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Our Love/Hate Relationship With Wikipedia
netbuzz points us to a somewhat snarky Washington Post article about the Wikipedians' work in upholding a minimum standard of "notability" for the collaborative encyclopedia. Here's his take on the Post's bemusement from a NetworkWorld blog: "The Washington Post this morning gets its snickers at the Wikipedians who do the best they can to apply the minimum 'notability' standards needed to keep the online encyclopedia's 1.5 million English entries relatively free of worthless junk. 'It's also safe to assume these are people with a lot of time on their hands,' the Post writer notes... These are people doing a truly thankless job... and they deserve a few thank-yous."
Most wikipedia editors you ever interact with are really quite nice. Wikipedia has a good sense of community. There's also a bit of personal satisfaction of knowing that you're slowly helping expand the ammount of freely available public knowledge, without the cruft.
Didn't the MSM take something of a similar attitude toward blogs once they first emerged as a real force? And Wikipedia has been gaining "critical mass" in the same way blogs did a two or three years past. Setting all that aside, the tone of the article is somewhat unprofessional if your evaluating a new idea.
That's hardly an inaccurate assumption. For example if myself and other AC's came to a consensus that you are a asshole, I'm sure that would be accurate.
I do not see the need for the stringent notability criterion on Wikipedia: it is not as that the book will be to thick and expensive to sell if every article would be allowed to stay. (Bandwidth-costs must outweigh the cost for harddisks as it is mainly text.) What would be the harm of being a repisotory of every article that somebody had the energy to write? Still keeping the wiki methid: anybody can correct any article at any time. (I do not see the reason for necessarily keeping the articles short, either. A long article is better than a short one, just make sure that there is a good summary in the beginning. This would also allow for giving opposing theories some space.)
Don't hold back. Tell us what you really think about Wikipedia.
IMHO the problem with wikipedia is that they included the prefix -pedia in their name. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It's more a global store of knowledge - a wiki - and ideas of varying quality will creep in much more than a published encyclopedia. Claims that anarchistic editing makes for higher accuracy than a published book are just unrealistic - when you set up such expectations and they are dashed you get very vocal critics of wikipedia such as yourself. If you treat it like a published work of course you'll be disappointed. Even with a published work you should check and re-check any fact you read if it's at all important. With wikipedia this is even more true since anyone can contribute not just recognised experts. To call it a shit casserole though is going way too far. It's an excellent free resource if all you want is a general idea on a topic or if that information is for interest and not something you'll base work or important decisions on.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
First among them, The Long Tail, and why it would benefit the site to take advantage of it rather than ignore it.
The whole "notability" criteria seems very much like 1980s thinking. So many lessons of the internet being ignored there.
With notability comes verifiability. If I submit a Wikipedia article about my cat, filled with adorable pictures and tales of the cat's day-by-day exploits, it may fit into the "room for everything" model that some snubbed band members might believe is right, but who's to say that all that drivel about my cat isn't just a bunch of lies? But if it turns out that I'm the President of the United States, then my cat becomes notable, because there are undoubtedly numerous verifiable news reports from reputable agencies detailing various events in the life of my cat.
It amuses me that most of the people complaining about the "notability" requirement are the same people whose vanity-based Wikipedia articles were seen for what they are - self-aggrandizement - and subsequently removed.
Also, for the record, I don't have a cat.
I use wikipedia all the time. I thoroughly enjoy the information. I think it is a great of example of what is good about the internet. A community of people donating the time and knowledge to betterment of us all. Like any source of information you must be a critical thinker and verify its validity, yet I find it to be very good for the most part. I would consider being critical if I was paying to use the service. I find it unreasonable to be too critical of something that is free.
Why should I prove that I know how to drive in order to edit Wikipedia ?
More generally, you are assuming that anonymous editors, people younger than 21 and people without a drivers license/ID currently bring more bad things than good things to Wikipedia. You may be right, but I don't see any reason to believe it just because you say it. Many anonymous editors make excellent contributions to Wikipedia, as do a lot of teenagers. What is the point of cutting down vandalism if we lose more valuable content simultaneously ?
Zorglub
This is really the only good reason for the "notability" standards, IMO. It doesn't 'hurt' WP to have articles on obscure subjects, except insofar as they become impossible to verify once you get below a certain 'critical mass' where you can reasonably expect to find people who are going to know something about the subject.
Part of the benefit of Wikipedia is that it has articles on a wide variety of things, far more than a paper encyclopedia ever could. If I wanted to read Encyclopedia Britannica, I'd just go and read it. One of the reasons I search WP is because it has far more content, on a wider variety of things, than a traditional encyclopedia would.
The only reason to eliminate articles is when they're such small niche topics, that they necessarily represent the views of only a small number of people.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Wikipedia is the 1994 USENET in 2006.
People exaggerate its flaws and underplay its usefulness, but everyone secretly knows it's the number one site on the 'net to start at if you need any kind of information.
People will propose stuff like what you've done. Some will, however, respond by pointing out that Wikipedia's fluidity and usefulness is actually directly proportional to the ease of access, and so any attempt to moderate it is doomed to failure. Others will run off and start their own forks, which will have all the heavy handed moderation supposedly necessary, and each will fail miserably.
Then, over time, the spammers and others with a commercial interest in vandalising Wikipedia will rise. Wikipedia's usefulness will start to drop. People will be turned off by it as a useful resource. And, many, hopefully many, many, years from now, it'll live on as a wasteland, a sad relic of an idealistic age.
But for now, it's the number one site on the 'net to start at if you need any kind of information, and just like Google Groups keeps the good in Usenet alive today, archives of Wikipedia will be awesome for "those in the know" in 2018.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
You're missing the point of notability. Obscure subjects can be notable, for the simple reason that "notability" on Wikipedia is a shorthand for whether it's believable that someone would actually want to read an article on the subject in question. All species of life are considered notable, for example, as are items in a few other areas.
The concept of "notability" was created because Wikipedia is constantly bombarded with new articles about someone's significant other, garage bands who have yet to relase an album, businesses looking for free advertising, and crackpot theories. Some people think that having an article on Wikipedia is a passport to fame & credibility. What we try to do on Wikipedia is report what other people believe is notable. And most -- I'll freely admit, not all, we do make mistakes -- of the articles that fail the notability guidelines are obviously of no interest except to a very few people -- if anyone beyond it's original author.
We are not an arbitor of importance: we're just trying to write an encyclopedia about topics people want to read, not include every last possible scrap of information conceivable. Unfortunately, with Wikipedia's high Alexa rating, too many people think that an Wikipedia leads to fame.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Maybe that could do it...Limit anonymous edits to changing +/50 characters or something.
Then you could have a Special page for all anonymous edits done, with a diff so it'd make it easy to find vandalism.
It still keeps the barrier to edit low so people can fix typos and bad grammar, but it doesn't let them post/remove entire articles/paragraphs. Also prevent page creation and deletion. Seems reasonable to me.
If some music nerd wants me to know John Lennon was wearing green socks on 4 April 1967 when he recorded A Day in the Life, it's not going to change dramatically the price of the Wikipedia. Heck, if I clicked through the hierarchy until I reached the article "Clothing of John Lennon during the SPLHCB session of 4 April 1967", I may be the only person who ever clicks the links, so it's virtually costless.
What if that data was actually in the "Great Britain" article because the music nerd thinks everyone who is interested in Great Britain should know about the colour of the socks of John Lennon during each recording session of Sergeant Pepper ? Guess what, YOU can edit the page to remove it (most authors won't actually mind) or move it to a more appropriate page (most authors would understand).
IMO there is no such thing as too much information.
Don't put Wik into the encyclopedia box. It's really a social knowledge network where opinion is just as entertaining as fact. It's engaging and addictive, especially around controversial topics. I think I spend more time on the Discussion pages than on the main pages. I enjoy (like many, I suspect) anonymously correcting little spelling, usage and grammar errors in Wik, just for the pleasure of it. I may never author an entry, but I'm Wikipedian, too.
Another key element of Wikipedia is its utility as a portal. I want to investigate a topic - click - there it is, ragged or elegant, but replete with interesting debate, useful links to current, socially vetted sources, etc. It is rich because it is messy. Messiness is info-liberation.
Wikipedia is probably more a threat to Yahoo and even Google than anyone else. I wouldn't mind if Wik was commercialised. This may be more productive than trying to police commercial messages and links out of Wik content.
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
Most of the articles about anything important were created before article 500,000. At 1.5 million, most of the articles are junk. It's bottom-feeder stuff now.
"Anything important"?? That's a completely subjective measure. The first 500, 000 entries were probably the most obvious ones. But much of what's "important" isn't obvious. (I'm sure you haven't scanned the next million articles to ascertain that they're "bottom-feeder" stuff. And equally sure that you're not qualified to make that judgement for all of those articles.)
My guess is that it wasn't until after the first 500,000 "popular" and easy subjects (including technical, non-controversial ones) were created that some of the most interesting articles — more likely to be "important" to people who already have some knowledge in an area — were created.
It's the job of WP editors to ascertain what's "important". They're developing criteria for that. Is an article on an obscure archeological site "important"? It might be "bottom-feed" to you, because you don't understand its significance. Likewise, an "obscure" band might have significant "importance" in the history of music.
Paper encyclopedias obviously can't bulge with highly specialist information. But what's highly specialist is up to specialists. There's no need for WP to constrain itself to what traditional 'pedias were constrained to. If John wants to write about something that only 20 people a year will read, where's the problem? Where WP might lack in depth, it might excel in breadth. I don't see the reasoning behind size constraints; notability, while still a very subjective criterion, seems a useful one at this point in WP's evolution. It's only had a few years to learn what the dead tree publishers had more than a century to learn.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
That's because you're an extremist idiot and you are notable as a result. Just sayin'.
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