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Larry Sanger on Wikipedia and World
Phoe6 writes "MIT Tech Review is running an article on Larry Sanger, an epistemologist and the co-creator of Wikipedia. It is very interesting to know his views on Wikipedia. He says, 'To build a public encyclopedia, you don't need faith in the possibility of knowledge, What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work together.'"
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy studying the nature of knowledge. "Jimbo" Wales, the other co-founder of Wikipedia, is purportedly a disciple of Ayn Rand, the Objectivist philosopher and novelist (who was a die-hard capitalist, too; an Objectivist co-founder of Wikipedia is nearly mind-boggling given its free nature... though it does explain a lot about NPOV policy).
I never knew an inkling about any of the predilections of wikipedia's founders; this is quite a revelation. In the far future, these two could conceivably be remembered as two of the great philosophers of our time.
Wow dude, has anybody seen the last article - Yellow Dog Linux? It's become a GNAA nest, I think. To be more on-topic, this dude does have some interesting views on wikipedia, but I think the core of it lies in the article summary - "it's all about having faith in people's ability to work together...". For a cynic like me, I don't have that faith - at least for something like an encyclopedia. There are enough people who like destruction for the sake of destruction, see previous article on Yellow Dof (and 9/11) for an example. What does it cost somebody to revert a wikipedia article and totally trash it? It's a teency-weency bit harder to do the same thing on a FOSS project. As it is, skeptics/cynics like me take all encyclopedias with a pinch of salt, be they online or on dead trees.
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By and large I have found the quality of articles to be quite good. Its incredible the range of topics covered in a short time. Truly a gem of the web.
> So, you poor Wikipedians, finish your sorry library project and create something much more unique.
I don't know... I decided to take a quick look at everything2 because I had not before, and wikipedia impresses me every time I check it out. I happen to come from Marion, OH, home of Warren G. Harding. (Sure, the rest of the planet thinks the guy was a terrible president but in Marion he's a home town boy and worshipped!) Anyways, I looked him up on both. I have to say that the Wikipedia Article looks much nicer than the the Everything2 article, contains more info, links, etc... I'd be happy to see a counter-example though!
Sanger says participants often become embroiled in "revert wars" in which overprotective authors undo the changes others try to make to their articles.
In my experience, this is not at all what revert wars are about. They're not about pride of authorship, because that's an impossibility on Wikipedia. They're about controversy. You get an article about, say, messianic judaism, or Ronald Reagan, which then becomes a battleground between believers and skeptics.
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Larry plays a mean Donegal-style fiddle in the local Irish music sessions.
Another angle would be to allow authors to block edits of their text, but to allow others to put dissenting links in it pointing their own articles.
I wouldn't do that, because the "author" is not necessarily any more an authority than the dissenters are. And the NPOV thing on Wikipedia is very specific about *not* treating all points of view equally, or letting a very vocal minority make itself seem like an equal player with commonly-accepted ideas.
At the moment, I can't think of a better way they how they do it -- it's not chaos, because they actually do lock down articles that have become wars, and they do include reference to fringe ideas (but clearly label them as fringe).
If you haven't read their bit on the neutral POV, it's very mind-opening stuff; there's no need for the chaos, and there should be no "winner" of the edit war.
The current wikipedia state...Is sad. When anybody can change the entire entry without anybody noticing.. the "Douche" entry was insulting some girl with first and last name for about a week or two before it was changed.
Without a serious review system, I can see it becoming a nest of crap that no one will be able to use.
I just went through the entire history of the Wikipedia article on Douche. I learned more about douching than I ever wanted to know. (Still, the review is much easier with the new Mediawiki v1.4, implemented in beta just this week. You can go directly from any version of the article to its immediate predecessor or successor, or you can do the same in the "diffs" that display the changed sections and highlight what was changed.) When I review the article, I don't find anything like what you describe.
The article seems to be a favorite place for the kiddies to insert people's names, but this vandalism gets reverted quickly. The first one ("Oh, and Eric's a douche") lasted all of one minute back in March before it was reverted.
Here are subsequent corrections reverting such edits, with their lag times showing how long the vandalism stayed up before it was caught:
one minute
three minutes
two minutes
seven minutes
one minute
nine minutes
one minute
Now, I'll admit, they got us this week. The vandalism that added someone's name at 2:02 on December 21 wasn't reverted for thirteen hours. I guess we were all at our Winter Solstice rituals. But there is nothing remotely close to "insulting some girl with first and last name for about a week or two before it was changed."
So, if you had added such a claim to a Wikipedia article, I'd just delete the misinformation, while giving my reasons (as above) in the edit summary or on the article's talk page. If you could back up your assertion, you could restore the passage. If you and I couldn't reach agreement, we'd get other participants involved. Here on Slashdot, with its "serious review system", however, all I can do is post this response.
Somewhere around 132 (depending on the test) gets you into Mensa (which means "better than 98% of the world), and almost nobody scores over 165 or so.
There are however a significant number of people who score under 19.
So before we even look at the entire distribution, we can be pretty sure that it's not a normal one.
Of course, most people with IQ scores below 60 or so do not participate in society very much, and live as wards of somebody else, but the geniuses walk among the general population relatively unnoticed. So if you meet a "random" person in a store, they are already part of a sub-set of people who are mentally capable of going shopping, and the odds of them being "above average" improve slightly... unless the store you meet them in is a Bose electronics store, because only a complete idiot would shop there.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
A validation system is in progress. Ideally, it would have a sort of advogato-style trust metric, so that community consensus would ensure all validated articles were of a particular quality; more trusted users would have a bigger vote towards validation.
Thus, there would be the 'live' version and the 'validated' version, trailing a short interval behind the live one.
Check out test.wikipedia.org for a really shitty implementation of validation. (It's vulnerable to all the same problems that editing is, thus providing no additional benefit, and a kludgy interface to boot. But validation could do what you say, in a scalable and extensible fashion.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca