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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?
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.
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
Sometimes I think it would be easier to grab the whole damned thing, strip out what isn't in topic...
So do that. Why is forking a bad thing? I thought that was the whole point of open-source.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
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!
This space intentionally left blank.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Just have 2 versions of every article - Evolving and Edited. People could toggle between the two depending on their preference.
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.
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. According to Wikipedia, Wiki wiki comes from the Hawaiian term for "quick" or "super-fast." Doesn't seem to be a buzzword. Now, wifi and blog are buzzwords and need to die, but wiki is fine in my book.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
on important issues people care to look up the most, you're virtually guaranteed a balanced article.
Is that like how the Slashdot moderation results in a balanced set of views?
Anyway, I'm off to use my KILLER Apple dual G5 (which can totally blow away anything Intel makes) with OS X (the best, prettiest OS ever) to share the latest movies and music with everyone in the world. Then perhaps I'll use my iPod for a while.
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."
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.
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."
Voting is flawed in that you can still have a lobby or biased voting base. [How many experts thought the earth was flat?]
Expert editorial is flawed because there is no way of identifying who is an unbiased, true expert. [The pope may be an expert on RC dogma but I wouldn't trust his opinions on Darwin.]
It is human nature to state an opinion as a fact as this is the basis for any argument. [A statement that uses passive wording or introduces self-doubt is always discounted. If evolution is true, man might have evolved from apes.]
It is easier to discount than disprove, which is why any comments must be factual. [The earth is round. No it isn't. Yes it is. Prove it.]
The only way to ensure reliable content is to have the 'benevolent dictator' it the form of a [re]known expert per field with published credentials. And that complete thwarts the ideal of a democracy.
And the whole expert thing is troubling anyway. Most of them are academics, and an academic by definition is a person who specializes in a field to the extent that they are narrow minded and no longer useful in most contexts. An evolutionist would argue that specialization may allow explotation of a niche, but over specialization is the key to extinction as there is slow adaptation to change.
Democracy does not yield a good genetic ranking. It assumes the voters aren't idiots.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
You seem to be taking a position that rape definitely did NOT happen. While a Google search does not prove anything, a quick read through of most of the articles found there should be sufficient to warrant further investigation before asserting with certainty that rape did not happen.
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.
If I add a really stupid bit of extra code to my linux kernel that solves my problem but causes bugs for 90% of other users out there, my change doesn't end up back in the main code that everyone else downloads unless it gets approval first. If I edit a Wikipedia article in a way that makes it true only 10% of the time, and false for 90% of cases, that change ends up in the public repository immediately.
So, no, this is nothing like open source.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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.
Is that like how the Slashdot moderation results in a balanced set of views?
Heheh, just like when someone gets modded "Flaimbait" for simply suggesting trying OpenBSD instead of Debian for a server (as seen in the recent 3.0r4 article). Given enough people and you'll likely see patterns in views. For lots of topics there can't really be a "balanced" view since everyone is going to have a different definition of "balance". Slashddot moderation isn't going for "balance" anyways, it's purely a populist/circlejerk tool.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
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.
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.
Uh, here's the small print from the top of that page:
This is not exactly the page you want to cite to debunk the suspicion that inauthentic photographs are being circulated out there by fanatics.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
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)
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/
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.
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.
There is the problem of determining the proper "balance".
For instance, I'm sure that if one solicited calls for 'balance' on Adolf Hitler, one could get LOTS of claims from his proponents suggesting all sorts of positives about him, blaming everybody but the Germans for the Second World War due to the Versaille Treaty, denying the Final Solution, attributing the Nazi defeat to Jewish Bolshevik traitors, or whatever. Personally, I'm inclined to think that any properly balanced view of him in terms of history should be profoundly negative... and fanatics will be inclined to frequently and loudly tilt the balance the other way.
In addition, the selection of facts -- even when true -- can be quite biased. A previous poster noted that an article on rape linked to the Abu Ghraib scandal. One might wonder if the same person who added that link would consent to linking an article about rampant sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers in the Congo, including the running of prostitution rings and the creation of child pornography involving rape, or perhaps listing articles on the French use of torture and extrajudicial execution during the war in Algiers in an article on torture or state terrorism. Somebody who has a bias specifically against the United States or its government, for instance, might constantly point to Abu Ghraib while ignoring far larger scandals.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Wikian: That's not right. I have a book that clearly states XYZ.
True--but sometimes a bit of give and take is necessary, too. Even when there is a new study (or more than one, for that matter) which reinterprets a historical event, there are often many people in the real world who may not want to change world views. You often have the same problem even if you ask an older expert. (Heck, if the old guy writes the Britannica article, the dead tree version is going to be stuck with the old theory, too.) It takes time to change minds, in Wikipedia as much as in the real world.
Sometimes diplomatic phrasing of the change helps quite a bit, so that people don't feel utterly snubbed. Something like
If there is a current dispute, address all of the reasonable points of view. If there has been a genuine shift in opinion, present the new view, but mention the old one for historical interest. Try not to delete anything unless absolutely necessary; just move it around to an appropriate section of the article. Heck, sometimes further new evidence will revive a deprecated theory, and it's handy to have the text around when that happens.Of course, sometimes some people on the Internet are just jerks, and there's not a lot you can do about them--if you meet one of those, you have my sympathy.
~Idarubicin