Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
"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)
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.
I am fortunate enough to work with a myrid of individuals from around the world. We often discuss world events to see how each other view the topic at hand. It's amazing how different we view the same events. Maybe someday I'll learn enough french to compare a British history book to a frecn one- that should be a kick!
....and having more up to date information on a specific topic is not a feature that should just be overlooked.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
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.
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.
That's why MLA citations include the date on which you accessed the cited information from the web. They change.
Of course, one may raise the question: what if I edit wikipedia to support my thesis all the way and cite it?
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
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
Ever seen the Remote Viewing article?
This is just bullshit.
You're right. This whole religious thing you guys have about Wikipedia is bullshit. No one is allowed to point out it's flaws without fanatics like you spouting off dogma.
Not all sides are represented, but if there is a controversy, it will be discussed far in excess of its worth. The "rathergate" article is a good example. Even though the article itself is about a controversy, it spares no expense in mentioning every subcontroversy surrounding it. It even quotes a comment to a blog post. Huh? This is not a NPOV policy, it's an "Every Stupid Point of View Imaginable" policy. The very fact that Wikipedia has to include every moonbat and wingnut theory biases the entire article. The idea that Karl Rove wrote the documents to set up the Democrats is laughable, but Wikipedia gives the idea a hearing. Sheesh.
Yes, a lot of students and academic faculty edit these articles. But so do a lot of geeks living in their parent's basement. The reason I don't trust Wikipedia is because the edits of these social dropouts are given equal status as those by university professors.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Oh, for the love of Christ.
I am so sick and tired of people abusing the word "community." Wikipedia isn't a community. It's a fucking web site. "Community" is not a synonym for "web site." Stop treating it as such.
Second, you grotesquely misunderstand "NPOV." I agree that "NPOV" is an intellectual atrocity, but you're misrepresenting it here, and that helps no one. "NPOV" doesn't mean that all sides must be documented no matter how loony. What it says is that articles with a clear agenda must be cleverly written to hide that agenda. For examples, see what the Wikipedia has to say about Halliburton or Israel. The articles are disgustingly partisan, but written in just the right way to make that revolting partisanship deniable. "It's neutral!" they claim, an outright lie if there ever was one.
Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia. It's not a source of knowledge or information. It's just a web site. Remember that, and stop treating it like it's the Holy fucking Grail.
Wow, you seem to have some issues.
1. I just glanced over the Little Saigon article. The story you freaked out about involves a store owner who posted a Ho Chi Minh poster in his window. There was a riot. The sentence you object to was "[t]he event also raised some controversial issues about constitutional free speech in the United States." According to a New York Times article about the event, "The Vietnamese immigrant who has battled his former countrymen here for weeks about his right to display a poster of Ho Chi Minh in his video store rehung the picture today, but it took dozens of police officers and sheriff's deputies to protect him and the First Amendment." Um, a major police presence to protect someone's first amendment rights doesn't count as "raising controversial issues"? You seem to think the person should not have been allowed to display the poster -- so presumably you yourself find the police actions controversial?
2. Newt's daughter. Don't you think it's rather interesting that the daughter of a prominent and anti-gay conservative is a leader of a gay-rights group? Even in a case where the activities of a son or daughter don't directly bear of those of the parents, don't you think an article about a prominent person should include some information about their children? (Most wikipedia articles do.) How is presenting factual, relevant information "liberal bias"? Perhaps you would like to expunge all information about Ron Hubbard's son from the Hubbard article?
3. Nice catch. I was going to remove it from the article, but it seems like someone already did. Thanks for helping to improve wikipedia!
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
...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...
Well, if you free yourself of the narrow confines of american-libertarian thinking ;-) you would notice that Wikipedia *is* a free market in the best of its definitions. Just because you're under the misconception that what is not paid in dollars has no value, doesn't means that there isn't a market interchange with signaling and interchange processes going on. In information economies the most scarce value is human attention, and that's just the interchange format of this market. More valuable than dollars, and more evenly distributed as well.
Thanks to the Free-as-in-speech license, users for whom information is mission-critical *can* put old-world green-money investing it for buying people's attention to test the truth of that information. Thanks to Wikipedia being Free, there's no compelling for it to be "bucks-free". Also, thanks to the GPL-like nature of that license, the results of that investment are required to be given back to the wiki-market if they want them to be published.
Of course "flamers" who supply misleading information also has their fair share of attention to spend, so it just happens that this free market adjusts to their needs and wants as well as those of the people using it for mission critical tasks. The market is being efficient in doing this, but it doesn't need to match *your* definition of efficiency. That information has been put there from people who invested their valued attention, and that's the value that you'll extract from it. But maybe you value money more than people's wants?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Whether it's as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica. No, it's not. Yet. Perhaps it will never be. I personally wouldn't want to bet.
What you seem to have gotten is reciprocation- money is not the only unit of reciprocation. If somebody has found something useful from the Wikipedia, then they are likely to reciprocate by adding something they know back in (like a 'tip' in a restaurant). Generally speaking in the Wikipedia, the quality only ratchets up, other editors will not permit the quality to go down; if that happens they revert the changes. So it gradually evolves into a better and more complete encyclopedia.
"Consider it evolution in action."
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Interesting summary there. Here's mine: the experiment propelled a third-world agricultural country to world-power status in less than forty years; after capitalism/democracy took over in the 1990s, suicide, crime, unemployment and alcoholism rates rose dramatically, to the point that large portions of the population, after having had a taste of both systems, now favor a return to Communist times.
This is not to say that socialist utopias with "markets" that exchange social stature and respect cannot flourish in the short run [...]. Often they do very well for a while, while the pioneering impulse lasts. But there are zero historical examples of long-term success.
For tenured professors, there is close to zero incentive to continue research and publication, except social stature and respect. The system seems to work pretty well, certainly better than all other systems that have been tried to nail down the truth.