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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?
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
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
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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