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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?"
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 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!
nice speech, but the truth is not democratically accountable.
I do rather like the idea of having some sort of editorial process to the wikipedia. Whenever this issue of "trustworthiness" has come up, I've always had the same hesitating suggestion: branch the wikipedia so that there's something like a "stable branch". Keep the wikipedia as it is, but it'd be nice if there were some kind of designated "editors" that could integrate the changes better, make sure the work is coherent, correct, etc. and put out the edited version as the "stable" version which would lag a bit behind from the "unstable".
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 just bullshit.
First off, not all sides must be represented. The page on Earth doesn't talk about the "Is it flat?" controversy. Loony opinions are absolutely NOT represented on Wikipedia. That issue has come and gone many times. No one talks about Pat Robertson's side of the story on Wikipedia.
Secondly, a lot of the edits on wikipedia are done by students and faculty of academic institutions. I don't consider these people "losers" because they're contributing to our base of information. I consider them an important asset to society.
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.
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wonder which article this was. I've never had this problem at all, and I've contributed to dozens of articles, both in science (I'm a Ph.D. in astrophysics), and in politics (where I have worked on "hot button" topics like the ACLU.) I have certaintly had occasional issues with people, but it's actually quite rare. In general, contentious but well-sourced material that belongs in an article, stays in an article, and people who try to remove it are considered vandals by the community and dealt with accordingly.
Reading between the lines of your post, it seems entirely possible that your edits, even if they were sourced by peer-reviewed journals, were inappropriate for the articles you edited. Wikipedia is not meant to be a series of technical review articles. The information you added may well have been considered at an inappropriately high level, it may have just been "too much" (articles are not supposed to grow without bounds) or, indeed, you may have added too much information about only one side of a contentious topic -- in the third case, people are likely to worry that you are subverting NPOV. (Adding detail to one side of an issue but not the other is probably the most tricky aspect of wikipedia -- I personally think it's OK, but it does, reasonably, set off people's NPOV alarms.)
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
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!
"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
That's the stupidest statement I've ever seen here on slashdot, and that's saying something. Al Fraken said it best in his book - people complain that news sources are biased towards the left or the right, and that's really missing the point. Yes, the NY Times might have a very, very slight left bias; the Wall Street Journal might have a teensy bit of a right-wing view on it; however, these institutions do their best to make their stories accurate and neutral. Their job is to inform the reader.
Then, you have the news that comes from other organizations like Fox News and the Washington Times. These are organizations which are so utterly, appallingly biased that it's clear their primary mission is to persuade. MediaWatch, a non-partisan media watchdog, actually found Fox viewers were MORE IGNORANT (that is, more likely to get current events questions wrong) than people WHO DID NOT WATCH THE NEWS. You actually become less informed by watching Fox!
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
While it is true that this happens on a regular basis, admins and regular contributors revert such edits very quickly on average. I know I spend a lot more time these days watching [[Special:Recentchanges]] than I do reading slashdot. I'd almost forgotten I had an account here.
"God is dead." - Frederik Nietzsche
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.