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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.'"
What he seems most upset about is the problem of "revert wars" happening whenever an author wants to be the absolute authority on a topic and regularly patrols their article to undo any edits that are made to what they consider their "perfect" work?
What could they do to defuse these situations with a moderations scheme that encurages contributors but discurage this kind of abuse?
In order to deal with the 'reliability' aspect constantly brought up, Wikipedia's appointed management, could use an audit to ascertain the quality of the project.
My rough idea is, pick the 10 most popular articles, 10 random articles of moderate-to-high traffic, 10 random articles of low traffic and then do a compare/contrast against 'reputable' references. Then, check those references (and Wikipedia) against primary source references (if they exist, like journals/textbooks, for medical facts..etc). It will provide a good, quantified metric of the quality, acting as a rough indicator of where Wikipedia stands.
It also works because of the amount of users that don't contribute. Imagine reading an article written by the average American... As a student at a public high school, I get to see how great the average American's grammar and spelling are everyday!
Everything2 was alright at one time. But since the advent of Wikipedia, e2 has been displaced and somewhat made irrelevant.
e2 has lots of idiotic entries, which include personal rants, crackpot theories, and at times - 5-word entries making sense only to its writer. It is slow as hell. The search feature is terrible. Entries are in a form of a forum conversation - there's little collaboration going on. Your entry never gets modified in order to be made better. And lastly, e2 is not indexed by google.
For all intents and purposes, Everything2 sucks. I used to be a major fan. But after Wikipedia, e2 is no longer desired.
why not have a moderation system like slashdot?
Require that 5 editors approve of a content addition/change before that modification is applied.
Track the editor's moderation record. Make negative modding count both against the negative moderator as well as the moderated.
This way only by getting 5 positive mods in x number of editor views can an addition get approved.
There certainly has to be a way to handle the vandalism and pettiness. slashdot's moderation system seems to do a great job of handling just that.
I mean, as an example, cruise slashdot at +5 and you get some good meat. drop to +4 and you've got your side of fries (or potatoes), +3 to eat your vegetables +2 for fiber +1 for garnish and 0&-1 for a dark alley to purge yourself in an anorexic fit.
Just cruise the first couple posts on this thread and take a gander at what allowing anyone to post anything brings...
I know there are problems with the slashdot moderation system - but as a whole it's a good system which tends to bring the most relevant and informative posts to the top of the heap. I would venture to say the slashdot moderation system is one of the most effective user-based moderation systems in existence.
Now, since I'm not familiar (and like to read the contributions of individuals), tell me; how closely does the slasdot moderation system currently relate to the wikipedia moderation system?
as an afterthought and to browse off topic (further?) since the inception of politics.slashdot.org I have contemplated the idea of something like a debate.slashdot.org
It's quite a tricky notion to convieve - how could you setup something akin to a formal debate in the form of a web forum? I mean, it seems all the lego pieces are here, robust moderation system, informed parties abounding with great skills at backing claims.
Would you somehow create opposing teams by using a vote system? how would you determine the representative for the side of the debate?
mark my words. With slashdot and wikipedia we have only begun to see the possibilities of massive contribution of free thought.
Rephrase: many GREAT archievements have been by individuals, but most of our GREATEST archievements have been by groups of people.
Great: discovering how to make fire, Newton figuring out laws of gravity, Einstein coming up with E=m*c^2, Linus starting Linux project, coming up with Wikipedia concept, etc.
Greater/greatest: USA and USSR putting men in space, Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China, filling Wikipedia with content, producing 10.000+ package Linux distro, human-like species surviving for millions of years, ...
Why are these greater? Making a scientific discovery, or coming up with a new idea is great, but somebody else could have done it. If Einstein didn't figure it out, some great mind could have done that later. If it had been forgotten how to make fire, you might re-invent that. But greater/greatest archievements can ONLY be done with groups of people working together. You can't put a man on the moon on your own, even if you would know how to build a rocket. It's just too much work for one person alone. Same with the other examples.
People working together usually create destruction.
Yeah, that happens a lot too, unfortunately. Maybe we should work some more on human co-operating skills?
Wikipedia is doomed
In that case, the rest of the WWW would be still be left ;-))
Much of Wikipedias last funding drive was pushed through by Ayn Rand supporters. Their motivations are unclear, however.
Slashdot:
- once you post it's set in stone
- everything is moderated by default
- mods have low power as individuals
- moderation is recursively cliqueish; moderator approval feeds back into modpoints
- system designed to force some semblance of signal into a high-noise community
- unavoidably encourages groupthink and modwhoring
Wikipedia
- everything is mutable
- moderator intervention is rare, the normal way problems are resolved is via discussion and edits
- moderation is a private club with significant power
- system assumes most people are "signal" and that "noise" is rare
- encourages discussion, reason, and NPOV
Yes, Jimbo ran a search portal that had pr0n on it. It's defunct.
Not.
whois bomis.com
Administrative Contact:
Wales, Jimmy (JW13135) internic-mgr@BOMIS.COM
I'll say it again. The guy (Wales) who runs Wikipedia is a common pornographer.
I've given this some serious thought since my earlier post, and while I'd love to see every edit moderated in some way, I don't think it's in any way practical, nor do I foresee that it ever will be.
Let's look at a few statistics, shall we?
Wikipedia's Wikistats show that for November 2004, there were over three-quarters of a million edits. That's an average of about 25,000 edits every day.
There are just over 15,000 registered "Wikipedians." Of these, approximately 1,000 have performed at least 100 edits. Let's call these people "active Wikipedians" and assume that these people all have time to moderate on a daily basis and, more importantly, are willing to moderate on a daily basis. That leaves each active Wikipedian with 25 edits each and every day that must be moderated.
Now, let's look at Wikipedia's growth during 2004. Since January, the number of monthly edits has increased by a factor of just over four. The number of active Wikipedians has increased by a factor of just over three. In one year's time, if these rates hold steady, the daily moderation burden of each active Wikipedian will increase to about 33 edits.
The number of edits is increasing faster than new Wikipedians are joining, which means this problem is only going to get worse.
In order for a moderation system to work -- I'm trying to be optimistic here -- Wikipedia would have to implement something that judged the "degree" of each edit. Edits that make large-scale changes -- where, say, more than one percent of the page changes -- would be a top priority for moderation, because it's these edits that have the most potential for destruction. Edits that simply change a character or two, copyediting stuff, wikifying, etc., would be less likely to be specifically harmful, and perhaps could be moderated at random.
Moderation, like meta-moderation here at Slashdot, could then be used to drive a karma system. The more useful edits a user makes, the higher his/her karma. After a certain point, perhaps that user's edits could be flagged as "low priority" for the moderators, because it's very likely that a user who has made many useful contributions in the past is continuing to do so.
In short, moderating every edit will never be practical, but moderation could probably be put to good use all the same. Implementation would be a nightmare, though.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Isn't Wikipedia just a subset of THE encyclopedia (the internet)?
Google's pagerank still rules the day. If Wikipedia's article on some subject is indeed the best web-wide it will be pulled to the top in search results. But that rarely happens in my experience.
So what the fuss is all about?
P.S. I wish i could exclude Wikipedia-related articles via /. preferences.
I used to be a massive fan of Wikipedia and a regular contributor in the fields of computer science, programming and military history.
However as Wikipedia has became more popular it has also became completely overwhelmed with pop-opinion, poor rigour and fact checking. It has become completely bogged down blatant bias and revisionist history, and simply trying to keep on top of this became exhausting.
At first I assumed this was simple ignorance, and tried to work withing the wikipedia process for resolution, but it was pointless, over time I came to understand that the trouble causers seemed to exhibit the same personality traits as usenet trolls and MOG griefer. The ignore facts, build straw men and resort to personal assaults. However the usual tactic of ignoring them doesnt work because they carry on changing the articles anyway, use revert bots to change articles on mass. Some examples.
- One contributor who tried to suggest that encapsulation was not a fundemental feature of OO.
- Another contributor kept removing the word riot from the blood Sunday article.
- Another contributor kept removing the evidence of JP Jones war crimes.
These are just some of the many problems I experienced at the hands of revert bots.
In the end I gave up and left them to their ignorance.
The article is the thing that's linked to. A link to the name should be to a bio, not the article.
Half of the last funding drive target was "pushed through" by me, when I suggested raising it from $25,000 to $50,000.
My motivations are very simple: I estimate what I think reasonable growth based on past performance will require and project roughly what it will cost to buy the equipment to keep up, then suggest a sufficient target to cover those needs.
For the quarter now ending that estimate was three database slaves and 15 Apache web servers as the reasonable maximum we'd need based on past growth, with 2/10 more likely. 2/10 was just about sufficient and we've been discussing and I'm preparing the last of the three anticipated orders for the quarter now. Performance suffered for a while because of equipment failures (more than 5 still out of service), delays getting those computers (compatibility issues the vendor sorted out, bits of bureaucracy and timing issues largely). So we're preparing to handle a larger number of failures as well...:)
For the next quarter I'm looking at something higher. I'm expecting to be in the top 100 sites on the net during the spring quarter, with a fair probability of the top 50. Not at all bad for a place funded solely by donations from well-meaning people who want and like the resource.:)
The "big" item coming soon is ordering a new master database server to handle the English and Japanese encyclopedias, so we'll have it in test service for two months before switching to it. Followed soon by similar very capable database slaves for them. If anyone knows a place willing to donate 12-40 15K SCSI drives...?:) Or, for that matter, any fairly fast drives, including drive maker refurbs, since everything is RAID. Or anything in the way of quite high end disk systems or high capacity RAM modules, for that matter. It's a fine opportunity for high profile public good PR.
Japanese is paired with English because Japanese load is falling while English is rising and vice-versa.
Instead of having one ULTIMATE explanation, which the original author 'restores' continuously, we could have 'alternative' pages for each topic.
Readers would be able to rate these (like on Amazon 'was this review useful to you?'). When you search for an item, only the top three or so would be shown, with a link to see all of them.
Imho this would NOT lead to an abundancy of pages, because for non-controversial topics no-one would be urged to give an alternative explation for e.g. 'DNA base pairs'. For controversial topics, alternative viewpoints would exist next to each other, instead of intertwining and damaging each other. I can imagine people love their 'wikibaby' so much, and try to restore it every time, but hopefully no-one would go so far as to intentionally destroy others work for the sake of it (e.g. to decrase its rating). Besides, destroying others' work is also possible today.
Z