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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.
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.
"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...:)
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.
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
It was locked because of people blanking it, changing the content to "omgwtf Bush is Evil!", and other such malicious vandalism. The John Kerry article was also protected for similar reasons on multiple occasions.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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 always think of Wikipedia as being quite like the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You'll find out a lot from reading it, if not always what you actually wanted to know...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
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
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.
The Observer is what one might call 'The Guardian on Sunday'.
Rich
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/.
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.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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.
Of course not. What I mean is that a model where a single article written by many is not going to work, because everybody will try to push their views into the article.
Many people writing many articles and letting the reader do the judging is the only way I can think of. And the media is, or at least supposed to be, doing exactly that.