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Wikipedia Wars -- Lake Express Ferry
vhfer writes "Wikipedia Warfare has become the latest tool in the battle between rival lake transport systems. The Lake Express Ferry, which links Milwaukee and Michigan, bypasses Chicago traffic. The competing SS Badger runs from Manitowoc, an hour North of Milwaukee, to Ludington, Michigan. The article in the Milwaukee Journal details efforts by SS Badger supporters to highlight some of the delays and problems experienced by the Lake Express, in an apparent effort to divert some traffic to the Badger. Numerous edits to the article added links to news articles critical of the Lake Express, and some derided presidential candidate John Kerry's 2004 ride and the political value of it. The operators of the SS Badger deny responsibility for all the postings, and also say they aren't Internet savvy enough to alter a Wikipedia article."
I find a good way to defend myself is to deny I have the ability to use a wiki.
If these guys say they aren't intelligent enough to edit an entry in wikipedia, why should we trust them to run a ferry?
Funnypics
As Slashdot readers we're aware that when people new to online communication find they can publish anything to the world, they can be like little kids in candy stores. With no parents for supervision, they'll pick a little of this and that, and when caught with a mouthfull by the store owner, will mumble a denial.
Wikipedia gives that kind of power to people unexperienced with digital media attention, and depending on the personality, they may be naive, or malicious.
Oh You POS
I like Jason Scott's rant about Wikipedia over at ASCII. It is related to this next Wikipedia War in the following way:
"It's that there's a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of twiddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority."
A related issue is that with some topics, you will *always* have debates. Certain wiki topics will always cause people to be at "war" with each other. I doubt this will kill off wiki technology, but eventually there probably will be some social conventions to handle disputes. Or, perhaps a more rigid technology will take the place of wikis. Who knows.
Sorry to ramble. My point is just that we need to be careful that we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. In plain language, a wiki war doesn't mean that wikis are bad.
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You make it sound like Slashdot is a person. ;-)
Remember, people submit news to Slashdot. So, blame the submitter: vhfer
Then again, I suppose you could blame CmdrTaco for not making the update.
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Ha. Didn't think this would make it to Slashdot. (I didn't participate in the Lake Express wars, but I did recreate the entire S.S. Badger page because it was created, and persisted, as a copy-and-paste of the History section of their website. I did notice strange things happening in Lake Express at the time, though...)
A more difficult issue in Wikipedia is figuring out how many copyright violations are in the encyclopedia. I don't see how it's feasible for every copyright holder to keep tabs of their Wikipedia article(s); that's not very fair to the copyright holder. More distressing, it seems that the art of proper summarization and citation has been lost from the general community in our generation (aged early 30s and younger) for some time.
With regional, nontechnical and just plain unpopular topics like this, if I (as an editor) don't fix it when I see it, the odds are pretty good no one will fix it. Not to mention I may be introducing some unwanted, commentary-style bias that I'm unaware of. But it always goes back to "unpopular"... unless you have a strong contingent of editors on a particular topic, whether numbering 3 or 30, lightly-traveled topics are just not going to be as good as they could be.
Regarding having opinions on an encyclopedia... it would be a better place if people just learned how and where to pick their battles. My answer to this is "I really don't give a damn, just pick something; it's not that important!"
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
This highlights a more fundamental problem than the fact that Wikipedia is vulnerable to edit wars, and that is people's/company's/political party's disregard for truth. I have a good friend who was part of a recent high-profile gubernatorial race. I was surprised to hear from him that they had to constantly guard the wikipedia page about their candidate as it would constantly be vandalized. Is it just me, or do you also get a kind-of "sick" feeling when you hear about these kind of things? This is especially true when you take a step back and think about what the potential Wikipedia (and other sites like it) holds for improving the lives of people all over the world. When you look at it from this perspective, well written, unbiased articles, in my opinion, hold a certain level of sacredness. And when you see it being defiled you can't help but to feel disgust.
Now, I know, this example is "small peanuts" in the grand scheme of things. However, it just makes me sick when I see this kind of intentionally malicious behavior focused on something with a primary goal to improve the lives of all.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
of course you can have error bounds greater than the measurement itself. Means you have a really unreliable measurement, but still...
:)
poor example, but
think about measuring 0.3mm with only a standard ruler, accurate to the mm.
i can say it's about 0.3mm, but measuring it with only my ruler, i could probably say it was ±0.50mm, truthfully.
that gives me 0.3mm ±167% (0.5/0.3 *100 - it's probably how they do it with their numbers)...
hope that makes sense?