Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Founder Sees Serious Quality Problems
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "The Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online project. From the article: 'Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that's almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, ... passionate, you haven't met a wiki-fiddler.'"
It's clearly benefited Slashdot. The story quality and lack of dupes proves it.
I'm seeing more and more people use it as their de facto source for information.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
What other encyclopedia chronicles the history of slashdot?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_history
No Sigs!
I've debated people here and they use wikipedia facts that were wrong as proof they were right. It drove me crazy... he wouldn't take any other source no matter how many, wikipedia was the spoken word. Yikes.
In a perfect world wikipedia would work, but people aren't perfect, and people have agendas... that is why it will never be taken seriously with anyone outside the community.
Considering our wiki was deleted because the site it pointed to had no alxia rating.... I find it a weak reason to delete a wiki about a anime club in montreal that has a rich history...I guess we should motion for an undelete but whe are a bit dissapointed.
It's still one of the best destinations and tools on the Net. Everytime I show it to someone who has never seen it, they're blown away.
Bark less. Wag more.
These people still can't hold a candle to Jack Thompson.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Of course there's a lack of quality. Anybody can come in and edit anybody else's work.
Step 1: Create an account
Step 2: Do whatever the hell you want to the whole place
Maybe a level system ought to be put in place. Create enough new entries and then you can edit other users' work. It's not a perfect solution, but it would cut down on some of the nonsense.
e2 | LJ
Wikipedia usually works, in my experience, especially on popular or controversial articles. Just within the last hour, another editor and I had a dispute over whether "dry mouth" is a negative or neutral effect of marijuana. We went back and forth a few times but we eventually agreed to combine that postive and negative effect lists, and now it is all settled. Such compromise is not always possible but it is much of the time and the system usually works.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
All it says is "Drunken Irish Layabout" and there's a picture of Leo DiCaprio.
Prepare for the Keith World Order
I also thought that recently there has been quite some crap oozing into Wikipedia. Lot's of articles contain inforation that isn't directly related to the topic, or they're just rumors. Sure, Wikipedia is a dynamic living creature, much more than an old fashioned stack of books, It seems that some people that edit the articles just dont "get" what wikipedia is about and sidetrack from the topic. Instead of describing what an apparatus can do and what its used for, some editors insert if runs linux and how you can install it on the apparatus...how nice..
A solution I liked was to make the publicly-editable entries into an unstable branch, and to promote versions of pages that have been fact-checked and have been agreed to be up to Wikipedia standards into a stable branch. Redirect anonymous viewers to stable pages if available, and mark each version as to which branch it belongs to.
There are a lot of vandals sabotaging the project. Anyone can take a page and add grafiti over it. The move page function for example is widley abused, as anyone can move a page to nonsense names. You don't even have to edit wikipedia to vandalize it anymore, just register an account with a nonsense user name and you get your account banned.
Do you play with your Willy?
It never will. And that's OK.
Wikipedia can be valuable even in mediocrity. I've used it as a "jumping off" point for knowledge about things that aren't covered in more traditional sources. Want to know the origins of "all your base are belong to us"? Wikipedia is great for that sort of trivia. Want an in-depth explanation of Relativity? You probably don't want to necessarily trust Wikipedia for the last word on it, but you might be able to find a few pointers to some good books.
Wikipedia is what it is. As long as everyone understands what it is, it'll do fine.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Now I'm not an expert on everything but there are a few things I've seen that is not so much incorrect as it has a bias to how it is written. There needs to be more control from a professional literary stand point. Proper referencing to original sources, unbiased commentary. It always cracked me up how much detail is put in writing an article about slash culture but yet you look at something like the demographical information of some third world country and it is sparce at best. Now I agree this is an envolvement issue. I just think it woudl be better if editors functioned more on a merrit basis and were invited. Thus allowing more control in the balance with regards to different fields.
slashdot reports on wikipedia's quality hm... first thing i wanted to check was what wikipedia said about slashdot.
;)
Slashdot is often criticized for posting story summaries that are inaccurate and/or misspelled, and for intentionally posting articles that many find highly biased, and/or defamatory and often incite flamewars, while ignoring news or commentary on issues which outsiders may consider more serious or important (see Slashdot subculture). It is also infamous for the Slashdot effect, when thousands of Slashdot readers read an article and connect to the linked website, flooding it with unexpected traffic, and at times bringing the site down in a manner similar to a Denial of Service attack. The use of "slashdot" as a verb refers to this effect.
Well I don't see any problems with the quality of that article
Jokes aside for most things I've used wikipedia for, it has been a good help and is pretty accurate too. Might be just because I normally read at geeky/nerdy type of articles.
sarchasm
to make a Wikipedia entry for this....
anyone up for it?
Regarding Wikipedia itself, I find it to be pretty useful as a repository of widely-known information (dates, names etc), very useful on computer-related information, and perhaps not so useful or reliable on other things. But that's still a net positive. Why the hostility?
Wikipedia is ultimately just like Slashdot - a collection of potentially relevent links to material you might be interested in accompanied by editorial material of highly dubious merit. And behind the scenes are a half million desperate nerds trying to be right about something, all while defending this exercise in social onanism as a "community" effort to provide a free educational resource to people.
Go ahead, mod me a troll. It makes you feel really good for just a few minutes, doesn't it? Fuck that guy! Stupid trolls! We're trying to have an open, honest debate and a free exchange of ideas and he's in here disagreeing with us!
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
And users have to fix it - Not the people running it.
By definition, it's an open encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute. That's what's great about it! It supports our ideals of open access and modification of information.
The problem is that the information being placed is sub par. I'm sure the submitter had their best intentions in mind when they contributed, but the average Joe can't compete with proffesional editors and fact finders like encyclopedias do.
So yes, we reach the point where wikipedia looks subpar. That's unfortunate, but an undeniable fact.
Don't get me wrong - Ther are quite alot of knowledgable articles that rival or surpass the proffesional standards we're being judged by!
But how many stubs are there? How many articles are there that contain only the barest of information? How many could use some serious grammar and spell-checking?
Alot.
And the article is correct - Things are only as strong as the weakest point. And wikipedia has alot more of those than it does anything else.
So what's the solution? Well, the people submitting need to offer higher quality work, and there should be some standard of quality - It is enforced to a point in some things, but too often do I see people who share a view backing each other up to the point that anything that doesn't quite fit in with their ideology is cut or edited.
Is this the majority? No! Of course not! But it exists, and the problem does need to be taken care of.
Some articles in the system, like the ones revolving around Bloody Sunday, have a good discussion going on about the accuracy of the information, and the nonpartisanship of the people submitting.
But there are other articles with the same problem, but none of the solution.
People do need to get involved and help fix things up. People do need to continue submitting. I think having alot more people interested in just editting to raise the written word level of the content would help out as well, and thankfully, I've seen a rise of people doing this.
well the pages on relativity seem fine. really, i find 99% of the time these pages are of high quality. this is just some knee-jerk contrarians trying to look insightful by pointing out the 1% flaw in something that works 99% of the time.
Could there be a commercial opportunity in forking Wikipedia, and then having an advertising-supported business hire some editors and professionals to verify Wikipedia articles, perhaps in conjunction with other content? Or perhaps having a university fork Wikipedia and then flag which edits have been verified, or edited, by students or professors of the subjects covered by a particular article? Or perhaps introducing a Slashdot-style moderation system (where you can by default, for instance, only see edits which are rated 5*'s or higher?)
http://amishthrasher.blogspot.com/
It seems like this is sort of a trend. I mean, didn't vandalism and trolling force the introduction of the moderation system here? And didn't that happen nearly everywhere on the web as discussion boards increased in size? Anyone see a trend? It seems that once it goes from a clubhouse to a gym, you start to get bad apples.
Another poster suggested a leveling system, and I agree. I think that wikipedia should establish a system whereby articles are ranked, i.e. culture - specialized - mainstream or something. That way, as you start out, you can work on culture articles, then work your way up. Or maybe base it on page views and specialization. People who just joined can make new articles (to fill the missing ones) or can work on general articles that are rarely viewed, then work their way up.
Wikipedia is an excellent online source of information. But because of its name, critics hold Wikipedia to the same standard as an encyclopedia. I certainly don't think it's the same thing as an encyclopedia, a wiki's open and collaborative nature is fundamentally different from the construct of an encyclopedia. It's not better or worse, it's just a different thing.
I've learned more from wikipedia in the last few weeks then I learned in 4 years of high school...
But then again I wasn't drunk and high while I was reading wikipedia....
I still don't understand what the Wiki editors hoped to gain by making that claim.
It's not like the Register doesn't have accuracy issues either.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Wikipedia is not better than a professionally edited encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is not worse than a professionally edited encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is, however, different than a professionally edited encyclopedia.
It is a work-in-progress, so a priori it cannot be judged based on the worst entries. Maybe its time for some type of rating system for articles, or maybe allow articles to branch into "Release x.x" and "In Development". We certainly don't judge Linux based on incomplete/buggy code under development. We rate it on what gets released.
Most of the scepticism I've met against Wikipedia when showing it to others has been the concern of quality of the material. The cost of having a free+gratis encyclopedia is that one has to be more critical than usual. Content can be edited at any time and controversial issues are likely to be biased. The cost is having to check the logs to find if material has been altered by trolls.
More importantly, for me, the WikiMedia software serves as a great knowledge base for the (very small) company I work for. I installed it to an intranet server and we all use it for documenting certain aspects of the company, from internal routines to which ink cardtriges the printers need.
If you get this, we're 10 of a kind.
I like wikipedia because I can look things up very quickly, without checking other sources and without using any search engines.
When I want to know more about a subject, I go and look a bit further.
There is a huge number of websites on the Internet that provides with information, "online encyclopedia". But the quality of the information depends on the author's knowledge, ability to write etc. And let's face it, most of the are of average to low quality.
I would say: when it's important to know the facts, don't rely on one source!
...write the encyclopedias that they then use to study with?
Me neither.
Easy as that.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Does that guy not know how to read, or is he just being a douche again?
The parent comment is a copy of another poster's comment with the sense of every statement reversed. A rather bizarre form of trolling, but trolling nonetheless.
I went in there to ask some questions about editing and about five minutes later, the channel got hacked into and everyone was booted out with an obscene racist message. Not even any of the staff could fix the problem for some time.
Very poor management here.
This was a wiki edit of the original comment.
By it's nature, Wikipedia is no good for academic research or as the final authority on anything. That said, if I want an overview of what something is all about, and the information doesn't have to be 100% accurate, then Wikipedia is the way to go.
Think about the information you would get by just Googling something. You're just as likely, probably more likely, to come up with garbage information. The difference at Wikipedia is that it's been reviewed by many eyes, and it's not under the sole control of some random dude with who has a web page.
Users should, of course, be aware of the potential for bad information. In fact, I'd recommend to any user who hasn't yet, you should read their What Wikipedia Is Not page.
That's all.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Some people do have really serious doubts about the credibility of wikipedia content.
On the other hand, wikipedia people do have doubts about these other lads as well. Hmmm, looks like circular distrust to me...
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Here's a classic example that I just came upon (from the Mythical Man Month page):
Though Brooks does not outright say it, he clearly implies in the book that he favors contract workers by suggesting that implementers may only be hired once the architecture of the system has been completed (a step that may take several months, during which time the implementers may have nothing to do). It stands to reason then that if written today, Brooks might have written in favor of outsourcing software jobs in the United States to third world countries where programmer salaries are much lower.
The author of this section is basically guessing as to what Brooks would think about outsourcing. If it's not a fact, it doesn't belong in an encyclopedia. Brooks may very well be in favor of outsourcing, but he doesn't say it in his book and therefore saying "it stands to reason" that he is is plain wrong.
I think wikipedia is interesting reading and very useful, but especially on less popular pages, there are tons of problems when compared with a real encyclopedia.
Best slashdot comment
Shouldn't all "authoritative information" come with a caveat emptor? Wikipedia's flaw may not be quality-shortfall, but merely incorrect product-labeling ...inasmuch as it's not academia-vetted scripture. But remember, pharmacological-grade precision isn't always foremost in a user's mind...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
ok case in point. How did you come to this conclusion? Did you light up and verify it or did you conduct a survey based on scientific priciples, or perhaps are you quoting from a reputable source.
This is the problem with wikipedia this is my opinion.
Perhaps I form of meta moderation should take place. For example, if a major change to an entry in wikipedia is detected, its flagged for group moderation/voting. The old and new is shown, and users would vote for which entry seems most accurate. Either that, or when a major change is detected, the previous author and the new author have to delegate between old and new changes. If the old author feels that the information submitted by the new author is an acceptable change to what he has written, he can approve it... or the two can work things out to reach something acceptable. Or, remove the ability to edit/remove text completely and only allow appending information, this would be quite inefficient though as you would have an entire length of information on the subject all in one giant block.
I read the article. (I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.)
Basically, you could sum it up like this: "We hate Wikipedia. We will attempt to come up with five clever ways of saying so, because we're Brits, damn you."
I'll only laugh at one of their clever witticisms here: an Encyclopedia should be judged on its worst entries, not its best.
Well, that's just awesome. So set up the definition of how something should be judged so this thing (Wikipedia) you obviously hate will lose out. Clue phone for you: ANYONE CAN ADD TO THE WIKIPEDIA. That means that it's going to have at least one uber-crap article.
How about you make a fair comparison, like the average quality of the 50,000 best articles? Oh? Right. That means Wikipedia would win.
Dumbasses.
fifth sigma, inc.
Dissatisfaction with the quality of an article in Wikipedia is not a fatal flaw... it's the engine that makes Wikipedia work. If a user needs information on a topic, and the information is incorrect or incomplete or poorly presented, the user will, in some cases, just go out and research what they need to know using other sources...
Wikipedia does not hold to the standards of print references because it's not finished. It's a work constantly in progress, and you get to see the work in progress as well as a finished product.
Bearing that in mind, Wikipedia must not be judged by its worst entries, as those entries will be brought up to par eventually... in a few hours or a few years. Bad entries will be made into good entries as the right editor for the job steps forward.
This requires information filtering abilities on the part of the reader, and these abilities have too long been dormant in most readers... in a polished and professional publication, mistakes aren't acknowleged as such. There's even a sentiment that if it's in print, it's an absolute irrefutable fact, rather than the best information available to the publisher.
In Wikipedia, the reader knows that what they are reading is a collection of the best information available to the writers... and they can modify it if they see a mistake, or have more to add to the topic. That sort of dynamic interaction with the source material is very, very powerful, and can lead to a depth impossible in a regular encyclopedia on obscure topics... everything from Hallucigenia to Indian Clubs. Try getting that info out of your Brittanica.
Wikipedia is great as a point of departure for further study. It will, at the very least, provide the reader with a notion of what the scope and nature of the subject is, and the incompleteness and error of the artivle will be corrected as people who know what they're talking about step forward over time.
SoupIsGood Food
Wikipedia provides a good initial starting point to find more information on a subject. It's need to be "balanced" actually skews a lot of the articles because it will list blantanly baseless points of view in the interest of "fairness" and "balance". I wouldn't write a University thesus with Wikipedia being a primary source but I would write a high school essay. It's "good enough" for that and it's pretty broad in the subjects it covers and although often not 100% accurate it's "good enough" to start with.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Wikipedia says so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_problems_here
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
It starts out "Yes it's garbage, but it's delivered so much faster!"
Then, "Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work."
And later, "This isn't promising."
Well, which is it? Encouraging, or non-promising? He don't sound like much of a friend of the project. He spends his entire article spewing napalm everywhere, and apparently never actually talked with Jim Wales to give him a chance to respond.
The guy is apparently taking one post, and using this as a sign of victory for the apparent hordes who believe that "it's garbage."
Fine, Andrew Orlowski, you don't like it. We get it. But you're not much of a journalist, either.
P.S. all of your analogies about chefs and food are crap, too. You could easily have taken the time to fix your precious Baby Washington entry. If everyone who cares took a minute to fix a bad article they cared about, guess what? There wouldn't be too many bady articles that anybody cared about.
P.P.S. next time you feel like bashing a huge project supported only by charity and selfless contributions, you might want to reconsider. Yes, the glass is half-empty, but it's also half-full, you dink.
Education is the silver bullet.
This is another Andrew Orlowski rant. He has a chip on his shoulder on a whole range of subjects and is generally not to be trusted.
For example, he has a vendetta against Google, and seems to regard Google as a less trustworthy company than even Microsoft. Google certainly isn't perfect but it sure doesn't have Microsoft's track record.
A case in point is the Wikipedia page on the village of Mellor, a small village that has languished on the edge of obscurity for 14,000 years and I'd swear it still had some of its original inhabitants walking around. The odds of there being more than two or three on Slashdot who have ever been there is virtually nil.
Because of the limited editing it gets, the accuracy is probably higher than normal. HOWEVER, any inaccuracy probably lasts longer than normal, for the same reason.
Pages that get edited frequently probably lose errors a lot faster, but gain new ones equally fast. In that sense, it is no different from computer programming, where rapid development cycles create as many (or more) bugs than they fix - although, they're usually different bugs the next time round.
I think Wikipedia would benefit from some sort of development cycle, where an "in progress" copy of the article is maintained, then occasionally snapshotted to create the "official" copy. For "non real-time" articles, I would suggest that pages not significantly edited for, say, 36 or 72 hours be treated as a "final revision". (A minor alteration would be the adding/removing of symbols such as commas and apostrophes.)
This would give you the "anyone can edit" freewheeling anarchy of the current system, the live, raw feel that some apparently crave, and yet also provide a version that has some semblance of consent behind it, something that maybe isn't perfect but is good enough for now. It's not exactly QA, in the usual sense, but it's still QA, in that you've got to not find any showstoppers within some deadline.
A "traditional"(!) wikipedia with deliberately de-synchronised mainstream version would probably not be the best solution, but I honestly can't think of a better one while keeping the current approach.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Why do people, particularly slashdotters, keep citing wikipedia articles as if everything in there is fact? So much that's there is inaccurate and much of it is slanted to serve the contributer's particular agenda. I've even seen on another message board, somebody was arguing with another poster about some issue, and during the argument he added an article to wikipedia supporting his own side, then cited that article in a post to the message board as if it were some third party authority backing him up! LOL
Most wikipedia articles that I've seen have some kernel of truth but the articles that deal with debatable issues normally present only one side of the issue.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Wikipedia is one of the most usefull resources out there. I couldent remember the name of Versachis killer. I went to wikipedia and looked up fashon, then went to a list of designers(i forgot how to spell versachi), then to a biography of versachi, and then to an article on his murderer. this took me about two minutes. It would have taken alot longer using google or a lybrarian. Wikipedia is one of the best systems of organising information. Its like yahoo on crack.
Ok, so we have The Register with an article "Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems". The article consists mostly of unsubstantiated Wikipedia bashing. There is only one sentence which discusses anything the Wikipedia founder actually said -- and that is only in reference to two specific articles, not the project as a whole. Besides, it was a comment on a Wikipedia mailing list.
Slashdot, of course, turns the headline into "Wikipedia founder sees serious quality problems", as if Zonk didn't RTFA. There's a constant dialogue about where Wikipedia is good and where it is bad on Wikipedia mailing lists. Nothing has changed.
The Register's real point in the article is a propaganda one: the concept that "an encyclopedia is only as good as its worst article". Puh-leeze. That's an insult to the intelligence of readers, as if we can't tell when we are reading gold and when we are reading crap. Then again, maybe that's a problem for regular readers of The Register.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
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The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
There's always a commercial opportunity in forking.
Good for general info and getting lost in interesting links in a lazy afternoon.
Encyclopedia? Nope, sorry.
They should have called it something else and they wouldn't have to deal with the criticism of not 'scaling' to that level.
Hey, it's not like "paper" encyclopedias don't have problems. Just open up encyclopedias printed in the 60's-70's in the US and in USSR and read a few chapters on socialism and communism. :-)
I've found that while Wikipedia can't be trusted on some issues, particularly popular/contraversial ones (if you can't be bothered to read the change history anyway), but it's great for finding some quick information, and ideally a few links to more reputable sources, when I'm working on an assignment.
:)
Now, I don't think I would cite it in anything important (not directly -- if I used it as a resource I would still make a note of that in accordance with academic regulations), but I might take a look at the sources of a particularly good article and cite one of them. There are plenty of sites that I never would have found through Google alone.
It's also a lot easier to find things within a particular field on Wikipedia than it is via Google. There are all too many computer-related words that show up in the most interesting (and unrelated) places online. I'd rather type "mount", "zip", "unzip", or "fsck" into Wikipedia and have it helpfully point me towards the computer science section than brave the wilds of the internet through Google
Register: Wikipedia Inaccurate, Badly-Written
Pots, kettles war over who's the blackest
[Story body here]
To make the project work, the project needs to ensure that people who have committment to the project and it's ideas and expertise in the field have some way of at least removing the agendas and making certain that the facts are as correct as possible. I'm not certain that this does not completely invalidate the whole project, however.
What Wikipedia is, however, is what you'd get when you asked everyone what they *believe to be true* based on whatever basis that they tend to trust in. I don't want that to seem like a put down, or a weakness, however. Most people have a firm basis for what they believe to be true, particularly if it comes from their personal, first hand experience. Therefore, Wikipedia will have tons of good information, and it does. However, when it comes to places where people start reaching farther than they can grasp, it starts to break down. And when those people are obnoxious or stridently unaware of their own limitations, you start getting problems.
What that system needs is a filtering system that lets you have the opportunity to screen out the contributions of people who fit a profile that you feel is suspect. The data should all remain in the wiki, but depending on what you, yourself want to see, you should be able to personalize the editing to match what you can accept. If you feel someone is a wacko (it doesn't mean they are), and they make an addition, you may wish to ignore their contributions in certain topic areas and instead accept the article as it exists without their input.
The worst part of this idea is that people who don't want to see what they don't understand, may find themselves hearing the choir singing to them. However, I don't think you can force people to learn things. It has to be their decision. The best you can do is accept their view point in their submission and then let their deeds speak for themselves and have people choose to ignore them. There should be a peer reviewed filter in Wikipedia that doesn't remove non-expert content, but rather, doesn't let the content of experts be overwritten if there is an agenda involved and that view of the article is viewable if you select the appropriate filter.
I do think, however, it would end the wars where the Wiki is compromised by billions of astroturfers and crackpots under different names. Under this system, what they post never gets overwritten, so they have no reason to go covert. At least, they have no motivation to keep up a running list of fake names and constant counter-editting. There will probably always be the people who post the same things under a billion different names to see if they can get to the most "trusted" filters, but if you are careful, they should never be able to sneak on to your lists.
Obviously, this system would have to be automatic, designed well, and probably require a huge amount of storage space to hold everyone's submissions. But I think it would be best suited to the actual aims and spirit of the Wiki, if it could be done.
Amen. As a society we cannot rely on our own knowledge to teach ourselves. I reccomend that we rely on an older, more advanced race of aliens to do our education and encyclopedia-writing for us. This is surely the only path to a brighter future! Notify the United Nations immediately!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Jimmy Wales runs Wikipedia from the profits that come from Bomis and from donations. Bomis.com is a porn directory network with an innocent-looking front end, and a huge number of ads and paid links.
Wikipedia is straining under the load from a massive increase in traffic. This is due to the buzz from the media, as well as impressive rankings in Yahoo and Google.
Most of the insider administrators are anonymous, and they can use their editing privileges to stomp on any initiatives from the unwashed masses that they find objectionable. The word "cult" comes to mind. Recently there is a move on to require footnote citations for most assertions, in order to make the articles appear neutral. However, in my experience last week with Jimmy and one of his top anonymous admins, SlimVirgin, it seems to me that if the citation itself looks like an opposing opinion, then that's good enough. No one over there actually reads the stuff they cite -- no time for that.
The only defense the unannointed have is to put together their own list of CGI proxies, and give them a hard time for a couple of days. But the admins have many more "rollback" weapons to make it easy to "revert" any changes, which makes this too much trouble for any single unprivileged person.
I predict that before Wikipedia breaks under the traffic load, Jimmy will start running AdSense or Yahoo ads. At that point a lot of editors will probably leave, since their work is volunteer and they might now see Wikipedia as something quite different. Look at what the Google tie-in did for Mozilla Foundation, for example. Potentially millions per year would be generated by ads on Wikipedia.
Then he'll bank most of the money, buy some more bandwidth to keep it going as long as he can, but ultimately let it run down. I don't for a minute believe that Jimmy is motivated by this:
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." -Jimmy Wales, July 2004
First of all, in Wikipedia you are not supposed to be subjective. If there is any contention, present an opinion supported by expert arguments. In the case of the undecided, present both points of view and note the existing debate. Further mention of any ongoing research into the issue would be informative.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
http://amishthrasher.blogspot.com/
I will no longer read the register. I have been too annoyed by 'articles' I read in the register that I found quite bitchy and immature. Yes, I'm annoyed when in dispute with someone else they try to prove their point by linking to wikipedia, which I consider to be of little value as a proof, BUT, it's nonetheless useful, and here's why - wikipedia, and I have RTFA on the register and here's where I disagree, does NOT need to replace the web. It does NOT need to be authoritative and conclusive; it only needs to be a *starting point* to introduce a topic and its range to someone. Accuracy, as far as I'm concerned, is a far lesser concern. In real life an encyclopedia would be the first thing you read when you research something, NOT the last! It should be no different for wikipedia.
And that is a blatant generalization.
I contribute to Wikipedia. What a shocker that I realize there are inaccuracies.
Heck, it's probably like usual...
A minor crowd of zealots that screams loudly is mistaken as the majority just because they are heard most.
Also, even works such as Encyclopedia Britannica has inaccuracies...
I mean, the perfect informational book hasn't been written.
What authors can strive for is to keep improving though, and that's a honorable goal.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The real challenge is finding the volunteers to fix all the obscure articles. People work on what they find interesting, and if no contributors find a topic interesting, it's not going to get fixed.
The problem is that a lot of the obscure stuff that *is* there is in areas where geek (or rather nerd) types have interests, and it's not always that well-written. In fact, I think this is arguably at the top of the (otherwised unordered) list of problems with Wikipedia:-
(1) The anal-retentive "fact"-adding tendency. Those who'll add obscure/unused abbrevs to a *disambiguation* page. They don't get that some facts are more important than others, or that simply adding information to an article doesn't necessarily make it more helpful. They'll create lots of small stub articles, when they'd be better combined in a single article (placing them in context). If there's one thing I've learned as I get older, it's that leaving stuff out is *hard* but very important. You can't include everything. And you have to order that information well. The self-indulgent factoid geeks don't know or care about this.
(2) Change for change's sake. I'd be interested to see the amount of "churn" that goes on in some articles simply caused by people changing stuff for the sake of it. It's not necessarily a bad thing; it's just pointlessly wasted effort over a minor issue.
(3) *Potential* subversion by those with an agenda, including professionals. I've seen at least one instance of what appeared to be a PR person editing anonymously. This is dangerous, because most zealots with an agenda are transparent; PR and the like are professionals, and more likely to slip under the radar.
(4) Vandalism; annoying, but usually pretty obvious
(5) Lack of citation. This is very rare, and whilst normal encyclopedias don't normally include citations, Wikipedia's credibility would be much enhanced with more of them.
There are probably more, but my brain is full; that's enough to be going on with...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Who the hell uses encyclopedia brittanica or any other encyclopedia for mission critical anything. You use it for what are the names of the beatles or the seven dwarves or where is liberia. Ususally it is pretty on for such things. If you need to be sure you can then multiply reference your results somewhere else to verify your source. LIKE YOU SHOULD if it is important. This is acutally a topic my girlfriend and I got into a fight about. Having never looked at it she stated that it couldn't be usefull because it wasn't peer reviewed. Well Brittanica isn't peer reviewed like a journal either but that's irrelevant. I understand the issues and value of style, professionalism and accountablility that you get in a traditional encyclopedia. Still accesibility and speed are not irrelevant. Multiple "voices" and viewpoints are a definite advantage over traditional encyclopedias. Also if you are reasonably sophisticated reading the editing arguements on highly subjective topics can be very enlightening more so than the "facts" in the article. Sure rely on it as a only source at your own risk but used intelligently with an awareness of it's pitfalls it is a very useful and valuable resource. It is neither as great as it's best article or as bad as it's worst. Someone else did a comparison recently and on three out four topics it had more information, was more up to date and accurate than the traditional encyclopedia on the fourth in the reviewers opinion was awful. I can live with that.
What de facto source of information would you prefer? In a perfect world I would read many articles from many sources and make up my own mind. Unfortunately I don't have the time for that, excepting for the topics which I personally find to be most important. Wikipedia seems to me an excellent source of information to suplement my areas of actual expertise.
Whenever someone says "X sucks" I always wonder "compared to what"?
Wikipedia sucks. Compared to an ideal unbiased, accurate, professional source of information. However, I don't see any alternative that is notably better. So graded on a curve, I think Wikipedia is well above average.
Cheers.
"Karakachans or Sarakatsani are an itinerant "white colour" (i.e. non-Roma) people of the Balkans. Their name is thought to be a pejorative label coined by Turkish conquerors, for their nomadic way of life. They used to practice transhumance, raising their herds on the move, wintering on the Aegean shore, and spending the summer in the Rhodopes or Balkan mountains. In the Ottoman period they were a relatively independent people and wealthy through trade in lamb meat and wool. After the WWII, they were sedentarized in Bulgaria. They speak an archaic Greek dialect (to some extent mixed with Romanian words) and are Eastern Orthodox."
The writing is a little odd, and obviously by someone who loves the thesaurus. ("transhumance?" ... why not just say that they migrate seasonally). However, the facts are dead on and this is valuable information to someone like me with interest in such an utterly obscure topic. It was especially interesting to know that this group has another name, the "Sarakatsani".
"Fuck off, Nazi punk."
I think the problem here is a matter of degrees. There are people out there who don't have a healthy skepticism of information they recieve. You see this all the time from the lame tradition of chic radicalism on college campuses to religious followers applying half baked theories to all manner of things. As a scientist I would like to think that I have developed a healthy ability to evaluate data and have enough skepticism to not immediately accept any bull**** that get lobbed across my screen. It is not really that difficult. The Wikipedia is not the type of reference I would cite in a paper. Or make high stakes bets on the validity of individual peices of information. The truth is it is a good "fuzzy" reference for all kinds of things. Again in science I often look up fairly specific article about molecular biology just to see what they say. Some are excellent and some are awful, but I don't use the Wikipedia to design experiments. If I want hard facts on well studied topics I would probably go elsewhere. The truth is that there is a lot of good information in the Wikipedia that you just can't find in a print encyclopedia. Print encyclopedias generally don't have information that is useful about BSD, Star Wars, The Flying Spahgetti Monster, etc. Yes these are "geek" topics but that is where the Wikipedia cleans up. So as usual dumb people that accept any information as accurate from a source that "anyone can edit" and make life and death decisions based on it are probably beyond the help of even the most stringent editor.
I've also noticed a trend whereby people will do stealth vandalism, changing one tiny fact or number. This is far more insidious than the harmless dorks who replace an entire article with "Brent Stevens eats babies". This is clearly an effort by people to discredit the very idea of Wikis.
Eat a fresh homemade chocolate chip cookie if your mouth gets dry. Just drinking something doesn't work, eating makes you salivate? or something. Works for me.
Wikipedia is, in every sense of the phrase, "open source." Thus, it's like any other open source project - there's a lot of good stuff there, but there can also be a lot of crap. Pointing that out, however, will often get you flamed. The ideals associated with these kinds of projects are often so strong as to be a hindrance. Just last night on Slashdot I read a comment along the lines of "Anyone who tries to monetize an open source application deserves to be put up against the wall and shot." How is that sort of attitude beneficial to open source? It's the same thing with Wikipedia.
That said, I think Wikipedia's quite good. I haven't run across any really bad articles that I can think of off the top of my head. I don't usually use it for research, though, as I've often got textbooks on whatever I'm researching...
Come on guys, this isn't news! That headline got me all worked up. Anybody involved has know there've been issues since day one, and from what I've heard from Jimbo, he openly and readily admits to them.
Now, if the versioning system that they've been discussing for a while would not crash the servers when it gets turned on, we'd have some news!
It's easy and fun to improve wikipedia, you know :)
I always found Wikipedia to be of exellent quality. Fail to see where the quality is lacking.
google.slashdot
Why not have a rating system? They should make a rating system, so you could add Informative, Incomplete, Biased, etc, and have articles with particularly low ratings flagged for review (do they do something like this already?).
I think they should lock a lot more articles that are known to be complete and accurate. The definition of, say, orange juice hasn't changed all that much in the last 10 years and probably won't in the next 10.
Working these two concepts in together, I think they should have the 'modifiability' of the article be based on how high it's rated. For just a stub, or no article at all, then anyone should be able to modify it. But if the article is long (enough) and complete, then say maybe only a register with many high-rated articles can change it.
I think the main idea here is to promote and protect good content, but I seriously think they should not do anything to restrict an average joe from exlpicitly adding content.
Anyone else there think I'm on the right track?
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
I would submit until he does a study with qualitive analysi fo the quality its only someone's personal belief and nto a fact.. Its well known that specific wiki foudners ar ento satisfied with the route wikipedia went and that is based on personal opinion and not factual.. Lets be blunt are you aware of that all major Encyclopedia pulbihers paid fro feedback to correct incorrect entries? its not just a wikipedia problem but problem when you publish anything!
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
Except that "compromise" is not always the best way to produce a truthful article. If one person is correct and the other incorrect, what benefit is there to "compromise" other than getting the two to stop bickering? Often the compromises produce pages that are at best schizophrenic ("Some say X while others say Z") and at worst, factually incorrect, just to please some bozo who insists on something that is demonstrably incorrect. The schizo articles are not necessarily unreasonable but often misleading because they present a "balance" of viewpoints even if the only people saying Z are complete fanatics or otherwise discredited sources.
Different areas should have boards that assign ownership of the pages to individuals that request ownership of the pages. Again, those committees can be chosen on the basis of merit by the wikiepdia guys. The members of these boards have the merit of being in the boards.
But what does it mean to own a page? the page is locked and you have to approve anything before it is published?
No, that is really not necessary. Simply your friggin name appears on top. So if the information below is wrong, you are ridiculed.
Wikipedia has become very important, too important. People are going to be interested in having their name associated with it.
Hell, I'd love to be the editor of the Java entry in Wikipedia. I'd love to have that in my resume. Or better yet, be in the board that decides who gets ownership of the CS pages.
Wouldn't you like to be the editor of the Klingon page? or be in the board that decides who gets ownership of the Sci Fi pages?
This is technically easy to implement, it would all work free and people who are controlling the quality of the information in the pages would receive credit for it.
You would have the most important element in quality assurance: someone to blame if there is a quality problem.
One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is that they give special preferences to anonymous vandals who use America Online to carry out their misdeeds. The Wikipedia block user interface specifically suggests to "keep blocks in these ranges to 15 minutes or less" when blocking a vandal within AOL's IP range. No other ISP in the world receives this sort of favoritism from Wikipedia; repeat agitators from all other internet service providers are blocked for hours, weeks, days, months, and, if necessary, indefinitely.
Thing about wikipedia is the licensing virtually guarantees that when someone wants encyclopedia-like content for a hardcopy book or website, the wikipedia will be there. While the wikipedia itself may not become the basic repository of human knowledge, many of its articles will be reproduced in various forms and built upon by people creating specialized encyclopedias or other sources of information. Journalists will pull quotes from wikipedia articles when writing stories, and though the quotes may be accurate and factual, they will represent idiosyncratic choices on the part of wikipedia editors. That is neither good nor bad inherently, but it does present the wikipedia as a significantly influential phenomenon, quite apart from its reliability.
I have come to believe that the quality of the technical articles is quite good. There are a limited number of people who know what matrix diagonalization, MRAM, etc. are. I think that it's nice that some of them are willing to post very accurate explainations of them. In the end, shouldn't this be an excercise in making smart decisions??? I mean -- wikipedia is no different in that the wrong information can be there as well. If you aren't intelligent enough to sort fact from fiction, then you aren't putting in the work, and you don't deserve to know -Z
If you go to any university's library, get five books on any even remotely obscure subject, then you'll likely find that each one contradicts the others in some areas. The problem with Wikipedia is not with its user-run method, but that all written history is inherently prone to factual errors.
just a guess, but their seems to be a bit of a human nature bit: How correct is correct? For instance looking up relgious topics you get a better starting point than almost anywear-look up say Buddhism, Islam or what have you-much of the information precicly becuase it it is realtime is as good as some books. Other less popular topics then you ask yourself how correct is correct, and it is like anyother tool. I used it in a major research paper because of frustrations with Medline that didn't even have the topic- wich involved meditation. I found lots of other things on Medline, and some on pubmed(almost none of which were any more recent than 2000). I do agree using it as your only source is not good. But again how correct is correct? If you're talking about say history, and oh I don't know the period you are looking into has no written records who's to say what's the 'correct'ness of information? On the other hand if you're talking about a recent event and describing it then then you have more concrete things to determine what is good enough for something like wikipedia.
I think the upper end of the blind-zealotry scale is:
9.0 - Scientologist
8.0 - Jihadist
7.8 - SCO lawyer
7.0 - Wikipedia twidler
6.5 - Mac evangelist
And of course, it is logarithmic.
There is a whole book to be written on on Wikipedia reflects today's culture wars. If you check the history of edits for any page on a contentious subject (e.g Islam, or even dicier, Homosexuality In Islam)you'll see the cascading waves of opposing edits, often purely subjective and little founded in facts. Religion, politics and sexuality find their battleground here, often disguised by endless polite qualifiers, e.g. "however, some modern historians dispute...".
That reminds me of a saying about the internet itself:
The best thing about the web is that anyone can publish. The worst thing about the web is that anyone can publish.
*STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO ANDREW ORLOWSKI!*
Okay, that was six words. The point still stands. This "journalist" has never once had anything not-gratuitously-insulting to say about Wikipedia.
Don't give him any page hits. Just go straight to the two articles he's analyzing. The first of the two is the article that the main story probably should have linked to, even though it lacks Orlowski's choice, insulting quotes (and therefore makes it less important, as measured in page hits). The second seems to take Orlowski's "amateurs suck" mentality, but is a good deal more polite about it.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
These citations include simple, unamibguous facts, as most encyclopedias have fact-checking and qualified authors. That's what Wikipedia lacks. Encyclopedias are generally poor sources, but for dates of the British Civil War, they should be good.
The restaurant analogy in the "The Register" article is false. When you go to a restaurant you have to pay. Wikipedia is free.
wikki-fiddler does not sound bad to me, does trekkie sound bad to you? or blogger?
what may be offensive to some, is not to others.
wiki-editor
wiki-journalist
wiki-scholar
wiki-fite
what name would you use to describe?
Yeah, and that's exactly why they should put in place some sort of hierarchical editorship. Slashdot does something like this, hell even in Battlefield 2 if you kill enough good guys, you're kicked from the server. For something which gets as many college kids quoting it as this does, they should take a little more care in who can post to it.
Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er
I'm an Atari ST fan you insensitive clod!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I've heard people say, "Wikipedia is like a public toilet; when you need, you're glad it's there, but you never know who was there before you".
I've been editing Wikipedia for about a year now, and while I find some of the utopian aspects (i.e. allowing anybody, even anonymous users, to edit) to be intellectually appealing, the result is, without a doubt, mostly crap. Instead of spending my time improving quality, I spend my time fighting blatant vandals, well-intentioned idiots, and clueless newbies. And what time is left over gets eaten up in silly beaurocracy.
Like many /.'ers, I do software development for a living. No software development project (or any big project, be it buiding a space ship or digging ditches) would survive with the attitude that anybody can do anything they want. People need to both be educated as to the right way to do things and prove themselves trustworthy.
Wikipedia is a great resource. I turn to it often to get background, or find out interesting facts about almost anything. But I wouldn't trust it for anything important.
Pretty funny how the guy, at the end of the article, wants to fire a parting shot at Wikipedia by pointing to the supposedly inferior "Baby Washington" article. Except he doesn't even know that the background singer Jeanette Washington (to which he linked) is different from the soul singer Jeanette Washington (which he meant).
Same here. I once bothered to spend a couple hours writing some new information in a couple articles. I would say I'm pretty much a subject expert on the subject (from first hand experience, studied about it, op in the only related IRC channel, webmaster of one of the biggest related sites and all). I figured I had done great work, and hence had done everyone a service. Most of it was pretty obvious to anyone remotely involved, but the information was really missing and all...
Only to find out some nobody rolled back all the changes a few hours after, asking me to back everything up with references... Like, dude, you want me to backup statements like "the sky is blue" ???
Sorry, but too fucking bad. I doubt I'll even bother visiting them (or referring them, mentionning them or anything) after that. (I've actually taken my wikipedia links off my websites eh)
The "tortured prose" of this Register article is apparent in their lack of details on how the Bill Gates and Jane Fonda Wikipedia entries are "unreadable crap" (in Jimmy Wales' words). We're merely told this repeatedly, but the Register never backs their argument (or Wales'). Also, one sees another instance of the double-standards which are tolerated for judging Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.
If "[s]omething that aspires to be a reference work ought to be judged by the quality of the worst entry" then why are we only allowed to judge one encyclopedia—Wikipedia—on that basis? With such a ridiculously high bar, it's easy to hand-pick articles one knows a great deal about and see if the encyclopedia in question measures up.
Which brings me to the next problematic criticism of these encyclopedias: drawing conclusions by weighing too small a sample. I recall that EB's former editor used exactly one entry to conclude that Wikipedia is akin to filth one is likely to find in a public bathroom (or words to that effect). The Register article's critique centers on reviews of two Wikipedia articles—Bill Gates and Jane Fonda's entries. The only way to reach the conclusion that EB has a "handful of errors" (as the Register says) is to do a survey; you can't judge articles you've never read. It seems to me that a proper review of a large encyclopedia would require a far larger sample size than a "handful" of articles in order to justify any reasonable conclusions about quality, no matter what those conclusions were.
Finally, the Register article mentions a few "respon[ses] to criticism" but doesn't actually critique these responses with a proper explanation. Just because one is told something like "this is what my critics will tell you" doesn't mean you have reason to dismiss the criticism. If one is interested in learning what's really going on, one has an obligation to think about the critique and weigh it on its merits. I "welcome the candour" as well the Register does, but I certainly want my candour to come with examples to back up points. When I evaluate EB using the guidelines I'm told to evaluate Wikipedia by, I come up with the conclusion that EB is merely different from, not better than, Wikipedia. And this conclusion I arrive at without giving any credit to Wikipedia for being free (as in the freedom to share and modify) which EB most certainly isn't. So, if I happen to be a victim of EB's "HUAC", I can't do anything to improve EB without going through the gatekeepers that registered their unwillingness to examine the above topics at all.
Digital Citizen
by the Uncyclopedia as the one true source for all knowledge.
...there was a grammar error in the article on Horcurxes. Fixed.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
All Jimmy Wales actually said was that two articles were terribly written. Wales has always had a goal of high quality in Wikipedia. Having two poorly written articles out of over three quarters of a million is hardly an admission of "Quality problems" except for the two particular articles cited. (yes, there are other articles that need work as well.)
... which seems as good a description as any to us."""
:-).
The real issue here is the repeated attacks by this reporter: Remember Andrew Orlowski is the same reporter who wrote about Wikipedia :
""""It's the Khmer Rouge in diapers,"
Clearly Andrew has found that Wikipedia bashing is an easy meal ticket and that is the actual source of his over-exaggerated headline writing. Orlonski needs to get paid and he needs his editors to view him as a positive asset, drawing lots of eyeballs to the Register website. A quick Google for Orlowski and Wikipedia shows a long, slanted history for our boy Andy.
There is a verb for this: "Dvoraking" "To Dvorak"
"The act of trolling by a supposedly 'professional' journalist in order to draw visitors to a webpage generating hits for the paid advertisements."
In fact, given this background information Andrew Orlowski has less real credibility than, say, your average slashdot poster.
Orlowski isn't a total waste of time however. After all he has noted that: "Segway's brains head for toy robot", "Microsoft FAT patent rejected - again", and the incredible "Police stake out bar, hoping to catch man drunk"
Wow, Andrew! Whats next? I wait in breathless anticipation.
(What, proofread this? not worth the time, Andrew.)
I'm not flaming here - but I don't think it's that big of a deal if an article on Bill Gates or Jane Fonda is inaccurate. I'll bet the one on Evolution isn't too great, either - but this is what Wikipedia is about. Let me explain:
To hear EB talk about it, you would think that the only good encyclopedia entry on Bill Gates would include factual information about his birth, life, finances, etc. That's fine if you are writing a history book for schoolchildren, but what Wikipedia does is actually captures the cultural moment around an issue - the fact that Bill Gates' article is inaccurate is because there is so much contention surrounding him.
To my eyes, Britannica is enforcing a cultural imperialism that the only right information is Politically Correct whitewashed facts. While that certainly is important, for instance, if you are really looking for the best definition of "evolution" or an impartial recounting of facts about Jane Fonda, that's not what Wikipedia does.
It captures the fullest dimension of the issues - the facts (as they are percieved) and all the culturally significant alternate views as well. Imagine what value future anthropologists might glean from a snapshot of Wikipedia - they wouldn't care who Bill Gates was in any kind of factual way - they would want to see what the world thought of him. Or the WTO, the World Bank, Greenpeace - you get the idea.
"I cannot believe you are a a stupid, stubborn, and illogical person, but your stance towards wikipedia (and the comment about waitors throwing food, and being only as good as your worst article) is either the result of ignorant rage or an advertisement. Journalistic integrity requires you to disclose any personal or business reason you may have to post such an article. Please include either this full disclosure or append a statement as to how you learned to make up for being slow with spite."
Come on, it's simple. The guy who wrote the article is just trying to justify his recent purchase of a large amount of books which he'll be paying down for the next two years.
Wikipedia has quality issues?
I don't believe it. Next thing you'll be telling me that there's pornography on the internet.
Correct the article, tell him to look again?
The problem with wikipedia is stubborn ignorance. I have had the experience of spending substantial time correcting a clear error in an article on a subject in which I am expert, only to discover the edit to be elided and the wrong information returned the next day. What motivation is there for experts to contribute when ignorant buffoons are simply trolling for an edit war?
OK, some have argued well that an Encyclopedia is really not a valid source of information for writing an article worth publishing. So, in that sense, both Wikipedia and other Encyclopedias (Britannica, etc.) offer starting points to point you in the direction of other more relevant sources of information.
Experts, including dead-tree encyclopedia authors, are definitely biased despite their voluminous amount of knowledge. They will *refuse* to look into some areas of study any further because they don't want to do so. The "peer reviews" may simply be a group of people patting each other on the back and not seriously attempting to counter the bias. The advantage of Wikipedia is not that it is unbiased, but that, given some time and effort, you can use the diff tool to find out what else each other has written and determine the bias. In other words, authors can't necessarily hide behind their biases.
Wikipedia of course has its stronger areas and weaker areas, but it is one resource among many that can be useful when doing research. As some have mentioned, it is kind of like running a Google search on something.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
The Wikipedia block user interface specifically suggests to "keep blocks in these ranges to 15 minutes or less" when blocking a vandal within AOL's IP range. No other ISP in the world receives this sort of favoritism from Wikipedia
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Linux is ill-suited to being a showcase product to flaunt open source and I have reason to believe Wikipedia is best suited to assume the role. In a span of only a few years, Wikipedia has amassed a considerable fan following. It's amazing how people power has launched the public encyclopedia into the big league and no one can deny that. Of course, like everything else, there may be a noise factor involved in this project too. However, the powers of construction are more potent than the powers of destruction...and Wikipedia manifests it well enough.
Hey, it's not like "paper" encyclopedias don't have problems. Just open up encyclopedias printed in the 60's-70's in the US and in USSR and read a few chapters on socialism and communism. :-)
I gave my 60's Britannica to a thrift store during my last move. They told me that craftsey people liked to cut out the middle of the volumes and make boxes of them. Traditionally these would store a "micky" (booze). Maybe I should have kept the Britannica, but I don't really need 30 mickys.
Wikipedia works best for geeky subjects.
I don't think that's true. Wikipedia's featured articles come from all categories. That's certainly not a perfect proof of my point, but an indication.
(6) The idiot who thinks he's funny. In fact, so funny, that _everyone_ should find his stand-up comedy act when seriously searching for information. In fact, heck, everyone should be mandated by law to read his jokes, but finding them instead of actual info is almost an acceptable substitute.
I still remember one article in the German wikipedia... about cloning didgeridoos. Complete with a picture of tiny little digeridoos in test tubes, and a paragraph about how they live longer than the ones born naturally. About a year later, it was still there. (Now it's finally gone, though.)
OK, so it's a sorta the bastard child of your points 3 and 4. Except while the PR professional knows they're subverting and polluting a resource for profit, and the vandal knows they're defacing, the "funny" idiot might actually think he's doing a public service.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Why does every project like this have to be "the next big thing". Why do we have to compare to the E. Britanica and rabidly defend Wikipedia with ever more elaborate answers? Wikipedia is an interesting project, and extremely useful as a starting point for research. That's good enough for me - leave the "Wiki-religion" outside.
Different things are "trivia" to different people. From my perspective, the birthdate and biography of someone who lived hundreds of years ago (except for someone historically significant, e.g. Shakespeare or Caesar) is trivia, while a rundown of the features in the latest World of Warcraft patch is not. I imagine the opposite is true for you. My interests are a closer match to Wikipedia than yours, so I'll use that (bearing in mind that it's constantly in motion and checking the Talk and Article History pages as necessary). You have more historical interest, and so a more conventional encyclopedia is probably a better fit for you. It's no shame to Wikipedia that they lack good information in some areas--simply a matter of specialization.
I suspect that this trend will continue. Wikipedia will continue to expand in geek-friendly and pop-culture areas, while articles one would expect to find in Encyclopedia Britannica will be left mostly empty. If you're looking for the title of a Star Trek episode or a comic book supervillain, check Wikipedia; for articles on Ancient Greece, use Encarta. Most teachers don't accept Wikipedia as a bibliographic source anyway, due to the possibility of students editing a Wikipedia article and then quoting themselves authoritatively. I think that as long as people (including Jimmy Wales, the founder) compare Wikipedia to Britannica and expect it to measure up, they'll continue to be disappointed--they're simply different things with different strengths. That's all there is to it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
Wikipedia is unreliable, and I punish students who rely on it for facts. I teach political science, and while some of the entertainment and computing entries are quite good, the history and politics articles are full of misinformation and selective/accidental omissions. I tell my students that they aren't permitted to source a fact to Wikipedia. Of course, if they get an idea from it, they are required to cite it as the source of the idea -- but they must then confirm whatever facts they want to use with a more reliable source. Of course, I generally discourage encyclopedias for all but the most mundane fact-checking, since most concepts and ideas worth discussing in academe are best covered in peer-reviewed articles in academic journals (or in some cases, in books published my respectable academic presses). Still, I wish the Wikipedia project luck, because I think it has the potential to be one of the best resources on the net; they just need to find some type of fact-checking process that works. Until then, a Wikipedia entry in a student's bibliography is a near-certain route to lost points.
Make cheese not war 8:)
experts on any field are such because the are recognized
if Wikipedia delivers a 'Wikipedia expertise score' which gains popularity then every person earning money thanks to his/her expertise will be interested in obtaining a good score. therefore let's use it to motivate experts to write and validate articles thanks to a challenging approach
a 'Wikipedia expertise score' will be delivered to every Wikipedia-account owner who writes at least an article. it will be a cryptographic certificates: any expert will be able to publish his score and anyone will be able to verify it because it will be digitally sealed-and-signed
on exact matters (sci and tech, not philosophy) the very fact that an expert validates an article which proves to be good (because any other expert will agree) has a value because it enables Wikipedia to allow, after a delay, a better 'expertise score' to the validating expert. therefore the first validator of a given article gains a whole lot of points, the next one gains less, and so on. the best way to be the first validator is to write the article, and any expert has available and public material for this, therefore he can do it and will earn (recognized expertise score) from doing so. from there any expert finding a factual error (validated as such by many others) will take a good fraction of the points earned, therefore the articles will be maintained and reviewed by a pool of score-seeking experts: their authors (trying to maintain them at a bulletproof stage) and other experts (trying to find errors in order to enhance their 'Wikipedia expertise score')
pitfalls :
- an expert gang may falsely 'vote wrong' in order to rack points. but using the existing (today!) set of articles an automagic analysis of the
volume of information produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted'
status, age and amount of readers) the motivation and efficiency of all
their authors can be calculted ('scored'). therefore a software can already (right now)
establish a 'confidence score' for each already registered author. the first stage of this operation is therefore to deliver a score to each of them. they are of good will and will devise a way to deliver other certificates.
- some people may sell expertise points by various means. I don't think that anyone will be able to benefit from those points in order to gain anything than spare time
check http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/#wikipediawhat I think the writer of this (imho) crappy article didn't seem to get.. it's not a normal encyclopedia. it's a shared media.. to share information.. not to suck it up. :)
if you go to a restaurant on a date.. you pay for it.. this is more like a free shared cook out where you prepare meals for each other for free, ofcourse you're not going to like all of it.. but you can help people with their recipe's and cooking.. you can still bring a date ofcourse
it's just like with opensource software.. it requires interaction, ah different way of thinking.. and that's what makes it a better product in the -end-
Maybe Wikipedia needs a content rating/ moderation system - say "Reliability Index" Content rating must be assessed based on stats like how many no. of reads, no. of edits. - these are just samples which indicate how many independent people have had a chance to assess the content. Maybe a Rate this Content would also help build some assessment of the reliability People should work towards improving the reliability index by correcting if necessary a threshold can be fixed where content is considered "autoritative"
When you create or edit a page just before linking to it, thereby creating a temporary appeal to authority in order to win an argument. I think that's graduated from a hobby to an addiction in my case.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Anyone can write anything on Wikipedia without having to back it up with references. Unless someone with in-depth knowledge on the subject area checks it over, these contributions may go unnoticed and could be taken as fact or even used academically. It doesn't seem right to me that there is no peer review stage between adding a contribution and it going "live". Wikipedia might be more accurate if other Wikipedians had a chance to check the (mandatory!) references and the factuality of contributions first before letting it go live.
There is no god but Google and GTalk is the messenger of Google.
To me its been a lot more helpful than a simple google. It might not be 100% accurate, or even 50% accurate, but it definately gives a great starting place! I have used it numerous times to find information, and almost everything I have looked up was not only on target accurate and helpful, but it also provided links to other related information that might be helpful. I think as far as a search tool, it far exceeds the usefulness as compared to google (for general subject searching)
I think the concept of an open encyclopedia is an amazing and breakthrough technology. There could be more measures put in place to allow some type of voting on quality or such. That quality index could be checked first. There are numerous ways to go about fixing a quality issue.
The fact remains, it is one of the best things to come to the internet ever. I would like to see more of this type of open concept applied to many other resources available on the web. (open DNS system perhaps???)
Have you not read their tagline? ;)
I've edited a bunch of articles on major Australian corporations, and I think I've a reasonable nose for somebody pushing the corporate line. If there are PR flacks editing a lot of articles, they're being pretty subtle about it. To take one example, the article on Rupert Murdoch doesn't pull too many punches.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
My first reference source is britannica.com, which costs money, but is the best encyclopedia I know of. The problem is that it doesn't cover everything that I'm interested in. Especially things that are new or trendy or not so important. For example Wikipedia has an entry for Mike Francesa, Britannica does not. This is fine, I don't care if there are factual inaccuracies in an article about Mike Francesa. Wikipedia has an entry for every football team in the NFL, Britannica does not. You get the point.
I think Wikipedia fills in the gaps that brittanica and more serious encyclopedias can't or won't fill.
I think it's natural for Wikipedia to have some churn on, for example, political topics.
But for topics like electronics, for example, it's great.
Yesterday I saw an article on Slashdot or Groklaw (can't remember which), it mentioned an amplifier design called "long tailed pair." I went to Wikipedia and it had a little circuit diagram and a very good explanation of how the design works and why it is used. One of the points in the explanation eluded me, but another Wikipedia search (from the same page) illuminated the point to my satisfaction.
Now, if you want to find an authoritative source for politics, knock yourself out: All such sources are biased in some way. Don't expect Wikipedia to do the impossible.
What may help Wikipedia is to adapt some of Everything2's ideas. Namely, to allow several concurring writeups for one topic. This would allow for many different viewpoints to coexist. For some topics it is simply not possible to condensate all the opinions and views into *one* coherent body of text.
Of course you'd still have the problem that a potential reader does not know which of these writeups he can rely on. So you could add 2 mechanisms. First, highlight articles from experts somehow, and second, have one 'main writeup' that is maintained exactly as it is now.
This would yield a consenus view on the subject AND additional personal viewpoints.
And the nice thing is, you could simply implement it by adding the possibility of writeups ('comments') to the existing articles and some sort of registered users who have proven credibility for certain subjects.
Keep open minded - but not that open your brain falls out...
It seems to me that the most important measure of quality sould be overall factual accuracy (logical quality). I find it fascinating that the complaints about quality by Carr don't really make any serious claims against the site's factual accuracy. Formatting and contextual issues such as spelling are quality issues but not nearly as important to useability as logical quality.
I do use Wikipedia regularly but could care less if Wikis replace encyclopedias or not.
Does anyone know of a serious statistical survery of the factual accuracy of articles in Wikipedia?
What % of articles are "garbage", and what % are legitimate starting points of reference (what % have an acceptable logical quality)?
The articles "randomly" selected by Nicholas Carr are telling: how many people's primary use of Britannica consists of celebrity bios (e.g. Gates, Fonda)? His "dazzeling post" hints that he sees the "amateur" nature of the project as the real problem. Not suprising, since trust seems to correlate with social status in the minds of business-folk.
What makes traditional encyclopedias "Objective"? How is NPOV related to objectivity?
"small percentage of good entries" -- what % of the entries in Wikipedia are good?
I've yet to see any meaningful debate on the logical quality of the project. Somebody should compare topics side by side with Britannica and note the differences.
g
If you think the response of "fix it yourself" is like being shown the kitchen in a restraunt, then you've come to the wrong place. There are plenty of conventional encyclopedias available if that's what you want.
Wikipedia is what the founders & the participants (who bought into the founders' vision) want it to be. There's nothing wrong with that.
Yeah, and look at Wikipedia anno 2001. Not so great, eh?
What's your point? That outdated encyclopedias are outdated? Wikipedia anno 1960 would have had just as much crap about communism as articles in Britannica had.
Let's at least try to be fair here, shall we?
You know what's great, is that peer review a la "karma" has fucked up nearly every online reference project and turned it into a cabalized, niche project whose proponents insist is still widely used but in reality has about the same number of active users as Gopher.
One major flaw with these systems is that they end up rewarding for large corpuses of mediocre work over smaller corpuses of more meaningfully created work, resulting in a rank system where free-time-loaded high school and college students and others not having a productive use for their time rise more rapidly than more educated, experienced, sensible, and wise contributors.
Jason Scott of textfiles.com and I got into an aborted debate at WP between the time he posted his "why WP sucks" rant and then erased it all from existence (or something), and it came down to cabalism vs. collectivism.
Some feel that an inner circle of arbitrarily and subjectively chosen warders (based on some selection criteria the proponent personally deems as infallible) will result in higher quality work. Unfortunately, such bodies tend to become Old Boy Networks, stuck in antiquated, elitist, and/or closed-minded thinking, driving a project into further and further irrelevancy on the greater scale. WP tends to be affected by this sort of influence anyway, but it is illegitimate (or no more fundamentally legitimate than the converse) -- though it has crept into the body having the power to expel contributors.
At WP, when it so occurs that the continuted activity of a contributor is to be decided, there is no rigid, inhuman mathematical figure by which the jurors can have their decision simplified. Instead, the corpus of the contributor's work must be evaluated wholly. In the end it comes down to subjective assessment, and tendencies of value judgement have clearly formed, but the difference is that the decision-makers have to think about it, and handle each case uniquely, beyond a nice, disempowered "less than X" basis.
I wish that body was less of a kangaroo court, but I have to appreciate this, as well as the generally devolved form of article government. At any given time the content of a broadly-attended-to article may be intensely debated, forcing rethinking and defense of position (Jason Scott hated this, arguing that contributors should not have to spend time defending their work on its own merits). Content review on WP, then, is constant, provided that the article doesn't suffer from a) an influx of fanboys, b) an overwhelming multitude of subject areas and angles, or c) lack of interest.
Ultimately the best solution for one's problems with WP is for one to contribute, and when one has done so, to find more to contribute. But you have to have the interest in helping the project succeed rather than being predisposed to either having it fail, digging up its flaws to laugh at them, or having it elevate you and your work to an ostentatious level of specialness where your name appears in bold bright text across your contributions.
Despite the examples presented by the critics (who did nothing to improve them, despite clearly having better information or ideas), those critics would be (and seem to be) rather hard pressed to find better references on any of them. That is, "better" by an encompassing range of criteria -- such as price, reusability, lack of bias, clarity, comprehensiveness, or maintenance.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Okay, so maybe the Jane Fonda and Bill Gates celebrity pages suck.
But try looking up the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season in your desk set encyclopedia.
Education is the silver bullet.
This word you're looking for is Troll.
--LWM