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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?"
"...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.
Er, no.
His argument is that the editing process fails to achieve a decent encyclopedia, and the article on Hamilton - which, he claims, has been edited repeatedly and now appears worse off than when it started - is an example of that. And his question is, how do you know when Wikipedia is authoritative? Just telling him to "edit it himself" is missing the point. I don't have the knowledge or time to write my own encyclopedia. At some point, the product has to become useful to the reader, as well as enjoyable for the contributors. Thus, your point that "Wikipedia thinking requires more depth" counts against Wikipedia, not for it.
Maybe there are valid counterarguments to this guy's point of view - I've used Wikipedia and been, subjectively, satisfied with it - but yours is not one.
The Hamilton article is used as an illustration of the problems he percives - his core argument is contained in this passage:
To put the Wikipedia method in its simplest terms:
1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.
2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.
Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:
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.
Points 1 and are essentially correct. Point 3 is the interesting one. One the face of it he is right again - sure contentious articles will go into dispute, but hum-drum articles on little-known issues? A typo or date inaccuracy could remain there for a very long time.
Of course similar errors could exist with a conventional encyclopedia - but I would be interested in refutations of his point 3.
FWIW, I love Wikipedia. It is an amazing resource and deserves to thrive, but if it can e made more robust, while retaining its essential open, collaborative nature, so much the better.
From an academic point of view I can quote say Encyclopadia Brittanica article on the charango from the 1995 edition.
Is it possible for me to date my wikipedia references in the same way? Particularly when the articles *are* likely to change often, and the review process before publication ('changes are visible immediately' comes up when I have a go at editing) is just not there.
For finding out about stuff wikipedia is fine - but I would prefer to quote something which has been published and can be got at 10 years later for review.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Let's hope you're not citing it in your research paper.
I've seen it cited on Aljazeera such as here.
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 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.
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.
I think that the poster has an undue faith in the philosophy of the Wikipeadea as opposed to its reality. An interesting but fraught analogy would be Marx's ideas about Socialism versus the real-world implementation of them. Such noble purposes ruined by mere human frailty.
McHenry's point is that despite the excellent ideals behind Wikipedia, which would seem self-evidently true to those of us inclined to believe "in faith" the potentiality of community-based-development, the reality is that in the area of research and writing an encyclopedea (as opposed to software) that:
- Many people are essentially lazy. Many might come upon an article that is incomplete or poorly written but for many reasons will not take the time to correct it even if they are qualified to do so.
- Many people are essentially arrogant. Many might come upon an article that is incomplete or poorly written and will take the time to correct it even if they are notqualified to do so either in subject knowledge or language use.
- Many people are essentially stupid. Many might come upon an article that is incomplete or poorly written and not know the difference.
- Some people (especially adolecents) are cruel and destructive and will muck up perfectly good articles just because they can.
Thus, the maintainers (bureaucrats?) are at a bit of a disadvantage as they have a constantly moving target.A modest proposal then. Why not have a "perfect" flag for articles? This flag would indicate that in the opinion of a certain number of maintainers (or heaven forbit, subject matter experts) the article in question is a close to perfect as possible. The article would then be locked for editing and it would require a special appeal to the bureaucrats to reopen it to change it; for the addition of newly brought to light information, for example.
In this way the bureaucrats can concentrate on the areas that need continuing work without having to continuously go over settled articles. But the community can still bubble up new information and content for existing articles, but in a more controlled manner. Just a thought. I'm certain I'm not the first to bring it up as it seems perfectly obvious.
Oh, and lastly the poster needs to get over the whole "the Internet will save us/print people are dinos who don't get it" attitude. McHenry made a living managing the process of updating an encyclopedia. Just because he did it in a for-profit environment in a medium where cost made revisions an annual event, does not mean he doesn't have insight into the area of maintaining an open encyclopedia in digital form. Don't kill the messenger.
"Being Irish, he possessed an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through brief episodes of joy." -W. B.
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.
And funny enough, that change has already been made. I believe they stole the text directly from Mr. McHenry's article!
seriouslyexcited.net
Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica which have been corrected in Wikipedia