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Observer Gives Wikipedia Glowing Report
JaxWeb writes "The UK newspaper The Observer is running an article about the open encyclopaedia Wikipedia. The article, 'Why encyclopaedic row speaks volumes about the old guard,' gives Wikipedia a glowing report and mentions some of the issues which have recently occurred regarding the project, including the need to lock the George Bush article in the run up to the election, and Ex-Britannica editor Robert McHenry's comments, as previously mentioned on Slashdot."
It's nice to see a traditional media outlet take a favorable---not just arms-length "hmm"---view of Wikipedia. I hope others follow suit.
I think we need a Wikipedia topic icon....
Which "old guard?" Do they mean the likes of the USSR and the Berlin wall or the editors?
Why do the Wikipedia admins need to lock popular, topical and controversial articles from editing? Is it because these articles somehow attract more vandals than well-meaning passersby and contributors?
Or is it just that these popular, topical and controversial articles make Wikipedia's fundamental flaws more obvious?
First, don't attribute a columnist's piece to the newspaper. Second, John Naughton praises wikipedia for what it could be more than what it is right now. He's excited about it as a proof-of-concept.
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
'The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection,' sniffed EB's executive editor, Ted Pappas. 'That premise is completely unproven.'
That premise is a tautology given the assumption that "perfection" is attainable by any means.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
And hey, look! We've locked the article again, since it's been featured on Slashdot. Lovely. :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
If you go to Wikipedia in the press then you can see all the articles about Wikipedia that have been in mainstream newspapers. There really isn't any reason to post every single one, especially since this is probably the fifth article on Wikipedia that has been in the observer in the last year. Granted, I love Wikipedia, but everyone on slashdot already knows what it is so linking to it every week only serves to cause problems for the people monitoring the recent changes by giving them a surge of extra work.
According to the laws of aerodynamics, the bumblebee should not be able to fly. Yet fly it manifestly does, albeit in a stately fashion. So much for the laws of aerodynamics.
Erm, whoops, yes they should be able to fly. Their cliché is outdated.
English is easier said than done.
There are editors for a reason -- throwing out a picture that's a central point of a goddamn Michael Moore hit piece shows that some of the content isn't what you'd call, "objective." In fact, it makes Fox News look like an example of journalistic integrity.
And it's not only this article. I was looking through a few things on Eastern Europe, specifically, the revolution in Romania in 1989. It's one thing to explain what happened -- it's another to assign motivations, for which you have zero evidence.
Wikipedia is useful for some things, but when it comes to contentious political issues, it's pretty lousy.
Once again, the apocryphal tale of bumblebees flying "despite the laws of aerodynamics saying they can't" makes the rounds.
In truth, the only reason such a "proof" exists is that the laws were applied incorrectly; the scientists involved used the explanations for single-foil flight (i.e. birds' wings.)
Whether they did so accidentally or as a joke remains the domain of speculation, but the truth is that the laws of aerodynamics can account for bumblebees quite nicely.
Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
Is that the wikipedia is designed around the original intent of the Internet in the first place. Nevermind what the internet has become in the modern era, it was originally designed to share and consolidate information from all its users. The Wikipedia is designed specifically to facilitate that. And, while in its default mode, it does leave itself open to people who want to make an arse of themselves, there are plenty of counter measures and options to such problems. All in all, it is satisfying to see the success of the project purely because it is nice to see the internet used for what it was intended for and do it well.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
Now wiktionary isn't responding at all. :-(
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." - Josef Stalin
"Just as one day kids will wonder if there was life before Google". Well, I'd say it is good that Wikipedia is in the company of Google.:) And also in the top 100 English language web sites according to Alexa. I suppose it's certain that this experiment is doomed to be a flop.:)
I'm biased, since I'm one of the roots for the Wikipedia/Wikimedia servers.
I suppose I should ask: any interest in a Slashdot interview on the capacity planning and technical side of Wikipedia? That's my area... of course, that also means I'll say what we'd love to have donated (anyone got a couple of racks and 100 megabits/s spare?:)) Oh, sorry, I'm supposed to have a neutral point of view...:) Or is that I'm supposed to be serious in public? Never can get that straight...:)
Might as well get the usual comments out of the way...
- Wikipedia is SOOOOO much more current than old smelly encyclopedias
- Wikipedia can be vandalized by ANYBODY
- Don't get your panties all twisted up, it's just a resource
- Donate your child's scholarship fund to wikipedia!!!1uno!!
- You know, if they were watching porn instead of listen to rap when they first thought up the name, it'd be a wompwompedia (rimshot)
- You know, I heard Elmer Fudd was disappointed that there's no entry on Ricardo Montalban's feet (rimshot)
- You know, I bet that if (poster is shot before finishing comment)
- And finally, the obligatory "Let's get this out of the way" post
No it's been like that for the last two days. They don't really know what is wrong with it as far as I knew last. If you look at the traffic chart you will see there are just some random holes where the servers requests for a few minutes. However in the last couple days it has been much more laggy than normal.
That is all.
Well, it's also useful for playing games with pages that you don't agree with until they get locked.
Nonsense. He says he and countless others use it all the time. He says he finds the articles useful and more timely than EB's. He cites the articles of George Bush and Sollog and Tsunami as examples of Wikipedia's enormous success. He even begins the article by comparing Wikipedia to the bumblebee: all of our theory says that it shouldn't work, but it does. This is not a man waiting for things to get better; it is a man who thinks things are great now. Perhaps you only read the last paragraph where he says that someday it will as invaluable and popular as Google. That hardly means he isn't praising its current state. RTFA next time.
Holes today were an unruly crawler. The appropriate /25 is now firewalled at the squids. Yesterday two of the five database slaves were down for a while. Site was available but it was slower than usual on the database side.
Performance issues these days are mostly due to uneven apache load balancing. We're working on it.
From the article:
Then a well-known crackpot wrote a Wikipedia page about himself, only to have it, er, rendered more objective by other contributors. This drove him wild. Again the page was locked (in what seemed to me to be an admirably detached state) to prevent further vandalism.
Does anyone know who this is referring to?
On a side note, some time ago I tried to create an article on the infamous AI crank Mentifex, but Mentifex himself (who also frequents slashdot) ended up vandalizing the article repeatedly. It got so bad and was so difficult to maintain that in the end the article was simply deleted.
Was it really locked because too much opinion was being injected into the article, or because the people that run Wikipedia didn't want to run afoul of McCain-Feingold (regardless of how truthful the entry may have been)?
Even if locking articles would fix the vandalism problem, it isn't the best solution IMHO.
Why don't they implement a 'sandbox' where new additions go, getting published after a certain period of time and where previous authors can vote against the addition?
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
The virtues of Wikipedia are IMO directly linked to reasons that visitors have for editing content. Like current news events: something big happens, and people flock to WP to check out how a tsunami speeds across the Pacific -> lots of edits on tsunami related articles. This makes Wikipedia look like a strange mix between encyclopedia and news site. If you would sort edit statistics by topic, and place that side by side with news events, a striking correspondence wouldn't surprise me.
Being web-based, and used mostly by folks that spend much time online, you can expect more-than-average tech interested editors, and yes, voila: a rich filled section on computer lingo and related topics.
So yes, biased in many ways, maybe not too accurate or authorative, but very useful nevertheless. Works for me...
Many people when first informed about the concept of Wikipedia scoff at the idea that you can get factual information from a medium that is open to everyone. Normally I just agre with them that it is a problem that requires some effort to combat.
Recently I've changed my whole view on reading information online, due mostly to thinking about the Wikipedia concept. Consider Wikipedia to be analogous to asking a classmate a question like "What does ecology mean?" or "Could you explain a null modem?"
Nobody would decry this as a fruitless effort to gain information, because it is quite possible that your friend knows a lot of information on the subject in question. So you take that information at face value, knowing that there is a possibility he's wrong. If the information "feels right" or "feels wrong" that's all you can tell. It then becomes a starting point for deeper investigation, not the final word on anything. In the end it raises another very important question: Who do you trust to have the final word on something?
with Wikipedia, read this. It seems there are some people who refuse to acknowledge that the other side may have some good points and they try to boil complex social problems into 1 sentence solutions. Now this is not nearly as popular an article as George W. Bush I am sure, but I would be willing to be that a 3rd grader is much more likely to do a report on homelessness than they are Bush.....
Monstar L
I am thinking about boycotting Wikipedia until there are more leftwing wikipedia admins
eat shiat and bark at the moon
One wonders what would have become of the Enlightenment had Guttenberg's press been instantly Wikified so that everything from Luther to Decarte had been subject to immediate editing, retraction and deletion by the the Roman Church, with their only recourse argument with armies of decons, friars, monks, priests, bishops and popes.
Seastead this.
Now, if you want to get more interesting, Yahoo! Japan got us pretty well once or twice after linking to something from their front page, which gave more than 400 extra hits per second; we survived. :)
Alexa's page ranking also puts Wikipedia well above Slashdot.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You know I was sorely tempted to mod you down just for using the words "Fox News" and "journalistic integrity" in the same sentence.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
What you are seeing in the Wiki fights is simply a microcosm of the conflicts that have permeated western societies since, well, the rise of humanism.
Who is authority? Who defines truth? Why should I believe them?
In our pseudo egalitarian society, we can no longer even really understand WHY someone would obey a king, or the concept of Divine Right, except insofar as the king-as-thug interpretation, since he's got all the military power and can threaten us. But the fact was that a great many people believed the king was the king because he DID have the divine right to be there.
What we see in Wiki is the ultimate in relativism - the 'consensus' decides what's truth, which I think we can all agree is patently absurd. But relativism has so overtaken our societies that no fact can simply be stated without dissent anymore. I that sense, Wiki is merely a symptom, not a disease of itself.
As the author states, if you use it, you vote for its validity. If you don't, you don't. Personally, I use Wiki all the time, and particularly for 'hot topics' I find it constantly plastered with bias and political correctness. (But then again, so are articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica - more subtle perhaps, but there is a probably bias inherent in any extended presentation of just about anything.)
Wiki is a useful friend who knows something about everything - you can ask him or her whatever you want and probably get a right answer. It doesn't mean Wiki should be held in the standard of a bibliographic reference tool, any more than a useful friend would be.
-Styopa
I agree. Too many people here forget that the only time an opinion can be attributed to a newspaper itself - rather than the opinion of an individual contributor - is if the opinion was an unsigned piece written by that paper's editorial board.
I just sent them a small donation to perhaps cover my own bandwidth costs for the next year or so. When I have time, I would like trying to download the version of their database that only contains most recent edits (i.e., not all edit histories). A lot of the articles have good categories attached to them so I would like to do a machine learning run to build a categorizer (but this took me several days to do with the Reuters corpus, so I may not get to this for a while).
this doesn't have to be bad, but it's a fact. Scientific practice around the world works by peer review. If you want to publish, your work is peer reviewed. If you want to get employment/government money, you are judget by peers with better credentials.
WP lets everyone edit (nearly) every page. The only distinction is time spent online. If you spend 4 hours, you can edit twice as much as with 2 hours. Generally, the quality of WP will converge to the mean of all users, a college education (considering that people with less skills pro'lly won't edit).
So if you want to "get a clue", WP is for you. If you are a bit above the noob in a topic, look elsewhere.
Notice the Bush entry says he went to Clown College. He certinly must have paid attention there.
Maybe slashdot should go to a "digs" system - have members vote on stories they like, and the most popular stories go on the front page.
WP is down or s--l--o--w all the time, especially peak. They could ask high power providers for mirror space but their too self-involved
Can somebody in the UK please explain the relationship between the Guardian and Observer newspapers. Thanks.
That would only be true if each person was wandering around Wikipedia editing perfectly good articles down to their own level of ignorance. While that concept is comedy gold, it's not reality. Ordinary people encountering a Wikipedia article about something they're ignorant of will read it an learn, not edit it destructively.
Looks like I said wiktionary not wikipedia - it's servers are overwhelmed just from normal load; having the extra traffic from wikipedia cross links and searches for undefined terms apparently was putting it under. Sorry for the ambiguity - I should know that most people reading quickly would mistake 'wiktionary' for 'wikipedia' in this context.
irony, cocksmoking teabaggers(tm)
John Naughton, who wrote the article, writes regular articles on the internet, software and related matters in the Observer's business section. He is one of the few journalists in the UK who really "gets it", and is also the author of the book "A Brief History of the Future" (published 1999) about the history and future of the Internet.
In fact his journalism is only a sideline to an academic career.
His Observer articles can be found archived at http://www.briefhistory.com/footnotes/.
His blog is at http://www.skillbytes.co.uk/memex/.
I will guess that when this paper next publishes a fundamentally misguided science story you'll be ranting about how journalists can never get anything right.
1. Peer review 450,000 Wikipedia articles, checking for accuracy, style, citations, consistency and integrity.
2. ?????
3. Profit!!
I think it might be step 2 that's stopping them....
because they didn't call it "Wikipaedia."
sulli
RTFJ.
I added some information to the wikipedia article about my home town a while ago. Some time later, I revisited it to discover that the article had become rather innacurate.
This wasn't the result of malicious action. What had happened was that a succession of well meaning people, despite knowing little about the subject, had edited the article in an attempt to improve the language. Each edit had subtly changed various sentences until, eventually, facts had become transposed and confused. The net result was that the article contained incorrect information.
I corrected the errors, but it did make me wonder how many other articles had suffered a similar fate. I guess this is a problem when you allow anyone to edit an entry, even when they have no expertise in that area. For popular articles it is not really an issue as the problems will be quickly spotted. But the inaccuracies in the article about my home town had stood for quite a while before I happened to spot them.
Locking up GB sounds like a great idea. (joke).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
> No, but traditional encyclopedias don't waste ink on celebrities as minor as Keira Knightley.
Well, apparently you've never seen her nude.
people like and use wikipedia because it's online, free and easy to use. There are folks of a certain mindset who of course cherish the "anyone can edit it" aspect of it above all else, and it's certainly a strong point for the wikipedia, but if Encyclopedia Britannica had their own wiki up, they'd probably be either just as (if not more) popular.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Whilst I don't doubt that wikipedia is useful to a far wider audience (and receives more hits) than slashdot, your logic neglects to take into account where alexa's page ranking comes from. It is apparently taken from "aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users" - is the proportion of slashdot visitors with this toolbar going to be lower than that for wikipedia or other sites, given slashdot's target audience?
You know you've been IMing too long when you almost say 'lol' out loud to a non-geeky friend...
Yeah, it sounds great! Like those pseudo-hacker babblings in movies, only , you know, not fake!
One of the was that a site build credibility is through at least the appearance of impartiality, especially on high-profile subject matter like politics. The GWB article is one big bashfest -- really, a blatant, unending laundry list of attacks. Regardless of whether or not you love or hate the man, there's no way the article can be called unbiased.
I find it interesting that there is no mention of Martin Luther King Jr.'s documented, well-known infidelity in his article, and JFK's womanizing is given a total of one paragraph -- actually, make that two sentences -- in his article. If Wikipedia wants to be taken seriously as a source when it comes to political topics, the editors need to make sure that all points of the political compass are equally represented.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
from Slashdot?
There is evidently some bias in that regard.
I thought the slashdotters views on WikiNews of a few days ago gave sufficient flavor as to how many regard Wiki , in all its varieties.
I have found that with the current spamish,overcrowded over advertised websites that finding real information is very dismal indeed. Therefore I have been returning to UseNet more and more.
Google has likely had a major impact in the increasing degradation of information on the web.
What was once free knowledge is now millions of advertisements for selling that previous information.
Google a recipe and you hit hundreds of cookbook advertisements.
The DotCom bubble did burst. It burst and spilled it ugly guts all over the net with its cheesy trash and spammish banners and popups.
I can understand the iconoclast who doesn't want to obey a King. However, can you not understand why some one (not everyone) would want to obey a King?
;)
Do you not understand this concept?
It might be wrong for you to obey a king. However, do you fail to understand that others do, others have, others will. It is just an historical fact.
When Cromwall brought English society to a crash the English invited the monarchy back.
Wasn't it their right to do so?
I don't see Wiki as useful friend.
To me it seems more like the Wikipedia is a place where people have a desparate need to try and sound like they have some valid point to make, when they only really just want to seem like an expert.
It is an annoying trait to want to be heard above everyone else even when you don't have a clue about what you are talking about.
Why can't the Wikipedia allow multiple articles on the same topic? Why does it have to be so conspriacy of the one?
Didn't the Enlightenment and modern Philosophy bring us to a point where we understand that there are multiple points of view? Wikipedia trys to sound like an authority on everything and hence looses all credibility as a source of any relevant information.
I am glad that you see the bias in the thing. I just can't get past all of the smarmy know-it-all-ism of the thing and the complete and total hubris of the psuedo-intellectual pronouncements that I always see when ever I see a quoted article.
It sounded like a good idea. It isn't a good idea. Why is there such an emotional attachment to a concept that isn't working?
It is like the people in the late 70's who were still spouting off all kinds of hippie nonsense when everyone could see that the culture of the hippie had to die (hence the funeral for the hippie).
Only at that time did the movement live.
The Wikipedia seems like a good idea until you actually try to use it for real information.
Oh, and PS: you use the word we when you should perhaps use the term I.
If you don't understand why someone would want to obey a king, that doesn't mean that all of us don't understand.
Were you using the royal we?
Then there's the problem of people so stubbornly committed to a Wikipedia article they've worked on that they will never let anyone else change anything but the smallest typo, (usually claiming expert knowledge--though that doesn't mean expert communication skills) Even if everyone on the talk pages says "this article is crap," or "I don't understand this part" or, god forbid, changes anything, the article hog will revert it back. It eventually just comes down to who can hold out the longest, and you end up with a poorly written article by one person, not a community. They may even have their facts straight, but that doesn't mean it's written well and easy to understand.
These people end up not just managing, but micromanaging the article and won't let anyone else get a word in edgewise. It's not really community-based when there's a dictator running the show.
...but it is absurd to imagine that the rate at which errors are introduced is anything like the rate at which good information is introduced. The comment I was responding to postulated that it would converge to a mean, which would only happen if editing were totally indiscriminate.
Yes, I imagine that's true. I didn't dispute parent's main point.
For articles of fact, Wikipedia is by far the greatest. However, for subjective topics such as politics, too much of openness is not a good idea IMHO.
Here is an example I posted few days back.
When we are taling about page locking, one can show times when wikipedia admins themselves act irresponsible of what they are doing.
/wished to correct it, but they can't & ignored it. Atleast admin must have spend 1min. googling or browsing sensible referal links before deleting all relevent discussions on the same subject or corrections on the topic. So, after having millions of smarties migrated allover the world from this state, also by millions of tourists, the page of the state stays with erroneous information.
For e.g., search for wikipedia page mentioning Kerala (a distinct state in south western tip of India, few times got slashdot attention for opensource topics, coloured rains, etc.). Any one can see that everywhere in Wikipedia the name of this state is wrongly scripted in their own local language - Malayalam. Corrections made were immediately reverted by admin without any verification or real study on the subject or stating stupid reasons. Surely, many might have tried
Whether the admins are thick-headed without a bit of knowledge about what they are handling is not a reason worth discussion when you are talking sensible about an encyclopedia worth referring.
Am sure similar mistakes might be repeated all over wikipedia, making a good idea go awry.
A well wisher.
what is going on with the world?
a lot of ppl (as previously mentioned on slashdot) are disgruntled with the wikipedia. i would go so far as to claim its useless. hell even one of the cofounders of the wikipedia doesnt like it any more.
i dont use it coz i know the facts there are either skewed or biased towards those who can win "revert wars".
its just a propaganda machine, not a fact machine
___
go ahead mod me a troll
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
Revert wars could be viewed as a slow-speed variant of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Anyone visiting a specific article at a particular time may get any one of several competing versions of wikitruth.
This leads to the situation whereby if you know where to find the information in wikipedia, you don't know if it's true or not; and if you see something on wikipedia you know to be untrue, you suddenly don't seem to be able to track down an alternative authorititive source.[0]
By ludicrous extension, the quantum foam we observe in the RealWorld is probably a higher dimension revert war about the position and momentum of articles in some supersymmetric wikiverse.
[0] And if you find something on wikipedia you believe to be true, you go merrily on your way without questioning it.
Wikipedia can become an excellent physical science and math encyclopedia. This information is verifable in itself. A reader could, in theory, verify the information by himself.
When it comes to historic or even political issues however, the human "I am right and you are not." attitude creates a lot of friction, arguments and edit wars.
I'm always glad to see good press about the use of the wiki. I hope to develop my site http://www.wikiweb.org/ as a showcase for using wikis in education. Anyone interested in helping me get this up and running?
I know I'm writing for the /. audience, so I get all technical sometimes.:) If anyone needs a translation, just ask.:)
...but it is absurd to imagine that the rate at which errors are introduced is anything like the rate at which good information is introduced
Look at the rate at which information becomes unusable - reading an article with a factual error on every page on average diminishes the usefulness to the gossip line.
This doesn't even take into account the missing information. If you count omissions, WP has dozens of errors per page.
For the record, the parent comment along with the next 6 in my comment history (i.e. the ones with score 0, or 1 with a positive modifier) were all modded "overrated" within a very short period of time. This occurred sometime on Sunday, January 16, 2005. As I have explained in this journal entry, it's rather interesting when someone gets hit with a seven-comment modbomb considering that regular (non-admin) users get a maximum of five mod points at a time.
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