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.'"

Comments

WE'RE UNDER ATTACK

[tarunthegreat2]

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.

revisionist history?

[bcrowell]

Interesting that the article completely ignores the failed nupedia project and Jimmy Wales. It makes it sound as if Wikipedia was a unitary project created in whole cloth by Larry Sanger, which really isn't the case.

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.

Sorry, your criticism is flat-out wrong

[JimLane]

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.