither Wikipedia nor Britannica is valuable for meaningful research of a specific topic. Rather, their strength lies in their broad coverage of nearly every available topic.
Of course, this article is really just a meta process of Wikipedia itself, and as such, should really only be viewed within that context. He's simply taking the editing and discussion process out of the builtin Wikipedia forum, bringing it before the eyes of a wider audience that probably isn't and shouldn't be concerned.
However, the one valuable aspect of his article outside the context of Wikipedia culture is his reference to poor standards in public school education. This is the real issue that the author should have been dealing with. Rather than critiquing the Wikipedia process, he could have been suggesting that more emphasis be put on teaching children how to evaluate the reliability of reference material in general or how to go to first sources as much as possible to find the best sources of information on a topic. Instead, he seems to be implying that a paper encyclopedia is better than Wikipedia, when he should be quite aware that both are actually very shallow sources of information.
Several posters want to say that the success of Linux validates the approach of Wikipedia. I see three major differences:
(1) Who does the writing?
Linux is made by a bunch of programmers (often programming experts) who have pooled their skill to produce a product. Experts are doing work in their field of expertise.
Wikipedia is the general public getting together to write specialized encyclopedia articles. Non-experts are contributing to various articles in their spare time. The thing that makes Wikipedia work pretty well, of course, is that there are lots of VERY devoted experts who maintain various articles. The method as a whole, however, cannot ensure this and is a bit unstable without these Herculean few.
(2) What's released?
Open-source software releases stable versions every now and then to the general public, not the nightly CVS build.
Wikipedia, essentially, is always presenting its nightly build to those members of the public who don't religiously follow the change log.
(3) How do you know if it's right?
Code can be run to see if it works. There can be all kinds of nasty, subtle bugs, but to first order you know if it works (though perhaps not how to fix it if it doesn't).
There is no such straightforward verification of encyclopedia material. Subtle inconsistencies or flaws can just sit there unless someone is VERY careful.
I would like to say:
I think no source of information can be deemed 100% accurate, as many have pointed out already, no one normally considers any encyclopedia as a complete and sufficient source of information for serious, deep research.
Even established views and theories can be challenged and eventually overthrown by newer/better ones. That is the scientific process. The Wikipedia imitates this process quite nicely: Scientists publicise their findings, their peers and colleagues verify, comment, complement etc...
It is very probable that classical encyclopedias contain inaccuracies, erroneous information as well. As many here have pointed out already:
Maybe the literary style and wording is not ideal, but as is mentioned in the linked article:
People dont come looking for poetry, they come looking for information (that needs to be correct) no matter how bad the wording is.
Example:
If you were to read the truth about the ultimate knowledge, would you care if it were written in bad english/german/french etc..? Or would you be just happy to have access to that ultimate knowledge.(And being able to rewrite it in better words? Something McHenry hasnt even considered doing)
True, there is a problem with people trying to get satisfaction out of posting an article, but that is the actual driving force!
The system is not perfect, but neither are encyclopedias, there is a downside to both systems, one may be better researched, written etc... but it is static and expensive.
Even if the points he is making are valid, the project has been existing for only 3 years!
Historically encyclopedias have taken far longer to be written/published, somewhere between 5 to 10 years on average.
And, although i did not search fo any evidence supporting this claim, i am sure the first versions were always error plagued, and containing untrue,and/or biased articles.
McHenry completely seems to forget that this effort is being made only since a short period of time, competing with an encyclopedic system hundreds if not thousands of years old. I am sure by the time Diderot got his volumes out, there was just another MacHenri le Stupide, criticising his effort, and pointing out all the infant sicknesses of his works.
Although his criticism is distructive in nature, i think it retains a certain validity and shows that the system needs to be improved, and that the people that hail the wikipedia as the best encyclopedia are just as disconnected from reality as this dude. There are flaws, just as in everything that is man-made, we can only hope to improve the system and the content, in order to satisfy the high standards of truth and literature.
pass me those sparticles will ya?!
Someone's already edited a sentence criticized in the article:
Arguably, he set the path for American economic and military greatness, though the benefits might be argued.
changed to:
Arguably, he set the path for American economic and military might.
Just thought it humorous..
When I read the /. comments of the article, I thought it was going to be a higly biased piece of crap, a bit like SCO trying to claim they are the poor victims of the bad OSS-crowd.
;-) the comments itself are idiotic: the article in question is very good, clear, and contains a high degree of logic and rationale. While my first thought was a bit 'how dares he attack one of the great accomplishments of the Net', I must say he makes very, very convincing arguments. Infact, after reflection, I think he's basically right.
To my surprise (ok, maybe I shouldn't have been, after all this time slashdorring
I too always thought that more eyes would mean better results, because...well, because we had the example of other (FL)OSS projects, like Linux. So how comes it isn't working (not very good at least) with the wikipedia? I think because firstly, to create, maintain and edit linuxcode, one has to know it in the first place. To some pretty high degree, people who are capable of coding are already experts to some level. In linux develoment, you can't just hop in, you have to prove that you at least have knowledge of the subject (which is derived from the assessment of the code given).
Furthermore, they have a product that has to work, and work better. You can actually look if it still works (better), something that can't be done in the wikipedia. I mean, make a totally crappy code, and the program won't work (or much worse); a clear indication something is wrong and that the new code is not right. Make a totally crappy page and you don't really have any objective measurement to see if it's better or worse, in an objective way. Sure, maybe experts would notice, but let's face it, even experts disagree often, and, more importantly as I (and the author of the article) said; a wikipedia isn't governed by experts. Even when an occasional expert may correct it, it's likely that some time later, a mediocre would-be ninkenpoop would edit it back in mediocrity.
I think the author made a very good point, and one that the current wikipediasystem will be unable to correct. The population, also in intelligence and intellect and even mere fact-knowing follows the curve of Gauss; meaning, that the majority of the populace are situated in the middle. The best example to demonstrate is that of IQ: the percentile of 80 to 120 (where 100 is the median) encompasses the vast majority, whereas the more smart and the more stupid make out an increasing litlle part.
Thus, it is easy to see that, if the populace is divided along the Gausscurve, people that are only moderatly knowledgable make out the vast majority, and since the wikipedia is open for all to edit, the bulk of the editors/users/etc. are going to be mediocre (as in: diverging to the median). So, even if a good article of an expert is going to be made, after a while, it will not become exellent, but will become more mediocre, just as the author says.
He does forget to mention, though, that the opposite is also through: the really bad articles will move towards the median too, so those WILL improve (but only to a certain extent). In the end, the whole wikipedia will, seen as a whole, wobble around mediocrity; not really bad, but not really good neither. I think this is, though a theory, probably an essential one. It's is impossible to break that trend, unless one has 1)a way to objectively see if an article is better, 2)there is a way of giving a higher degree of (strict) editing to the experts, which can be done on beforehand (by actually contacting experts), or by having a controlling function that lets editing be depended on the worth -determined by peers - of the articles.
Point 1 is going to be very difficult, because I don't see any way in which to objectively view which page is the better one, exept maybe by actually refering to real encyclopedia's (and thus, indirectly from experts). The difficulties with pages of knowledge and facts is that they can't be shown to be true (or better) or not, con
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
McHenry's thoughts are compelling and interesting. Discussion questions for the class:
McHenry's analysis is based largely on an appeal to authority. By what means is that authority currently established in the world of print media? Was that authority always so well established throughout its history?
McHenry cites a problem with fact consistency in a sample article he selected to discuss. What was the greatest failure you experienced in attempting to use print encyclopedias to research a subject? Was the problem limited to factual errors, or did you come across hopelessly outdated or biased information?
McHenry bemoans the quality of writing in Wikipedia, likening it to mediocre high school grade writing. How many times have you ever used a print encyclopedia to research a paper written at any level higher than middle school for which the encyclopedia served any purpose beyond providing a starting bibliography?
I agree.. Wikipedia is a dam nifty source.. but it's not authoriatian.. more higher level articles in WP, I would imagine, would tend to be created/edit by persons that have a better grasp on the subject..
but the problem is, you should still x-ref anything you get out of it.. I coudl easily go in and change a X for a Y.. or a Na to a Fe, and if you took it at face value without validating it, you'd end up in some pretty signifigant problems.
The author's views are correct, and IMO, the point he is trying to make is that there are to many dam n people out there that THINK they know the answer.. when they really don't.. and now they can make THIER answer the correct one..
The problem is more with people then the system..
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
So, the community, having been notified of problems with the Hamilton article has spent a bunch of time fixing it.
The nice thing putting notes about disputed information in the article is that the situation is now clear to future editors. Someone with only part of the information is less likely to see the other side as a error and "fix" it.
Unfortunately, someone plagarized Mr. McHenry's comments about the dispute.
This goes directly against the expectations of Wikipedia -- that the lastest version of an article is the "best". Casual readers can not help but assume that subsequent editing to an article has improved it.
So in effect you are perverting the Wikipedia system by ignoring later contributions. Now, that's not to say that what you are doing is bad. But it does show that in this case Wikipedia has failed at what it was meant to do.
Where new graduates, overstuffed with their new expertise, can cloud any subject with enough unexplained jargon and unimportant minutia to make even a simple subject appear beyond the ken of those beneath them.
Where even a simple subject is turned into a catalog of unwritten entries by some well-meaning font of trivia, such that it burries the actual article.
Don't get me wrong, I love the project, I've contributed in the past; but anyone who says there aren't any problems, or that all the problems will eventually be fixed by "the community" needs to step back and get some perspective.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
What I find most useful about Wikipedia is the thousands of topics that it covers which an Encyclopedia (I would assume) wouldn't even begin to touch. Highly technical or deep-rooted entries about the fields of Science and Philosophy, as well as many other fields, are contained in the Wikipedia and would never be touched by a generalization-filled Encyclopedia.
To me, that's the strong point of the Wikipedia. People with genuine expert on one or two specific subjects come to the Wikipedia and give articles of great length about the subject of their choice, and it gives a more thorough picture, overall, than an encyclopedia could. Would Brittanica have an extended article about proper coding style, for example? No, they are about generalizations.
My rule of thumb about the Wikipedia is this: as long as you think carefully about what you're reading, you may find something that you wouldn't have in the Status-Quo Encyclopedias.
-Vendal Thornheart
I think that Wikipedia is cool, so assume my comments are made in a kind way: there needs to be some trust mechanism, perhaps having registered users assign a numeric score to rate articles. I am not sure how credit would be spread between original authors and editors.
My friend Tom Munnecke [www.munnecke.com/blog/] does a lot of work on ideas for online charities. A huge issue is implementing a good trust mechanism.
It seems like Wikipedia needs more basic research in a trust mechanism for rating authors and editors.
I like the original idea for the web: I publish some material on my web site (mostly dealing with Lisp, AI, and Java), and a few hundred people link to what I write. Since it is on my web site I am responsible for quality and content (althouh many people help me by reporting typos and providing great ideas - my online Lisp book is the best example: many smart people in the Lisp community contributed good ideas, but I am responsible for the quality of the material).
Anyway, I like the idea behind Wikipedia, but I have 2 suggestions:
1. Break the system into smaller parts (perhaps many), each with an "editor in chief". Actually, some form of hierarchy of editor might be a good idea.
2. implement a trust/rating system
-Mark
I think, overall, this is McHenry's point - you cannot trust the information in Wikipedia. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Wikipedia and I have contributed to it and used it, on occasion, to jumpstart my research on a particular topic - but I would never consider Wikipedia as a "definitive" source and, as such, its value as an encyclopedia and as a reliable source of information is suspect. Were I to use Britannica to check the same fact or initiate the same research I might not feel the need to go further - with Wikipedia, it would almost be foolish to not go further.
I think that what it comes down to is the pedigree of the information. Britannica has a reputation to maintain and, as such, employs credentialed writers and reviewers - the users of an Encyclopedia Britannica know that the articles were written and peer-reviewed by established experts in a given field; Wikipedia has no such thing hoping, instead, that the cream will eventually rise to the top of the barrel. So...when you read that Wikipedia article, are you getting cream or are you getting something less? You never know (and that is the problem). Unfortunately, even if Wikipedia had credentialed authors and reviewers, the same problem would remain as long as articles remain open to anyone who cares to edit.
I think Wikipedia is a great example of collaborative writing (not that all of the writing is great - just that it is cool how the whole "wiki" concept works); I think Wikipedia is a great example of a community pulling together. However, using Wikipedia as a sole source (not that you are) is probably less wise than using Encyclopedia Britannica or Funk & Wagnalls' for the same purpose.
I agree with the reviewer that Wiki isn't absolutely complete or correct, or devoid of bias [e.g. Intelligent Design entry]. And he is right that the 'real' encyclopedias work hard present topics in as factual and unbiased way as possible [which is why they can be quite dry, IMO].
But the power of Wikipedia [at least as I use it] is that it is a quick and inexpensive way to get an idea about a topic and its background. If I'm using it for source information then I'm going to be looking to additional sources for corroboration, but I don't always need that.
Yes, some times it's not 100% accurate, but then, what is? Even encyclopedias go through re-writes in their new editions.
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
In other words, a hundred ill-informed opinions are still worse than one well-informed one.
This may be true in some situations but it is not necessarily true that the opinion of one expert is always better than the weigt of an opinion. I worked for a bookmaker's for a while and it is certainly true you will do better betting on the favourite than you will following the scheme of a pundit. New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki has written a book on this subject:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/038Paul M
"There are no innocent bystanders. What where they doing there in the first place"
William S Burroughs
Wordiness was all the rage in the 19th century; it's the 21st century now.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Those 'top level' articles are still there, just not linked anymore from the main page. I agree though, the category pages aren't as nice to start with.
But if 'little Johnny' does turn in a paper ( most likely copied with a few minor changes ) from a ruined wikipedia article, then the fallout, will teach 'little Johnny' an important lesson in not believeing everything you read.
A million monkeys might eventually write Shakespeare...
Actually, a monkey did eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare and it only took approximately 5 million years.
-PCB
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
A problem I can see with Wikipedia's model is that its reads form a biased sample of the population (in the statistical sense).
If Joe User is searching Wikipedia for information on Alexander Hamilton, chances are good Mr. User is not himself an expert in U.S. history. It's more likely he knows little or nothing about Hamilton and came to Wikipedia to learn something. Therefore, Joe User is ill prepared to identify factual errors, let alone correct them through editing.
I believe the point of the article is that article quality will go down over time because there are more ignorant people than knowledgeable people visiting the site. It does not follow that the ignorant people will necessarily ruin the article by editing it, but one must admit the possibility exists.
This is an interesting point and, I believe, a flaw in the philosophy of the Wikipedia. On what basis can we expect readers to be qualified to actually improve an existing article, given that most experts on a subject don't go looking it up on the Web at all?
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out? - Will Rogers
I think the biggest, most compeling illustration of wikipedia's success is that fact that almost everyone here has probably (there's that word probably again) benefited from it. I know I have. Although the information may be somewhat inaccurate, I'm a discerning adult. Overall, my experiences with wikipedia have been wonderful, and I have used it far more than I have nor ever will use any other encyclopedia.
Whether in the form of a historical document or a carefully designed experiment, the approach to truth relies on evidence. In academic fields, authority tend to be earned by those who are most capable of finding and communicating strong evidence for their assertions. A Darwinian competition for authority takes place, often with young upstarts asking the current holders of authority to back-up their assertions with evidence (put up or shut up).
Wikipedia is wonderful, but I found Robert McHenry's article to be interesting and well-argued. Although only a single example served as evidence, it succinctly supported his assertions using a prominent encyclopedia topic. If nothing else, his assertions merit further investigation. How common is the effect he observed?
On the other hand, I found your post to be poorly argued. If nothing else, your Ad Hominem is a classically fallacious method of questioning authority.
Lets compare the Hamilton example in both Concise Britanica and Wikipedia
First off in wikipedia you get the full article, rather than a shorter article and a sales pitch. Thats the main problem with britanica, its not part of the free internet. It's content is only for those prepared to pay. Well I want a resource that I can point my friends, family and colegues to. Britanica does not cut it.
I was not sure which 'Hamilton' Robert McHenry was refering to. Of more interest to me was William Hamilton the mathematician, creator of the quatornians. I can read something about him on wikipedia, but not in Britanica.
Maybe a better comparision is with other free internet sources. I'd trust the reliability of wikipedia far more than any other source on the internet.
And the date issue, is now fixed! How quickly could an error in Britanica be fixed? Seems like these monkeys are pretty quick off the ball.
Wikipedia got a nicer picture!
Britanica, consistantly times out. Wheres the 'reliability' in that.
I think Robert McHenry is disingenious, his whole article revolves around one bug, and the usual unfounded critiques of open source. Anyone in software knows how easy it is to find a bug. One bug does not make a useless bit of software or resource. The article seems like the typical rubishing piece, put out by another orginization feeling threatened buy this 'open' stuff.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
1: He is upset that the article on Alexander Hamilton doesn't cover a dispute over his birthdate. By the time I finished reading the article (and most likely by the time I started) the article had a footnote added about his birthdate. This is the essence of the Wikipedia.
2: He keeps implying that "probably" is a bad thing, maybe he should read the article on Casinos and pay special attention to how they make their money.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Yeh, and a million monkeys may write software, but how would they recognise if they had.
Like, when 25% of the hits to wiki come from schools, colages and universities then there probably onto a sure thing.
Who knows, maybe people will publish papers and patent blockers in wiki one day.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
In brief, at the end of the day after 100+ edits, the Alexander Hamilton piece is NOT a rich tapestry of nuance and expertise. It's a high-school quality wallpaper job.
The author has proposed mechanism as to why such articles are, in effect, wallpaper jobs and does, in my opinion, a good bit to evidence the "emperor has no clothes" nature of those such as yourself who have a faith-based view of collaboration - the well meaning, but certainly not proven and possibly quite wrong idea that groups of humans "quasi Darwinially" converge upon optimal solutions.
The probem may not be that the author doesn't understand the spirit of Wiki - it may be that he understands it too well.
/ full disclosure: I have contributed articles to Wiki, though I am under no illusions as to its potential and, frankly, share the author's views. When I do serious work, I don't use Wiki as a reference.
...is that something is still better than nothing at all.
The "quasi-Darwinian process" is not voodoo at all, it's just a matter of (1) somebody knowing better, and volunteering an improvement (2) quality being recognisable (3) there being enough "eyeballs" that mistakes - deliberate or not - will eventually be detected.
His error, really, is to think of Wikipedia as asymptotically approaching a fixed perfection. Instead, it's an ongoing attempt to refine the state of the art. In that regard it's more like the process of science, than like the old-fashioned compilation of encyclopedia articles.
A million monkeys might eventually write Shakespeare, but how would they recognise it once they had?
They'd use RFC 2795, the Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite of course
Any article can be corrupted to any truth distance value at any step of the process. In addition, there is no guarantee that eventually corrections would be made. And if there are useful corrections, there is no guarantee that they too won't be undone.
It's as if Slashdot decided to use only the last moderator to determine whats insightful, interesting or funny.
A sequence of random numbers doesn't converge. Of course, an inifinite set of radom number sequences might contian one that does ...
Anyone who treats any single information source as the canonical reference for all things is a fool.
True, but I would argue that using a single source, including Britannica, is just an incredibly unwise thing to do in the first place. If it's important enough to matter you would be a fool to use a single source. Even the oh so holy Britannica has it's biases and omissions.
Midway through the article, McHenry states:
s tory any day. And, I'll be better informed on the vast majority of topics that little Britannica will never have the means to cover. Where's Britannica's entry on w00t, punk?
"To see what Wikipedia is like I chose a single article, the biography of Alexander Hamilton. I chose that topic because I happen to know that there is a problem with his birth date, and how a reference work deals with that problem tells me something about its standards. The problem is this: While the day and month of Hamilton's birth are known, there is some uncertainty as to the year, whether it be 1755 or 1757. Hamilton himself used, and most contemporary biographers prefer, the latter year; a reference work ought at least to note the issue.
The Wikipedia article on Hamilton (as of November 4, 2004) uses the 1755 date without comment. Unfortunately, a couple of references within the body of the article that mention his age in certain years are clearly derived from a source that used the 1757 date, creating an internal inconsistency that the reader has no means to resolve."
The first thing I thought was "Hey, it's open-source.. let's go fix it." But sure enough, it was fixed already. The notes to the page even state:
"While the day and month of Hamilton's birth are known, there is some uncertainty as to the year, whether it be 1755 or 1757. Hamilton himself used, and most contemporary biographers prefer, the latter year. (Source: Robert McHenry article about Wikipedia http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html)"
LMFAO
This guy is a total luser. I'm sorry. His criticisms are food for thought, but his first critcism didn't even last the length of time it took to finish his article, and instead of bitching, he should have stepped up and fixed it.
He says wikipedia is like a public bathroom. Ha! Holy Ivory Tower Batman!
I'll take a free, open, public, dynamic Encyclopedia any day to an expensive, pwned, private, static, aristocratic-this-is-the-official-version-of-his-
Bah. Fella shoulda stepped up. Luser.
In terms of universal history, human readable compendiums of knowledge are a fairly recent endeavor. Over the last couple hundred years Encyclopedia Britannica and others have made great strides in compiling and editing knowledge bases, and Mr. McHenry's criticisms are valid. Yet this issue, as with most others, basically comes down to a worldview. Do we need the medicine man to lead us to the land of milk and honey? Or in an emergent way, can we just get there together? Mr. McHenry shows us his worldview right away in reference to the leaderless interpedia. But Wikipedia is an interesting experiment. Liken a malicious editor to the mobs that destroyed the library of Alexandria. Knowledge is lost, and for a time 'there be dragons', but those who know preserve and restore the knowledge (often igniting new ideas). This is all new. I'm not saying that the oversoul operates on port 80 or anything, but it's way to early to be casting your bets.
Sure, there may be a bad apple here and there, but the stereotypical Wiki author is most definitely NOT a biased, flamebaiting cynic.
Those are probably not that contraversial among Wikipedia users. Wikipedia is in the Open camp, and so DRM will be strongly dispised, Windows somewhat despised, and open Unicies popular. These aren't really controversial topics within geekdom, but between geekdom and the rest of the world. An article on emacs or vi might be more contraversial.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Obvious troll for mod points and totally redundant, IMHO.
This actually just comes down to process. In the software world we call it The Cathedral and the Bazaar. EB is an example of the former and Wikipedia is an example of tha latter.
And as far as I can tell, exactly the same argunments apply. What would be interesting is what he will say of Wikipedia in 10 years time. I am willing to bet that by then it will be considered to be far superior.
but one wikipedia article is not statistically significant. As a researcher, he should know that opinion pieces that only site one example of an issue are usually intended to be inflamatory in nature. Now if this were meant to be a treatise as to the effectiveness of the wikipedia project as a whole, one would have to take a representative sample (say 1000-10000 articles), and verify the veracity of each article.
Now, people have mentioned that since he has noticed issues with the Alexander Hamilton article, he should edit it to correct them. This he is unlikely to do, because if the wikipedia project ever becomes truly successful in its goals, people like him are out of a job.
IANAL... But I play one on
I used to like Wikipedia a lot and turn to it when I'm looking for information. Yet, on sober reflection, I'm not sure how the Darwin-assumption behind the Wikipedia, namely that every article will evolve through time towards a state of perfection, can possibly work.
After all, which articles do people tend to look up more? Those for which they are experts and know most of the stuff anyway, or those from which they hope to get information on something that they may have no previous clue about? I would argue that for any given article, most of the people who could make a useful contribution won't read it and most of the people who read it can't make a useful contribution. The author's observation that the quality of an article has degraded since the original publication then seems obvious and inevitable to me. So... how can Wikipedia ever reach high quality?
Wikipedia at its best is an example of the Socratic Teaching Method in action, assuming of course there are smart "teachers" who read and correct the Wikipedia.
Wikipedia at its worst is a "populist" encyclopedia. You could also say the Internet is a giant encyclopedia and a search engine is the index, however the Internet as a whole contains a much higher level of error that Wikipedia.
Comparing Wikipedia to a Public Restroom is just unfair. The Internet maybe. Slashdot definately. Fark is more of an alternate reality. I just prefer to think of Wikipedia as the Socratic Populist Encyclopedia, where TRUTH is, what you YOU believe it to be. After all, many of the things we hold true, especially is science are WRONG and will eventually be updated with the new TRUTH. Also, History is written by whoever won the war. Wikipedia will give the losers a chance to tell their side of the story just as soon as they get Internet connectivity and electricity back.
I've always found wikis to be a great source of opinions and a mediocre source of facts.
I think this is something more people should realize. Wikipedia supplements other information found on the Internet, not the other way round.
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
Except that most people sometimes think they know what they're talking about when they don't
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Oh boy, what a stereotyped answer. I like to call this the "if there is a mistake in Wikipedia, it's the fault of the person who notices the mistake" response. According to this logic, the persons who make horrible mistakes in Wikipedia, and the editors and financial contributors who enable them to do so, are somehow never even a tiny bit responsible for errors in the articles, but somebody who idly wanders by and notices a mistake is. Yeah, right.
Enough of that, and the article will go into dispute and moderators will resolve it.
Not only do you treat the mistake in the entry as the fault of somebody who's never been involved in it, but you expect this innocent party to spend a few days continuously reloading the article and reediting it, at the meantime arguing with a bunch of strangers over the internet. Again: yeah, right.
One of the basic ideas behind the Wiki is that people will only edit things if they actually know better than what is already there. After all, why would a person who knows very little about a subject "correct" something written by an expert?
The problem is that people who know almost nothing about subjects, tend to think they are experts. And sadly, the experts -- knowing the limits of their knowledge -- tend to not consider themselves expert.
If you happen to think you know a lot about something (anything), you really should read this study: http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html.
It probably applies to you. It certainly does apply to the people writing and "correcting" Wiki articles.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
I concur 100%. "Difficult to ignore?" I'm ignoring the little pile of slurs now!
I thought it was interesting how theoretical his argument about Wikipedia's accuracy is. I have faith in Wikipedia's accuracy because I use it all the time, checking its facts against other sources. On the points I've cared about, it fares very well indeed.
It is interesting that he is so exercised by the birthdate of Alexander Hamilton. The article about Hamilton is in general quite consonant with published biographical information. Amusingly, the birthdate has also already been corrected. Try achieving a 24-hour correction cycle sometime, Britannica!
I also find it fascinating how the /. crowd and mods have jumped on the "Wikipedia sucks" bandwagon for this article. These are presumably many of the same people who, like myself, use and contribute to it regularly. Just goes to show, IMHO, that the temptation to appear "intellectual" in public is very strong.
There will always be a place in the world for professionally-edited knowledge sources. For me, however, the cost of Britannica means that I will use it rarely, and at the library. For most of my actual reference needs, Wikipedia works just fine, today.
Add release versions to pages where one or more editor/bureaucrat empowered users would take the current work of everyone (plus any personal edits) and release a new version of the page. The latest released version of a page would be the one that the public sees when browsing the wikipedia (by default), with an option to click through to the latest scratch-pad version (if no released version of a page existed, the user would see the wiki page with some appropriate marking to distinguish the different page forms). Only the free-for-all wiki version of the article is editable, and everyone is free to continue to collaborate on a new version at any time.
This editorial model is closer to what is achieved by an open source software project--peoples ideas, suggestions, and patches are filtered through a release mechanism to generate a more authoritative and consistent end result. This also gives the reader more choices, since they can continue to browse the current wiki pages if they so desire, but they would also have access to "blessed" pages that would have gone through a quality review process to achieve their new release status.
Of course, the big problem with this idea is one of resources. Where do you get the people who are ready, willing, and able to do some editor roles and rove through the raw pages, creating the newest release pages? Some sort of cooperative process would probably be needed where pages that were nominated as ready for a new release would be reviewed by multiple people of various disciplines, including those that can fact-check the information (perhaps choosing several from a pool of volunteers in the required area of expertise) and those that can check for mistakes in grammar, spelling, and such.
I think that the current wikipedia is a wonderful resource, but if it wants to achieve the reliability part of their stated goals, an extra process such as the one suggested above will need to be enacted to make that goal possible.
..wayne..
This attitude, i.e., the blind faith that a bunch of random people editing and/or adding three sentences at a time to an article, will produce a reasonable text, is one of the main things that's responsible for the low quality of Wikipedia articles. One article after the other reads like a disjointed mess of unrelated sentences and sections put together by a haphazard collection of people who never planned anything together, because, in fact, they were put together by a haphazard collection of people who never planned anything together.
You also get zealot points for using the good old "if there's an error in Wikipedia, it's the fault of the person who discovers the error, not of the person(s) who wrote it and perpetuated it" argument (a.k.a. "if I fuck up it's your fault for not stopping me").
There are problems in Wikipedia, and there are problems in Britannica. But if I want a printed copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I have to spend hundreds of dollars. Wikipedia is free and instantaneous, and can be accessed anywhere there is an internet connection. Even though it is not perfectly accurate, it is accurate enough to be useful. The benefits far, far outweigh the disadvantages.
Furthermore, Wikipedia articles often cite web pages that contain further information. This makes it even easier to find more information quickly, rather than having to go to a library to look up print references.
Visit the
McHenry uses a particular subject as an example, but his point is not that Wikipedia is a poor reference on Alexander Hamilton. Updating that entry does not address his concerns.
His point is there are fundamental flaws in the Wikipedia methodology. One of those flaws is that people are, on average, well...average. Edits may improve a poor entry but are likely to weaken a great one. Articles are eventually "edited into mediocrity." McHenry takes issue with the concept of a general knowledge source such as an encyclopedia edited and maintained by committee that takes all comers.
So the "action" by which McHenry is allowing incorrect information to spread is to allow Wikipedia to exist. Is it therefor his moral obligation to destroy Wikipedia?
It is a very, very interesting view of how people think things are. It is not a reliable source of information. There's already been one slashdot article by someone who experimented with deliberately inserted misinformation in several articles. None of it was ever identified or corrected until the experimenter restored the articles. Because anybody can write what they want, Wikipedia is not acceptable as a factual reference. It is of real utility however, to sociologists and anthropologists who want to study how legends, both mythic and urban come about. In this respect Wikipedia says a great deal about it's writers and the internet community.
Remember that if you compare word for word it salmost the same arguement that Bill Gates offered for the predicted failure of linux..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
It also might help if you used tyres...
His argument is flawed on two counts:
1. The assumption that the writing of a professional encyclopedia writer is more 'truthful' than that of neophytes. No one has a monopoly on the truth - and assuming the 'professionals' are less likely to be biased is horse pucky.
2. The assumption that one sample article will tell you the over-all value of the Wikipedia. After he extolls the virtues of the scientific method, he then uses an example that is statistically meaningless.
The reality is every form of media is subject to inaccuracy for several reasons:
a) The information was recorded incorrectly to begin with.
b) The writer and/or source of the information has an agenda which misrepresenting the facts serves.
c) Typographical errors.
This will always be the case. The only way to know 'for sure' is to either witness the event first hand (and even that is subject to perceptual anamolies) or use many different sources and determine if they agree on the issue at hand. Even then, you have to trust that they all got it right. It is possible they didn't.
When all is said and done there is not much difference between professional media and that produced by volunteers. The key difference is money, and the fact that a large internet operation of volunteers is more likely to come across people with more than a passing interest in the subjects. Additionally, while the quality of the writing may vary, you can certainly be sure of getting a large number of points of view - much more interesting in many contexts IMHO.
I don't know about you, but I grew up being fed what I was 'supposed' to know and think from the media most of my life. Having the vast resources of the internet is a balance against abuses of the mainstream media.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I think the answer to the question "Is Wikipedia a reliable reference, like an encyclopedia?" depends on what the purpose of these documents is.
If the purpose is "To be the definitive word on any given topic", I think that traditional encyclopedias probably have a slight advantage (although the source material would be a MUCH better reference).
If the purpose is "To give an overview of a topic, and foster further learning and research", then I think Wikipedia is more than adequate (particularly the entries with good bibliographic data).
As a matter of fact, I think it is good to get out of the habit of assuming any given reference is The Truth. Just as many eyes make for shallow bugs in programming, many perspectives make for a closer understanding of The Truth.
We can judge any given Wikipedia article on its thoroughness, quality, and reference information. It need not be "blessed" by Brittanica in order to educate.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The article is really an amazingly nasty, vicious rant, even if his basic points are sound. Unfortunately, the author misses the whole point of Wikipedia -- instead of writing a sloppy wet kiss to academic snobbery, maybe he should have just fixed the errors in the article.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I see that the author didn't bother to correct the Alexander Hamilton article, he just criticises it. Doesn't the community usually tell those people to go fly a kite?
I don't know whether she does or not, but the person whose phone you just listed may not care for the slashdotting asking for Joan.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
I think part of the reason is that, with mathematics, you either know something or you don't. There are many laypeople who would jump at the chance to remedy a perceived inaccuracy in a biography of Alexander Hamilton, but would be intimidated at the idea of trying to muck around with the article on asymmetric encryption algorithms. There is also a higher probability that a given editor will have a computer or science background than a history background. Liberal arts people seem to fear computers for some reason.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
No, that would only make the gas more expensive. ("tyres" is British, and I'm not)
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
-FL
Wikipedia, when it is at its best, is similar. It will never reach the Truth, however, as people contribute to it, it will hopefully approach it. Information that is not useful (because it conflicts too grossly with other "models of the Truth" out there) will be removed, and information that is useful (help the users) will be added.
The Britannica author comes from another tradition. A tradition where Truth is based on authority rather than consensus. The ultimate Truth is God, and is expressed through the hierarchy of the Church down to the common churchgoer. Lately, the Church has been supplemented by Science. This gives the common layman view of Science as a Truth, competing or supplementing the Church. Scientists, of course, know that is not so, but the whole dissemination system (schools) has not been updated yet. It uses the old Church based mechanisms. When scientists teach, they try to teach pupils to think. They don't just pass knowledge given from above.
Much of the Britannica authors ruminations about the degeneration of modern society stems from the same source. Focus is shifting towards the process, and old barriers are removed. Teaching methods is (slowly) catching up. The world is changing, and the best you can teach your pupils is how to adapt to the change. He does not understand that. What was once the Truth, will always be the Truth. That is the nature of Truth. He complains that Wikipedia does not consider the reader, only the authors. This is because the Wikipedians don't use the same model of the world he does. There are no separation between authors and readers, both are users and contributors to the system. The Truth may stay the same, but how we see it will change. It has always changed, but it changes faster now. Being able to change with it is a competitive advantage.
Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica which have been corrected in Wikipedia
Besides, McHenry betrays his elitism with:
The implication here is that readers going to Britannica for information needn't fret over exercising care because they somehow "know who used the facilities before". What a load of crap.I am a moderately heavy wikipedia user, and I haven't seem the same level of errors that McHenry did. I have checked wikipedia's entries on topics which I know quite well, and found them to be pretty good. Far better than any other source, in terms of adequate summary and depth, and fairly much in line with commercial encyclopedias in terms of accuracy.
After reading McHenry critique, I thought about what the fundamental concept of an encyclopedia is. It is an authority. Each will market itself as such, touting its panels of experts, professional editing, and its long history. A group authority does not function well when there are sharp divisions between its members on issues of fact. As such, Encyclopedias tend to round the edges, so to speak, and while addressing undeniably popular secondary views, they do not deal well with views that aren't as widely held. To do so would be to rob the reader of the feeling of certainty that they have turned to the dictionary for.
To accomplish this unified view, encyclopedists have created systems wherein experts are found based upon academic credentials, and their work overseen by editors of the encyclopedia. There is no room for radicals. The institutions of Academia and Encyclopedia therefore reinforce each other, as someone who states a fact that is in sharp opposition to an entry in an encyclopedia is seen as a rebel, and therefore will have a difficult time with an academic career, and subsequently will be less likely to be asked to work on an encyclopedia entry. Over time, views may change, but this process is very slow. Encyclopedias are conservative. Note the small 'c'.
The wikipedia is much more of a living document. It can never be called complete, it will always have errors of many types. While it also has editorial committees, the nature of its constant incrememental editing means that some agreement for aknowlegement of less popular views can more easily be reached.
I think that over time, wikipedia will continue to gain respect. I know that it is quite frequently used in academia already, even if it is not cited. I am not saying that scholars are being dishonest, but they often use wikipedia as a shadow source, i.e. a source of sources. I am speaking of not some slouching upstart Internet degree mill either, I am speaking of Harvard University. Over time, citing of, and, more importantly, contributing to, wikipedia will become more common even among the academics who are the core of writers for the traditional encyclopedias. That doesn't mean that Britannica, etc. are going to die off any time soon. The inertia of these weighty volumes is significant.
What needs to happen with wikipedia is for some editors to be funded. I believe these should be endowed, but I am not sure by whom. I have some ideas that I am putting together in an article regarding modern knowledge monastaries, and wikipedia work may be a good project for them.
(note: i didn't review any of this for grammar, etc. It's not a wikipedia article!)
I couldn't have said it any better.
I've used the Wikipedia before, and was not impressed. In fact, I'm not impressed in the slightest by the idea of a wiki, or the software itself.
The interface is clunkly, you have things that are difficult to read, like the strange system of not using any spacing when labeling something, etc.
I'm a serious user as described in the article: I want a known-good resource to answer my questions, and those answers need to be as correct and as accurate as possible. That's why I prefer "niche" sites like imdb.com instead of the Wikipedia.
One possibility that occurs to me is this: you are a pompous ass. Oh, excuse me, in Wikipedia-speak that would be fucking asshole.
Ok, I'm done now.
I've written scores of articles in the Wiki and helped with scores more. But the complaint of the Britannica editor is pretty much spot on. The Wiki can approach very high quality when an article is written by a disciplined single individual who does his research; it doesn't have to be an article by an expert if people bother to actually read the subject material first and then write articles. It also achieves very high quality when a community of writers converge on the article and work at it constantly. See the article on evolution for an example of that.
The Wiki itself, though, in areas not as popular becomes prone to ego wars. You'll see nearly identical articles on the same topic that don't cross reference one another (and rightfully should be merged into one article). You'll people with massive egos rewriting everything to suit their fancy, throwing away large chunks of other people's work because their writing is an extension of their superiority complex. Getting something fixed if you're Joe Writer and not a Wiki ghod is well nigh impossible.
One major advantage of the Wikipedia is glossed over by the critique though: the Wiki beats just about any orthodox encyclopedia in rapidly developing areas of popular culture. When traditional sources could barely pronounce the word anime, the article in the Wiki is rich in detail and coverage. I imagine this advantage will forever remain. The Wikipedia, accuracy questions or no, will always be a more responsive medium to change.
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1755 or 17571- July 12, 1804) was an American statesman, journalist, and lawyer. He is credited as being America's greatest constitutional lawyer. As the principal author of the Federalist Papers, he successfully defended the U.S. Constitution to skeptical New Yorkers. He also put the new United States of America onto a sound economic footing as its first and most influential Secretary of the Treasury, establishing a National Bank, public credit, the "permanent debt theory" and the foundations for American capitalism and stock and commodity exchanges.
Early years
Alexander Hamilton was born on the West Indies island of Nevis. He was the son of James Hamilton, a struggling businessman from Scotland, and Rachel Fawcet Lavien, who was then married to another man. His father abandoned the family, and his mother died when Hamilton was in his early teens. As a teenager, a letter he wrote to the local paper caused such a sensation that community leaders raised money to fund his passage to America. He settled in New York in 1772 for formal education, beginning with grammar school. Later he attended King's College, now Columbia College at Columbia University.
Hamilton possessed talents of the highest order. At the start of his teenage years, he was an impoverished orphan with no family connections, working as a clerk on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean. By the close of his teenage years, he was in America, General George Washington's most trusted aide-de-camp, an accomplished artillery captain, and a published pamphleteer, renowned in his own state of New York. It was while on the battlefield, however, that Hamilton began formulating the ideas on government and economics that would make him an historic figure.
He left Washington to take command of an infantry regiment that took part in the siege of Yorktown. As a young man, he served as a member of the Continental Congress (from 1782-1783), retiring to open his own law office in New York City. His public career resumed when he attended the Annapolis Convention as a delegate in 1786.
He also served in the New York State Legislature and attended the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. Throughout the convention's proceedings Hamilton, a federalist, argued consistently for a strong central government, including a king-like (though not hereditary) president and an upper house based on the English House of Lords. Hamilton opposed equal representation in the Senate, saying the concept "shocks too much the ideas of justice and every human feeling". He also wanted senators to serve for life, subject to good behavior. Finally, Hamilton strongly advocated the abolition of slavery.
Although the constitution eventually produced by the convention was less centralist than Hamilton proposed, and the tenures of those exercising power were shorter than he desired, Hamilton was active in the successful campaign for its ratification in New York. In this endeavor he made the largest single contribution to the authorship of the Federalist Papers.
In 1788, Hamilton served another term in what proved to be the last time the Continental Congress met under the new Articles of Confederation.
Secretary of the Treasury
On the recommendation of Robert Morris, with whom he had discussed economics as an aide-de-camp during the Revolution, President George Washington appointed Hamilton as the first Secretary of the Treasury when the first Congress passed an act establishing the Treasury Department. He served in that post from September 11, 1789 until January 31, 1795 It is for his tenure as Secretary of the Treasury that Hamilton is considered one of America's greatest statesmen.
Hamilton's term was marked by bold innovation, statesmanlike planning, and masterful reports. In office for barely a month, he proposed the idea of a seagoing branch of the military to secure the tax revenue against contraband shipments. The following summer, the Congre
We revile Microsoft and others for failing to correct problems identifed by outside sources. The numerous comments calling "just edit it" or "facts are always in dispute" are hypocritical and self-serving.
My areas of expertise are quite narrow, but I have taken time to edit a couple of articles in those areas, contribuiting, to the best of my ability, my knowledge to the broader community. Some of those articles have been subsequently edited by people with a "Freshman-Level" background and understanding, and brought to a palatable, easily understood, and lamentably incorrect state. Editing by the masses produces a product palatable to the masses. Truth, however, should not be hostage to the whim and inclinations of an uneducated majority.
It has been said that, "The victor writes the history books." A lamentable truth. Will Wikipedia accuratly report the "War on Terror", for example, or will it be sanitized to reflect the political expediencies of the times, and altered as needed to fit the shifting political waters of the future? Is it a factual document or a populist, revisionist history?
I like Wickpedia, but I think that there needs to be some verification of qualifications and community-building in individual topic areas. I know next-to-nothing about European history. Should my opinion even be considered on those topics? On the other hand, I have advanced degrees in Biogeochemistry, so why am I casually overwritten? It's an honest criticism, and failure to address it leaves Wikipedia an interesting, useful, but fundamentally (potentially fatally) flawed, project.
CmdrTaco et al please note that techcentralstation.com is run by a Beltway lobbying firm, DCI Group LLC, and is the sort of site that some might characterize as "astroturf." From DCIGroup.com:
Not that I'm a rock-throwing anarchist or anything, but what the heck are "Corporate Grassroots Campaigns"?!?!?!?!?
Vampire Watermelon
Alexander Hamilton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Revision as of 04:43, 4 Mar 2003)
(article copied from U.S. Treasury (http://www.ustreas.gov/opc/opc0010.html))
Alexander Hamilton was born on the West Indies Island of Nevis on January 11, 1757. He went to New York in 1772 for his formal education, beginning with grammar school. Later he attended King's College, which is now Columbia University.
Hamilton's great qualities of mind and spirit revealed themselves early. While in his teens, he took a firm stand on the side of the patriots, and became a leader in the movement advocating independence. Before he was 20 years of age, Hamilton commanded artillery troops in several important battles, and from 1777 to 1781, served as aide-de-camp to General Washington.
He left Washington to take command of an infantry regiment that took part in the siege of Yorktown. At the age of 50, he served as a member of the Continental Congress from 1782-1783, then retired to open his own law office in New York City. His public career continued when he attended the Annapolis Convention as a delegate in 1786.
He also served in the New York State Legislature and attended the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. Throughout the convention's proceedings Hamilton argued consistently for a strong central government, including an upper house with members appointed for life rather than subject to re-election. Although the document finally produced by the convention was less centralist than Hamilton proposed, he was active in the successful campaign for its ratification as the Constitution of the United States on September 2, 1789. In this endeavour Hamilton made the largest single contribution to the authorship of the Federalist Papers.
Hamilton served another term in 1788 in what proved to be the last time the Continental Congress met under the new Articles of Confederation.
President George Washington appointed him to be the first Secretary of the Treasury when the first Congress passed an Act establishing the Treasury Department. He served as Secretary of the Treasury from September 11, 1789 until January 31, 1795.
As Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton's term was marked by bold innovation, statesmanlike planning, and masterful reports. His financial program provided public credit where there was none before, and gave the infant Nation a circulating medium and financial machinery.
After being in office for barely one month, he proposed the idea of a seagoing branch of the military to secure the revenue against contraband. The following summer, the Congress authorized a Revenue Marine force of ten cutters. The Revenue Marine is now the United States Coast Guard. He also played a crucial role in creating the United States Navy (the Naval Act of 1794). Hamilton also proposed the creation of a Naval Academy, an idea ahead of his time.
He published "Report on the Public Credit" on January 14, 1790, (although some reports put the date at January 9, 1790), which amounted to a watershed in American history, marking the end of an era of bankruptcy and repudiation. The plan provided for assumption of both the domestic and the foreign debts. Both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson strongly opposed Hamilton's plan, but it passed overwhelmingly. He advocated assumption by the Federal Government of the debts of the States. Madison and Jefferson also opposed this plan, but they settled the contest in a private meeting on July 21, 1790. During this meeting, Hamilton agreed to the future location of the Nation's Capital on the Potomac River, in return for Jefferson's support of assumption.
Hamilton's perceptive and creative mind coupled with his driving ambition to set his ideas in motion resulted many proposals to the Congress. His proposals included a plan including import duties and excise taxes for raising revenue, funding of the revolutionary debt, and suggestions on naval laws. He also developed plans for a Congressional charter for the first Bank of the United
Are you sure this is the example you are looking for?
From Wikipedia:
Orthodox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
# ur) (last) 17:49, 16 Nov 2004 24.91.157.212 (Notes - added citation of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, which is now in the public Domain, copyright is expired.)
# (cur) (last) 17:33, 16 Nov 2004 Bkonrad (rv --agree references are nice, but that was not an authoritative reference and only tangentially concerned Hamilton)
# (cur) (last) 17:29, 16 Nov 2004 Taxman m (cited the note to the reference)
# (cur) (last) 17:27, 16 Nov 2004 Taxman (added back reference. We need references corraborating the material, not ''notes'')
# (cur) (last) 17:04, 16 Nov 2004 208.205.177.8 (Hamilton and modern politics)
# (cur) (last) 17:00, 16 Nov 2004 Bkonrad m (Notes - since it is not an exact quote, there is no point for quote marks or a citation)
# (cur) (last) 16:58, 16 Nov 2004 Bkonrad m (replace and repair the notes link)
# (cur) (last) 16:54, 16 Nov 2004 Nevyn m (Remove the link to the #notes section that doesn't exist.)
# (cur) (last) 16:46, 16 Nov 2004 160.227.22.103 (Notes -Pretty formatted the link)
# (cur) (last) 16:39, 16 Nov 2004 160.227.22.103 (Notes)
# (cur) (last) 16:39, 16 Nov 2004 160.227.22.103 (Notes - Eek! Where'd the citation go?)
# (cur) (last) 16:38, 16 Nov 2004 160.227.22.103 (Notes - Added quote marks around quotation.)
# (cur) (last) 16:25, 16 Nov 2004 R. fiend (reverted note on birth to original phrasing)
# (cur) (last) 16:24, 16 Nov 2004 192.25.240.225 (Notes)
# (cur) (last) 16:22, 16 Nov 2004 192.25.240.225 (Notes)
# (cur) (last) 16:17, 16 Nov 2004 4.19.249.110 (Notes)
# (cur) (last) 16:13, 16 Nov 2004 152.92.106.181 (Lacked a comma.)
# (cur) (last) 16:12, 16 Nov 2004 Jyp m (+interwiki fr:)
# (cur) (last) 16:08, 16 Nov 2004 Duncharris m (fmt)
# (cur) (last) 15:51, 16 Nov 2004 128.38.221.127 (Elements of the article were redundant (3 pictures and many passages appearing 3 times))
# (cur) (last) 15:30, 16 Nov 2004 64.225.154.226 m (We cannot know his age due to uncertainty of birth year. However, 1782-1783 is indeed correct according to http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl ?index=H000101)
# (cur) (last) 15:29, 16 Nov 2004 64.225.154.226 m (We cannot know his age due to uncertainty of birth year. However, 1782-1783 is indeed correct according to http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl ?index=H000101)
# (cur) (last) 15:26, 16 Nov 2004 63.90.112.163
# (cur) (last) 15:13, 16 Nov 2004 64.225.154.226 m (Fixed end date of his tenure as secretary of Treaury, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=United_ States_Secretary_of_the_Treasury)
# (cur) (last) 15:07, 16 Nov 2004 146.142.45.188 (Notes)
# (cur) (last) 15:06, 16 Nov 2004 12.33.176.147 (Notes)
# (cur) (last) 15:05, 16 Nov 2004 146.142.45.188 (Uncertain date of birth)
# (cur) (last) 15:03, 16 Nov 2004 24.8.237.127 (Uncertain date of birth)
# (cur) (last) 15:03, 16 Nov 2004 RadicalBender m (Secretary of the Treasury - Link U.S. Navy)
# (cur) (last) 15:00, 16 Nov 2004 RadicalBender m (Uncertain date of birth - Apostrophe)
# (cur) (last) 14:59, 16 Nov 2004 150.203.2.60 (Notes)
# (cur) (last) 14:53, 16 Nov 2004 12.222.68.155 (Notes)
# (cur) (last) 14:48, 16 Nov 2004 150.203.2.60
# (cur) (last) 14:47, 16 Nov 2004 38.250.129.2 (Secretary of the Treasury - copy edits)
# (cur) (last) 14:42, 16 Nov 2004 38.250.129.2 (Early years - - copy edits)
# (cur) (last) 07:24, 16 Nov 2004 JesseW (various gramatical improvements)
# (cur) (last) 07:17, 16 Nov 2004 JesseW (fixed 3 or so spelling errors)
# (cur) (last) 05:26, 16 Nov 2004 Rhobite (Hamilton and modern politics - sp, style)
# (cur) (last) 23:25, 15 Nov 2004 152.5.254.17 (Hamilton and modern politics)
# (cur) (last) 23:00, 15 Nov 2004 Matt Crypto m (Notes - fix typo)
# (cur) (last) 22:49, 15 Nov 2004 R. fiend (deleted so-called "reference" again. see talk page.)
# (cur) (last) 22:15, 15 Nov 2004 Maveric149 (do not remove References)
# (cur) (last) 21:48, 15 Nov 2004 Decumanus m (rm dead category)
# (
I decided to head on over to wikipedia to see what hte Hamilton article said now... unfortunately I was confronted with the image of a man holding his asshole open (a featured article on the front page about Felix the Cat, but, uh, I think the image might have been changed). Next to that, in the day's news brief next to "# U.S. President George W. Bush nominates National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (pictured right) to succeed Colin Powell as Secretary of State." was a picture of a nude man with a very large... appendage.
This really makes me want to rely on wikipedia as a source of information... (I know, it will be fixed in a few seconds probably, but still).
Wikipedia has different coverage than Britannica. Perhaps Wikipedia's greatest strength is that it documents things that have no real business being in Britannica, but are interesting nonetheless. And should be documented for posterity, if nothing else.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
The whole tone of the piece is dismissive from the beginning. He's clearly defending entrenched interests. That said, he has some points. Good editing would reveal internal inconsistencies. A well written article would also make one aware of contraversial points, etc. Clearly these are editorial values that Britannica adds. Is this value worth a thousand dollars? Not for me.
It should be clear though that Britannica's only value is editorial. There are very few subject matter experts at Britannica. They hire subject matter experts from outside of the company to write the entries. Those people they hire are those regarded by their peers as experts. None of this guarantees any kind of accuracy. In fact, it can result in highly "subjective" responses.
At the end of the article he smugly mentions that some of the entries in the Wikipedia are of the same quality as a paper that would get a "C" in high school. That may be true, but any high school student who uses an encyclopedia, let's say Britannica, as his only source should also get a "C" or worse.
Encyclopedia's can be a good place to begin researching, but multiple primary sources or first order evidence are essential for good research. So, from that perspective the Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica seem to be on even ground. If this is is the case, then we must ask whether this additional effort on the part of Britannica is of any value to anyone other than a grammar school student.
I don't think anyone doubts that Britannica will be more more correct than the Wikipedia (note: that doesn't necessarily mean more true), but the question is whether that this correctness is of any value. On the other hand, Wikipedia may need to adopt a more restricted method of submission or emendation in order to keep people properly motivated. It also doesn't help that the person advocating for EB is condescending, dismissive, and smug. I suppose he can afford to be as it won't be him who is put out of a job by the Wikipedia.
Back when I was in high school, I used to look at the Encylopedia Britannica for doing papers. However, I frequently found it at odds with books specializing in the particular subjects I was reading. Who was right, the EB or the author of the book who is considered an expert on the subject? I don't know. The beauty of history is that nobody can prove it one way or the other. Whoever gets the most press, wins. Even recent histroy (like a month ago) is rife with different opinions on who did what or what was done. I am certain the EB is packed with incorrect information; however, since history is written by the people with power we'll never know.
For me, the older the topic, the less likely I am to believe anyone. Perception defines reality and I have no desire to adopt someone else's reality just because they say they are the ones with the one true answer.
At the end of the day, I still don't know when Hamilton was born. Thanks for clearing that up for me Mr. Britannica.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
I argued in this article that Wikipedia is the only knowledge base that can be called an encyclopedia today because it is the only one that still have an underlying political project of its own. The political importance of the Wikipedia Project : the only true encyclopedia of our days. Then, it's not up to wikipedia to defend itself as an encyclopedia. It's to other so-called encyclopedias to be able to desmonstrate that they are something else than a big book where scholars were paid to write some stuff about what they studied before.
True, but I would argue that using a single source, including Britannica, is just an incredibly unwise thing to do in the first place. If it's important enough to matter you would be a fool to use a single source. Even the oh so holy Britannica has it's biases and omissions.
Nonsense. For many kinds of facts one source is enough. If I'm writing a paper on classical music, and need to know his dates of birth and death, I stop at Brittanica. Going further is an ineffective use of time.
If a creator of the Wikipedia were to write something about glowing about it, would the /. story on it mention his "obvious bias"? Or would it praise his "expert opinion"?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
While his formulation implies article quality is governed by some kind of genetic algorithm, my view of the process is that it's analogous to simulated annealing, which leads to a more modest (but substantiated) claim: the probability of an article being crap decreases monotonically. (And this is not refuted by a single article with deteriorating quality).
This weaker claim of course means that it's not wise to rely on Wikipedia as an authoritative source. OTOH, I don't have significantly higher hopes when using a print encyclopedia.
(And some helpful editor could have told the fellow that it's not slashdot.com.)
Let's give Wikipedia a few decades, internet-style, to right itself, and by then let's see who's besting who. I'll bet at some point Wikipedia crosses some line in the sand where it makes economic sense to have moderators involved, and to help it better link-match more professional source materials.
If I may speak as a (fairly successful) student of philosophy, I think many of the criticisms are misplaced.
First, the author assumes a problematic theory of truth that is not appropriate in many encyclopedic entries. While there is a truth-of-the-matter in cases of birth dates and scientific facts, there is no such thing in topics in the "human dimension", like in interpretations of historical events or art works. The "truth" in these areas comes from exactly the sort of community discussion that Wikipedia fosters, and I imagine Wikipidia outshines other encyclopedias in these areas.
To give one example, the Wikipedia entry on the philosopher Kant mentions Kant's flirtation with white supremacy, something that few "authoritative" encyclopedias mention. I imagine Wikipedia gives more space to the concerns of small but important groups in other areas, such as in feminist critiques of science. Typically, I see this happening as addendums to otherwise neutral articles rather than a "feminization" of an article, and hence reflect breadth rather than bias.
This first point, in conjunction with the already mentioned depth of information about Science and Technology, would indicate that Wikipedia has an edge in both Science and Humanities.
The second (but related) major point I want to raise is that, as someone going into the field of academics, I can attest to the fact that "experts" are far from biased. Academic departments experience more than their share of politics, and the most expert are often the ones most thoroughly engaged in a field. So, for example, if you go to the most respected expert on George Washington, he or she may not be familiar with more marginal (but influential) debates. That is because what keeps these debates from being marginal is precisely the objections of the "experts" who are writing the encyclopedia articles. One result is that encyclopedias tend to reflect the most common interpretation of a person/work/event rather than explain where that interpretation might go wrong. For this reason when I want to get an overview on an issue where I already have advanced knowledge I go to Wikipedia first because I know Britanica is going to be watered down and oversimplified.
As others have pointed out, relying on an Encyclopedia when it really matters is not good policy. In fact, before Wikipedia, I had ruled out Encyclopedias altogether because it was easier to find relevant information in authoritative texts. An Encyclopedia is meant to be a cursory gathering of knowledge in one location. I think Wikipedia meets that and goes further. But like any source of information, you have to know how to use it.
You cannot assume that information is right just because it was written down by supposedly "reputable" authors. You need to check every piece of information for internal consistency and consistency with many other sources. That's true whether you read the Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Between the two, I have found the Wikipedia to be the more useful. And I wouldn't trust the EB editors any more than the Wikipedia authors--EB has biases, too, they are just different.
So, Robert McHenry the dumfuck didn't even fix the date problem? He is a worthless POS!
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
It seems to me that Wikipedia gives us a view of a subject that is a kind of smoothed-out average across all the public contributors opinions on that topic, whereas traditional encyclopedias give us a peer-review/scholar based view.
That in itself would seem to make Wikipedia interesting and useful, simply as an alternative source of information.
The lack of referencing seems a serious problem though. Joe Bloggs may have something interesting and relevant to say, but if he hasn't backed up his content with any references, how are readers or future editors supposed to judge it? They could ask him, if he's left contact details and is still around, but otherwise...
There seems to be a distinct lack of referencing going on at Wikipedia, I think the Wikipedia community should consider changing the system so that it encourages people to indicate sources for all their content, whether their sources are other web-pages, books, articles, conversations, first hand experiences, etc.
Yeah, a great effort, but is it right?
The problem with Wikipedia is that anyone can edit an article, quality is difficult to maintain.
/. moderator like system where article contributers accept or reject each other's edits. Useful edits earn points that allow you to earn editorial points. (Also of course they could expand to a meta-editor system). A points system would also encourage contributions.
Perhaps they should move to some type of
Were I to use Britannica to check the same fact or initiate the same research I might not feel the need to go further
And therin lies the irony.
Everyone automatically assumes the Wikipedia entry is wrong because McHenry is a "Former Editor in Chief, the Encyclopaedia Britannica".
Funny, he cites no sources other than himself. How do I know he's right?
Further research is needed.
The valuse of wikipedia is that it is teaching people NOT to trust ANY one source of infomation.
This happens in two ways:
1. The natural unreliablity of the infomation, or instability if you perfer.
2. Wikipedia provides a methode for people who would never be able to contribute to "normal" encyclopedia to do so. Thus allowing in radical ideas to sit along side the accpted truth with out fear of being censored by a "higher authority", thus challanging peoples world view.
While I don't disagree with all the points in this article, and thing the "trending towards mediocrity" issue is one that needs to be addressed (if you read the mailing list archives, it in fact has come up numerous times), Britannica is hardly a repository of flawless truth either.
For some examples from the other side, see:
Errors in Britannica which have been corrected in Wikipedia
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Let me make a short summary before I rebut (I'm sure everyone's going to stop reading after this, anyway). It seems to me that this guy is honestly missing the point of wikipedia. It's not Britannica, it's not inerrant truth, it's a user-edited free encyclopedia, and it admits its own shortcomings.
..."in this short description"; it's laid out more clearly elsewhere on the site.
...speaking of unintelligible, I'm having a hard time understanding this moist notion of his...
He makes some valid points and clarifies differences between wikipedia and a print encyclopedia, but he seems to be dismissing wikipedia altogether. I don't mean to imply that the Britannica is worthless; it has it's place, but wikipedia still excels at many things. For instance, all of the errors he mentions have already been corrected, it's way more up-to-date and it has articles on things you WILL NOT find anywhere else. Whether they're too current, too bizarre, or just too obscure to be included in "The Britannica", they make their way into wikipedia, and if they haven't yet, it won't take too long for you to change that. Maybe when Britannica gets a goatse.cx entry, I'll reconsider it's inherent superiority.
"Note the adjectives, and the order in which they appear"...
I must have missed the part where the linear order of adjectives in sentences predicts their level of importance... Notice that he classifies reliable under "and also". Also notice, however, that in the sentence it's "to become"..."reliable". The wikipedia project accepts its unreliability, and they are addressing the issue, but they haven't sufficiently resolved it, yet. Although he doesn't mention it they are hoping to develop a process to validate the information and release "versions".
He also mentions the frequency with which they use probabalistic adjectives (such as might, probably, could). This is seen less as a recognition of the state of the wikipedia - which is taken to be inconcrete, but rather as his clever discovery of their fallability.
"The basis for the assertion that [collaborative editing] is advantageous vis-à-vis the traditional method of editing an encyclopedia remains, however, unclear."
I feel he left out
"Does someone actually believe [that this quasi-darwinian system of editing will work]? Evidently so. Why? It's very hard to say."
Of course, it's effects on other devlopmental processes might influence that belief...
He then says that the process suggests "journaling" which refers to young students writing lots of unclear, nonspecific information that is judged in bulk by their teachers.
"So many pages are required per week or semester, but the writing on those pages need not be grammatical or even intelligible"
Of course, here is where the processes split. In one, nongrammatical and/or unintelligible information is overlooked, whereas in the other, it is (usually/eventually) noticed and corrected.
"Superimpose on this intellectual preparation the moist and modish notion of "community" and some vague notions about information "wanting" to be free, et voilà!"
NOTE: after writing this, I looked up moist and found the definition of "Fresh, or new." in Webster's 1913 Dictionary. I would add a note to his article to help clear it up, but I CAN'T.
"But conceding for a moment that this exercise in encyclopedia making is enjoyed and even believed in fervently by many thousands of participants,"...
I don't think that's something that requires a concession, I think that's a fact.
"let us take note of someone who is absolutely central to the concept of an encyclopedia but who is hardly acknowledged at all by the Wikipedians. I mean, of course, the user. As in the reader."
Which goes to show a misunderstanding of the concept of the wikipedia. The user is not necessarily seperate from the writer. Far from being not acknowledged, their role is held in the highest significance. It is uphe
If I'm writing a paper on classical music, and need to know his dates of birth and death, I stop at Brittanica. Going further is an ineffective use of time.
Do you want an answer, or do you want to be correct? Dates of birth and death are frequently debatable, just like this article shows, and even "authorative" sources often present one date like it was truth.
This is Slashodt we're some of the most cynical people on the face of the planet, I wouldn't take something as fact regardless of whether I was reading it in Britannica or Wikipedia, I'd want to confirm it by using multiple sources...
Get your torrents...
Well? The reviewer for the Guardian found a number of errors in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Does that make that book useless also?
I've seen articles at Wikipedia that uses lots of information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1910, since the copyright is apparently expired.
and I know of a number of articles that are written by people who are indeed the experts in the relevant field. Wikipedia is fast becoming my first port of call for scientific and mathematical information in fields with which I am unfamiliar.
And as pointed out by another poster, Wikipedia presents theories as theories, not as fact.
Wouldn't it be possible to apply a moderation system to Wikipedia, ala Slashdot, where authors gain karma/credibity points when others vote for them?
Alternatively, couldn't there be a rating system on the posts?
Or are these suggestions somehow anathema to the Wiki concept?
Just a few thoughts...
We don't know what most readers would do with EB if they were given the freedom to change and distribute it because they are not given that freedom. Even McHenry concedes that the Wikipedia claim is true--they were able to get a lot of volunteers to edit and revise. He must say this because he tries to use it to justify a poor review of Wikipedia later on. This freedom to make copies, change the work, and distribute copies (verbatim or modified) is one of the issues Wikipedia takes up (the first in its list of values, in fact). This sense of freedom (not zero price) is apparently quite important for Wikipedia ("The license we use grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely." from Wikipedia:Copyrights).
Taking the blame doesn't help anything if it doesn't result in getting problems fixed. EB's approach is about framing the debate in terms they are comfortable with an excluding others from building on their work. The practical outcome of this for me is that too many encyclopedias I've seen fail to address important social movements of the day (like the free software movement, encouraging an ethical approach to computer software, and the only significant challenge to one of the largest monopolies of our day--Microsoft's proprietary software), or they are updated too infrequently to talk about things I want to learn more about (like the recent goings-on and the history of the anti-war movement).
Other practical considerations are left out too: What if I want to make a copy of EB in case EB goes away? EB is under a restrictive license which doesn't allow me to do things I want to do. Contacting EB has not produced the kind of feedback I was looking for, including pointers to primary sources and essays written by people in the know on topics I care about. The end result of this is that I can't help myself by helping like-minded neighbors find these topics either.
To review Wikipedia, McHenry presents something closer to an all-or-nothing case ("assessing an encyclopedia...can't be done in any thoroughgoing way") where a complete reading is infeasible but clearly one must read something from the encyclopedia or else one can't say anything about its content. And then he says that he "chose a single article, the biography of Alexander Hamilton.". McHenry actively arguing against sampling--assessing the figurative lay of the land by looking at many places, not by looking at one hand-picked part and making that review stand for the rest.
But since he thinks this one-article approach is an appropriate yardstick, I figure two can play that game. I chose to look up something from the online EB about the free software movement and I found no entry (not even in the subscriber's short list). "GNU", in the context of computer software, seemed to elicit no response, neither did "open source" (which could have pointed to how the open source and free software movements differ), but "GNU/Linux" provides a hit (only because of the word "Linux"). Unfortunately EB falls into a trap much like the reviewer cited for Wikipedia's Hamilton entry--he picked the Alexander Hamilton entry because he knew that Hamilton's birthdate was likely to be wrong (and thus set up bad dates for the remainder of the entry), and that is exactly what he found. In my setup to fail, I know that exactly what Linux is and how it ought to be credited is controversial. Yet EB goes on boldly claiming that Linux is an operating system (when actually it is only part of an operating system called a "kernel"), and EB seems to make no distinction between free as in price and free as in the freedoms to share and
Digital Citizen
Darn it all!!! I had successfully avoided posting (except for one brief episode) for over TWO MONTHS. And now, all because of you, I've been entangled in a moral obligation to let you know that your idea of moral obligations is all wet.
People have the right to be wrong. Therefore, I do not have the obligation to correct them all the time. Hence, your main contention is entirely incorrect. However, operating within your system, I *do* have the obligation to let you know that _you_ are wrong. Hope it helps!
Whimsically,
Jeff Cagle
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
I use wikipedia when confronted with some concept that I don't know. I get a summary from wikipedia. In that mode, it really doesn't matter if they have someone's birthday exactly right. I am not on a fact-checking mission, I need an overview. Wikipedia does that VERY well. If I wanted to do hard-core research, I would probably use other tools or sites dedicated to the topic. I expect wikipedia to carry general knowledge, not incredibly detailed information. What an encyclopedia means to me, versus what it means to him are obviously totally different.
britain > america
and no, im not british
Of course, the "highest degree of accuracy" is not 100% in practice, and never will be. The fact of the matter is that all refference works are subject to the limitations of the authors' knowledge. As many here have noted already, print encyclopaedias like Britannica are just as effected by bias, incomplete research, and the like. Indeed, print works like Britannica, being the product of academia, may be even more subject to the whims of the Zeitgeist. My mother has a set of World Book encyclopaedias (for youth) from 1957 - it is full of anti-communist propoganda. Mind you, I'm not pro-communist myself, but I don't believe in overstating the facts to get my point across, either. I've seen egregious errors in the Encyclopaedia Americana as well, many of which were linked to passing academic fads.
The nice thing about Wikipedia is that someone who sees a mistake, or an omission can correct it. Yes, one can introduce mistakes as well, but it's just like OSS: the number of people intent on fixing mistakes is likely to outnumber the number of people intent on introducing them. Is that faith-based to an extent? Yes, but getting information from Britannica is faith-based, too: one has faith in the Britannica name. Would you expect the same level of integrity from some "Bob's Discount Book of Stuff" that you bought at the supermarket? Of course not.
The lesson here is never to rely on a single source for refrence. Always read critically, looking for the slightest sign of bias or poor scholarship. Blind faith in any human work is foolish, and Britannica is far from Divine.
I call Bullshit. I doubt anyone here is solely basing their belief in Wikipedia's reliability on McHenry. The question of Wikipedia's reliability has been debated for quite some time. There are rabid supporters on both sides of the debate; McHenry just brings another set of "eyeballs" to the debate and raises some valid points.
Further, the Encyclopedia Brittanica is composed of articles written by recognized experts in their fields and peer-reviewed. Are there errors? Probably. McHenry admits as much:
Which source is likely to have more errors?- A. The source written and peer-reviewed by experts with a reputation to uphold
- B. The source written by a mob of well-intentioned individuals with mixed levels of expertise (some could even be the same experts that submitted to EB) and, possibly, vandalized by @$$wipes with nothing better to do.
The mere presence of the word "possibly" in item B. is what makes Wikipedia's "reliability" questionable and makes EB the "more reliable" source.Funny, he cites no sources other than himself. How do I know he's right?
Further research is needed.
Touche!
However, while McHenry is a former "Editor in Chief" he still occupied only a single cog in the EB wheel. Also, consider the example he picked - the disputed birthdate of Alexander Hamilton. He chose this piece of information because it is disputed among scholars - he was interested in seeing how Wikipedia would handle that dispute:
What he found confirmed his suspicions - not only did Wiki not even mention the dispute, the article itself was not internally consistent!What he found confirmed his suspicions
At which he self-righteously set back and did no more looking. In research, you should set your suspicions aside and actually study the issue and look at the facts. Instead, he made his decision on Wikipedia, which is obvious from the tone of the first half of the article, he looked at one solitary article of Wikipedia, and quit looking. That's not research; that's just opinion.
If the article on Alexander Hamilton had been correct, would he have continued looking until he found a bad article he could rag on? Did he in fact look at several articles until he found one he could rag on? Given the quality of his article, I'm not sure the answer to both questions would be yes.
The essence of an encylopedia is research over things which have already occurred. Open source, on the other hand, builds something new. The value of the the thing open source builds is measured by its efficacy and utility. The thing that an encyclopedia builds is measured by its accuracy.
The skillsets for both are different. You can learn to be a better builder of things, if you work at it. You can sit in your room and program ever better, all the time. In a hot environment, strong peer review can improve you still. But, there's not "practice" to history in the sense of perfecting a skill, there's the sheer acquisition of accurate knowledge.
This is my sig.
It appears that the Wikipedia is doing a rather better job of meeting the needs of readers to find information than the Encyclopedia Britannica is online. To the tune of ten times the number of page views as Britannica.com. Readers are voting with their feet and the winner isn't EB.
Jeff
This response clearly demonstrates that you need to work on your reading comprehension skills. You might also want to step up your logic game while you're at it. When your get your shit together we can discuss this subject in more detail.
Thanks
The author did not choose an article at random. He deliberately chose an article where he had personal knowledge that would lead him to believe that the Wikipedia authors would be likely to mess up (that is, the controversy over Hamilton's birth date). In other words, he set out to find a mistake, and he found one. I'm sure that the Wikipedia folks will now clean up the Hamilton article, but this is not a random assessment of quality.
When I do serious work, I don't use Wiki as a reference.
An encyclopedia should never be a reference for serious work as an encyclopedia is not a first hand source and there is no promise (and it is usually not the case) that the articles are written by experts in the field.
In short, you are a strawman building asshat.
Let me try out http://www.britannica.com/ against http://www.wikipedia.org/ on some contemporary words.
"wiki" - wikipedia full description; britannica nothing.
"spam" - wikipedia several entries including one on "email spam"; britannica some indirect references.
"moveon" - wikipedia full description of MoveOn.org; britannica nothing.
"kazaa" - wikipedia full description; britannica indirect reference in "Music and Film on the Internet".
MOD PARENT UP
Come now, critics. Truth is subjective. Wikipedia is as good as it gets (to me).
Finally, it's interesting you mention the Halting problem. IIRC, about a year ago somebody added a big section about reformulating "the halting problem in mathematics". It was almost incomprehensible. After checking with a few other editors I ended up removing the lot.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This rube expects us to accept his "unbiased" analysis of the Wikipedia based on one article on Alexander Hamilton, while many of us who contribute to the Wikipedia have witnessed many articles progressing over time to become fairly accurate, and even more importantly, more complete than anyone would find in any printed encyclopedia.
Hopefully, this rube developed his Britannica articles using more than just one unrepresentative example.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
let users have names if they want.
This way authors can gain or loose reputation based on the articles they update.
Of course anonymous authoring and editing should still be allowed.
This could help the reliability problem as well as the editing problem.
If an AC edits a highly reputable contributor, then that edit should be high on the list of things to review.
Also, the author system could let authors know when there contibutions were updated, and what those updates were. That is, if they wanted to be.
that is all.
I think EB has started to get beyond their dismissiveness stage concerning Wikipedia and are starting to come to the realization that Wikipedia, not Encarta, is their number 1 long term threat.
A NDER.htm (EB should have had an article on Hamilton for over a hundred years by that time).
i ne&o=140475&sa=106;
That said, it would be wonderful to compare the oldest version of EB's article on Alexandar Hamilton available to the Wikipedia version. Ideally their 3 year old version would be best to compare since that is the age of the Wikipedia version but let's look at their 11th edition version at http://14.1911encyclopedia.org/H/HA/HAMILTON_ALEX
Well, for one thing is has extaclty the same birth date issue (his major criticism)!
Or when the current editor-in-chief of EB said in a recent Guardian article at http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=Leisure-Onl
"People write on things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on the UK TV soap opera Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."
Which is an odd comparison since EB does not have an article on Hurricane Frances or Coronation Street, and the Wikipedia article on Tony Blair has been longer than the EB version for well over a year. Oh, and the Coronation Street article on Wikipedia is not twice the size of the Tony Blair article (in fact, they are about the same size).
Oh, and the German Wikipedia won hands down in breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, in a head-to-head comparison between Brockhaus and Microsoft's Encarta (German version) conducted by the German nation-wide newspaper Die Zeit. See http://www.zeit.de/2004/43/C-Enzyklop_8adien-Test
I'm sure a similar study conducted on the English Wikipedia except against EB and Encarta, would have the same results.
Wikipedia has been around for less than 4 years. These other encyclopedias have been around for much, much longer.
How about including the sources? Most wikipedia articles cite nothing!
When I started reading this I found myself agreeing. Yes, the information could be recycled. Not everybody who writes it might know what they're talking about. The masses are ignorant. People, in general, are stupid.
Then I realized "Hey, I'm a person!" and thought, "That's not nice at all."
There are plenty of smart people to make up for the dumb ones, and generally people who write this stuff are going to know something about it. I think (I hope) that if somebody really didn't know what the subject was about, they would hesitate before trying to explain it.
Excellent point.
Spreading Knowledge, The Wiki Way
Any resource can, and probably will, have errors. While I use Wikipedia, and enjoy reading some of the articles on Wikipedia, I do not think it is of the same caliber as a peer-reviewed reference like Funk & Wagnall's or Encyclopedia Britannica. The community nature of Wikipedia (certainly a strength), coupled with a lack of formalized accountability, limits the applicability of the information contained within.
Ironically, when I went to Wikipedia's site in order to get their take on their own reliability I was greeted by a front page sporting the following :
This wikipedia article on Wikipedia's reliability I think succinctly captures the very debate we are having:
Printed publications do their best to ensure the material they present is accurate. When they fail to do so, they are heavily criticized and pressured to do better (witness the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times). Wikipedia has no processes in place to ensure the accuracy of its information other than a hope and a belief that people will do the right thing.
I agree with Bradley, quoted above. I would love to get fully behind Wikipedia (and have even recommended it to family members with a caveat on its reliability) - but I cannot because its reliability is only "potentially greater" than a traditional source (for now).
Perhaps this "crofty old coot" can never be made happy because he has an economic relationship with EB, thus his one-article sample(!) was designed to downplay Wikipedia's strengths and freedoms. I debunk the validity of his one-article sample approach elsewhere in this thread.
Digital Citizen
A monkey responds:
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
McHenry brings up interesting points that I think are worth discussion:
"Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy."
"Take the statements of faith in the efficacy of collaborative editing, replace the shibboleth "community" with the banal "committee," and the surprise dissolves before your eyes. Or, if you are of a statistical turn of mind, think a little about regression to the mean and the shape of the normal distribution curve. However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler."
His main claim is that an open process will gravitate towards a median of accuracy and quality. For now let us lump quality and accuracy together.
What McHenry is really counting on is that only a few can recognize quality and that they must be entrusted with promoting and preserving that quality.
His comparison of Wikipedia to a committee is flawed because a committee is not open, it is a selected group with limited membership and thus is actually an example of the Britanica system. That McHenry isn't able to see that is an example of just how much he doesn't understand what a truely open and collaborative process is.
Now to investigate the all articles evolve to the median argument. Assuming you could score an article on quality, McHenry's claim is true if the quality score of edits that reduce quality are equal to the score of edits that increase quality. Furthermore the reductions must overwrite or not be overwritten by increases. Basically given an already median quality the chance that an edit reduces quality must be 50%.
Ignoring sabotage and dealing only with the claim that stupid/ignorant people will harm the Wikipedia we can quite quickly see that his argument falls apart.
Grammatical errors and typos will definitely see an improvement over time and not a move towards a median. No one would change a correct spelling with a wrong one (besides American vs British English arguments). Edits that add new text will introduce new errors but those too will be corrected over time.
Thus for negative quality edits that will bring aricles to a mediocre median you require incorect information and a belief that you are more right than the Wikipedia - proud ignorance. McHenry assumes that there are more proud ignorant people than there are committed people with accurate information. I'm not sure where he gets his numbers from.
For McHenry's claim to be true a high quality article wil get more negative edits than positive edits. The proud ignorants must disregard more obviously correct (high quality) information. I would propose the opposite - that the number of negative edits decreases slightly as the quality of the article increases as those who are ignorant accept the article as true rather than their previous beliefs. I would also propose that the decrease in negative edits does not linearly correspond to the increase in quality. There will always be people who think they are right no matter how good the evidence against them is but this is a small minority of the population of editors not the majority.
Most importantly though is Wikipedias ability to compromise and admit ambiguity. This is a huge strength. For topics where there are multiple and/or conflicting truths/information the highest quality edits wil be those that acknowledge the disagreements and uncertainties. McHenry himself gives an excellent example in the brithdate of Alexander Hamilton. In this way the cycle of edit wars is resolved in a postive edit that is much more likely to resist further negative edits. It is this phenomenon that will create a rising trend of quality especially if those types of edits become a regular part of the Wikipedia culture/community.
Last, there are many tools that
Complexity Happens
Reading the article, his criticism does not appear to be "this area needs improvement", but "wikipedia can never work".
I'm not connected to wikipedia, and I agree that it will never be the same thing as a funded encylopedia written by a smaller group of professionals.
But I think he and other critics miss an important question:
"Should wikipedia exist?"
Is it a worthwhile endevour? Is there merit to building an encyclopedia that aims for the qualities of traditional ones, but with "free" thrown in?
Yes.
End of story.
I'm not going to present my reasoning behind that "yes" here, since I'd be preaching to the choir here, and different people have different reasons. My point is that Wiki isn't what it's most rabit proponents want it to be, but it has merit, and is worthwhile, and should exist.
So criticisms like his can be fairly criticised as lazy rather than constructive. He points to known problems, but isn't interested in doing anything about them, instead suggesting it can never work, while for many people, it already works.
The ox is quite clearly not a horse, but only an idiot would shoot it because it's unlikely to win at the racetrack.
A good counter-argument can be found at kuro5hin
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
There is not a population of articles on the same subject competing for attention.
I'd say the list of article versions on the history page of an article is exactly such a population. Thinking more broadly, you could think of the space of all possible versions as the population, since at any time anyone could replace the current version with any other element of that space. Whether it stuck around or not would depend to a large degree on its qualities.
That's not the same as natural selection, but the similarites are quite clear.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Nothing on wikipedia is ever "instantaneously" reverted. All reversions require someone familiar with Wikipedia to read the article, notice the difficulty, and revert it back to the original. This takes at least some noticeable time. Indeed, the Holocaust article you mentioned routinely has neo-Nazi material added to it that often remains uncorrected for 30 minutes or more. Even a neo-Nazi rant published as recently as last month ran for 7 minutes. (See history of the article).
7 minutes is sufficient time for a great many web hits. There were probably hundreds of page views of the incorrect material before someone corrected it.
Thus, your analysis that uncorrected revisions being viewed are "the absolute least likely thing to happen" is clearly false. Instead, it's absolutely inevitable that incorrect revisions will be viewed. In fact, since there are far more innocent non-editing viewers in the world than responsible Wikipedia editors, it seems likely that the average neo-Nazi rant will be viewed by several innocent viewers before being corrected.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
--Soviet Admiral Gorshkov
I preface my post with this quote because I think this realization is vitally important to the Wikipedia discussion. Personally I think the structure of Wikipedia as it is now is good enough. I'm wary that all the talk of introducing forms of validation or content rating is a dangerous attempt to reach perfection. Why is this bad? Why is perfection the enemy of good? Because of the Law of Unintended consequences. Every new solution also produces new problems. Often the cure ends up being worse than the disease. (Example Prohibition led to rampant organized crime)
The goal of Wikipedia shouldn't be to become a perfect information source. It really shouldn't be to become a in depth scholarly resource either, since scholarly books and articles better fill that niche. Instead the wiki format is best suited to allowing broad acess to basic information on a number of topics. For that matter that is what the EB's goal is as well. Personally I believe Wiki beats the EB on that matter because of its breadth acessibility, and easy navigation.
I was just about to rant and rave about "begging the question", but, funnily enough, Wikipedia comes to the rescue.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
This Wikipedia unaccountability problem becomes much more dramatic when you see one of the zealots answer accuracy criticisms by saying, in effect, that it's the users consulting the "encyclopedia" who are accountable for mistakes. To quote the top-level post from this thread:
In other words: "if the Alexander Hamilton article is wrong, it's the fault of the Britannica guy for not noodling around endlessly in Wikipedia edit wars and politics to fix it."Seriously, I'm reminded of arguments against open source when linux was in its infancy. Any old hack could be adding code to your operating system! Trust our elite closed group, instead! It's true that many "wiki zealots" are wayyy overstating the power of the medium, but this article is on the opposite end of that spectrum -- a vitriolic outburst ridiculing the very concept of wikipedia from every angle he can muster. I call into question the author's motivations in writing this piece.
Look, here's how I see it:
1) First of all, Wikipedia has been around for under a decade -- Brittanica has been around for CENTURIES. Other traditional encyclopedias have been around much longer than Wikipedia, as well. How can you conclude that their relative qualities are due solely to the editing process involved when there's such a disparity in the timeframes involved?
2) Yes, you shouldn't use wiki as an authoritative source. But am I the only one here that has been taught that you should never use *any* encyclopedia as an authoritative source? The last time an encyclopedia article was my only source on a subject was in gradeschool. Encyclopedias are primarily for an overview of a topic -- a starting point from which to branch out into further research. And Wikipedia is immensely useful in that respect.
3) Wikipedia's quality is only as good as the community editing it. This causes certain topics to be stellar -- maths and computer science, for instance -- in fact, surpassing most traditional encyclopedias that I've seen in these kinds of areas. But other areas aren't as great, and will develop more slowly. As more people from broader backgrounds use and contribute to wikipedia, it will develop that much more quickly. And wikipedia should still be considered in development, at least for a few decades, IMHO. See point #1. (But that doesn't mean it's useless in the meantime. See point #2)
4) After all the author's handwaving about why the concept itself won't work, after his laughing at strawman attitudes of those involved in the project, and after his unnecessary exposition on failed projects that preceded wikipedia, he finally gets to a concrete, empirical argument to show that wikipedia is sub-par. He picks one mistaken fact out of one of the articles [in fact, not even a mistaken fact, but a failure to explain that the fact isn't 100% known to be true], and uses that to conclude that wikipedia doesn't work. I have several things to say in response:
a) First of all, one could comb through any traditional encyclopedia and find mistakes and omissions. If you brought those to the attention of the editors, they'd probably be fixed in the next edition. (there's that word that he hates -- "probably.")
b) Hey, guess what, the omission he pointed out has already been corrected in the Wikipedia article. Neat, huh?
c) Wikipedia's content is ever expanding and growing. Both in terms of new articles, and within articles themselves. As new content is added, it takes a lot of time for that content to be polished, fixed up, and made presentable. As that's occurring, new content is continuously being added. Therefore, at any time in the development of wikipedia, you'll be able to find some rusty information. However, many other articles are absolute gems. No one has yet found a way to judge the *overall* quality of the encyclopedia, and the author of the article even admits that it's impossible to do so (so why do we trust traditional encyclopedias, again?). Nitpicks don't cut it.
d) He tries, in what essentially is his final thesis, to argue against the idea that these mistakes will be fixed by "some darwinian process" over time by pointing out that the original version of the article (which came from the US treasury) was actually better quality than it is now. However, he's missing a huge point, and so are most of the slashdot readers who are parroting his argument in this discussion -- The scope and depth of the article has increased *substantially* since its original version! Increasing scope and incr
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Hey Skarmor:
I'm going to "edit" some articles on your beloved site.
I've always thought of Wikipedia as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Earth. Maybe at some time we will be able to say "the Wikipedia sells rather better than the Encyclopaedia Brittannica"
Go hug some trees.
Peer review includes a consistent process and strict enforcement policy. A peer (usually more than one) believed to be qualified in the field is asked directly for his opinion, and gives one of several responses
- I'm not qualified to review it, or have conflict of interest, find another peer, perhaps so-and-so.
- OK to publish
- do not publish without such-and-such change
- do not publish: not worth fixing, not significant, not sufficient quality, etc.
Result: not published unless the review is successfully passed, with editors responsible and accountable for reconciling different opinions among multiple reviewers.
Wiki-review is
- random volunteers, self-selected
- based on a successful struggle in basically uncontrolled edit-wars
- has no consistently applied enforcement policy
it most certainly IS NOT equivalent to peer-review.
You can even easily read the license plates on the cars. Now that's my idea of high res!
Mere procedural differences. The heart of scientific studies is not in pre-publication review, but in the judgement of the community post-publication. It was in this that I was likening the process to that of the peer-review journals. Lots of worthless studies get published, but the community as a whole judges them harshly. Pre-publication review prevents some bad studies from being published, but not nearly all of them. It is post-publication review by the peer-community (peer-review in a looser sense, perhaps) which filters out the remainder over time.
Unfortunately, every time this subject comes up in Slashdot the discussion seems very predictable.
People think of wikipedia as 'open-source', and there are some parallels:
People who think of wikipedia as 'open source for encyclopedias' have trouble digesting the fact that most people go to encyclopedias to Save Time (TM), not to start their own investigation to confirm and correct the veracity of an article written by some educated amateur.
There are some interesting parallels in their replies to criticism too:
- All the edits are there! If you find an error just fix it!
Which is all well and good if you don't have anything better to do with your time than helping to maintain that project.
But most people have other things to do, such as working in other projects, and would rather go to an 'authoritative source' when they need quick reliability, whether free or not.
The question is whether wikipedia can be a Product (in the scope of Britannica) or not. The answer is not.
An open source tree does not a Product make, not unless your product is the hobby itself.
Most properly maintained open source projects learned this: an 'authoritative' release version is required to be taken seriously by the less adventurous. Let the hobbyist have the snapshots.
IF wikipedia wants to be authoritative, it would benefit from the concept of a fact-checked, edited 'release' with the corresponding cycle.
It wouldn't even have to be done by Wikipedia itself; the space could be taken by independent organizations (for profit or not) much like Linux distributions provide tested, documented bundles of software that is developed through more dynamic cycles.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
3 points:
Point 1:
PoMo literary criticism gets pretty hairy, but I can pretty much sum it up in 4 words: most text has bias. Britannia is no different. But people trust it. Why? Well, here's an idea: Trust is built through time, reputation, and endorsement. Texts compete with one another over time and are challenged by many people's evaluative skills. Wikipedia simply has a lot of growing to reach Britannia in terms of competition, endorsement, and assessing the reputations of the endorsers. It probably will take less time than Britannia took, though (due to the differences in medium).
Point 2:
What is the purpose of a dictionary, or an encyclopedia? Here's a reasonable start: to organize thought and language. This can be a power of great good, or great evil. It can be liberating, or controlling. I propose two approaches to the use of "references": a humanist approach vs. a rationalist approach.
One view is that a reference is a tool for examination, a series of questions, an inquiry into meaning, a weapon against received wisdom and therefore against the assumptions of established power. In other words, an organized Socratic approach.
Another view is that that the reference is a dispensary of truth. An instrument to limit meaning by defining language. It directs what people think. This is the Platonic elitist approach.
How are people supposed to enter into public debate if the concepts which define our society and decided the mannner in which we're governed are open neither to understanding nor questioning?
Change can only come through what will seem at first to be outrageous statements, provocation, and a stubborn refusal to accept the calm, controlling formulae of conventional wisdom.
Remember: Encyclopedias and dictionaries were largely developed during the enlightenment by folks such as Diderot, Voltaire, and Flaubert as verbal guerilla warfare. They freed language from religion and court politics, and challenged the old regime. Which is more true to that spirit -- Wikipedia, or Britannia?
(Apology: the above is largely a paraphrase of the intro to John Ralston Saul's "The Doubter's Companion")
Point 3:
Both Marshall McLuhan (Wired magazine's patron saint) and Harold Innis (his mentor) claimed that communications mediums have a tremendous effect on culture, meaning, and interpretation. "The medium is the message", indeed.
Some mediums tend to enhance our communications over a wide area, promoting conformity of knowledge. This is referred to as "space bias" - aka. a "literate" society. Other mediums tend to enhance our communications over time, preserving and evolving knowledge. This is referred to as "time bias" - aka. an "oral" society.
An oral society is immediate -- words are spoken "now", provoking reactions immediately. Knowledge resides in memory and belongs to the community -- and is only available to those who can hear it. A literate society is one where knowledge is a point of view, argued linearly, in a logical order. Thought is stored, but cannot be reacted to ("you can't ask a book a question"). Action becomes seperate from thought, so "planning" becomes popular.
The Internet flips the written wor
-Stu
unlike the encyclopedia britannica - wikipedia didn't print 10,000,000 copies of an error with
no way back!
...The hamilton article has been fixed, thankyou for your contribution mister X-Encyclopedia editor. Looks like it worked...
or else!
True. But what distinguishes one from the other?
Someone without knowledge of a field comes in and learns by reading a bunch of current sources, and writes on a topic. Versus someone who learnt (maybe at Oral Roberts University, or Grand Canyon University) something 20 years ago?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Wikipedia is already good enough and there is no way it's gonna get worse. Eventually we'll have AI read the digitized references and check and crosscheck the facts. But for now it's good enough and what's better, it's free, open and more up-to-date than many alternatives.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I find it interesting the parent (and many others, to be sure) have the opinion:
It was OK, but I wouldn't take every word in it as unassailable fact.
I also wouldn't trust it not to gloss over important aspects of topics and to create the impression that a relatively unimportant aspect of a topic was more important than it really was by going into too much detail over it.
I just read an article today by Howard Zinn that states:
"But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world -- by a teacher, a writer, anyone -- is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts are not important and so they are omitted from the presentation."
McHenry hints at this in his article, mostly by saying that the sheer amount of "fact" to go into any encyclopaedia is overwhelming. It is unfortunate that the border between "fact" and "opinion" (or "ignorance") is blurred in Wikipedia.
McHenry's suggestion about "community" vis-a-vis "committee" can also be applied to some Free Software projects.
Wikipedia single greatest problem is, without doubt, the antiquated American system of copyright, damned be those fucktards at Disney. The main reason why the quality of Wikipedia is not as high as one might have liked is because wikipedians need to create the whole encyclopedia from scratch, do it for free and because they chose to approach it on a wide front.
To mature, Wikipedia might need another decade. To mature only a subset of its articles through fact-checking and peer-review it might need 5 years or so. One must understand that Wikipedia is a work in progress and that it's provided AS IS. It doesn't claim to be better than Encarta or Britannica, if you don't like it, don't use it. However, the very openness and freedom ensured that it became popular. Even though it's not ready yet.
The same can be said about many open-source products - they are still in 0.9, but many people find it good enough to use them in production settings.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
There are plans to make a "release" version of Wikipedia, by selecting a subset of articles, factchecking, peerreviewing them and then freezing them in a separate address space.
There are also plans for a system that would allow references to be integrated into the very fabric of articles much better than it's done now.
There are a lot of ideas and projects going on in Wikipedia. People there realise all the weaknesses Wikipedia currently has, but also understand that the Rome wasn't built in one day. Don't treat Wikipedia as finished yet, treat it as a work in progress, which just happens to already be useful for many purposes.
Also realise that there is no possible way that in 2030 there won't exist an open, free, authoritative and complete source of all human knowledge, accessible online from any place on this planet and some places beyond, that contains everything worthwhile that was ever written, the true sum of all human knowledge, constantly updated and checked. And if one has to guess, whether it will be based on Britannica or Wikipedia, I guess the latter looks slightly more likely.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
With little objective understanding of worldly matters --or for that matter, the word "objective" itself-- you should be thankful that they are even able to put together a newspaper, or even just pronounce "journalism". In fact, you should be thankful for the very fact that they are pretending to be "reporting" rather than trying to put together a suitcase bomb.
For each bad example (like Hamilton) you can find equally good counter-examples. For example, the article about my country Belarus and my native language Belarusian on Britannica is pathetic. It's full of BS. It's full of wrong information. And, on the other hand, Wikipedia items on Belarus and Belarusian language are much more accurate and up-to-date. I don't see how he can make a claim based on one article that he probably specifically looked for.
After a flurry of editing, the Hamilton article has already been corrected - every factual nit the reviewer noted has been fixed. Now, as to the quality of the writing - you get what you pay for...
-josh
Encyclopaedia Britannica on DVD costs about 50 bucks and is a Java application that runs on Linux.
To put things into perspective, one could point out that the Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th edition makes the same mistake about Hamilton's birth year as Wikipedia did until recently.
... i.e. that open source projects lack in quality (security), because there is no quality assurance. as i see it, that's true for recent projects, and as the project matures, that changes drastically. for something like wikipedia, that probably means that you should treat every page as a project - the first couple of versions are likely (but not necessarily) of lower quality, and as the page gets revised, it matures. that _does_ pose a problem if you want to use wikipedia as a definite source. on the other hand, no encyclopedia article can replace a textbook on the same topic, so people should take a wikipedia article for what it is: an entrypoint to a topic.
"Would it really tend to be the same curve as the general population, or are those with more expertise in a given area also more likely to be editting in the first place?"
To some extend this is probably true, but the effect will be greater on obscure or very specialised topics, then on more general ones. As the saying goes: 'With art, everyone is an expert' (replace art with a considerable number of other topics). The more popular or high profile (or evoking much emotions) a topic is, the more all sorts of people will edit it - this will no doubt be close to a Gausscurve of the general population.
For obscure/dry (to the populace)/specialised/etc. topics, it is probable that experts will be more prone to edit it. Yet, even then it does not solve the problem completely: you do not elliminate the degradation towards the median, you only slow it down.
Because, after all, it is still possible for every Joe Doe to edit those articles, and sooner or later it *will* happen. The only way in which those specific articles would get slowly better, is if the experts editing it would be greater then the amount of hoi palloi editors. The more popular wikipedia becomes, the less likely this is going to be, because new 'incomming' experts on those obscure or specialised topics will be less in comparison (as the Gauscurve demonstrates), then the amount of freshly arriving and ready-to-mess-up mediocre ninkenpoops of this world that find their way to the wikipedia.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
No, it is not a simple procedural difference.
Pre-publication review means that when I pick up a copy of Applied Physics Letters, the results in there have met a certain standard of review. It doesn't mean that the paper deserves to be engraved into solid gold and preserved in the National Archives, but it means that someone familiar with the field believes it was prepared with reasonable care.
Yes, it may be flawed, it may be worthless, but at least I know it met the standards of APL referees, and APL bases its reputation on the integrity of the peer-review process.
There is no such guarantee on Wikipedia. All I know is that it met the standards of the latest self-appointed editor.
While Robert McHenry makes some good points, there are also some amazing differences in Wikipedia's favor. Try looking up "The battle of Leyte Gulf" (the largest naval battle in history, during WWII). While I don't have a subscription to Britannica, their website says the article is 288 words. In contrast, the Wikipedia article is 3,141 words, including strategic background, detailed descriptions of each phase of the battle, and the aftermath. It includes maps, photographs, and statistics, book references, and web site references. As a person who is reasonably knowledgable on the subject, I give it an "A" for accuracy. Plus I didn't have to pay to see it :-).
I'd say there's something to be said for the open publishing process!
Style-review is universally important, to make sure articles are readable. Review of facts would be far more difficult to implement fairly, and of more questionable value.
Pre-publication review is a double-edged sword which is too often a means of supressing dissent, rather than controlling accuracy. Does Wikipedia's post-publication review system system need tweaking, perhaps; but no wholesale change, like pre-publication review, is needed. Given the choice between rigid control and allowing every kook on the net to present his "facts," I'd rather err on the side of the latter.
So long as they are scientific papers that is. The work of creationists and creationism you adroitly avoid referring to by name simply doesn't meet the measure. (And no, both sides aren't guilty of not adressing evidence... Only one is, and that's why they don't get published in reputeable journals.)
A post-publication review system has to exist before it can be tweaked, and on both a general as well as a specific scale the Wikipedia's is all-but-nonexistent.
I agree.
At least, I would if I could get that blasted formula rendering to work.