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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.'"
He says, for the whole thing to work, humans have to work together and help one another. Now, I like Wikipedia, and I think it works, but not because people are "helping" as much as they can. It works because there are lots of people with big egos that want to show off their knowledge, and moderators that aren't afraid to ban an entire subnet (any computers from the Calgary Board of Education, where I go to school, are prohibited for making changes; take two guesses why, the first one doesn't count). It still works, but the assumption that it is because people are "helpful" to each other is slightly flawed. I'm sure there are some, but as with most other facets of life, I imagine they are vastly overshadowed.
It may sound silly, but there is no good way to arrive at a universally agreed upon "truth". Every source of information has bias, and it's ridiculous to pretend as though this is not the case.
The problem with Wikipedia is that the bias is inconsistent. That is, if the bias was consistently left or right or Zoroastrian or what not, then it would be easier to understand Wikipedia's articles. There would be a frame of reference -- you could perceive it for what it was. However, with no particular leaning, any individual article could be the result of any individual person with an axe to grind. I prefer a website with a single consistent bias to one with wildly unpredictable ones.
How could we go about creating a website with a consistent bias? A simple Slashdot-like mod points system would work wonders.
Having text subject to a moderation period for hours or maybe a day or two in a discussion area (with some sort of indicator or flag) would be a LOT better than instantaneous posting, IMO.
I contributed to the entry on Internet Explorer (specifically, removing it). A while back, some editors at Wikipedia (I'm not attributing--I'm sure this time lack of attribution will make them happy) were continually deleting the section on removing Internet Explorer from Windows. The kept changing criteria... First, they wanted the passage on removing IE to say exactly who recommends it. Then, it had to meet Neutral Point of View and attribution criteria. Then, another Wikipedia editor asked what computer security experts recommend IE removal. It finally ended; they deferred and named the three experts in the field.
Per the article: Nonbias is a difficult ideal to live up to. Indeed, the most common complaint against Wikipedia is that it is unreliable; since anyone can publish or edit any article instantly, theres nothing except the diligence of other contributors to keep favoritism, misinformation, vandalism, or sheer stupidity out of the encyclopedias pages. I'd argue that so-called nonbias is not the problem.
The problem was that these dedicated editors were not deferring to the actual experts (in this case, me--the guy who has a site on removing Internet Explorer from Windows 2000, and ignoring the creators of XPLite and nLite). If the editors don't like something, all they have to do is claim that it violates the holy grail Neutral Point of View and you'll have to beat them over their heads to get your text into the Wikipedia. Moderation is a lousy way to get at the exact truth, but eventually, it comes to light (seems to here at Slashdot, anyway). No, obviously the truth isn't what everyone thinks, but it would sure help with those editorial battles. An article might have a comment that Hydrogen caused the Hindenberg disaster, and it gets modded +5. Eventually, you can bet the comments pointing out that it was the zeppelin's skin (paint) will also get modded +4 or +5. The key is with the Wiki, with moderation, potential authors wouldn't have to have month-long running debates and editorial beat-downs.
You've obviously never worked in a Wikipedia environment. It's amazing that once you've become free from most of the rules, and are given a simply goal, how people will organize themselves and work toward a common goal. Not to say there aren't trolls, but now you have the community, not just the moderators working against them. I'm honestly surprised at how Wikipedia has gotten so many things right - not to say there aren't problems, but overall the project itself is a grand success.
But Wikipedia's "staff" of volunteers is "better than any full-time staff you could imagine, because there are so many people involved," Sanger says. Any malicious or mistaken entry "is going to be instantly noticed" and corrected.
Bzzt. Wikipedia has a LOT of articles...430000+ in the English version alone, with varying ranges of popularity, of course. Vandalism that happens on some articles will be corrected immediately, vandalism on others could take days to languish. I've seen insidiously biased and incomplete articles that take far longer than an instant to get fixed.
What's more troubling is that people think Wikipedia is an end-all of knowledge. I wish it were, I really do. The problem is, a vandal or somebody just flatout misinformed could easily change some obscure date from like 1342 to 1324 and nobody except an expert could possibly notice and correct. From this we can derive a major problem in Wikipedia: The number of bad edits to good editors can be incredibly disproportionate, and everyone else in between won't usually know the difference.
In a perfect world, we'd seek out that information three times over before using it, and change any wrong edits back, but humans are just naturally lazy and not inquisitive enough when it comes to information on Wikipedia. In some sordid way, Wikipedia really does reflect the sum of all human knowledge. It's just that humans aren't perfect.
When someone uploads a patch to an opensource project, you have a pretty good idea of the effectiveness of that patch--it'll either do what it says, or it won't, if the new source will even compile. Bugs can be found by the sheer number of people using the software, and they're usually a lot more apparent than an unfact on Wikipedia. No information compiler exists, and it doesn't spit out warnings when you've mispelled somebody's name, transposed a digit in their birthyear, or just die when you've got something completely wrong.
I think Wikipedia would do well to perhaps remove editing by anonymous users, or perhaps introduce some sort of moderation system like those discussed elsewhere in the thread. The problem with these solutions is that knowledge is very fleeting--sometimes somebody just won't care long enough to create an account before an edit, or they might be a rare holder of some tidbit of knowledge that can't be verified by a moderator. And who's to say the moderator's correct?
Wikipedia has a vast amount of potential. Their pursuit for freedom in both beer and speech of human knowledge is remarkably admirable, and I consider them one of the best Internet charities around. Regardless of the inherent problems, I will continue to be an editor and support them in other ways as time goes on.
--sean
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
Wikipedia has its own infoculture as well, considering how many topics there are (understandably) on arcane technical and computer-related topics. Try submitting something arcane on, oh say religion. See how fast it gets dumped into the Votes for Deletion que.
a . And, yes, there are also articles about Lindisfarne http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne, the Lindisfarne Gospels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne_Gospels, and even Penda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penda_of_Mercia.
OK, how about Saint Oswald of Northumbria? Read how he helped to establish the monastery at Lindisfarne (where monks later produced the Lindisfarne Gospels) and about his eventual martyrdom at the hands of Penda, the cruel pagan king: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_of_Northumbri
To learn something arcane from eastern religion, you can read about the three gunas, a concept developed by the Samkhya branch of Hinduism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guna. If you're more of a big-picture guy, maybe you'd prefer to start with the general article on Samkhya philosophy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya.
So, uh, just how arcane do you want?
AFAICT, none of these articles has ever been proposed for deletion.