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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.'"
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
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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.
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.
I would have thought that in matters such as encyclopedias, the biggest indicator of quality would be accuracy. Who cares how much information you cover, or how great your spelling is, if the information you present is incorrect?
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.
...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.
"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.
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.
For a long time the first four Chinese dynasties were dismised as 'mythological' by Western academics. The original reason for this was that the dates of these dynasties were incompatible with the biblical flood and so they had to be explained away. This claim still persists today even though there is at least as much evidence for the existence of the yellow emperor as Homer. The criteria for changing the established view are far higher than creating one.
The modern Brittanica is both huge and for many purposes useless. If you want detailed information on a topic like cryptography you will find maybe a short article on RSA in Brittanica but unlikely to find out very much. Wikipedia on the other hand has extensive in depth coverage of far more obscure points.
Every information source is biased and wrong. If you have the misfortune to watch Fox News you will see plenty that is deliberately deceptive, much that is outright lies. There are very few blogs on either the right or the left that sink to the level of mendacity that is standard operating procedure for the Murdoch/Hearst press. We don't see many editorials in the old media complaining about that.
The issues raised by the Brittanica guy are not completely groundless, the Wikipedia people need to consider them carefully. Wiki is not the first extended Internet collaboration system to reach a large audience. The problem is that success brings trolls, spammers and cranks. Together the trolls spammers and cranks destroyed USENET in the mid 90's. It only recovered when the parasites moved on to try to wreck email.
I think the issues raised are fixable but we will have to think carefully about mechanism. I do not think peer review is feasible on that scale but reputation systems might be.
A deeper problem that Wiki shares with Britanica is that it tries to impose a single systematization of knowledge. This is fine for areas where there is no controversy. Where controversy is active the result is either a tug of war between extreemes or some bland statement that takes no position.
Sometimes you have to put the facts on the line, there is no 'scientific' theory of creationism. Creationism is revealled knowledge and that is simply not compatible with science. But there are people who honestly beleive the opposite.
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.
there are also cases of genuine academic dispute where things get equally nasty and ideological.
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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
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.
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 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
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
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.
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.
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
So, I can create the greatest encyclopedia on earth by being very accurate? Well, here goes say's quality encyclopedia:
a-r no entries. s say's quality encyclopedia The encyclopedia with the highest quality in the entire known world. t-z no entries.Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.
2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.
Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:
3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.
Personally, I suspect he may be right. I fail to see the sorting mechanism in Wikipedia by which good writing and accurate facts rise to float above all the shit and the articles are often of low quality; I'm speaking as a fairly frequent contributor.
It often feels like a fool's errand. Articles frequently seem to become more jumbled, incoherent, and full of extraneous bullshit over time. Articles usually lack any sort of references to primary literature, and it seems that in general (a) it's failed to draw in the experts it needs to produce a really high quality product, and (b)the experts voices don't sound any louder than those of some quasi-literate high school sophomore, so they tend to get lost in the storm, and (c) the result of dozens of different voices working on a text is something which is bland and lacking in life, prose designed by committee and largely stripped of life. In particular I wonder if it will suffer the same fate as many mailing lists: the ignorant idiots with nothing intelligent to say tend to scream loudest. The informed people tend to speak less because they have a better sense of their own ignorance, eventually get fed up, and leave.
Granted, it works a hell of a lot better than I'd expect it to, and it's useful if you want facts in a hurry and are going to check them later, but the idea that it currently stands shoulder-to-shoulder with traditional media and peer-reviewed scientific publications is just ridiculous. I think the project has potential, and I think in its current incarnation it can be a useful alternative to traditional journal articles, texts, and soforth, but I think it's a long way from being a consistently well-written and reliable resource. Can it get there? I wouldn't write it off. It's amazing it got this far and works as well as it does.
"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.
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.
A deeper problem that Wiki shares with Britanica is that it tries to impose a single systematization of knowledge. This is fine for areas where there is no controversy. Where controversy is active the result is either a tug of war between extreemes or some bland statement that takes no position.
This is wrong: Wikipedia works on these things very actively. Check the article on Zoophilia to see example where NPOV (Neutral Point Of View) was achieved without loss to the quality of the article. The rule is simple: If consensus can't be achieved, best of voices/arguments of all sides are published and it's up to the reader to decide which one they prefer. Something hardly ever happens in Britannica: If some "expert" has his own agenda to push, there's no way to achieve NPOV, if there is some kind of argument going on, encyclopedia either takes one side or does what you said: leaves a short, bland statement. No way to discuss things, no way to explain differences, no chance for rebuttal of fallacious arguments.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"Brittanica? You sirs have been trolled."
This is probably the best comment on this topic. Not only are *all* encyclopedias just simple gloss-overs of real research but Brittanica is aimed at the early teen market.
The wikipedia oughtn't worry about how traditional encyclopedia's view them. It won't matter in the end -- the wikipedia is free, accessible, pervasive and mainly supported by the people. Those are winning factors everytime.