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Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?
swestcott writes to mention an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education site, wondering if Wikipedia will ever 'make the grade'? Academics are split, and feuding, about how to handle the popular collaborative project. Due to the ease of editing correct information into nonsense, many professors are ignoring it. Others want to start contributing. From the article: "As the encyclopedia's popularity continues to grow, some professors are calling on scholars to contribute articles to Wikipedia, or at least to hone less-than-inspiring entries in the site's vast and growing collection. Those scholars' take is simple: If you can't beat the Wikipedians, join 'em. Proponents of that strategy showed up in force at Wikimania, the annual meeting for Wikipedia contributors, a three-day event held in August at Harvard University. Leaders of Wikipedia said there that they had turned their attention to increasing the accuracy of information on the Web site, announcing several policies intended to prevent editorial vandalism and to improve or erase Wikipedia's least-trusted entries."
Answer: yes. And in the few days since the last Wikipedia-related Slashdot article, not much has changed. It feels like a dupe over and over again, but its actually different articles each time. Yet they all say the same thing.
swestcott writes to mention an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education site, wondering if Wikipedia will ever 'make the grade'?
Actually, according to the article about Wikipedia on Wikipedia, it already has 'made the grade', and is universally praised in all academic circles. As a matter of fact, its popularity has tripled in the last six months.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Actually, in the last few days a few hundred thousand things have changed:
s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchange
Here's an idea to make Wikipedia more reliable: show the time of the last edit for pages, or even better, for sections of pages.
Wikipedia pages are constantly viewed by people. If thousands of people see a wikipedia page and don't change it for a month, I would be inclined to trust the information presented in the page. However, if the page was edited in the last 24 hours, I might be more skeptical. Longer or shorter times would lead to more trust or skepticism.
A lot of people claim that you can't trust the masses, which I don't really believe. Why should we trust a couple experts on a subject over those same two experts along with a few thousand people, when they are trying to determine whether or not information is true? There are plenty of "experts" who look at / edit wikipedia pages. I have trouble understanding why people have such a hard time trusting wikipedia but trust other sources of news. I'm not saying that anyone should trust wikipedia articles, just that I don't think there is sufficient evidence to show that wikipedia articles are any more or less trustworthy than other sources of information. Take anything you read with a grain of salt.
With all that said, bringing some form of timestamps to wikipedia would, in my opinion, make it more trustworthy.
There's quite a lot of academics adding information to the Wikipedia already. It's no stranger than writing a magazine article, or appearing on any kind of radio or TV show, or writing part of a primary school textbook - or writing an article in a paper encyclopedia for that matter. Reaching out to a wider audience is part and parcel of the job today, and just because you won't get a citation or a CV bullet point out of it doesn't mean it's completely worthless to you.
No, Wikipedia is not an authoritative reference, but then, neither is EB.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
If "make the grade" actually means anything, it happened when the first "quality" studies were done comparing wikipedia's error rate with assorted encyclopedias and other reference material. The reports were that wikipedia's error rate was either about the same as or slightly better than the others.
The reaction of the wikipedia crowd was mostly to discuss how to improve this situation. Being "no worse than Britannica" wasn't taken as high praise. This is further evidence that wikipedia is doing something right.
Now if they can avoid the tendency of all organizations to bog down in bureaucratic protocols, they might turn into a reference site that's actually good, not just "good enough".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Wikipedia is a termendously useful resource - an excellent source of information, and at least a good place to start research into almost any topic. Will it ever replace brittanica? I don't know. But does it need to? Certainly not.
Wikipedia is already performing a vital function in aggregating information and external links on important (and sometimes not-so-important) stuff. It's also a great social experiment.
That being said, I'm still looking forward to Citizendium, which, IMHO, will be more like a real encyclopaedia.
I love the new additions to the landscape. We need them!
If I can add a little plug... With the potential rise of Citizendium and the continued media circus surrounding Wikipedia's foibles, it's a good time to review the current state of Wikimania and consider what these disruptive technologies mean for the future of "authoritative" information sources. If you've ever wanted for a general overview of Wikipedia or needed something to point to when asked, "Wikipedia? Isn't that just a bunch of lies?" then the 1-hour screencast titled "Why Wiki?" is for you. The online video is my perspective on the pros and cons of Wikipedia and how it stacks up to traditional publication formats.
Sure, you can edit a page into nonsense, but most pages are closely watched so such vandalism will be undone in short order.
It seems to me that the only people who don't take wikipedia seriously are those who feel threatened by it. Employees of traditional encyclopedias and M$ shills who want to keep selling Encarta, and so on.
All the same
We take our chances
Laughed at by time
Tricked by circumstances
Plus a change
Plus c'est la meme chose
The more that things change
The more they stay the same
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
My teachers feel that it is an excellent place to start research. I understand them not accepting a anonymous person with a computer as a valid source.
... than people think. I don't encourage anyone to try, but if you do, your edit will typically be reverted in a couple of hours. There are a LOT of people who do nothing with their lives but keep an eye on recent edits. /former Wikipedia troll, retired
...and as such, should not be used as a reference in any research above the grade-school level. Period. If I were teaching a college class and anyone used encyclopedias in their paper, I wouldn't give them above a C.
Wikipedia taken as a whole (including the vandalism and nonsense) is as much about zeitgeist as it is accuracy. Uncontroversial topics with exclusively dispassionate editors are likely be to reference quality because the world is not paying attention to them. Contemporary topics mixed up in controversy are more likely to have style and NPOV problems because they reflect that spirit of the times.
Put another way, if I go to Wikipedia and see a vandalized or nonsense article, or one that is clearly biased (stating opinions and perceptions as facts), I know that the topic about which I'm reading is one that some people feel strongly about. That in and of itself is interesting information, separate from the facts that may or may not be there.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Or tenacity, depending on how you want to look at it. I've a friend who is listed on Wikipedia since he has done work the public is aware of. He found his page and made some updates. Nothing self propping or anything, just some background information. It was reverted by someone who claimed it was inaccurate and lacked a source. Well ok, he didn't cite a source, but then he doesn't need to he's the primary. He decided the hell with it and left it alone.
No big deal, of course, it's just a page about some random DJ, but it's a demonstration of how the "Well someone will fix it" mentality isn't always a good thing. Regardless of how right you think you are, you may not be. However if the misinformed person is tenatious, and if others agree with them, that can become the "accepted truth" as far as Wikipedia is concerned.
My answer to the question is no. Wikipedia's biggest flaw is that the admins simply can not stop a large biased mob of editors trying to keep the article biased. Just look at all the articles related to Ayn Rand. All of them are in some way slanted in favor of Rand and/or her fans because a mob of her fans keep it in perpetual bias. So far, I haven't found one admin who's willing to deal with the problem; all of them have told me that it's too big of a mess for them to handle, or flat out refused to do anything. Knowing that Jimbo is one of Rand's cult followers, I've gotten suspicious of whether or not he's got a hand in this.
Wikipedia = Crappiest Search, Anywhere
Seriously, it's 2006, and you're still doing case-sensitive searches?
The Encyclopædia Britannica article is gearing up to make featured article status. Ironically this may happen as the English version of wikipedia approaches 1.5 million articles (currently aprox 1.45mil). The coming months will be very interesting...
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
As a purely constructive Wikipedia contributor, I have a feeling (from my gut, of course, not my head) that there will never in the future be a moment, even a millisecond, when there is absolutely no vandalism present on WP. However, Wikipedia is far more comprehensive, I believe, than any other encyclopedia operating by academic submissions will ever be.
There is far more specific knowledge. Just see this page. Awesome stuff; I would never expect to see anything like that in a regular general encyclopedia. I believe that, given that everything else in the world has an (at most) linear rate of change (in terms of fossil fuels, engineering, knowledge, celebrity divorces), Wikipedia will continue to exist well. Of course, someone could take over Wikipedia and use it for unscrupulous objectives, just like RSA encryption has allowed criminals to flourish. We'll never know, of course, since Douglas Adams died before he wrote that 6th book.
But don't panic. Yet.
Professors are not the ones who will decide whether Wikipedia will make the grade or not. The populus will. And the populus has already decided. I know a number of people who now go to Wikipedia first, Google second.
Simpy
Here's a thought I haven't seen before ... allow each page to have a static copy that has been independantly verified by approved moderators. When a moderator (e.g. a professor, expert, significant contributor, etc.) finds a page with problems, (s)he can make corrections and then flag it as 'static' ... or if they find a page that is fine, they can just flag it as Verified. Internally it could work kind of like source code control, where you have tons of revisions that may or may not make it into a release, then one tested/verified copy that is tagged for release.
The user could then view either the static/verified content or regular updated copy (or both concurrently using some type of 'View Changes' feature).
Thoughts?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
The ever relevant reply to questions like that - is something good, is it perfect, is it great, is it bad - is, "good for what?"
Are they asking if Wikipedia is 'good' as an advanced refence library for every science? Or if it should be archived for use by future generations with the purpose of historians having an authoriative source of contemporary events? Or if the information in it makes the grade for use in criminal court trials? The answers to those are, 'not really'.
I think most people, including yours truly, see it as a way to find the main layperson-communicated view(s) on a subject from people who are reasonably knowledgeable about it. It's like having a question about apples, and having access to an unknown apple enthusiast who is willing to share his knowledge. Even so we are fully _aware_ of the possibility that it could all be lies, or motivated by strange ideologies - but the less controversial the subject, and the less mission-critical the information is, the better it is to trust the 'unknown enthusiast'. And to be honest, I don't really see Wikipedia going anywhere from that, and I wouldn't like it to either.
On negative opinions about it - I used to be quite critical. Mainly because articles could a) contain inaccuracies, or really more b) contain biased language courtesy of ideologists. Yes, it's quite easy to write two articles containing the same facts but instilling completely different mindsets in the reader just based on things like word connotations, 'no smoke without fire' principle, loose associations, etc.
What I've gradually started to feel is that for the first part complete accuracy is usually neither desperately needed nor do people who refer to it typically claim it to be. Usage is always in line with the 'unknown enthusiast' idea. For the second part, most articles do appear surprisingly factual and balanced, the ones that don't are the ones you would expect, and two additions I made a year ago of somewhat unpleasant historical facts to the profiles of two well-known international figures popular amongst the.. 'idealists' are still there. I'm now more happy about it than I used to be, and as an 'unknown enthusiast' source I certainly find it very useful and not in need for fixing.
The only concern I have is people who get very involved in the whole project over quite some time, and therefore get quite a bit of implicit "authority", while they have 'ownership' of a range of articles with potential for controversy. I witnessed once a page where someone had made a couple of factually right but critical additions about a national group - and then had them removed and a lot of swearing added to the talk page, by someone with a three-page long personal profile who was dedicated entirely to that specific subject. I think there should be some mechanism for handling that kind of disagreement on content, or at least awareness that it can happen.
Here's a good suggestion, guys:
Next time you see an inaccuracy that you know how to fix, be bold! FIX IT!
One thing I've noticed is the similarity between the way criticisms of wikipedia and criticisms of some open source software are handled.
"Hmm, XFooBar has problems - it crashed when I saved a document when it was a full moon"
"STFU luser and contribute to the project!!!11!!"
vs
"This page is innacurate. The page in my printed encyclopedia is accurate on the same subject"
"Well, why don't you fix it!?!?! That's the WIKI WAY!"
With the zealots failing to notice that the person was hoping for software that works/a useful reference work. If it's not supposed to be that, don't advertise it like that, say it's a work in progress that requires hackers before it's ready for real people to use.
DISCLAIMER: Many people associated with these areas are very helpful. I'm just pointing out problems with a minority of loudmouthed zealots.
As a professor the primary problems I see with Wikipedia:
1) The content is in flux and what a student sees today may not be the same tomorrow.
2) Wikipedia makes a good resource to find other resources.
3) I don't allow any web based content to be a primary resource (stand alone), nor am I interested in seeing papers based on encyclopedias (only) either.
4) My limited forays into Wikipedia left a poor taste I'm not interested in dealing with the general social software scene nor turning over peer reviewed research to have it edited by who knows who.
--- Location Unknown
Wikipedia isn't perfect. Nothing is, after all.
As the article notes, hard science is a strong point for Wikipedia. If you are a troll, it's more fun to insert random flamage into the article on George W. Bush than it is to hack up the discussion of the Fourier Transform or something; and science geeks are more likely to be comfortable with computers than English teachers are. Another strong point of Wikipedia is pop culture. What's the name of Spiderman's secret identity? I don't know that the Encyclopedia Brittanica could even answer that one.
The Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't perfect either. The biggest flaw: it costs money, while Wikipedia is free. If you value accuracy over all else, and don't mind the cost of Brittanica, of course Brittanica is the better choice. And if you are a University professor, the previous sentence probably describes you. But guess which one is more likely to be used in third-world classrooms. (If the teacher and the students have One Laptop Per Child laptop computers: Buy a USB flash drive for $30 at Fry's. Put a subset of Wikipedia on it. Plug it in to the teacher's laptop. Share it out over the wireless mesh. This will happen.)
My favorite part of the article: they had an expert check Wikipedia to see how good the information was. He spotted some minor errors... and couldn't resist fixing the errors!
The biggest question in my mind is: which approach is better, the "anyone can edit" Wikipedia, or a more restricted environment with hand-picked experts? Fortunately, this experiment is now being tried. We can wait and see whether one of the credentialed forks of Wikipedia turn out to be better, or if Wikipedia wins. And we can check them against each other!
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Wikipedia is OK for most people on most subjects. However when you want information on a specialized topic it is better to find other sources. For example when I need to look up something about philosophy I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy whose articles are contributed by people with PhDs about their area of expertise. It also has copious references on each topic. Such a source will always be better than wikipedia, at least if you need the most accurate information.
Philosophy.
My wife, a professor at a local community college, has used Wikipedia a few times to quickly gather sources on a topic she's not too familiar with. Then, she'll use the article to sort out primary and secondary sources if there cited in Wikipedia. She never actually relies on the entries *themselves*. During her work on her Masters Degree, she took a class on Historiography. By studying how History is written, not just what is true and false, she learned a lot about how to tell the difference between well thought out writing, and poor writing [in text books, in others thesis, etc...] and the importance of citing *primary* sources in those entries, and not to rely on secondary sources unless they are known to be trustworthy, or primary sources aren't available anymore (destroyed, stolen, etc.). Wikipedia articles should never be used as a primary or secondary source in the academic world, as I can guarantee if one of her students cites Wikipedia entries in a bibliography on a paper, she will probably laugh and that student will need to work harder finding better sources on the next paper.
flectere si nequeo superos, Achaeronta movebo
I'm always suspicious of people who throw around the term "bias" in the way you're doing. What I often see is that they're the most biased of all, to the point that their ideas are constantly being ridiculed by everyone else. So their only recourse is to yell "BIAS!", just like Republicans tend to yell "COMMUNISM!" or "TERRORISM!" when their ideas are being torn to shreds, and Microsoft fanatics yell "HIPPIES!" when shown that open source software is of a higher quality.
Instead of facing the fact that their way of thinking is completely wrong or invalid, they resort to what amounts to ad hominem attacks on their opponents. And as we all know, such attacks are very frowned upon in serious academic circles.
whats next geocities and myspace users ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Bowers
how entries like this have any "encyclopaedic" value is a mystery
Wikipedia can never be used in research work with an authoritative citation, since it is constantly changing. If I use a wikipedia article in a research paper's footnotes or bibliography, the article is likely to change before anyone goes back to check the references. Sure you could go back through the history file and try to reconstruct the article as it existed when the citation was taken, but that just adds a whole new level of difficulty to citations, now the author must cite the date and exact time when the research was taken. And then, the changes to the article before and after that time, are they more or less accurate than the citation? Furthermore, wikipedia articles are full of "citation needed" footnotes, and may also contain huge sections of plagiarized text. Sources are hugely problematic, it can be impossible to trace a basic fact back to its source from a wikipedia article.
Scholarship is a system where we build on the work of others, if the chain is broken, there can be no progress. If scholars cannot work with authoritative citations, their work may not just be useless, it may be damaging. Look at some of the recent scandals over scientists who faked research, they got away with it because nobody could check their sources, and millions of dollars of research funding were wasted following up on the faked research. Wikipedia is just going to make this problem worse. I hope that scientists with PhDs know better than to use wikipedia for research, but then, your average 7 year old kid in elementary school might end up as a PhD or M.D. one day, do your really want the surgeon who might operate on YOU someday, to have learned his basic science from possibly-vandalized articles in wikipedia?
Wikipedia, to me, is meant for the casual person who wants a centralized, fairly reliable source of information about the world. In this Wikipedia succeeds magnificently. I am willing to bet that most wikipedia queries are from people who are looking for overview primer materials. Even academics can use it for these purposes profitably.
However, academics should go past wikipedia in their research simply because it is usually better to read actual research articles published in the scientific journals which they have access to. Academics need more than an overview, they need the meat, bones, and fat of the subject.
For those who say that this well and good for scientists, but offers little to the debate concerning non-science academic use of Wikipedia. Well my answer may be less satisfying than some. But it goes something like this: If its not science then it shouldn't be considered academic.
Lastly, I think the use of encyclopedias in academics is generally an issue of laziness and an unwillingness to do serious research into the subject.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Someone is taking steps. See the lowdown on the Citizendium project .
I guess in a couple of months/years wikipedia's slogan will no longer say "The encyclopedia that any can edit", it will be replaced by "The encyclopedia you can trust because it was edited by academic shcolars"
I don't trust current events on Wikipedia necessarily, but if I'm doing research for a project (like the American System, or Luis Walter Alvarez) I find that Wikipedia offers a great summary and good sources for further info. Common sense dictates what I will and won't believe.
Scholars joining Wikipedia in the hopes of fixing the thing is a mistake. The great migration(s) from Wikipedia have been primarily experts who are chased off by griefers. Getting a new batch involved will just set things up for another exodus.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Information from any single source should not be trusted without verification. Britanica, CNN.com, or FoxNews may all be fine sites. But let's see them show a list of links to external websites noting their sources, and alternative views. Once you have found the definitive source for all of your information, you have just become another sheep.
The vandalism keeps us in check.
You suspect "a large biased mob of editors trying to keep the article biased" in favor of Ayn Rand. The admins you have contacted all refused to "help", and you suspect that Jimbo himself is behind the edits. Have you considered the possibility you are the one who is biased -- against this "nutjob" Ayn Rand?
-Fyodor
Insecure.Org
I think this really depends on the definition used for "making the grade". Just because something succeeds doesn't make it great, or even good, if you happen to measure greatness by a different metric. The populace determines a lot of things, including an adequate quality of television, and an adequate quality of elected government legislators. I don't agree that either of these meet my own expectations of adequacy, on most occasions, and I can fully appreciate that any individual should be able to decide that they also don't want to accept something simply because "the populace" does.
I use Wikipedia a lot, and I contribute to it a lot. I love it because it has such a wide range of information about all sorts of things, which is very difficult to find elsewhere. There aren't many other places where you could find such an in-depth description of something like the Slashdot subculture, for instance, and I'd consider directing people to that article if they wanted a summary of the site.
But I use Wikipedia cautiously, with an understanding of how it works, and that the information I get from it probably isn't authoritative and will need verifying if I'm using it for something important. If I relay the information to other people, I'll usually indicate where I got it from, and do my best to point out that it could potentially be suspect if I think it's appropriate to do so. I'm not sure that most of the populace has the same cautious approach. I'm beginning to see more and more people treat Wikipedia as if it's just automatically authoritative information, without any realistic understanding of what it actually is and where it comes from. I find that a bit disconcerting.
All that said, I guess with people's choices of TV and political representation, and many other things, there are quite a few things that I have trouble relating to in the "general populace".
My opinion follows. I don't really have scientific measures to back up my opinions... but anyway...
I've noticed (in the past 6 months, especially) much more academically-inclined admins getting deeply involved in supervising the content. While the admin process sometimes bogs down in nit-hair-splitting contests, the majority of the time, the content comes through pretty clean and well thought out.
The further evolution of publishing/entry standards, and their enforcement, has resulted in far cleaner and better-thought-out content, for the most part.
This "better supervision" has positive and negative side effects - On the positive side, more and more thoughtful people are keeping the spam/hack/waste/junk to a dull roar, while helping the content have better referential integrity. On the negative side, the grass-rootsy "encyclopedia anyone can edit" is no longer a place where people can just edit based on their knowledge, expertise or SME capability: submitters must now read many pages of rules and regs, then write their bits, then submit their materials with onerous loads of documentation/references/justification just to keep the admins from quick-deleting what's been entered. I suppose that this type of Yin and Yang is actually pretty necessary... academia is fond of healthy and reasonable debate.
To close on point: As long as the community evolves towards quality, reference-able content - and keeps the place relatively clean, Wikipedia will be a continuing effort towards an academically-acceptable reference. Only time will tell, though, if academia will ever emotionally accept Wikipedia, methinks.
I'm glad that so many people are concentrating on it, are working on it, and trying to make it something special. It's hard to imagine the huge number of hours of positive efforts go into Wikipedia on any given day. I, for one, am glad of it.
A Passionate Independent Musician
Most of the articles and comments relating to information on Wikipedia have so far missed what is the crucial element: trust.
When reading a Wikipedia article I might generally accept the content as true, but that does not mean I trust it to be accurate. If the information is going to be critical to some decision, I'm going to double check the facts against another source. If the other source disagrees, and is an expert, guess who I'm going to believe? Yes, experts make mistakes. However, they make less mistakes (in their field) than lay people. As for the wisdom of the public, we only have to look at the effectiveness of "talking points", and how they've been used in recent elections, to see how the public can be misled into accepting unsupported statements as fact.
Without some mechanism to gauge the trustworthiness of an article's authors, academics are never going to accept wikipedia. At minimum, their names should be public. Wikipedia shields authors' identities, so it also hides any method of gauging trust.
- Circular motion - Like nearly all physics and math articles on Wikipedia, this one seems to have been written by grad students trying to show off how smart they were. I have a PhD in physics, so I can understand it, but the average reader will have no idea what it's about.
- Jane Austen - A very short article for such an important literary figure, and has a cleanup tag at the top.
Articles like #2 can be fixed if people continue to participate in Wikipedia. Articles like #1, on the other hand, will never be fixed; they are the way they are because of the way Wikipedia works.Find free books.
Article titles can't start with a lower case character "due to technical limitations."
Wikipedia is a triumph. Amazing breadth and depth of info at your fingertips for free, updated and improved thousands a times/day.
Generally it is control freaks and central authorities, or unsurprisingly members of "old media" that dislike wiki. I set one up at work, and many in management didn't want to put info in it because "anyone" can change it. That is the advantage not the weakness. Because the wiki continues to be updated, because anyone can do it. Our centrally controlled work pages always died of neglect. The Wiki is living and growing.
Long live the wiki.
I think that whats interesting to see what happens to wikipedia as time passes.
Initially, from the time when it was first concieved till now, it is open for everyone to edit. It accumulates a massive amount of information, and the quality of that information increases over time.
But what happens when wikipedia gets to the point where nearly all mainstream information is covered, and the only stuff thats missing is really really rare topics, or really field specific topics? At that point, most of the articles will be of sufficiant quality that edits are no longer required.
Of course, as new discoveries are made, there needs to be additions, but at this point, the majority of the edits to existing articles will be vandalism. So over time, won't the ratio of helpful/new information to vandalism/biased information decrease?
Citizendium seems to be based partly on this sort of thinking, and it seems to me that tighter control over who can edit would be the next logical step.
It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
I'm Starting to Suspect That a Dungeons and Dragons Player Named "Elgdorf the Mage" Is Abusing His Wikipedia Editorial Privileges.
you had me at #!
..and that is for them to collectively STOP hiding scholarly articles behind the expensive pay per view online mags subscription or by the article sites. Joe surfer, wikipedia user, is not going to pony up the thousands and thousands a year it would take to subscribe to all these places to get to the meat, just ain't happening. Wikipedia-in part - is the reaction to this "keep knowledge buried and expensive and only available to the elite" nonsense. I thought this got sorted out in the middle ages when it was finally decided that "the commoners" could learn to read, but apparently it is still some sort of feudalistic system. We already have a huge collaborative construction, called the web, and ways to find what you are looking for, called search engines, they just need to make access a little more user and *wallet* friendly. You either believe in sharing knowledge or you don't.
wikipedia entry -> blah blah, and she said he said
next guy erases that, "no, it's like this and this is a stub anyway, needs an expert and..."
joe academic "but we are the real experts, and have all this stuff written down over here, look"
Joe searcher and seeker of knowledge-"you want HOW MUCH to read a few pages???"
Ball is in their court near as I can see it, put up or shutup. If they don't like the open nature of wikipedia, they can open up the existing journals, or dual publish, one or the other or both. They have had it in their power all along, so they have no excuse to whine about the free and Free aspects of the wiki, it has been a natural reaction.
she's flat-out rejected as being a highly derivative
No sources cited
nutjob unworthy of serious attention
non-NPOV
Sorry, I'm going to have to revert this comment!
0 1 - just my two bits
On topics that only a few people know about, it is good. For example, the Alpa camera article is good, though unfinished. Why? Only a few people have bothered with it (and yes, I put in the photos). There is only one controversy in the whole thing, and those of us working on it came to a consensus.
Go to a hot topic, and the biased admins can't even get all the facts right. Take John Kerry for example. I had to go get some data off the way back machine to prove to them the simple fact that John Kerry was only promoted to LT as a temporary rank, and that it was recinded when he was transferred to the reserves. That shouldn't have slipped by the authors.
There is a lot more garbage out there, being kept there by biased admins as well.
I don't know how Wikipedia can address this. But until it does, Wikipedia is a pop-culture reference, not anything that can be used as a legitimate scientific or literary reference.
As it stands, Wikipedia will never "make the grade" in academic circles for a simple reason: Academic citation is meaningless without authority -- almost by defintion -- and allowing anyone to modify entries removes any guarantee that the entries themselves are authoritative. (This situation is actually somewhat worse than that: On account of the free editing policy, any article can contain contradictory statements are different times, or even at once.) Whether Wikipedia has the qualifications for academic citation (i.e. is a source to trust your academic reputation to) is separate from whether it is useful or a valuable resource in any other context. Indeed, Wikipedia is a superb, even unparalleled resource, in many other ("softer") ways: (1) It's an excellent casual reference, as a starting point for academic research, or as a source for rounded, pithy introductions to just about anything. (2) It _is_ a source for just about anything. No other general-purpose reference source has a treatise on the decimal expansion 0.999... with 63 references or nine-page articles on foreign cartoon characters (w.r.t. America).
Ugh. The only thing keeping you from reading those "oh so secret" papers is you. Get off your lazy ass and go to the library. Doesn't seem so hard now, does it? I don't hear you bitching about how Crichton has the nerve to charge for his books. Or how the New York Times is evil for not giving away their paper. If you want it for free, go to your library. And yes, your library can get academic volumes for you. You just have to wait a bit.
And the other reason academics don't all just throw their preprints up on the web (some do) before review is because they don't want them to be widely read until they have been reviewed by some competent critics. It's because academics KNOW that much of what they write is crap - which is more than can be said for most of wikipedia's contributors.
That's actually fairly accurate. It is a system based on the medieval system of apprenticeship. It is designed to foster competence, respect, and (as I hinted above) humility. I know, those things are anathema to the wikipedians, but everybody already knows that iconoclasm and utopianism don't get you very far on a scale of crappy to reliable - well except for the drones who actually believed that the Nature article "proved" that wikipedia was reliable. That was good for a laugh.There is hope for wikipedia, but it does not lie with people who share your attitude. Fortunately, there are a couple people left within wikipedia who might be able to foster more productive dialog than yours.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
Wikipedia is reliable. The live negotiation over content that makes the terms non-authoritative at any given moment, renders the graph of what terms are being live-negotiated, authoritative at every moment. That's an important type of information and on that it's a primary source. And it's better than Google, because Google suffers under a negative-blind filter. Things rate highly on Google when they are being talked about, no matter what is being said about them. The wikipedia is the best way currently available in the world to get an approx at snapshot of current human beliefs and knowledge, without the negative-blind filter. And that includes a view of what are the hot-button issues that create a lot of push-pull negotiations in the global editing community. (Never ignore the discussions page of a wiki entry.) I think the wikipedia is vastly underrated and will be vindicated.
In spite of this fancy tough talk, most academics can't or don't walk the walk.
As far as I can see, education and science is now just about prestige and money.
I recall an incident happening at my school, where one of our teachers used one of the school computers to create a Wikipedia article about the school. For some reason, he was left logged in, and a few weeks later a student edited his article. My school briefly became well known for it's "promiscuous female students" (which was news to me...)
Anyway, a few months after that, I found this teacher was still logged in. I could have vandalised a heap of articles, destroying his reputation in the community. I just logged him out though. Things like this can lower the credibility of people who edit the accounts, even if they were once respected members of the community. Do you think things like this happen often?
Try to edit the "Muhammad" article and you will see a flock of Islamo-fanatics swoop down on you and undo all your edits. They "patrol" that article so that anything truthful that might reflect negative will be erased from it. They "tag team" to get around the 3RR rule, and fill the article with religious beliefs rather than historical fact. I theorize that they are supported by mosques to keep that article that way 24/7 and do absolutely nothing else.
This shows the great weakness of Wikipedia. How a group of people can "game" wikipedia to force their particular view on everyone else.
At Sierra College, when doing research for a paper, you must explicitly not use any sites with .com or .org names. When asked, I found it was because they may contain bias information ("money" comes to mind as far as incentive for biasness). Unfortunately, Wikipedia falls under this category.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
So every time someone wants to access something quality, do some research, they have to jump in the car and go to the library-that's your solution? In my case that's close to a 40 mile round trip, and obviously only when they are open.
..checks calendar..yes, 2006, not 1946, or 1596, we have the internet now, nice to use it.
Oh ya, that's just wonderful.... real practical, now why didn't I think of that... oh ya again, I did and do..but only once in a great while because it's an inconveninet and expensive PITA when I have a perfectly good computer and net connection right here.
sorry, feudalism sucks. Sucked then, sucks now and closed guilds did nothing to advance much of anything, just resulted in centuries of stagnation.
If they want to contribute to wikipedia, then publish their papers, wiki picks up the tab over at their site. If they want to restrict it to the expensive pay per view, then don't be surprised if very few people ever read them over there. Which is fine really, really, it is, if that is your's or their's goal-your choice, but dissin' wikipedia because you as the academic have a beef with some of the content, yet don't want to share your content, is beyond hypocritical, and falls into the *crazy* as in insane realm. Just go away then, keep doing what you are doing-some people are getting more involved with this and the open access concept is starting to get noticed and have some legs. Knowledge sharing will progress across the globe, and will be using what remains of the original concept of the web, despite you and some of your peers archaic and dark ages modelled elitist snob ways.
I agree with the inventor, you are free to disagree. We'll be seeing how it works out in the long run.
they'll find out what everyone else already knows -- wikipedia is prejudiced against people who actually know what they're talking about. The best information will be removed on the grounds that the submitter is biased and unreliable (never mind the tenet of criticizing the message, not the messenger). Not only is Wikipedia not interested in finding the truth, you're not even allowed to suggest that it exists.
Again, good intentions on the part of Wikipedia moderators, but in practice it's another story. This is taken from a meta-Wikipedia article:
But if I read this article on clearance, I have to already understand the principle of renal physiology and volume of distribution just to get past the first sentence. If I want to read further, I have to already understand differential equations. Not that this is a huge problem, but it certainly begs the question of whether technical articles should stay technical or if they should be presentable to those who are not in the field. And this is not to say that there aren't articles on Wikipedia that do a very good job of "trickling" down levels of detail in a progressive fashion, starting from very accessible to relatively technical - take this article on rainbows, for example.
I really get tired of hearing this claim by dedicated Wikipedians:
The most successful FOSS projects are run as benevolent dictatorships, like Torvalds and the Linux Kernal, and GNU and Stallman. Even those that are more democratic, like Debian, have a transparent, well-defined process of governance will a leader who is elected by open voting.
I use Wikipedia all the time as a first gloss on a subject (and it can't be beat for centralized info on video games -- that stuff just doesn't exist anywhere else). But the description in the article of Wikipedia as a kind of "communal Maoism" is correct. By turns there is a kind of anonymous mob attack on editors, and at other times, a self-selected group of admins with the power of banning accounts that swoops in like the Politburo.
I use what this process produces, but there's no way I'd ever contribute to it again.
You have to judge information on Wikipedia on its own merits: is it internally consistent, is it consistent with other information, and does it have proper sources and attributions. But, then, you have to do that with everything that's printed: the New York Times, the Washington Post, Nature, Science, whatever.
Academics who think that this is a problem are the kinds of intellectual sloths who themselves believe that if "it's printed somewhere, it must be true". They are academics that falsely judge the quality of a paper by the name of its authors and the length of its reference list.
The error that has "slipped into" academia is those kinds of pseudo-academics; public, truly peer reviewed content like Wikipedia is the antidote to current, widespread academic sloppiness and intellectual laziness. The fact that you know that anybody can edit almost anything on Wikipedia at any time is what makes it so great, and the fact that it is actually pretty accurate is what makes it still useful.
what ever happend to that study that said that it had only 1 more mistake than encyclopedia britanica on average, per page. Its an accademic resource that is if anything the least biased take on what the world considers history.
One problem that I've seen happen even in previous featured articles (voted as the best of the best on Wikepedia) is a sort of quality rot where a good article is slowly having nonsense, bias, or unsourced material added to it over time. Not quickly enough in one big edit that people have their alarms trigger, but slowly, perhaps making it look like it's new material that'll get fixed up better in time, only that it isn't. The average quality of the article starts to worse and at one point the article is even voted to have a cancelled featured article status with a preview showing it was shorter, more condensed, lacking some new information, but more to the point and having a higher average quality before.
So even if some professor or other expert on a subject would edit an article, people on its Talk page would agree it's great addition, perhaps thanking the user, that's far from a guarantee the material will have its quality preserved in the future, and not due to vandals, but due to average people without as much of a clue but trying to do good, sometimes missing out on sources etc, editing the article to have a worsened quality.
As Wikipedia is now maturing in many articles and it's less and less about creating articles for notable subjects compared to before, I think this is starting to be a new growing problem Wikipedia will face. Not the threat of vandals (Wikipedia is on the other hand increasingly efficient against those now with bots having a very high ratio of accurate vandal reverts, semi-protections etc), but the threat of their average user. With articles having an increasingly better quality, this is a logical problem to follow too; there are less and less people around the world that will be able to maintain an article's quality, but still want to contribute.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
... and not articulate enough when it tries to comming up with new ways to distill complex information to those who do not process more complex information as fast or as easily as others. I always keep thinking back to Albert Einsteins comments on if you can't communicate your concepts or break them down into understandable terms to anyone, which IMHO means a lot of your smarts you could do good with are wasted.
Lastly, I think the lack of academics and credentialists who can be bribed / corrupted, or living in their own little distorted reality, actually helps wikipedia. I do believe that having as many eyes on information as possible and churning it through millions of different minds gives us the ability to REFINE and CLARIFY what is being said, and distill that information CLEARLY better to everyone, then a group of academics can, since even good academics can edit wikipedia, and then others can break down jargon into clear statements.
I'm reminded of debates of philosophers of the ancients, where one of the purposes of argumentation was to CLEAR your thoughts and refine ideas to clarify those "murky ideas" in others heads that are more complicated and not easily communicated without refinement through argumentation... and I believe that's wikipedia's greatest strength. I don't care how smart someone is, one fantasticly superior mind cannot beat millions of average to great ones minds.
Not to mention measuring "merit" and "superiority" through academic credentialism or scholastic obstacle does not give one a monopoly on the judgement of the quality of ideas, nor in the clarity of their communication.
Just Google it:
site:wikipedia.org [SEARCH WORDS HERE]
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Spend a week reverting vandalism on recent changes and you'll see why.
Think "Intranet" or "Internal" Wikis
Without Google, I think Wikis would be dead on the Internet, but I also use them internally where Google can't reach (and I wouldn't want them to). I'm having a really hard time trying to find a Wiki search replacement that doesn't completely suck...
Most scientists learn early on in their career to assess the informativenes, credibility and dependability of their sources. Sometimes sources such as newspaper articles, popular magazines highlighting an issue, television programmes covering a particular topic can be used to give you ideas and to serve as a source of things to add to your list of "things to investigate", but rarely (except in historical or political research) as source of raw data or as an authoritative opinion.
Autoritative opinion
Now what is an authoritative (scientific) opinion? I agree with the posters earlier in this thread that it's a considered opinion from someone that you know has mastered the field, who is schooled in and committed to the scientific methodology used in that field, and who is prepared to go on record for that opinion. I.e. that opinion is published among everyone who works in the field under his name and if that opinion is wrong you'll know which individual was wrong.
Tracing ideas and opinions
This means that whoever wrote that opinion cannot (ever) be allowed to change the original publication. There may be debates in which the original author may or may not change his mind, and retract or amend his opinion. But the original author can only ever do this in the form of a new publication, lets call it [Authorname (YYYY) Title 2], in which he can then write "In [Authorname (YYYY) Title 1] I said this, but in the light of developments xyz, additional data abc, and/or further thought I now think such-and-such". This is what happens in scientific journals. Despite all debates and changes of opinion that may follow, the article [Authorname (YYYY) Title 1] remains archived for further reference, comments, study, and sometimes as an example of what pitfalls to avoid. Scientists are only human after all ... but all their colleagues and students can read the entire (unedited) debate and then make up their own mind.
The value of peer reviewed journals
Most autoritative scientific (and technical) journals are peer-reviewed. So what is peer-review? Peer review is when person abc things he's got something good to report and sends it to a journal. The journal editor figures out who else is working in the field to which the article relates and sends it to those other people before any decision is taken to publish it. They read the article and give their opinion about a number of aspects:
(1)- is the question addressed in the article well-defined? Does it use generally accepted theory and concepts with which to state the problem? If not, why not?
(2)- has the author done a thorough review of the existing literature that deals with this area, and has he either pointed out an error, a weakness or a gap (complete lack of coverage) in the literature?
(3)- is the methodology used valid? Is statistical methods were used are they appropriate and correct?
(4)- is the data used to support the conclusions used relevant? Can somethinf be said about whether the data is valid?
(5)- is the reasoning made sufficiently explicit and is it correct and valid?
(6)- are the conclusions supported by the work described in the article?
Questions such as an expert in the field under consideration should be able to answer. The editor receives the reviews, reads them, andthe ndecides whether or not to accept the original article for publication, to reject it outright, or to have the original author patch up the more serious problems and try again. Pee
Why aren't the pranksters ever prosecuted by the Law?
Should they be? I think so... City of New York is cracking down on graffiti big time, for example, because it is ugly and costs them a lot of money to repair.
Wiki-vandalism is not cheap either — in fact, it appears from the article, that it threatens Wikipedia's growth and, perhaps, even its very survival as more and more of their resources go to fighting it, while the would-be contributors get put off by the vandalism and decide to not contribute at all.
I don't even think, new laws are needed — just legal advice on how to use the existing ones...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I don't understand all the fuss about Wikipedia. It's an excellent idea, and an excellent site.
It says on the homepage that it is the free encylopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone who doesn't grasp the implications of that is frankly stupid.
It is an excellent resource for quickly finding non-critical information, and a excellent start-point for finding critical information.
Problems only begin when people rely on it for critical information - It's their own fault if they do that.
A lot of academics are completely missing the point about an encyclopaedia. It doesn't matter whether it's a sober tome like Britannica, or something with a less formal structure such as Wikipedia - NO encyclopaedia should be cited in an academic work, whether it's a first year student paper or a Ph.D thesis. An encyclopaedia is a repository of general knowledge, not research - it should be used as a _starting point_ only in your line of enquiry.
Wikipedia as a whole is no better or worse than the Internet as a whole. Generally, I find it very useful because there are style guidelines, there is a consistent layout, and it makes a good starting point on most subjects which would otherwise be hours of frustrating searching to get going on. To take recent hobby projects as an example, although Wikipedia might not turn me into an electrical engineer, it still gave me a good enough starting point that I could build a switch mode power supply to make 170 volts from 12 volts. It's often my first port of call to find out what I need to do next for my hobby electronics point. Not the ending point, or the absolute fount of all knowledge - but a very useful starting point which is far easier to use than, say, Britannica, and covers far more subject matter.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
For that purpose--that is, being a kind of running "Who's Who"--Wikipedia works pretty well. That said, as a professor, I scoff when students show that the only thing they know about a subject is from Wikipedia. This scoffing is a bit of theater designed to transmit unambiguously the message that the student's claim "I've only read Wikipedia, but I think that x is..." is laughably inadequate for most things. (P.S. I wouldn't necessarily say that about some obscure corner of a technical or scientific area that they knew about otherwise. There, too, Wikipedia hits the mark.)
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Wikipedia has some factual and scientific articles that are excellent, and almost cite-worthy though you'd rather use the sources cited in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has a stunning amount of trivia, which I doubt is very much peer reviewed, watched or otherwise - but it's there, and it might be good.
Wikipedia has some good articles on controversial topics where there's a fairly equal amount of editors on either side.
Wikipedia has quite a bit that's crap, inaccurate, ruled by a biased mob or someone with an agenda or otherwise completely off.
So if you're citing me a wikipedia page, I'd check it out. If it looks like a scientific paper with proper references, great. If it looks taken out of thin air, shame on you for using it as a source. And if it's so central that you should only quote primary sources (not everything in every paper is that important, even though it should have a citation), then shame on you for using wikipedia in any case.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but a contributor needs to cite a source to say 2 and 2 is 4. This leads to quibbling over details and giving even ridiculous points of view credence; Encyclopedia Dramatica did a good job parodying this:
If you have the misfortune of looking up anything related to certain bodily processes on Wikipedia, beware of the pictures! Outright pornography (even bestiality) is present on some of them (and the articles themselves are not on a pornographic topic), and a "consensus" has formed to keep them! Why? Basically a few trolls with too much time on their hands revert the pictures whenever they're deleted and cry "Wikipedia is not censored!" or "That this picture is disgusting is not NPOV." Wikipedia treats these trolls as legitimately as anyone else and basically assumes good faith on their part (when it is quite clear they are trying to shock people and not add the photos to be informative). The blind Wikipedians have no other choice but to take their arguments seriously and try to find another policy to counter with.
The debate roughly devolves into this:
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
Why do you believe knowledge should be free? I had to pay for my education. Courses, text books, computer time, everything (sure there are scholarships and subsidies, but I still had to pay a lot). Profs, TAs, all have to be paid. If I'd said, "teach me for free!", I'd have gotten some very funny looks, to say the least.
You apparently take the view that misinformation is better than no information! Just get it out there, and hope for the best! That is pure gambling, and very dangerous. The scientific method may seem slow and stodgy to you, but it's the only way to go. Wikipedia does not follow the scientific method. End of story.
Obviously Wikipedia is based on majority. Just have a look on discussions about any controversial topic about the history, arts, or even science (let's say - Evolution versus creationism). On one hand that's fine, because discussions are boosters of progress. On another - this is something like majority against minority. Remember: Minority might be wrong. But majority is never right.
And all the crap goes away. Except for the stories like this one.
Even a Wiktionary would be an authoritative reference.
If its not science then it shouldn't be considered academic.
That statement strongly implies that there was no such thing as academia prior to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. I believe that there are a lot of scientists and a huge number of scholars who would disagree with you.
There are also a number of subjects of scholarly study where the scientific method cannot be applied. One that comes to mind is history. Another is mathematics(!) Yet another is logic(!!) That's interesting-- if logic is not academic, and if what we are having here is an academic discussion, then it doesn't matter whether any assertion either of us make is logical.
But enough of this.
Core aspects of traditional scholarship involve finding authorities and understanding the credentialing processes that make certain persons and works authoritative in different fields, and using proven scholastic methods to derive new contexts from comparisons between authorities. Often enough, new insights come from these new contexts.
Wikipedia turns this all on its head. I don't give a hoot about whether a Wikipedia article was written by an authority. Instead I simply check the facts that I plan to rely on against the rest of this intarweb thang, by using Google. I've got another way to validate things; I don't need the cumbersome authoritarian approach any more.
This means that I'm increasingly working in a world of truths that are provisional and mutable: at any time anything that I accept as true from Wikipedia-Google I may learn is actually not correct. So I've got to allow for that. I can't be as sure of myself as I could if I relied on authoritative truths.
I think that is actually a Good Thing, since an awful lot of the word's violence comes out of an excessive reliance on certain authorities. If everyone was a little less sure about their beliefs, then I believe that we would all get along much better. We've all been dancing on quicksand ever since our ancestors started to substitute words for direct experiences; it probably is not a bad thing to recognize that more often.
Back to the scholars: the universe of discourse has suddenly changed in the last 10 years. The skills needed in developing, identifying, and credentialing authorities are less important to the general populace since the Wikipedia-Google approach allows an alternative way of cross-checking salient facts. I have had to teach physicians who had spent decades honing their skills in finding pertinent details in a patient's thick chart that all those best practice techniques they had worked to develop were now useless; they've got to learn new computerized ways. And they should really learn how to type on a keyboard, too. Now it seems like the scholars are facing a similar crisis, where new methods have made big portions of established best practices obsolete.
So yeah, let's continue to replace authoritative truths with provisional truthiness. And let's be sure to celebrate those scholars who are helping to shape how we use this new Wikipedia-Google approach. Theirs is a tradition of truth-seeking with more than a millenium of experience behind it; some of the trappings of that tradition should be shelved, but the living core of it can be adapted to the new ways.
Q)why do I believe it should be free (or *much more* affordable for everyone)?
A) It's just a better idea. I would like your education to have been free or more affordable. The dark ages method...is just that, the dark ages. Sorry if you got burned by the ongoing existing technofeudalism practices, but I am not in favor of that method. I think humanity as a whole is better off the more people who have access to more knowledge. and with modern advances, it has become pretty cheap to publish electronic data bits. We have arrived in the future, and we have at least one sort of functional "replicator" now, so I think we should use it as much as possible.
For instance, I support the OLPC project, I couldn't see dangling it in front of those kids and then going "well..like to give you access to this knowledge, but it will cost you 10$ an article and so on..pony it up or suffer..what? You only make 235 bucks a year over there in east elbownia? You can't afford it? Tough shit, kid, now, fuck off"
sorry, that method isn't working out very well for the bulk of the planet's population. That's what you want to keep in place for perpetuity? Just because that is the old method and a lot of the still running current method? Isn't that a little bogus?
Yes, wikipedia has some serious flaws, absolutely no one is saying it is exactly perfect, but at least it is a credible and working step in the right direction and has been a pretty good success so far and is undergoing practical evolution. I like that. Just like some of the open courseware offerings from some Unis are a good step in the right direction. I like those, too. Maybe eventually you'll (anyone you) be able to get a degree using them at very little cost, from wherever you might be sitting. Save a lot, humanity knowledge base expands rapidly, all good things. I think it should just be expanded further now that we know and can see it is actually possible. If it alters employment around the planet, so be it, I know I have had to change jobs several times and learn new skills from..well, mostly globalism and how the fatcats are running the economy. And I still am actually. And you probably will too. And it isn't going to stop, we have to accept reality, so the quickest way to make sure *no one* gets burnt is to increase the planetary knowledge-base, and the best way to do that is to provide as much free/inexpensive education as possible in the shortest time frame possible.
mass education=good
mass ignorance=bad
near as I can see it...
Wikipedia has the potential to be just as effective, if not more effective, than any other encyclopedia ever made. All a person needs is references to back up their points. It works just the same as any big research paper, thesis, or professional journal article. The more references you have, the more powerful your case is. Especially if your references contain peer reviewed articles, randomized controlled trials, and meta-analyses. In fact, I can see wikipedia as being a logical extension to the vast number of internet based and electronic full-text journal articles. What can be easier than looking through journals via the internet, citing their points, and putting it on a website without too many restrictions? Others can also change the website if they find new information. One way to improve the credibility of wikipedia is to mandate the use of references before you make a change to a wikipage. References can be pretty much anything, from personal communications, books, journal articles, newspapers, etc. As long as people have an organized way of showing how they came up with information, it makes the whole process more legit.
Mild agreement that Wikipedia is basically OK +5 interesting
Strong agreement that Wikipedia is basically sound and scholars should join +5 informative
Criticism of Wikipedia in any form -10 Troll
Informed criticism of Wikipedia's lack of scholarship -25 offtopic
Detailed criticism of above plus abusive admins, arcane rulesets, Marxist philosophy and endless fancruft -1000 Burn in Hell
Get 'em while they're hot.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Yeah, because it's SO FUCKING HARD to GET OFF YOUR ARSE and walk INTO A LIBRARY where you DON'T HAVE TO PAY A CENT. The argument you propose is an argument from sheer unadulterated inexcusable laziness.
As a graduate student, whenever I'm grading my student's papers, I almost always mark off for using encyclopedias or dictionaries no matter if they are Britannica, Webster's, Wikipedia, or Wiktionary. Just because anyone with internet access can edit one while another is published by people who are supposed to be professionals is largely irrelevant. Those types of works are general references intended for general audiences and basic information. There are more specialized encyclopedias and dictionaries, but in most cases no matter how accurate Britannica or for that matter wikipedia are, if you are writing an academic paper, there are better and more specialized sources for students to use. Moreover, going to a website and simply typing in the topic of your paper is just lazy. At least show me you've put some amount of effort into this assignment! At least type your paper topic into Google Scholar rather than Britannica.com or Wikipedia.org
On the other hand, academics who complain, "I looked up subject X and it was inaccurate" and don't try to fix it are either ignorant about how wikipedia works, or are snobs who would rather point out the faults in something rather than try to improve them.
I use wikipedia all the time to look up anything I just happen to be curious about and whenever I find a topic that I find an error in or find lacking, I try to help improve the article. I wouldn't dream of using it in a paper in place of a more specialized source.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Academia and official accreditation sources will never capture the rich information stream of sources without people contributing from a Wiki (many:1). A single-source of authority paradigm is dead in today's parallel Worlds evolving faster than Moore's Law will sustain.
Information which was gathered mere months ago, may be outdated and disproven today. Academian's cannot reflect that fast a data-set change and hold the keys to Society's knowledge. Knowledge is the collective intelligence of organized information captured in juxtaposition with accepted wisdom of the present.
We all contribute, we all gain - there are no Master's of the Universe: we are the Universe...
~= scwizard =~
...so stupid. And you need anger management. Tell me o wise one, did you ever stop to think some folks might live hundreds of miles away from a decent library? There's a pretty big planet out there, and a lot of it is completely skipping the western world wired experience and going right to wireless and net access that way. No grid, local solar. No wired telecom, just cell phones and wifi. so, they get a taste of actually getting some knowledge then get charged western rich guy rates? What a sport! What a humanitarian! A lot of them don't make much either. So, you just tell them folks to go pound sand, tough shit for them? Even inside the US, you think everyone lives two blocks from some huge well equipped library? Are you nuts or just ignorant of facts on the ground today? I need to go look something up and it's a serious one hour round trip just for me to get to the library, and I am not even all that rural. And my local library only carries one expensive journal, that's it, and it isn't open when I need to use it, late at night. I have to work onsite, got things to do chores, livintg creatures to take care of, can't just go bop off to town. And that's why I got a computer and the internet, to use it. I don't play videogames, I use the web. There are MILLIONS of people just inside the US who are a long ways away from a library,. and chances are when they get there it is pretty small. Go do some travelling outside the top hundred major urban areas for a few weeks, you'll see.
And me lazy? HAHAHAHAHA! I do hard physical labor on a farm for a living,as in work,and I could work your pasty asthmatic ass into the ground any day of the week, guaranteed.
I am talking about all users all over, not just me, dig it, not just me. You want to keep your precious knowledge locked up and expensive, fine with me, but the rest of the world is starting to open up and SHARE because it's a spiffy idea. That is why wikipedia is so well received, because overall it is a wonderful idea. It still needs work and some tuning, hence the original article, but the basic concept is just great! You and your profits at any cost ilk can stick with the old feudalistic elite model, I'll pass on that, I was never that greedy, and I am NEVER gonna fork out ten dollars for a few page PDF file. That's stupid and I wouldn't even want my little local rural library to even think about it either, that's throwing good money at elitist fucktards for no reason other than their greed.
so go rub your hands together with maniacal glee and go "mine, mine , ALL MINE". Maybe count your money at the same time, sounds about your speed.
Guys like you crack me up really, wouldn't know a good thing if it bit you in the butt and then stopped and explained it to you. Probably smart, but clueless with the big picture on how cooperative sharing of knowledge helps everyone. Or maybe you do understand that, but just don't care. I am betting the latter.
sorry.
In particular I am glad that Wikipedia serves to organize and store content on the business and products of various corporations. In particular its corporate histories are very informative and help me understand the complex relationship between entites that now largely shape our lives. No other reference has as much (supposedly) neutral information collected in one place. It makes me feel like less of a cog in a machine now that I can understand the beast.
Many encyclopedias would scoff at the idea of creating an article dedicated to Viacom, the now-gone DEC, or Six Apart. But Wikipedia has wealths of such information, and it is invaluable for this reason.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I was shooting for "funny" or "flamebait" depending on what the mods' opinion of wikipedia is today, but I'll take "insightful" is that's what you've got...
0 1 - just my two bits
One way to deal with the articles is to make a new system in which the relevance, popularity etc. are given points or something, so as the users themselves. This way, if a article becomes popular or scientificly proven, only a handfull of users who have the needed credentials to be able to contribute, limiting the number of bad article posts. Also a moderating scheme such as Slashdot could be devised for articles and users. So a user (or IP) with bad karma would not be able to break the article or fill it with nonsense, while new articles would be open for editing to everyone until it matures ... It is kind of constraining, but I think that would raise the quallity of Wikipedia alot.
..is in inverse proportion to number of disputes a subject generates.
Oh,and it must be "Notable".