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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."
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?
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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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.
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.
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
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.
Sure, there are revert wars, but there are also technical measures in place to stop them quickly. Wikipedia's so-called "Three Revert Rule" (any single person cannot revert the same article more than 3 times in any 24 hour period) get fairly strictly enforced nowadays. If you notice a glaring mistake, you could at least point it out on the articles Talk page. Reverting Talk pages is a big no-no, and if anyone disagrees they can add a comment to your objection, rather than reverting your edit.
/. it can happen that someone builds up excellent karma and then starts to troll, somewhat with impunity at least initially. On WP you may be forced to explain a change you made even though you may have a history of good edits, but that too is a Good Thing. You may be an expert in one area, but that doesn't mean all your changes should be automatically trusted.
In general the "threat of revert wars" you speak of seems more like FUD to me. People always say, "Anyone can edit? That will never work." Yet so far it's been working amazingly well. Sure there are trolls and, perhaps more importantly, changes made in good faith that are of poor quality or plainly wrong. The fact that anyone can edit helps, since you can go in and correct those mistakes.
Don't take a vague threat of a revert war as an excuse. You may need to explain on an article's Talk page why you made certain corrections, but that's a Good Thing. Anti-elitism is something to be embraced: it means not blindly following someone because they have the right credentials as an authority. It's usually good to have those credentials, but it's better to demonstrate that you know what you're doing than to simply assert it. If you really know your stuff, you should be able to explain your position clearly and I shouldn't have to take your word for it.
Ideally, this also means that editors cannot abuse trust based on a history of useful contributions. Here on
Overall, open rational dialog is a successful approach. Sure, there will be trolls who try to abuse this, but you already know how to deal with them from your experience here on Slashdot.
Wikipedia gets 24.8 "submissions" (edits) per minute. This is several orders of magnitude higher than the linux kernel. Your comparison is specious. -- A Wikipedia Admin
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
No data sources are reliable. The Encyclopeadia Britanica which keeps being referred to as some sort of gold standard of accuracy was started as a triumphalist celebration of the British Empire.
But even unreliable data can point to data that is more reliable. Police investigations do not begin with firm facts, they begin with a set of evidence which may or may not be contaminated in various ways. The same is actually the case in physics research, there are very few experiments that work really well and repeatedly when they are first done.
In the last election we discovered that the mainstream media are terrebly sloppy and unreliable. The media gave far more attention to the smear boat liars for Bush and TANG memos provided by a highly dubious source than they did to actual policies.
The problem with openness is that it only takes a small proportion of jerks to screw everything up. I don't think anyone would seriously consider running the Linux kernel on wiki lines.
Fortunately there is a very simple way out of the current situation and one that will inevitably be put into practice. Just as slashdot has a reputation mechanism and can be surfed at +1 (mostly good stuff) or -1 (mostly trolls) the same sort of mechanism will eventually be put in place on wikipedia or a branch thereof.
The creative commons license even makes it easy for people to do this, the troll version of wiki is simply the last input to the editor queue.
A deeper problem though is the one that all these knowledge engineering projects suffer from at some point, not everything is physics, in most fields there is no absolute knowledge of the form that fits into a rigid taxonomic structure. There is no definitive opinion of the literary merits of Burroughs or Dickens.
The revert wars are in part reflecting genuine differences of opinion. A bunch of loonies who think they have found absolute truth and attempt to construct a rigid ideology arround it are not going to tolerate dissenting views. And bunches of loonies with a rigid ideology are not going to tollerate any form of epistomological relativism.
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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.
but when you run into something that's wrong, it's really wrong.
I'm curious what is really wrong about the Fox News piece. There are a couple of other replies asking the same question that appear to indicate a bias against Fox News, and I want to make clear that I'm not railing against Fox. I host a highly politically charged mailing list with extremists and moderates from the full spectrum. While there is strong disagreement on whether Fox News presents the views of the majority of the US, those from both the left and the right concur that, overall, it is presented with a neo-conservative perspective. Likewise, members of the list from both the left and right concur that The New York Times presents things from a liberal perspective. I hasten to add that the fact that those people concur does not make the content of the allegations fact, but it does make the allegations themselves worthy of inclusion in a proper analysis of current events.
If the Fox News piece were reflective of some bias in Wikipedia, I would not expect to see reports of left bias allegations in the article on The New York Times - but, indeed, the entry for The New York Times includes a similar section on allegations of bias.
This strikes me as being about stating the facts. There are allegations of bias, and it's not Wikipedia's job to decide that those allegations are correct (and state them as fact) or that they are incorrect (and not state them). The role of an encyclopedia, at least in the context of current events, and where made possible by the technological capabilities of Wikipedia, is to state the facts, and make clear when those facts are allegations (IE: the allegation itself is a fact, the truth of the content of the allegation may be questionable).
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And that is a perfect illustration of why someone with an agenda (or just ego problems) will always win stupid arguments on the Internet - they care more. Since the very young have a tendency toward fanaticism, more time, more energy and fewer opportunities for rewards in other spheres their views often win out in "easy democracy" like wikis or newsgroups.
Another poster argued that the Fox News "allegations of bias" section is unfair because no similar section can be put on CNN's article. This simply shows that *there is less controversy over bias on CNN* which is undoubtedly true. CNN is generally percieved as no more or less biased than the general American media; whose percieved bias is already documented on Wikipedia. All Wikipedia can do is be a record of what is generally percieved; it cannot aspire to some higher standard of "genuine truth". Indeed, the nature of "genuine truth" is a philosophical question which can be debated at length. Despite this lack of "genuine truth", Wikipedia (including this "Fox News" article) is still an amazingly valuable resource.
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Just curious, if someone forced you to pose naked in a position where it appeared you were about to engage in homosexual acts, and took pictures and threatened to show the pictures to your friends and family would you take offense. Might you call that "sexual torture"?
You see you got hung up on the "rape" part exclusively and the article's title was "Rape and SEXUAL TORTURE". Whether rape occurred at Abu Ghraib is open to debate, you dismiss it out of hand though you don't know. What would it take to prove to you rape happened at Abu Ghraib? Well video tapes but video tapes aren't proof either, they tend to just look like porn and its not likely someone would be stupid enough to actually rape someone in front of a camera anyway. Is anecdotal evidence good enough, well that is mostly what you have that Saddam used rape as tool, and that is mostly what you have that it occurred at Abu Ghraib. As in most cases of political propaganda you have anecdotal evidence that you choose to believe(against Saddam) and anecdotal evidence you choose to disregard(against Abu Ghraib) because you predetermined which you wanted to believe.
The rape issue aside, there is a mountain of photo and video evidence of sexual abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, but you seem to be trying to brush it under the rug because it doesn't conform to what you want to believe.
If you weren't pushing a political agenda here you should have probably added the link to Saddam's use of torture, and not tried to purge the Abu Ghraib link. Abu Ghraib is an undeniable instance of sexual torture, occuring in a U.S. military prison, with indisputable graphic evidence on a scale which is rare. You choose to try to make Abu Ghraib go away because it doesn't conform to what you thought the U.S. stands for. Well the U.S. unfortunately has fallen pretty far from the lofty ideal you seem to think it adheres to. You trying to pretend otherwise isn't going to change it. If you feel bad about it you should hold the Bush administration and the Army responsible for failing to insure humane treatment of prisoners of war.
As for state sponsorship of all this, well that is a tough one. Unfortunately the organization that conducted the investigation was the same organization that perpetrated the offense, the Army. It is an unspoken truth about most militaries that, if they can they will blame everthing on the little fish, the enlisted men, and protect their officer corp and chain of command. It appears they may have done just that at Abu Ghraib so far. Its pretty much undeniable military intelligence officers and the CIA were endorsing the "softening up" that was occuring at Abu Ghraib, though maybe the people doing it got carried away. There have been far to many leaks of of information showing that officers and the civilian leadership in the Bush administration has been sanctioning degrees of torture as a matter of policy. Unfortunately when you santion a little torture you run a pretty high risk of it becoming rampant and abusive as it did at Abu Ghraib. This is a place the U.S. just simply should have never gone. It should have strictly adhered to the Geneva conventions in treatment of all prisoners instead of finding legal justifications in the White House for why people in these wars aren't worthy of this most basic humane treatment. You strictly adhere to the Geneva conventions, if for no other reason, than to help insure your soldiers will get the same humane treatment if they are taken prisoner. It is no assurance of that treatment but at this point the U.S. has no ground to stand on in demanding humane treatment of its POW's because it has chosen to unilaterally withdraw from the Geneva conventions using legalistic hair splitting.
@de_machina
That is certainly not the premise or philosophy behind Wikipedia. As an editorial showcase, Wikipedia is hardly well designed. The ability to edit articles (and, by extension, remove or change incorrect information) only makes sense if you accept that there is a difference between truth and falsehood.
I think criticism of Wikipedia generally tends to miss the fact that most contributors recognize that bad data can sneak in, and that it's impossible to ensure 100% reliability. The rationale for Wikipedia merely suggests that the "open" approach offers some benefits not available to traditional encyclopedias (specifically, the breadth of specialized, niche or quickly changing information).
As someone who is an "expert" in at least one field (MLS degree), I tend to think that most criticism of Wikipedia is a bit naive: it overlooks shortcomings of traditional reference sources (print encyclopedias, etc.) simply because most people are familiar with them. We know how to read Encyclopedia Britannica, we know what to expect, and we know what to look out for, even if we often do so unconsciously. Wikipedia is an entirely new approach, and most people are still approaching it as they would traditional sources. Once things settle down and people become used to the idiosyncracies of Wikipedia as they have to other sources, I think it will be recognized for what it is: a valuable reference source that does not replace traditional encyclopedias anymore than traditional encyclopedias replaced research lithographs.
(Not to suggest that there aren't things that can be done to tweak Wikipedia so that, in Mr. Sanger's words, "the general public can regard [it] as reliable." But I think that's really something quite different than the sort of radical departure most such suggestions invariably seem to take.)
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
If I, rd_syringe, do not personally believe that something is true, no reference to it should be made.
This is clearly the case in the "Fisher Price" incident. This is a well-known criticism of Windows XP. The "hardcore guy" you are criticizing did the correct thing by citing the references and showing that yes, this is a criticism that's out there. You did the wrong thing by declaring 'Well, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia unless it's the majority view!' Is that what you think Wikipedia's purpose and policy is, to report only the "majority" view and pretend those other 'minority' views don't exist?
On the issue of the "Rape" article, you fail to mention several things.
One is that when you claimed that the wording only applied to "countries where torture is tolerated or accepted as part of the normal behaviour of police or security", the wording was changed to eliminate that artificial restriction on discussion of the subject. (It wouldn't make sense to create separate sections for "Rape and sexual torture in countries that tolerate it" and "Rape and sexual torture in countries that don't officially tolerate it", since they'd say pretty much the same thing.) Funny that you mention that "based strictly on the wording of the section, the link didn't apply," but fail to mention how that technicality disappeared.
Another is that you're bringing in your misconception again that the majority view (your view) is the truth and there's no need to discuss any others. First you say "there were no cases of rape involved" at Abu Ghraib. Then you mention "except that one prisoner is claiming it without proof." If you had joined Wikipedia earlier, instead of just joining around the same time that you started repeatedly removing the link to "Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse", I wouldn't have been surprised to see you editing out any reference to coercive interrogation techniques being used there because, hey, it's only one person claiming it without proof! Then it's only two people claiming it without proof, only five people claiming it with a photo of Lynndie England smirking at hooded naked prisoners simulating fellatio as proof...
Thirdly, you offer up as your proof that you were the thoughtful considerate party in the right, and that it was the other side, the "hardcore guy", who was "politically motivated", who "snuck in" his restoration of the link you removed ("snuck in"? are you suggesting I had a webcam on you and was carefully watching and waiting until you were looking the other way?) the fact that you offered The Rape of Nanjing as an alternate. Which you are claiming now is "more pertinent to that section than either of the links we had" and "just a given".
You fail to mention that it was explained to you why that was not a suitable alternative: the Rape of Nanjing was a famous military atrocity where there is no question that rapes were committed, as well as murders, as well as wholesale destruction. However, the entire reason that the Rape article has a section on Rape and Sexual Torture is to discuss rape when it occurs not as an act of self-gratification committed at another's expense (as it usually does), but as a method of torture to advance policy. No historical evidence has ever suggested that the Japanese commanders said to the soldiers who did the raping, "Hey, we're gonna want to get information out of those civilians later, so why don't you torture them by raping a bunch?" There's no suggestion that it was anything other than "They're the enemy anyways; whatever you feel like doing to them, go ahead and do it." To quote someone whose name I can't recall, "based strictly on the wording of the section, the link didn't apply."
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
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.
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