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FUD-Based Encyclopedias
blacklily8 writes "Someone has finally gotten around to offering an intelligent point-by-point rejoinder to an ex-Brittanica editor's lambasting of Wikipedia--which was covered in this earlier Slashdot post. Aaron Krowne, a mathematician and head of Emory University's library research department, argues here that established encyclopedias are using FUD to discredit what is actually a more reliable way to build an encyclopedia: 'McHenry's definition of quality seems to consist solely of presentational matters such as spelling, grammar, and text flow. These are of course important considerations, but I propose that there are other important facets of quality - for example, coverage.'"
so, if that's the case, MTV2 made MTV better quality? After all, it gave all those music videos better quality?
Sorry, while I see how some times bigger coverage can push for better quality (in the form of competition, for instance), it just doesn't necessarily translate to it.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Brittanica? You sirs have been trolled.
As a really bad spller, I really apreciate Aaron Krowne. Thanks for poiting out that other things mater.
San Francisco Photographers
Having glanced at Krowne's missive, I'd have no choice but to support McHenry in whatever it was he said.
Sorry, that article was so boring I can't even think of a reply.
The problem with Wikipedia is that information is not a democracy. George Washington's birthday is not determined by whatever day most people think it is, but with Wikipedia, errors like that can slip in unnoticed. It's like the people in certain areas who want "intelligen design" to be taught instead of Darwin's scientifically viable theory of evolution. They say things like, "We don't belive Darwin 'round these parts, so we don't want it taught in our schools!" That's great if you're an ignorant redneck, but it doesn't make it right. Wikipedia has a danger of being (or at least becoming) extremely biased, not necessarily for ideological reasons, but through simply through public ignorance.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
Except the have-nots are the people who refuse to embrace the internet themselves.
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... Some Things About the Underground Railroad: What was the Underground Railroad?
... Thanks for taking our trip on the Underground Railroad!. html - 11k - Cached - Similar pages
The paper-based encyclopedias are dying fairly rapidly, as I can check the search engines and find many, many sources of information.
Lets do one, shall we... Phrase: Underground Railroad.
1: I get a map thrumbnail showing paths on the Underground Railroad
2: The amount of material gleaned on just the metadata and the URL. See below.
____________
Underground Railroad--History of Slavery, Pictures, Information
You are a slave in Maryland in the 1800s. Can you escape? Learn what challenges slaves faced in National Geographic's Underground Railroad adventure. Get information
www.nationalgeographic.com/railroad/ - 5k - Cached - Similar pages
Underground Railroad--History of Slavery, Pictures, Information
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD CONTENTS.
www.nationalgeographic.com/railroad/j1.html - 8k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.nationalgeographic.com ]
Aboard the Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad refers to the effort--sometimes spontaneous, sometimes highly organized--to assist persons held in bondage in North America to escape
www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/ - 8k - Cached - Similar pages
The Underground Railroad Site - Table of Contents
The Underground Railroad Table of Contents. - This site is no longer maintained!
education.ucdavis.edu/NEW/ STC/lesson/socstud/railroad/contents.htm - 6k - Cached - Similar pages
Harriet Tubman and The Underground Railroad for Children
Click here to go back to Pocantico Hills School. Harriet Tubman & The Underground Railroad.
www2.lhric.org/pocantico/tubman/tubman
___________
If I had no clue, North America, Black, Escape, Harriet Tubman, and much more.
And those who would say "The Encyclopedias check data for us more than we'll ever need to", well.. Look at the 1'st link. Would you consider National Geographic, or then many many colleges to have non-factual information?
Tsk tsk. I await for the death of our past information-controlling overlords.
That you don't have to have correct spelling, grammar, or text flow to deliver a high-quality product.
The same arguments are used against blogs.
Information is undergoing the same transformation that government did with the creation of the first modern democracy (republic, whatever). The people decided they could rule themselves just as well, if not better, than those who hold power by divine right.
Now those who distrubute knowledge and information are using whatever power they have left to try and prevent the people from applying the same concepts to their industries.
RIAA/MPAA/ALA - RIP
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Wikipedia is almost becoming authoritative, a fact which clearly upsets McHenry and similarly-situated individuals
Wikipedia certainly has it's place, but it should never be regarded at authoritative. People regarding it is such is bound to upset many more people that McHenry, for example teachers
Both 'pedias can suffer from bias and distortions due to the opinions and prevailing cultures of the authors. Wiki follows the whims and fads of the editing/contributing public and Britannica follows the whims of the academic elite. On the one hand, if an idea is "popular" and repeated enough, it becomes truth in a Wiki, regardless of the evidence to the contrary and regardless of the pedigree of that assessment. On the other hand, Britannica's funneling process means that the opinions of gatekeepers trump any dissent.
Neither approach is right or wrong. The Wiki approach provides too much power to mediocrity. The Britannica approach provides too much power to a concentrated elite.
The real solution, possible within an advanced wiki-like system, is a 'pedia that permits these alternative entries and dissenting opinions. Rather than try to create the "One Right Answer" through a battle between contributors, this advanced online system (a MultiWiki?) could provide space for side-by-side comparison of differing entries. Would this system give voice to crackpots? Sure. But it would also provide the means to directly compare differing opinions and allow different groups to marshal their respective bodies of evidence.
Anyone who studies history, economics, and even science will find that there is often no 100% confident consensus. A MultiWiki would provide the infrastructure of recording the parallel, developing threads of knowledge.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Even a 12 year old knows they can't be trusted!
It's pretty much a rule that in every online community I visit that Wikipedia doesn't count as a source of factual information.
Hell, two of my professors have specifically said that Wikipedia can't be used as a reference for projects and papers.
...the assumption that there will be two distinct sources of reference information in the future - the Wikipedia style on-line "texts", which may contain far greater detail than the Encyclopedia in your library on modern day topics, recent developments, and the short but almost 100% factually correct entry in that reference book from your library.
Both have their place, and both have pros and cons.
Bugger both of them, I'd get shot down if I tried to cite either as a factual source in an academic paper. Encyclopedias are supposed to be a low-depth survey text, not a high-depth high-accuracy research text. As such, Wikipedia survey's many more topics than Britannica - in greater depth.
And the "we're professionals, they're not" argument is just plain childish. I've seen some really damn stupid factual errors in print encyclopedias, at least with Wikipedia someone with a better knowledge of the topic can come along later and fix it.
FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt", and is named after an IBM sales technique circa 1970 where IBM salespeople would undermine their competitors by promoting plausable arguments as to their competitor's long term viability (and hence ability to support their product) rather than competing on technical merits. In recent years, Microsoft has used FUD, amongst other strategies, against Free Software and Open Source, but some, unaware of the history of the term, have determined it means "anything that I disgree with that's been argued against something I believe in." Hence, if Microsoft argues that GNU/Linux has a higher TCO, Slashbots will leap upon the suggestion as "FUD", when in fact it's actually part of the usual process of arguing merits using frequently subjective criteria.
This guy decides he's going to use that definition, then plods on for paragraph after paragraph about the subject. It's become more important to him to believe that Britannica's argument is "FUD" than it is to address those issues. He insults the intelligence of most readers by creating silly composites of leading people who have said things he doesn't agree with (note - no IBM salespeople!) FUD is, apparently, the ultimate in sin, and by Jegnuses, he's found a sinner!
Meanwhile, those who know what FUD is will cringe while reading this, and those who don't will react with about as much shock and horror as a lesbian in Indonesia would on hearing that an employee of Burger King in Florida used the wrong form to procure a shipment of buns.
Why is it that those in favour of free information have such awful advocates at the moment?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Damn, I thought someone had made a peer-to-peer version of Wikipedia. Now that would be a cool thing.
"McHenry's definition of quality seems to consist solely of presentational matters such as spelling, grammar, and text flow."
In other words, McHenry was doing his job. Namely, the checking of spelling, grammar, and text flow, on the generally rational basis that a single person cannot reasonably be expected to be able to verify the truth, falsity, or indeterminacy of every fact in the encyclopedia.
If you were McHenry's boss, on what other basis would you grade the performance of your editor in chief?
I'm not saying that Britannica is a better encyclopedia than the Wikipedia. They're both pretty good. I prefer the Wikipedia because it's more accessible and because I (like Krowne), believe that coverage is an important metric, and I'm willing to sacrifice the quality of the prose somewhat in order to get more coverage. There are plenty of folks like me, and consequently, Wikipedia optimizes for coverage.
McHenry's boss doesn't share my preference. McHenry optimizes for spelling, grammar, and text flow.
Until we realize that, this debate is going to consist of both sides thumping their chests and flinging poo at each other, while screeching "You're optimizing for the wrong metric."
The Wikipedia entries for "primate psychology" and "total quality management" is probably better filled-out than the Britannica ones at my former schools. But that's what this debate comes down to.
Your point is absolutely valid. This is why most wikipedians would reject the idea that wikipedia is a democratic institution or (even worse) that article creation is following democratic rules.
There is no survey whether 2+2 is 5 or what day Alexander Hamilton was born.
After having struggled through Krowne's turgid prose, I discern that he is making two points:
1) The Wikipedia is a "success" because lots of people use it, and the only way you can say that's not a success is by claiming that people are dumb.
2) The Wikipedia makes up for the overall low quality of its entries by its vast "coverage."
If this is the best defense someone can come up with, the Wikipedia is seriously screwed.
Response to point 1: People ARE dumb, by and large, or at least ignorant, and they are also lazy. People use Wikipedia because it's easy, and because they don't know that not everything you read on the Internet is true. By Krowne's logic, Macdonald's is the best restaurant in the world.
Response to point 2: This amounts to admitting that the Wikipedia contains inaccurate information, but that's okay because it has LOTS of inaccurate information. E.g., all my buckets have holes in them, but because I have so many buckets I must also be collecting lots of rainwater.
It may be possible to make a good case for the Wikipedia, but Krowne sure hasn't done it.
After Microsoft did Encarta and began to crush Brittanica, Brittanica management went back to Bill Gates and proposed a lower buy-out price. Gates told them that their product now had negative value, because their sales force was so expensive to operate that it made the product noncompetitive.
I've found Wikipedia to be a great source for even somewhat esoteric things, in particular, chemistry/biology.
For example, I needed to know the biological significance of Zinc metal for a chemistry problem set the other day... lo and behold, Wikipedia's page on Zinc had a broad answer that led me to know what to search for in books (Zinc "fingers" & DNA).
I also used Wikipedia as the starting point for a large research paper on thrombin, a blood clotting enzyme. Note: this is not some simple little tidbit, but a enzyme in a extremely complex series of reactions that are the blood clotting cascade. And who had a good overview of the process to get me started ? Wikipedia ! (Coagulation) & (Thrombin).
What I find MOST helpful about wikipedia is the cross-linking. It represents uncommon words as a treasure trove of further information instead of a confusing word just sitting there. Sometimes you avoid looking up all those words because of the effort involved, but w/ Wikipedia it's extrememly painless.
As you can see, i've had a lot of good experiences w/ Wikipedia. I've found it to be lacking in certain topics, but I've actually found myself contributing to those topics due to the help i've received from it before.
I think the fact that it provides such a high quality resource to a lot of people will only encourage them to help add to it, to make it better, or as a way of saying thanks. I sure did.
It's only important that he is an EX editor and we are all CURRENT editors :)
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
The coolest thing, by far, about Wikipedia, is the culture articles. No traditional encyclopedia can possibly record that like Wikipedia does.
Whether it be language trends, popular contemporary figures, information on small localities and online subcultures, unconventional ideas in science and technology, or books, an encyclopedia model like that of Wikipedia is the only thing that can compile and store such stuff.
And I think I exceeded the reasonable link limit for that post.
If I were doing serious research about something, I'd only use Wikipedia, Britannica, or any other encyclopedia as a starting point. Neither of them are going to contain exhaustive entries about what I'm looking for, and in any event, I'm not going to trust the small-group biases Britannica has any more than I'm going to trust the large-group biases that Wikipedia contributors have.
Both sources are starting points for real research. If you want to get a general overview of something, either encyclopedia is a fine place to start, but don't trust them on the details. Go find primary sources and examine them if you want to find accurate, in-depth info.
* Where "never" is defined as "virtually never," because you have to use your own judgment.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The same applies to encyclopedias.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Call me elitist if you like, but I like my doctor to have a M.D.; I like the guys who design my buildings and aircraft to be Real Engineers, and I like the guys who write my reference sources to be real scholars.
The basic difference between Wikipedia and Free Software is that Wikipedia doesn't have a compiler. A compiler, you say? Yes!
Compilers do something much more important than turn C into machine instructions. The do a critical first step of filtering out people who are not able to usefully contribute. They get rid of the people who can't learn to program and the people who can't be bothered to learn the details of the program in question. If someone sends you a patch and it doesn't compile, just toss it out! Sure, you'll lose a few good ideas, but you'll throw out a lot of incoherent garbage and save yourself some valuable time.
Without a compiler as a first filter, can you imagine actually getting the Linux kernel to compile, if everyone could add patches? (If you can imagine it, you should start writing science fiction...) That's the situation of Wikipedia.
Does anyone seriously believe that human knowledge is simpler than the Linux kernel? Seesh!
The problem with the Wikipedia idea is that all the people who really know and care about some topic would have to spend their entire lives guarding it from all kinds of problems: inveterate fiddlers, guys with axes to grind, and the many many slightly confused people in the world. Without that intense and permanent guardianship, it will simply be wrong. Just like the Linux kernel would, if anyone could add in patches.
Oh, yes. Software has one more advantage over the Wikipedia. When there's a mistake inside, sometimes you get lucky and it crashes. When that happens, people tend to realize that something is wrong. When an entry in the Wikipedia is wrong, what happens? Nothing.
Has anyone given thought to a way to provide legitimacy to Wikipedia entires? Suppose EB thinks that they are superior because their articles are written and vetted by "experts" in their respective fields. Why not open Wikipedia to some method of academic validation? An "expert" in the field could attach their name to any given version of a wikipedia article, without comprimising anything that makes the system work, because anyone could still change the entry, so long as a copy of the last validated version remained avaiblable. Academics could register with Wikipedia using their .edu e-mail addresses, since these are fairly tightly controlled, in a manner similar to thefacebook. Probably for extra security, a staff member or trusted volunteer could review credentials by matching .edu e-mail adddresses against university faculty and/or graduate student directories before turning on moderation privileges.
The articles would then be as good as the reputations of the people who authorized them, not unlike the EB's 11th edition, which contained articles from Einstein, Muir, etc. Could anyone think of a reason this might not work?
Didn't this guy notice the "edit" button? He looked at wikipedia, decided it was broken, and didn't fix it? Lazy bastard.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I went and read the first article - 'The faith-based encyclopaedia' and thought that it made a lot of valid points about the potential shortcomings of a publically editable medium that is intended to hold authoritative information.
I tried reading the supposedly 'intelligent rejoinder' but quickly realised it was written by one of those tiresome tinfoil-hattists that just loves to squawk about FUD at the drop of a hat. I must admit that as a result, the guys message, whatever it was, didnt make much of an impact on me. 'Faith-based' seems to be an excellent term to use.
Both 'pedias can suffer from bias and distortions due to the opinions and prevailing cultures of the authors. Wiki follows the whims and fads of the editing/contributing public and Britannica follows the whims of the academic elite.
I think you've hit the nail right on the head there. That said, Wikipedia admins probably have less bias than Britannica editors. Wikipedian admins tend to be strongly opposed to any bias. Perhaps this could be considered a bias toward moral relativism and skepticism, but that's probably a bias an encyclopedia is supposed to have.
Sure, there are also biases towards open source, against George Bush, even against the United States to some extent, but I just don't think it's as bad with Wikipedia. Maybe it's a fallacy that collective intelligence is better than individual intelligence when it comes to encyclopedia topics. I don't know, the audience gets the millionaire question right more than I do.
To take just one example: Wikipedia has settled on a definition of genocide so narrow that it excludes the masisve genocies carried out by the Soviet Union and Communist China. Moreover, excluding all Soviet genocide even goes against their stated definition, as several instances of Soviet genocide (the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, the exile of the Volga Germans, etc.) meet the UN criteria of mass murdrers aimed at a particular ethnic group.
There are other examples of bias on similar political subjects. Occasionally the administrators will take steps to prevent the most overt forms of bias (for example, locking the page on George W. Bush), but mre subtle bias eitehr goes on corrected, or if corrected has those corrections erased the original biased entry reinstated.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
...if an expert is someone who is outstanding in their field.
indeed a bad joke
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Fu**ed up dictionary?
Fu**ed up definitions?
Free Utter Destruction
wtf is a fud? shit i cant find it in this new godamn dictionary, wtf ever happend to books?
Your skill in reading has increased by one point!
There's one type of encyclopedia missing from this debate, Encarta and Encarta like encyclopedias. These could provide the best of both worlds, an encyclopedia that is searchable and updatable through the internet (like wikipedia) as well as one that is thoroughly researched by professionals (like the paper based Britannica). Encyclopedias like this make it easier to offer rich media interfaces and examples (such as video or interactive charts and graphs or atlases linked to other pertinent data) which would otherwise be slower via the web.
Carousel is a lie!
If you find an error in an article you can fix it. If an article is not good enough you can write a new one. The only reason Wikipedia can fail is laziness. The so-called professionals and academics who frown on Wikipedia are ignorant and lazy.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
In the past I have been contributing to Wikipedia - but I have stopped. In every topic which is contraversial, Wikipedia is so biased & unprofessional. Especially if the controversy is between nations.
I always tried to make some neutral contributions - but it always turns that a larger nation dilutes the effort with biased information. Just human stupidity takes over and over again. So I have stopped.
Well, Wikipedia is good only for technical reference or some positive things to read - but never about politics or history facts to learn about, because there is always someone to fix what he doesn't want to read.
Unedit if you dislike it, even if that's the world turns... A pessimist's rant?..
"Also, new articles in Wikipedia *are* being checked by others (I'm doing that myself, some time), and that *does* include checking for factual accuracy just as much as it includes checking for spelling errors (like "intelligen"), grammatical mistakes and the like."
Checked against what?
add 4) tell those they couldn't acquire, whom they have now surpassed instead, the equivalent of "Blow Me" 5) run copied ideas in lucrative business 6) run occasional Windows-has-lower-TCO-and-outperforms-Linux banner ads on Slashdot 7) Profit! and it'll be good to go.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I don't know why people make a fuss about this. These companies want to sell their encyclopedias. They compete against other companies that offer similar resources. Part of selling something is marketing; explaining why someone should choose your product over another. This includes pointing out the drawbacks of competitor products. It is normal.
/. and you call it FUD.
/. roasts M$ products alive in a bonfire, and you all dance around waving your wireless keyboards. Does Bill Gates log in to call it FUD? No. He recognizes that it is just normal marketing.
A software company might point out a lack of support if you go with an open source (free) alternative. Then you all go crazy when it is posted on
Then EncyclopediaX points out that some fool could log into Wikipedia and post some bogus information. Oh no!!! More FUD!
Meanwhile, practically every other story on
"The paper-based encyclopedias are dying fairly rapidly, as I can check the search engines and find many, many sources of information."
And how many of these "sources of information" started out as books to begin with? Let alone "original" sources of information.
Also, how do I access this miracle search engine in the middle of nowere on my laptop? Hint: CDs and DVDs.
And last, paper still has advantages that electronic can't touch. So any Netcraft predictions of death, are at best, wishful thinking.
No big $$$ corporation or government can pay or threaten someone to have information removed or false information spread. Good examples are Monosodium glutamate or Freigeld.
McHenry's definition of quality seems to consist solely of presentational matters such as spelling, grammar, and text flow.
If he finds spelling and grammar errors regularly, why doesn't he do his part and correct them?
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
"I firmly beleive in the 'reality based' universe and want information sources that share this belief. I do not want my information contaminated by the crationist world view or any other silliness."
For some wide definition of "contaminated".
Reference works, other encyclopedias, personal knowledge and so on - it always depends. I'm not fact-checking topics I know nothing about, of course, but for example, I'm a maths major, so if someone creates or edits a mathematics-related article, chances are that I will be able to spot mistakes that an average reader (without any special expertise in this field) might not.
;)
Yeah, it's not perfect, but it works quite well, and I dare conjecture it does converge towards perfection, too.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of "reference material". It's not always to favour one POV over another. But to present the related aspects, and let the individual make the decision as to it's validity or not. YOU may not belive in creationism, just as OTHERS may not believe in evolution. however it's not the place of either side to censor the other like some "1984" gone wild.
the lengths the author goes to associate the former Britannica editor with Ballmer, McBride, et al, seriously weakens his credibility.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
I would have thought that in matters such as encyclopedias, the biggest indicator of quality would be accuracy.
Exactly. I can report a small sample of experience in seeing how accuracy has been managed in a particular wiki. That sample does not inspire me with confidence.
In a nutshell, I read a wiki page, saw some incorrect data about a subject which has been my bread and butter, and I added a note giving correct data (plus citations for independent verification by whoever might want to check it out).
A day later, the note had been removed to a discussion page accompanied by a comment by someone who seemed to be taking a role as the wiki's maintainer, saying that he 'didn't feel like' putting that stuff in 'right now'. Several months later, the correct info still was not back on the wiki page, the information on the wiki page was as incorrect as it had been when I first saw it.
I didn't try to push the correction, it's a free medium, seemingly the maintainer and maybe everybody else (or maybe not?) has a right to offer and put in what they please.
That freedom clearly has a lot of pluses.
But accuracy, or an assurance of accuracy, equally clearly isn't one of them.
I don't know how many wiki pages have maintainers. But that's what I saw happening.
My conclusion is that a wiki appears to be as accurate (or inaccurate) as its maintainer keeps it; or if there is no maintainer, then it is as likely to be as inaccurate as the most careless of its contributors.
-wb-
Critic: I happen to be an expert in a rather arcane area of knowledge, and note that Wikipedia is wildly wrong where it covers the stuff I know. This leads me to conclude that they might also be wildly wrong about obscure topic which do not happen to fall into my area of expertise, and so I can not rely on it as a reference for such information.
Fanboy: Duh! If you see something in Wiki that's wrong, it's your moral duty to the universe to correct it!!!!1!!!one!!! Then Wiki be the best encyclopedia 3var! Also, you need to STFU and stop saying bad things about this 00ber-kewl project, or we will mod you into oblivion.
Critic: No... That's not my point. If they are wrong about the stuff I can validate, I have no way to be confident that they are right about the... oh, fuck it, I can't talk to you people.
Fanboy: Victory!
"Britannica follows the whims of the academic elite."
I've mentioned this before, but contrary to what is often asserted, the positions of the "academic elite" are generally more than "whims."
Like it or not, there is a lot of review process that goes on in a variety of ways before someone becomes a professor, whether it be of of history, math, political science, or whatever. First, they are reviewed by their degree commitee, then the faculty of the university where they get a job, then the rest of their peers when they submit papers, and so forth and so on.
I'm not saying that mistakes aren't make in academics, but generally, that there are a lot of filters that get put in place before someone attains a position to be asked by a reference encyclopedia to compose an article.
Let's say I want to read about quantum computing, for example. I go to choose a book. One of them is written by some professor at MIT, another by a professor at University of Michigan, another by a researcher at IBM, and another one by Joe Smith, an accountant for a grocery chain in the local area who has an interest in quantum computing.
Which one am I going to read? Certainly not the one by Joe Smith, when the other options are available. It's not that I think Joe Smith is dumb, or stupid, it's just that there's no reason for me to believe that he really understands the material as well as the other individuals. He may, but I have no reason to believe that a priori.
Using Wikipedia, to me, is just like choosing to read that book by Joe Smith over the books by other individuals.
I may understand using Wikipedia when a better source isn't available, but with internet search engines progressing as far as they have, I don't see the point. If I want to know about quantum computing, I'm more likely to find it at about 10 reputable professor, class, or research institution websites than at Wikipedia. And at least when it's coming from ibm.com, or x.edu, or whatever, that I know who it's coming from, and have some sense of why they're where they are.
It exists:
Wikinfo
Wikinfo, formerly known as Internet-Encyclopedia (renamed in January 2004), is a fork of Wikipedia initiated by Fred Bauder in July 2003. It is hosted by ibiblio. Wikinfo makes no attempt to be multilingual, although existing links to Wikipedia articles in other languages are retained in the case of articles copied from Wikipedia.
Wikinfo's policy on point of view is different from Wikipedia: rather than adopting a neutral point of view, the set of articles about a particular topic are split into a number of articles with a specified point of view--thus it tries to have several points of view on each topic. The main article is written from a sympathetic point of view which is described as "a way of encouraging a pluralism of content, rather than limiting content to an unattainable encyclopedic goal."
Main Page
It's funny to hear encyclopedia editors stand up and talk like their profession represented the pinnacle of intellectualism. Encyclopedias try to reduce complex subjects to miniscule overview articles, often written by non-specialists. Encyclopedias are great for children and teenagers to find out about the world, but for adults, if you want to know something about a subject, just "get the book".
Encyclopedias are the fast food of the book publishing business, with encyclopedia editors writers being the short order cooks among editors and writers.
As such, the fast food served up by Wikipedia is better than most: it represents more viewpoints, it represents genuine debate among many interested parties, and it isn't constrained by size or budgets. The fact that you can't be certain of the quality of articles in Wikipedia is a good thing: you can't be certain of the quality of anything you read, and with Wikipedia, people at least think about that fact.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
In doing some research on Google, I came across the Wikipedia entry for Cantor Fitzgerald, which ... well, I'll just give you the thing in its entirety:
a -w eirdness.html
Cantor Fitzgerald Securities is an investment bank specializing in bond trading. It owns the eSpeed network.
Its New York office, on the 101st-105th floors of One World Trade Center, lost 685 employees in the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack, considerably more than any other employer, including the FDNY. This was about 2/3 of its employees.
eSpeed had sponsored the U.S. Naval War College "NewRuleSets" research program, which used the two towers of the World Trade Center with a lightning bolt through them as its logo. It had been known since an earlier attack on the WTC in 1993 (the World Trade Center bombing) that it was a major target of asymmetric warfare and terrorism.
Sez who? But that's always the question with Wikipedia.
Here's what Cantor's own Web site says about eSpeed:
In 1999, Cantor announced its intentions to migrate the company's robust inter-dealer and voice brokering global fixed income business to the eSpeed electronic trading platform. In December of 1999, eSpeed became a publicly traded, and separately run, business in its own right.
Seems like a straight-up business venture. A faster way to make trades. I found a bit about NewRuleSets here:
The NewRuleSets.Project was a multi-year research effort designed to explore how globalization and the rise of the New Economy are altering the basic "rules of the road" in the international security environment, with special reference to how these changes may redefine the U.S. Navy's historic role as security enabler of America's commercial network ties with the world. The project was hosted by the online securities broker-dealer firm, eSpeed (an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald LP), and involved personnel from the Decision Strategies Department of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. Adm. William Flanagan, USN (Ret.), and Philip Ginsberg of Cantor Fitzgerald (then-senior managing director and executive vice president, respectively) served as informal advisers to the project, actively participating in all planning and design. The joint Wall Street-Naval War College workshops in the series involved energy, environmental issues and foreign direct investment in Asia.
And here. It was a once-and-done attempt to learn something to refine the U.S. Navy's role (inherited from the British Navy of old) of policing the high seas and passively protecting international commerce. It was an instance of the military asking a business to help it do a better job of protecting the global economy.
It certainly doesn't seem to rate its dominant position in the Wikipedia entry on this company. Read this, and all you know is 1. they did something in conjunction with the U.S. military; 2. they got hit hard on 9-11.
Yet by clumsy innuendo, the writer of the Wikipedia entry (which is reproduced almost verbatim at some radical sites) suggests the reader connect the dots and make CF part of some shadowy U.S. military cabal, that knew it was a target of terrorists (and, perhaps, deserved to be?).
It all looks like a lot of conspiracy theory hoo-ha. Perhaps someone will step out from the Wikipedia shadows and be brave enough to go the next step and say Osama knew all about this, or that the death pilots were aiming for certain floors of the building because they knew who worked there. Anyone, anyone? Ward?
Conspiracy theories have a place, and they may even have a place in a Wikipedia. But this seems a curiously incomplete full entry for a major company that has been around since 1945.
http://vernondent.blogspot.com/2005/02/wikipedi
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
Now that the control over what various ideas and concepts mean, has been, quite literally, handed over to the people at large, This is one more stone wall that will come tumbling down, as institutions like Encyclopedia Britannica no longer have an iron grip on the acquisition, distillation, and dissemination of information. People always put up a fight when an entrenched institution is supplanted with something newer, so it's no surprise that we're starting to see some resistance.
"The problem with Wikipedia is that information is not a democracy."
There is a WikiProject called "Fact and Reference Check" that was created to reference the article's facts with a variety of sources (books, articles, magazines, academic journals, websites etc.).
If we can get 'smart' foot/end notes designed into Wikipedia's Software (MediaWiki) then I am sure Wikipedia could become the most authoritative source of information every created: Each article's facts being referenced with dozens of sources, and each of these references being confirmed by dozens of individuals.
Those who still sulk over the fact that "information on the Internet is biased" should find better things to sulk over. Further, what information is not biased? Here I quote Lao-Tse, the "boss" of Taoism, "Everything that can be said is not truth." (a liberal interpretation of the first words from Morality Sutra, namely, Tao De Ching) Having set up that wide premise, yes, Wikipedia contains "biased" information, so do all other encyclopedias, be they leather-bound or Web-based, and we as the consumers of information simply need to keep our critical antenna up. Here, I might sing a "rare praise" for Microsoft, as its Encarta, which is often freely bundled with a newly purchased computer, beats Encyclopedia Britannica handily, and the latter only looks cool in your private library, that is, if you have one.
Sun and Fun
If we can get 'smart' foot/end notes designed into Wikipedia's Software (MediaWiki) then I am sure Wikipedia could become the most authoritative source of information every created: Each article's facts being referenced with dozens of sources, and each of these references being confirmed by dozens of individuals.
Of course the Encyclopaedia Britannica never makes mistakes:
12-year-old expert brings top encyclopaedia to book
" The trouble with Wikipedia in practice is that there aren't any (or darn few) references to real outside sources."
I agree completely and I believe it is Wikipedia's Achilles' heel, but we can change that.
There is a WikiProject called "Fact and Reference Check" that was created to reference the article's facts with a variety of sources (books, articles, magazines, academic journals, websites etc.).
If we can get 'smart' foot/end notes designed into Wikipedia's Software (MediaWiki) then I am sure Wikipedia could become the most authoritative source of information every created: Each article's facts being referenced with dozens of sources, and each of these references being confirmed by dozens of individuals.
You are confusing the Editor-in-chief with a copy editor. The Editor-in-chief determines the content and direction of the publication, as well as yelling at any copy editors who let problems with spelling, grammar, and text flow.
McHenry presents his point of view, cites examples, and presents his conclusion.
It's up to me to reflect about what he said, and draw my conclusion.
I contrast, Krowne lets me know that McHenry is full of it and a malicious propaganda twit. This method shows intimate familiarity with Hermann Görings methods, but somehow he manages to not know that the name is spelled with only one "r".
If you want to tell me, that one of the "intelligent point-by-point rejoinders" is his musing about what McHenry allegedly 'implied', then your expectation in regard to intelligence seem rather low. Why not just stick with what the man said?
Krowne takes the freedom to interpret McHenry for me. In fact he tells me how I have to interpret McHenry. I can do that myself, thank you.
The McHenry article gave me something to think.
Krowne makes me feel manipulated. I don't like it.
George Washington's birthday is not determined by whatever day most people think it is,
That's only partially true. It's not a "democracy" among the population, but "facts" certainly depend on the prevailing view among experts in the field.
The date that we agree on for George Washington's birthday is determined by what most people who have access to all the physical evidence ("the experts") believe it is. But among them, it's a kind of democracy.
It's like the people in certain areas who want "intelligen design" to be taught instead of Darwin's scientifically viable theory of evolution
Intelligent design may well become the prevalent view in the US, both among experts and among the population at large, and at that point, that's what encyclopedias and textbooks would talk about. The fact that you or I think it's unscientific wouldn't change that.
Wikipedia has a danger of being (or at least becoming) extremely biased, not necessarily for ideological reasons, but through simply through public ignorance.
So does every textbook and encyclopedia. They are written by human beings, after all, and they make mistakes and aren't experts in everything. In fact, existing textbooks and encyclopedias are full of biases, half-truths, and outright errors.
Well here are a couple of common misconceptions.
Cracking your knuckles does not causes arthritis or anything else.
Wiki looses
Interestingly the chiropractic perspective at the bottom isn't reflected in the top of the article, so I expect that someone edited the article without correcting the incorrect top section.
The way water goes down the plug-hole has nothing to do with centripetal progressions that causes normal weather systems to rotate.
Nothing in wiki about this.
Edison did not invent the light-bulb, or at least that claim is weak.
But google has Edison second to top, so wiki wins here.
So one out of three.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
" I think you miss-read my comment and put your own view across"
As you did mine.
"...(though you are not prepaired to stand by your view AC)."
Yes. I can see that your posts need all the leg-up a name to them will provide.
However, it is not true that Wikipedia in general has either a bias or an agenda (outside of the agenda of providing a good, accurate and neutral encyclopedia).
Wikipedia is the sum of it's users, if it's users have an agenda (even through coincidence) then Wikipedia has an agenda.
Page protection does nothing to stop me waiting a month or two and then putting my jibe in.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I would like to know if Wikipedia could be purchased for browsing offline, that would be pretty sweet and could also fund wikipedia.
Every once in a while I like to change some information to something ridiculous, but subtle (and false). Attribute a generic quote to Martin Luther King Jr that really belongs to David Duke, for example. Change some date. Little things that no one would know off the top of his head and would require work to verify, but go unverified because the change seems reasonable.
It's a game, actually, like that one where people try to find search terms that return no pages from Google. How many changes can I (and others) insert that stick? There's no good reason to do it, just to see if I can get away with it. Like hackers that penetrate systems to see if they can (except what I do is malicious).
Yes, people like me are the reason I won't use Wikipedia.
Homer does not really exist. He's a cartoon character. But he is yellow!
Ties in with Slashdot's thinking - we have the most readers, hence we are the best. Who else would have the gall to claim "stuff that matters?" The rest of the stuff doesn't?
Is this a troll?! Goebbels is attributed with this quote not Göring.
Wikipedia allows people to 'debate' or 'argue' facts, until a settled version of the fact is written. Thereby allowing for more reliable information.
I dont know if sending letters with references to Britannica would have worked, it did have misinformation about people from central Afghanistan for example. There was no practical way to debate those facts.
That said, I'm not sure how a disagreement of facts in wikipedia really work, and what if reliable authors cannot find common ground. Ideally, within the text, it should present the two 'schools of thought' and the facts from both sides. That too will be difficult in subjects like abortion and the holocaust denial, in which one side will work hard not to have the facts from the other side presented.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Wikipedia is biased. This doesn't mean that they deliberately falsify information, that's not what "bias" means. What it does mean is that the the presentation of facts in Wikipedia is not politically neutral. I can't tell whether this bias comes from the collective political leanings of the editor community, or is merely an emergent phenomena of medium. But it is there.
Two recent blogs take a look at this. Of course, these blogs are also biased, but at least they admit it! Sometimes you need a bias on the right to point out the bias on the left. Since this is a recent issue on the right leaning blogs, expect the left leaning blogs to find biases in the opposite direction next week.
The first blog from a week ago is from Kesher Talk, which includes several examples of the bias. The other is from yesterday from Done With Mirrors, also mentioned on Instapundit. Edits to correct the biases in stories are being rejected! Trivialities are being magnified. A claim of controversy on a neutral fact will taint it and keep it out of a story.
Wikipedia needs to stop claiming it is objective and unbiased, because it's simply isn't true.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Despite the reality that academics are not well paid, the competition is still intense, and one ends up working much more than the nominal 40 hours/week, if one wants to maintain a career.
Consequently, contributing to Wikipedia or even arguing about it (like I'm doing) is really a luxury that many academics cannot afford.
for example, the church has had rather an undue influence on E.B. content.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Witness the article about Satellite C Band:
And another passage which is not only inflammatory but factually incorrect:
Note this anecdotal comment that the author, whoever it may be (there is no way to tell) had evidently pulled out of thin air:
Over in an article on the use of L Band, there is a curious comment about how its allocation affects satellite radio but the entry doesn't offer any supporting facts.
Another article about Television receive-only satellite has an opening sentence that is even worse:
I'm sure this kind of commentary cannot help Wikipedia's credibility. Wikipedia needs a huge content enema.
Kriston
And for more on FUD see: :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUD
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
I was one of the big fans of Brittanica when it went online - it was a great thing and sorely needed. But Brittanica, in their infinite wisdom, couldn't figure out how to make a vastly popular website pay for itself. (Perhaps they should have asked Google.) So it went behind a subscription-based wall, thus creating the need for Wikipedia: our appetites had been whetted, and we weren't going to roll over and fork out $5/month, because, hey, information wants to be free, right?
So now we have a commercial encyclopedia, and an open-source encyclopedia. Both are online. Only one of them has an article on relativity written by Einstein. (Hint: it ain't Wikipedia.) And now they get to duke it out in the all-too-fickle hearts and minds of the billion users of the net.
To quote an old saw: Brittanica is a fine institution - but who wants to be in an institution? Libraries, certainly, they're already institutionalized. But for the casual user, Wikipedia is nearly always more accessible. And in the age of infinite media choice, accessiblity always triumphs reliability.
Wikipedia may not be perfect, but it is far more complete (particularly on anything to do with CS) than Brittanica could ever afford to be. Brittanica will likely always be more accurate than Wikipedia could ever hope to be.
This isn't an either/or situation; it's a world of and-and-and. It's good to have both; Wikipedia will try to live up to Britannica's standards of quality, and Britannica will try to live up to Wikipedia's openness, flexibility and breadth.
And that's a good thing.
According to Wikipedia, the original Homer is also legendary. No word about his color.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
...on Wikipedia, was published in the editorial section of the National Post today. Here's a link. Interesting metaphor: Wikipedia as forest, Britannica as rock garden. Also how the entire way we research things in the Internet age leaves old encyclopedias in the dust.
Not to the people generally, but rather to the determined minority who have the desire, stamina, organization and ruthlessness to impose their will on a public forum.
You want Creationism to displace the teaching of Evolution in the schools, this is how you get there.
The problem with the Wikipedia idea is that all the people who really know and care about some topic would have to spend their entire lives guarding it from all kinds of problems: inveterate fiddlers, guys with axes to grind, and the many many slightly confused people in the world. Without that intense and permanent guardianship, it will simply be wrong.
That, in essence, is scholarship. And that is also why scholarship is not left to dilettantes.
When an entry in the Wikipedia is wrong, what happens? Nothing.
Exactly. As a previous poster pointed out, errors found in the Brittanica by a 12-year old became a headline on the BBC. That's because the old greybeard of encyclopediae has a reputation it trades on. With Wikipedia, for all we know, 12 year-olds are doing the writing.
But popularity could force solutions. Growing usage of Wikipedia could produce demands for higher accuracy, in turn leading to a more trustworthy model for filtering.
I'm not sure I see the connection.
I am only an occasional user of Wikipedia, as the quality still seems a little uneven. However, I find it valuable for two reasons. First of all, its coverage within a subject is often much greater than is the case with other sources, so it informs me of aspects of a subject which I did not know about. Secondly it gives me an idea of how the "mentally active" community perceives a subject. So when I treat that subject in a paper, I have a better idea of how to focus my discussion, so as to communicate with the people who know something about it. Cordially L. A. Changa.
Leftist seem to swarm over the thing
You might as well give it to ANSWER
and Kim Jong Il
The religion of mass murder is all over it
And presto the Stalinist view should be considered ?
You show why leftism is evil
strawman
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
That's exactly what I want to see in Wikipedia! I do not subscribe to Islamic beliefs, but imagine my suprise to find an inaccurate and biased article on Jihad. I read that article because I wanted to understand what Jihad is, and why it is done, and how it is justified. I was not interested so much in why it was wrong: I wanted an explanation of what it is! Perhaps having criticisms incorporated into the article, but having a POV screed was not helpful.
It seems that my experience of Jihad was similar to your experience of the Evolution article. It took a long battle to at least try to resolve this. At one point I had to block the POV pusher for personal attacks! It appears that this is Wikipedia's greatest challenge: how to deal with those pushing their POV on others to the exclusion of all else.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"So, how do I find the spelling of a word?"
"Look it up in the dictionary, starting with the first letter."
"If I knew how to spell it, I wouldn't be looking it up!"
"Googling" for a subject or for a person can be very effective, but you generally have to know a bit about what you're looking for if you wish to be successful in your search. For instance, anyone could put my name into Google and get about 4 (it fluctuates from day to day) references to me on the first page. However, I often don't hold the topmost entry and there are other people more prominently featured. There's a Sean Duggan who does graphic design, also teaching classes and writing books on computer graphics. There's a Sean Duggan who's a Benedictine monk who does jazz piano in Pittsburgh. And then there's me, also listed in some places under computer art, in some places under music and half a dozen other things.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Yur sdupit. Har. Har.