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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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
If the "monkeys" decide they like what they wrote, that's good
But the problem is that more often than not the monkey's opinion of the truth or fact isn't in fact necessarily congruent with the truth or fact.
Popular isn't necessarily correct or incorrect. It's just popular. You can have a dozen wikipedians arguing back and forth on a topic but at the end of the day the socratic or arugmentative process doesn't guarantee a solid article.
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.
"If the 'monkeys' decide they like what they wrote, that's good enough -- it doesn't have to be Shakespeare."
Your sole standard is whether you "like" what's written?! It appears that truth no longer matters in your bottom-up society.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
This has nothing to do with elites and top down society. The point of the article is that Wikipedia may not be the ultimate encyclopedia as some of its boosters may proclaim.
To address your point, you're saying that tyranny of mediocrity is acceptable and in fact desireable? In your world, there is no reason for people to aspire to higher knowledge and enlightenment?
Self awareness - try it!
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.
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.
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.
Oh get over yourself. This isn't about class struggle--anyone can get a job as a writer if they're qualified. Factual accuracy has never been more important than in today's so-called "information age".
You don't have to be an elite to recognize the importance of accuracy.
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 |
The argument that Wikipedia sucks because it has a lot of people working on it doesn't hold any water. Look at Linux!
But that's exactly his point. Linux has editors (Linus) and sub-editors (component maintainers) to regulate what actually gets in and make sure it's good.
Imagine if kernel.bkbits was opened up and *anyone* could commit *anything* to it. That's the wikipedia model.
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".
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.
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/
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.
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.
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?!
Now how in the hell am I supposed to trust this definition of Asymptote?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The average guy is at least as likely to tell the truth as an elite expert.
Absolutely true, and completely irrelevant. [Encyclo|Wiki]pediae deal in facts, not "truth". By definition, elite experts are much better equipped to write factual information than the average guy.
This doesn't mean that Wiki are doomed; everyone is knowledgeable about something, so they can contribute to those articles that they are expert in, and simply read the rest without editing. In this way, the community can build a valuable encyclopedia.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.'"
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.
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
(Now, granted, it's fair game to make fun of him for his spelling of encyclypedia.)
|/usr/games/fortune
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.
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." ---
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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?
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
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?
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
No, you're missing the point. If all these articles on the Wikipedia require a Britannica editor to fix them, then how is that different than www.britannica.com?
His point was that with the masses having write access to the article, the quality of the article had *fallen* to merely average quality.
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
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"?!?!?!?!?
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).
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.
Oh, shit. That's embarrassing.
Typos happen. *shrug*
You can't tell me a misplaced apostrophe is a typo, though. Look at a QWERTY keyboard, and you'll see how it happened.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
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.
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
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
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.