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Co-Founder Forks Wikipedia
tmk writes "Larry Sanger, first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, plans to fork the project. In Berlin he announced the start of Citizendium — the citizen's compendium. Main differences: no anonymous editing, and experts will rule the project. Members of Wikipedia were not amused."
Too bad the second link is not english - I can hardly rtfa ;)
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
I hate Anonymous Cowards!
Wikipedia members were not amused... ... and neither were Slashdot readers who don't speak German!
So, it's not really a fork of Wikipedia, because it's not really a wiki anymore. It's just...a controlled community database.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
Ich ain' lesend t alle jene Scheiße!
Sugapablo
So then, they are recreating Nupedia?
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
... what will teh Interweb do?
Until now, Wikipedia was the first and last linke of research, and dismissed because it wasn't done by experts.
How will people now dismis this Citizendium?
Won't anyone think of the flamers?
Seriously, it can't be bad.
Another source is always a good thing.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Looking at the concept (starting with a 1:1 mirror of wikipedia, adding all new articles from wikipedia, mirroring wikipedia changes in imported articles that havent been changed locally) it makes no sense.
if the current base is really so bad and unreliable as he makes it look, this will result in taking over everything bad but shutting out the broad mass of eyes that could spot a error and correct it.
Even worse, seeing the much lower editor/article ratio, i cannot see how he thinks to ever archive some kind of quality census. A random article browsed there will be with a very high likelyhood just a copy of the wiki article. So trying to get people to think its more reliable (and thus view it with less suspicion/ less "thinking") is a bit like cheating the user.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
There's no problem in having two free encyclopedias on the web and I want the option of having a moderated, somewhat accountable one. Wikipedia is just not reliable enough for certain topics.
Other than the usual "intellectual property" considerations of making a copy of the some of the images/other data currently in Wikipedia, what's the big deal with someone forking it for any reason?
The guy isn't using the information to crush opposing opinions, he's just offering a different filter, without destroying the original. That's creative, additive, not destructive. There are a lot of definitions of freedom - some of them involve having the capability to make informed decisions. It looks at the offset that having this new Wikipedia fork will increase at least that kind of freedom, rather than subtract anyone's freedoms.
Ryan Fenton
That's the whole spirit of the internet. Do what you want and if people find it of value, they will contribute. Otherwise it will lie by the wayside. Let him do it. Why should wikipedia or anyone else "not be amused"? It's exactly like Linux, if you don't like a particular distribution, then fork it and make your own. The Internet is Darwinism at its finest, if wikipedia is all that it thinks it is, it will survive, and it won't need union or monopoly mentality to do it... people will just congregate to it naturally because it is "selected for".
Heres a Google translation:
F %2Ffocus.msn.de%2Fdigital%2Fnetguide%2Finternet_ni d_35628.html&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT F-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2
Yes, it doesn't translate exactly, but you can get the general idea.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
Germans are never amused.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Edit wars are going to take on a whole new meaning.
Wikipedia has gained a reputation for being a somewhat less than reputable source of information, due to edit wars, vandalism, and outright inaccuracies. But the intent is unquestionably been good, and while not a perfect source of information, for all non research uses, its usually good enough. And the way that the information is not controled by any one interest is seen as being good in that it prevents censorship.
Forking the project will cause alot of noise and debate, but in the end, I think the final result wont have any great signifigance. Forked or not, Wikipedia is probably not going to disappear.
END COMMUNICATION
If it's a reputation or moderation system, it might not be bad.
However, experts have also known to be wrong. In the sciences, there are great debates. Einstein turned the world upside down afterall, and none of the previous experts would have had it right. In history, there are debates, and theories that are hotly contested - such as the thought that Egypt didn't have iron tools to make the pyramids, even though iron has been found in the great pyramid insitu (in place).
And different experts have different biases.
How will different viewpoints get across? In the wiki, at least, as an informed user, I can look up the discussions and history of pages. I don't have to depend that the latest page is 100% correct nor do I expect it to me.
It seems to me that any furhter chase for perfection is like chasing a rainbow for that pot of gold.
I don't think so... they didn't even bother to vandalize the guy's wikipedia page!
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Considering it's probably virtually impossible to find any media or reference source upon which someone may not challenge its reliability, I've always wondered what the basis of the often ambiguous claims that are spewed around the net and other media on Wiki's supposed inaccuracies?
Personally, I think 99% of the claims are bullshit. You have political people out there who claim Wiki is bogus because the articles don't match up with their agenda. I think the majority of the claims probably have to do with subjective, delusional interpretations of that nature.
That notwithstanding, I've still never really found Wiki information to be significantly inaccurate. Maybe I am not looking in the right places, but even when an entry is defaced, it's pretty obvious and often it's quickly corrected. I still don't think there is any encyclopedic source anywhere that is as dynamic and comprehensive (and probably willing to be updated based on consensus discussion among a wide variety of participants).
So is this notion of Wiki being a questionable information source warranted? Or is this some ambiguous claim that seems to be passed on and on without much substance behind it?
I'm an outsider to the Wikipedia community. I read the site avidly - looking up everything from gas-turbines to the history of afghanistan - but I only rarely post to articles and when I do I'm generally just fixing typos. I do have an account on wikipedia, but I've never started my own entry or contributed significantly to one that already existed. Nor do I go to conferences, or know any of the serious wikipedia contributors.
It does seem to me, however, that this is an overreaction to some of the bad press that Wikipedia has gotten over the last year or so. If you listen to the news media, wikipedia is an untrustworthy haven for trolls, flamers, liers, Colbert-elephant vandals, and so on. While it is true that Wikipedia isn't perfect and no one should base a research paper on it, in my experience the quality of information has actually been quite good. So I don't think there's really a huge problem to be addressed. Which means there's not much to gain by forking it. (I assume by "fork" they mean "we're going to steal all the hard work that's been denoted so far so that our new product doesn't have to start from scratch.")
On the other hand, what do we have to lose with the new version of wikipedia? To my mind, the most important aspect of Wikipedia was transparency in contradistinction to authority. Instead of being based on authority (e.g. if it's in Britannica, it's in true because it's Britannica and presented with a set of polished, edited, and reviewed "facts", when you look up something on Wikipedia you get the whole process. You see the front page, the article itself, but also have access to the discussions that go into that page. If something is controversial you see the controversy. This affords a kind of meta-information every article that opened up a whole new kind of information from enyclopedias. No longer just a static repository for authoritative information, it became a dynamic view into the process of cataloging information.
The new citipendium or whatever (clumsy name) threatens to reverse all of that. What made wikipedia revolutionary was it's rejection of "experts" (e.g. authority) in favor of democracy. Clearly the initial anarchy had to be toned down. Instituting onymity may be a great advancement. But closing it to "experts" is a huge step back.
It seems like a repudiation of the very heart of the open philosophy. Isn't this move akin to someone taking Linux and "forking" it into closed source OS? No matter how good the resulting OS could be, haven't you torpedoed the philosophical basis of Linux by doing so?
If you only care about a good OS (or, by analogy, a good encyclopedia) then I guess there's no reason to be worried. But if you care about the open source movement, then this is cause for grave concern indeed.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium
I'm a Wikipedia member, and I'm amused. I'm very amused. Have lots of fun over there, Larry-boy! Three cheers if you make it work, but, haha, we'll see if it goes the way of Nupedia, eh?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F %2Ffocus.msn.de%2Fdigital%2Fnetguide%2Finternet_ni d_35628.html&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT F-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
I see dead pixels!
Maybe you could call it Scholarpedia?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
yet another example of "open" failing....
Completely the opposite. The openness allows someone with a "better idea", yet to be proven, to attempt to prove it better, without having to start from scratch.
Wikipedia itself has several language versions. They're not translations; they're separate systems, run by different people. The German version already runs under somewhat stricter rules than the English version. Often, articles are translated from one language fork to another, but that's for new article creation. An update to one won't be translated and propagated to the others. So they're forks.
Then there's Wikinfo, a true Wikipedia fork branched off in 2003. It's not very popular.
And, of course, there are all the copies of Wikipedia that add advertising, like answers.com. But they aren't really forks.
Um, no. Yet another example of "open" creating choice for us. One or the other may become the most popular choice for people looking for information, but that's their problem. For us users, it's all good.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
In the land of the edited, the anonymous coward is king.
Someone who edits 1,000 articles about comic book characters may be an "expert" in that category.
But that same person may have only limited "knowledge" of world history or any of the hard sciences.
The problem is how to identify the "experts" as opposed to some bored school kid.
I would add the following questions to the list
... and ditch it to the slashdotting crowd
have you visited the site? []
have you been a regular user? []
have you used this service? []
The tone of the comments so far are quite amusing - for quite some time, people have been saying "the beauty of GPL is that you can fork - if you don't like the Wikipedia, fork it!". Now that someone is doing so - all the comments revolve around why it's a bad idea to do so.
Wikipedia doesn't work like a regular encyclopedia. Stephen Colbert is making fun of us. The modern media hates us because we're not Encyclopedia Britanica.
Wikipedia is a wonderful thing. On top of being an incredible source for information, it's an excercise in damage control and chaos theory. Wikipedia works, not despite page defacers and fact monglers, but *because* of them. Without the constant controversy surrounding things like politicians changing their own wiki entries, innacurate or false information would tend to sit in the pool and stagnate.
Wikipedia is not a traditional encyclopedia. It's not meant to be one. It's not meant to work like one. Trying to treat it like one is foolish. Trying to base a traditional encyclopedia off of Wikipedia is foolish.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Unrelated to the topic, but note that searching for "Citizendium" on Google as of the time of this comment yields zero (0) results. Yahoo, on the other hands lists 983, and Windows Live Search lists -- I kid you not -- 6,273.
After copying Wikipedia, delete all stubs, fancruft, lists of pr0n stars, album descriptions and metal waffle (the articles on obscure metal bands of the 80s in Scandianavia, for example).
That should reduce the database by 90%
Next, put ratings on all articles. Those which are rated crap, get deleted and new submissions requested.
That should halve the database again.
Now add.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
It seems like both the Wiki-approach and the "scholar"-based approach have their merits. However it's tough or impossible to combine the two approaches in one project. As you point out, it would be frustrating to spend your time writing an article you know to be true, and have some 'idiot' revert it; however it would also be frustrating to have an article which represents a wide body of consensus opinion thrown away because one self-described "expert" disagreed.
These things need to be done separately. What I think would be optimal is a open-to-the-public Wikipedia, and a more selective Expertpedia; the latter would require articles to be written with real names or at least authenticated psuedonyms attached, and would check credentials, etc.
Then I think I would leave it for the market to develop resources which combine the two things. Although I don't like the site because of its hideous number of advertisements, a frontend like Answers.com is an example of how a site could take content from both places and combine it. If you searched for "nuclear power," you'd see both articles; the one from Wikipedia representing a sort of hive-mind concensus on the issue, and then various articles written by experts, each of which might have a distinct flavor and opinion.
Trying to incorporate experts into Wikipedia is a mistake -- having that sort of hierarchy destroys its purpose and community spirit; alternately, allowing public editing of articles written by true subject-matter experts would be obnoxious. Both types of information have their place, and assuming they're shared freely, others can provide the front-ends which allow an end user to pick which approach they'd like to use in a particular situation.
Sometimes you want the Wiki viewpoint, other times you might want more opinionated, authoritative sources; it all depends. The user should be presented with options and allowed to choose.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I still prefer my hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.
Nonsense. This new endeavour is, in a way, going to be more transparent than Wikipedia. People with actual qualifications in a field understand the importance of citing all their assertions against previous research. Instead of Joe Average's folk explanation that could just be pulled out of his ass, which one finds in a lot of Wikipedia articles, you'll actually know where the material on the new encyclopedia is derived from.
haha, we'll see if it goes the way of Nupedia, eh?
I tried working on Nupedia for a while, and got fairly far through the process of writing an article before giving up on it. After that, I spent several years as a Wikipedia editor. This new project seems to fix some problems with Nupedia, while failing to fix others. It also seems to fix some problems with Wikipedia.
One problem with Nupedia was that articles were written by experts, but reviewed by non-experts. For example, I have a PhD in physics, and teach the subject for a living, but my article on physics was endlessly wrangled over by people who weren't physicists. Most of them were reasonable people, and made good comments; some weren't. The design of Citizendium seems to address this point by envisioning a community of experts on each topic, although it's not clear to me that they'll be able to attract the necessary number of people to have multiple experts per topic. It's also good that he states that everybody will be expected to give their real name, and a CV; in Nupedia, it was really annoying to have to deal with people who were set up as gate-keepers, but didn't give real names, and didn't seem to have any evident expertise.
A major problem with Nupedia was that the browser-based software didn't work, so everything was basically done via e-mail, and that was very clumsy and time-consuming. Sanger seems to be starting off Citizendium with exactly the same problem, and, as before, he seems to have no real plan as to how to solve the problem, except to hope that it will fix itself. It remains to be seen whether Citizendium will attract programmers with enough spare man-hours to volunteer to create the software; it doesn't seem like the kind of project that would be exciting to most OSS programmer types, but I could be wrong.
Citizendium's design does seem to address what I consider the main problems with Wikipedia: disorganized, low-quality edits by well-intentioned people. The design of Wikipedia basically wastes huge amounts of time. Most articles gradually rise to a certain level of quality, and then the pioneers lose interest in the topic because there's not much left to be done. After that, the article gradually decays in quality. You'll get hundreds of edits on an article, but the diff between the beginning and the ending version can be zero. The current system basically requires serious editors to have huge watch-lists, and check them vigilantly to keep entropy from having its way. That's no fun, and it's the reason why, after several years of heavy participation, I gave up on WP.
Find free books.
Wow, they're speaking German - they must be really pissed.
Many members of wikipedia are very much amused. This fork was needed just so we could shut up the critics when this project fails. It's not that I wish it to fail, it's just that there is no other way. It's been tried from the start with Nupedia, and without the openess it won't work. Not to mention that Wikipedia has a lot of momentum now and it's not going to be easy to turn that into another project.
Unless you want to go all RMS on us and redefine "wiki" to mean "completely open and always editable by any user and IP address". But that's never been what it meant. But by that kind of standard even Wikipedia wouldn't be a wiki.
Perhaps you should instead use a new term for that model. Free and Unrestricted Content -Ki?
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
I would expect an expert to respect another experts view and add his own view after the original
Obviously, the "experts" you know are a lot more polite than the ones I'm familiar with. I think that if anything, someone who thinks of themselves as an expert is more likely to wipe out information which they perceive to be 'incorrect;' intellectual debates can get pretty heated, after all.
I think the only way that an expert system could work is if edit rights are restricted to certain individuals, allowing each person to basically have their own article about a particular controversial topic. For instance, if you looked up string theory or evolution, there would be several different articles to choose from on string theory, written by several distinct "experts," each with different backgrounds and expressing a different perspective on the issue. It's a big mistake to let one expert have edit rights on content written by someone else whom they disagree with, and expect them to just play nice.
Maybe the string theorists would get along and let each others' work be; perhaps the evolutionarians would as well. But how do you think the article on Islam is going to work? I could think of people who might both be well-described as "experts," who nonetheless might have little tolerance for the opinions or work of the other. People kill each other over philosophical disagreements, where religion and politics are involved -- do you really think that they wouldn't revert each other's stuff online?
I think it's a mistake to try to cram too many different viewpoints into one article. This is the trademark of an encyclopedia, to be sure -- one article per entry -- but it's one of the reasons why encyclopedias traditionally aren't used for real research. It's just not possible to have one monolithic article for each topic and still preserve the context and flavor of each argument; to have an honest discussion of a contentious issue requires that you give each of the different viewpoints a separate space in which to express their argument, and then read them each in context.
Any 'expert system' which lets one 'expert' overwrite another is probably going to have just as many revert wars as the layman's Wikipedia; the only difference might be the grammar level used in the ad hominem attacks in the discussion pages. Being an 'expert' doesn't instantly make people respectful of dissenting views; if anything, my experience has taught me the contrary. The more developed someone's opinions on something are, the less likely they are to accept the dissenting point of view as valid. There are exceptions to this, but they're somewhat rare.
My ideal system would be one where I could go to a topic and see a consensus-based general introduction, which would be publicly editable and have a tracked history. This would allow me to get an idea of the "man on the street" perspective -- it might not be correct, and it might be totally at odds with what scientists or experts think at the same time, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of value. (E.g., it would be helpful to know of the wide gap today between the scientific consensus on global warming and the hoi polloi; the latter is important even if it's wrong, just because it's widely held.) Separate from this would be the 'expert articles.' The expert pages would each have a single author (which might be a real person, a psudeonymous entity, or a group of people acting as author -- for example a committee), and express a particular viewpoint. I would be free to agree or disagree with these, and they might contradict one another. That's the nature of knowledge.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Of course, as others have said with Citizendium et al., it still makes an excellent addition to the wiki-verse. Well, at least for those of us with an interest in computational neuroscience, dynamical systems, and/or computational intelligence. Presumably, additional scholastic areas will be added as demand calls for it. (If you are interested in these areas, you might also enjoy NeuroJet.net. It, too, has a wiki, but it's only helpful if you're planning on using the neural network simulator that is NeuroJet.)
I also want to give a shout out to Eugene Izhikevich (founder and editor-in-chief of Scholarpedia) for his contributions to all of those fields.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
This might seem a little trite, but the name for this fork is really awful. Names are important because they relate to how a product or service registers in the minds of its users, and I think the namer here really dropped the ball. "Citizendium" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Plus, the word "citizen" looks shoehorned into the name as a kind of clumsy contrivance designed to evoke this false sense of community involvement, even though the article suggests that the new project will be run by "experts"--which suggests less overall involvement by laymen. Hell, even "Wikipedia" is better, and that's really saying something. If Mr. Sanger wants people to use this new 'pedia instead of leave them tonguetied and confused, then he should rename the project before it's too late. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to found my own free knowledge project--"FreedomWeboHyperpediadium."
The Wikipedia has been much more successful than anyone anticipated, and I don't think anyone fully understands why. Personally, I think that excluding a few minor and localized problem areas the Wikipedia is pretty damn impressive. Moreover, I think that for the most part its critics are not impressive. At least, they haven't impressed me much. Frankly, most of them seem to be silly people who are pretty much clueless.
Full disclosure, I wrote a number of wikipedia articles -- mostly about Earth Science -- in the early days of the project. I had to stop because some personal things came up that required that I manufacture some spare time somewhere. Frankly, I think that the Wikipedia may be the better for it. Much of what I wrote has been extensively rewritten by others, and with one minor exception, every one of those edits has been an improvement.
Anyway, I'm not sure that Larry's new project will work out. All sorts of things could go wrong. For example, his experts may end up wrangling over "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin" issues. But if he really does achieve some success, I can't see how that can make the world a worse place.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
*goes to read about citizendium on wikipedia* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
So this will be a Wiki for control- and restrictionfreaks.
My guess is that ot will fail in comparsion to the anarchy approach like Slashdots AC molestation fails in comparsion to digg.
"Larry Sanger, first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, plans to fork the project.
A friend of mine is an authority in his very specific field of medicine. Surgeons have been taught new methods based on his discoveries and new drugs can be made also due to him. He told me that he looked up his particular area in Wikipedia and found some of the information to be incorrect, so he edited it to correct the flaws. Soon after that, the previous author had removed his edits. Perhaps ego sometimes wins the day at Wikipedia and then the truth suffers.
Do we really need an encyclopedia which is built by any schmucks off the street? Some of the super complex, very specific stuff is not going to have lots of experts around to participate as a community. Encyclopedias are supposed to be authoritive texts. How can they be if they allow non-experts to contribute content?
It seems that the Wikipedia melting pot is about as reliable as the Linux melting pot, which is losing some of its shine.
First off, there's a well known story that Larry Sanger originally bailed from the Wikipedia because he was submitting poor-quality edits that didn't fit to the standards the community had hashed out, and Larry Sanger got really angry that they weren't being accepted. His logic was, how dare you, I am a professor of philosophy at somewhere or other and I helped found this project etc. The community response was, whatever, but you're putting things into philosophy articles which are not only not very clearly written, but are just your opinion as a single opinionated philosophy professor, and we're trying to build something objective and neutral. Then his edits got alternately rewritten or taken out, depending on circumstance. Larry Sanger went HOW DARE YOU and quit the project. I must stress that I was not there and have heard all of this only secondhand, but I have heard it from multiple sources and if it's even remotely true, I don't think Larry Sanger is going to be able to handle the people skills of getting many people to contribute to this new gated community wiki.
Second off, this exact model has been tried before, and it has failed. Have you ever heard of H2G2? Unless you've been around on Slashdot since 1999, no, probably not. H2G2 started around the same time, maybe before, I don't even remember, as wikipedia. (I'm pretty sure it started after everything2.) It was sort of the same premise as wikipedia, but the articles were edited and approved by a board. The problem a few experts writing stellar stuff isn't enough. Most people just don't have the energy to do that for more than a few articles. You need lots of people contributing and massive openness and community momentum or, like H2G2, the whole thing fizzles.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
fork off then!
I'm a big believer that Wikipedia is great because it is so radically open. The word "wiki" derives from the Hawaiian word for "quick", and I think that is a good word to use when describing Wikipedia. Citizendium was announced yesterday. There's already an article on Citizendium in Wikipedia today.
But in my opinion there's no way to completely separate quick from dirty. Hopefully Larry Sanger realizes this, and isn't just in disagreement with Jimmy Wales over the details. If so, and Citizendium becomes a success, it may just be the best thing for Wikipedia. Wikipedia needs to stick with an open process if it wants to succeed. There is a lot of pressure from various academic and political forces for it to give up this openness. and as much as Wales tries to claim that Wikipedia is more open then ever, it is actually getting more and more closed. A successful Citizendium will likely relieve many of these pressures, and allow Wikipedia to become a wiki once again.
We'll see what becomes of Citizendium. I've signed up for the mailing list and if I get a chance I'm going to suggest that the process of importing articles from Wikipedia into Citizendium not be an automated "click this button" process. "Just start writing" is not the way to produce a high quality encyclopedia article.
I'm an anonymous editor of Wikipedia. I tend to be very judicious in my approach. If I have some supported facts to contribute to a topic, then I engage in making additions and/or tweaks. Often times, my efforts are actually grammatical or logical improvements to poorly crafted works. Because I'm anonymous or not holding a PHD in topic X means I should be sandboxed?
I don't agree with that view, although I might pretend to understand why a reasonable person my promote it. There are various governments, organizations, and religious institutions who would just love for a non-anonymous system to become the only popularly acceptable repository of human knowledge.
yet another example of "open" failing....
Of course it is, but that's an illegal thought here, as we shall all soon see. In fact, it's already started -- your post has been labeled "flamebait".
As one of the people involved in the EGCS/GCC fork, I can attest that the following are prerequisites for a successful fork:
1. A commonly (and I mean *commonly*, not just by a few insiders) perceived problem.
2. A massive switch of developers (in this case, article writers) to the new kid in
town, in a short time (days).
In our case, the following was also important:
3. Keep the door open for reconciliation.
So why is there so much outrage about Linux destops? There are two many (pun intended) desktop environments, then there are too many configurable options in them, then they all look like windows (need more options there)...
That being that it _is_ the broad mass of eyes that have produced that peice of crap in the first place. I cannot tell you how many articles I've found on wikipedia that are completely full of crap.
What drivel.
I am anonymous editor who has contributed to Wikipedia. I fully disagree with your experience as being indicative as to the current state of quality at Wikipedia. I have found many articles in need of a helping hand with grammar and I have anonymously done so. I have found few which were factually in error or had weird distortions (like "the Russians always rape children when invading") and believe my efforts and the efforts of countless efforts make those errors negligible.
Fact is, Wikipedia is a great resource. It might require one approach things with guarded optimism, but it is hardly the piece of crap you claim it to be.
I'm not, in any way, opposed to Neutopia's Citizendium of Popuexperknowledge as being potentially Better Than. In fact, let's fork it a couple more times! But stop disparaging Wikipedia with mischaracterizations. Please.
Wikipedia really must be pissed at this fork. Their response was in German, which is well known as the international language of anger.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
VHS.. mp3.. myspace.. wikipedia?
They weren't necessarily the best of their categories, but the public chose them as the standards of their time. I find it hard to believe that an off-shoot of wikipedia would surpass the original - at least in popularity.
What happens when there are 500 different wikipedias like there are 500 different linux distros?
Well, there was the Didgeridoo cloning article, but that was more an isolated prank than an inaccuracy.
Im fine with it as long as they don't work along with any censorship. Ofcourse, if not everyone can edit, they are in a much easier position to censor things. (in a previous story it was mentioned that china could fork to censor it)
Needless to say, if they do somehow bend to any suppresing of ideas/opinions we should boycot them. (and be very pissed)
Hold on, this needs a few edits...
Larry Sanger, first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia and well-known cross-dresser, plans to fork the project to impress his new boyfriend. From a Berlin slum he announced the start of Citizendium -- the citizen's compendium. Main differences: no anonymous editing except for Sanger's good friends, fresh healthy juice for all participants, and experts will rule the project from a mountside lair. Members of Wikipedia were masturbating furiously, as they usually do."
there we go.
Linux and the various open source BSD's are quality products of their own right, which are capable of doing a lot. They can use some work in some areas (not all of which is their fault, IE, they need to find a way to strongarm hardware providers), but they do a job and they do it well.
Wikipedia is not terrible, but it puts itself out there as a source of information. Except, a lot of that information is false. How many Wikipedia articles are outright advertisements engineered by the subject of the topic? There's a lot of obvious bias and inaccuracies.
I don't believe in the "open source movement" if it produces tripe. There's no progress by producing lower quality goods, whether they're free or not. And if you think that the aim of open source is to produce lower quality goods, you're missing the point.
Where are you going to find enough experts to cover all of Wikipedia? You can't. It's too big. This effort will be wasted and the experts will want to be paid... good luck getting that to happen.
The beautiful thing about Wikipedia is that it's information given freely. As with any information you have to question the source. Read an American encylopedia and it's clear that the US won WWII... pretty much single handedly. And we get taught that in public school. But if you read an encylopedia from Britain, the same WWII article tells a different story.
YOU HAVE TO QUESTION THE SOURCE.
When you read Wikipedia you aren't reading "the truth". You're reading opinions that someone happens to be able to point to someone else who also had that opinion. Experts, generally, aren't any better or worse at this, they just tend to be more opinionated about the sources they trust.
Personally I find the articles on Wikipedia very suitable for my uses. I want to know who shot Hamilton, it's right there. I want to know when Wild Bill died in Deadwood, I can find that. And it's mostly likley correct.
I don't go near the stuff that might be controversial. I trust other sources for that.
Wikia hosts hundreds of wikis on specialist topics. These projects are often controlled by "experts", although it's not explicitly stated that way, and there is not usually an official restriction on editing.
Sig under construction since 1998.
I don't contribute to Wikipedia as an expert simply because I don't want my edits to compete with wanna-be experts.
This really sums up 95% of the opposition to Wikipedia. (The other 5% comes from people who actually contribute to Wikipedia and whose opinions, therefore, actually count for shit.) It's petty egotism.
The contents of any given article are either factually correct, well-organized, and well-written, or they are not. And as far as Wikipedia goes, there are some really excellent articles and some really awful ones, and a bunch of relatively mediocre articles in between. There are some areas -- the physical sciences and European history, for example -- which are generally pretty good, and there are some areas -- biographical articles in general -- which are of much lower quality overall. Some articles, like the ones on quantum chromodynamics, are mostly maintained by people who have the necessary expertise, but who seem to think they're writing for people who already have expertise in the subject.
The bottom line, though, is that a good article is a good article whether it is written by a PhD or a "bored 17-year-old". The expert is more likely to be able to write an article off-the-cuff, while the 17-year-old is going to have to do more research to write the same article, but either way, the end result stands or falls on its own merits. There is such a thing as expertise, but there is also such a thing as a well-informed layman. Arguably, encyclopedias are written for laymen and other non-experts: a professional particle physicist isn't ever going to look up fermions in an encyclopedia.
The sad part is that experts could make a significant contribution to Wikipedia (and many, in fact, do), but that's only possible if they don't stomp in the door with raging egos expecting lay users to just roll over because some random netizen claims to have an advanced degree -- a claim that often made falsely anyway. That's appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy. If you are an expert and you are interested in educating the public then you should be willing to take the time to back up your arguments with evidence and, most importantly, do so calmly and politely even when not everyone else is. If you're not interested in educating the public -- and doing whatever it takes to accomplish that task -- then Wikipedia doesn't need you. Neither does anyone else, in fact. Go masturbate with your ego somewhere else.
Wikipedia is as successful as it is because it invites active public participation, and simply being able to participate as a peer is the incentive that drives contributors. Encyclopaedia Britannica is as successful as it is because it pays experts to participate. Citizendium offers neither money or treatment as a peer. It doesn't take an expert to see that Citizendium will be authoritative... and very nearly devoid of content.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
If one is required to have a degree in the field they're posting on, where will the expertise on the implications of the 264th Rule of Aquisition of aquisition or the glitches in the newest Pikachu Digital Pet?
"When I wake up in the morning I piss cryptographic excellence." - Bruce Schneier
I'd prefer if they improved the current Wikipedia by implementing an (optional) reputation system to identify experts in particular fields. That way the data would all stay in one place where all the people are and that all the people are using for research already, yet we'd accomplish the same thing of having known experts have more influence on an article.
All they'd need to do is create a verification system where you could submit your credentials and identifying information (if you wished), then tag your user id with an "expert" tag that linked to your areas of expertise. They wouldn't necessarily even need to give those experts more power, just identifying them in the revision history would cause their version to survive (sometimes being reverted back to) unless it was too radical or misinformed (which can still happen even with experts).
This is an open-content project; we fully support and applaud any serious attempt to make use of Wikipedia content.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
A big question for me is, how do you rate qualifications for obscure cultural references? I started the Wikipedia article on gaming conventions, and to be honest I'm worried that someone's going to slap a "This article does not cite its sources" tag on it. (I'm sure that now that I've said this some joker will do just that.) I've been to a bunch of gaming conventions, have helped run cons that include gaming and know quite a bit about the topic in general. On the other hand, most of the articles that have been published about gaming conventions have been extremely inaccurate (usually in the direction of titillation), and there isn't much in the way of other research about them. This means that using citable sources in this case would lower the accuracy of the article. For some articles, expertise is extremely hard to quantify. How Citizendium will work around this?
Second, if you're interested, may I suggest (maybe after you look at the long or short version of the introductory essay and/or the FAQ) that you sign up to a project mailing list, and especially (since there are so many geeks reading this) the Citizendium-tools list?
You see, I have this crazily optimistic deadline of September 30 for actually setting up the servers and wiki. I can set up and manage a wiki myself that doesn't get slammed a lot, but I know I can't set up Citizendium's wiki (and server(s)). So I need your expert advice!
I assume I'm a "Wikipedia member" as I contribute quite a lot to that site, and the only thing I have to say about their lack of amusement is that it sounds childish to me. Why is this so bad? A big reason Wikipedia use the GFDL license is to allow forking like this, so please save me from your hypocrisity.
If they're afraid Wikipedia will have their vandal ratio worsen with their expert contributors moving to this Citizendium (sounds like a cheesy name though), well then that's only a sign Wikipedia's model and welcoming anonymous contributors didn't work quite as well as expected. Take it like men and live with it.
If on the other hand (which I don't consider too unlikely either) the Citizendium would have contributions move at a snail's pace with the project eventually dying out due to lack of interest and bueraucratic hurdles, then it's a sign Wikipedia has its problems, but necessary evils for the success it is, which can only be alleviated more or less by better safeguards.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
is lack of references that are both dependable and free (as in readable by anyone at no cost). Its all very well to reference stuff but if the other editors can't read your references then it doesn't help much.
i'm a university student, i have access to lots of journal archives online through the university (the university pays subscriptions which let all thier members acess them). However if i reference one then
the same applies to national standards, as an example the best reference for large parts of the BS1363 article is BS1363 itself but at most one or two of the editors have easy acess to it without going out to buy a copy themselves.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Yes, you describe a major flaw with wikipedia dogma. I've encountered a similar
problem (via a known puppeteer) with the Green Map entry. You can't be *too* much
more useful or exhaustive than Britannica if you inisist only re-regurgitating
information.
Were that I say, pancakes?
I went to the site and had a read of the proposed rules for the Citizendium.
The thing that immediately struck me is that the only real change (in terms of the role of experts, etc) is that the Citizendium will actually be consciously, formally having exactly the same type of policy which informally exists right now with Wikipedia itself.
With Wikipedia, certain individuals set themselves up as the authority in terms of a given article...if you edit it, and your edit is contrary to their individual bias(es), then you can entirely forget about said edit remaining permanent. The other problem is that Wikipedians then repeatedly lie about the supposedly open nature of Wikipedia, trying to claim that the above does not take place. The Wikipedian claim of neutrality is therefore also, a straight lie.
The degree of fascistic pendantry surrounding the citation of sources issue has also become utterly rediculous, recently. One fool who reverted some of my edits to a particular article did so with the suggestion that I ought to get a magazine article published somewhere, and then simply/purely quote that as a means of editing the article! What he is really saying there is that only academics have the right to edit Wikipedia at all. If that's true, they need to STOP promoting it as something which *anyone* can edit...because it fairly clearly isn't.
The other thing that Larry has done with the Citizendium, which I think Wikipedia should have done a long time ago, is to admit openly that the Citizendium does not have nor will have the same level of credibility as a print encyclopedia, and should not be assumed to have the same level of credibility. Also, I'm entirely open to the idea that Larry may very well not want me editing his wiki at all. All I ask is that if I am in fact not wanted, I am honestly told that up front.
I don't understand why every discussion about wikipedia is so damn ideological and dogmatic. Yes, wikipedia isn't reviewed by experts and is more likely to have a prank entry or a totally unfounded claim making it unsuitable for an authoratative reference despite it's high overall level of quality. All this means is that you probably shouldn't use it as an authoratative source in your thesis. Yet for some reason lots of people out there seem to be actively offended by wikipedia's existance as if wikipedia was pretending to be reviewed by experts.
Similarly their is a need for an authoratative edited encyclopedia. Obviously authoratative content will take longer to produce and likely not be as comprehensive as wikipedia but this doesn't mean it doesn't serve a useful purpose. So why get upset if someone is trying to provide this alternative option. Unlike a software project one doesn't need to worry about incompatible protocols or splintered interfaces. It isn't like wikipedia is a small struggling project it won't fold under the competition.
Why can't we just live and let live here. Their just websites people, useful important websites, but websites all the same. If someone else wants to serve a slightly different need let them and let the consumers, i.e., the people reading the info, decide which is more useful.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
As long as they keep with the GFDL, texts from Citipendium could be grafted into Wikipedia.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
nt
lameness filter bypasser
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
So: no anonymous editing, articles written by experts... what's the difference between this and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, aside from the fact that one's online and one's not?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I vaguely attempt to keep the vehicle dynamics part of wiki in line with reality. Pop Mechanics is not a terrible reference, but generally is not detailed enough. The problem with car related stuff is that EVERYONE is an expert, and if you are a wanker with a TVR (for example) that apparently means you know everything about cars.
Since there are perfectly good textbooks out there it is not hard to find references, but the cheap books are often wrong or have weird theories and rarely cover the maths properly. The decent books all sound alike, cost about the same ($150), and agree. So, which should I use for references? websites that happen to have the right equation on them, but are likely to vanish, or sensible books that will exist for another 30 years?
You can't be *too* much
more useful or exhaustive than Britannica if you inisist only re-regurgitating
information.
Why is in important to be more useful or exhaustive than Britannica? Wikipedia is not meant to be a place for original research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiabili ty : The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. If the information is collected by you going to gaming conventions and reporting your findings, and not from published sources, then sorry, that's original research and shouldn't be in Wikipedia.
I think it makes sense. It stops people saying "Trust me, I know because of such-and-such". Now, I wonder if an encyclopedia that requires editors to be "experts" could drop this restriction. But firstly, I still don't think that an encyclopedia is the place for new research, and secondly, as you point out, it would be hard to rate who was an "expert" in gaming conventions.
The fact that it's hard to quantify expertise is one of the reasons why Wikipedia requires verifiability.
Greetings Brother, I see you're enjoying the Kool-Aid.
There are different kinds of "original research": scientific findings, hypotheses
pulled from the ether, synthesis of existing and "new" content. When a specialist
can contribute to an obviously desired, pre-existing entry which was originally just
copy and pasted marketing drivel or referenced articles containing factual errors why
should this information be disqualified? Relevant information should be incorporated
whenceever it is available. Wikipedia's power is not in letting a million monkeys
recreate Encarta, it is in allowing monkeys with information not included in Encarta
the ability and means to share it *in a structured manner*. It's important to be more
exhaustive, because besides the minor "I can look up WWII for free, instead of buying
an encyclopedia, or trekking to the library" the major utility of such a resource is
the ability to include everything under the sun (vis. Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy).
Were that I say, pancakes?
People who dislike openness dislike choice. Therefore every choice that openness enables is seen as a failure.
So create a new Wiki for original research purposes. That's a sufficiently different area that it's better to set it up separately, rather than having Wikipedia become bogged down with all the problems that would come with allowing original research.
There are a few. My favorites are:
http://www.enlightenment.org/
http://www.xfce.org/
More ways of making your desktop look different here:
http://xwinman.org/
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
heres the link in english
c us.msn.de/digital/netguide/internet_nid_35628.html
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://fo
yet another example of "open" failing....
Completely the opposite. The openness allows someone with a "better idea", yet to be proven, to attempt to prove it better, without having to start from scratch.
________________________________________________
I'm voluntarily declare shill! on this and else where it's appropriate:
.
It's tried before (and failed), but my pal (creator of voicemail) eight miles (to the inch) has launched an alpha of social searching ChaCha. You can search alone or with a guide.
So... I'd been thinking along these lines for quite a while, and sort of working on a idea where you have a forum system with ratings etc. but then also have a "summarize" feature where an editor comes along and summarizes a set of posts. Then, rather than hunting through all the posts, new people could come by and just read the summary. Or, if they want, dig into the individual posts and reply to them. Then, replying to either the summary or the original posts would mark the summary as needing a revision, which would attract an editor to come by and integrate any new useful facts or ideas.
Then... I realized that we almost have the framework for this with Backslash! We've got the posting system, the ratings system, and an easy way to browse therough the important posts looking for useful bits to repost as the summary. All we'd need is a mentality of treating the data from an encyclopedia point of view, a way to add lots of editors (high karma, and good ratings on editing skills?), and articles searchable by topic which never "expire". Oh, and the way to flag the topic as needing a re-edit.
Also, instead of quoting people literally, we would want to just summarize their thoughts into the mix, with maybe a link to the post they made.
Choosing editors (to write or update summaries) could be done on the same random-selection process that they use for choosing moderators, and maybe assign editor priveleges more often to those whose summaries are highly rated.
Also, as a final note, I would like it if posts were not assigned to a particular topic, but free-floating nodes of a graph, where a node could have multiple parents and multiple children. Maybe just links between post objects that have a relational property to them, like "Reply", "Reference", "Correction".
And as a final-final idea, I would also want the comments to be updatable by the person who made them (with a history) and retractable if that person decided to change their mind. (leaving the post and its history, but "muting" it from the discussion with some sort of "this post has been retracted by author, click here to view edit history")
Ok... so maybe Backslash doesn't have very many of these points covered. but its still sort of a neat name.
Mark of the Coder fades from you. You perform Opening on World of Warcraft. Warcraft crits GPA for 4. GPA dies.
I wish Larry the best of luck with his new endeavour.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I agree that Wikipedia's model has problems, but I think such a thoroughly expert-driven model has other problems. Note that I don't have a solution for an ideal model myself; these are just comments.
:) I don't think they've found a panacea, though.
The main Wikipedia problem, as you point out, is that especially on complex subjects, articles tend to degrade over time unless a handful of knowledgeable members stick around and are willing to commit significant time (or new ones come by to replace those who wander off).
Having only experts edit and review articles isn't exactly a panacea, though.
First of all, it drastically reduces the volunteer labor. I can claim expertise in some areas of computer science, but I don't edit Wikipedia articles on those for the most part, because it's what I already do all day, so not that fun. I use Wikipedia to indulge my hobbies, in which I don't have formal expertise, but do create pretty good articles if I may say so. I have done significant reading in the areas that are my hobbies, even if I'm not accredited in them, and I make sure all my edits are well-referenced, pay attention to comments on talk pages from others who might have expertise in the area, and generally make a good-faith and well-researched effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage on thos subjects (or in many cases, initiate coverage that was non-existent). Requiring me to edit only in the areas where I have credentials would make the project much less fun, and I would not spend nearly as much time on it.
Secondly, it may make articles unreadable by outsiders. Even well-intentioned specialists have a huge amount of background knowledge they subconsciously assume, and a lot of jargon. Wikipedia articles, for the most part, avoid falling into this trap---although even on Wikipedia there are sometimes arguments over just how formal the first paragraph of a technical article should be (specialists argue for maximally precise definitions; non-specialists tend to push for an informal summary). It's a difficult problem, but Wikipedia forces editors into confronting it, and in most cases the results are that some sort of compromise gets hammered out. I fear that this new project is tilted towards the specialists: by specialists, but also for specialists.
Thirdly, it may bias articles on general subjects towards a particular specialist take on things. There are countless Wikipedia articles that *could* be colonized by a particular field of research, but in principle are broader than that: While "clinical depression", for example, is a medical topic, "depression" is a wider one, and an article on "depression" written solely by psychiatrists would hardly give a very good overview (at the very least, hopefully some historians and sociologists would be added to the list of experts). Some effort would have to be made to stop this sort of "academic colonization".
In any case, I do wish them well, and look forward to copying anything good they do back to Wikipedia.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As someone who's in academia, I can say pretty confidently that nobody ever really uses traditional encyclopedias for anything.
Many people, especially in more technically-minded areas (e.g. computer science) have started using Wikipedia as a quick first look to get their bearings on a subject. Sometimes it's on purpose; sometimes it's because they're still using the previous first-line method of "just google for it" and Wikipedia comes up as the first hit (as it often now does). For that purpose, it's decent; it's certainly an improvement on the previous google-for-it method, since at least it aggregates information from multiple people who review it, instead of being one random author's geocities page. In the best cases, the article is even referenced with some good sources to go to for more information.
The only other encyclopedia I can think of that is in the running for that type of use is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and that only of course in the specific area of philosophy. This is probably also because it's freely available online. However, it doesn't do as good a job summarizing things into small chunks, and so isn't as good for quick orientation (Wikipedia articles are typically written in a hierarchical summarize-and-link-to-details style, while Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles are the more traditional "long essay under one heading").
If you can't get yourself oriented on the internet, you go to a textbook next, or dive into a search of a journal database. Britannica never enters the equation.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I predict that over time the Wikipedia will have moved forward quickly enough to make the Citizendium a less useful source. Remember, we've already had plenty of expert edited encyclopedias and references around. The fact that Wikipedia is useful (regardless of any criticisms) shows that it has some advantage over the other references that existed beforehand. Never underestimate the power of large numbers. I am curious to see if Citizendium does offer a useful middle ground between traditional encyclopedias and the wiki.
Cheers.
Someone with a PhD assumes that his voice has merit over those who do not possess a PhD in the topic because he has spent the time and dedication to becoming an expert in that field. Whether or not that knowledge has merit (there are always debunked theories), when in Rome, do as the Romans do and don't bitch when they don't let you into their private clubs because you don't speak Roman.
while the 17-year-old is going to have to do more research to write the same article, but either way, the end result stands or falls on its own merits.
Um... says who? The same legions of idiots that don't do their own research and simply support it to pad their own egos? Democracy in its purest form! People with the PhDs will always be in the minority and will always be squelched in the end.
I'm a PhD student who will have a PhD relatively soon, so I apparently find some merit in earning one. However I would hardly think that when I have one I'll have some special standing to write an encyclopedia. A PhD does not in any way prepare you to write encyclopedias (nor, but that's a different problem, to teach intro-level classes). It specifically prepares you to do academic research in a narrow area; no more or less.
I actually heard a new graduate student mention something about how he read something that was "written by a professor in the area, and so probably reasoanble", which was met by riotous laughter from the professors in earshot.
You'll find in most areas that the intelligent people with PhDs tend not to bring that fact up much; it's usually the defensive folks of mediocre intelligence who add comma-PhD to the end of their names at every opportunity.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you'll notice, in the offline world parasitic organisms of various sorts are nearly ubiquitous, to the point where at any given time just about every organism of sufficient size has at least one minor infection.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There is plenty of skepticism that Sangers is on the right track, but I don't think people are particularly irritated. The main developer of the MediaWiki software, for example, said on the mailing list that this is a great thing and exactly the sort of use that free-content licenses are supposed to encourage.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you make a significant edit, no matter what your expertise, you must cite a source. The reason is that articles should not only be correct, but verifiable as correct by following up on the sources. The fact that you "know" it is no longer good enough.
If you, as an expert familiar with the literature, make an edit with footnotes citing your sources, then Wikipedia will indeed recognize its superiority to edits that do not cite any relevant sources. If someone comes by and writes some crap with no reference to back it up, or a really shitty reference, then you can indeed revert that person's change, or it will likely be reverted by someone else even if you don't. At most you can post something on the talk page, saying "I wrote [x], which is summarized from [source y]; someone came by and changed it without a source to something I don't think is right"---it will be fixed rather quickly.
The point is that your expertise is not in itself some sort of card to wave around. Your expertise means that you ought to be more familiar with the literature, and thus can easily cite sources for your edits. If you do that, you will indeed be given a degree of deference above those who are less familiar with the literature and do not cite sources (or don't cite good sources) for their edits.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If there are widely available reputable sources on a subject, then there's no good reason to cite obscure hard-to-find sources. If there are no widely available good sources, then obscure hard-to-find sources are acceptable.
The issue only usually comes up if: 1) it's a really, really obscure source; or 2) it's backing up claims that seem unlikely, or aren't corroborated in any other sources anyone can find.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You hit it right on the head: Wikipedia's success is largely due to its casual nature.
I have hope, however that this project will serve as a sort of "stable" branch of Wikipedia, much like the Red Hat/Debian arrangement. The experts would then only be required to approve and merge changes that in their judgement were beneficial to the argument. I don't think either project benefits by "forking," and I suspect that in reality what will happen is that Wikipedia articles will find their way (after some fact-checking) into Citizendium, whether or not there is a formal merge process between the two.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
I wondered what login GWB was using here. That would explain so many of your decisions over the last 6 years; It is all the education that you claim. And I sure that all the freedom fighting that you did in Vietnam has contributed to your ideas on the Geneva conventions and warrentless wiretaps.
The most successful move so far has been cultural change (still ongoing) towards requiring verifiable sources for edits, especially major ones. There's no need to track down offenders; their edits will just get reverted, so long as the majority of the community is on board with the verifiability policy.
There are plans, unfortunately taking a long time to be put into action, for stabilizing displayed versions of popular articles. So instead of getting an up-to-the-second version that could be in flux or vandalized, revisions would be periodically blessed as pretty decent (or at least free of obvious crap), and by default people would get displayed the last blessed version.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The reason academic tenure committees are so politicized is precisely that there are no good objective measures of expertise. Number of publications in peer-reviewed journals---but which journals count? Some journals were founded yesterday, have no prestige, and publish 90% of papers that get submitted. Some journals are run by a small group of editors who publish each others' work. So a tenure committee has to make sure they only count publications in good journals. How do you decide that? One attempt has been the ISI citation ratings, which are mostly objective (though which journals they choose to count for the sample set is subjective) but controversial.
In computer science, for example, journals are actually not the most prestigious publication venue---most top research is published in conferences, the best of which (e.g. SIGGRAPH) are both more selective and more influential than most CS journals. But that makes the job even harder, because nearly anything can be published in some conference (there are tons of them), so you have to limit yourself to "good" conferences again.
This is all not to mention that none of this measures ability to write an encyclopedia article, or even general knowledge of a field, since most academic publications are on some trivially narrow topic. I have a decent track record of publications, but they don't correlate that well with my areas of expertise---I am broadly knowledgeable and up-to-date on the literature in some areas I don't regularly publish in, and only very narrowly knowledgeable in some areas I do regularly publish in. What's more, I have nearly zero interest in volunteering to edit encyclopedia articles on those subjects, which I already work on all day. I prefer to edit articles on subjects in which I am very knowledgeable, but which aren't actually the subject of my academic job.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You seem to have in mind experts who are willing to gently guide laypeople in creating good articles. But such experts can already work on Wikipedia! Especially if they do indeed "gently" guide articles---act politely, point out good sources, etc.---they are generally listened to and respected.
The loudest complaints about Wikipedia from experts have been those, like some in these comments, who abhor the idea of having to work with someone who isn't knowledgeable in their field. Those experts see the participation of non-experts in article writing as the very problem, and having to interact with such laypeople as something to be avoided! So presumably they aren't the gentle guiding experts you're after.
Perhaps such experts exist---people who basically would fit in at Wikipedia, since they don't inherently object to working with non-experts, but would prefer a slightly more organized structure---but I doubt there are tons of them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There are areas of popular culture that are studied academically, e.g. by sociologists. But do we really want the general-audience encyclopedia articles written by academics? Do you want to pull up an article on, say, "gender", and get an academic treatise by a gender theorist? There are people with PhDs in gender studies, but they are not necessarily the only people who should be writing that article.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Ahhhh... we all know the line, but who watches the watchers.t rip-for-4-to-hawaii-takin'-vanna-show-him-what-he- won mofo.
I think you just elected yourself, you 3rd-caller-10,000th-customer-grand-prize-winnin'-
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Sanger has been skeptical from the beginning of letting ordinary folk edit an encyclopedia. Wales came up with the idea of letting anyone edit an encyclopedia as an experiment to sit alongside Nupedia, and Sanger has admitted that this was not his idea, and that he didn't particularly promote it. He does appear to have suggested the specific use of wiki software for the experiment, although Wales disputes that Sanger was the first one to suggest wikis to him.
Sanger was then hired as an editor of sorts for Wikipedia, and stopped contributing to it once he stopped being paid to do so.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A high quality English translation of the second link can be found here.
Sanger was paid by Wales to edit Nupedia, and when Wales decided to shift focus to Wikipedia, Sanger's job became editing Wikipedia. The instant he stopped being paid, he left and never returned---he even unsubscribed from all the mailing lists, and his subsequent critiques of Wikipedia were communicated via third parties (slashdot and kuro5hin). As far as I can tell he's still bitter about being fired or something, because he has shown absolutely zero interest in involving himself with Wikipedia or providing constructive feedback or suggestions since the day he stopped being paid to do so. Nobody prevented him from signing up to the mailing lists or making proposals, but he chose not to.
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The "experts" are "in charge" of Wikipedia anyway. Just try to change anything on key articles
like "George W. Bush", "The Holocaust", "israel", "Jesus Christ", "Catholic Church" or even
the "Anti Defamation League" and watch how an "expert" with admin rights blocks you and corrects your
evil. The good thing about Wikipedia is that no matter how much lip service is paid to the concept of
"Neutral Point of View" all key articles usually revert according to catechism and dogma.
I recommend anyone really looking at Wikipedia to look through an article's discussion page and
check out the history for deletions or "vandalism reverts". You will find many unwelcome fact there
that has been flagged vandalism.
You're assuming that the guy who runs out of steam is irreplaceable. The fact that the article remains open after the edit war defeat, means that someone else can step in and continue the fight. Just like the War on Tourism TM
With great edits from Citizendium we can import it back to Wikipedia. Maybe the CZ system is better for certain types of articles, and WP will then always import it from CZ.
Except, a lot of that information is false. How many Wikipedia articles are outright advertisements engineered by the subject of the topic?
I've never come across an advertisement while using Wikipedia. I've also never come across something outright false. True, when researching things I know nothing about, I'd have no idea if it was true or false. But I also keep an eye on the few specialties I am qualified to know something about, and I always find the information first rate.
The internet was supposed to be the hallmark of the Information Age, and yet trying to find useful information online can be like pulling teeth. Compared to the rest of the ineternet, Wikipedia is a cornucopia of useful information. And, as the Nature article indicated, it's actually pretty accurate too.
I think reports of Wikipedia hijackings are overblown. They tend to be much more rare than you'd think, and when they are common (e.g. congressional aids doctoring entries on their boss) they are exploitations of entries that don't even exist in mainstream encyclopedias.
There's no way you can realistically say wikipedia is "tripe". It's not perfect, but it's an awfully long way from tripe.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Why not Everything2? No anonymous edits, you own whatever you submit, and there's an XP system.
Wikipedia's stance of glorifying stupidity and refusing people who actually KNOW about topics was getting rather old. If I cared what my next-door neighbor thought of invasive species I'd ask them. When I check a resource online I expect to see facts, not 'oh, but we have to save the XXX' species of the week bullshit.
Nuclear power was mentioned earlier. It's amazing how many thousands of PHDs in nuclear physics, mechanical engineering, statistics and software there are on wikipedia weighing in their fully-researched opinion on the topic. Oh wait, they're not, it's just a bunch of soundbytes and knee-jerk reactions. On both sides.
If they get rid of the ban on original research and move it to 'must be peer-reviewed' that'd be excellent start.
I was referring primarily to the person I replied to's assertion that "quality be damned, its about furthering open source". Open source, in and of itself, is only as good as the quality of products it produces.
Wikipedia is 'Ok', but it is not accurate enough to use outside of leisure/hobbies.
Open source, in and of itself, is only as good as the quality of products it produces.
That's a debatable issue. You may as well say "a system of gov't is only as good as the quality of products it produces". And yet there are relatively benign dictators with healthy economies (Singapore) and there are radical, violent, crazy elected democracies (see Hamas). So it's probably better to judge system of governments with an eye to the principles and process as well as the historical results. This is especially true when you're talking about a new system of gov't or any new philosophy. I'm not saying you should ignore the actual results, of course you shouldn't. But I think principle is also important to judge which is better for the simple reason that life doesn't afford us the opportunity to run controlled, repeatable experiments on things like capitalism vs. communism, closed-source vs. open-source, etc.
Wikipedia is 'Ok', but it is not accurate enough to use outside of leisure/hobbies.
A lot of the best inventions, theories, etc. have been born out of leisure/hobbies. Providing ample information at that level is not as unimportant as seem to think. It's vitally important to allow all people access to a wealth of information at the leisure/hobby level because that is exactly where all interesting ideas start. That's the birthplace of ideas - and wikipedia is perfect fertilizer. Before you actually take your device/theory/whatever mainstream, you should certainly get into scholarly research and for that reason academic journals are in no way threatened by the existence of wikipedia, but both can play an essential role. Furthermore, we've had academic journals for quite some time now. A free and democratic encyclopedia is new.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Its ridiculous to compare governments with software. Home users of software and companies need software to perform a purpose. The idealogical aspect of it is a far second to that. Communism is not comparable to open source and people need to not associate the two. Open source is about service based business models and removing 'lock-ins'. Its not about giving away stuff for free.
I'm also not knocking Wikipedia, my point is that we need to stop the philosophy of "so what if its bad, its open source!". If the product needs to be improved, then it should be improved. Philosophy is not an excuse for failure. I'm not declaring Wikipedia a failure, either, but it has flaws which I'm hopeful that this new site will address. Competition only increases quality.
Its ridiculous to compare governments with software
Who said open-source was only about software? Since we're talking about wikipedia as being an open-source encyclopedia, clearly this is not the case.
Home users of software and companies need software to perform a purpose. The idealogical aspect of it is a far second to that.
You didn't pay attention to my post. I said the reason idealogy was relevant was precisely because it can shed light on the ability of software (or something else) to perform a purpose. You call it "idealogy" but a better term would be "principles". Do you think the principles or philosophy of software have nothing to do with performance?
I'm also not knocking Wikipedia, my point is that we need to stop the philosophy of "so what if its bad, its open source!"
I agree 100%. All I'm saying is that you can't always separate principles of open source from performance.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
You wrote articles and posted them to third-party websites, which you didn't even really come back and discuss (you're notably absent from the kuro5hin comments). You didn't attempt to actually propose anything *to* the Wikipedia community, and most certainly not anything concrete and implementable. You basically consider yourself some sort of elite who is too important to discuss things with the plebians, which is why nobody took you seriously then, and why your project isn't going to get anybody editing it now.
Hint: Many of us plebians have are experts in our fields too (even with PhDs!). You're not somehow unique in that respect.
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