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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?"
His whole point is that the article started off reasonably good and through haphazard editing sounds like a highschool student wrote it.
I use wikipedia as well, but just to get a starting point on a subject I know little about.
"A REAL computer has ONE speed and the only powersaving it permits is when you pull the power leads out of the back!"
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.
ack! It's not smilk, it's "Malk", now with vitamin R!
Monstar L
From an academic point of view I can quote say Encyclopadia Brittanica article on the charango from the 1995 edition.
You can do such things with Wikipedia as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Slashdo t&oldid=279882
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
Wikipedia is a community effort.
If we replace the word "community" with the word "committee" the problem is obvious.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
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
The moderation of your comment is a prime example of Wiki's weaknesses, no information in your post to back up your assertions, yet someone still moderates you interesting
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.
Too many people are trying to correct that article right now, so that corrections are stepping on each other. (Note how the history list shows it being sorrceted, but later revisions are over writing it with other corrections.) I'm sure, by the time this slashdotting is over, the dispute over Hamilton's date will be well presented.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
That is the absolute least likely thing to happen. Holocaust articles, Judaism, US election/political figures, and articles about the Middle East are subject to the most scrutiny of any article type on Wikipedia. Massive vandalism of the type you indicate to fool little Johnny would be instantaneously reverted, and the user vigorously blocked without warning. Little Johnny would never have a chance to glance it.
It is the small, subtle changes to data on obscure topics which is to be feared, not a broad sweeping alterations of a major topic.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Actually, even Wikipedia can't spell it right, that fact alone hinting at the lack of wisdom of using Wikipedia to be a credible source of data. OK, so DNS can't support the æ ligature needed to get the correct spelling: Wikipædia. But they could at least have used the A and E as separate characters: Wikipaedia.
I assume you are joking, and probably also from the UK. Nevertheless:
(1) Technically DNS names are 8-bit data. There is no requirement that they be ASCII or even any sort of text at all. See RFC 2181.
(2) The most common spelling of "encyclopedia" in the U.S. does not have a ligature. "Encyclopædia" looks foreign to most people here.
where there's fish, there's cats
The Britannica article does not present the theory as a scientific fact. It uses the qualifier "probably," which means it is likely true but there is no conclusive proof.
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.
Mod up the parent. The full entry for the Oort cloud in the Encyclopedia is much longer (and is part of the 20 page entry for Comets. I don't think I should paste the entire entry, but here's a couple of sentences just to get the idea:
The most probable hypothesis is that [the Oort cloud] was formed at the same time as the giant planets by the very process that accreted them. The Soviet astronomer Viktor S. Safronov developed this accretionary theory of the planetary system mathematically in 1972. According to his model, the planets originated from a disk or a ring of dust around the Sun, and cometary nuclei are nothing more than primordial planetesimals that accreted first and became the building blocks of the planets. From the accreted mass of the giant planets, Safronov predicted the correct order of magnitude of the mass of the Oort cloud, which was built up by those planetesimals that missed colliding with the planetary embryos and were thrust far away by their perturbations. In effect, the Oort cloud in this theory becomes the necessary consequence and the natural by-product of the accretion of the giant planets.
Researchers should not be using encyclopedias.
Even when I'm making casual enquiries, I still like to get answers that are correct.
As even the article author admitted in his introduction, accuracy and fact checking in print encyclopedias is "not thoroughgoing" because it's just too big a job.
I think you misread this: I did too on the first pass. He's not saying it's impossible to be accurate or fact check thoroughly when compiling an encylopedia. What he's saying is that reviewing an encylopedia, print or electronic, can not be done comprehensively:
I know as well as anyone and better than most what is involved in assessing an encyclopedia. I know, to begin with, that it can't be done in any thoroughgoing way. The job is just too big. Professional reviewers content themselves with some statistics...
Presumbably, if a good sample of articles check out, then the process used to create the encyclopedia was valid.
I think this would be an *excellent* thing to happen to little Johnny. It would be anobject lesson in the importance of critical thinking
Sure, if little Johnny is doing a paper and is likeley to be corrected by his teachers. But what if its not for a paper? How does little Johnny know what he doesn't know, i.e. that the information is wrong? In any case, as was noted elsewhere, the danger is not with subjects like the Holocaust, which are watched liked hawks for now (but in a 100 years, who knows?), but lesser known areas which don't get as much scrutiny.
The ex-Britannica's example of the Hamilton birthdate is a good one: armed with the power of critical assesement you might notice there are internal inconsistencies in the article, but you would chalk that up to poor writing or research on the part of contributers, not a fundamental ambiguity in the historical record.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
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).
Whoa, something pissing you off there?
From
Wikipedia: Spelling of 'Encyclopedia':
None of the spellings -- encyclopedia, encyclopaedia, or encyclopædia -- are formally misspellings. Historically, however, the latter two represent a very old spelling mistake. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the spelling with the ae or æ is "pseudo-Greek" and "an erroneous form (said to be a false reading) occurring in MSS. of Quintilian, Pliny, and Galen". The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the æ is not found in the original Greek enkyklios paideia for "encyclical education", described as "the circle of arts and sciences considered by the Greeks as essential to a liberal education".
Then EB is behind the times in an inappropriate way as well as being grossly incorrect in what it publishes today (again, by McHenry's ridiculous standards which would render every encyclopedia useless--one bad article and you're out). The free software movement is 20 years old this year. It began in 1984 with RMS' announcement of the GNU project.
It's ironic that you picked Mozilla as an example to bolster your point ultimately aimed at debunking the need for the freedom to share and modify because the history of Mozilla is rife with the need for these freedoms. Mozilla came to be what we know through the hard work of the extant free software community, the community that preceeded the Mozilla project by over a decade. Mozilla is licensed under three licenses, two of which came from the FSF (the GPL and LGPL). The open source movement started in reaction to Netscape's distribution of the source code that began the Mozilla project. Wikipedia's priority apparently includes distributing their work under a free documentation license (the GFDL, yet another license written by the FSF). Granting people the freedom to do useful things with the work continues to be important to them and to me, and that makes me enjoy the Wikipedia all the more. It's a shame this gets such short shrift in McHenry's review, but perhaps that is because he isn't interested in people learning how these freedom empower them to work together to replace what he made his living doing.
When we lost the 1960 and 1970 censuses we lost the work of the typists put in to transcribe the data into electronic format. Only some of the data from those censuses is available today. You can't statistically examine this volume of data without computers, and computers can't work on dead tree formatted data, they need electronic copies of data. At least with computers we can pay attention to keeping things in free formats and periodically copying data so as to keep it ready for statistical analysis whenever we want. Dead trees are not as useful here.
Furthermore, the 1960 and 1970 censuses were distributed on tapes, hence the need for the Dualabs compression program. I'm told that around 1880 there may have been a fire which prevents getting paper records for censuses before that time. Other than that, you should be free to scan in the microfiche facsimilies and recreate the data for many censuses with much typing (far more work than it would be to create a copying program to put data in a desired new format). Maybe you should look up the story of how the Dualabs problem came to be and why it matters so much to data archivists. Perhaps, someday, EB will come around to describe this issue.
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