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Wikipedia Criticised by Its Co-founder
wikinerd writes "Wikipedia is under criticism by its co-founder Larry Sanger who has left the project. He warns of a possible future fork due to Wikipedia's Anti-Elitism and he presents his view on Wikipedia's (lack of) reliability. New wikis on various subjects have already emerged, with some of them being complete forks of Wikipedia. Critical articles on Wikipedia are also being published by other sources."
I occasionally use Wikipedia for something or other, generally when I click a link to an entry which someone has posted on their Web site. I've found that it's reliable for the most part, but when you run into something that's wrong, it's really wrong. And the threat of revert wars can keep many people (including me) from contributing at all.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Incase you didnt notice it, this is just one big ad made to promote the 10 different wikis this guy has set up.
I hadn't realized Sanger's background was in the theory of knowledge. I'm wondering now if what he's actually up to is something much more subtle than seems evident on the surface. Of course Google is into the "sum of all human knowledge" business too, but they're going for bulk and automated quality selection methods, rather than Wikipedia's human touch. Having been around myself since the Interpedia days, I know there's a long history here...
The first encyclopedists had at least ulterior motives. Anybody have any other ideas what this is really all about? Then there's always the parallels to the world of Asimov's Foundation series, which started off as an Encyclopedia project!
Energy: time to change the picture.
I'm playing around with a Wiki for American history with a focus on the American West (1820-1900) and the Frontier. Sometimes I think it would be easier to grab the whole damned thing, strip out what isn't in topic and add than what I'm doing now, which is adding piece by piece articles and when something is there that Wikipedia has I want, copying it over.
Wikipedia was set up as a very big experiment. As with all experiments you will have problems and run the risk of eventual failure.
Maybe a completely free online encyclopedia is just impossible. There are hundreds if not thousands of revisions done on Wikipedia each day and to have a team sit there to review each update and research it would be monotonous without a paid team of researchers.
As well, having a team of professionals review their particular field on the online encyclopedia surely will not come free. Perhaps Wikipedia has hit a stopping point, if not slowing point?
Sanger's dead-on with his points. These are precisely the reasons that have kept me from relying on Wikipedia for anything important.
Every once in a while I may go look something up on there for general interest purposes, but never for anything for my classes.
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
Larrys contributions page on wikipedia...
:)
2002 was the last time he edited a page *not* related to himself
> it became very clear that the most active and influential members of the project-- beginning with Jimmy Wales ... were decidedly anti-elitist
Larry probably better be careful what he says, it just might get him in a world of hurt...
---- Go ahead, mod me down, I'll just post it again and you lose your mod points.
It should work -- in theory. What happens is that you get a mass conglomerate of well-detailed correct knowledge, intentionally misleading information, vague summaries of misunderstood concepts, and/or group think. I admit, I have edited a few entries on Wiki (mostly on highly non-technical information, and have seen it work. I've also seen a lot of articles on more technical info (in my field) that aren't wrong, they're just... bad.
The best solution I have seen was someone suggesting "stickyness" -- the longer an entry remains, the sticker and more truthful it is. I think that, combined with academics actually starting to put in information* and some sort of meta-moderating system, could work.
Either way, I think it's neat. I would not rely on it for critical information, but then, I never do that with the internet to begin with.
* I'm sure academics do now -- I guess I meant "Academia" in that a lot of them contribute.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
You know, one thing that annoys me about Wikipedia (I know this is OT, but I don't care) is how so many articles have nonsensical links.
For example, let's say we're looking at the article on Wikipedia itself. Somewhere within it, it says "Wikipedia has been criticized for being an unreliable source of information."
Now, anywhere else on the web, you'd expect that the link in there would point to further information on that specific criticism of Wikipedia. But, instead it points to a page defining the term "critic"! How useless is that?
I can't count the number of times I've seen a link on Wikipedia that made me say "ooh, I'd like to know more about that" and clicked it, just to find out that it only points to a simple definition of whatever term I clicked. That's not what I wanted, dammit!
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the word "wiki" has always put me off. I didnt' bother to even visit a "wiki" because that word reminded me of things like "flooz" and "Beenz" - useless marketing words that meant nothing and weren't creative.
once i bothered to go to wikipedia and realized that it is an encyclopedia composed entirely of user-contributed articles, i kinda had a feeling it wouldn't work. i didn't think it would work for the same reason that IRC and message boards are now all but useless. the same goes for everything2.com.
The fact that they're forking makes them even more useless. If they were based on facts, there would be no need to fork anything. Even if one of the forks is designed to be the truth wiki, how the hell do i know which one it is? They all claim to be encyclopedic, which one is actually a reference and not a site full of opinion?
Wikipedia and Everything2 are both full of opinion, rhetoric and useless data someone feels that they should shove down my optic nerve at the expense of some other information i've learned somewhere else. They're venues for flamewars disguised as articles, and if you can't trust one article on a particular wiki, you can't trust any.
i've visited both only a handful of times each, and i hope to limit my exposure to both to little more than that.
(and by the way, forking isn't bad. forking for stupid reasons is only bad because of the stupid reasons, not because something forked)
"say something nice or say nothing at all"
Take your own advice and shut up, otherwise stop spewing silly platitudes.
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I agree with Sanger that there should be greater respect for expertise, but I have to say I rarely use Wikipedia for researching any subject that has a real "expert."
Most of the time, I use it as a resource for pop culture references (leet, for instance) for which other people, though not experts, know a bit more than I do. I think of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia of the moment.
A good example is this article, which has a section biased towards the separates Tamil Tiger guerrillas. Compare it with this article on CNN.
Wikipedia has the right basic structure but they need a rotating team of pro Guest Editors to go through and fact-check and then "lock" articles, or portions of articles. I'm sure they could easily add a section entitled "Are you and Expert" and many experts would volunteer their time to look at specific sections.
I said this months ago and many of you pooh-poohed as nonsense. But committees that accrete information based on whomever is motivated enough to motivate others to contribute is clearly establishing a bias and an agenda. But even if I'm right and most of you are wrong, you are wrong but you don't really care. And this begs the question, what is the value of accuracy or truth?
If you're in school and you're doing one of the 3 million papers you will do in your school career about the Civil War, let's say and you go to Wiki and it's chockful of subtle agendized "Wawr of Northun Aggresshun" revisionism. So what? You will probably get a good grade if you live in the south and you will probably get a pass if you live in the north and all its multicultural tolerance and whatnot.
A few weeks ago for example the entire nationalized abstinence sex ed curriculum was exposed as a fraud, jammed with flat out inaccurate information. So? It wasn't an accident and the fact that it's exposed really doesn't change anyone's mind. So in the end, truth is whatever you can use to further your own aims and accuracy be damned.
You've hit the nail on the head, regardless of your intent. The problem with the wikipedia is people slinging mud at expers who know what they are talking about, particularly by anonymous people with only the barest reading comprehension skills.
There is a decidedly revisionist, politically correct, liberal, secular humanist bent to the Wikipedia that prevents it from becoming an entirely reliable source. Accuracy isn't nearly as encouraged as non-offensiveness. Anyone who dealt with the flames on the Bush and Kerry campaign can see that easily.
Never confuse volume with power.
Is there something wrong with selling "smut"? And what does it have to do with elitism?
As for the stopped participating part, we all need to feed ourselves and our families. Why work for free for something that is filled with venom and abuse? His point was get paid and deal with the abuse or work for free if there is no abuse.
You also are a hypocrite. You obviously didn't have something nice to say.
It seems that incorporating a version of Slashdot's moderating routines would not only solve most of wiki's downsides, but people may learn lot from just metamoderating.
I'm not impressed. What's porn got to do with the way wikipedia accepts submissions? It's potentially as misleading as slashdot comments.
I don't really see where Sanger gets off calling it "anti-elitism" that the project doesn't let experts have the final word. I agree with him when he says "if the project participants had greater respect for expertise, they would have long since invited a board of academics and researchers to manage a culled version of Wikipedia." And this would probably produce a superior product - but not the one Sanger envisioned when he started the project, as he fully admits. No, this was not to be the be-all-end-all everything-to-everyone reference volume, it was first and foremost a community-oriented enterprise, and the (somewhat misplaced) loyalty to the community, even in the face of people who generally should know better, means the current maintainers' hearts are in the right place with regard to that goal.
So, "Anti-elitism"? No, it's "pro-community," and while I agree that it's out of place for mediating some rather silly disputes, the community-driven atmosphere has survived. Sanger is rightly second-guessing the community's ability to make Wikipedia a fully credible source, but while Wikipedia has been one of the internet/open source community's greatest achievements, it should also be allowed to highlight its limitations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sex_positions a fork of this page is a must
Is it possible to post the affiliations and credentials of Wiki contributors and have these somehow audited? The basic Wiki concept is absolutely right, after all what is knowledge if not the sum-total of everyone's insights? But it's far too easy to abuse this system with the result that there is no way to assess the quality.
We don't have this problem with open-source software, because the good stuff bubbles up to the top. Can we possibly set up an informal editorial board? No, I'm not suggesting we pay people to do that. But wouldn't you suppose that the foremost experts will want to have the expanded presence and notability that would come from their presence on a better-audited Wiki?
There are plenty of elistist encyclopedia publications out there for people that want to "respect the experts and authorities". Pick your favorite pre-net era encyclopedia, and contribute to that. If you want respect for your authority or expertise.
Larry Sanger may be an epistemologist, but his views on knowledge and its justification seem a bit naive. Who determines who the "experts" and "authorities" are? It can't be these same people, that would just beg the question. Or perhaps its the social structures already created that mold and promote expertise. But then why even make wikipedia in the first place? Wikipedia is not a reflection of these social structures, and that was intentional from the very beginning. It's not a mistake to be rectified.
Go ahead, fork the project. It was founded so that those unhappy with its direction could fork it. Just like Linux. Make your own elitist version. Just don't expect any tears from me.
So the masses of folks have no respect for expertise and the elite of various fields. How is this different than society as a whole?
The problem that infects Wikipedia is not limited to a few simple trolls. It is a world-wide societal problem. It is the wicked child of the delusional advocates of democracy and egalitarianism, who in their naivete believe that all people are equal in their abilities and judgement.
How else can we explain the sick believe that masters of rhetoric and intrigue make decisions that are affecting the future of the world? How is it a moron with an 8th grade education is allowed to have a legitimate position on highly technical topics like environmental protection and global warming?
The world has become too complex for any one man to have the requisite knowledge to make decisions about anything other than his field of expertise. What we require is a new social order than recognizes the various discplines of each citizen and identifies his expertise. When our electorate is organized along these lines, only then can representative government work. Instead of a mass of rhetoricians ruling over the world, we should have a council of experts, each elected by the members of his respective field. Chemists should elect the most elite chemist. Electrical engineers, the most elite electrical engineer.
With this top down approach, Wikipedia and society at large will work far better. Further, we may prevent the complete destruction of our civilization by ceasing to hand power to the unqualified and depraved.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
So in the end, truth is whatever you can use to further your own aims and accuracy be damned.
Scary but true.
History is written by the winners.
-kgj
-kgj
This is kind of the "who's watching the watchers" question, except, who's editing the writers (and editors).
./er's can tell you a ton about Star Wars, but probably very little about the Easter Island heads.
You need a peer rating system where authors and editors can be given points as to the quality of their material and corrections. I think Experts Exchange and probably others offer something of this kind. This, as always, required community participation to work effectively. But beyond that, for an encyclopedia people should have an overall rating and a rating for subcategories, for example a lot of
How is the entry on FOX News wrong? I skimmed it, and it seems pretty accurate based on my personal knowledge. On think that struck me as possibly wrong is critics claiming that suicide bombers shouldn't be called "terrorists" because that gives them a negative connotation.
As an evolutionary genomicist specializing in microbes, I have contributed to Wikipedia and always explained in the discussion why I changed things and mentioned my (easily verified) credentials relating to the topic. In general, people are quite willing to accept changes if someone can explain *why* the current information is out of date or just plain wrong. Maybe affairs like the status of Taiwan or Tibet will be biased in Wikipedia, but they will be in normal encyclopedias too, because in such cases there are no "right answers", just political opinions.
It's one thing to call for tolerance towards expertise and specialization, and another entirely to put it into effect.
Who determines what areas are specialized enough to warrant closer consideration? How?
Same two questions, on the subject of who is an expert?
These problems aren't clearly resolved among the academics and professionals who work in the relevant fields. Areas of chemistry and biology frequently overlap, and a celebrated expert in German Idealism might contribute a diatribe on Marxist philosophy, rather than a thoughtful article.
It's for this reason that encyclopedia articles have both expertise and careful, professional editing. I'm not sure how such things could be implemented within the structure of wiki.
Larsal
The Linux kernel is a good model of how Wikipedia should work. All source code contributions must be vetted by Linus or one of his designated underlings before being checked into the kernel. If anybody and everybody could check whatever code they want directly into the root branch, the kernel would quickly become an unusable mess. New Wikipedia submissions or changes should be held as pending until passing editorial review.
/. style moderation, where you can log in and vote on the accuracy of an article. Enough -ve mods and the entry would be deleted or rolled back to its previous iteration. Meta-moderation would ensure that the moderation system is not abused, and trolls are prevented from moderating.
Another option is
But the idea behind Wikipedia is great, and shouldn't be allowed to die. Despite its warts, I do consider it a valuble reference, and keep a quick link to it on my Mozilla toolbar.
My rights don't need management.
And lack of respect for authorities on a field is a problem in my opinion. It is bad when people will not recognise that some text and ideas are just WRONG - this is of course especially obvious in the natural sciences and mathematics.
Just have 2 versions of every article - Evolving and Edited. People could toggle between the two depending on their preference.
Juvenile statements like this are the reason why blogpedias will never be taken seriously.
Every time I looked something up regarding the Mid-East conflict, I noticed how biased Wkipedia is. Just look at West Bank or Gaza, no word of illegal occupation, or buried at the bottom.
Timo's Audio Software http://www.esseraudio.com
Good generalization, especially given your vast experiences and that whole graduating high school thing.
I've said from the beginning that the major problem with Wikipedia is that it tries to be everything to everyone.
In the past 20 years or so, media has become extremely niche (if you're a bicycle rider into tarantulas, there's probably a magazine for you). The benefit of this is that you often get experts and people genuinely interested in the subject writing the articles.
I tried Wikipedia and gave up in disgust (particularly that articles about GNAA trolls, filled with lies and editorials, were kept). I since have spent some time with the (admitally silly) Homestar Wiki at http://www.hrwiki.org, and have found it to be a much different environment. No brass arguments, no format wars -- just people adding bits and pieces of what they like about their favorite web cartoon. I've thought about setting up a similar MST3K wiki.
The point is, all-encompassing media is dead. No one expects CNN/Fox News/etc. to focus on every story available, and no one should expect the same from internet sites. Niche media will continue to thrive.
If you can have a solution that fulfills their need for open contribution AND society's need for milestones of knowledge, why fight it? It kind of flies in the face of their open philosophy to not let the device itself change.
Guy founds project. Guy loses political arguments while running project. Guy leaves project in a political huff. Guy criticizes project.
Must be a slow news day.
Think of all the inaccurance in the term papers students cut-and-paste from wikipedia!
My experience is very far different. Being at a large university (Boston University) it was easy to forget that the outside world existed, because I might not leave campus for days at a time. Additionally, Boston tends to be "a terribly over-educated city" (to quote one of my professors). However, returning home to Iowa was a culture shock, as I encountered so many people I thought were complete idiots.
The bottom line is that I am an elitist, and I think its a good idea. Shouldn't the smartest people be in charge? Wasn't America founded a meritocracy?
Many associate elitism with getting rid of the un-elite. I put forth that most intellectual elite do not see the "average" man as something to be gotten rid of, but rather something to learn to live with and to take care of. The interests of the intellectual elite and the average need not be in conflict. If you think they are, you misunderstand the problems faced by both groups.
"Another option is /. style moderation, where you can log in and vote on the accuracy of an article."
any topics that are deemed sensitive by a large enough fraction of the population will be modded down
the result would be that anything to do with sex, violence, drugs, laws would be voted down by either europeans or americans, depending on the issue.
look at slashdot itself: any pro linux post automatically gets modded up, while almost any pro windows post gets modded down, regardless of the value of the information itself.
EncyclopediaDramatica is an internet drama and controversy wiki that was formed as a direct result of institutional meddling at Wikipedia. I've contributed some, but mostly enjoy the reading. Entertaining, and informative.
Just my $0.02
I suspect everyone has ulterior motives. The notion that an encyclopedia can be unbiased is ridiculous when if you sat twenty scientists in a room and gave them one article an academic fight would break out with many subjects.
Flaming Wikipedia for inaccuracy is missing the two most important single points about Wikipedia that no other encyclopedia has.
#1 You can reuse, reference and reprocess the content. If you want trusted articles then set up a scheme where experts in the field can GPG sign versions of the article that they believe to be correct.
#2 Unlike every other encyclopedia you can take Wikipedia content under license and "fix it", where fixing means adjusting to your own world view. If you happen to think the Encyclopedia Britannica has its head up its backside you can't fix it. Wikipedia you can. Thats both powerful and dangerous as you can easily imagine groups with an agenda doing things like issuing 'evolution free' wikipedia variants to schools.
What matters for Wikipedia isn't IMHO whether Sanger has an axe to grind but who is going to build the tools to take this kind of distributed public knowledgebase further.
We all know Wikipedia is not totally reliable. It is, as the article says, one of those sources that is not totally reliable, but everyone reads it anyway. That's what it'll always be.
Postings saying "Wikipedia is unreliable!" are inherently uninteresting and shouldn't be greenlit as articles on Slashdot, especially front page articles.
I often find that most of the major articles have one or two hardcore guys with an agenda who "monitor" all the contributions everyone else puts in. For instance, the page on rape had a section called "Rape and Sexual Torture" and talked about societies where rape is tolerated and accepted as a government function. Then the link at the end was "Abu Ghraib prison scandal."
While Abu Ghraib is definitely an abuse situation, there were no cases of rape involved, and it's not standard U.S. policy to rape people. U.S. society doesn't view it as a viable, standard policy. Based strictly on the wording of the section, the link didn't apply.
Well, anyway, I changed the link to something clearly more pertinent (in my mind)--"Human rights in Saddam's Iraq." The Saddam page specifically describes how rape was used against political dissidents and citizens, just as the section on the rape page talked about, so already it was more relevant than the Abu Ghraib link. Also, I had feelings that the Abu Ghraib link was politically motivated, and rather than have the page start political flamewars, I felt a link to Saddam's Iraq was something everyone could agree on.
This one hardcore guy wouldn't let go. Eventually, I removed both our links and stuck in the Rape of Nanjing as a compromise--something more pertinent to that section than either of the links we had. The other guy seemed to agree and let it be. Then I didn't watch the page for a month or two.
I came back, and sitting beside my Nanjing link was, you guessed it, Abu Ghraib again, snuck in with some other major update. The page on Abu Ghraib doesn't even mention rape except that one prisoner is claiming it without proof. However, the Saddam page mentions rape, and Nanjing is just a given.
I also find this same thing in other articles. For instance, the Windows XP article contains a "fisher price" comment. I removed it and said it was a personal comment that implies a majority of users feel that way, and that if you're going to imply it, you should cite it. The hardcore guy of the Windows XP page stuck the link right back and linked to a couple of blogs and news sites where the author mentions the "fisher price" interface--still no hard numbers to show the majority of users actually feel that way, but now it looks "official" simply because he linked to some sites that use the term.
I've stopped looking at Wiki with the assumption of objectivity. Just about the only fun pages there are the ones about games and such.
People write here about revert wars, bias and so on. For me the solution is simple: I use Wikipedia to get reasonably non controversial data. What is this strange name I encountered in a book? An esoteric piece of cutlery? A vegetable?
And if I read about Bush, Fox News, Stalin or whatever controversial subject, I just get careful and try to detect bias. That said, I do the same when I read mainstream press or watch TV.
Anyway, Wikipedia is much more reliable and less biased than communist encyclopedias from before 1989 (I come from Poland, I even have a few old encyclopedias I read from time to time just for fun - so out of touch with reality they are).
Cheers
Raf
Anyone can take and modify the content of wikipedia.
That is open source/open content.
Of what Sanger was said.
I seriously ask you to RTFA instead of paraphrasing what other comments have said, and you own spiel, which as a post further down the page said, most people are average, many don't realise it. Contrary to what you might think, your comments lack any profound insight.
I find it immensely ironic that the reliability of wikipedia is being attacked by as unreliable a source as TCS! Funded by Exxon-Mobil, if anybody needs reminding of that...
Energy: time to change the picture.
This is naive. Encyclopedias aren't just catalogues of facts. The majority of entries involve someone's interpretation of the item being described. In commercial encyclopedias, the issue of objectivity was addressed by a process involving peer review, editors, and other checks and balances that attempt to prevent obvious abuses in which a contributor gets to promote their own points of view over others.
This has its limits, though. Such processes don't usually remove cultural bias -- think of the difference between CNN and Al-Jazeera. If all the editors and contributors share the same basic ideas and cultural context, a bias will be present that they may not even be aware of -- or if they are aware of it, they all think it's "right", and thus OK to perpetuate in the pages of their encyclopedia (or other media). You see this sort of thing in newspapers and on TV news channels all the time -- the famous liberal bias or conservative bias, depending on whether you're talking about e.g. New York Times vs. the New York Post, or CBS vs. Fox, in which even basic terms used to describe people or events are varyingly pejorative or complimentary depending on the bias of the source. Encyclopedias aren't fundamentally any different -- think of them as a type of really slow newspaper.
"All" Wikipedia does is remove some of these controls. Of course, that can result in various kinds of problems, but it's worth keeping in mind that these same problems exist in regular encyclopedias, and although the controls in those encyclopedias may catch the egregious problems, in many other cases the problems are just better hidden. Wikipedia gives an excellent insight into what postmodernists call socially constructed truth, and should remind us that when it comes to the kind of subjective descriptions that encyclopedias are full of, facts and objectivity are not nearly as simple a matter as some like to think.
It comes from an anoynmous account which claims to be him. There is no proof that this is really him.
Man, Wikipedia is the future of the world! Democracy at it's finest! The will of the people, cumulated and tallied, will always balance out into the most accurate and correct truth! There's no need to seek out truth in individual intelligence or judgment, or in "facts" or "objectivity"! Everyone is biased anyway! So just tally it all up and I'll take it! ........
.....
....
God, I can't believe they reelected Bush! How can people be so stupid? What the hell is wrong with people?
Man, I hate McDonalds! They have thousands of restaurants! I can't believe everyone eats at McDonalds! What the hell is wrong with people?
Good christ, I can't believe The Day After Tomorrow made $200 million! What a horrible movie! What the hell is wrong with people?
Well, time to get back to working on Wikipedia! I sure love my scrumptious Will of the People, yes sir I do!
And I still listen to the Dead Kennedy's and Minor Threat. *sigh*. Guess I'm just hopelessly out of date. But postmodernism is most definitely stinking up the cemetary these days... --M
Yes, that's the point. The purpose of these revolutionary forms of encyclopedia never seems to be just the encyclopedia itself, but something beyond that. Others here are saying Wikipedia was just an experiment. Maybe so, but if that, at least a very interesting and productive experiment.
Energy: time to change the picture.
I think by default academic elitists are more educated than average. I would agree that oftentimes people confuse education and intelligence, not to mention wisdom. However, the net is risen from academic institutions. They actually created the concept of free distribution of information back in the day. This is not to say there aren't any stodgy underacheiving elitists who will stop at nothing to hold their ground, but labeling them as "Academic, period" is somewhat uneducated.
HA! See how I tied it all in? Funny, if you ask me.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
But I don't think the danger is for wikipedia. I think the danger is for the rest of us. To aquire a significant amount of specialized knowledge is difficult, requiring a significant investment of a person's resources, not the least of which is time. With Wiki, you've got something that's occasionally reliable (I think we all remember the unit on conditioning from a psych 101 course), but extremely easy to find information with. Wikipedia probably "knows" more now, that's even accurate, than any single person could reasonably expect to. Wiki's relevance won't likely wane, it's too easy to use. And because of that, and the extreme minority true experts are in, there is a real danger they could be drowned out in the din of other people's bullshit, while wikipedia becomes a standard of truth just though the merits of it's interface. That network effect is powerful. It trumps quality. Frequently.
I think a large part of it has to do with the culture at large. Look at the movies. Intuition, guessing correctly, is more highly prized than being able to prove something beyond doubt. It is more complicated than The Matrix vs Lemoney Snickets, but I don't think it's a completely horrible metaphore.
In so many words, he is saying that Wikipedia is not reliably accurate in the academic sense... I say so what...!! How many sources can you use to verify pieces of information and do research? A plethora. The great thing about Wikipedia is that it is evolving. It is a piece of Quantum Evolution in motion. Imagine a history book of knowledge that is changing daily with people's perceptions. I think it is great. I personally wouldn't use it for reliable research, but it is certainly a great social experiment and one that should stand the test of time... How many projects end up being useful for something other than what they were intended to be used for?
He's also just a tad biased:
"Robert McHenry is Former Editor in Chief, the Encyclopædia Britannica, and author of How to Know (Booklocker.com, 2004)"
Don't you think Britannica is just a tad bit unsettled by how wikipedia, in under 5 years, has pretty much revolutionized the concept of an Encyclopedia? They're already beaten and bruised by the internet in general, this is just salt on the wound.
A number of his points aren't terribly valid- go read some encyclopedias from the 50's and 60's and see how fair they are towards women's reproductive rights, and what light the Soviet Union is cast in.
Wikipedia has the same advantages of open-source; faults are caught by the community most of the time, and on important issues people care to look up the most, you're virtually guaranteed a balanced article.
What Wikipedia DOES need is a better control over accounts. If you're going to contribute something, you need to be held accountable. No posting without logging in, email confirmations for the accounts (they collect your email but do NOTHING to check it!) and the visual verification word thing (sorry, forgot the name for it...captka or whatever it is).
Hello, Wikipedia, 1995 is calling, they want their security back!
Please help metamoderate.
It's interesting to note that in the whole rant, he never actually explained this. He said that both guest experts and ordinary people will be able to contribute (which can be done now). But exactly what policy that favors the experts will make editing wars less likely?
The original post that started this all speaks of forks. Most of the links provided, though, are simply specialized topics - I see no problem with such forks. If it bothers anyone, they're probably free to just go copy the whole article and place it on Wikipedia (depending on the license, of course).
Regardless of its criticisms, I'd say that Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia I have seen to date. Yes - for certain topics, Brittannica(sp?) seems a bit more pedantic, but that's precisely because only one viewpoint is being represented. I'm sure I can find plenty of articles in Brittannica that I think are hogwash. I can do the same with Wikipedia, but am free to look at the History pages to see the whole story.
I do recognize the problem with controversial articles always getting edited back and forth, and it does affect the quality of those articles for the majority who do not wish to view article histories.
I myself am considering starting a fork, which I plan to work on alone for a number of years before releasing it to the public. The content that I wish to specialize on would be highly controversial, and I don't want edit wars to spoil what would be most of the articles. I wish MediaWiki had some method by which I could:
1) Assign one or a few sysops to each category.
2) Allow logged in users to make contributions (anyone can get an account). However, their contributions will not get to the main article automatically, but be tagged for review.
3) The sysop for that category will review, and if there are no major complaints, will allow it to get posted.
The only problem is if two or more people edit the same article before the sysop can review it...
But one thing I would insist on is that the sysops not be experts in the category they pick - it would probably be a random assignment. Most of the "experts" I have seen in some fields are incredibly biased, and I simply do not trust them.
In addition, once a change in the article has been approved, it would require, say, a vote of 3 or 5 sysops to revert that change. And a means to phase out horrible sysops.
You get the idea. Some means of quality control. The actual rules could vary.
However, the above is simply not suited for Wikipedia.
Beetle B.
un/low paid graduate student interns working for class credit.
Wikipedia will live or die by its traffic. As it seems bent upon being an encyclopedia of everything, it has to have the hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thousands and more revisions each day.
For any project that seeks to be an encyclopedia of everything, there are but two roads: leave the door open to all, like Wikipedia, or keep the writing closed, and hire researchers to build the articles from the inside. The trouble is, the more knowledge you want to include, and the faster you want it, the more researchers you'll need to hire. That costs a lot of money, and unless you hire a true army of people to do the job, it's going to be a few years before you begin to see any progress. And the progress doesn't get faster.
No, for all the inaccuracies, arguments, and varied forms of pettiness, the raging river of activity has to remain and grow for Wikipedia to survive... and to have any form of accuracy. Consider that one person creates an article. It is only a stub, but it all information in it is correct. Someone edits it, and adds something, but some part of that is incorrect. Someone else edits again, correcting that, and adding something else that's incorrect. Someone else adds something else, and misses the mistake. Another person comes along, and fixes the mistake. The stub is shaping up, and the article gets more attention for some reason. A few people edit the budding article one way and then another. They get into an argument, and the argument becomes a fight. The truth lies somewhere between their positions, but that's forgotten. Maybe there's a reversion war. One of them gets pissed off and leaves. The other one feels he's won the day, and lingers for a little bit, then leaves. Then somebody else comes in and fixes the article.
The end result is the article becomes acceptably accurate. And it has the hands of many different people, and the subtle truths that they bring. A single researcher brings only his own hand and the truth he knows.
Great example of some of the strengths of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Time and time again, I run into this wrong headed notion of the "expert". When I was a kid, I bought into it. I believed there were people who knew just about everything there is to know about a particular subject. As I got older, I saw these "experts" cut down one by one as they could no longer provide answers to questions for me. It happened first with my parents. Then with various teachers and librarians while I was in elementary school, junior high and high school. Finally, with my professors at the various colleges I went to. This is not to say that these people don't know a great deal, but there is not one person on the planet that can be called an expert.
The fool who wrote this critique of Wikipedia is attempting to defend the exclusivity of who can be considered to be informed and who can't. One of the worst things in the world you can do to any information resource is to make it exclusive. When you make it exclusive, you make it useless and inaccessible to the average person. It might be nice to have someone who has a deep knowledge of philosphy share their knowledge on Wikipedia, but if they can't speak in terms that others can understand, what good is it? Even with it's warts, Wikipedia provides people with better access to knowledge on various subjects than they previously had access to. That's the point. If one wishes to expand their knowledge on that subject, then they can feel free to delve deeper into it from more authoritative sources. The Wikipedia is not meant to be ultimately authoritative. The set of Encyclopedia Britanica Year books I have at home prove that to me. In the early 50s, their music reviewer (a supposed expert) claimed that rock and roll was a fad of insanity where children wanted to play and listen to tribal rhythms. Apparently, he was wrong since rock and roll had a long life beyond the 1950s. By the 1957 edition, he had been replaced by someone who was a little more flexible in their thinking. By the previous expert's opinions, I'm sure that the new reviewer was one the "rabble" or the "hoi polloi" who didn't understand the value of real music vs. those tribal jungle rhythms. (Note: the older reviewer did refer to rock music in increasingly racial terms between 1955 and 1956 editions, I believe)
My point is that there can be no experts because information is not immutable. It always changes and updates are required. Homosexuality used to be considered a psychological disorder that could be "cured". Blacks used to be considered sub-human as they didn't possess souls. These views are quite obviously wrong. But if you would have checked with an expert of the past, those are the answers you would have gotten. If Wikipedia never reaches a point where the information is 100% reliable at all times, it doesn't matter because it still does the job of opening minds to new subjects and areas of knowledge. I say, kick this guy in the bollocks and charge forward. If we want people to be armed with knowledge, Wikipedia is a pretty darn good tool.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
for pointing out that discussions on /. are heavily influenced by bias and personal opinions.
QED
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy
Aww, you guys are just mad because a search for "slashdot" on Wikipedia turns up such gems as the following:
The Slashdot editors are sometimes accused of posting (and even preferring) stories that are, themselves, thinly-disguised trolls, which encourage large numbers of postings in response, and of accepting kickbacks to post certain stories
The site's slogan is "News for nerds, stuff that matters", but Slashdot is sometimes criticized for posting inaccurate, highly biased, and/or inflammatory story summaries that incite heated posting, as opposed to serious news or commentary (see Slashdot subculture).
True or not, this is certainly the most opinionated "encyclopedia" I've ever seen. I don't think it's likely to be taken as seriously (and rightly so) as resources such as Britannica so long as this is the case.
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
I think the problem with this particular theory would have presented itself to you quite clearly had you ever taken the trip just across the river to Harvard or MIT, and asked the people you met there what they thought of BU. Who are the elite? Who gets to decide?
Democrat huh?
And I dont need 20 seconds to proof this geeknicks...
Take a subject like history, OTOH, and you'll often have a completely different experience than the one you discussed. History interests a lot of people and, at a certain level, is extremely accessible. Unfortunately, this leads to many people considering themselves to be indisputible experts -- I stopped contributing to Wiki after a few of these exchanges:
Me: Hey, I'm going to make this change. The article is based on an outdated understanding of the source material. Here are the studys...
Wikian: That's not right. I have a book that clearly states XYZ.
Me: Right, that's what I'm saying. That was a misunderstanding. People bought it for hundreds of years, but when someone finally looked into it they found that it was all based on a misreading that took place a thousand years after the event. It's in the article, look here...
Wikian: Pft, you're telling me that what I read in this history books was wrong? What, that people had a bad understanding of this for centuries?
Me: Well, yeah. Did you look at the research? I mean, I'm not making this up.
Wikian: Yeah, I'm not going to let you change it.
Of course, I can change it, but there's generally folks like this have far more time and dedication towards keeping things as they are.
I'm not suggesting this happens all the time -- I mean, most articles don't have anything wrong with them to begin with. Others don't have any of these, er, "difficult" sorts associated with them. But frankly, you have something like this happen once or twice and it's hard to find the motivation to keep on truckin' with the Wikiwork.
Your milage may vary and all that. You may find it worthwhile to fight these fights -- hell, five years ago I would have -- but nowadays it's just not worth my time.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Did you not read his post?
He is actually working on something real, the Tsunami!
The total and complete narcissim of some of the people, especially wiki-mo's, really gets me angry.
The day that the Tsuanmi happened their was a wiki-plugger here on slash-dot, and I told him that I thought that he was being insenstive to plug his work.
Try to remember that there is a real world beyond your keyboard.
Personally, my favourite format for linking descriptions of words, which I see slowly gaining pace, is just hrefing the last letter, like so: anaptotic.
I'd really appreciate opinions on how right/wrong/established/crazy that is...
Make it so when someone tries editing a popular article, ones that may be frequent to warring, a CAPTCHA is required.
Have a succesful CAPTCHA give 30 to 60 minutes of access to that specific article for each unique IP address.
Have a failed CAPTCHA require a 10 minute block from retrying the CATPCA for that specific article.
I feel that Larry Sanger's comments are important, but not necessary a threat to Wikipedia. I feel that Wikipedia could be better served if it adopted a policy similiar to debian's different distributions. Articles, like packages, have different levels of quality. Articles begin in unstable and mature to stable. By establishing a distrobution of wikipedia that contains a selection edited or stable Wikipedia articles, one can maintain an edition acceptable for academics, while maintaining an unstable and more dynamic environment for the development of articles.
Part of the importance of wikipedia is that it has been one of the best ways of documenting internet culture. It has flourished because it does not define or editorialize about what articles are needed. I feel that elitism at the submission level would be to the detriment to the project. Although an unstable version would be unreliable at times, but I feel its reliability would be overshadowed by its expansive content.
Also, wikipedia is still developing. Encyclopedias have been around for hundreds of years. One should not be so quick to condemn Wikipedia because it has come along way in a short time.
Sincerely,
Fenwick McKelvey
This is one of the reasons why I love the Snopes Urban Legends site. Not only do the stories tend to be well-researched, they list references at the bottom and the writers tend to admit when they're unsure about their sources of information and/or conclusions. ^_^ The wacky humor and illustrations are nice too.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Some people take certain publications to be bona fide facts because the contributors and editors are supposed to be screened and professional and give all the facts and only the facts.
Then the bona fide publications get polluted by people living in a fantasy world like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. Wikipedia is no different, but just on a wider scale because anybody can write for it.
Unreliability/bias seems to be pretty popular these days, but hey, at least now anybody can contribute to that.
Some call me Howie Feltersnatch
You're right that the freedom Wikipedia enables is important. And I'm not surprised you think the key question is one of building tools on top of it. Tools can be transformative - wikipedia itself is mainly just a tool that brings ordinary people in to contribute to it.
... if you really need reliable information, it needs a stable, reliable review process - no such process will be perfect, but review does far more than we sometimes give it credit for. In particular, a reliably reviewed source rarely if ever has difficulties with "difficult people, trolls, and their enablers".
The interesting thing to me, though, working for an academic publisher with very tightly controlled review processes, are two other things the wikipedia project has proven:
#1 - complete freedom, lack of control, trust in the general average person out there, can accomplish amazing things. There is much less reason to fear that sort of freedom than we might have thought, and I think wikipedia's success has cross-fed the Open Access movement in science publishing, which on balance is a very good thing.
#2 - But
Energy: time to change the picture.
'nuff said.
I think Wikipedia missed the mark in its open-collaboration model. For instance, Linux does not let just anybody modify the kernel code. Kernel patches have to go through maintainers who are experts in their field. If Wikipedia worked the same way, its credibility problems would go away. The trick would be in finding maintainers who really are competent and are willing to let people "patch" their articles.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
You also are a hypocrite. You obviously didn't have something nice to say.
Really? Let's see. According to Wordnet, smut can be defined as:
"Creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc. of no LITERARY OR ARTISTIC value other than to stimulate sexual desire."
Need I say more?
And what does it have to do with elitism?
Well, does the word crass mean anything to you? He was obviously knocking wikipedia for their refusal to discriminate. Given where he now earns his keep, it's hard to reconcile his words with his actions.
You also say: As for the stopped participating part, we all need to feed ourselves and our families. Why work for free for something that is filled with venom and abuse? His point was get paid and deal with the abuse or work for free if there is no abuse.
Well, I'm not sure where you're going with that, but I didn't get that he was doing this to feed his family. Furthermore, if he was simply there to make money, it would not excuse trolling/heckling. One could conclude from your remarks that abuse may be tolerated if the services are offered quid pro quo, as opposed to pro bono.
Well, it's a free country, if you feel you can work well under such conditions, knock yourself out.
You also are a hypocrite. You obviously didn't have something nice to say.
I guess the point I was trying to make was not OBVIOUS to you. An entire community is being castigated for their efforts on a project which can be described in a word as noble.
So, Slashdot publishes a one-sided article that slams wikipedia from three main sources (1) A disgruntled former project leader of the wikipedia (2) Robert McHenry of the Encyclopedia Britannica and well known avowed enemy of wikipedia (3) a intern level "news" writer.
Then the first group of comments is from people that for the most part proclaim how they purposefully avoid using wikipedia.
What are we missing here? (1) All information is biased, and bias is a truism in reporting of any kind (2) In wikipedia bias is an assumption rather than a blurred fact (3) NPOV is the religion of wikipedia, and for the most part the community's understanding of and attention to NPOV is amazing.
Bottom line is people don't understand why wikipedia works, it just works. It's a complex social phenomena and a mature community. And just like the fact that you don't have to watch Fox News for its bias, or CNN's for its, or read Britannica for its, you don't have to choose to use wikipedia and deal with its contributors biases. No big deal. I'd suggest a little NPOV in this story though because the irony is palpable (yay! a correct usage of the word irony for a change).
This is hard to argue with; but it is also hard to support, because it involves predicting the future, and the future, when it comes to public opinion, is extremely unpredictable.
Well, hindsight is 20/20 so that's a simple fix, just arrive in the future and then look back and change the past!
I just type my sig in the reply form...
It wouldn't be such a bad thing if there were dozens of versions of Wikipedia out there. At the very least, it might cause people to question what they read on the net more than they do now, and to question all the ways they get news and information. There's a lot of crap out there that masquerades as journalism or factual content, and the world will be a better place when folks question sources more than they do now.
First, full disclosure - I'm a wikipedia admin, I'm the featured article director (I choose the featured articles on Wikipedia's main page), and I'm one of the arbitrators (on the arbitration committee Larry mentions). I'm going to try to address Larry's points in turn. Some of what he says is true, but much of it is wrong, or totally misses the point. Larry left in 2002, meaning that he has been away longer than most of th currently active people have been there. The policies have changed radically, and so I don't think it's unfair to say he has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to the community or the policies.
First, about the title of this thread - calling Larry Sanger a co-founder of Wikipedia is a bit of a stretch. It's before my time, but I know several people who were around from those days found this objectionable. As I understand it, Larry was more involved in Nupedia (now defunct). Wikipedia was started to augment Nupedia, and (as I understand it) the idea was Jimbo Wales'.
Now, this "lack of public perception of credibility" Larry mentions - this is misleading. Wikipedia is (as others on this thread have said) an experiment. However, I don't think the public percieves us as uncredible. I think it would be more accurate to say that the public is still making up its mind. Yes, there is some inaccurate information in Wikipedia - the same can be said of Britannica. However, Wikipedia has been cited in in books, in academic studies, in conferences, and in court cases. If the public really though of Wikipedia as a unreliable source, then I don't think that it would be drawing in these kinds of references
The next problem Larry mentiosn is the trolls. The arbitration committee was formed about a year ago as a way for Jimbo Wales (the actual founder of Wikipedia) to devolve his powers to the community. In particular, he appointed a committee of 12 users who would have the right to issue decrees and such - the ability to prohibit people from doing certain things, or ban them, 'etc etc. The primary (and pretty much only) complaint against the committee to date has been that it has been too slow to act. On the other hand, I think if you were to ask the average user what he thinks, the trolling problem has been getting much better in recent months - just look at the list of complete cases. Several long time trouble makers are currently banned (and if they come back, it resets the clock on their ban). I know one recently banned user (troll) said (before he was banned) how much he hated it, how much the "cabal" had taken over, 'etc. If the trolls are saying this, I take it as a good sign. Beyond that, I can't really reply to Larry's nebulous complaint about trolling because he's really not saying a whole lot there.
Larry's third (and perhaps only concrete point - IE, specifically refutable point) is that he claims Wikipedia has a lack of respect for experts. Nonsense, I say. As a rule of thumb, we expect that everyone (experts and laymen alike), if requested, can cite specific sources to justify their edits. In this respect, it is no different than Academia. Quite frankly (and this is my personal opinion) I think a great majority of the editing disputes could be solved by requiring disputants to cite and/or quote reputable sources. On the other hand, Larry's asseration that "But if the expert should have the gall to complain to the community about the problem, he or she will be shouted down (at worst) or politely asked to "work with" persons who have proven themselves to be unreasonable (at best)." - I think this gets more to the heart of how Wikipedia works. If you want to contribut
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I've often wondered why it is so easy to contest wikipedia content. Malicious (or simply hard headed) users can insert personal beliefs and sentiments that are not widely shared.
While extending extra editorial powers to "experts" as the author suggests, may *seem* like one way to solve the problem, the same issues will ultimately exist between experts. In some ways the 'conflicting content' problem of Wikipedia is just a macrocosmic version of what happens in academia all the time. Wiki illustrates many of the problems with general (non-wiki) encyclopedia creation. (Although the problems with most encyclopedia's are much more minor by comparison).
An alternative solution might be to have all changes subject to a running (democratic) vote by the user base. (Although this too would surely have problems. Religious issues would create a particularly difficult/scary situation for any 'editorial vote' process)
Ultimately the solution will probably be a combination of expert-editorial, user-contributions, and editorial-votes. Until then we'll see a lot of users inserting their personal opinions as universal fact.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
It's should be expected that a hotheaded retard like avalys would have trouble understanding that the point was to defend the work of an entire community.
Take away the take write-offs for those Boston Schools and see how the rich run away from them.
Intellectualism is a nice thing, but not an answer to everything.
The smartest rarely get to lead because they usually lack the compassion to be good leaders.
That is not to say that they aren't valued advisers.
The privledged accedemic class is often just parasitic on the rest of us and hence ill-suited to lead as far as I am concerned.
Please mod the parent up -- it's one of the more informative posts in the story.
I've never actually seen that, but it seems like a very good idea. Unobtrusive, yet informative.
From the University of Oxford Wikipedia page: "Admission to the University of Oxford is entirely on academic merit and potential."
Why is it necessary at all for the article to say this?! The issue is a 'hot topic' every summer in the UK media when Oxford admissions selection takes place. As a result, there have been edit wars over this artice, and the Article Discussion includes gems such as:
"Sorry, folks, but if you genuinely believe that admission to Oxford is based exclusively on academic merit, then heaven help you. ... It is also a total disregard for the truth to claim that Oxford is making any sort of worthwhile progress towards attractive more state-educated students. There remains a huge discrepancy at the institution." - James.F.
This is a prime example of the motion of the topic of this thread. Clearly (in my personal opinion) (some of) those editing the article, and those commenting upon it, are biased and ill-informed non-experts.
The most intractible problem with Sangor's ideas is his argument to respect 'expertise' and 'authority'.
I have known doctorates who have less of a working knowledge of their area of expertise than bacheloreates, yet they may have impressive credentials. Just because someone is considered an 'authority' on a subject does not mean they can not make a mistake, or learn something new that changes their view of the subject.
Who certifies who is an expert and who is not? If we go for a review process (similar to the slashdot karma system, for example) how do we ensure that it is completely unbiased?
The fact of the matter is: we can't.
As long as there are people with agendas our view of the world will be shaped by those agendas; every system has some flaw that serves as a springboard to further some agenda.
This is why our (United States) system of government is a republic, rather than a simple democracy - because mob rule loses more in noise than it gains in inclusiveness. This is also why we have checks and balances (some would argue have been erroded) to control the centralization of power to make it work for everyone (even the minorities). So far this system has been successful. However we would all agree it is still far from perfect.
Accept the anarchy or modify it by creating a 'republic' of expert contributors, peer reviews or other mechanisms to modulate the noise. In all cases the result will be the same: some group or groups will feel disenfranchised from the process and in no way can we definitively certify the encyclopedia's authority.
Largely it comes down to acceptance - faith, if you will. Whether you are using the Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britanica, you have to 'buy-in' to the authority - because for the large breadth of knowledge covered there will be no way to verify your choice for every article in any meaningful way.
Ironically, this is exactly what Sangor is arguing for - an illusion of acceptability to 'legitimize' it as a 'serious' reference and research tool. The people who put credence in such things are just fooling themselves (as I have illustrated).
I will offer one suggestion: rather than having everyone able to edit one single article on a subject, why not have different viewpoints shown as different interpretations of the subject - fully segregated and attributed to the specific author. Where facts can be independently verified, put that information without any editorial comment into the intro, then have sections where the subject can be interpreted. This will avoid the revert-wars and bring some stability to the reference for the end users - who will be able to tell fact from interpretation. This won't prevent agendas from being put forward, but it will prevent any one agenda from drowning out the others.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
So the masses of folks have no respect for expertise and the elite of various fields. How is this different than society as a whole?
How is it the same, which is your implication? History shows that society follows leaders they perceive as having "expertise." Society is not anarchy, which is what Wikipedia is.
The problem that infects Wikipedia is not limited to a few simple trolls. It is a world-wide societal problem. It is the wicked child of the delusional advocates of democracy and egalitarianism, who in their naivete believe that all people are equal in their abilities and judgement.
"wicked child of the delusional advocates of democracy and egalitarianism"...okay, stop the 60s dorm room speak. You're not witty just because you think you're so anti-establishment and socio-critical.
How else can we explain the sick believe that masters of rhetoric and intrigue make decisions that are affecting the future of the world? How is it a moron with an 8th grade education is allowed to have a legitimate position on highly technical topics like environmental protection and global warming?
I don't know. Why is it some Alabama womanizer got to have his dick sucked and lied about it while terror groups like Al Queda grew in power and plotted 9/11 all the way back in 1996? If you were really so intelligent in your remarks, you would understand both sides of the issue and wouldn't make such lame, personal attacks. Wow, you attacked "Bush's 8th grade edumacation!" Nobody's ever heard that before.
The world has become too complex for any one man to have the requisite knowledge to make decisions about anything other than his field of expertise.
Which is why leaders have groups of advisors, branches of government, and so forth.
What we require is a new social order than recognizes the various discplines of each citizen and identifies his expertise.
"New social order?" Viva la revolution, fellow hippie-wannabes!
When our electorate is organized along these lines, only then can representative government work. Instead of a mass of rhetoricians ruling over the world, we should have a council of experts, each elected by the members of his respective field. Chemists should elect the most elite chemist. Electrical engineers, the most elite electrical engineer.
So then we'd have a mass of elite chemists and engineers ruling along with the rhetoricians?
With this top down approach, Wikipedia and society at large will work far better. Further, we may prevent the complete destruction of our civilization by ceasing to hand power to the unqualified and depraved.
"Complete destruction of our civilization?" Come on, mods. Why are you falling for this?!
Here is the basic concept. We use direct democracy a la california ballot initiatives. That is anything of any significance is put to a public vote.
Now you would say that on first viewing this makes things worse as we have obvious non-experts making decisions in various areas. This is where the concept of delegated voting comes in.
I can delegate my vote on any area to someone else. If I vote on a topic my vote is counted if I do not bother to vote and I have delegated votes on that topic to someone else then my vote is added to their tally.
Some examples:
- My mother runs a recruitment firm and recently did her PHD in industrial psychoology on unemployment. I trust her judgement in this area therefore any votes on employment she can cast mine along with hers.
- My friend Chris knows a lot about markets and I think has a good balance between social justice and economic growth. I would delegate my economy votes to hiom in most instances. I don't trust him as much as I trust my mother though so in some key insances I may decide to vote myself.
- If friends decided to delegate their votes to me on certain areas where I feel confident (community, education, religion) I would be honored to vote on their behalf.
I think something like this could work for wikipedia. If you are a trusted member of the community you can give your votes for deletion in an area to a certain trusted person.
REmembr you can alwats still vote yourself and you can always move your vote from one person if you feel they no longer adequately rtepresent you.
Wow, your post brings up a good point, but few will see it, because a mod found it disagreable, and modded you down, illustrating your point.
I've learned to browse at -1 because of all the ridiculous inappropriate negative mods that seek to silence posts that ruffle their feathers.
I've often wondered - just how is it that the slashdot moderation system is supposed to have a positive effect? It seems like a good idea on the surface, but...if the people posting are the same people moderating, then how are the moderations applied supposed to be any more insightful than the posts?
Sleep is futile.
My pie in the sky idea'r is to develop a genetic algorithm that's aimed at finding the optimal formula for identifying the smarties.
The basic idea is to have a ranking system (a score for each contributer's level of repute that entitles them to specialness). Here's a five-second brainstorm on some possible inputs...
To evolve the formula, one could provide recombination of the rules based on
When conducting a survey, you could weigh the responses based on reputation, and you could subject that weighting factor to survey as well. I think I've done enough babbling for now...
The goal would be that if you're trollish enough, you could be placed into exile, made to suffer review on your edits, or whatever. If you're wise enough, you could be asked to perform academic reviews, be eligible to win a free coffee mug, or some other token of superiority.
I know, the genetic algorithm thing probably isn't all that necessary, and there's always a chance it could unravel itself, but it seems to me like it would be a very interesting experiment with such a large population of contributers... Final thought: I think some incentive to be a good wiki-citizen would be a wise addition, and it doesn't need to conflict with the open nature of the project IMHO.
Abu Gharib did involve the sodomizing of underage boys (with broomsticks I believe). That definately falls under the category. There's even audio tape of the rapings.
I still don't know what's wrong with selling pornography. If I define steak as "food of not literary or artistic value other than to satisfy hunger" then would it be bad? Not everything has to have literary or artistic value. Most of what is one TV and the internet (including slashdot) has no literary or artistic value. It is also a matter of opinion what is artistic and what is not.
You still make no sense with trying to connect his current job with elitism. You keep putting the two together but can't seem to make coherent explanation. Why is it so hard to reconcile his job with his words? Why even try? If Larry Flint had some great profound thought would you discount it because he sells porn? Even if it is true?
He can't control the trolling and heckling but would you deal with it for free when you had a hard time dealing with it for money? I am not sure how you can miss where I am "going with that". It is like Mary Poppins said - A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
Like you said - it is a free country. In your opinion the project is noble and obviously above criticism. In his more educated, and seemingly more intelligent, opinion he thinks there are flaws and chose to express them along with solutions. Both of you are welcome to express your opinions and your silly "if you don't have something nice to say then don't say anything at all" can go to hell.
Why is this an issue?
In some sense, the whole concept is flawed, but then again, so is any kind of historical content put into a history.
In ancient history, Roman anyway, 'rich guys' that happened to be leaders due to wealth as opposed to merrit, were obliged to write histories on various things they may have witnessed or heard about... sometimes decades after events... because it was the thing to do. This had the nasty effect of very narrow and subjective views of events supporting specific class, ideology, or political persuasion.
Not much has changed. Who writes history today, besides academics, victors, and popular artists? Someone pushing a point of view, and if you really want to know, it is up to you to research as many (possibly contradicting) sources as possible to figure out what really happened.
What is particularily amusing is the argument about democratic processes behind validity of data. History is flawed, rewritten, and mangled to be non-factual and express specific points of view. Stating that somehow letting anyone modify or ammend encyclopedia data is a good thing, given that there are editor/administrators, and the fact that as a whole, only people of means and with knowledge of internet have the ability to do so.
Only the rich were educated.
Only the rich could write.
Only the rich could afford to write.
Only people with computers and internet can partake of wikipedia.
Only a fool would consider a public data source as a reliable, single source.
Iterpretation is everything. And it doesn't matter, because blind faith allows you to discount everything anyway.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
"Although it contains much that is apocryphal (or at least wildly inaccurate..."
Wikipedia is accessible and generally unpretentious. Also quite free (as in beer) to use and access. And it's got the awesome Trillian plugin now.
Even if it sucks, at least it's something along the lines of a collective, informal repository of information.
Wikipedia is based on the premise that there is no real truth, merely opinions. However, what's the point of creating a system of facts when you know they are all untrue?
Why not simply type up and publish a bunch of gibberish? If a person believes there is no real truth, then how could that person ever argue that gibberish is any less valid than the articles?
Maybe I'll join and start writing gibberish. It'll be interesting to see how far I get.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The answer the problem of trusting articles could be solved very nicely by implementing a PGP-like Web of Trust idea. For example, if you came across an article that you found especially good, you could be given the option to digitally sign it. Then anyone who trusted you would have confidence that the article is sound. Or maybe they don't know you, but they trust someone who trusts you. And so on. Then you come across an article which stinks to high heaven. So you put the author on the untrusted list. And now the system would block you from seeing contributions from this user. And everyone who trusted you would end up censoring this user to some extent. In the end, everyone could end up with their own personal, customized fork of wikipedia.
to hit slashdot, or have there been others? Rusty's servers seem to be holding up well under the load.
Best Slashdot Co
What wikipedia needs is patch sets just like the Linux kernel.
With the kernel the experts makes there own patch set like:
2.6.10-ac and 2.6.10-mm
If wikipedia could allow the experts to keep there own copy of a page which only they can edit.
Then users can see the official page and the expert pages if any.
This will also allow the users to see if there is different opinions on the subject.
It seems to me that if you have things like revert wars, the only possibiliy for a real comprimise is to present some questioned part of an entry in multiple parts, and let each group that feels something very strongly present thier own case - perhaps allowing three edits a day per group of that section (to provide counter-arguments to things posted in other sections).
That would let each group present thier own side and let people cool down a little, while not masking a side that might be "right" over one that is more loud or persistant.
Then it's up to the viewer to decide which point is more accurate, perhaps based on writing or included links. At the very least the viewer would know there was heated debate on the topic.
This would be much better that forking the Wikipedia as a whole, since there are doubtless many many entries that no-one would question - like the entry for kitten.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A lot of the complaints about Wikipedia relate to the entropy caused by vandals, clueless newbies, and lazy editors. There are also edit wars over the "one true" version of an article. It's also noted that things like open source software, Usenet FAQs, etc., are often high-quality because they have editors that okay additions and changes.
At the same time, heavy-handed attempts to appoint "privileged" editors, and/or only allow them to modify, can quickly mire down a project in inertia (cf. Nupedia) or social infighting for control (cf. lots of MUDs).
So, why not keep it simple? Allow any registered user to become "Editor" of an article, simply by declaring they're doing so.
Once an article has an Editor, they can designate 'releases' of the article (like the stable releases of a software program). People can still see the bleeding edge (the "CVS nightlies" if you will) if they want, but by default, they'll see an Editor's version. Editors can decide periodically whether they want new 'bleeding-edge' edits included or not (and if so, which ones).
Don't like the job the Editor is doing? Then you can decide to be an Editor yourself on the article. When you do, the article forks, so you have have your stream and other Editor's streams.
The vast majority of articles would have 0 or 1 Editors, I'd expect. If there are multiple Editor forks for a given article, you can decide which fork(s) to trust by looking at a quick summary of the edit history and the Editor (including whether particular voluntary associations endorse the Editor). You could even have a client decide to just view the fork(s) maintained by Editors who are endorsed by voluntary associations you trust.
What if Editors get busy or lose interest in an article? Perhaps there could be a way of declaring a fork "up for grabs" for a new Editor, with the proposed edits to date automatically
folded in at that point, if an Editor does not touch an article for a certain time period.
Perhaps Editors who are happy with "benign neglect" could also set a flag that automatically incorporates edits into the release after a certain time period if the Editor hasn't said yea or nay on them.
With something like this, you could introduce quality control without a lot of hoops to jump through, or factions to appease. And you can have multiple points of view and editorial standards incorporated into the same encyclopedia, but still with some ways of letting users determine which ones are more trustworthy or useful. Editors would still have to come back to articles now and again to keep them in good repair, but at least they wouldn't have to do it *every* time someone messes it up.
Have there been any proposals along these lines?
I think the basic problem with all of these criticisms of Wikipedia's reliability, or "anti-elitism" is that they flatly miss the point. The very reason we're having these sorts of discussions now are because Wikipedia's original model and ethos have been effective. Yes, there are always problems and pitfalls along the way, but the point of the matter is that no one would be arguing about how badly Wikipedia needs a stricter editorial review process (or whatever) if it was a collection of a dozen odd incomplete articles that no one ever bothered to contribute to....
Wikipedia was built on the backs of the thousands of users who have contributed to it. Some of these contributors were bona fide academic experts in a specific field, others were just interest amateurs. But in both cases, they contributed because they could, and, most importantly, because the entire philosophy of the project not only allows for, but encourages, that sort of contribution. We've reached the point where we people can start to take Wikipedia seriously enough to ponder questions like the ones Mr. Sanger brings up.
Wikipedia is not anti-elitist. That's a downright silly allegation. It does not specially privilege "elites," but they are likewise no more discriminated against than anyone else. The problem Mr. Sanger is addressing is ultimately not how eliminate anti-elitism, but how to institute pro-elitism. Which is absolutely fine, if your goal is to produce a traditional encyclopedia the likes of Britannica. But to encourage a special privilege for experts conversely discourages the participation of non-experts: if you make it so that average users can no longer edit Wikipedia articles, or make it enough of a chore that they no longer want to, then the entire project isn't Wikipedia anymore. And what's worse is if you appropriate the work they've already contributed in the process. It's the functional equivalent of a software company hosting an open source project which then they turn around and close once it's progressed to a certain point.
But more than that, it's a denial of what's gotten Wikipedia to where it is now in the first place. Without the active participation of all users, expert or not, it's unlikely Wikipedia would have gotten very far to begin with. To change it into something it isn't (and never aspired to be) now is silly. To imply that the contributions of non-experts are no longer desired because otherwise Wikipedia will never occupy the same privileged position as Encyclopedia Britannica is misguided. Wikipedia is not Britannica. It does some things better than Britannica, and it does some things worse than Britannica. While some specific failings can be addressed whilst maintaining the core of the Wikipedia philosophy, the key is to do so without damaging that which Wikipedia does well.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
I like the idea, but it has a few problems - one is that from a user interface standpoint, it's kind of hard to read the word and also hard to use the link.
Instead I really feel like definitions or encyclopedic entries of words whould be more a system service that would let you highlight and look up any word you were reading - to me links always imply a link to some deeper look into the topic at hand, and not a definition for an arbitrarily chosen word in a sentence.
I looked around, but could not find such a service for OS X which has a good mechanism for doing this with Services.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
InfoshopOpenWikie
http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag
The Matrix - anti-corporate wikih p/Main_Page
http://www.infoshop.org/octo/matrix/index.p
Science Fiction and Fantasy Wiki
http://www.infoshop.org/sf/index.php/Main_Page
Sorry, but rape does happen in US torture centres. If you had just googled around for a minute, you would have found enough stories about it. Two examples I could find:1 /article06.shtml
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2004-07/2
http://qc.indymedia.org/news/2004/08/1303.php
The indymedia article has even links to photos. So instead of accusing people of lying, you could have done some 1 minute research yourself and find that it does happen.
Wikipedia is under Free documentation license. If somebody wants to do a fork, he is allowed to do. When he succeeds, Wikipedia can get the information back.
Just imagine: 50 historians take the articles about their special topic in their own project, where only scientists can contribute. One or two years later they have 1000 excellent articles. This articles can come back to Wikipedia.
I refuse to use Wiki for anything except finding other, more reliable sources. Until it has a completely transparent system of review by experts, it's simply not worth my time or risk of unknowingly getting taken in by someone's agenda.
And please don't keep pushing this idiotic meme that "all sources are imperfect". Strictly speaking, yes, that's true, but it's also wildly misleading. If you found something in a source that contradicts the conventional wisdom, would you be more willing to believe it if it were in Britannica or Wiki?
I've already laid out in another post why I thought it would be a good idea to allow for forks within a wikipedia entry.
But after reading more of the comments, I thought I should present a case against moderation for Wikipedia.
People present moderation as the solution for quality Wikipedia entires. But I strongly feel that under no circumstances should an entry in Wikipedia be the result of a popularity contest!!
I do like moderation for something like Slashdot - generally I feel it works pretty well. But the key for Slashdot moderation is that any time you are free to go see what was moderated down and decide if the tide of opinion is something you agree with.
In the case of Wikipedia, you only have on entry - you you are always masking the unpopular in the case of moderation. At least in the case of revert wars you have a chance to see both sides!
That's why I feel so strongly that the ultimate solutuion needs to be one that lets multiple group make cases for something they say, along with evidence for what they are saying - then readers can have a set of ideas to weigh instead of the most popular "truth".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Really. In the past two years Larry Sanger has made precisely one edit to Wikipedia that was not on his "user page", and that was to post the complaint that "I don't like the categorization scheme". I don't think he's qualified to suggest a sweeping paradigm shift at this point, because he really hasn't a clue what's going on.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
spoil the broth? Articles on WP generally try to be NPOV. However, this leads to representing any and all opinions on the subject. The more complex a problem a problem, the more convoluted (exeption: maths and science pages) and the more controversial or conspiracy-prone, the more noise. Often, a slightly biased but consistent presentation would be better--at least easier to understand.
/., I checked the pages relating to Kiddie porn. They are scary... extremely "neutral" in that they calmly argue for or against some practices, circumstances and groups of people that are (still?) deeply in criminal waters, actually observed by the intelligence agency in this country. Same applies to articles like Heroin, where they talk on about "recreational use". Libertarianism taken to its extreme, and putting WP in the filthy corner of the net. Amounts IMHO in a worldview too
And now the Flaimbait:
This lack of respect for expertise explains the first problem, because if the project participants had greater respect for expertise, they would have long since invited a board of academics and researchers
Duh, half of the people working on WP are disgruntled academics or others with serious attention deficit.
And, reacting to a recent Troll on
I think there will be a fork, of much of Wikipedia, for essentially the reasons Sanger has outlined. However, I think Wikipedia will still survive, because the fork is going to need to hire experts, and as such can't possibly be free (as in beer, but as I'll explain it likely won't be free as in freedom either).
I should probably take a sidestep and explain how it's possible to create a non-free fork of Wikipedia. It's pretty simple, really, since Wikipedia is released under the GFDL. Like the GPL, the GFDL doesn't restrict you from selling the content for money, but that's only the beginning. The GFDL also allows you to aggregate non-free content within a larger work containing GFDLed works. So a non-free fork can include non-free images, and even non-free articles and other non-free text. Add to this the GFDL's permission to add invariant sections, and it's pretty clear that reintroducing content from the forked version back into Wikipedia will be a very arduous task. One need only include a few statements which reflect points of view that a few Wikipedians don't like and the content will be forever non-free. This is one of the problems with the GFDL - yes, Wikipedia is free, as Wikipedia doesn't use invariant sections, but that doesn't mean forks can't use them.
Will this spell the end of Wikipedia? I don't think so. Wikipedia is useful because it can be edited by anyone. Within minutes in many cases articles are updated to reflect new information. A fork, especially a fork which had to hire people to fact check, couldn't possibly keep up. As long as Wikipedia can afford to maintain up its servers (as has been a problem in the past), I don't see it dying. There's far too much momentum on its side.
But I see a fork as inevitable. The only thing to be decided is whether or not the Wikimedia Foundation itself will manage the fork, or whether it'll be done by a commercial entity. There is promise that the fork may be done by the foundation itself. After all, a print version is one of the goals of the foundation, and a print version is necessarily a fork (you can't print a new version every 2 seconds). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pushing_to_ 1.0 for more information. The problem is, Jimbo Wales has expressed his opinion that "1.0" not be a separate project. He may have changed his mind though, this was based on reading his early thoughts on 1.0.
But I would trust Linus over you to tell me how the Linux kernel worked. That's the goal with wikipedia; trust people who know more than other people.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
I call shenanigans -- I checked through the history of the CNN article, and it looks like there has been a "liberal bias" paragraph in there fairly consistently for over a year at least.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Small wikis do tend to work better than large ones. For example, I recently set up a MathWiki for the maths students at my university. It's still suffering growth pains (and no-one ever posts during the holidays...), but shows every sign of being a very useful resource.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
great article and the right view about the project. I am really glad the at least one of the founders realizes the problems that Wikipedia has starting to face. In a perfect society people would never post junk on like but this is no perfect world and the truth is that some people get off on the crap that they post. Like a friend of mine says, the internet gives the ability to every moron to "write on the wall" without repercussions
"Expert" is an ambiguous term and usually used in an argument from authority attempt. You can use some heuristics to try and define an "expert," such as "someone who has a PhD" or "someone with published work on the topic" but this is all unreliable and misleading. I, personally, might be considered an expert on old, bad movies. I have no degree in film, and I've never written a published work. In fact, many people I know don't even know about my "expertise." The only way to know if someone is truly knowledgeable is to throw their words up for peer review, which is exactly what Wikipedia does.
Slashdot reporting on a k5 story? What a circle-jerk.
Larry Sanger is having a multi-year case of severe sour grapes. He helped to create Wikipedia, then found that it didn't conform to his world view. He hasn't worked on Wikipedia, not even fixing typos or categorizing stubs or anything, in more than two years, nearly three now, I think. And yet he professes to be an expert on it.
There are, in fact, experts working on Wikipedia; there are PhDs. Their heads, however, are not quite as inflated as Larry's. He does make some valid points, about the culture of openness and taking every crapflooder seriously. But the main thrust of this, and of the other articles about Wikipedia he's authored, have amounted to little more than "WAAAH NO ONE RESPECTS ME WAAAH".
An article validation system would benefit Wikipedia greatly, if it could be implemented as a sort of trust metric, like the provably correct one that Advogato uses. (More research is needed here.) To make some users more equal than others, capable of making decisions from on high, is the wrong fucking idea.
Article validation does not require Larry to be placed at the top of some sort of hierarchy.
And besides, Larry can threaten to fork all he wants. He can go join WikInfo in their, ah, stunning success.
By what goddamn right does Larry Sanger have such a loud voice? He's an obvious crank, and he hasn't worked on, much less led, Wikipedia in years.
Get a life, Larry!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Good: Something on anything. Get a clue. Not too wordy compared to other net sources
Bad: Many POVs make for a badly structured article. The more complex the topic, the worse. Especially if possibly worldview & conspiracy debate
Ugly: NPOV on everything makes me sick (personal opinion...) therefore: WP not for kids/office use
"New wikis on various subjects have already emerged..."
Hello? Welcome to 2001.
Would you trust a car with a disclaimer that says "this car has been put together by people who don't necessarily know anything about mechanics or safety"?
Would you trust food with a disclaimer that says "this food has been prepared by people who know nothing about cooking or sanitary conditions"?
Well then, would you trust an encyclopedia with a disclaimer that says "please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by professionals with the expertise necessary to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information"
I think any information source with a disclaimer that says "this is not a reliable source of information" should be taken very lightly.
I think Wikipedia is a great source of information and is largely acurate but I have also ran into the problem articles that are way off. Or the facts that just simply turn out to be made up. But there has to ba an answer to fix it.
Why can't we use a little less anonimity in the articles. Allow senior users to watch over or sponsor certain articles and keep them in line. Publish these users names on the article page and provide some sort of accuracy rating for users that can be made by their peers. There will always be inaccuracy but this would allow you to judge the trustworthyness of each article based on the rating of its sponsor and contributers.
Of course, the problem with introducing an editorial board is that there must be a way to decide whether the board is qualified to issue a ruling on the matter. Obviously, one may somehow get a tenured professor from a well-known university to edit (or rubber-stamp, whatever) articles about evolutionary biology, who gets to edit an article about the TV psychic phenomenon, or the controversy on John Kerry's Vietnam record? It's very difficult to amass all that kind of talent.
Do the revert wars ultimately matter enough to warrant this furor? All they really affect is the presentation of the current-version of the article.
I don't see why anyone would approach Wikipedia in the same way they would a standard encyclopedia, that seems ludicrous to me. May as well try to ride an elephant like you would a pony. It isn't a standard encyclopedia; why should analysis of it be limited to the mundane and superficial?
For any given article, even one in the midst of a Revert Jihad, there is a discussion tab and a history tab. You can revert the current-version till the cows come home, but whatever you're trying to censor will still remain a part of Wikipedia, within the article's general domain. And the discussions usually track outrageous changes and provide lucid commentary on the reasons and ideas behind any revert war that may have occured in the past or that is currently ongoing.
If you get bad information from Wikipedia because you took an article from it as you would from a standard Encyclopedia, without considering the article's history or the discussion surrounding it (i.e. not considering wikipedia qua wikipedia, as Jimbo Wales might be inclined to say)... whose fault is that really?
This situation reminds me of Hollywood's notoriously inaccurate portrayal of historical events, and the academic criticism that generates. The type of person who might learn his history from a Hollywood movie is probably the same type that would accept information presented on Wikipedia as truth, acontextually.
Doesn't it just simply boil down to supporting evidence, whichever way you look at it? It's the same for the elitist academics, and the humble sysops - be prepared to back up what you say - I would analogize it to physics - you can have an open discussion on a debatable theory (ex:strings) - perfect forum for Wiki - unless you're going to back it up with measurable results, until then, all it's going to be is a theory - or in the case of Wiki - an opinion.
How about...
1. Only allow those with accounts to post.
2. Accounts initially start off with a score of 0 on each topic.
3. Accounts earn points (or lose points, going negative) as their owners demonstrate knowledge/expertise/understanding of various topics.
4. Below a certain level, edits need to be submittted for approval. Below another level, individuals cannot post on a topic, due to their demonstrated ignornace of it.
5. Below a certain overall average level, individuals cannot post at all, because they've demonstrated they aren't being constructive.
6. Above a certain level, individuals are considered competent, supercompetent, or experts in various areas.
7. When there are arguments in a field (e.g., in economics, between mainstream economists and Austrian economists), to support objectivity, editors and contributors should not take positions, but rather explain the positions of particular sides. They should be judged on how accurately they explain these differences, and compare and contrast.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Doesn't it just simply boil down to supporting evidence, whichever way you look at it? It's the same for the elitist academics, and the humble sysops - be prepared to back up what you say - I would analogize it to physics - you can have an open discussion on a debatable theory (ex:strings) - perfect forum for Wiki - unless you're going to back it up with measurable results, until then, all it's going to be is a theory - or in the case of Wiki - an opinion.
Amongst contributors to a given article, there could be requests for experts that would help settle and lock articles.
The experts would be voted amongst contributors, and finally, if ther would not be agreement even about this, a set of editorialists could have the last word regarding a given expert selection.
At the end, for Wikipedia to be useful, somebody will need t be granted authority one way or another, otherwise the reference value bacomes questionable.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I also feel that Larry's criticism about "antielitism" is a little weird, because I actually tried to contribute a physics article to Nupedia, and the reason I gave up on the process was exactly because I felt that it was the kind of "antielitist" atmosphere he seems to be imputing to Wikipedia. I have a PhD in physics, I teach physics at a community college, and I've written some free physics textbooks. I don't expect other people to fall down on their knees and worship my erudition, but I think I qualify as an expert within my field. My experience with Nupedia was that I was being endlessly nitpicked by people who had no particular expertise in physics. On Wikipedia, OTOH, I've generally found that people tend to contribute at their level of ability, and it works great. People who know a lot do the biggest, most important edits, and people who know less generally exercise a lot of self-restraint. I'm an amateur musician, but not an expert by any means. If I'm editing a music article, I'll typically restrict myself to correcting typos, or contributing factual information that I'm very sure of (or, if it's something more substantial, I'll typically post on the article's talk page).
Wikipedia is a huge success, within certain limits. The main limitation is simply that it doesn't work well on controversial topics. I find it really odd that Larry's critique talked all about rudeness, trolling, etc., but never talked about the situation that, in my experience, is what leads to people getting upset. It comes from arguments about controversial topics: Ronald Reagan, astrology, ... And the problem with these topics is not that people ignorant about Ronald Reagan fail to defer to people who are experts on Ronald Reagan. The problem with those topics is that there is intense disagreement. That's the way Wikipedia is. It can't handle controvesial topics, and I don't see any way to modify it so that it can. The NPOV (neutral point of view) policy works fine on noncontroversial articles, and doesn't work at all on controversial ones. Wikipedia is a tool that works for some jobs, but not for others.
Find free books.
I mean, linking to "wrong" as an example for wrong is slightly odd, so maybe he was going to definitions, in a sense?
Of course, I took your view at first, but I read the entry and couldn't find anything that was hugely inaccurate (like a statement that fox news is biased, although I do think one of the things they mentioned blurred the distinction between Fox News and the local news on a Fox affiliate station).
If it was intended as humor, then, hehe, and if not, then I agree with you.
...entertaining that people who argue for ultimate truth sould be so willing to look away from truth when it's too ugly for them to bear. Further down this thread there is someone who tries to explain why they removed a reference to Abu Ghraib in the Rape entry on Wikipedia. Later, there is photographic edivence of rape as well as a quote from someone who should know that rapes occurred. Even in the light of such information, the person who tried to expunge the Abu Ghraib reference still argues that there were no rapes. Just astounding how people are willing to bend their perception of reality to hold to their political agendas and then turn around and point at other people's agendas. It's all bullshit if you ask me.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Maybe articles/sections could have dedicated moderators?
Moderators would be interviewed by the moderator of the parent section. All changes made would be reviewed by a moderator. If a moderator fails to approve/deney a particular change in a particular time period, the parent moderator would receive a forward of the change request. The parent moderator of that section could then decide if a new moderator should be instated.
Users could vote on the accuracy and usefulness of sections/articles. Problem areas could easily be statistically identified and fixed. Failure to fix a section could result in the appointment of a new moderator.
Unmoderated sections/articles would be clearly identified for credability purposes. Users could even have the option of showing unapproved changes, unmoderated articles, or poorly scored articles.
Sound reasonable?
http://brandonbloom.name
There is nothing inherent in science which requires one to be either politically liberal (whatever /that/ means today), much less a secular humanist, no matter how trendy they are just now (give us long enough, and people will laugh at how old fasioned you are--hell, that philosophy of yours is already a bit dated, you would think we were still in the Enlightenment period and only you were invited).
Science is a process of arriving at reliable conclusions based on the best data from the best-concieved experiments we can devise. It most certainly does NOT require a foray into the particular brand metaphysics favored by you--namely secular humanism; it's strength is that it doesn't *matter* what biases you have, so long as you do the experiments properly, the *data* will come out right and bear out only the proper conclusion.
Now go away, troll, and spare us your insipid cheerleading. Science doesn't need cheerleaders, it needs solid research, and this "more scientific than thou" attitude I see bandied about is quite tiresome. Speaking of research, I'd best be getting back to mine.
Which would only further erode the influence of experts who would, by definition, post their own knowledge of the subject.
Instead, you would have people simply regurgitate what they read somewhere else, without any way to validate whether or not they correctly interpreted the information.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
I'm borrowing from a post over at Kuro5hin. More people read /., so it's more interesting to discuss it here.
The comment author argues that by these standards, Wikipedia is not really an encyclopedia. The problem in his/her argument is its blindness. A traditional encyclopedia, like Encylopedia Brittanica fails in more of these criteria than Wikipedia does! By the stated criteria, nothing has ever been an encyclopedia... maybe being one is still a worthwhile goal, but it's only a theoretical idea (and an ideal Wikipedia is approaching much faster than anything else is approaching it).
Buy Text Processing in Python
As far as pages pertaining to say Israel and Palestine, I think quality control is hopeless. I am perfectly happy to get into flame (or revert) wars on Wikipedia, but even I'm scared to go into that section. Different people have very different views on certain historical and political issues. I do not mind the idea of some kind of peer review for scientific articles, but I would be very suspicious of such a process related to say the Israel and Palestine pages, or the Northern Ireland pages, or the George W. Bush and John Kerry pages and so forth. Wikipedia already have administrators who are ideological fanatics. I'm thinking of four of them right now - two are hard-core right-wingers, one is a social democrat (Americans would say liberal) who is nonetheless fanatically anti-communist, and the other is far-left.
I don't believe objectivity exists in historical and political matters. Wikipedia incorporates the now public domain 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, and some of the material in there would appear biased, racist, sexist and so forth to our modern eyes. English Wikipedia is mostly comprised of citizens of England and its former colonies, including the US. Relative to the half of the world living on less than $2 a day and whom have never made a phone call, these are relatively privileged people, and Wikipedia is a subset of even these people since Internet users and Wikipedians are more likely to be college-educated than from some ghetto or even a blue-collar household. This alone makes for a very elitist and skewed view of the world. For example, in the 1950's, there were lots of accusations in the US that the Bandung Conference was some kind of communist ploy, which in my opinion is far removed from reality. A person from India or some other third world country would have had a more realistic view of this I think. Then again, the rest of the world has some odd ideas about the US, perhaps they watch Baywatch, Friends, and shows like that and think that is what life in the US is really like.
The link in the article to Wikinfo is a fork of Wikipedia, one run by a right-wing Wikipedia user who thinks Wikipedia is too left-wing. There are forks by left-wing people who think Wikipedia is too right-wing by left-wing users as well - the "liberal Democrat" DKosopedia and the anarchist English Anarchopedia and Infoshop's OpenWiki. Wikipedia articles are GFDL so forks are easy.
Wikipedia should be able to handle science articles on biology and so forth, although speciality forks might appear by people who realize the Man's conspiracy to cover up the reality of orgone energy (please consult Robert A. Wilson). More likely, people will realize Wikipedia pages on the Israel/Palestine conflict will always be in flux depending on the time of day, and will go off and start wikis pertaining to primarily politics and history and other social science types topics. But outside of what touches upon the social world, Wikipedia should be able to handle it.
WTF is this "neo"-con business? I mean, isn't the whole point of being conservative an attempt to (a) maintain the status quo or (b) revert something to a previous form? I don't get the "neo" prefix.
I can only think of two explanations: either the conservatives themselves are new, or this is a ridiculous attempt to divide half of the political thought in the world (conservation) into two arbitrary groups, probably for purposes of dehumanization. One of these close enough?
(whining)On a side note, when did everything the democratic, green, and socialist american parties support become liberal? If liberal is desiring social change, then favoring abortion rights is a conservative perspective, what with them being an established part of the legal system and all. If liberalism is favoring personal freedom, then the republican tendency to remove pollution restrictions is the most liberal policy in the country. While I agree with the line of argument, that Fox news favors the REPUBLICAN PARTY line, while NYT favors the DEMOCRATIIC PARTY line, I think you're making implied faulty characterizations of american politics in the language of your argument. (/whining)
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
I guess I take a more pragmatic approach. I trust that topics like "The History of PI" are more factual than topics like "Voting Fraud in Ohio". I may not always be correct, but it's what I use. Enjoy, Randy Stegbauer
Unlink it then ....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'll add my own wiki experience to the mix. I was doing a paper on the Japanese writer Higuchi Ichiyo last semester and, not knowing much about her, I ended up using wiki as a source. EVERYTHING I cited from wikipedia was factually wrong. Luckily I ran it by my professor before handing it in, but I will never use Wikipedia as a source on a paper again. They've completely turned me off to using it for any academic purpose. I do still visit wikipedia when I need general information but I even take that with a major grain of salt.
Am I alone in thinking wikipedia should A) have experts come in and run a "stable" version of the encyclopedia and that B) a Google scholars type function is right up wiki's ally?
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Trust in the Semantic Web - Jen Golbeck offers a solution to this very problem. Specifically, topical trust about people in subject areas... so you can make statements like "Bob trusts Joe 90% in knowledge of Subatomic Nuclear Reactions In a Post Feminist Climate". Get enough people chained together and you have a web of trust - reasonably easy to implement in wikipedia I'd imagine. Joe trusts Bob 90%. Bob works for the NOAA. The NOAA trusts Bob 100%. Joe trusts the NOAA 50%. Kathy doesn't know bob but trusts the NOAA only 40%. You can then get an average trust metric from everyone about Bob's knowledge of the climate.
Most of the "War of Northern Agression" stuff actually isn't revisionism, or, rather, no less revisionistic than the original version. It's just people taking things entirely to personally, and holding one hell of a grudge. Kind of like both sides tend to do in, you know, a war.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
I'm suggesting he's doing something far more interesting, and has been since he helped found Wikipedia - a kind of social experiment with the human minds spread across the internet. And build a bit of an encyclopedia while he's at it.
Energy: time to change the picture.
The smear boat liars have been proven to be liars numerous times. The fact that you attempt to repeat their baseless claims shows that you are the partisan hack here. I note that you claim that I am unable to support my claims with facts when in fact you provide absolutely no facts to back your argument, moreover the burden of proof is squarely on the accusers which in this case is the smear boat liars for Bush.
The leader of the smear boat liars operated a smear campaign against Kerry on behalf of Richard Nixon. In a taped interview with Nixon he is heard to claim that he was personally in Cambodia, yet one of the 'lies' he accuses Kerry of is of falsely claiming the be in Cambodia. Similarly the claims that Kerry was not under fire during the engagement for which he won a bronze star are disproved by the citation of another award to the very 'eyewitness' claiming that there was no fire.
When all contemporary sources refute the claims of cowardice being made and the claims come from a clearly partisan source the claims can have absolutely no credibility.
If CBS had been doing real journalism they would never have published the alleged TANG reports on Bush. Not because of the specious allegations that they were produced using Word or that typewriters did not exist in those days as the blogosphere pundits would have it. The documents are very clearly produced on a typewriter, the baseline moves up and down, other documents released by the WH and accepted as genuine are in the same proportional font. But no journalist should be accepting that type of material from a single source that has already claimed to be an eyewitness. If he had the material he would have released it when he made the first allegation.
The irony of the situation is that CBS could easily have stitched up Bush completely by simply pulling out a 1970s era IBM Director typewriter and showing a memo being produced on it. The blogosphere almost ended up causing the bogus to be certified as genuine because they were latching onto the wrong test for authenticity.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
As an aside, describe concretely the differences of the US Republican from the former Revolutionary France Monarchists, and the former Italian and Russian Authoritarians; this is an area I am interested in finding the opinion of an extremist US Republican on.
People often try to pass off their skewed view of the world as fact, and there are always enough suckers around to soak it up.
Slashdot is just one petri dish for this kind of shit.
I notice that Larry combined "expertise and authority" at one point. I do think almost everyone respects expertise. The few that don't are either seriously misinformed, or might have something new we need to learn. But the real problem comes from authority. When authority exists, then censorship can happen. Initially, authority is usually well intentioned. And in most cases it never departs from that. But there are enough cases where authority does result in censorship that people rightfully fear authority.
I'm reminded of when I was at university decades ago. For many topics I did research in I could not find the information I sought. It was quite easy to get abstracts of papers that were written. It was quite difficult to get the actual papers. A lot of that was the costs, at the time, of handling the information. But the excuse so often given was that I didn't really need that information, or in some cases that I even had no right to it (because I was a lowly undergrad student). In most cases there was a cost structure associated with it, but no means to pay for the costs because it was set up only to work from departmental accounts.
The internet changes the costs structure. Getting information is so cheap it's virtually free. If you can't afford to run a server to provide it (see, it's not 100% free) you can hand it off by other means and it's free anyway. Post it on Usenet and it's on Google Groups forever. Put it on a P2P network and then everyone will have it.
But there are powers that be. The legacy academic process is still going strong. Research publication is still refereed, and always should be. But the structure is wrong in terms of how it is financed. But those who benefitted well from the legacy structure are trying to keep it in place.
All research results should be available. Peer review should not ever be a form of censorship (though in the past it has had that effect). Instead, it should simply be a form of recognition. For example if every researcher published all their own work on their own web servers (or their department or university server), and then the peer review process indexed it all and made the decision on what to highlight, we'd have a better system; the best of both the peer review "elitism" and the openness of anarchy and anti-elitism. As long as the author wants to make it available, you can find it. And those who want to narrow their search based on the experts they trust, can do so as well.
So, forking Wikipedia would, in my opinion, not be a bad thing at all. As long as it is done in a friendly way, we get the best of both. One possible way to do this under a single site would be for articles written or rewritten by experts to always still link to the alternatives others offer. But even if it is done via separate sites, we still can have our cake and consume it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You have been massively trolled by someone who makes it their life's work to stir up controversy where none exists--mainly by making up so-called "facts" (no doubt culled from unbiased sources like Faux News) and spouting them as if they were absolute truth. He does it not only with this account, but with accounts under the names of bonch and Overly Critical Guy.
Please, do us all a favor and stop encouraging this troll by modding him up. And to those who modded him up: For shame. You will be punished in M2.
As our perceptions are limited, in some ways, our knowledge is always biased (because of experience, choices, agendas, etc.)
:)
Everything is matter of opinion.
I think the only thing that escapes this condition it's mathematics, as it is a pure mind creation. Others may not agree
So why can't Wikipedia be a multi-view encyclopedia?
This encyclopedia should be as diverse as the internet is.
Sure it's going to be source of debate and some bad memes are going to infiltrate (racism, religious intolerance), but surely can be balanced with proper commentary, and some sort of poll where people can tell what opinion was more useful/accepted (this even may change in time).
Can we be so arrogant to think there's only one way to interpret every thing in life?
And so facts, like opinions, largely become either trusted or untrusted, rather than verified. Wikipedia should implement a ratings system somewhat like that of slashdot, with these features:
- Everyone can rate any entry at any time, rather than by dint of being granted mod points
- More than one entry can exist for a given topic in Wikipedia, potentially conflicting directly with other entries on the same subject
- In addition to being able to rate entries, everyone can rate everyone else in terms of how much a given person trusts another person
The above leads to a situation where each person viewing wikipedia can mark various entries as trusted or not, and various people as trustworthy or not, and get a filtered view of wikipedia (or at least a per-entry score) individually tailored to the trust instincts of the individual viewer.For an example of a trust metric, check out Advogato.
I do not mean to say that there is no such thing as objective truth or reality, there indeed is such a thing. But geographical distance, time passed, lack of measuring equipment, and other factors mean that in a very practical and real sense, "knowing" truth in many cases is reduced to a matter of trust and intuition. There is such a thing as expertise, but qualifying expertise is, in the end, a matter of trust.
Debating this point is worthwhile, because it can be difficult to grasp and should not be accepted lightly. But neither should we go around in circles never acknowledging this point or moving past it. In the end, filtering reality through a sytem of trust, tailored to the individual, is something that should be reflected in entities such as wikipedia.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
As far back as the ancient Greeks, it was known the Earth was a sphere seven thousand miles across. The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes was down in one city on the spring solstice and looked down a well. He discovered the sunlight shone down to the very bottom. The next year in a different city, again on the solstice, he found himself again by a well. Lo and behold, he was embarassed to discover the well's shadow landed halfway down it.
Eratosthenes thought this was an interesting problem and set himself to tackling it. The only way it could work, he realized, was if the surface of the Earth was a sphere. So by measuring where the shadows fell on the inside of the well and doing a little math, Eratosthenes correctly measured the size of the Earth, accurate to within five percent.
It was one of the finest hacks in the histories of physics, of geometry, of geography, of mathematics. Eratosthenes published his discovery far and wide, and it was a standard part of education throughout the Roman Empire, throughout the Dark Ages, on into the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.
Every educated person in Columbus' time knew the Earth was round, could tell you why the Earth was round and how Eratosthenes proved the Earth was round. Columbus knew the Earth was round because Columbus had read Eratosthenes as a young man.
Quite some time ago, a writer named Washington Irving wrote a biography of Christopher Columbus in which he needed to make Columbus a man with vision in a world full of the blind. So, with complete disregard for historical truth, Irving had as his story's centerpiece Columbus' conception of the world being round and the world insisting that no, it must be flat.
So no, inertia doesn't have much to do with truth.
As evidenced by the fact you think that for a long time people thought the Earth was flat.
In the finite field of two elements, the only elements are 0 and 1. There is no element named 2, and for this reason it is simply not possible for 1+1 to equal 2 (in fact, 1+1 equals 0 in this context). More generally, 1+1 equals 0 in any ring of characteristic 2.
This example illustrates the reason that I think you are wrong and that the Wikipedia founder who wrote the articles being referenced in the story is right. You claim that
which is literally true, but misleading for what it leaves out. What it leaves out is that you need unrealistically strong critical thinking skills in order for you alone to match up with the entirety of human knowledge that has been accumulated in the generations before you. I believe that no one person can ever be truly an expert in even a single field of human knowledge. How then can you expect anyone to accurately filter good information from bad, across the entire spectrum of human knowledge?It is easy to say that in principle one could distinguish good information from bad by thought alone. However, as you yourself just demonstrated, doing it in practice is much harder than it seems in theory. The truth is that 1+1 does not always equal 2, but very very very few people would ever even initiate the process of questioning such a fact. The number of people who can recognize inaccuracies in a statement such as "you can [only] get one answer. 1+1=2." is very very small. It is simply not true that most people can filter good information from bad in specialized subjects.
That, my friend, is why we need experts.
Slashdot of course has its famous slashdot moderation mechanism. I see truth in Wikipedia being filtered by something else, the passion of a relatively smaller (per subject or wiki entry) group of committed bloggers. Entries on controversial subjects (like the ones on a certain invaded or liberated Middle Eastern country) tend to be reverted and re-reverted more often because more people feel passionate enough about them to actually click on the Edit tab and rewrite the truth from their perspective. On the other hand, wrong information on subjects which are of interest to literally only a handful of people tend to sit for a long time. But that's okay. Only a handful of people will be affected by the mis(dis)information.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
Someone call Ken Jennings and have him review the changes being made.
It's just plain stupid to call Wikipedia a "failure".
In 2 years, it has gone from the 10,000th most visited site on the net to the 200th. There are over 400,000 English articles and almost 25 edits every minute.
Wikipedia *is* the largest encyclopedia in the world.
Everyone likes to complain about Wikipedia's "reliability". They miss the point of Wikipedia altogether - Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a primary source, it's supposed to be a reference. It's a place where a casual user can find information about a wide range of topics. Some of that information may be inaccurate or biased, but so what? All sources are biased and no source is free from inaccuracies. CNN frequently makes horrendous mistakes. Just look at their tech articles. The WSJ recommended a homeopathic medication (a.k.a. water) for the flu on their "Top ways to avoid the flu" list, just below hand washing. Britanica is ripe with errors and bias.
Wikipedia is an experiment. Guess what, so is democracy. I've seen first hand how uninformed and confused voters are (particularly in the US, but also worldwide). But we live in a representative democracy because we don't have anything better. We believe in a limited free market because, despite all of its flaws, we don't have anything better.
Wikipedia is the best resource we have. Complaining that it is too open is like complaining that democracy is too open. The uninformed can edit, and the uninformed can vote. Is it really any different?
Most people here try to say that Wikipedia is indeed accurate (proof by example) or is not accurate (again quoting examples). The point that the author of the article makes is that Wikipedia is not in principle accurate in the sense that theoretically (even if it NEVER happens) some one may hit a highly inaccurate version of the truth that just happened to be there, even for a few minutes.
This is not a matter of actual content (which may be excellent), but a matter of principle. Can you trust an anonymous editor as source? This is the real question. Maybe foo32@koko.com is a real genius, but maybe I would trust a Nobel prize winner much more in a given issue.
To put this into perspective, instead of quoting semi-religious/political issues, let us consider for example whether any of us would trust wikipedia as a reference for a medical condition. Would you really take pill X or have surgery because wikipedia says so? You would probably want an extremely rigorous randomized double-blind stage-III study for safety and an FDA approval for health matters. You definitely do not need this kind of academic rigor for most wikipedia entries, but the difference is real.
The academic world is not perfect and maybe some anti-elitism is well deserved, but I think wikipedia must really adopt slightly different policies in order to transcend the level of "convenient online source" and become a real repository of human knowledge.
P.
You're mixing up intelligence and merit. These are not necessarily the same. One might point to any number of people whose intelligence might be beyond dispute, but who might be properly disqualified from a list of best potential leaders for other failings. It would be implausible to suggest, for instance, that Osama bin Laden is an idiot; he clearly has some ability to inspire, as well as a highly developed knack for self-preservation beyond what is likely to be possessed by a fool.
Josef Stalin was also quite probably highly intelligent, given his rise to power and his ability to maintain it despite not only the Nazi threat to the Soviet state but also the enmity of numerous other factions within the Communist party and the surviving anti-Communists. He was certainly bright enough to reverse previous dogma when it seemed necessary to do so, such as reducing the influence of political commissars in the military; reinstating officer's shoulderboards as a symbol of their authority despite how this might contradict the goal of classlessness; and even rehabilitating some worthy commanders from the prison system, IIRC.
Bobby Fischer might also be highly intelligent. He's at least capable of having been one of the world's best chess players, and that's a domain in which the ability to plan ahead and a fanatical attention to detail and memorization works. He's also, from what I've read, possibly bi-polar, and definitely a radical Holocaust denier and a paranoid believer in wide-ranging Jewish conspiracies to get him.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I put forth that most intellectual elite do not see the "average" man as something to be gotten rid of, but rather something to learn to live with and to take care of.
Never gotten rid of, but far too often exploited or used. Even taken care of is not a great thing; would you like to be adopted as someone's pet and taken care of, and denied any right or ability to make your own choices, or your own ways in life?
And funily enough your argument is so persuasive superficially that you would be a shining example probing it. But you are not, because your argument is plainly speaking crap.
Human knowledge changes all the time, an expert is a person that after devoting more time and energy than most to a given topic can provide more relevant information than lets say, er, you, or in general most other people.
The two examples you cite, specially regarding homosexuality, reflected the knowledge of the time (and sometimes that knowledge is framed by politics or bigotry, like your example about black people).
Experts were more knowledgable about the topic,, but the understanding of the topic was so bad that their opinions, with 20/20 hindsight, were as you have rightly put it, compltely wrong.
To judge present days experts, dealing with todays constraints about current knowledge, based on how we perceive today experts of the past is most intellectually dishonest and frankly disingineous.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Essentially you're saying that no one should be considered a reputable source because no one can ever agree with someone else about something being factual. That's complete bullshit. The reality is that in most cases the FACTS are relatively easy to agree on and the presentation is only a little more difficult. Considering this is a repository of known information it seems rather nihilistic to say that nothing has an absoluteness or basis in truth.
Also, experts are rare. Even if you get 5 or 10 fighting over something that's still magnitudes more productive than having millions of idiots fighting. Experts have a tendency to be considerate of opposing views and are usually rational enough to accept a different opinion if it is proven superior to theirs.
Lastly, in the absence of a perfect world of having one grand expert in every topic, you can just have a number of omnipotent Wiki editors who have good sense. Much like Cowboy Neal, there are many people who are not experts in everything but are very good JUDGES of experts. It goes a long way to putting the odds with the right facts and not just the popular facts.
I guess my main question is how he wants to declare who is an expert. If it's something like karma where the community can vote to increase or decrease the so-called experts power then it'd be fine. I wouldn't want to be forced to accept some self-declared experts point of view just because they have a Harvard degree or something such as that though.
So let users give karma to other users and let them decide to filter out edits done by users under a given karma level unless those edits are approved by a higher-level user. I'd never keep someone from editing, since the system keeps revisions anyway, (excepting spam-bots, etc) but I'd allow users to control what they saw.
Linux has experts but they are experts that come out of the community. Nobody goes out and hires experts to take over a responsibility - they just join, contribute, and as they earn trust they work their way up the chain.
Community trust should be all that defines who is an expert and who is not. If people want to show some creditials to boost that trust then that is fine but I wouldn't assign users a trust rating based soley on their creditials.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
"truth is the invention of a liar" Heinz von Foerster (according to google)
The difference between science and other studies is that there is a well established scientific method for determining scientific truth. If hypothesis can be verified by experiment then it is accepted. Ms Irigaray can scream at the top of her lungs that the distinction between red and green is a product of sexist bias but that won't stop her from getting run over at the next intersection.
The problem is that nowadays the experiments are so much more complicated than crossing the street that the layman cannot understand the results. Hence, they need to reference sources many degrees of separation from the primary data. Irigaray's rants become equated with the theory of Einstein because people don't understand the Michelson Morley experiment and that the reasoning that follows its interpretation leading to relativity are *not* arbitrary.
As for your examples. Everyone knew Lysenko was full of crock - possibly even Lysenko. Or to put it another way, the data, even then, did not support his assertions. As for nature/nurture debates and climatology - these will be resolved eventually - with more evidence. Not loudness of shouting, not voting, not modding up or down, not TV campaigns but evidence. That's science. Whether people decide to listen - well that's politics...
Just add Slashdot style moderation of articles and revisions thereto.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It sure would be nice if Wikipedia worked with Firefox.
The third thing that makes Wikipedia unlike any other encylopedia, in my mind just as important as the two you mention, is the existence of a change history. By itself this makes Wiki better than any of the other encyclopedias.
We can talk about revert wars, and in fact we can see how they happened. When you pick up your Encylopedia Britannica, can you see what disagreements existed between the author, the editor, and the publisher? Can you see what changed between one revision and the next? Being able to see how the encyclopedia got to where it is -- be that an excellent article or a terrible one -- is a great advantage.
The enemies of Democracy are
Perhaps you would enlighten us with the eternal, non-relativistic, truths of morality.
If you believe that post was informative, then you really are naive and fit in with most of the /. crowd, immature and unable to separate wheat from chaf just as most readers of Wikipedia can't tell crap from "truth". The whole mentality of "it's on the internet, so it must be true" is so lame.
There's a lot of talk about some sort of editorial system / peer review / approved article / version 1.0 / what-have-you at Wikipedia already. See here for starters. Jimbo Wales has even talked about it. Perhaps people should check out what's actually going on at Wikipedia instead of speculatively bashing it/writing suggestion articles about it/etc with their backs apparently turned?
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
It's as though those behind Wikipedia believe there is no real truth. And if that's the case, why even bother to create an encyclopedia based on facts. To create a system of facts that you know are no true, because there is no truth, seems like an exercise in futility.
:-)
Certainly there's truth, but no one really agrees what that is
There's empirically verifiable truth, what are often called 'facts'. There's also historical truth, which sometimes can be empirically verified (ends & outcomes), but other times not (means). And there's theorems, which if empirically verifiable or mathematically provable, are considered "true" until we find a counter-example. And then there's an area of stuff called "knowledge", or justified true belief. Problem with knowledge, is that it's very personal. And so "experts" (especially law experts!) disagree all the time!
This is why encyclopedias haven't very useful for anything beyond widely reputable empirical and historical facts, and while specialized texts or monographs drive expert debate.
Wikipedia seems to be toying with going further in terms of offering a forum for 'expert debate' than past encyclopedias. Perhaps it will succeed, or more likely satellilte wikis will pop up.
What's to stop the same utterly informed beliefs from mucking up Wikipedia?
Do you trust the strength of a literate elite to ensure that an encyclopedia is accurate, or in the strength of an oral community to ensure discipline in the evolution of that knowledge? Britannia was the former, Wikipedia is the latter. There's a tradeoff. WIth literate communities, they can spread their knowledge far & wide, but the feedback process is slow and minimal. You basically have to hope for a benevolent set of people, without hidden agendas.
With traditional oral societies, control breaks down at a certain size due to the immediacy of debate (e.g. in wikipedia, this would be a revert war) -- but there is a benefit that the nuance of evolving thought is carried through time.
What makes Wikipedia interesting is that it could become a nice hybrid of the two approaches, assuming they one day introduce a reputation system to go along side the free editing.
It also seem ridiculous that people at Wikipedia will assume that someone who plays Halo all day will have equal knowledge about aquatic plant life as someone who has studied it his entire life. If that's the world we're heading for, we are screwed as a society.
Ah, Platonic elitism rears its head.
Look, no one is suggesting that a gamer has more knowledge than a dedicated scientist. All I think the suggestion is that the Halo 2 gamer has the ability and right to question authority.
Society needs this desperately. I'm going to channel John Ralston Saul for a moment: How are people supposed to enter into public debate if the concepts which define our society and decided the manner in which we're governed are open neither to understanding nor questioning? Change can only come through what will seem at first to be outrageous statements, provocation, and a stubborn refusal to accept the calm, controlling formulae of conventional wisdom.
Remember: Encyclopedias and dictionaries were largely developed during the enlightenment by folks such as Diderot, Voltaire, and Flaubert as verbal guerilla warfare. They freed language from religion and court politics, and challenged the old regime. They didn't claim to be perveyors of "truth". Which is more true to that spirit -- Wikipedia, or traditional encyclopedias?
-Stu
The problem is that the problem is not made evident.
;-) No elitism. No limits. No experts.
Wikipedia does not do well in discussing controversial subjects because there are revision wars. The wars should not be stopped, they should be identified and made obvious.
Wikipedia does not do well with really obscure content because nobody looks at it to check that it's right. These articles shouldn't be banned, they should be labeled as seldom viewed.
Next to the definition of a term should lie 2 indicators. Consent given to the current revision, and volatility of the term. If there have been a large number of revisions recently then volatility is high. Nobody touching anything, then volatility is low. If a subject is controversial then the information given should be identified as rapidly changing and under debate with a high volatility marking.
Consent is something that can be given by anyone to a revision that is particularly apt. No more than one point of consent can be received by a revision per hour, only the current revision can receive consent points, consent can come from anyone who has not already given consent to the term in question.
Items of little interest to the majority will have neither consent nor volatility. Good, unoffending revisions will gain consent and lack volatility. Items under debate will have high volatility and consent will be impossible, as well as meaningless. Problem solved. Wiki would now self identify its own authoritativeness. These fields would not be editable by anyone.
This is the way things should be as I see them. Elect me dictator, and I will make them so.
-theed
You're right, that's not a very good link. There actually is an article on wikipedia detailing and responding to criticisms about it. When wikipedia stops being down for me (my personal biggest gripe with wikipedia -- its downtime) i'll go change that link for you ;)
After all, every page is editable. If that link annoyed you, why didn't you change it?
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
I've thought about this alot. Forums represent the underlying thought process behind a particular (say a) wiki article.
Forums are discussions about the truth of something. The purpose of discussions is to find the truth.
Documents should represent the truth. And they are a quick reference and summary to the discussions.
for example, how many times did you wish the information you were looking for on an online forum were in a document format (a bit like an FAQ)? Then you wouldn't have to sift through lots of crap posts posted by people like HotGuy76 and LAN8. Instead those forum members could put their thoughts into a form of a document while at the same time discuss a topic in a forum format. It's great for newbies to a subject to read the representative document. Experienced forum members (subject experts) modify this document as necessary.
In my world, to every topic there should be two elements: a discussion (forum/meeting/conversation/debate..) AND a document describing the topic (article/wiki/book..). The two can coexist.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
1) Trust the people.
Wikipedia demonstrates how to empower the people. How to find the equilibrium between freedom and control, trust and caution.
2) Spread the knowledge.
Wikipedia is being developed in more than 200 languages, the last time when I checked. Most of the non-english languages have negligible presence on the web (for e.g. Asian languages), while some don't have any web presence at all and still have to figure out how to computerize their language (for e.g. some African languages). The articles written even by non-experts in those languages are proved to be much more useful to the people who don't understand english. The issue of "Reliability of source" does not arise when there are not too many sources available. Or in some cases the other options are too difficult to access, like visiting the "nearest" library that may be more than 100 miles away and requesting the librarian to help you find an article published in the Encyclopedia (in your language) in the year 1970!
3) Sister sites like wikiquote, wiktionary, wikibooks etc.
The issues of bias and trolls does not arise in case of quotes by great people and wiktionary (dictionary). I think no one will doubt the value that is being created through these sites.
I can't count the number of times I've seen a link on Wikipedia that made me say "ooh, I'd like to know more about that" and clicked it, just to find out that it only points to a simple definition of whatever term I clicked. That's not what I wanted, dammit!
^_^ And you're absolutely right. Wikipedia is not a dictionary as they repeatedly state. Doesn't keep people from treating it that way, but eh... reminds me of that old wooden spoon about how an early encyclopaedia went through 16 pages on horse breeding and the entry on "woman" was "The female counterpart to Man."
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Your "example" doesn't actually exist in wikipedia. Not a very strong argument, that.
The actual wikipedia article links to an actual criticisms of wikipedia article, no problem. Though I like this one better.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.