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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?
=w=
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
Content forking: The generally accepted policy is that all facts and majority Points of View on a certain subject are treated in one article. This is where the NPOV weasels get to put the kabosh on ideas they don't like.
Seastead this.
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.