Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
As a really bad spller, I really apreciate Aaron Krowne. Thanks for poiting out that other things mater.
San Francisco Photographers
If you'd read the article in full, you'd notice that Aaron does not, in fact, claim that it does. Quite the opposite; unlike McHenry, he specifically states that there are several ways to define quality and that coverage (like cohesion) is one of them (but not the only one).
That being said, "coverage" does not refer to how widely-known/widely-used a certain piece of information is. It's not about how much coverage an article (or a music video) gets; it's about how much coverage it *contains*. What Krowne means is that a longer article with more information and more details has a higher quality (measured in the coverage metric, that is) - provided that the information is correct, but that goes without saying -, not that an article that's read by more people is of a higher quality (even though in Wikipedia's collaborative model where everyone can edit articles, at least, an article with more readers will likely reach a higher coverage and/or cohesion, too).
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
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.
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?
Errors like that can slip in in any encyclopedia; the difference between Wikipedia and - say - Britannica is not that that the former is more error-prone but rather that a) it is admitted that errors can, in fact, happen and b) it is possible to correct an error when you come across it.
Furthermore, you're making another crucial mistake (one that McHenry also made): you assume that people are, generally, stupid, uninformed and/or not able/willing to check facts. Now, that may be true for many people, of course, but it's not true for *all* people, and in fact, I'd say that anyone who makes substantial edits on Wikipedia is likely to have a reasonable amount of intelligence at least.
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.
Finally, last I checked, George Washington's birthday as listed in Wikipedia is, in fact, correct, so that's not a good example by any means.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Even a 12 year old knows they can't be trusted!
...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.
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.
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
Wp is confirmably biased - just try "correcting" factual inaccuracies in a political reference. I have tried. With backup statements, direct quotes, etc. They definitely have an agenda.
It would be nice to have a couple of links to your edits - not the articles, but the edit history itself, so we can check the story. Political debates can get hot, but I've never seen a wikipedia article with a clear bias.
Apart from the fact that addressing wikipedia with "they", let alone "they have an agenda", shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how wikipedia works.
Indeed, and Wikipedia is all about that: facts, and nothing else (the relevant policy is called "NPOV", which means "Neutral Point of View").
That being said, conflicts happen, of course, and not every single Wikipedia user does hold this principle in as high a regard as they should; and in fact, with certain topics (politics are one example), there unfortunately are users who not only try to push an agenda, but are also very insistent.
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).
That being said, if you have problems with specific articles and a consensus with other editors of these articles cannot be reached, there are ways to resolve those conflicts. The first step is to ask for comments from other (not directly involved) people at Wikipedia: Requests for Comments. If that does not help, you can file a request for mediation, where the two parties agree to a mediator that tries to help them resolve the problem; if that does not help, either, you can bring the case to the arbitration committee, who will hear all involved parties, gather evidence, hear statements etc. and ultimately come to a binding resolution. Try it - I've done so myself, and although the conflict this was about lingered for about three months and produced at least 300 KB of mud-slinging on the relevant article's talk page alone, it ultimately *did* get resolved; the offending user (who continued to push an agenda of their own and continually violated the NPOV principle) was banned from editing the relevant article and all pertaining to it for a year, and since then, constructive work on the article has resumed.
That being said, for immediate conflict resolution, if there is an edit war going on over a page, you can also request page protection; locking an article for a few days is often is a nice way of making sure that everyone cools down and a civilised discussion can resume.
As for facts not being negotiable, of course they aren't, but you should take care not to confuse facts with opinions. Not everything that *looks* like a fact is one, and while things like the date of George Washington's birthday really *are* facts, other questions like whether the it'd be justified to list shrub's regime on the Kleptocracy article ultimately revolve around opinions, not hard facts.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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-
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.
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.
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