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Interview Looks at How and Why Wikipedia Works
driehle writes to tell us that he recently had a chance to interview Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. All three are leading Wikipedia practitioners in the English, German, and Japanese Wikipedias and related projects. The interview focuses on how Wikipedia works and why these three practitioners believe it will keep working.
Wikipedia works because it completely satisfies our need for getting information that's probably *mostly* accurate with little to no effort. And, since the internet is practically filled with people who think they know more than you, there's an endless supply of folks willing to type of wiki entries! =)
I'm willing to bet that at some point we'll see more and more incorect information, as the system struggles with being crushed under its own weight.
The sheer number of roles is daunting.
And further on in the interview, I read "there is increasingly a distinction between 'normal' authors and 'high-end' authors who are explicitly trying to get their articles 'featured'."
I don't know... that statement right there speaks volumes as to how unbiased a system Wikipedia can really be.
Because despite our cynicism, and contrary to our oft stated negative perception of the world, good people far outnumber bad people. By a huge margin, actually. For the sake of argument I'll assume we all know what I mean by good and bad here. Sure, there are bad people, and they can destroy things and do so in a loud manner. But the fact remains that most people are content to just keep to themselves and do no harm unless provoked. It's why society works. It's why Wikipedia works. It's not because of laws or punishment or any of that. It's because most people don't want to be assholes unless they have to be. It's because being an asshole doesn't usually result in anything positive. And being a nice person usually does. It almost gives me some hope for humanity or something.
Cheers.
In recent times i've actually started to consider wiki as not being so bad. This is mainly because it has grown up, and is no longer the repository of knowledge of america's teenagers, as it seemed to be to start with. Its still a bit weak in some areas, and perhaps a bit too technical in others. But all in all its a pretty decent effort.
Unfortunately, its greatest strength (dynamic content) is also the reason it cannot be used as a definitive academic resource. In essence, the content that a student or researcher references is not necessarily the content that someone down the line is going to read. So if i reference a synthesis technique or method thats on wiki, someone who tries to duplicate my work might not be following the same recipe that i did. Reproducability is the keystone of research (even incorrect methods/results must be referenceable), and so university people get understandably annoyed by wiki references. Its a great resource, but for academics it can only ever be an interface to static content from somewhere else.
The German Wikipedia used to sport a whole article about cloning didgeridoos. Complete with a picture of little didgeridoos in test tubes, and pseudo-science stuff like whether they live longer or shorter than natural born didgeridoos. The thing stayed up for more than a year.
It's stuff like that that put an end once and for all to my illusions about the value of Wikipedia to actually learn anything.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Having a brain turned on isn't going to help you if you don't already have the data to judge that stuff as true or false. You can be the most logical person in the world, and still lack the data on which to use that logic.
E.g., if you're not a historian and I start telling you about the achievements and pyramid of the great pharaohs Tutankhbast and Bastmeses... how do you know if they even existed? Or maybe it's just me pulling your leg and telling you what happened in my last Children Of The Nile games? You may even know enough about pharaoh names to notice that they _are_ built in the same manner as some real pharaoh names you may have already heard of. One means "Living Image Of Bast" (same as Tutankhamun = Living Image Of Amun) and one is "Born of Bast" (same as Rameses = Born of Ra). But how do you know if they actually existed or I'm pulling your leg? I'll tell you in this case that it's the later. It's the cat-loving dynasty names I've used in a computer game.
See, that's the whole problem. Sometimes having a brain and having it turned on won't help you much. You'd also have to do the research and dig up the data to judge whether the stuff on Wikipedia is believable or not. At which point, frankly, why bother with Wikipedia at all?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
For one thing, even with a more static webpage, you don't have any idea who wrote it. None. With Angelfire or Geocities or some other freeware webbuilding site, I could make a professional-looking webpage that proclaims that hyperdrive is physically possible. I could BS a theory based on quantum mechanics or string theory, and have a "schematic drawing" of an engine running on said principals. I could probably have a few references to Sci-fi to show it's a joke (no my name really is Cochrane). Wikipedia takes that and multiplies it times 200 -- because now it's not just some yahoo with internet access and free time, it's millions of yahoos with internet access. And if you're stupid enough to quote a webpage post-junior-high-school, frankly you deserve to flunk. Even reading one wikipedia discussion page will put you off trusting Wikipedia forever.
And quoting the enycyclopedia has never really been acceptable for serious papers. Not even Britannica. All that shows the teacher is that you're too lazy to go to the library, or even to access Lexis-Nexis to find journal articles related to your subject. Chances are that the paper in question was assigned months ago. Fine by me if you chose to screw off on the project until the week before, but quoting an encyclopedia makes it obvious that you waited til the last minute.
Long story short, the Web is probably ok for a starting point (if you have a good bullshit detector), or your topic is related to nerd popculture (redshirts from ST, Jedi fighting styles). it's not reliable enough for serious research.