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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?
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
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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.
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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?
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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.
I think people should realize that:
the solution is to simply make sure it is more clear to people that any source of information is not the final authority and any particular document you are viewing might be inaccurate.
I think the real problem is that too many people accept information without being critical about it. Wikipedia comes along and suddenly people freak out and yell "you can't trust it for reason X." The truth is that you *always* need to double-check sources if what they are claiming sounds strange, or if you need high accuracy information, or if it is a controversial subject. This applies equally to Wikipedia, Britannica, the NY Times, Slashdot, and quality scientific journals.
I think Wikipedia is an amazing ressource that is right far far more often than it is wrong. However the general lesson here is that we all need to analyze all the information we receive in a more critical fashion. If anything, we can thank Wikipedia for bringing this issue to light (and providing a venue for improving the status quo).
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.
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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.