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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."
'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.
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.
"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...:)
And what of everyone who read the article before someone more knowledgeable noticed the mistake and corrected it?
And please note I'm not talking of small errors of interpretation or language. I'm talking about honkers like "Prof. George Peabody expanded on string theorist Brian Greene's work to develop rope theory" (paraphrased)--two months uncorrected when I read it on the Columbia University article. You'll find shit like this scattered across the entire encyclopedia, if you're watchful.
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.
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
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
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.
Wikipedia is considering a "stable" version, consisting of articles that have gone through a formal peer-review process. The stable version would be locked down, but would be updated from time to time. Problem is, nobody is really sure how to go about doing this. I think this is a good place for the Encyclopedia Britanica to step in. They've been hit hard by the rise of the Internet. From the quote from TFA, it sounds like their trying to spread FUD about the Wikipedia. So apparently they find the Wikipedia a threat. They have experience at fact-checking articles, and have a staff of experts who could perform peer-review. The Wikipedia (with the exception of some images and other multimedia files) is available under the GFDL, which allows commercial use. So why doesn't Britanica just take Wikipedia articles, work the bugs out, and find a way of making a profit for their troubles?
"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?"
Well, put it this way: I sometimes edit a "normal" wiki, without the page-locking feature. Thousands of pages are vandalised every hour. You can hardly get up for a coffee before the front-page is vandalised again.
Now, wikipedia is better than that, but mostly because it's got so many people tending it. I've seen vandalised articles, done a refresh, and seen it corrected within minutes. But that requires there to be hundreds of people constantly watching edits. I'm quite grateful to Wikipedia that they provide such a well-tended facility that I can use. Blocking IPs, "vandalism in progress" alerts and the like all help too, of course.
As to the contraversial articles, I think yes, they do attract more vandals than contributors. Some people just have nothing better to do (naming no names, but one criminal in particular). Other people might use scripts. Some people may even be paid to vandalise stories (I know the US government has a department of media relations whose job-description involves putting false or misleading stories into the international media, and it would be silly to think that some distasteful countries (again, naming no names, israel) didn't have people whose job it is to present certain topics in a favorable light)
Maybe they're just testing wikipedia. who knows? But I certainly find it surprising when they unprotect these contraversial articles - it must be a bit like opening ornamental gardens in a warzone, and just keeping teams of people ready to pick-up litter or replant beds, walking around behind the vandals as they do their work...
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.