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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.'"
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.
I know this was intended as a joke, but it might be good for wikipedia.
Lately I'm finding more "missing" articles than problem ones. Topics that should be there but aren't. Maybe they could have some sort of bounty system to get people to write these missing articles. Of course, that would require paid editors to approve the entires before a payment can be made.
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
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.
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/
Just hold on for a minute!
Wikipedia is far from a thousand monkeys pounding on typewriters. Yes, some contributors are not the most experienced, but if many contributors, even those ignorant about a particular aspect of knowledge, try to self edit and get the details right, over time the result will be so positive that conductive breakdown will occur and lightning will happen.
Consider this. When Hardy saw Ramanujan's for the first time, he figured that "a single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true, for if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them". Similarly, Wikipedia info is no joke - there are so many serious articles that people put enormous effort into. This should encourage anyone who really cares about any shortcoming to put some work into making the marginal improvements that ultimately benefit us all.
A message to people who have poor communications skills - just express yourself. Do not give in to embarrassment. Put in your knowledge and take a look at other articles. Even copying someone else's style will enable you to enhance your input. If someone edits your work, that's supposed to be a good thing, as long as you maintain the attitude of writing with higher and higher quality.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Wikipedia is worthless, from anything other than a triva perspective. Silly me, I once tried to include literature citations in the entry for Julius Caesar, they were promptly deleted and someone re-entered demonstrably false information.
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).
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!"
Silly me, I once tried to include literature citations in the entry for Julius Caesar, they were promptly deleted and someone re-entered demonstrably false information.
Yeah, no kidding.
Point 1. The system doesn't favor true information, it favors whoever can be the most obstinate, anal-retentive, vindictive prick. Take this dipshit, for example. Imagine having a flaming, bitchy drag queen editing your stuff. Not to make it better or more correct-- changing/deleting/removing content just because he didn't like edits to other, unrelated articles you'd done.
Point 2. Then you get the tools that label your factually correct additions as "vandalism". They'll delete whole paragraphs just because they consider the article to be "their" article. This is especially prevalent by the older users towards the newer users.
Point 3. Then there's the "vote for deletion" nazis. See Tverbeek, above. Again, as "revenge" for some perceived past slight, these mental giants will put your stuff up for deletion with the rationale that it belongs on uncyclopedia, this is the typical rationale for deleting topics relating to fiction or pop-culture. Why then, do certain "uncyclopedia-quality" articles (i.e. the Klingon dictionary) stick while others don't? See Point 1.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Point 1 & Point 2: Some interesting comments on Digg, mostly to the same effect as the points I was making.
i.e. "on one entry, me and several friends have inside sources (one being the entry) and when we try to correct it, or correct misinformation that has been posted, the sites owner locks it down or chooses the misinformation over what is even know as fact. starting to distrust information found on there due to personal experience."
Tverbeek was a good example, because he's a royal prick, but he's got no shortage of equivalents on Wikipedia.
And my points are reiterated by one of the Wiki admins there, as well (so no, I'm not "trolling", unless you're also accusing Wiki admins of trolling as well):
The majority of edits on large topics are decreasing the quality of those articles. This is because, for most people, the quality of the article as a whole is taking a back seat to the desire everyone seemingly has to have their imprint on articles. This is turning many articles into long lists of disparate trivia instead of naturally-flowing, high-quality encyclopedia articles. Efforts to stem this and make the encyclopedia more encyclopedic are criticized as counter to the spirit of "openness."
His User page is here.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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
What wikipedia needs to do is have both "stable" and "unstable" branches of wikipedia, like the linux kernel does.
Make searches default to the stable page, with the option to add in the more recent changes by clicking a button.
This has a number of advantages:
Life is too short to proofread.
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!