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?
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
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?
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...
I changed wikipedia policy to state that, but a large group of assholes kept changing it back.
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
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.
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?
> I'm confused.. is that an offer?
Remember, there's no 'I' in "drone".
The question which isn't being asked is "why the bitter and sustained attacks on Wikipedia from the mass media?". What we have here is a free resource, a collaborative community effort which would be lauded as a benefit by any sane society, even if it isn't perfect. Instead it's being vilified. Why is this happening?
Successful community efforts terrify centralised mass media. Wikipedia, Wikinews et al, and even Youtube and Google Video are in their infancy now, and experiencing all the teething troubles you'd expect from a newborn. Anyone with a little vision though, can see the potential for these fledglings to replace todays big media organisations.
Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine says our culture is evolving into a "mass of niches". Community efforts are better suited to serving those niches than centralised mass media, and people like Jaron Lanier, who makes his living writing for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harpers Magazine, etc, etc, recognise that threat and are fighting back.
This "Digital Maoism" article is an attempt at poisoning by association. The linking of Wikipedia and Maoist collectivism doesn't stand up to even minimal scrutiny. It's sole premise, once the verbiage has been stripped from the text, is that people take the information in Wikipedia too seriously.
That may be true, but it's not a valid criticism of Wikipedia. Many people take Fox news seriously too, but we don't see the Jaron Laniers of the world writing scholarly articles about that phenomenon.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The question is now whether you can accept "crap or not" but whether are you seeking understanding or regurgitation. Your description of "low time high source accountability" is great for well known or well documented topics where you expect there to be some existing accurate source. Things like knee surgery, a particular legal case, a review of things related to some other medical topic. This can lead to a narrow understanding. Essentially regurgitation. In the case of new or emerging concepts, trends, technologies, etc. when you are researching the keys to finding the really good info is finding keywords relevant to the topic and that relate to finding the cluster of related topics that can give you true and deeper understanding of the topic at hand.
A better statement is from the NPOV policy:
What's your alternate proposal? I gather that you have a notion that's not a fact and not a common point of view, but that you'd like it to be in an encyclopedia article because you consider it important. To me, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Without the NPOV policy, every physics article would be filled with psychoceramic nonsense like the Time Cube cruft.
It is also possible that they mean that the article's point of view needs to consider as many sides of an issue or idea as possible, and not just the most important ones. I would argue that a man who sees the entire universe from every point of view at all times is closer to having a neutral point of view than a man who sees from but a few points. Perhaps the term should be recast to "equilibrium point of view," no? There is also a significant distinction between the words "no" and "neutral." In the phrase "neutral point of view" it is implied that our point of view must take into account all sides of an issue. "No point of view" which is what many people think of when they see "neutral point of view" implies that our eyes are closed. I think this is where people make mistakes, because they assume that neutrality steps nowhere, though in fact to be neutral one must take a stand in nautrality. I don't quite see how neutrality is fiction. I do see how human fallibility makes it more of an ideal to be reached for than a concrete milestone.
If you need any other arguments of great philosophical complexity reduced to semantics, I'll be here all week.
SRSLY.
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.
For those who don't immediately recognise the OCD TLA, you can read about it here; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCD
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.
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