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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! =)
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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Posted by: Anonymous Coward
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
"there is increasingly a distinction between 'normal' authors and 'high-end' authors who are explicitly trying to get their articles 'featured'."
Wikipedia, just like many other community sites, has some elements of a game. This can be both a good and a bad thing. The good thing is, this sort of rewards usually encourage more people to participate in the site by creating new content. The bad thing is, more and more people will eventually come to realize that it's just a game, and start taking advantage of this -- and of other people -- in order to 'win' (on Slashdot, this could mean Karma or Friend whoring). This, I think, can seriously hinder them from reaching (or even working towards) their goal of creating an encyclopedia "of the highest possible quality". We won't see more incorrect information because of this, but we might start seeing (or not seeing) more and more behind-the-scenes fighting, which could eventually lead to many people leaving the 'game'.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
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.
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.
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.