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The Dangers of Open Content
gihan_ripper writes "Recently released open movie Elephants Dream found itself in hot water with Catalonians after accidentally using an offensive word instead of 'Català' in the subtitle menu. The cause? Designer Matt Ebb had used Wikipedia to look up the Catalan word for Catalan on a day when the entry had been vandalized. He writes about this experience on the Elephant Dream blog.
We may have scoffed at John Seigenthaler over his criticisms of Wikipedia, but it gives us pause for thought when we to heavily on Wikipedia."
However, this is more about the troubles with doing international work - its hard to understand the sensitivities & languages of multiple (over 30!) cultures. Companies as large as Microsoft have made mistakes like this before, withlout using open content.
As the (google cache) blog author says:
*shrug* - not that big a deal, and an internationalisation, not open content problem.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Nuff said.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
is show the importance of checking multiple sources, especially when you are relying on it for something important! However, I believe that Wikipedia is already looking at a stable version, in which a stable and unstable branch of the project are maintained with the unstable changes merged in reguarly. This would remove problems like this one, for the most part anyway.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
I'm catalan. And I can say that lately there's been a lot of hatred against our nation pushed by some spanish political parties (Yet I don't to turn this into a political discussion). This problem appeared because of a vandalized entry in wikipedia, but could also have appeared if a person had modified the film or written it wrong from the start, so the problem here is not the reliance on open content, but the reliance on people's goodness, which in the open [content, source, ...] is mostly there, but can be displaced by some feelings, most of them learnt and fueled since childhood.
But the same thing's been happening throughout the history. Surely if you looked on recognized encyclopedias some time ago, a lot of entries about slaves would be unaccpetable by today standards. The same happens over conquered soil after a war, when the losers become the vermin that had to be erradicated and the winners the saviors of the people (and usually end up being as bad as those they overthrew). And many other examples could be given.
So the problem here is the open content or close-minded people?
I think I found the real problem.
You edited a version from April 7th and therefore you overwrote all the edits people have made over the last three months. You also managed to miss about 10 stray "Polacos" scattered through your old starting version of the article. The article was reverted and had no "Polacos" at all, but it now seems to have been reverted to your version again.
I hope you will have a long and happy relationship with Wikipedia, and get an account there
This is a good example of a more general problem with WP, which is that the design was optimized for getting an encyclopedia off the ground initially, not for maintaining it in the long-term. It's analogous to an internet startup company that kludges up their software real quick using Visual Basic code, lots of gotos, and no comments; what they care about is getting it working initially, so they can make their IPO.
A lot of people don't realize that WP's design emerged after an initial period of uncertainty and experimentation over what model to use. There were alternative models, like Nupedia's, but they failed mainly because they were too cumbersome for new writers to get involved in.
My experience as a WP editor over the last few years has been that in the early stages, both the number and quality of the articles improved rapidly, but that within the last year or so, there have started to be severe quality problems. In the early stages, the problems came from not having enough users. For instance, the early versions of the article on astrology were ridiculously credulous, and when I tried to make it more balanced, I couldn't make any progress, because there were only roughly three of us working on the article, and the other two were true believers. I gave up on the article, but when I came back and looked at it again in a couple of years, the problem had been pretty well corrected, presumably because the continuing influx of new users made it impossible for a couple of fanatical true believers to continue using the article to push their POV.
But recently, there's the opposite problem. There are so many people editing WP that it's become virtually impossible to keep a good article good. It's an interesting exercise to look at an article that became a featured article, say, a year ago, and compare its quality then with its quality now. In most cases, you'll find that it's gotten worse because of lots of random, uncoordinated edits by people who may have a POV to push, or who may just not be very knowledgeable.
WP's design is an exteme design, going about as far as it's possible to go toward openness and ease of use. I don't think that design is working at this stage in WP's evolution, which is why I've mostly stopped editing on WP.
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