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Nitpicking Wikipedia's Vulnerabilities
tiltowait writes "A lot of Wikipedia critics point to hypothetical situations when giving reasons for not valuing the site. Wikipedia even has a 'Replies to common objections' article set up to field these. I'd rather look at some real examples of applying the same level of scrutiny to materials often held up as the Platonic ideal of 'scholarship,' such as peer-reviewed journals, conference papers, established journalism sources, monographs, and print encyclopedias. Even these have disclaimers because they can be can be vandalized or have their reliability and accuracy questioned. As dangerous as it is to trust unverified information, it can be just as bad to make prior judgments discounting information because the source happens to be anonymous. The above examples illustrate that all materials existing along a continuum of valuable information formats. Wikipedia articles can be useful for quickly obtaining factual overviews or as a starting point to further research. But that's just one librarian's opinion. How do tech-savvy people view Wikipedia?"
The problem that I have had with Wikipedia is that in editing articles on which I am a recognized expert, I have had my edits and entries entirely removed by others who "feel" that these edits were somehow inappropriate, even when I referenced those entries along with results from peer reviewed journals. So, while allowing everybody to edit, there is no weighting system in place for those individuals who may, in fact, know more about a particular subject matter than others who exert their biased or uneducated editorial control.
Now, all of that said, I do really appreciate Wikipedia as like the poster stated is a good starting out point for research into a particular topic.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
With firefox.
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
I'm probably in the minority, being a librarian a with a good opinion of Wikipedia. Many (mostly older) librarians, for example, relish their roles as gatekeepers to information. I suppose it comes from the old warden-style approach to protecting books, or some sort of warped view of taking "information is power" as a need to hoard and protect its distribution.
There is this sometimes misguided need to teach "information literacy," with exaggerated assumptions about "kids believing everything they read online." Recent library conferences have covered this alongside how students learn and use technology -- often with the same sort of bemused condescension that 19th century anthropologists exhibited toward alien cultures. It's unnerving. But teaching others to evaluate information themselves, rather than thinking it's our job to do it for them, is on the right track. History as shown a path towards direct and open access to information, and I see wiki publishing as a direct extension of this trend.
Librarians, in general, seem stuck on the "omg you can vandalize Wikipedia so it's worthless" argument. Jimbo even got asked, at the last ALA conference, essentially, "What's to stop me from distrupting information in Wikipedia?," by a librarian. And this is the profession so disturbed by book bannings? I just don't see libraries staying relevant if we don't acknowledge the value of blogs, wikis, and other new information formats (and we're not quite there yet).
Of course, those story links are nitpicks themselves. Library stuff (if it exists on your topic) is of better quality than what you'll find via Google. As for Wikipedia, content zealots -- both snobs and censors -- threaten the open encyclopedia's mission at least as much as the cranks. But there's no need to exaggerate the problems of Wikipedia. Sure, it can get messy, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
As another frontiersman was warned, "If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."
So anyway, all of these comments are a bit of a hyperbolism. As a piece on peak libraries I started shows (oh yeah, that's a library science Wiki btw), I'm something of a provocateur at times. It's just that, after spending my early career trying to educate everyone that librarians are "with it", I've discovered that there's just as much of a need to convince librarians to get with the times.
Its convenient.
For me the best thing about wikipedia is the concept behind it. A collaboration of people, working to increase the sum of human knowledge, because the sum of accumulated knowledge is something that is greater than its parts. Everyone working together to maintain this knowledge for the betterment of all. Is that an idealistic view? Of course. But what's wrong with idealism and striving for it? Wikipedia is more that just an encyclopedia -- though it's very good at that. It's a hope that we actually can all work together on something -- something that embiggens us all.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I view it as a great way to waste time at work, mostly.
-Sub
I use Wikipedia all the time when I just need to look up minor facts about historical events. I however review the history of what fact I am working off to make sure that some 5 year old (don't take this as a stereotype) didn't change it to complete BS. The benefit is fast access to information.
I just had a similar discussion with my girlfriend this past weekend. She found some valuable information on Wikipedia for a paper she’s writing on Chinese culture. I told her she should use that as a springboard: that Wikipedia could provide her the facts and details she needs, and that she should then find independent citable sources for each individual facts. I told her that I was sure it couldn’t be cited because the information there is simply too fluid and couldn’t be counted on to remain unchanged over time. She checked with her professor who wasn’t terribly familiar with the details, but had at least heard of it. He looked into the matter and told her that it was perfectly acceptable as long as the citations were up to MLA standards. I told her that her professor would turn out to be wrong in the long run (yeah, modesty is part of my charm, why do you ask?).
So I guess I agree with the story submittor (askor?) that Wikipedia rocks, but that their model simply doesn’t lend itself the the level of credibility needed for that sort of use. It’s great, and in many ways a more valuable resource than Google, and one hell of a social experiment. But at the end of the day, you simply don’t know if any given fact was contributed by a Princeton research librarian or Karl Rove.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I think that it can be useful if you want info that you might not find elsewhere. I actually used it to look up stuff about slashdot subculture and related stuff. Quite informative. I just don't use it for school-related things, since it can't be trusted in that way. Any of my teachers that know about it say we are not allowed to even look at the site for projects. Still good for reading stuff when bored, whether or not it's accurate.
People need to realize the basis of Wikipedia. It may be fact checked all the time, but if you access the wrong information during the short time it's on there, then you lose.
The Library of Congress is soliciting feedback on the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions again. Without doubt, they have heard it all before, but with this particular piece of legislation, the complaints bear repeating. Since that time, the DMCA anti-circumvention clauses have been used against manufacturers of of printer cartridges and garage door openers, against owners of robot dogs and to stifle competition in the mobile phone service market just to name a few. You have until December 1, 2005 to submit your written comments, so hop to it.
CmdrTaco: Wiki is silly. Not scalalble.
hemos: Wiki's make me want to guage my eyes out. gouge, even.
CmdrTaco: They're fun for small groups.
hemos: No, I like the idea.
CmdrTaco: Slashdot is for millions.
hemos: And yeah, for smaller groups is great. But we spent the 3 years scaling up to this level of users
CmdrTaco: Thats the thing that people don't understand-
hemos: and I'd hate to do the same thing over again with a different technology.
CmdrTaco: the rules are different when you have 5,000 users vs 350,000 each day. What works @5,000 is ludicrous at 350,000. You don't lock your doors in a town with a population of 5,000... but at a quartermilllion people, thats just stupid
So there you have it, from the same horses mouth that told us that the iPod is lame.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
but how do you take a resource seriously when the article for Robocop has more depth than an article for George Washington Carver
Yeah, it can be vandalized. So can an ordinary dictionary, or encyclopedia. Some page could be ripped out, or an editor could have inserted a joke or mistake. The only difference, is that everyone believes everything they read on the Internet, so it's more dangerous for an online resource to contain misinformation.
Yeah, I'm kidding just a little.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Couldn't some of the same arguments about anonymous information be said about the Internet as a whole?
I have the view that whenever someone comes out with an article about Wikipedia, someone will post to Slashdot complaining that the evil biased Wikipedia editors and administrators have prevented them from inserting their latest crackpot theory. Oh, but they cry, I'm an expert in my field!!! Such mean evil administrators. You can't trust any of them. Regular cabal.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
> How do tech-savvy people view Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a wonderful resource for pop culture - you can find anything you want to know about bands, movies, books, etc.
It's also good for a quick reference when you run across a term you're not familiar with.
The problem is the way the articles are polluted by true believers. Proponents of a religion, nationalism, and other ideology are really bad about modifying articles to be Politically Correct from their ideological POV. They're also really bad about finding an excuse to mention their views in all kinds of articles where their views wouldn't be relevant even if given a balanced treatment.
I still use it a lot, but I rarely contribute anything anymore. I've good better things to do than clean up behind True Believers and other kooks.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I use Wikipedia quite often, but I usually perform some secondary research.
Click here or here.
Yes Wikipedia gets a lot of vandalism. Many features of Wikipedia can be abused. I abused the move function of pages which got me blocked pretty quickly. I have countless imitators of my vandalism. They even implemented a page move restriction and move log to counter page move antics.
Do you play with your Willy?
Wikipedia and other online collaborative sites allow us to quickly access and learn a bit on almost any subject. We also share our own personal knowledge freely, through it.
So what is it called when I can learn anything you know, and you can learn anything we all know collectively?
I think that's called a Hive Mind. It's not as fast or built-in and wireless as we imagined, but it still serves the same purpose.
but I suppose like any research I wouldn't use it exclusively. It's probably not a good idea to rely on a singular resource anyway. I'm not really sure why I don't use it, it's out there, it's popular and I'm sure it's easy to use I've just never felt any particular draw to it.
piss off
I use Google and Wikipedia as starting points for research. Frequently they are also ending points, such as when I want to look up something that's very unlikely to be incorrect, such as Abraham Lincoln's Birthday.
:)
Beyond that, I use other reference material, other search engines, and the history of wikipedia pages.
The bottom line:
I start with easy sources and stop when I get what I think is accurate and complete-enough-for-the-task-at-hand information.
Oh, and to agree with someone above, I view Wikipedia with Firefox too.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
After that we open up our "Intarweb Browser" and...
...wait, this *is* what tiltowait is asking for, isn't it?
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
As dangerous as it is to trust unverified information, it can be even more dangerous to trust information which has been "verified" by "experts" (especially if it's information from your 1966 set of EB's)
Sure, Wikipedia probably contains more errors than EB, but it also contains many more articles. It would be interesting to know how these ratios compare.
If you knew Wikipedia at all, you'd know that they're called admins, not mods. Nowhere on Wikipedia are there "moderators".
Personally, I consider myself proud to be one of the many "elitist pinhead fucktards", as you so eloquently called them. And most people who have negative views of the administrators have either been blocked for trolling (which I suspect, given the obvious troll comments you made above), or are still pissed that the vanity articles about themselves were deleted.
I view it as an excellent starting place to get some information. If I have a basic question, it'll probably be answered by the Wikipedia article. If it's a more advanced question, the article should point me to more in-depth references.
So remember, if you're adding information, try to cite a source!
the Platonic ideal of 'scholarship'
Oh really? When was the last time Plato got published in a peer-reviewed journal?
Wikipedia's the second best source of information there is (the first is The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, of course).
When I look something up in Wikipedia, I generally approach it with the assumption that I'm going to get a short, moderately informative, and probably at least somewhat mistaken article. Instead, I almost always find a well-researched and in-depth piece on whatever trivia I was looking up. It's not perfect, but I generally learn a great deal.
Yeah, I know I should stop assuming that I'm not going to get much, but I have that assumption with everything I look up online. It's just that Wikipedia gives me more pleasant surprises than most other sources.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
So that's basically it, there is a spectrum of categories from where Wikipedia works well and has reliable information (mathematics, history and technology categories) to where it is just edit wars that get worse and worse (society and history categories). Wikipedia is fairly reliable about what ideas Godel had about mathematics, Wikipedia is completely unreliable if you are interested in reading about say France's Front National or Vietnam's National Liberation Front. Wikipedia has not gotten better over the years in this regard, it has gotten worse. There are left wing wiki encyclopedias like Demopedia, Dkosopedia and Anarchopedia, and right-leaning ones like Wikinfo, and I predict over the coming years these alternative wikis will become quite large.
One recent example I can give, one guy just popped up who is accusing virtually every left-wing or liberal person in the 1950's was a Soviet spy, and by virtually everyone I mean editing hundreds of biographies and inserting that they were spies. Doing this is fine if done in the right way, but he is a bit nutty or stubborn or whatever and he has a dozen people reverting his stuff but that doesn't do much good. Then we have Lyndon Larouche followers come in as well. Or way out communists saying nutty things. Wikipedia would probably be better off if these people all went off to their own respective wikis.
"Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.
"John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.
"But Solomon Snyder, senior editor at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, US, says most working scientists understand the limitations of published research.
"'When I read the literature, I'm not reading it to find proof like a textbook. I'm reading to get ideas.'"
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7915&f eedId=online-news_rss091>New Scientist: "Most scientific papers are probably wrong"
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
When I tell my friends about wikipedia these days I fell like I did during the hotbot, scour net and google early days:
Me: "Dude there is this whole repository of information at your fingertips totally changing the way we think and collaborate! Just google something factual and add "wiki" at the beginning of the string at your there."
Them: "Uhhmmm, a wiki-what?"
Only to be followed by them explaining wikipedia (google-hotbot, scour-napster, ) bacl to me a year or so later. Despite its flaws the wiki is a truly amazing tool.
Nothing is perfect - wikipedia is useful. Therefore it is good (enough for me).
Dr.O
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
On every other site on teh Intarweb, I can hit alt-E > F to bring up Firefox's 'find' toolbar. Wikipedia overrides alt-E so that it instead launches the editor for that page.
Workaround on Windows: Press and release Alt, and *then* press E. That brings up the Firefox 'edit' menu.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I enter some keywords into the search field, and wish the results would come back before I am old enough to retire.
One of the things about Wikipedia is that it has become so large and vast in such a short time. Just three years ago Wikipedia only had around 50,000 articles. Last year it only had 300,000. It has grown so fast that it is now the 35th most visited website acording to alexa, and searching for Wikipedia gives over 300 million results.
Wikipedia has literally appeared out of nowhere in the context of the Internet and printed encyclopedias. It is already the most popular online reference work in terms of linkage and hits per month.
Its the fact that Wikipedia is so big, yet still relavtivley new that many people are skeptical of it, but I have been with Wikipedia for a long time and have appreciated its value, by around 2010 Wikipedia will have millions of articles, and people will have gotten used to its power. Anti vandal techniques are being developed, there is a dedicated vandal fighter program and there is now almost 600 administrators patrolling it.
Wikipedia is a monster, and it is carving out the internet. The World wide web will soon split into two webs, the Wiki web, and the Loki web.
You don't have to be an idiot to use Wikipedia, just naive. Using it is just as foolish as when grandma clicks on the malware spam email; only instead of your computer being comprimised, its your mind. People who think Wikipedia has value are simply not aware of the insidious and deviant nature of some people in the world. Normally these people have no influence on society, but given an anonymous way influence and subvert the trusting masses, they will do so with abandon. Joseph Goebbels has nothing on these people.
I personally love wikipedia. Yes, Im aware that it CAN be wrong, but Ive not had any problems with it so far. (That I know of)
Compare wikipedia to something along similar lines, but more "professional". Such as the encyclopedia britannica. Wikipedia can be wrong, sure. But so can the encyclopedia britannica. And wikipedia is more likely to be up to date with current events.
The encyclopedia britannica most likely wont have its page on Time Cubism or Scientology graffitid. But then, does it even have those pages?
You get what you want from it. Youd be an idiot to 100% believe everything in it, but then Id argue the same holds true for anything. Always double check your facts- hell, triple check - if its important. Otherwise, for people like me who don't write scientific papers for a living, it does the job fine.
You are absolutely right. Probably, there should be some kind of quality control mechanism. Having the edit history available would be a start. Maybe having some kind of karma points for given subjects would help. The trouble is that any 'better' solution might quickly become unwieldy. Anyway, I think you are safe from having your articles on Sophocles edited by a six year old, if you get my drift.
Having said the above, Wiki has the enormous advantage that people can fight back against misinfomation. No matter what you think about his politics, Noam Chomsky has demonstrated many times that the 'trustworthy' mainstream media has misstated the truth and then refused to retract when they were caught. At least on Wiki, the truth stands a fighting chance.
In Korea, only old people use Wikipedia!
A few days back there was talk about the Moller Sky Car, and someone said that the Newtonian and Bernoulli theories are incompatible, citing a Wikipedia article. (I'd link it, but I have a freakin migraine and really need to get to bed...)
Well, the wikipedia article was BS. Pulling out a real text like "Fundamentals of Aerodynamics" by Anderson would confirm that the Newtonian and Bernoulli views are compatible, just two different ways of expressing the same phenomenon. But since anyone who thinks s/he knows something about something can edit a wikipedia entry we get entries like that, which spread falsehoods.
I personally avoid Wikipedia for that very reason.
I suggest to people that when they are interested in a phenomenon that they try to find a reputable website that focuses on **just** that phenomenon. For example, if you have a question in aerodynamics, look for an aero website. Et Cetera.
-everphilski-
My only problem with wikipedia is that all the articles end up being styleless and very boring even compared to traditional eencyclopedias. I'll guess it is because with so many people editing everything trends towards the very bland but it is still a problem. Nice starting place though.
Its just a convenient place to start research, or get some quick facts. Its easily and readily accessible, and for the most part its pretty accurate. I wouldn't base any full fledged research paper off of facts derived from it since there is that chance it may not be correct. I agree with a previous post that sometimes there are articles where people's bias can come in and twist facts or emphasize certain things more than others. And in a way, I think that can be helpful and help educate people on not only the facts, but also things that surround the facts that are deeper. On the talk pages that accompany the regular pages, this type of discussion and 'arguing' sometimes occurs and it can often times be helpful to resolve disputes about an article as well as expose people to other views and the reasons behind those views. So basically you have to take wikipedia with a grain of salt. Its really interesting and amazing to see what an open source community can contribute.
~Hergio
is that the pack of lies that it is will be exposed once everyone begins reading the true truth found in the Uncyclopedia.
We view it (I hope), like anything else - with a grain of salt...at least initially. Believe it or not, nothing of what you read or hear from ANYPLACE is this Utopia of "true and verified". You must take each thing and compare it to what you know, what makes sense, what other sources say, and what common sense tells you. Then do your own additional research to try and validate things. This is to say that one should always be a healthy skeptic, no matter what the source. Anything else, and you are asking for trouble.
Within universities wikipedia is somewhat of a joke. But the concept of a freely available web encyclopedia is definitely valid.
I'd like to see a 'peer-reviewed' wikipedia appear that students can use for study.
I like wikipedia, I use it whenever I want to quickly bring myself up to speed on a topic. I do not use wikipeida for technical info. I have never refered to it to help me write a program, or to find out something about hardware, or to locate technical resources. Yeah, it's probably not made for that, so I'm probably not misusing it then. The point is that being a technical person does not seem to give me a unique opinion of wikipedia except maybe that I'm better at searching & navigating. Having said that I don't believe any source of information should be considered truth unless it makes sense to you personally. We as humans are blessed with intuition, and if we use it it can save us considerable time. If my intuition tells me information is false, and I can't verify the information, then I'll disbelieve it, be it in a journal, a highschool text book, or some guy on the internet. That said I'll probably spend less time trying to verify the word of 'some guy' than a text book, but generally the text book will explain things a fair bit better to me.
I think its a great resource when you're just curious about something, but I would use it to write a paper.
I only use it to look stuff up quick when google isn't returning anything very useful to satisfy my whim of curiosity.
Your friendly local Wikipedia Priest 2nd Class.
One thing about Wikipeida is that it has articles on individual elementry schools (example). This has caused a lot of friction in the community, there are even dedicated school watches to stop people from attempting to delete the information.
Personally, I sabotage random facts in random articles as a hobby.
Notice that they don't say that the liberal bias has disappeared. In fact, it has become rather distinctly entrenched at the administrator level.
Notice how Accuracy in Media is called a conservative organization (which it is) time and time again, but the analagous organization on thee left is described thusly: "Media Matters monitors for and refutes identified and materially substantiated conservative misinformation found in media news reports, public affairs and talk radio shows from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and others."
So, in short your bias is "identified and materially substantiated misinformation," my bias is truth.
You can find about a hudnred other examples, for example the breaking up of the article on Communism into theory and practice to avoid having to mention any of that nasty genocide in the main article.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
It's tough to increase the sum of knowledge when you're building on questionable facts. There are many, many everyday scientific myths that are widespread. Wikipedia is controlled by quantity, not quality.
What's to say that these myths don't become "facts" in Wikipedia due to sheer numbers? Is that increasing the sum of human knowledge? If anything, it's damaging it, because everybody who reads thsi "fact" will assume that it's true.
Wikipedia is the opposite of knowledge: it's based on majority rule. Wikipedia in 1805 would have described the "wonders of the African Ape-Man and his Ability to Pick Cotton." After all, the majority believed that it was true.
is not a wiki. Does that make the information you find there credible at all?
Although it is amature, It's better than many google results where all you get are people trying to sell you the things you want to learn about.
for example:
GOOGLE "light"
result (right hand column)
www.ebay.com, Great deals on light!
Seems ebay now sells light. Do they sell it by the particle and charge more for fashonable wavelengths? Perhaps I'll buy gallon drum of light.
You can always count on the sponsored ad from ebay to sound amusing.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
All you have to do to fix this problem is take the problem to the discussion page, or the talk page of the user who keeps reverting you. Simple enough. If they persist, get an administrator to help. Except that you have to do it forever, for a neverending sequence of random clueless lusers.
Are you adequate?
Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia. It's a community. Don't confuse the two.
Your contributions were probably questioned for two reasons. First, because Wikipedia is governed by a policy called NPOV, or Neutral Point Of View, which is interpreted to mean that an encyclopedia must reflect all perspectives on any subject. There can be no "absolute right" or "absolute wrong." According to NPOV, your opinion just that. Expertise does not exist. All sides must be represented, no matter how loony.
Second, you probably weren't taken seriously because you didn't contribute hundreds of edits over the course of a week. Wikipedia is dominated, literally, by those users who spend the most time editing. This, ultimately, is Wikipedia's greatest flaw: Its users are more interested in participating in a community than in building an encyclopedia. They call themselves "Wikipedians," and they stage meet-ups. Their reasons for participating are primarily social.
The result is a project governed by losers. Sorry, but it's the truth: The people with the most free time to dedicate to an online encyclopedia will always be the people least-qualified to contribute, because those who are qualified spend their time earning and practicing those qualifications in the real world. If the project were coordinated somehow, maybe shared between several universities with each department contributing according to its own specialization...maybe it could work. But Wikipedia is doomed to mediocrity, simply because it's populated by nutjobs with no social skills who drive away qualified contributors who threaten their pretend authority.
Knowledge is not democratic -- and expertise necessarily erodes equality. You cannot build a worthwhile encyclopedia based on the premise that everyone's contributions will be valuable.
Please don't read my journal
[Obligatory comment]
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Yes, there are also well-written articles. And, despite the lack of fact-checking, there are relatively few glaring errors. But even the the good stuff/crap ratio is suprisingly high, there's still a lot of crap.
I'm one of those factoid geeks who read reference books for pleasure. (Do you know why a Major ranks a Lieutenant, but a Lieutenant-General ranks a Major-General? I do, God help me!) I'll never do that with Wikipedia, because I never know in advance whether the article I'm about to read will educate and inspire me or confuse and nauseate me. It's a reference I find useful, but unlike many other reference works, I can never really fall in love with.
I think Wikipedia's long-term value will be less in its ability to inform its readers than it's ability to educate its contributers. It's teaching them how hard it is to put together a useful reference work, which is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. Maybe someday there're be a Wikipedia 2.0 that harnesses all that effort but offers better crap filters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
hah! I thought it'd be funny to start with a link to wikipedia on a discussion about wikipedia. Anyway I believe we should look at wikipedia with this law in mind. There are thousands of contributors and articles. Some may be written by paranoid commie trolls who dont know what they're talking about, but for every 1 of these individuals there are 50 people who actually know what they're talking about. I think it is safe to assume that the average wikipedia contributor has a higher than average IQ; i dont think that joe schmoe would waste his time on something like wikipedia. There are biased individuals who may post...there are also many people who try to be unbiased. You could probably find the same bias in historical textbooks or other encyclopedias. Wikipedia is great for learning. It is probably not as good for a research paper, however, neither would a regular encyclopedia.
The things printed encyclopedias have over the eletronic versions is that you can access them without power, the content and language is usually suitable for all ages and if you are bored you can easily learn new things by pulling down a volume and flipping through the pages quickly (Wikipedia is kinda slow on my end).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
wikipedia is amazing for looking up pop culture references, actors, music, video games, the ins-and-outs of pro-wrestling character histories. has anybody read the wiki for action movies? or for GREY GOO? it's brilliant.
anything that doesn't involve peoples egos or nationalistic identities is usually brilliantly done. it's also great for looking up foods, plants, animals, technology, vinegars-- a big beautiful range of things.
science and math articles are great too, but try looking up an important scientific figure who happens to have said some unflattering things about american foreign policy, or american race relations. gg.
look up these things though, you won't be disappointed:
fermi paradox
grey goo
clanking replicator
steven seagal (call me crazy)
action movies
or, if you're disappointed, you're already dead, RIP.
I see Wikipedia as an imperfect but much needed update to the traditional encyclopedia. Because the writers work for free, with not topic restrictions are space limits, Wikipedia will inevitably end up covering more topics in more detail than traditional encyclopedias. Hyperlinking also allows Wikipedia to link to related information, which will eventually make it a valuable research tool. Wikipedia articles may often be inaccurate or biased, but the same can be said of many encyclodpedias - which is why so many teachers limited the number of encyclopedias a student could cite in papers (I use the past tense because it doesn't happen anymore, as most students don't seem to bother with the old encyclopedias.).
The important thing to remember regarding Wikipedia is that if you're doing important research, double check it somewhere else. Just like the old printed encylopedias, Wikipedia should be used as a starting point, and not a primary source.
This blog entry by Jason Scott made that same point really well, I think.
Are you adequate?
I use Wiki to give me a clue about some item I am unfamiliar with, and I accept it as a layman's resource: not necessarily in depth and not necessarily completely factual.
Having said that, I used it last for a quick description of what argyria is. However, when writing a paper for a chemistry class about the gravimetric analysis of nickel in an ore, I found a page with some useful info, but decided to hit some more trustworthy resources instead.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
I know lots of stuff about reality. Been there, done that. I can't seem to get out of it.
So wikipedia isn't as much fun as I'd like. Better to see a new, enhanced version of reality - where the facts have been changed to make the story more interesting.
Thats why I like the uncyclopedia.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Vandalism is a big problem and drains resources such as volunteer time, which could be better spent on more important things instead of reverting articles. It's the anonymous (No registration required) policy.
Many people hate it, but some ideologues remain stubborn about it. To be fair, there are quite a lot of justifications, which could be viewed here.
Still, most (if not all) vandalized pages are impulse edits. It's inconceivable that someone would go through the trouble of creating an account on Wikipedia just to change a sentence. The argument leveled against such logic goes "But it will stop the legitimate users who don't want to register." To which I say if someone is passionate about a topic and knows the subject better than current editors, he or she would take that step and register. I don't understand why laziness is being hailed as virtue by those who oppose registration-based editing.
Hopefully in the future the rational wikipedians will put an end to this idiotic policy.
(Dislaimer - I'm a wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and the "featured article director" -- I choose the featured articles you see on the main page every day)
/Lexika: Wikipedia gegen Brockhaus und Encarta/, starting on p. 132 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vs_Brockh aus_and_Encarta
Last week I was a guest speaker for a group of education graduate students about Wikipedia (the course was on technology use in education; wikipedia was part of the curriculum). Before the lecture, sent them a few items I thought they should read - objective studies of Wikipedia's accuracy done by impartial, outside organization. Here's what I sent them:
----------
1) "A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles -- in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" -- when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-08-01/Featured_content
PDF of research paper can be found at: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki. pdf
2) An article comparing the WP to Brockhaus and Encarta has appeared in issue 21/04 of C't, a major German computer engineering magazine. It is titled
Full survey results can be found at: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/20 04-October/035339.html
3) "As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects." - IBM study of Wikipedia - http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/results. htm
4) Computer Science professor (and minor geek rockstar) Ed Felton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Felten) posted in his blog about a
small-scale survey he did of Wikipedia: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=674
-----------------
As far as my personal interactions - as featured article director, I can say first-hand that we've been hitting really hard on the need to have inline cited sources in the article text. It's been an explicit requirement for featured articles for some time now (9-12 months or so). In many ways, this makes our content much more trustworhty than most other information sources.
Furthermore, purely from personal experience, I can say there's something to be said for the expert-hobbyist. For example, the "best" writer on wikipedia (in terms of number of featured articles written) is a 17 year old from New Jersey who writes long, thorough, well referenced, accurate articles on, erm, British and the Bri
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Wikipedia is the top hit on google for a lot of common searches, and I do agree that it is an okay source of information if you need info in a hurry. However I have noticed a clear liberal bias among many articles. Here are three examples I remember off the top of my head from searches in the last week --
Little Saigon, CA -- the article gives a good overview of the landscape of Westminister and Garden Grove, but then out of nowhere he drops "The event also raised some controversial issues about constitutional free speech in the United States". No sir, the event didn't raise controversial issues. I suppose if you were a socialist then yes, maybe the issues would be controversial. But to 99.99% of America, someone flying the VC flag on American soil is a disgrace to those who gave their lives in Vietnam. The guy broke the law by selling pirated movies and he was arrested, end of story.
Newt Gingrich -- In the TRIVIA section: "Candace Gingrich, his sister, works for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation's largest gay and lesbian organization. In years past she has headed up HRC's "National Coming Out Day" campaign." Gee, thanks for that "trivia". The author couldn't reasonably fit that line in an article on Newt himself, so he sneaks it into the "trivia" section. Clear liberal bias here.
Ronald Reagan -- "It is frequently reported that Secret Service agents had to inform Reagan every morning that he was once the president". Really sir, since it's so "frequently" reported I guess you wouldn't mind providing a link? What business does this phrase have in an encyclopedia entry of Ronald Reagan other than to undermine his legacy??
it's seems to me this is very similar to the 'secuity through obscurity' debate though in a different realm. both debates actually bleed into social networking; as long as informed parties are aware of the resources at hand, they can be present to contest inaccuracies/'backdoors' and ultimately participate in the dissemintation of knowledge (or untainted code) to the masses...
just my $.02
-e
I believe the problem is the divide between the emergent knowledge institution known as Wikipedia and the various disparate wikipedians who have a huge amount of time on their hands to change whatever they want. Time trumps expertise on wikipedia (and the Internet). In the battle for information on the Internet it is often the person with the most time on their hands that will win. Whilst we see the emergent properties of wikipedia as "good" and they can be explained away with "replies to common objections" it is the problems at the chaotic lower levels that are troublesome.
I imagine Wikipedia at its rawest, at the lower levels of editing, reflects the human race. Coalitions, in-fighting, control of knowledge, backstabbing, Machiavellian behaviour etc. These seem to be the problems people talk of when referring to wikipedia, but as I have stated, when compared to the final product of the emergent knowledge in wikipedia these problems are not acknowledged because they are compared with a final product, or structure, not the giant messy process going on behind the scenes.
I am a master's student in psychology. All of the research I use in my thesis is from published academic sources. However, Wikipedia is a great tool to see what types of connections exist between ideas. I used it the other night to do some additional studying for my exam. Mind you, I didn't commit many of the terms to memory, as some were a bit off, but the elaborative nature and the connected system of ideas really opens up some insights for me at times. So in a non-academic use, it really can be used as a great tool to facilitate expanded thought on topics. just use salt, one or two grains preferably.
That was funny
...MetaWikipedia!
Create a Wikipedia variant where only entries validated by a set of experts. When articles are updated in the main Wikipedia site they'll be queued for expert review; until then, the older, verified versions will remain in place.
(There's room for more than one of these; in fact, Wikipedia.org might grant subdomains to the most deserving versions.)
I teach freshman composition at the U of Texas in Austin. My students are about to begin their second paper, which will involve a substantial research component, and Wikipedia was one of the first things I covered in discussing acceptable sources. I do not accept citations of Wikipedia articles, for two reasons:
1) The articles are not stable. They change on a regular basis. If my students cite something, I need it to be static so that I can verify their citations easily. I am well aware that Wikipedia has a robust versioning system, but that is irrelevant to my purposes. If a student cites something and I cannot immediately locate it, I simply do not have the time to sort through the recent edits to find a version of the article that matches what my student quoted. This is particularly true of popular and frequently updated articles, where there can be dozens of recent edits to sort through. There just aren't enough hours in the day for that.
2) The sources are all too frequently anonymous. Some Wikipedia articles contain excellently documented source information, it is true; but many others do not. There is no reliable way to separate solid, documentable information from personal crank theories. Sometimes they're obvious; sometimes they're not. Some will invoke the magic of "many eyeballs make shallow bugs" at this point, pointing out that errors tend to get corrected or reverted fairly rapidly. But once again, that is irrelevant. If my student cites an unfixed "bug" to support an argument, that's just as damaging to the student's paper as it would be if the bug never got fixed.
So what I tell my students is this: Wikipedia is great for fast, informal definitions of unfamiliar material, but not for formal papers submitted for credit. You can use it as a starting point for further research -- I have used it as such a starting point myself. But every piece of information from the Wikipedia article needs to be verified against a static, identifiable source before it can be used in a paper, and then you need to cite the verifying source rather than Wikipedia.
If it makes the Wikipedia people feel better, I also refuse to accept citations of the Encyclopedia Britannica -- or any encyclopedia, for that matter. Encyclopedias provide useful overviews; but I want my students to grapple with primary sources, not secondary summaries.
While I find wikipedia interesting to read and not a bad starting place, because its anonymous its impossible to trace back (and sometimes correct) errors.
With real science there are all sorts of peer reviewed papers that don't lead to anything meaningful, or have errors etc... after all the peer review process doesn't necessarily include verification of results. The problem with wikipedia is that if researchers believe person x died in 2793 BC at the age of 18, and I do oodles of research and conclude in fact that he died at age 19, and then change the wikipedia article to reflect that, and then the previous author who isn't yet familiar goes and changes it back, there's no way to argue this point away really (esspecially if it is a relatively trivial part of otherwise longwinded articles), unless you create a dispute page. Which isn't always worth the effort, nor will it necessarily attract the correct attention. I would be inclined to include a changelog in wikipedia, or 'past versions' that sort of thing so you can see at the bottom of the page what is being changed and perhaps a justification where warranted, granted tools like that are non trivial to write.
Do I take everything I read there seriously? No, no more (or less) so than I take what The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times has to say. After all their authors are anonymous to me, and I frequently diagree with their facts or intrepretations.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I use Uncyclopedia instead because it is more reliable than Wikipedia. Your milage may vary, but I think that Uncyclopedia is the better choice for Internet Encyclopedias.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I introduced a couple of subtle but serious changes into a few articles as long as 18 months ago. They were average non high profile articles. I stopped checking most of them as it got boring and only look at a single article every now and then anymore to see what is going on and if someone has mercy with the truth. The result is that some people do contribute to the article but actually continue to incorporate my malicious change. Even reverted back to it when at one time someone righted my wrongdoing. Whine all you want about how evil it was to make that change, the sad fact is that wikipedias peer review failed and continues to do so. You simply can't get an excellent information source out of the vast mediocre group of contributors. Instead you at best end up with a least common denominator.
A couple of days ago, Nick Carr posted a fascinating blog entry, titled The Amorality of Web 2.0 that included a fairly devastating assessment of Wikipedia's quality and reliability. Carr's broader point is that free, user-created sites like Wikipedia make it uneconomical to maintain for-fee alternatives, and that we end up getting stuck with amateurish stuff as a result. Here's a brief quote (it's a long piece): "The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die . . . Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening."
Yep, usually pleasantly surprised myself. Wikipedia is a near-perfect illustration of the old joke
"That's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory".
That's nowhere nearly as bad as the 20 year old college student who vastly overestimates his understanding of a topic, and the value of what he has to contribute.
It's easy to notice the handiwork of the twelve-year old and revert it, and there's countless people who can do it. There's relatively few people who can understand why the 20-year old's contribution is very wrong; it takes them considerable effort to demonstrate the guy's errors to a layperson audience; and they're very much outnumbered by the 20 year olds.
And nothing is worse than a mob of said 20 year olds, independently making small edits to a coherent, cohesive article in order to make small, local "improvements" (without any concern for the overall organization and narrative flow of the article), and thereby rendering the article into an unreadable random shopping list of distorted half-truths.
Are you adequate?
Sure the opportunity exists. But the idea behind wiki is that the legit folks far out number the vandals and will fix errors at a far greater rate than they occur.
I just looked up the electro magentic phenomena of "Eddy Currents" on wiki yesterday and found the info to be pretty accurate. If such a page were vandalized I (and many others) would just cut and paste the correct info back into wiki until the vandals eventually gave up. We outnumber them and we will ultimately prevail in maintaining the correct info by a democratic consensus. Jeez, as if the vandals would even care about Eddy Currents.
Long live wiki.
If you don't prevent the literati from becoming editors you end up with literature biased toward the literati.
This is a general problem with literacy of course but it is seriously amplified when the literati can act as an anonymous mob at a moment's notice.
Seastead this.
Given the perponderous dexterity exhibited by morose posters of esoterical comments, I am rather inclined to inject a fallacious viewpoint.
Since all online encyclopedias desire to be unquestioned in their accuracy, they should start charging a nominal fee for posting descriptions, comments, and for elucidating their viewpoints.
Hell, if Slashdot added a fee for posting, this comment would not be here!
I'm another librarian who has contributed to Wikipedia and been burned by the mess that is has descended into. I think that librarians should be more receptive to Wikipedia, but I think everybody should be more critical of the project. I really enjoy much of the content and use Wikipedia to look up information. It's really great because it is democractic, anarchistic, and open, which all contributes to a reference tool that is pretty useful.
At the same time, Wikipedia has some serious problems, most of which involve its zealous users, anonymity, and the lack of any system of accountability and authority. As much as I dislike using the word "authority"-- or advocating that a project needs more of it--Wikipedia could use a system whereby "experts" could freeze certain entries when they get to a fleshed out point. These volunteers would also restore some sanity to some entires, especially the ones where a few nuts with time on their hands persistently pass of misinformation as factual information. The other big problem is the zealous users. I've made factual changes to subjects I know something about--some of which involve substantial rewrites--only to have one of these zealous users change an entry back to the inaccurate version. If you try to correct these changes and do it too often, these zealots accuse you of violating some "rule" about "reverts." One thing that Wikipedia could do is to get rid of the "watch this page" feature, which would discourage zealots from thinking that they own a page. This change, and other changes, would discourage other zealots from becoming a new form of "expert class," which is ironic given that Wikipedia is supposed to be an open, democratic project.
Wikipedia has lots of great content and has lots of potential, but this librarian will not contribute until the social problems in the Wikipedia community are resolved.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does anyone realize how many other online encyclopedias are just running spiders through wikipedia's content, then cutting and pasting to their own products? They cite wikipedia when they use it as a source, but it's in teeny print beneath the page...
These other encyclopedias are so much more pernicious. With Wikipedia, you know you're getting user submissions, you bring your grain of salt. With an ad-supported static online encyclopedia, you can get caught off guard really easily.
Some encyclopedias that copy wikipedia articles:
www.reference.com
www.arikah.net
www.wordiq.com
www.onpedia.com
The few times I've checked it against other, reliable sources, it's failed miserably. I'm an avid lapidary. One gemstone near and dear to my heart is precious opal. I checked Wikipedia here for what causes "play of color." They're claiming it's an interference pattern caused by parallel plates formed inside the stone. That's wrong.
Opal is amorphous. It fractures with a conchoidal shape. There are no microscopic parallel plates in opal, tho there are in labradorite. Opal's color play is caused by a regular pattern of silica microspheres, all the same size, forming a diffraction grating.
Opal's colors are pure like a rainbow. You'll never see metallic bronze, or metallic gold, coming from an opal, because of this, but you will see them coming from labradorite.
Their explanation was shown false some 25 years ago, with scanning electron microscope photos of precious opal. Why are they propagating a factual falsehood? And, more importantly, if they do this on a subject that I know well, what happens on subjects where I know little? How can I trust them???
Lemon curry?
What about the Slashdot trolling phenomena? i.e. when slashdot links to wikipedia don't click any links... Isn't slashdot wikipedia's biggest vunerability?
I was just searching images of 50's shoes for my wife, and at some point went to Wikipedia's article on the 1950s. There was nothing about fashion, and she noted there were only "men things".
As there are more males among people that actually edit content, that sort of bias happens, even if unintentionally.
I've always had the same hesitating suggestion: branch the wikipedia so that there's something like a "stable branch".
Of course, such a thing would be a logistical nightmare, and it's damn near impossible. However, I think it would be appreciated by a lot of people if some editorial process could be worked in somehow.
This is actually a very good idea.
A stub could start out as a beta, where it gets many edits. After a certain ammount of time/edits the entry could be forked into a RC and dev page. The RC could be locked and the dev maintained on a seperate tab (like the discussion or talk links are now). You could then put up a voting system where you can give a thumbs up or down.
If it gets a number of yes votes it could then be called a stable page (1.0) More edits would still be made on the dev page until it reaches the limit where it goes up for a up/down vote again, and a snapshot of the dev would go up for review. If it passes you could then have a 1.1 version of the page and continue adnausium.
This would provide a signifigant ammount of quality control on the page.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
That's just wrong.
Let's think for a moment about what the purpose of granting Ph.D. degrees is. A Ph.D., being the highest degree one can attain is something that's granted to a person by a group of people who are themselves Ph.D.'s, and thus, have a degree no higher than what they're granting. When one is granted a Ph.D., essentially, it's means that other Ph.D.'s have recognized you as a peer in their field. Which would speak against this notion of yours that if one is not "the absolute world's expert on your topic, you are in comparison uneducated to [the person who] occupies this position"--the "absolute world's expert," as a regular part of their career, recognizes new people as peers.
That's a bit of a formalistic argument, but overall, I think that sentence of yours that I quote is just wrong. Somebody who spends many years studying a topic, and hanging out with experts discussing that topic, is not uneducated compared to the "top scholar" in the topic (if such a thing can be said to exist at all, actually). There is a huge gulf between a layperson and an average expert, but not so between the average expert and the top scholar.
Are you adequate?
What i don't get is why in wikipedia you can't cite a source, just something that makes it harder to change things. Then have people confirm the source. If the source is confirmed make it harder to change, something like a vote.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
So... why don't you edit the article yourself if it is wrong instead of complaining?
I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here, and ask: why not give him unlimited deference?
The general sort of counterarguments I expect revolve around the notion that he'll make some mistake. My general strategy to respond to particular cases will be to say that sure, he's gonna make mistakes, but given that he's an expert, his mistakes are going to be way more educational than a layperson's. I.e., even if he's wrong about X, you're still going to a lot of insight about X if you copy his error.
Are you adequate?
Yes, I totally agreed that
wikipedia is a good starting point for informal information
definition of some terms, but it is hardly to be some reference source for academic citations, etc...
Ok.. freedom of speech gives us the quick, fast, and many different info.
But the ability to clarify, filter the information and thinking is also important,
I will do my citation/paper by serach on google and yahoo for sth.. but just for reference only..
What on earth are you on about? Some Wikipedia editors are more interested in the "community", however when it becomes clear that they aren't really contributing to articles they do tend to be ignored by the same community. And at the end of the day, the community is geared towards writing factual and neutral encyclopedia articles. Those who participate in the featured article candidates process are definitely the most constructive ones. I'd say the same for those who participate in WikiProjects.
It kind of sounds like you are bitter about the site. It's either that, or your really don't know what you are talking about.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"Who cares if it's easy to deface, it's got great moderation!"
Swift (and not so swift) moderation doesn't do very much good. A friend added me to a list of famous erotic authors. It was removed.. a few weeks later. Get what? I (Aaron Gyes) am still, months later, all over the damn internet.
http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-authors-of-er otic-works i /list_of_authors_of_erotic_works.htm o f%20authors%20of%20erotic%20works c _authors u thors c _authors f _erotic_works t ic_authors / List_of_authors_of_erotic_works.html / s _of_erotic_works L ist_of_erotic_authors s t_of_erotic_authors . html d .aspx?w=List_of_erotic_authors o f_erotic_works c _authors
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/l/l
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/List%20
http://www.biologydaily.com/biology/List_of_eroti
http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/List_of_erotic_a
http://web.linix.ca/pedia/index.php/List_of_eroti
http://www.europe.com/index.php/List_of_authors_o
http://www.medicalrace.com/dictionary/List_of_ero
http://www.dictionaryofeverything.com/explore/112
http://list-of-authors-of-erotic-works.iqnaut.net
http://www.omnipelagos.com/entry?n=list_of_author
http://www.gardeningdaily.com/flowers-and-plants/
http://www.braindex.com/encyclopedia/index.php/Li
http://en.efactory.pl/List_of_erotic_authors
http://www.art-fresh.net/DisplayArticleFull314102
http://www.thefreeencyclopedia.com/definition/wor
http://bigpedia.com/encyclopedia/List_of_authors_
http://www.dogluvers.com/dog_breeds/List_of_eroti
People like that just like to bitch instead of fixing the problem. It's like anything else. A mechanic has a break down? Said mechanic can do one of two things, bitch or fix it. Depending on the person you'll get one or the other.
Note:
Whatever answer you get, you should immediately do some poll elsewhere to find out if you can trust it. A lot of Slashdot critics(*) have pointed to hypothetical situations where comments might not actually be tech-savvy!
(*)"It should be noted that polls on Slashdot, like most on the Internet, are notoriously unreliable."
This is...
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While I don't mind if my students cite Wikipedia (I teach at the college level), I ask that they turn in a printout of the referenced page. This way, should the web page change drastically, I have their original intended reference.
I personally like Everything2.com, since there is usually a long list of items per topic, including the loony ones. Most of the serious posts are heavily cited, and contain links to other posts and websites for further reference. Having a funny post in the middle is also a welcome relief in the throes of research and manuscript writing.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Fix it.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
... should eventually get it right
Many (mostly older) librarians, for example, relish their roles as gatekeepers to information.
Being a librarian, I'm sure you've read Eco's The Name of the Rose. I read it in French while working in-country with a professor of Medieval French Culture, and I had a discussion with a historian at the Abby of Notre-Dame de Senanque where he claimed the story to be very caricaturial, which I assumed it to be.
But then we tried to see an original manuscript in the municipal library in Axe-en-Provence. We had been in libraries from Paris and Arras, all the way to Provence, and we were always able to study the manuscript firsthand. Of course, we had always done our homework, studied microfiche, etc., and only needed the manuscript for a few moments to inspect a few details. Well, the librarian in Axe was more of the archivist tradition. Her main complaint about us getting to see it was that she herself had only seen it once or twice.
From that time on, I've considered Eco's portrayal of librarians as gatekeepers more truthful than fiction.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Seriously, I think that you might just need to learn a bit of Wikipedia etiquette. If someone disagrees with you, don't go off half-cocked but instead take your concerns to the talk page. Discuss the issue, and if nothing happens there and the other party appears intractible, list the article on the RFC page. Perhaps send the other party a message. Be polite.
Almost every time I've ignored my own advise, I've gotten into trouble. The problem, then, was not with the other editors: it was with myself.
I'm hearing a lot of people commenting that it's impossible to get their information listed. Yet I hear a lot of blame of the other party, and no discussion of their own behaviour.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Hmmm... I know what you mean. But my suggestion is, if your gf found useful and verifiable information then she should cite the URL that points to that specific article revision. Don't cite the URL of the most up2date version of the Wikipedia article.
Just a hint.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That is not correct, though there is a blocking policy and mechanism.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ya... but the slashdot mods have already dealt with the comment you're replying to :-)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Man, did you ever hit the nail on the head... right on!
I feel so bad for the one's that do work there that are actually worth something, and not facist control freaks... because they put up with the others (how do they do it!) I'm never going back to that planet.
The Admin and the Engineer
Linux is an encyclopedia now?
Oh. You mean emacs.
Correspondingly, gazillions of Wikipedia entries that have something to do with language are labeled as "linguistics" by their layperson language enthusiast authors. My favorite example: the Etymology entry, which starts: "In historical linguistics, etymology is the study of the origins of words." Sounds reasonable, right?
Except that historical linguists don't really care about the origins of words; they care about the origin of languages. If you take a course in historical linguistics (and I have taken such a course), you're going to spend your time learning and practicing the comparative method, not researching etymologies of words; and you're going to get the idea drilled into your head that the origins of individual words is not what matters, but rather, systematic structural correspondences between languages. Etymology is not really a subfield of historical linguistics, contrary to what the article states in the first sentence; it's largely trivial, and mostly irrelevant to the real subject matter. The article was evidently written by one of those layperson language enthusiasts, who tend to think of language as a big bag of words (as opposed to structural arrangements of words), and therefore, that the task of historical linguistics must obviously be to list the origin of each word.
Anyway, astrophysics, just from the name of it, sounds like it's the complete opposite--every non-expert knows that they know zilch about it, and therefore, will defer to any perceived authority. (And that includes false authority, so yeah, you have your problems too.)
In general, there's some fields which are more like linguistics in that regard, and others which are more like astrophysics. Anthropologists, sociologists and some kinds of psychologist can probably empathize the most with linguists in this regard. I presume historians also have that sort of problem; I do know philosophers have it. Particle physicists, neuroscientists and their ilk probably don't suffer from it.
Are you adequate?
Actually, the democracy on Wikipedia is a positive thing. If some correct information from expert gets objected (or even deleted), it's usually a sign that he didn't explained the issue or gave good sources. This is a good thing, because it gives feedback to expert about parts of their knowledge that is problematic/hard to accept/unknown for the commnon people. This can lead to much better articles. There is no such feedback in traditional encyclopedias.
Then you still have to determine if that edit was the one that had ture and accurate information. I mean suppose the students actually collaborated on it. Suppose that they have a friend who has an account make a change to a page to give them the quote or information they want. It gets reverted, but they perma-link to it. Ok, now what? Unfortuantely for freshman courses with papers on a wide range of topics, it's not possible for a professor to become an expert in each subject and fact check. They can only check by checking cited sources and thus those sources need to be somewhat reliable.
Also you do have to be careful. Because of the rather democratic nature of Wikipedia, it's venurable to myths. It's amazing the things that are "common knowledge" that often turn out to be wrong. Well fighting against those can be hard, and the truth is not a democratic process. Wikipeida's generally very good, but I still wouldn't hang my hat on it.
I've never personally contributed to Wikipedia, but I have fought with groupthink and people who believe themselves to be experts on things they aren't. I used to hang out in IRC and in one channel, a discussion got started on high-end network lines. One thing lead to another and people were talking nonsense about standards that didn't exist. I called bullshit and was told I was wrong. So I went and checked. At the time, I worked for Network Operations. This related to optical lines on the phone network, so I went and asked the guy who ran the 5ESS phone switch. He told me I was right and told me where to find the spec. I showed this to them, and was told I was wrong and the page was wrong. No amount of arguing would change anything, these people were convinced they were "experts", and others beleived them because they had positioned themselves as such. Though I consulted a real expert (5ESS operator) and cited an authority (Lucent docs) it was not persuasive.
So I would say Wikipeida is a great starting point, get background, and get citations on where to start But I wouldn't cite it myself. It's similar that you don't want to cite articles that cite other articles, you want to go to the orignal and cite that. The extra layer is just a chance for things to get muddled.
Three comments. I am not a wiki fanatic, but I seem to be playing one tonight...
1. I'm not sure I see your objection clearly. The "etymology" article does indeed assert that etymology is connected to the field of historical lingusitics. You don't seem to disagree with that statement -- you instead assert that etymology is a rather dull, uninteresting part of lingusitics and really not a central problem of the field as some people seem to think. If you go to the article on Historical Linguistics itself, there is no mention of etymology! In any case, following your comments, I removed the three words you objected to linking etymology to historical linguistics, I couldn't resist.
In general, I can see what you're saying -- people not really grasping the difference between Linguistics, the field, and linguistics "the study of language and stuff". But it seems to be a minor problem (if irritating)? (Oh, and to be fair, what seems to be a reasonable, certaintly non-zero, number of lingustics people don't mind calling etymology an aspect of historical linguistics -- follow up some of the webpages here.)
2. I think you point out an interesting problem with wikipedia, which is that a big difficulty exists in the large-scale structures of the information. Generally, a factually incorrect sentence or paragraph gets fixed pretty quickly. But large-scale problems -- involving how various articles are "threaded" together -- are much harder to fix.
3. I personally would be terrified of editing the linguistics articles, since linguistics to me is astrophysics to you. But I can definitely see the problems that might arise when dealing with concepts that "everybody" understands, including things in psychology and anthropology. In general, fixing these problems takes work and a bit of dedication from experts; what's weird is that wikipedia seems to, on occasion, attract just those people.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
Is that because social liberals are more willing to work on something like Wikipedia for free, without a fiscal incentive? If you want it to be more conservative in outlook, why not get involved?
While I don't know anything about Little Siagon, you pointed to articles about Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan, two lightning-rods for political debate in the United States. Articles about topics that are inherently political will always be interpreted by some people as being biased, regardless of which news source publishes them.
I don't mind finding occasional bias in articles I know will be controversial. It's when you can't detect bias that it is most dangerous, imho. Let me end by asking you this: Did you get a lot of good historical info on Gingrich and Reagan, or were there factual errors?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The only thing is, who certifies?
It's only top-down designers who face this perennial conundrum, you know. If you free yourself from the narrow confines of socialist thinking this problem is easy to solve: let a free market assign the appropriate value of Wikipedia information, just as it successfully assigns the appropriate value of bazillions of commodities from 1/8" copper tubing to expertise in brain surgery.
How could that work? Simple, if Wikipedia could figure out a way to let users bid to pay for information, and let experts (or random wannabes) bid to sell information, and connect them up. The ol' invisible hand would rapidly solve the problem of assigning an appropriate value to every article and every author in the Wikipedia.
Users for whom information is mission-critical, e.g. who will be testing the truth of that information most severely, would end up offering the highest price for it. So, information that consistently proves reliable and accurate in actual use (and not just in some academical opinion) would fetch the highest price. Similarly, experts who really are expert, who can easily provide the high quality information, are going to end up commanding the highest fees, fees which will encourage them to provide more of those tasty nuggets. Lonely groupies who merely browse and argue without actually using the information in the real world won't be paying high prices, so they will have little effect on the nature of the supply. Flamers who supply plausible-sounding but useless or misleading garbage will quickly find the price of their product falling to peanuts.
In other words, I think the essential flaw in Wikipedia is that it is free, because in the real world things that are free usually end up being worth the price (i.e. nothing), because there is, indeed, as you point out, no clearly reliable way to ensure that noise and froth do not swamp what's actually valuable.
That being said, it's hard to know how Wikipedia could change this. Aside from its philosophical blinders, which probably prevent it from understanding the nature of its dilemma and the solution, it is difficult to make appropriate micropayments. No Wikipedia article is worth, say, $2 for a look, or $50/year for a subscription. But would I pay a nickel for a look, if I could pay instantly with just a single mouse click? I might indeed. Especially if I knew that the price was set by market demand from people who had to put up their own money to get the information, which goes far to guarantee that the information has proven worth the price when actually used.
Because I no longer have the book with photos to cite author, ISBN number and page to back it up. Also, see the above comments on fixing articles. As I've never been involved there before, from what others have said, my correction is likely to be edited away.
I've already had flame wars about opal with another old-timer on rockhound mailing lists. He claims to have photos to back his claims up, but wants $500, and a signed non-disclosure agreement, before showing them to me. As I've run afoul of him more than once, it might well be the same issue here. Sans *my* referrences, I'd be wasting my time and effort. While I have boatloads of time now that I'm on disability, my "effort" supply is rather limited.
Lemon curry?
Hear, hear. Wikipedia is to authoritative comment as a graffiti'ed wall in a vacant lot is to art. The political content is especially risible. It has a noise to signal ratio that's somewhere between National Enquirer and either DailyKos or FreeRepublic. Open access + zealous internet pimps = noise.
Yes, Wikipedia is vulnerable to vandalism. But from my experience, Wikipedia also has a growing problem with hardcore zealots who patrol pages and prevent factual information from being added by newer people or casual users. In other words, some of the anti-vandal users are actually vandalizing content because they are more interested in playing Wikipedia cops instead of being Wikipedia writers, editors, and cybrarians.
Get rid of the "watch this page" feature (except for admins). This feature gives the zealots the idea that they "own" certain pages.
It's a wiki, for christ's sake. You don't need a PhD to contribute.
If you want, add your understanding as an "alternative theory". After a while, somebody who knows may just remove the other one or relegate it to a "historical theory" or something.
You're right, a lot of the technical articles are either 1) based on outdated theories, or 2) up-to-date, but ridiculously complex. But, guess what? Most educational materials are the same way! Schools still teach Newton even though he's been proven wrong for a hundred years.
If intelligent people always insist on appealing to arbitrary authority to back up their assertions, we wouldn't get anywhere. Read this if you don't believe me.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Apparently, academic institutions are far better than Wikipedia. But wait! A quick Google search for the ABC shows that Department of Computer Science in Iowa State University believes the same thing: that "The Atanasoff-Berry Computer was the world's first electronic digital computer."
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yeah, but then the thousand-and-first nutjob overwrites.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
In my experience it depends greatly on the type of article - the less "concrete" the worse it is (in the sense of mathematics being very concrete and "is this author good" being not very concrete). Politically charged - not even remotely useful - not even as a starting point.
But then, I would say that is to be expected. In a lot of areas the "pro" people care enough to police it and pretty much control it. The "anti" people don't really think about it much but may from time to time edit on it (and sometimes in a destructive way), but it's not common. Especially given some subjects are very soft, or subjective, and the people feel VERY strongly about thier subject this can lead to a HUGE skew that peer reviewed papers are usually weed out. Technical stuff tends to be correct or wrong - whether I'm a gun nut, don't care one way or another, or think all guns are evil it doesn't change when a quicksort is better than a bubble sort - yet that would really color my views on firearms.
Take the some of the vegan entries, some of the stuff said in there has been, well, idiotic. It may stay for a while, be edited out and back in many times, but rarely is some of the more idiotic things left out for long. Essentially those that care enough to look at it much are mostly vegan, usually not just "vegan" but politically so also (I mean to differentiate between people who are simply vegan and ones who wish to push it on others regardles of any facts). I read it from time to time just for laughs - things like vegans never get sick, cures asthma, diabetes, heart disease, live for well over a hundred years, make you dog/cat a vegan, etc etc. But then, if you read it over time it's obvious which ones because they change quite frequently - one day it may be full of nutso and a few hours later actually a good take on veganism.
But then, you need to do that filtering on any source too - just that you are more likely to be burned on the wikipedia than a full peer reviewd academic article.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
this is so true.
But all the same in traditional publishing world.
It's hard to get top people for relatively low-paying writing gigs.
there is at least an approach for publishing various insurances on the Web:
the detail is at http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/ (potential non-intrusive application to Wikipedia: http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/#wikipedia)
Long and winded. I mean, look at the +5 comments on this thread. I had to move my middle finger 10 times to get to the bottom where I read the QOTD. That was the most important anyway. Whenever someone uses platonic or plutonic or whatever that word is, I usually stop there. Plus the article was huge and had too many links, how do these literaries expect tech-savvy people allowance of our time?!
First of all, you know what research actually means - to get facts. And you know, opinion from liberal/religic lunatic/commie/etc. is also fact (about other peoples do feel about it). So it is like big, big bowl of these opinions, mixed with facts. Some of articles are war fields, some of them - very good references. Some of them not.
BUT in overall Wikipedia is God send, because I search in that almost all the time for various movies, books, etc. entities which facts simply cannot easy interpreted. Lengh of mile in kilometres can't be different in US and UK, can it?
I also like community feeling around it. It is like it's own universe. Knowledge, to know is the keywords to Wikipedia. And sharing of knowledge is what I really root for.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The endless thing about authority misses the point - wikipedia isn't trying to be a supreme informational authority, if such a thing can exist. The function of wikipedia, based on it's guidelines, is primarily as an information aggregator, summariser, and linker. For serious work, an article should be considered as a starting point for research, or a way to see at a glance what related fields there are.
"The people with the most free time to dedicate to an online encyclopedia will always be the people least-qualified to contribute, because those who are qualified spend their time earning and practicing those qualifications in the real world."
Couldn't this be said for almost all OSs projects, including Linux?
What I'm trying to say is that your statement here is wrong and really ingotant of who and why people contribute to non profit stuff in their free time.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
On the other hand, its often quite good for looking up dates and other similarly objective data.
As a research tool, well, as long as your subject is not historical or political it is a good start. If those are your subjects then it's worse than useless and you'd be a fool to use it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
...but the feedback loop from customer to producer is poor. Google doesn't allow the Researcher fee structure to be set by the market. They have this simple system where Researchers just get canned if they get too many poor reviews. That's very crude. For one thing, a good market needs crappy vendors who sell their wares cheaply, because sometimes a crappy answer is Good Enough -- sometimes you want to rent a limo to impress your date, but sometimes you want to rent a wreck to move your crap from one apartment to another.
/. denizens posting from Mom's basement? Hmmm.
Also, the price you set for your question probably only affects the speed of the answer. To make it affect the quality of your answer -- which is probably a lot more important! -- Google should provide some way for you to "hire" a Researcher with a quality you prefer (e.g. a degree in the field), or at least a Researcher with a better Google Answer track record.
Actually, the best system is clearly just an auction. You post a question, and Researchers bid on the right to answer it, with stated deadlines for doing so. You accept whatever bid you like, or none of them, pay your money, get your answer. Depending on how you like it, you attach a positive or negative comment to the Researcher's growing "reputation" file. A Researcher with a large and glowing reputation can, of course, post far higher bids for his services than a newbie or person with a mixed reputation.
A fascinating social experiment would emerge if Google kept everything about the Researchers except their Google-Answer-earned reputation secret: would the "conventional" measures of authority be reflected in the actual fees commanded by Researchers, after a while? For example, would people with PhDs from top schools actually end up with market-set fees that are a lot higher than the fees the market sets for lowly college students or
A large system like this, supported by micropayment, would also revolutionize how many of us work. Suppose I'm very good at programming in general, but the absolute world's expert on some tiny corner of it, say certain types of machine vision algorithms. Now, I can't really make a living consulting on the tiny sliver where I'm absolutely top, because people rarely need that level of expertise in this narrow field, and they don't need it for long. So I have to make a living using my broader, less high talents, and be paid accordingly less.
But...what if I can collect micropayments for answering questions on my narrow topic of superb expertise from all over the world? Among a pool of 2 billion workers, there might very well be enough questions in my micro-discipline to support me. Which means two interesting things: first, I have a better average pay rate, because I am being hired mostly for that in which I am the world's top expert rather than for that in which I am only pretty knowledgeable. Secondly, people have a better chance of getting very good answers to their questions, because they have the chance to hire the world's top expert for 10 minutes instead of hiring someone merely pretty knowledgeable for two months.
In fact, ever had a question which you just know an expert could answer instantly, but on which you also just know you'll beat your head for four weeks? I sure have. What a great deal it would be if you could hire the expert for 60 seconds! I'd gladly pay $50 for 60 seconds of certain expert's time from time to time. It's a good deal for me -- I save weeks of my own time -- and it's a good deal for the expert -- at $50/minute he's earning money awfully fast. If there's a way to collect and process zillions of $50 microtransactions from all over the world...
Is it possible in wikipedia to 'revert' an article to a previous version quickly, without having to manually edit it, say to remove random text entered by some moron? Figured I'll ask here since its relatively on-topic :)
printf("Goodbye cruel world!\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
Micropayments simply haven't worked for anyone yet...
Exactly so. And the problems you mention are fierce. So the situation is just completely ripe for some fiendishly clever entrepreneur to come along and snarf the whole market. Some Jeff Bezos kind of fellow who sees how it can be done where the rest of us just shrug our shoulders and say, well, this is just the way it's always worked...if man were meant to fly he'd have wings...640k is enough for anybody...mutter mutter...
A potential profit of billions is, I think, an understatement if anything.
This post *is* offensive, irrespective of the words "No offense". It doesn't matter if the GP poster lives in Utah or is Mormon. This is like making arguments based on someone having, say, a Jewish-sounding or Polish-sounding name. It is irrelevant.
...it's just that mostly morons watch it in the first place.
Please post your crap here instead and leave Wikipedia alone. Thank you.
w00t
You just demonstrated that you're famous now.
You're going to blame them now for being unusually farsighted?
Anybody who has been part of an 'event' that turned up on TV or in print media knows that all information is incomplete, biased, and potentially wrong. It is common for an author to pick one aspect of an event that is not central to the actual event and turn the side-thread into 'THE' main content.
I'm actually much happier reading Wikipedia than the news because I think peer review is likely to be more complete and the final content more robust. All of us are smarter than each of us.
When I was growing up ecyclopedias were banned for citation use for our assorted papers in elemtary and secondary school. In college, they were also banned for citation use.
So I went through the education system without using encyclopedias for anything other than an "Ask Mr. Wizard" source for personal entertainment and enlightenment.
And that's exactly what I use Wikipedia for today.
Granted I'm past the age of writing papers for school, but there's still a lot of interesting things out there that I simply don't know about or can benefit from learning more about.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I experienced pretty much the same situation.
One particularly bad problem is that due to certain bestselling "physics" books written by celebriries, there are quite many people out there who think they not only know something about certain research areas of modern theoretical physics (string theory, quantum gravity, general relativity, particle physics), but also know something about the scientific standards of those disciplines, while in fact, they can not at all discern between (1) oversimplified explanations for laymen, (2) wild speculations of a single author, and (3) common scientific consensus, and (4) claims that are backed by experimental evidence. Worse yet, many even do not see that there is such a distinction!
So, Wikipedia is a place where an overly enthusiastic pop physics fan/hobbyist and an established string theorist can edit one's others writings. The one knows that he is right, because what he says is what celebs claim in their books, and they seem to do a fantastic job in how they explain things to laymen - while the other one knows about backgrounds and knows enough about the subject to see that many of those pop physics books usually serve the purpose to make the maximum amount of money that can be made without bending one's scientific conscience too much. I.e. simplify as much as you can, even if you know that any honest physicist will see the very real danger of people getting false mental pictures from your writings.
And now, guess which fraction usually puts more man-hours into wikipedia. The countless pop physics fans or the few over-worked experts who are under an enormous pressure to work on building a scientific reputation of their own.
Is this a problem of Wikipedia, or is just a case where Wikipedia shines a light at the "pop physics culture" problem, which should be addressed seperately? If the latter thought is right, then one may even regard Wikipedia as an important tool to unearth an important issue that requires being resolved.
One would think that a librarian's post wouldn't contain an incomplete sentence.
but the earth is flat.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
wikipedia is unreliable information as opposed to what? Fact?
Facts are extremely elusive. I think that wikipedia is the bomb just because it attempts to set up a framework that for the most part chases facts. I have yet to see a source (newspapers, news, encyclopedias, etc.) that is truly Factual and actually a lot of them are not factual on Purpose. So, kudos wikipedia.
"The page on Earth doesn't talk about the "Is it flat?" controversy."
But it does, here's a snapshot of the Earth Article as I type this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Earth&ol did=24952519#Descriptions_of_Earth
Note the second paragraph in the referenced section. Not only does it talk about the "flat earth" issue, it references an article just on this topic. And there are quite a few references elsewhere to the Flat Earth article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere /Flat_Earth
"No one talks about Pat Robertson's side of the story on Wikipedia."
I'm not exactly sure what Pat Robertson's side is on the flat earth question. I suspect that the theory is a little too "conservative" even for Pat. However, the article about him seems to be referenced quite a bit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere /Pat_Robertson
Here are some samples of these references.
From the article on "Fundamentalism":
From the article on "Religion and sexuality":
It seems to me that the wikipedia and its philosopies stand up pretty well to controversial material. Things might look kind of ugly at certain points of time, but they do seem to even out.
Consider the coverage of the evolution vs. intelligent design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
Look at the article and then look at the talk page and the archived peer review (yes wikipedia does have a process for that):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Peer_review /Intelligent_design
One of the real strengths of wikipedia is that the review process if openly visible should someone care to look.
And other (perhaps loony) opinions are also covered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Mons terism
May y'all be touched by his noodly appendage!
I think that like all things you have to evaluate it against its mission. Is Wikipedia a scholarly research tool? No. Lack of attributions, references and serious criticism of the content make it fall well sort of that ideal. But is it useful for looking up the factoids that you need to get through daily life? Very much so.
I use it just the way I would use the Britainica and it's fine for general knowledge. It does, in fact, rock. Would you use the article on Wikipedia for preforming instruction on an appendectomy? only if you're a dumbass. For your doctoral thesis? again -dumbass. Any one who has looked at a high school history book will tell you that they too have been vandalized. They are sanitized to promote or demote an agenda and do it without offending anybody. As I remember it, the history of the world has been very offensive -especially to librarians, at the moment. Do you think that because a book is in print it cannot be a lie? Does a library of congress number or it's place in the Dewey Decimal system attest to it's veracity? Do Librarians somehow protect us from the untruths lurking in every book? I've noticed the untruths are off the scale in the fiction section, they should devote some special attention to that area. I am an insensitive clod -that's a given- but the librarians sound like every other group that critized an innovation... like those monks who copied the entire Bible by hand complete with the fancy lettering and illustrations. The irony of this situation is ironic...
The big problem is that in post modern thought we have decided that there must be an egalitarianism (equality) among ideas. The fact is that some ideas are intrinsically better than others. Some things are accurate, others are inaccurate. This simply demonstrates that point exactly. It is true that each person has the same intrinsic value as every other person.
:)
What is not true is that each person has the same quality of ideas on a particular topic. The egalitarianism of people does not equate to equality of ideas.
This will be the grand difficulty with wikipedia. Peer review has a purpose. Presumably peers have more likelihood of equality of ideas.
Post modern thought loses again..... There is such a thing as absolute truth. Bummer.
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
For those that critique wikipedia based on it's accuracy. If you aren't getting your information on a certain topic from wikipedia where else would you get it?
If your answer is "I'd google it" then what advantage does going to Joe Public's website have over Wikipedia? Does that mean that this person knows more than the person who posted on wikipedia?
All that wikipedia did was take a whole bunch of people who think they know about a particular subject, (some do know and some think they know) and gave them a forum to use instead of making a page on Angel Fire.
Is it completely accurate? No, but neither it just "googling" it either. I think the questions raised by this article can be applied to the internet as a whole.
A.C.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies_to_ common_objections#Mixing_ignorance_and_knowledge
Second, there is a problem with the concept of peer review in general. Many great advances in the social and natural sciences have come by challenging the status quo and, because of that, their contributions were ignored or belittled by their peers. For example, George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics in 2001, had his classic paper (for which he won the Nobel Prize) entitled "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" rejected by the American Economic Review for being trivial and by the Journal of Political Economy because it conflicted with economic theory. Only after submitting it to a third journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, did the breakthrough article become published. Wikipedia allows for discourse where other venues would not.
I really like Wikipedia, the only fear (as others have pointed out) is that there is the possibility that a correct, detailed explanation of an item can be edited at will by other users, thereby replacing 'good' content with 'not so good.'
There needs to be set of standard listings/definitions/explanations for an item with another section for additions and updates.
As to who determines as what is 'factually correct' that is another issue they will have to tackle. Maybe some sort of Ombudsman could oversee the changes before they are made at will, or are replacing a better listing.
Overall, Wikipedia is a wonderful resource and I am glad that it is free.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I like Wikpedia very, very much for quick and dirty answers as well as for exploring things that I've never heard of before.
But I'd never, ever, ever use them as a reference for professional or school work.
--Jim (me)
So Wikipedia may have a few problems.
Who does the fact checking for Encyclopædia Britannica?
Wikipedia at least allows the posting of crossreferences.
Its far from perfect, and probably far from the best system out there. Even checking up on things like Electric Universe, Wikipedia has a reference to Phil Platt's Bad Astronomy page. (They should also have a reference to Crank.net.) The Wikipedia reference to Aleister Crowley, is far more accurate than, (At least pervious versions), of Britannica.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
in your system, a rich person with the intention of keeping some information secret can pay to maintain the information out of the encyclopedia (possibly by disseminating disinformation). Very bad.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Before taking anything on the interweb as law, I always do some fact checking to make sure the data is accurate. Though, I rarely need to verify everything, http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/0 6/0020223&tid=133&tid=14 Why would I need to verify this? Would it benefit my knowledge base? Probably not. Is it entertaining to read? Most definately. I used this as an example, I know for a fact that Anaconda do in fact eat Cayman crocodiles, so this is well within the realm of probability. I also know that constricting snakes, because of this helpless ness will not swallow live prey, so I know for a fact that the gator did not "claw it's way out". All this I know, not from one specific source, but rather from various sources, that seem to support each other.
When doing a research paper in college, did you rely on one source for your research? Or various sources that seemed to pretty much support each others data?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Definition of illiterate : " uneducated in the fundamentals of a given art or branch of learning; lacking knowledge of a specific field; "she is ignorant of quantum mechanics"; "he is musically illiterate" ". And that's the first problem with Wikipedia. Then add to that - the impact of schooling. One of the prime purposes of schooling is to get kids (who then get older) to "always obey authority figures". Then add to that the propensity of lying in most parts western world - especially when it comes to politicians. For example, Iraqs "Weapons Of Mass Destruction" lies by Bush et al.. Or the lying that went on initially by Bush and the Boys regarding Katrina. Then add Money to the equation. People in white lab coats at universities will say anything to keep the tax/research money flowing. Lying and/or illiteracy just becomes the norm!
Not entirely true.
To test the system, I searched for an entry that I assumed would be under the radar, something like the Nicaraguan electorial process. In there I changed the number of seats in the Nicaraguan system by a few seats and left it like that to see if anyone changed it back.
Result? My incorrect entry resided on Wikipedia for over a month, until I went in and fixed the error. During that time, its quite possible many a high school research used employed inaccurate data.
While its nice and all, there needs to be _some_ level of editorial process involved. Perhaps designate "moderators" per category like popular discussion boards do for each section.
It's got fewer bogus articles than slashdot!
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Your praises are all from technical sources. That is why you guys "just don't get it."
i nton
I won't use Wiki not because there isn't enough static info - there isn't - but because reasonable edits, fixes and corrections are edited out by unreasonable people, who form the majority and you're directly responsible for that. You can fix this by raising your standards, but you won't.
Here's why your standards are low: because you're quoting hits as an example of your power and success. Raising your standards would remove the 'fun' part of editing Conservatives out and reduce vandalism. Everyone who writes on your site has an agenda, otherwise they wouldn't bother. You're a tech-happy liberal crowd more interested in page hits and technical accolades and liberal/libertarian propaganda than basic, useful information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jefferson_Cl
What's wrong with these? Old allegations against W persist and as many negatives are brought up as possible throughout the article. Allegations and convictions against Slick Willie are buried and barely mentioned - compare that to W's decades-old drinking exploits. Clinton's religion does not appear. Clinton's ridiculously fratboy staff doesn't get a mention - or was there another staff that defaced White House equipment on their way out? Where are Clinton's pardons from his last day in office? Who even cares about all this Bush stuff? Detailed arguments with his father? Really? Is this National Enquirer?
And the 'Neutrality is questioned' sign is a joke, it's on Left-wing politics but not on George W. Bush? Really?
It's simple, really. My impression of Clinton is your impression of Bush and you shouldn't try to change that: it's not in your mission statement. You can't handle current politics, and your website should stop trying, but I know you're willing to lose an audience that just doesn't agree with your staff. If you can't find a way to build editorial policy in - like no editorial commentary on politicians or 'controversies' - then I've got no use for you. At least do with Bush and Christianity what you do for Islam - split out criticism. Anything less is inherently biased.
You need to freeze certain pages for their controversy, not just when content shouldn't change.
How is this news? Say, compared to Businessweek's expose of the Blu-Ray format?
and the other day I was wondering just how much of what I did then... a long time ago, trust me on that... was out on the Internet. Phillip Agee, who wrote "Inside the Company" outted a lot of cryptonyms as well as true names all linked to operations and operational information back in the 70s. But I had read his book and not a lot of what I did was in there. And, thankfully, we were never stationed in the same place at the same time. Plus I was relatively unimportant. Still, when I did get a copy of his book I was stunned and immediately relieved when I wasn't in the index (and, ya, I checked).
So I did a search for "jmwave" on Wikipedia and found that plus a lot more and all of it, as far as I could tell, accurate. No one knows everything about what they worked on, of course, but with Wiki I could have corrected information or even added to it. The digraphs they identified and that I knew about were accurate.. including "KU" which any staffer during the cold war would recognize. And I could, if I chose to, add to it (I know, for instance, what the digraph "KM" refers to).
My point is that almost no one editing any other encyclopedia would have actually worked on these projects and had the ability to edit the material. So even if some of Wikipedia is inaccurate, the little bitty part that I looked at and that I know about was pretty damn good.
So go to the Encyclopedia Britannica, search on "jmwave", and see if they have as much information as Wiki does.
And... I apologize for the anonymous posting... I tried to post it under my Slashdot ident but just couldn't... old habits die hard.
Normally through a browser. Just like tech - no savvy people would.
Here's an example of an anonymous article being deleted by wikipedia, does it have merit? You be the judge.
Wikipedia-Entry by anonymous to be deleted.
Just about anything anyone ever cared about can be found in it, or will be in it soon.
It's user-editable so that people from a wide variety of occupations and experiences can contribute what they know.
it's Free as in Speech and as in Beer.
It has come to replace the Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of knowledge in the known universe.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
Information needs to be free to have a free society. I love getting carried away on Wiki by looking up one obscure topic, finding heaps of valuable information which piques my curiosity further, leading me to more wikipedia articles until I've exhausted a slow afternoon at work.
Seriously, though, I tend to trust the information on Wikipedia more than I would a traditional source. It's the same reason I trust open source software more than closed source - sure, anyone could write intentionally harmful code to nuke my hard drive, but peer review all over the process prevents it from ever getting anywhere.
By contrast, the "closed-source", traditional encyclopedia has plenty of opportunity for bias and inaccuracies.
Information, in general, is never 100% accurate, just as no software is 100% perfect. The secret to being an intelligent human being on earth is exposing yourself to as much information and opinion as possible, then filtering through it to find out what works best.
Yup. While a degree should give weight to an opinion, it shouldn't be the final criteria used to judge someone's expertise in a place like Wikipedia, because frankly, there are so many whackjob professors out there right now. In an ideal world, all professors would be wise, honest experts. Unfortunately, the academy has these leading lights to contend with these days:
Ward Churchill - got a full professorship without a PhD because he's an American Indian. Oh wait...
Leonard Jeffries - The guy at CCNY that claimed melatonin made blacks a superior race. I'm surprised they found the courage to sack this jackoff.
Martin Bernal - His book Black Athena claims Greece was a black civilization.
All of these guys are or were professors at schools with good reputations (CU, CCNY, Cornell). Though they've been discredited, lots of their ilk remain in the academy, yet to be exposed. Only professors in the maths and hard sciences should get the kind of near-automatic legitimacy being discussed for Wikipedia. And keep in mind, even science has it's dogmas. The fact that it took twenty years for the truth of the real cause of ulcers (bactieria) to gain mainstraim scientific acceptance should give us pause; the scientific method may be perfect, but humans practicing the scientific method are not.
One more note of caution; many people with advanced degrees are given automatic credibility even when speaking on a non-related subject, and this also should give us pause. Noam Chomsky is a good example. His field of expertise is linguistics, but he's most noted for his political writings and opinions. Should Chomsky be given automatic credibility when speaking on matters other than language? He and others often are, being lumped into the general category of "intellectuals". For something like wikipedia, "expert" status on something should be limited to actual expertise in the given field.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
One of the problems with this discussion is that it appears that writers are trying to characterize wikipedia as a whole. In my view, from what I have seen, some of it is really useful, say, the entries on Linux and some of it can get out into the weeds say in philosophy.
A project like this, if it can continue as it seems it will, should be judged by the spectrum of quality it produces. What categories appear reliable over a large population of users? What categories' credibility is limited to small populations of users? What does that say about the communities of users contributing to and consuming the encyclopedia?
Those who expect any information resource to achieve high levels of credibility indpendent of those that use it should have been born in Greece about 2500 years ago - that was the last time to my mind that those ideas were really able to advance society.
Ivan Handler
The bottom line is that those who are criticizing Wikipedia are those who stand to lose an oligopoly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly) and all the profits that go with one. Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia ever made by man. It just works. You can tell the difference in quality just by reading the articles and comparing them to printed Encyclopedias. In fact, I now tend to go to Wikipedia before even Google when looking for knowledge of a subject. That says a lot.
It's actually a rather amazing thing that the Wikipedia approach works (at least when implemented well). Three are enough people who actually care about accurate, unbiased knowledge to overcome all the selfish profiteers and vandalizes who try to make Wikipedia fail. It shows that the masses can imposed *rationality* as well as we know masses can impose irrationality.
Make no mistake, Wikipedia is one of the first steps to bringing true equality and democracy to the world. And it has more than proven its worth already.
Wikipedia: I read it on the Internet, it must be true!
Wikipedia: A great source for 'common knowledge' and 'conventional wisdom'.
(Exactly the kind of info that often turns ot to be wrong.)
I view it as a big inner-city wall covered in graffiti. Sometimes it's right. Sometimes it's wrong. Whatever it is, it gets painted over eventually. As an information source, I rank it somewhere between astrology and next week's stock picks.
First off, no encyclopedia ever published has been unbiased and all-encompassing. They are starting points for further research and nothing more. This is why they are rarely acceptable sources when referenced in a research paper or journal. Wikipedia does a great job of helping get your research on a topic off the ground. Yes, it's flawed, inexpert, and often comprised of information from the "public consensus," but it gives you enough information to go to google or ovid, or whatever you use to find more. Wikipedia's biggest strength is that it doesn't pretend to be omniscient. Unlike with a "legitimate" encylopedia in which all articles are written by "experts", readers instantly take wikipedia articles with a grain of salt. With a "legitimate" encylopedia, readers are often lulled into a false sense of security in the info. Encyclopediae are like dictionaries. They can give you the "sense" of an entry and how it is usually used, but you are free to agree, disagree, use, misuse, and reinterpret the entries as you see fit. You're a fool if you rely on them as THE source of all that is truth.
He who would be a man, must be a nonconformist. -- Emerson
I find wikipedia is great for getting a quick brush up on a topic I don't know about, but I'd never take anything in it as gospel. It still only one source, so if I absolutly need to know the nitty gritty, I'll read the article and then borrow/buy a couple of books/magazines by diffrent authors. That usually gives you enough of an idea to know when you are being shoveled crap. Expecting any one source of information to be pure and without bias is just plain stupid.
Crow T. Trollbot
The problem that I have had with Wikipedia is that in editing articles on which I am a recognized expert, I have had my edits and entries entirely removed by others who "feel" that these edits were somehow inappropriate, even when I referenced those entries along with results from peer reviewed journals.
Part of the Wikipedia experience as an editor is to continuously observe an article. In this case it means reversing the reverse, mentioning in the comment that the other party is to put some explanation on the discussion page. Yes, it's tedious, stupid, a waste of time, but the persistency is necessary in the Wikipedia project. Plus, if you're lucky, there are some similar-minded editors who observe the same article and can help reversing false edits so that you don't have to do it all of the time.
I'm not sure if you meant to suggest that because Wikipedia has an article on "Flat Earth", it must be representing all sides of the question of Earth's geography (as discussed further up the thread). If you read the article, it discusses this history of the idea that the earth is flat, from ancient times through the present, and makes it pretty clear that modern "Flat Earthers" are a tiny minority.
Sean
Of course there's an article on Pat Robertson - like him or not, he's an important public figure. And to include a discussion of Pat Robertson without going into some of his controversial remarks/beliefs would be a waste of time.
Were you trying to suggest that the mere fact that Wikipedia has an entry for Pat Robertson means that the encyclopedia is somehow unworthy of use? How do you feel about Who's Who in America? Or Encarta?
Since the OP already knows the correct information, what would she (I presume) gain from making the correction to the website? Those knowledgable in a field have no obligation to the rest of humanity to educate us.
They are even less inclined to do so when ordered, by anonymous dingbats on the Internet, to "Fix it." Since you're such an idealist with only Wikipedia's best interests at heart, and she apparently will not edit the page, why don't you do the rest of us a favor and make the change yourself? Or would that detract from your self-righteousness?
Well, I understand the argument, and I understand its persuasiveness, but the historical record forces me to regretfully conclude that your beautiful, compelling theory about human motivation is, alas, simply wrong.
It's not a new argument. You are repeating the excited theories of intellectual socialists in the early part of the 20th century. They argued powerfully that the pleasure of serving your community well, of stature and respect from your comrades -- of being paid in "human attention" as you put it -- would serve to motivate people's best efforts far better than mere grubby money.
Alas, the experiment set up to confirm this theory -- the Soviet Union -- started off very promising (there were glowing reports of the accomplishments of communism in the 20s and early 30s) but collapsed 70 years later in a horrifying welter of human misery from which Russia has still not emerged. Clearly the theory, however lovely and compelling in the mind, is a flat-out disaster when put into operation.
Now, bear in mind that I agree with you that "human attention" should be the most valued commodity, and that in theory a "market" based on that as the medium of exchange rather than money should flourish. But it just doesn't, not in the long term. I don't know why. Maybe no one does.
This is not to say that socialist utopias with "markets" that exchange social stature and respect cannot flourish in the short run, like Shaker communities* or kibbutzim. Often they do very well for a while, while the pioneering impulse lasts. But there are zero historical examples of long-term success. That should be a very sobering thought for OSS proponents -- and I say that as one of them -- and a cheering thought for those wretches in Redmond, damn them.
-----------
* Shaker communities were highly socialist 19th century American utopias that, curiously enough, emphasized celibacy, which helps account for their almost complete disappearance.
Does he? How does he stay rich, then? Considering that if it's useful millions of people are wanting the information and will pay to get it?
Think it all the way through: Mr. Rich Bastard pays Mr. Clever Dick $1 to keep information Z secret. But 10 ordinary people now offer Mr. Dick 25 cents each for Z. Mr. Dick goes back to Mr. Bastard: Dude, they're offering me $2.50 to sell out, I'm going to do it...so Mr. Bastard says wait, I'll meet their price. His bribe goes up to $3. Now Mr. Clever Copycat realizes there's a market for Z and sets about reproducing it. Mr. Bastard must bribe him, too. Ugh! Expenses are mounting....so, by and by, the market demand increases, Mr. Bastard's bribes increases, he has to buy off more and more copycats...and soon enough, I surmise, Mr. Bastard is just going to run out of money and see his whole nefarious scheme collapse. See, Mr. Bastard's evil system's fatal weakness is that he is spending money in this market but not earning money by providing any service that people want. His position is therefore unsustainable, however obnoxious he can make himself in the short run.
In fact, seems to me what you're describing is a very good aspect of the market. What you're saying is that the (false) lure of controlling information permanently will seduce an antisocial person into behaviour that will rapidly and efficiently siphon off all his wealth and render him powerless.
Of course not. But you have mistaken the argument, which goes like this:
A handsome young cardiologist has convinced all other cardiologists that they ought to provide help to men who scream, clutch their chests, et cetera, free and without charge. After all, they will be "paid" in respect and attention from the community, as well as the ardent thanks of the wives, some of whom are still young and good-looking, har de har har... "Medical skill wants to be be free!" they chant enthusiastically as they fan out, compressing chests, injecting ephinephrine, doing good deeds. Wives in crowded theaters all over the land huzzah lustily...
But then, alas, the cardiologists' mortgages come due, and the kids need braces. Unfortunately the theater work doesn't pay except in self-respect and the occasional "tip" from the wives (wink wink), so they need to take on other jobs, e.g. transplanting hearts for big bux at St. Evil Exploiter of the Masses Enormously Expensive Hospital and Whorehouse. Leaves them less time to patrol the theaters. But that's OK, because other people step in, people who have fewer opportunities to earn the big bux doing heart transplants at St. EEMEEH and W, and wouldn't mind at all the warm feeling of being the heroic "doctor in the house" and the ardent thank-you. First, it's nurses and EMTs who fill the cardiologists' shoes.
Crucial point: surely the wives would prefer a cardiologist to an EMT. But how can they enforce that preference? They have no incentive to offer the cardiologist, to induce him back to the theater.
Not surprisingly, more men clutching their chests don't make it, since the skill of the responder is less. Not surprisingly, the providers are seen less often as heros, and the thanks of the wives becomes, well, cooler.
By and by, even the nurses and EMTs find they have bills to pay and the cooling thanks and diminished heroic stature are not enough even for them. But that's OK, because random strangers with no skill at cardiology at all are perfectly happy to step in, because even the reduced stature of playing a doctor in the theater and the lukewarm thanks of the wives (or more often widows) are better than what they get stuffing envelopes and walking dogs.
And, again, there is no way the wives can enforce their preference for a higher level of skill. Not paying for labor gives them zero leverage over the kind of labor they get.
Eventually, the heroic stature goes entirely away, because it's rare that when a man clutches his chest, et cetera, and his wife cries out for a "doctor" in the house that they get a real doctor, and not some charlatan pretending to be one. No one can expect warm thanks from wives. And the only people still jumping up when wives cry out for a doctor in the house are wretches for whom the modest attention and rare thanks from addled wives who don't realize when they're being scammed are better than what they can get spamming millions from Mom's basement with Enhance Your Manhood ads. That is, the labor the wives can get has fallen in value to exactly what they were willing to pay for it: zero.
That's my point. The fundamental capitalist rule is simple: Only when you insist on paying for what you get, will you routinely get what you pay for.
Many folks have tried this, but the problem is, like birth control, it's the kind of thing you don't realize you want until, er, the need is rather urgent. It's hard to plan ahead and have the thingies in the bed-side table when the Right Moment unexpectedly occurs, and equally it's hard to have funds available in the banks of all the information sources I might, someday, suddenly want to use.
What I want -- what we can't yet get -- what the world is waiting for some entrepreneur to provide -- is the ability to decide on the spot, at the time, bang, just like that, that I want this information, and the ability to spend almost zero time and effort transferring some tiny payment to the author for it. One click and I'm done, that kind of thing.
Well, EB has been making money for three and a half centuries. Wikipedia has yet to prove it can sustain itself over a single decade, and the fate of other freely shared commodities -- think "Tragedy of the Commons" -- is not especially encouraging.
If I were a Wikipediast enthusiast I would be thinking about this carefully. Do I have a sustainable model, or are we going to be a merely marvelously fun flash in the pan?
My impression is that people are worrying already about the weaknesses in their model for incentive and reward, when they regret the flames and trolls and general unruliness. There seems no way to easily and reliably sort out value from trash, reward the former and punish the latter. There are worries that the quality may be diluted by noise, and that, once that happens, the incentive to contribute quality will diminish.
You're absolutely right that money is not the only unit of reciprocation -- otherwise marriages and families would never work out. But, alas, in a large community of relative strangers no one has yet found a workable substitute. Perhaps the Wiki wookies will prove that one exists. I hope they do. But I wouldn't bet on it.
MediaWatch also (if I recall correctly) interpreted as "ignorance" the holding of some opinions that were at least debatably correct and asked questions with a framing bias such that conservatives were likely to give the "wrong" answer.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Turn it around, my friend. Right now, Congressman Joe pays consultants and staff lawyers lots of money to tell him the temperature of his political waters, keep him in touch with what is selling, and not, amongst the voters.
Well, with micropayments, why not hire you the actual voter instead? In other words, how about Joe fires his consultants and instead just pays you some small amount to fill out some survey, respond to his e-mail, tell him what you and your co-workers talked about yesterday around the water cooler? You won't get much money, sure, because your opinion by itself is of low value -- only in combination with thousands of others does it matter. But money is money, and even a little tidbit for nothing more than what's on your mind is nice, and Joe will better represent you to boot.
Not to mention that, if it just happens to turn out that you are some kind of wizard who understands very, very well how people in your community see Joe -- if your information is unusually useful -- then Joe will be willing to pay more and more for it. (Not just Joe, of course -- his competitors will also want it, and you can sell to the highest bidder.)
See, the interesting aspect of micropayment for communication is that, at some time and in some circumstances, practically everyone's attention is highly desirable for a few minutes or an hour, but at present, there is no way to buy and sell that attention at the appropriate value, because you can only buy attention at all if you buy it in large lotsizes, days to weeks.
Can you imagine a world where only "us" americans with money were the only ones able to "edit" the material?
Not really, no. Because there'll be, say, an article on current business conditions in China, and in good etiquette when closing a sensitive deal. And some guy in China is going to have exactly the right information on that topic, and so his article on the subject is going to sell for the highest price.
Since you're such an idealist with only Wikipedia's best interests at heart, and she apparently will not edit the page, why don't you do the rest of us a favor and make the change yourself? Or would that detract from your self-righteousness?
I never claimed to be an expert of opals. I admit to knowing nothing about opals. The OP does claim to be an expert, and chances are they know more about opals than I. If there are inaccuracies in wikipedia, anyone can improve the entry. So pretty please, fix it. It would be better for everyone if someone who knew better changed the entry, than post about it on Slashdot.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
But seriously, if I skip the references to the mechanics of fame, you describe an interesting -and general- effect, but its impact is easily overestimated. In principle a lot can go wrong, and maybe wikipedia can go sour at some stage, but at the moment it works well. Good quality on average.
Apart from the statistics of errors, there is also the weight an error carries. Note that the error your friend inserted was really not blatant. In fact it had no adverse effect. The link is valid.
Whereas with Wikipedia, you can correct it yourself. In a couple of minutes.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Let's see that:
"S" is a small and not very rich scientist, which just invented the cure for AIDS.
"L" is a (obvious filthy rich) lab that goes on charging $1000/people-month for AIDS continuous use drugs.
"L" pays the Pedia $500k to shut "S"'s information. "L"'s discovery is shut down.
Obviously this is a simplification, but there exists a lot of equivalent scenarios. You are forgetting that 5% of the population control 95% of the wealth.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
A lot of military custom and nomenclature dates from the Renaissance, when most soldier were mercenaries. Which is why low ranking soldiers are still called "private soldiers". Passing in Review was invented so that the people hiring mercenaries could see that they were getting all the soldiers they had paid for, and that they were all sober, healthy, and properly equipped. There are other bits of trivia like that, but you get the idea.
Now, mercenaries operated in mercenary companies. Configurations varied, but companies were typically led by three men called (in England of course, though there's similar usage in other countries, more on this later) the Captain (a word that has meant "leader" since ancient times) the Lieutenant (from an old French word for "Deputy") and the Sargent.
The word "Sargent" ("servant") is particularly important here. In the middle ages, the Sargentry was a social class consisting of commoners who had a lot of status, due to wealth or professional skills. This class was the top level before you hit the glass ceiling that separated commoners from the nobility. In medieval armies, the Sargentry led the infantry (then a low-status service consisting mostly of untrained peasants) into battle.
The relationship of the sergentry to the nobility was complicated and inconsistent. In theory, you had to be born into the nobility. In practice, high-ranking commoners often rose into the nobility, and this infusion of new families did a lot to keep Europe's ruling classes vital. As time went by, class structures became more rigid and inflexible; it became harder for Sergentry to become nobles, and many nobles preferred to deny their humble origins.
Back to the Renaissance mercenary company. (Somebody into military history could describe this better than me, but I think I can give the basics.) This entity actually had fewer class distinctions than the outside world, and they didn't have the rigid officer-enlisted barrier modern armies have. The sergent then had much the same role he has now: in charge of day-to-day discipline, low-level management, and representing the grunts to the leaders. But the social and legal boundaries between him and his officers weren't anything like what we now have.
Mercenary companies varied a lot in size — they were business outfits, not standardized military units. When mercenary companies started turning into units of permanent armies, they were standardized in different ways. That's why "Captain" is a high rank in some countries, and is still a moderately senior rank in English-speaking navies. But in English armies, the company was standardized as a low-level outfit.
That meant they needed new ranks for higher-level units, like regiments and armies. For regiments, they borrowed Spanish word, Colonel ("column leader") for the top job, assisted by a Lieutenant-Colonel ("deputy Colonel") and Sergent Major ("big sergent"). An army was led by a Captain-General or Colonel-General, assisted by a Lieutenant-General and a Sergent-Major General. As these job titles turned into ranks and were simplified (and, I suspect, high-ranking officers objected to titles that had the low-class word "sergent" in them), these became General, Lieutenant-General, and Major-General. And there you are.
Somebody's going to say, "You should turn that into a Wikipedia article." And if I were a typical Wikipedia contributor, I would. But while I don't mind sharing my magpie reading in a forum like this, I'm loath to put this mental regurgitation into a reference work. It's just stuff I've picked up that I can't give sources for, and I'm sure I've gotten many crucial facts wrong.
I know it seems like all these lovely techie things -- Wikipedia, OSS, the Internet itself -- are so well-established and obviously good that they will persist as they are forever; indeed, that the only question is how fast will they come to dominate our society, and which nifty innovation will appear next. And it seems crazy to imagine that some unforeseen social force might wreck them entirely, so that we look back in a few decades and say: what the heck? I thought the future was almost here, and now it's receded into the distance...
/. community -- might take a page from older books, and by incorporating some aspects of the famously robust institution of the free market, try to armor themselves against those social forces that have, historically, torn apart every communitarian utopia.
But let's remember the "Space Age." Remember how in 1970, say, the future seemed to belong to space travel? The only question was how fast interplanetary -- if not interstellar! -- travel would transform society, and which nifty innovations would happen next. Now we look around us and say (cf. Calvin and Hobbes): what the heck? Where are the moon colonies? Where are the Federation starships and all that?
I'm not denying the persuasive power of the theory that the 'net as it has been, more or less a tech weenie's utopia, and the OSS movement, and, yes, Wikipedia and the communitarian spirit that moves it might well prove to be permanent fixtures of tomorrow's society. May it happen! I'm only saying that such theories have in the past had a sad tendency to suffer brutal collisions with reality. The wise investor (of money or personal time) thinks about that, and tries to prepare.
In the context of my original observation, what this is meant to suggest is that perhaps the Wikipediasts -- and even the
Yes, but you have stopped your simulation of the alternate reality too soon. It's as if you said: what if Germany had won the Battle of Britain and invaded England in 1941? Ha! Germany would have conquered Britain....but forgotten about what the rest of the world would have done after 1941, and how long Germany would have kept control of England.
So what happens after the events you have described? S may be a small and poor, but he is obviously clever, and more importantly, he has something of value to sell. So, let's see, at the end of our last episode, he tried to publish it in Wikipedia. But, alas, L paid off the 'pedia and it was suppressed. Ha! we find S thinking, as the opening credits recede, you do realize This Means War! So S writes a long letter to the New York Times, including not only his discovery but also that L is paying to have it suppressed -- imagine the effect on L's PR if word gets out!
But L is no dummy and pays off the NYT, too. Only, since NYT, Inc., is a much fatter cat than Wikipedia they want a lot more dough. Say $10 million. "Curses, foiled again!" mutters S to himself, as he furiously pens more letters, to the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, as well as submits learned articles to the Journal of the American Medical Association, National Geographic and Ladies Home Journal...
L is now writing checks like crazy to suppress all this. Moreover, the number of people who necessarily know about S's invention grows exponentially. Initially, just editors and the treasurer and top management of L know. Er, plus the friends of S, possibly his secretary....hmm, plus some pretty women and handsome men at cocktail parties whom people in the know have let in on the secret to try to impress them...
One of these is E, who has a bit of money to invest, and who can see that commercializing and selling S's idea is a great way to break into the high-profit pharmaceutical business. He can undersell L (not least of all because L's bribery budget has been exploding) and make a killing. So E contacts S, they form E&S, Inc., and start selling product. By word of mouth full of cocktail, um, so to speak, at first, maybe. And, yes, they must compete with L's deep-pocket-funded FUD.
But, you see, S&E have got money always coming in, more and more of it as people buy their immensely valuable product. L, by contrast, has got money going out, only, because they have nothing to sell. Sooner or later, L will no longer be rich and S&E will be.
I think the misconception you've got is that being rich is some kind of indefinite personal resource, like being strong. If you're strong you can exert your strength indefinitely and doing so never makes you less strong. But rich is quite different. If you're rich you can't exert your power -- pay people off -- without decreasing it. The more you try to throw your weight around, the faster your wealth drains away.
Getting rich means more money comes in than goes out. It means people buy from you more than you buy from them. It means you are influenced in what you do by what other people (your market) want more than you try to influence others (by paying them). Being rich certainly means you have the power to influence others, but it is a very curious power, a power that diminishes rapidly as soon as you start using it. So staying rich when there's a free market means, ipso facto, that you have to use your power as little as possible. That's why a free market has historically proven to be the best possible guarantee against tyranny of the privileged.
Um, there's this odd little gap in your summary: why did capitalism/democracy take over in the 1990s if the experiment was as successful as you say?
No, wait, don't tell me -- I can guess. Stalin trod this path long before you. It was "wreckers" and kulaks (wealthy peasants) and petty bourgeousie and evil foreign influence and the cruel false seductions of money that ruined the noble experiment. It certainly had nothing to do with the majority of plain folks looking around at their lives and concluding: this just sucks. We've given the "experiment" a good long run and it doesn't work. Time to try something else, anything else.
If you can pass over the collapse of the Soviet Union and the radical restructuring of the economy in Communist China and Vietnam -- indeed in all surviving socialist countries -- since the 1990s without seeing the stark fact that almost everyone who has himself lived under these "experiments" has soundly rejected your premise, that the "experiments" are a success, then there is no arguing with you. You are in the grips of ideology!
Large portions of the population, after having had a taste of both systems, now favor a return to Communist times.
Sure, here is a report of a survey in which about 20% of Russians surveyed wanted a return to Communism. That is, indeed, a "large portion." But it's a minority. What you might have said -- indeed what I would have said -- is this: "Despite the chaos and misery occasioned by the sudden transition from Communism to the free market, and despite the steep decline in international influence after the Soviet Union broke up, a remarkable 80% of Russians do not want to return to Communism. One can only conclude that, having had a taste of both systems, they prefer capitalism/democracy (with all its warts) to Communism by substantial and enduring majorities."
For tenured professors, there is close to zero incentive to continue research and publication, except social stature and respect.
Is that so? In what country would that be? At least in the U.S., where I'm personally familiar with the system, if you aren't "research-active," as they say, your office migrates away from the windows, your full-time secretary turns into a 20% secretary, your pay immediately drops by 30% (no more "summer salary" from the research grant), you have to buy office supplies and computer equipment out of your own pocket, not to mention being unable to hire graduate students and post-docs to help with your work, and you are assigned sharply more teaching and administrative duties, so that the time in which you can do what you want plummets. Then of course you don't get any more promotions and raises except for the piddling 2% every other year cost-of-living bump, assuming your university does even that.
In short, as far as U.S. universities go, you're dead wrong. The incentives on tenured professors to research and publish are strong and strongly economic. And why would that be? Would it be because (A) that's what works, or (B) wreckers and evil foreign influence have subverted US university administrations, so that the latter falsely imagines "social stature and respect" are not quite as effective in motivating professors to do good work as filthy degrading money and the things that disgusting but curiously attractive stuff can buy?