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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.
This is how Wiki works:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
Or at least, this is the only way to explain the sheer amount of article defacement and trolling. People + anonymity = total asshats.
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! =)
Wikipedia is of course an excellent resource. However I'd wish that people would also have an eye for Wikimedia Commons, a giant multimedia library to which everyone can upload files, all perfectly categorized. More importantly, every file that's in there can be linked to by Wikipedia.
From the help page:
The Wikimedia Commons (or "Commons") is a repository of free images, sound and other multimedia files. Uploaded files can be used as local files by other projects on the Wikimedia servers, including Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wiktionary.
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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.
One Wikipedia contributor, David Gerard, did a nice job of summarizing Wikipedia's dirty little secret of how it works: 'On Wikipedia, the reward for a job well done is another three jobs'. Once someone establishes himself as being reliable, trustworthy, comptentent, 'etc, they tend to get handed a lot of responsability in short order. A relatively small number of people tend to wear many hats. (Myself included - I'm an administrator, burecreat, arbitrator, checkuser-weilder, member of the communications and press committees, handler of email via OTRS, 'etc)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
Wikipedia is fairly balanced and accurate when it comes to topics that interest a lot of people. When there is a potentially controversial article like a biography of some well know politican an ideological debate or something of that sort there are a lot of editors representing various views and blocking most extreme ones out. However when there is a relativley obscure and exotic topic a bunch of cynical people can just about write any crap they write.
I actually personally noticed a very curious effect. Articles relating to my native Ukraine are constantly assulted with rabid natonalistic Russian point of view, the vast majority of it comming from a small bunch of trolls. The few Ukrainian are simply outnumbered by the aggressive nationalist Russians editing and the few Brittons or Americans unable to notice the bias. On the other hand the coverage of Ukraine related topics on the Russian language wikipedia, although of course with a clear bias, is actually somewhat more neutral as there are simply more normal people interested in the topic and somewhat familiar with it but without a malicous agenda.
This is not a valid argument; you can just report which revision you worked from. One advantage this has over encyclopedias is that you can then compare that version with the most recent to see how knowledge has changed over time or to spot corrections.
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.
There is certainly bias in virtually any source. However, I think there is simply more bias present in Wikipedia articles than in traditional encyclopedias. This is probably due to a combination of better (as in more stringent) editorial control, professional authorship, and the relative youth of Wikipedia as a reference work. I certainly don't consider this a damning fault of Wikipedia, but I find that using it as a reference requires somewhat larger grains of salt than does using a top-tier traditional encyclopedia. I'm generally willing to tolerate this because it's free, convenient, and usually has a decent selection of links to other sources.
One thing that I've found to be somewhat helpful in evaluating Wikipedia entries is the discussion page. Often, the discussion there gives hints as to the strengths, weaknesses, and biases in the article. I'm really glad that it's there and is visible. I wish they'd improve the threading of the discussions to make it easier to read, but it's still quite helpful.
Yes, and that cynicism and perception is based on the amount of damage that that small number of people can do. And they can do it precisely _because_ the rest of the people are nice and believe in being nice, so you can get away with doing a _lot_ of harm before someone gets over their niceness to stop you once and for all.
Cute, but you're massively underestimating the kind of damage someone can do if they don't give a shit about society working. At the risk of tempting Goodwin, although in this case it's an on-topic example, look at WW2 to see what destruction a small group of psychopaths can cause if they can get in a position to. (Hitler was diagnosed a psychopath during WW1. I don't know if the others were ever diagnosed, but some, e.g., Himmler, show consistent sociopathic behaviour.)
Other smaller scale examples include stuff like the gangster mobs in the 30's, employers shooting employees on strike also back then, etc. Or in the non-violent spectrum, see the scams ranging all the way to Enron and the like. Don't underestimate the extent of damage and death a few people can cause if they end up in a position where they can expect to get away with it.
In a nutshell _that_ is why we needed laws, police, punishment, etc. Because nice people are easy prey for ruthless assholes. So at one point society decided to make a set of rules and a police force and, basically, say, "Ok, these are the rules, if you refuse to live by them, we _will_ throw you in a dungeon cell."
And to return to Wikipedia, due to its very nature, it needs to deal not only with "assholes", but also with the kind of nerd who isn't "bad" as such, but has to have the last word and be perceived as "right", no matter what. There are a ton of people who aren't into destruction and defacement as such, but built their whole self-respect on being right about _everything_. If he's read somewhere that the Aztecs conquered China (probably in a parody about Civ 4), and doubly so if he's said it once, he'll devote any disproportionate amount of energy to having the last word about that and establishing his authority on the subject. It's not that he's "bad", it's that in his mind he's by definition right, thus if you disaggree with him you must be the ignorant simpleton.
And with the fanboy or zealot on an ideological crusade to save the wold. And no means or disinformation are too much for such a "noble" goal.
And with the kind of joker who isn't inherently "bad", but thinks he's funny and you should stop taking yourself so seriously. It's the kind who'll write a whole article about cloning didgeridoos or insert a paragraph about how Bush shot Kennedy, just because he thinks he's funny. In fact, he thinks he's hillarious. The whole world should stumble upon his gems of pure comedy and laugh their arse off.
And with the paid shill or PR guy who isn't in it to be an "asshole", but to sell you a bottle of snake oil for good money. They already have no remorse in creating "news" for more traditional media. In fact, at least in America, _most_ news you read are just veiled PR campaigns. What makes you think they won't do the same pollution on Wikipedia, if it makes a buck?
Etc, etc, etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I generally use wiki as a reference text for something i already know, but can't completely remember. Something like the derivation of a commonly used function, or an exact date for an event etc. I wouldn't use it for more specialised "professional" information (i'm a research scientist). Basically i treat it like an encyclopedia rather than an authoritative reference text. It has value in that context, but i agree with your point that in other ways it doesn't.
The unofficial
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.