Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia and the Collective Hive Mind?
devv_null asks: "This morning on my drive to work, I was listening to the latest podcast of the Philosophers Zone. The topic of the program was 'Is a free market in ideas a good idea?'. It featured author and speaker Jaron Lanier, who in May published an article Digital Maoism. He highlighted Wikipedia as an example of the one of the worst kinds of 'collective intelligence' and using the 'wisdom of the crowd' to average facts about the world and include them in a massive, lifeless document. Being a habitual Wikipedia user, I could only disagree with his take on the web enterprise. While it shouldn't be considered the ultimate source of knowledge on the web, I think it's ideal in many cases to use as a starting point. Apparently, Lanier thinks a Google search results page is better." So, what is your take on this issue?
Wikipedia is basically a game where the most OCD person gets to rewrite history in their own image.
Since Google simply returns what it consider is the most relevant result (but does zippo fact checking), I use both when I'm interested in something. The classic example is "miserable failure" where Google's #1 results is George Bush's WhiteHouse page ... what many people don't know is the #2 result is Michael Moore's Home page ... I'll let you decide which is the more "accurate" miserable failure ... but at least in this example, Wiki has a great explanation
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
The idea that you can provide a "neutral" point of view is simply fallacious. Even the Wikipedia NPOV policy admits that there is a point of view and it is whatever is "mainstream". By Wikipedia's standard, the "mainstream" viewpoint could be creationism and evolution the spawn of satan, and the article on "evolution" would be named "Satanic ideas about creation".
Seastead this.
He's just bitter that Wikipedia doesn't use a 3D VR interface.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I think it's ideal in many cases to use as a starting point.
You may think it's a starting point, but millions of people think it's the end of their research. As we all now know, research starts at MySpace. Whoever has the most embedded music videos has the most accurate link to the most salient Wikipedia article.
On an only slightly related note, I for the first time recently noticed that some of my web content was being crawled by a counter-plagarism search engine marketed to high school and college instructors. I'm not sure if I should be flattered or annoyed.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia. A cooperative one. So what? We've had cooperative software devel for decades now. It's natural. This guy is overanalyzing "the Wikipedia phenomonon".
Since Wikipedia's new policy of no original content, there's basically less and less difference between the information in Wikipedia and the information you could get from a good search. The difference is conciseness.
The ideal Wikipedia article (these days) is a concise summary of all the information that's available on the web, with each fact linked to a footnote consisting of a link to the URL of the page the fact came from. (Quite what purpose the extra layer of indirection serves isn't clear to me.)
So most of the time, a Wikipedia search is a good way to get most of the same factual information you'd get in a web search, but in a lot less time.
There are problems, however. The nature of truth is that it isn't decided by majority vote; often that which is true is extremely unpopular. In areas of knowledge where that is the case, Wikipedia's summaries often end up being watered down or padded out to appease the masses, with a corresponding loss of intellectual rigor or conciseness. The Libertarian socialism article is one, if you look through the history of it you can see how it turned into a mass of waffle, and the trolls and vandals still keep attacking it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Most Wikipedia criticisms can be answered the same way. It is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, which is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. That needs to be kept in mind when using it as a reference (and particularly so with controversial subjects). If people do not the solution is not to slam the entire idea and write it off as a disaster -- the solution is to simply make sure it is more clear to people that Wikipedia is not authoritative and at any particular moment the version of the article you are viewing might be an inaccurate one. For most purposes, the risk of that happening is far outweighed by the strong likelihood that you are getting an article so high in quality that it leaves Britannica and Encarta in the dust (assuming they even cover that topic).
One person who is causing real headaches for Wikipedia is Daniel Brandt, who is upset that there is an article about him that may potentially contain untruths about him. His response is to wage war against the encyclopedia and its administrators and most prominent users. A better idea for him and everybody, one that wouldn't be futile and one that would save everybody a lot of trouble, would be to use your soapbox to recognize the extraordinarily high quality product the Wikipedia project makes available to web users for free, while being very vocal and clear about its weaknesses that most people might not understand.
audioLibre - freedom of music
What discussion, exactly, is this article going to start that hasn't been covered in every other article that slashdot posts about wikipedia? Learn to use the search box already.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
While it shouldn't be considered the ultimate source of knowledge on the web, I think it's ideal in many cases to use as a starting point.
That's true if your need for such knowledge is for just entertainment/casual purposes. For more critical needs, where research time needs to be low and source accountability needs to be high, beginning at a "starting point" is not an option.
Basically, your point is equivalent to: if it doesn't matter to someone whether it's crap or not, wikipedia is good enough to try first.
We talked about this a while ago on CommunityWiki; you may want to see it: DigitalMaoism.
;)
General take on things: (1) Nice sentiment, yes: don't surrender the individual to the group. (2) But no, this isn't a major danger here. (3) The title is inappropriate.
We actually have quite a bit of thinking about the HiveMind.
1) The problem with Maoism isn't collectivism per se, it's killing everybody who gets in the way of the collectivist scheme. Until some megacidal Web 2.0-based regime starts killing everyone with individual expertise, I don't see what the problem is.
2) I think there's a generational gap here. People with a certain degree of familiarity with the Internet take for granted that there's a certain percentage of error, stupidity and lying out there, and weight what they read accordingly. But others have expectations of an encyclopedia that include its being 100% goatse.cx free.
3) (And I don't feel like changing the subject header.) Who the hell cares what Jaron Lanier thinks, except for other Wired-ish blowhards?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Wikipedia is more of an outlet for fan boys to pay homage to their various hobbies/heros/whatever. Which in itself can be an incredible resource if say you are interested in a dissertation on the origins of Robocop. However, if you are interested in Voyager space progam you best venture elsewhere.
Wow! I just checked out this "google" thing linked to in the article. It's really good! Definitely worth checking out!!
A "free market of ideas" is a bad metaphor. In a market, people bargain for commodities. When there is a limited supply of commodity X, and lots of people want it, only the people who are willing to sacrifice the most (time, energy, money, whatever) get to use commodity X. If I give you my supply of commodity X, then I don't have it any more.
Ideas are totally different. If I give you an idea - I still have the idea. In fact, now we BOTH have the idea. Even if you pay me for the idea, I still have the idea too. My knowledge of the idea doesn't vanish when I transfer it to you. Thomas Jefferson said it best: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
The marketplace metaphor is therefore completely inappropriate to ideas. You can't exchange ideas in the same way you can physical goods. It just doesn't work that way.
There is a difference between a collection of facts and a collective of facts. Wikipedia is a collection. Anyone who has read the discussion pages and reviewed history logs knows wikipedians often disagree with one another. This makes wikipedia more representative of human knowledge, which is fluid. A collective is more like a traditional encyclopedia which is a specific group of people who share the same ideas. A traditional encyclopedia is lifeless in the sense it removes discontent from its pages.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I love Wikipedia. It's more than an ideal source for a "starting point." It's probably one of the biggest collective sources of information that's available to the largest number of people in the world and should be treated as such. It has had information on most of what I've wanted to search for, and the information is accurate and detailed.
There's all this talk about how biased it is because of some controversy surrounding people editing articles based off of an agenda like the Ken Lay thing, but as has been said by a few posts in that slashdot article, Wikipedia isn't there for up-to-date news. It's for information. And as such, there's no better source of information than thousands of people editing articles for accuracy if they see something that's wrong. What's the alternative? A reporter or journalist taking a complex topic that is beyond their scope and education and paraphrasing it so that the "common man" can read it? I haven't read one New York Times technology article that hasn't had some glaring errors or ommissions that I could pick out even when I'm not an expert. I can't even imagine all the articles that I can't pick out the errors for because I'm not in the respective field.
Every single source of information has bias attached to it because it's written by people who are biased by nature. The only way to combat the bias is to have more viewpoints attached to the topic, and Wikipedia is an amazing representation of that. As the old saying goes "history is written by the victors." I think something like Wikipedia is needed because it gives the losers the chance to put in their perspective - something that has never been done before.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Ask Slashdot: Wikipedia and the Collective Hive Mind?
I'm confused.. is that an offer?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Man, is Wikipedia bashing in vouge!
The reason Wikipedia works is not because it is the "intelligence of the masses." Each article is usually edited by a relatively small fraction of the masses, a good portion of which are qualified to edit the article: those who know about the subject matter, those with good grammar skills, etc. With the masses viewing it, those interested in contributing from the masses will find the right place to do it, and thus it will naturally separate the many into the few. Assuming no one is malicious, people who are unqualified to write will generally stray away from writing, and those that are qualified can catch minor errors. Assuming people are malicious, malicious edits are either obvious or subtle. Obvious vandalism is kept in line by those of the masses drawn to stoping vandalism. Subtle vandalism is indistinguishable from well-meaning errors.
Wikipedia works not because of market forces or anything, it works because there are enough people using the encyclopedia. There is enough "manpower," and I define "manpower" to mean the number of people working on it who will provide a positive contribution. And by "positive contribution" I mean something that will make the article more correct. It works because of the same reason open source works. If you look at it, there is very little difference between a central organization checking patches into a repository and an "edit first, ask questions later" style on a system designed to be easy to correct mistakes in. The only difference is when the quality is checked. With central control, you can control what version users see so bad patches never make it in. This is important in software where complete correctness is extraordinarily vital. The downside is that you can't get new features for a while, and the social barrier to contributing is higher. With Wikipedia, you are on the 'bleeding edge' - so you have to be careful of bugs. The upside is that information is processed more quickly, and if you are capable of contributing, you can do so immediately.
What people don't realize is that because of this, Wikipedia is not the most correct it could be. Assuming an ideal Wikipedia where experts contributing to Wikipedia could cover a subject 100% correctly, Wikipedia's correctness would be less than 100% - maybe 85% or 95% depending on manpower. The more manpower, the closer that number gets to 100%. (Imagine an asymptotic curve.) The surprising thing about Wikipedia is that the manpower to "chaff" ratio of visitors remains constant as the number of visitors increase. Will this change in the future? I think that's impossible to tell. My guess is that it won't unless the popularity of vandalism protection goes down.
Point of course being, USE WIKIPEDIA AS A STARTING POINT. It's amazing if you want to learn basic facts about things - who the fuck Jethro Tull really was, etc., but always check references. Wikipedia is quite thorough in its referencing, but a proper researcher should be more thorough. Of course, it's better than most political non-fiction out there now, anyway.
It's quite reminiscient of American government - the basic desires of the masses are communicated to a select few who are (in theory) smart enough to know how to legislate, lead, or judge to make those desires a reality in addition to keeping the country in line.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Maoism is an atheistic form of government responsible for the death of millions. Part of the reason it didn't work is that it was horribly mismanaged for the benefit of a few, rather than the benefit of all, and the other part of the problem is that there simply wasn't enough to go around. Honestly, the government is neither virtuous enough nor smart enough to control that much of society.
With information, however, there's always enough to go around--the more you share, the more everyone has. Moreover, I don't think Wikipedia has killed anyone, let alone millions.
As such, I would mod that article (-1, Libertarian Rant) and be done with it.
And that really is the problem with hiveminds. They tend to supress discussion. This can be very dangerous.
At least part of the current race problems in western europe can be blamed on the fact that for several decades discussing race issues was stiffled by political correctness. The hivemind of politically correct media comes down like a ton of bricks on anyone who dares to say something that isn't PC. The truth doesn't matter (either way) what matters is what the group thinks.
This is extremely dangerous because it tends to close you off from the real world. Several countries have been suprised by the emergence of new parties wich suddenly get a huge amount of votes because they dare to say the things the public thinks but that the "mainstream" parties have ignored because in their own circles there hivemind thinking have made it seem the issues were non-existant.
A very simple example. There is a dutch radio program with a couple of male presentors kinda of the type of top-gear presentors. Jobbo's I think they are called by the brits. They are strong supporters of the tuftuf club wich a is an illegal group that targets speeding camera's.
They reacted pretty suprised when a newspaper reported that a poll indicated that speeding camera's have the support of the majority of people. How could this be? All the people they know are against them.
Well, yeah. They would. Hivemind. You make friends with the people that agree with you and ignore those that don't. It is very easy to then start to believe that all those people around you that agree with you are "all the people". Since all your friends think speed camera's are the devils tool surely that is the opinion of the entire country?
Slashdot is the same, everyone here thinks DRM is evil so surely the entire world feels the same?
The problem is very real. Mario Antionette who commented on the poor not being able to afford bread said, "let them eat cake". Could this be simply because she existed in her own little world where that was indeed an option? That she existed in the hivemind of the superrich?
That mentality still exists. "Just get a job", is what business leaders say on the subject of social security because the superrich who never ever get fired live in their own little world where they reinforce their own ideas by making sure to only ever associate with people who share their own ideas.
And offcourse the "left" is the same when you look at some nature lovers who propose schemes that just can't work in the real world. Banning all meat products? Just because all your friends are vegans doesn't mean everyone in the world wants to become one.
Hell it is as simple as soccer. Soccer is huge it was watched by millions! Yes and it is NOT watched by even more people. If you are in the pro-soccer on tv 24/7 camp you will find yourselve surrounded by people who agree while watching the latest world cup match. If you don't like soccer you will also find yourself surrounded by people not watching the latest world cup match during the latest world cup match.
Two groups, each convinced they right and getting it confirmed by everyone around them.
So how can Wikipedia possibly hope to only publish the aboslute truth? It even starts with the basic idea of wich articles need to be
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Nash Equilibrium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
http://www.google.com/search?q=Nash+Equilibrium
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
I think both have their uses and both need to be used appropriately. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia (like any other common reference) is (or should be) written by "experts" on the subject which is then peer-reviewed. While I am an overall expert in the computer world and my preference is for Mac & Linux, I also know a lot about Windows, AIX, Unix, BSD. My view is without a doubt biassed towards the *nix world but I have a general knowledge about a lot of subjects. Thus my views might be used (either paid or unpaid) by any encyclopedia (Wiki, Britannica, Encarta) because of my general knowledge in the area but they are going to be biassed towards the *nix world. Being peer-reviewed, my comments are then going to be rewritten or slightly altered for correctness, bias in the other direction and other small things. The good thing about wiki compared to any other source is that all my peers can review it and change it. In overall this works pretty good, the mainstream idea about Windows is bad programming and security although there are some fanboys (this is an example) who say different. Who is right? I think that being an admin at a computer is not safe, it is easier for managing though, thus at work everyone is local admin on their workstation by decision. Good or bad, I think it's bad (out of security perspective) my manager and CIO thinks it is good out of management and cost perspective. But who is going to say I am more right than them. So if I write about security in any document, I say that it's not good to do this. My peers and overlords are going to review this with another mindset and thus add/alter my comment and say that it could be better cost-wise. If I did this in a printed encyclopedia, my comments would only be reviewed by a small number of peers which might lead to a certain mindset (what if they were all security admins and not managers) but in the wiki, my boss and his peers can also add to this leading to a less biassed view on the issue. I can use and refer to sources in either way and that is what an encyclopedia should do: have documented sources about the idea and why it is so (scientific proof for example) then I can draw my own conclusions out of it. If there are no sources and it's just ideas by somebody, then it is just another book I can buy to read late night, smile and put it away, I won't use it as a source for my science paper. And even decent encyclopedia's are biassed or use biassed sources, there is no such thing as a neutral standpoint. Multiple sources are the only solution if you really want to know something about a subject or use it in a scientific paper. Google/Yahoo/MSN Search are search bots. It is not (or should not be) biassed towards subjects, personal preferences or anything personal. It just counts the words and if you type a word, it searches the pages with the highest wordcount and gives me the result sorted by highest number of words appearing on the page. It is off course slightly biassed by now to prevent abuse but in general it gives the good results about a certain subject on both ends of the perspective if you can use a good search string and know how to handle them. Then I can select my sources however I want. Google gives me the original sources that an encyclopedia will use to derive it's information from. But every single source is written by someone and should be used like that: independent sources, not the highest hit taken as the only-and-true source for information. An encyclopedia adds those sources together, derives and compacts the information in it and write a little essay about it. Which sources I take and how much sources I take from either end of a perspective as an encyclopedia source will finally make the article, but neither the sources nor the derived information of the combination is to be used as 'the truth' or 'scientific proof'
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Well, Google lets you search for Wikipedia articles :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
n/t
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
So the jew-obsessed, white supremacist neo-nazi who believes that autism is caused by Indian immigrants doesn't like the way that wikipedia's NPOV policy works out.
It's really funny how the people who complain about bias in Wikipedia invariably tend to have have massive ulterior motives, or at least a big chip on their shoulder. Unfortunately the chip on said shoulder is not immediately visible, so a resonable person would tend to take allegations of bias at face value and moderate them up on slashdot or whatnot, if the person alleging bias is someone they have not encountered before.
Anyone who has encountered Baldrson in another context than Slashdot, however, and knows about the very many chips on his shoulder, would see this "NPOV is a fallacy" comment and immediately come to the very strong suspicion that the complaints about "majority viewpoints" do not stem from any valid perception of a problem within wikipedia, but rather stem 100% from some incident or other in which Baldrson tried to push an insane and poorly supported fringe idea into a wikipedia article (like his old crazy theories about autism I'm familiar with), and was pushed out. Upset, he then later goes on Slashdot and smears Wikipedia, complaining that "neutral point of view" really means "majority point of view" just because wikipedia refused to to conform to his, decidedly non-neutral, point of view.
At least that was my suspicion. And with two minutes on Google this suspicion was quickly confirmed. See this post on slashdot and the response by a wikipedia admin. Interesting.
Wikipedia's NPOV works excellently; not perfectly, but better than with any similar endeavor I have ever seen attempted. The problem with NPOV is that from the perspective of someone who is massively massively biased themselves, a neutral point of view looks like an opposing point of view. Sometimes neutrality requires reporting facts which are neutral, but uncomfortable-- like "26 million people were killed in the Holocaust, 5.5 million of them Jewish"-- or, regrettably, sometimes excluding some ideas which are so fringe that it would be an abridgement of neutrality to endorse them. Sometimes this necessity makes it seem to people who are on the fringe like the neutral source is in fact not neutral, but biased toward the "majority". Sometimes this is unfortunate. But it is what NPOV is supposed to mean. And NPOV is not supposed to mean that internet nutters get to hijack what should be a neutral information source to promote their crazy beliefs. Baldrson who I am responding to is himself an internet nutter known for doing this kind of thing, and he should not be encouraged.
PS Sorry about the AC thing, everyone. I would like to post this with my real name on it, but I've seen what Baldrson-orchestrated Stormfront raids can do to a website (see first link, this comment) and don't want the long-term "attention" that daring to speak out against someone like Baldrson can sometimes draw from him and his friends.
Of course they both have their place. Wiki gives an average, Google gives the actual results, widely or narrowly spaced as they may be.
An mean-average is an incredibly useful thing to have, but let's not make the mistake that it's always an accurrate representation.
I mean that if you try to introduce evidence that makes famous people look bad or that makes America look bad, they will remove it and ban you, even if you have good sources. Wikipedia honchos know that if they allow in this sort of hidden truth about how evil and manipulative the American elite are, the mainstream media will shun them, and give them no publicity, and then they will not be able to sell wikipedia for bug $$$$$ or make big $$$$$$ from consulting and speaking fees based on that media coverage. In order to get rich off the internet, you have to play the establishment game and not expose the hyprocrisy and corruption of the American elite. That is why Wikipedia is rightwing and conformist
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
I basically agree. I love wikipedia but it has problems.
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
Google & Wikipedia both do exactly the same thing; they cross-reference a massive set of otherwise inexplorable data and provide a means by which to intelligently navigate it.
The key (and essentially only effective) difference is that one is a machine and the other is human.
Google: the machines interpretation of the world with all the brute-force power that machines offer but no real intelligence. Ever tried searching for the anti-thesis of a given topic? Google can't help you because it can't make a logical connection between a topic and it's converse.
Wikipedia: the humans generalised (and hopefully averaged) interpretation of the world with all the wonderful lateral cross-links that humans do so well but all the same mistakes (and opinions) that humans are known for.
These two things are tools which both outshine the other in the right context. Use them both.
Call it "mainstream point of view" or better yet "Wikipedian point of view". Not all of us have the time and motivation to spend out lives fighting political battles over Wikipedia articles.
Seastead this.
Personally I've been a big fan of E2 for many, many years. Sure Wikipedia has some advantages (typos and small bits can easily be changed, it's easier to update and modify something when someone leaves the site and never comes back, it has links and images), but E2 manages to do away with many of the disadvantages as well. Users individually own their writeups so unless an editor changes something (and I've never seen it happen aside from very light proof-reading or wholesale, and typically justified deletion) it's not going to be changed just because someone comes along and disagrees with you. Individual pieces tend to take on much more of a personal voice rather than being the bland, monotone of multiple users slowly working away at something over time. If something is wrong it's likely corrected by someone else. Multiple views are presented on topics giving them greater depth and perspective. Finally errors and poor writing tend to be worked out through a process of survival of the fittest. As better writeups are entered into the system they tend to push out weaker, older ones creating a constant evolutionary process. While Wikipedia evolves unless significant forking is done it tends to be much more convergant while E2 tends to be parallel or divergent most of the time.
Do I still use Wikipedia? Yeah, on occasion I'll want images or more information than I find listed on E2, but I typically use Wikipedia as a sort of study guide and an aide to doing further searching. E2 tends to function much better as a primer.
While I disagree, I will seek to respond in such a way as to catalogue the alternatives in order to allow someone reading about this to make up their mind. ;-)
There are some people who maintain that Wikipedia's Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) goal is impossible because it cannot be authoritative or accurately represent the middle-ground of a contentious topic. Others maintain that the best way to describe a topic while meeting the NPOV requirements is to describe all sides of an issue, acknowledging their strengths and weaknesses. This leaves an article to the mercy of sins of omission: that criticisms of one or many of the viewpoints are left out in order to make one perspective appear better than others. The consequences which follow are a stub which needs expansion. Click 'Reply' to expand the stub...
Oh, how I wish I had mod points...
Past the age of 12, no one should read any encyclopedia, even as a starting point. They were a crutch in a time before the Internet. They are moderately useful before you learn who to trust and what a bias is. They are of no usefulness for adults. Certainly not this version of an "encyclopedia" where nothing can be relied on minute to minute.
And the philosophy of sharing "all significant points of view" is ridiculous. Who writes for the Amish? What about illiterate Chinese? Who writes for the majority of the society that can't tell the difference between URL and IP address? No one.
Wikipedia should just be honest and state that their primary audience and their primary editorial staff are one and the same: rich libertarians and liberals who are technology early adopters. Wikipedia is another form of post-modern political indoctrination. The real issue isn't that Wikipedia is biased, it's their statement that you can correct their bias. You can't correct bias, because their legion of editors "fix" things back to bias. Article to article, there is no consistency and overall there is no guarantee that your "starting point" won't be complete rubbish.
And to agree with someone far above in this thread, truth isn't democratic.
You can't just say a person who can see the entire universe from every POV (I like to refer to this person as "G-d") is the ideal of neutrality. Presumably, this person would be able to fix all of Wikipedia's mistakes, and therefore be neutral in no sense of the term. It's not even a neutral POV, because obvervation without motivation leaves no basis for conclusion.
A being, in other words, sufficiently complex to understand all POVs, would necessarily have developed a relationship with all POVs, and therefore have it's own POV.
Neutrality is fiction because any judgement is subject to incomplete information, insufficient time to render judgement and insufficient understanding of collected information. Which is why everyone loves to hate democracy.
Fox News is pretty obvious about their bias and they do invite other POVs on many of their shows. I could argue that Wikipedia is obvious, too, except for the farce of the founder claiming to create a 'bipartisan' politics website last week.
So let me say this: subtly poisoned facts are no help to a free society. I'm not a booster of the mass media, since they have the same damn liberal POV and are just as dishonest about it (funny how Rather is in the news getting hyped as a great source of news...). No, many people hate wikipedia because it's a stupid idea poorly executed. It's degenerated to an editorial staff that shepherds articles to the same "neutral" POV that lazy overpaid college professors spout at public schools across the country, and especially in California.
This isn't a resource. For simpletons, it's confirmation that they're right, conservatives are stupid and poorly educated and they shouldn't worry about inconvenient facts.
As for a sane society? Hasn't ever been one.
I use Wikipedia as my pop culture dictionary. If there is a term I'm not aware of, or a movement, I can check it out there.
Topics I would check on Wikipedia:
Who was the Green Lantern Rough statistical facts or histories Basic guidelines for brewing beer. or learning the terminology.
Things I would not rely on Wikipedia for:
Anything that I would want to be correct when presented to the public.
Wikipedia is basically my electronic Guiness book of world records. Nice for trivia, risky for research.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Nobody wants to (can?) have an intelligent conversation any more, there are no longer shades of gray, everything is polarized whether you're talking about abortion, global warming, or wikipedia.
On the one hand you have the "wiki fiddlers" as the anti-wikis call them, this camp I can understand, as it's a hobby. Most people are pretty passionate about their hobbies, whether it's building boats in bottles or editing wikipedia.
What I can't understand is the vitriol against wikipedia by some writers. Sure, wikipedia will less accurate than britannica (duh), but you don't quote ANY encyclopedia in a college paper anyway (unless you like failing grades).
That doesn't mean wikipedia is useless, as the anti-wikis postulate. If you want to quickly satisfy a curiosity about something or other, wikipedia is usually sufficient. Deeper knowlege will require an internet search, while serious research requires a trip to at least one (and usually more) library.
For an example of wikipedia's usefulness (and limitations), I had Cataract surgery last month. My eye surgeon recommended the "CrystaLens", so I did a wiki search and an internet search.
The article is better now when I first looked it up; it didn't say much then about the multifocal intraocular lens implants (the ones my surgeon mentioned). It's more complete now, but not entirely accurate still. It states that they "can cost the patient upwards of $1500 per eye." Mine was $1900; this is not the entire cost, but only the part insurance doesn't cover. On top of a $900 check to the hospital and a $1000 check to the surgeon, my insurance will be paying $4089 to the hospital, I haven't gotten a statement from the surgeon yet. This isn't clear in the wiki article.
It says "Cataract operations are mostly performed under a local anaesthetic" but in addition, I had an I.V. drip they called "twilight sleep" that rendered me nearly unconcious, and was told after the operation I would be legally intoxicated for 24 hours and not to sign documents, make important decisions, drive, or operate dangerous machinery.
"New FDA approved multifocal intraocular lens implants allow post operative cataract patients the advantage of nearly glass free vision." (Emphasis mine.) Someone (not me) shoud edit this to remove "nearly". Before the operation my sight was 20/400, and as I'm 54 I needed reading glasses on top of my contact lenses. After only two weeks of excersizing my focusing muscles (atrophed after a decade of non-use) my distance vision is 20/16 and still improving, and I can read four point type on a good day; no more glasses at all! I still wear a contact lens in the eye that wasn't operated on, it still has worse than 20/400 vision.
But these are very minor nits. Of my searches for info about this, the wiki was the most informative.
It says (along with other sources) that ultraviolet causes cataracts and "Genetic factors are often a cause of congenital cataracts and may also play a role in predisposing someone to cataracts." This doesn't explain my parents, both in their 70s. My dad worked outside all his life, and hasn't developed cataracts, while my mom worked in an office and needed the surgery a few years ago. I suspect that although environment plays a role (my eye doctor said my cataract was caused by steroids), genetics are a far more likely suspect; none of my dad's uncles, or his mother or father, ever had cataracts.
Perfect? By no means. Useful? Hell yes!
The amount of venom expended on Wikipedia is quite bizarre. The complaint that it's not authoritative is utter bullshit. By nature, no encyclopedia is authoritative. An encyclopedia is meant to provide brief summaries of subjects that are covered elsewhere by entire volumes, preferably with citations so that the reader can get at those primary sources. It's a starting point for research or, if you're so inclined (I am), a good way to pass the time browsing idly. Outside of high school and remedial undergraduate courses, you'd better not try citing an encyclopedia as a source in a real paper, unless that paper happens to be about encyclopedias.
As for Jaron Lanier, I remember reading articles about him in the Whole Earth Review more than twenty years ago in which he showed off his prototype gloves and goggles and promised that the world would be utterly transformed by our choice of I/O devices. As near as I can tell, Wikipedia is of greater practical use to more people today than anything Lanier has said or done.
For me, the irony is that if I ever had the kind of mind-machine interface that folks like Lanier blather about, one of the first things I'd want is 24/7 access to Wikipedia.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
My point was not that the Evolution article was an example of abuse of the NPOV myth -- clearly there is no article titled "The Pseudoscience of Creationism" -- it is that were the Creationists to capture the mainstream they might well be able to get put into place an article titled "Satanic ideas about creation" and have it stick. The trick seems to be the following: When someone forks an article to discuss objectively a point of view to which the mainstream is morally hostile, the mainstream invokes the anti-forking policy I quoted so as to delete the article. Then when they decide they want to fork an article with their own title/spin etc. they justify it with another "NPOV policy" that permits the creation of articles "describing minority points of view".
Seastead this.
You have to be careful now. If you ever turn in any of your own work for a future assignment, you may be flagged as a plagiarist!
Funny you should say that. I was talking to an acquaintance the other day, about a common interest. I brought up a point that I've been making a lot lately, and asked if I'd just read that on the such-and-such web site. I laughed, and pointed out that I wrote it on the such-and-such web site, that being my site and whatnot. He didn't believe me until I hopped on a laptop and changed the punctuation in a sentence while he was watching.
It's not clear, looking at the site, that it's ME writing it (no need to make the folks at the day job wonder about my priorities!). But your point is a good one. A particular turn of a phrase, or string of words that I like to use could easily be mis-interpreted by someone else as me ripping off... me.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yet another instance of the dreaded new disease spreading like a plague across the Web. It is no longer the simple disease in which a single complete paragraph proliferates like viral grafitti throughout blogland. Now in its new extremely virulant form, the paragraphs replicate repeatedly throughout each blog. In this unfortunate case, the blog is afflicted with three copies of the same long paragraph.
Experts say it is not clear why this new mutation of blografitism has emerged, and admit that no cure is immediately at hand. However, they hypothesize that there is a genetic root to the problem since Wikipedia recognizes blogging as a viral phenomenon.
I dunno. What does everyone else think I should think?
Take off every 'SIG'!!
Jason is also more very keen on Google in preference to Wikipedia. But again the results of Google are the result of a hive mind: that of the collective set of all links by people who made webpages.
Anyway it must be said this is one of the most informed criticism of Wikipedia I've read.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
So you're saying that Google has access to an unbiased, incorruptible source of truth? Cool, I never knew that!
Oh wait... how do I know you're telling the truth?
When presented, the non-mainstream viewpoints are are routinely presented from the perspective of the mainstream viewpoint. This is accomplished by burdening them with "criticisms" not burdening the presentation of the mainstream viewpoint to nearly the same degree.
Seastead this.
I read his article so: "Can you trust Wikipedia?" after you answer this question: "Do you trust Wikipedia?" His sample abiut his own entry (well, is it _his_?? :-) ) illustrates the main problem: Nobody cares about somebody changes correct information into incorrect information.
This is the fundamental problem with it, oh Wikipedia has been called a flagship of "Web 2.0" ;-)
IMO, just widen the topic: "Can you trust _any_ information on the Web?"
It's so easy to publish data, but neither you know the person, nor do you know his/her reputation.
With Wikipedia alone, you trust anybody: the most important scientist as well as the village fool, but which one is it the information comes from?