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A Wikipedia WIthout Graffiti
Editor control over articles is controversial within the "radical collaboration" community; the Wikimedia foundation lists five "foundation issues that are essentially beyond debate", which includes "Ability of anyone to edit articles without registering". (In practice there are some safeguards in place to protect articles that are frequent targets of vandalism, like the George W. Bush entry.) But I'm fanatically results-oriented in my thinking, and I always ask: What are the purposes of this project, and how does this feature help achieve those purposes? It seems to me that a free online encyclopedia fills four main needs:
- A source of information about pop culture that can be fun to read even without being 100% sure that it's accurate (like who R.A.B. is)
- A source of information that can be freely and legally redistributed, e.g. by printing out copies for a class to read
- A source of information on subjects where you need to be close to 100% certain that the information is reliable -- at least as certain, say, as you would be if you read the same fact in several books
- A source of information that you can cite in a school paper as being reasonably authoritative and reliable
For the reliability problem, I can't improve on this priceless sentence from Wikipedia's own "Citing Wikipedia" page:
For many purposes, but particularly in academia, Wikipedia may not be considered an acceptable source. [ citation needed ]Wikipedia has actually done much better than I would have expected -- a study done in 2005 found that Wikipedia averaged about 4 errors per article compared to Britannica's 3, which is pretty good for a site where anybody can write that Columbus sailed to the New World in ships named the Ninja, the Pinto, and the Santa Fe. But for a site that harnesses the efforts of volunteers all over the world, I think the goal should be to surpass what has been done before, not just to tie with Britannica. And even if Wikipedia's error rate someday beats Britannica's, under its current model Wikipedia can never have the key property that Britannica has, which is that you can cite it as an authoritative source without sounding silly.
Citizendium's model of editor-approved articles, and editor approval of further edits to those articles, can help to achieve the benefits of collaboration, harnessing the efforts of volunteers, without falling into Wikipedia's traps. Assuming you can verify an editor's credentials (and we'll get to this in a minute), having an editor manage an article means two things: (a) you know the page wasn't vandalized in the last five minutes, and (b) you ought to be able to cite the work as a reference in a paper if your teacher isn't a total Luddite and you can explain to them how Citizendium works. Meanwhile, volunteers can still contribute without their own credentials being checked out; they can write as much as they want for an editor-approved article, as long as it's approved by the editor before going live.
There are still loopholes, of course. Currently Citizendium asks people to edit under their real name, but says that "we will use the honor principle to begin with", so anyone could claim to be a professor or a lunar astronaut. But the key words are "to begin with"; the difference between Wikipedia and Citizendium is that Citizendium views this as a loophole and not an intrinsic "community value", and loopholes can be fixed. To make the reliability as airtight as possible, I hope that Citizendium will eventually implement some sort of verification system, such as checking a professor's contact information on a Web page in the "faculty" section of an .edu Web server. I'm not instinctively thrilled by the thought of checking out volunteers' contact information, but it seems like the only way to achieve goals #3 and #4 above, so if it's as simple as sending a verification e-mail to an .edu address, that's a lot of gain for little effort. (Remember, this only has to be done for editors who sign off on articles, not for all volunteers. A non-editor volunteer could still ask to have their credentials checked out, so that they can be cited by their real name in the "end credits" of an article that lists volunteer contributors. But impersonation among regular volunteers is not likely to be a problem, since the editorial approval process ensures that only value-adding edits will be allowed, and it's unlikely that Alice would pretend to be Bob so that Bob can take all the glory of Alice's contributions to the project!)
Besides verifying authors' credentials, the one change that I hope Citizendium considers in the future is to give authors and editors credit at the top of each article -- or, for articles with many contributors, perhaps editors would be listed at the top and the "end credits" would list all contributors, on a separate page if necessary. This is because credited authorship for an article can help improve the article's usefulness in two ways -- the article can be cited as a reliable source, and the "name up in lights" factor rewards people for contributing more and better articles. Having authors listed only on the history page of an article, as they are in the current model, achieves the credibility benefit but not the "name up in lights" benefit. Larry Sanger suggested that having authors listed at the top of each article might put off readers from submitting edits -- if an article is perceived as being "owned", then others might feel like it's rude for them to change it. For me personally, this could go either way -- on the one hand, I might not realize that I was welcome to edit an article, but on the other hand, I think I might be more inclined to submit edits if I knew there was an editor in charge to keep someone else from frivolously overwriting my edits later. But in any case, to address this problem, each article could carry a banner at the top saying "Readers are encouraged to submit edits and other suggestions", and each paragraph could be accompanied by an "Edit" link, similar to Wikipedia (except that edits would go into a queue to be reviewed by the editor instead of going live). This would address the ownership-intimidation problem without taking away from the "name up in lights" factor. Sanger says that the Digital Universe Encyclopedia -- comprising the Encyclopedia of Earth and an Encyclopedia of the Cosmos, under development -- has plans to join with Citizendium and will use the credited-author model on their version of the site.
You might say that editors having their "name up in lights" would be an ego thing for editors, and I think you'd be right -- but I don't think this would be a bad thing, inasmuch as ego would motivate more people to become editors and do their best work. Perhaps I'd be wrong about this. Maybe a limited experiment could be carried out with two sites that are similar in every respect except that one allows editors and authors to take credit for their work, as might turn out to be the case with Citizendium and Encyclopedia of Earth. The point is that I don't think such a suggestion should be judged by whether it goes against the "spirit" of the project (as it certainly does in the case of Wikipedia!), but rather whether it helps to achieve the projects goals, such as goals #1 through #4 listed above.
There are still some problems that Citizendium's differences from Wikipedia won't solve. Many schools discourage citing Wikipedia not because it's written anonymously or because it contains errors, but because it's an encyclopedia. Yale's guidelines for citing Wikipedia state:
As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is written for a common readership. But students in Yale courses are already consulting primary materials and learning from experts in the discipline. In this context, to rely on Wikipedia -- even when the material is accurate -- is to position your work as inexpert and immature.Presumably many academics would have the same objections to a student citing Citizendium. I understand what these teachers mean, but I think this is a case of not thinking in terms of results. If the purpose of an assignment is to collect and present information, then any means of accomplishing that goal should be valid, including the easiest method of looking up the information in an encyclopedia. To make a student look beyond the encyclopedia, an assignment can simply require depth of research that goes beyond what the encyclopedia would provide. (Students, if you're worried that your teacher will take this to heart and make your assignments harder, just be happy that your teacher is hip enough to be reading this in the first place.) Some things are hard, but they should only be hard if they're intrinsically hard, not because you handicapped yourself with arbitrary rules.
But there is another, more permanent problem -- even with verification of authors' credentials, how do we know that the information in Citizendium articles is accurate? How do we know the author didn't make a mistake, or lie? This gets into deeper issues because these problems exist no matter what source you're consulting. There are books in print that deny the Holocaust or the possibility of evolution, and they're printed on real paper, with ISBN numbers and everything. Some of them even make it into libraries. How skeptical should we be of we read in books? In January two advocacy groups presented a report to Congress in which many government scientists said they felt pressured by the Bush administration to downplay the global warming threat in their statements. Does that mean statements from government scientists are inherently suspect?
And almost anyone who has had more than two articles written about them, knows the feeling of reading the article and reacting, "Wow, I had no idea that I was a transgendered NRA member who volunteers with the Moonies!" The New York Times is hosting an article about me from 2000 claiming that I was fired from Microsoft, when I actually quit. I showed them a copy of my personnel file with "Voluntary resignation" printed on it, but they have still refused to change the article. (When I first wrote to the paper's "Public Editor" about the matter, created to restore "reader credibility" after the Jayson Blair scandal, they replied that they wouldn't change the error because it never appeared in the print version of the paper. Huh?) I put up my own webpage to tell my side of the story, but if you were a Wikipedia or Citizendium editor and you had conflicting information from different sources, who would you believe, the New York Times, or a Web site called PublicEditorMyAss.com?
And yet, I freely admit that even today, I would trust a fact from the New York Times more than a fact from Bob's Bait And Tackle Shop And Technology Blog. We instinctively trust sources because of their reputation; we figure that they must have gotten their reputation somehow. This is not a great algorithm for deciding trustworthiness, but it may be the best that we can do -- in a world where we can't verify every fact firsthand, what choice do we have but to rely on sources that have provided mostly-reliable information in the past? (Wikipedia vandals are able to hack this mental algorithm because we think of Wikipedia as "one source" with a high average reliability, when it's really comprised of many sources, some of whom are deliberately less reliable than others.)
So, I think the Citizendium model is a move in the right direction -- taking into account the limits of what we can know from third-party sources, and doing the best we can within those limits. The least we can do is to know who has signed off on the accuracy of an article, so we can factor that into our decision to trust it. Last month Citizendium released their first editor-approved article, a single article about Biology. It may not look like anything revolutionary right now, but the difference between that and the Wikipedia entry is that you can't change the title of the Citizendium article to LARRY SANGER IS A BUTT BRAIN HA HA. You have to go through an editor for that.
I think this very interesting article has a very good point when it says that it would be nice if contributers were allowed to recieve credit for their work. Especially if this credit would result in being allowed to have a link from your name like it does here on /. (the part with the link is my addition to what the article talks about)
I know and agree that in the perfect world it shouldn't matter, but this world is not perfect. For those with a steady income and a good job they are happy with it doesn't matter so much, but for someone like me a link to my homepage often means the difference between if take the time to contribute or not.
Traffic on a homepage equals income, at least for me and I do at times have to count the cents.
I would really like to contribute with something worthwhile now and then and the link to my homepage justifies that I do spend the time on doing so.
Right now I do not live from my web pages, I don't know if I want to, but with my present job status those returning visitors I do have on my webpage and blog are quite valuable to me as they might be the start of what I may have to turn to make a living, at least for a time, if no geophysics work shows up here soon.
The job spec they put out for that editor...
Nothing witty
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The immediate publication of changes is a big motivator, not just for spammers and pranksters. It adds a reward to the work that people are doing. Remove that and you lose many contributors, and without an abundance of contributors you lose the second motivation as well: Completeness. Nobody wants to work on something that continues to lack in breadth. In turn that means you need to provide other motivations, which usually means paying people for their work.
This sounds similar to a reputation system for editors combined with a moderation system. Changes to an article or entry would need to be passed up through a chain of editors with increasing rank or rep. Use the best of vbulletin and slashcode to fix wiki. (Gotta love all the buzzwords)
Vista Help Forum
Windows Vista Help Forum
Unfortunately, in the real world they do.
But that's a nit- it's a fundamental problem of ANY reference (be it the news, university research, or even good old Britannica).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Watch a livefeed of edits in real time.
Click on suspicious ones to check them out, and revert when apropriate. It's easy, fun and satisifying.
The rules regarding non-citation of material gathered from an encyclopedia isn't arbitrary. It's because encyclopedias are not authoritative, in that they do not research information but merely collate it. As such, they are not sources of information in and of themselves. Hence, you cannot reasonably question the logic of what is said there, just question the source of it. It is vital in any reasonable paper to be able to question and argue with the findings.
All that needs to be done is have a "second face" to wikipedia, where the article visible to the general population is the "last good version" okayed by an administrator or long-time user. This is being done on one of the foreign wikipedias already (wasn't there a /. article about it?)
Besides, who wants to reproduce all the wikipedia knowledge into a new database? Let's just improve the one we have already. (Yes, the new database can just copy wikipedia's content, but they then have to credit wikipedia indefinitely.)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
and call it Nupedia... and then scrap it because Wikipedia was better? :)
And Wikipedia is already trying out the "editor" plan anyway.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Just imagine what that woul***ERIC IS A FAG***
Wikipedia made a huge mistake. It figured that everyone can contribute *and* edit, and that editors were also contributors. Nope, contributors are mostly good contributors, that Wikipedia got right. Editors, however, either want to present information, ot just their own POV.
Letting contributors be editors is asking for poor presentation. Asking editors to be contributors is begging to be hurt. The "but more people will fix it" response may be true, but that's is a kludge, not an answer to the problem.
Therefore, there needs to be a separation between contributing to a page and editting it. Allowing people to edit the main page is silly. Allowing them to edit a candidate is an excellent idea. As a candidate begins to differ from the main page (or possibly a certain amount of time has passed), there can be a process ot make it the main page. This process, whether by hand, by vote, or who knows what, should have different rules than fully open contributions.
The only real drawback is who gets to decide what goes live is not a more limited pool and be even more easily usurped by a group that decides they want to "own" a page, or bias of the responsible editor. It'll be interesting to see how it works out, and then how the finished product differs from Wikipedia.
Have you read my journal today?
This really sucks. I use wikipedia for the sole purpose of proving to my wife that I'm right 100% of the time by editing articles, publishing them, and quickly showing them to her before someone can change it.
Quick, mod article away!!
I just wanted to read a few articles. I can't. Sorry, but that means I have to give you an e-mail address. Major flaw, sorry, game over.
I can't even be bothered to read into the docs to find out whether they're going to try and make money on this somehow. Well written Slashvertisement, but Wikipedia is obviously a very good source or not so many would use it. Semi-anonymous editors seem to be hammering out the graffiti pretty well regardless.
My little site.
It's true, the first version of anything on the Internet always remains the best-maintained and most popular. That's why I still do all my searching with the World Wide Web Worm and get all my tech news from Slashdot.
Hmm, not sure I agree regarding scalability. "Editors" in one sense already exist on wikipedia. We tend to adopt articles and keep an eye on them - mostly reverts of vandalism. The only problem, IMHO, would be if they place the editor-bar too high....
... and I have no idea what is so significant about being first, or why you assume that wikipedia will always be a better source of information...
I have a love/hate relationship with wikipedia, as, I suspect, most people do who have contributed over a period of time. Coping with vandals, coping with trolls, aggressive nationalists and other assorted weirdos - half the time I wonder why I bother... the incentive to craft and hone an article under those circs. is very weak.
I think also the original contributor should have some moderation rights, but not ultimate... Maybe based on your level, you can moderate, or over-moderate other people?
How skeptical should we be of we read in books?
What?
Have you read my journal today?
Consider the story of the Phantom console. Slashdot collectively said "Interesting, but let's see some proof". The more flowery or adrenaline pumped the prose, the more skeptical we should be when there's nothing we can actually get our hands on. This article about the greatness of Citizendium falls into the same trap, and our response here should be to hold off on our praise until there's something that can be evaluated.
One other thing is the issue of graffiti. It's given quite a bit of exposure, heck, it's even in the title of the article itself. But realistically speaking, how big of a problem is it? Wikipedia has a pretty darn good response time when it comes to defacement/graffiti. There are vandalbots that autorevert some changes that meet certain heuristics, there are groups of people who skim through the latest changes, there are IRC channels that make it easy for people to see a feed of what's happening... I'd like to suggest that vandalism isn't really a _problem_ in the sense that it hurts the project, because even though there's lots of vandalism, it's nipped in the bud so quickly that 99.9% of the end users who are just _using_ the project don't see it. I think there are people who perceive vandalism as a bigger issue that it is because they either take the knowledge that vandalism is possible and logically extrapolate that it must therefor be widespread, and the other group are the folks who specifically fight vandalism, and because of that, it's the only thing they see on the project.
Citizendium is a neat idea, but I hope that as a community we'll let it succeed or fail on its own merits and not because we want to "teach wikipedia a lesson" or because the PR behind that project is controlling our feelings.
The problem this site and other self-congratulatory sites like Digital Universe face in replacing Wikipedia is dislodging a recognized central repository on the Internet. The Internet is really good at decentralizing control and information, but if you manage to do the reverse, then its very difficult to change that. Many have created better auction software than eBay, but they're not likely to replace eBay because it has the largest audience for sellers. Wikipedia has plenty of critics, but none of them have succeeded in replacing it. Nobody looking for information is going to replace Wikipedia because there is more authoritative editors or tighter control at another site. They're going to go where the information is. Vandalism is not enough of a reason. As Stephen Colbert proved, Wikipedia has this under control because again, they have the largest audience controlling it.
That said, Mr. Haselton's article smells an awful lot like astroturfing.
I rather welcome the fact that you have to think about whether a Wikipedia article is accurate. You should apply the same evaluation for *any* source. It's high time the "it's right here in black and white" was discredited as an argument winner.
Citizendium will go the way of Nupedia. Or worse, the way of enciclopedia libre, the languishing spanish language fork of wikipedia; if you manage to load the page (seldom possible due to technical problems all the time), you'll see it has about 20% as many articles as the spanish wikipedia, which is by no means among the top 5 wikipedias.
Schemes that foster collaboration are key here; Nupedia was too closed; it's no wonder that both citizendium and enciclopedia libre are far more restrictive than wikipedia, thus both are destined to always lag behind in the way of content.
I love wikipedia, but it does have one important issue: it is increasingly banned from use in various forms of research, for instance, as a work cited in a research paper for school. Whether that is appropriate or not (I have mixed feelings on the subject myself) has no bearing on the fact that it is happening. Something like this, with accountable "expert" editorial control could prove to be a resource as powerful as wikipedia that also has the added benefit of being recognized by the larger acedemic community.
Again, let me stress this, I'm not saying that the bans on wikipedia articles are right, just that they are happening. The main argument for the bans (whether flawed or not) seems to what is said to be a "lack of editorial control" (again, I'm not arguing this personally) and I think something like this could appease those currently banning wikipedia which is altogether a great resource for research.
The "editor plan" as you call it is as scalable as anything can be. It's not unreasonable to think that a person can review a CV in about 10 minutes. Multiply that by 10 people approving CVs at an hour a day, and we can have 60 new editors a day without breaking a sweat.
Zachary Pruckowski
Citizendium Executive Board
... and I have no idea what is so significant about being first Being the first wiki encyclopedia probably isn't significant. But building a userbase and a brand first is.There are now millions of people who's first instinct is to look in Wikipedia. Dragging them to some other site (who's name I've already forgotten) is hard. Like getting Google search users to switch.
I always wonder why Wikipedia doesn't keep some kind of "merit" number for articles.
Registered users could have a merit number based on how long they've been around, how many edits they made etc.
Also, registered users could mod authors as well as articles (and, hence, their authors.) That would give each author a semi-reliable merit value. Then you could calculate a merit figure for an article from how much was contributed by whom and any mod points for the article itself.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
You can have 6,000 editors, but Wikipedia has over 1.6 million articles just in English. 10 minutes per article is a LOT of time, even spread over thousands of people.
Developers: We can use your help.
I think wikipedia solidly has the model right (even if the reviewing system is poor) about what's encyclopedic. The big point is pop culture and five minute stories arn't encyclopedic. The story about R.A.B. is a very special case as there is an encyclopedic nature to how the story was leaked, even there it's debatable if it will remain in the wiki (I don't see much there ).
No matter what site it is you won't be able to cite it. Many schools will not take any encyclopedia as a primary source in the first place (and if you have to use an encyclopedia as a source you really arn't trying hard enough.)
Wikipedia is a good first page to go to so you can learn the broad scope of a subject but if someone expect to be a master of knowledge with just wikipedia that's a problem. Any site similar to Wikipedia no matter what will fall into the same problem, no matter how many self appointed experts they promote. If the way to get your info on the site is through reference sites you can easily do that by faking three or four different sites about the info with the fake info.
The other thing is I've seen this before with www.tvtome.com There was a serious problem with "what is allowed". You would have editors who have different standards (and still do on www.tv.com) and then you'd have editors who did nothing but veto anyone's work and steal credit which makes people not want to contribute. Or just grab as many pages that they can and sit on them, not editing. All in all having an editor with the power to veto and approve work always ends up hurting collabrative efforts, not to meantion potential bias.
However, all the Wikipedia text and many of the images are available under GNU Free Documentation License. If someone thinks they have a better way of operating, they can grab a copy of the current Wikipedia and go fork it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
... and I have no idea what is so significant about being first... What are you talking about? Everybody I know uses VisiCalc (first spreadsheet) and WordStar (first commercial word processing program) on their MITS Altair workstations. And what about these Google people, thinking that they can surpass Altavista? Pffft!That is correct, and Wikipedia's solution to the problem of editor bias is the reason that it is so popular and robust. Every editor, unknown or otherwise, is fallable. Limiting publishing privileges to a few people means that there are fewer checks and balances on content. These checks and balances also keep Wikipedia's spam level improbably low for an open-content site of its size.
Wikipedia is successful because it is what Humanity Has to Say. Its problems resemble the problems of human discourse in general. Like other small problems that occur within human interactions, most of Wikipedia's minor hiccups are sorted out quickly through a sustained high level of that human interaction.
No jokes, please
Ah, fresh astro turf. Wikipedia's draw is that I can enter anything I want. This includes anything about me or my pet dog or my favorite color. But this also means I can edit the definition of the Bill of Rights, etc. This is the whole point, that I can add, edit or view anything. And the notion of using it as a viable source is completely shot down, as anyone in scholastics would tell you, because you are much better off just using the sources that are cited. This would in turn make your paper valid and much more effective than even sourcing the Britannica.
art is science made clear. -cocteau
No Wikipedia is NOT slightly less accurate than Britannica, it's very very inaccurate. The study that wikiphiles like to quote was a stitch-up designed to show Wikipedia in the most favorable light.
Most of the time Wikipedia varies between mediocre and deeply flawed. Yes there's lots of interesting trivia in there but there are also gaping flaws that the unwary won't pick up on.
Nor can you avoid Wikipedia by just putting -wikipedia and -wiki in your search engine: there are at least 965 domains that scrape Wikipedia and more are being setup by the day.
Will Citizendium avoid the bear-trap that Wikipedia has fallen into? It depends very much on how much control the editors really have. It also depends on whether Citizendium's contributors continue to do so when they have no guarantee that their work ever sees the light of day.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
First, let me be yet another person to say that I won't use any encyclopedia that forces me to register before I can read. I know that's probably a temporary flaw, but it's a major one.
Second, I'm intrigued by the editor approach. But Wikipedia is not only known for the occasional inaccuracy -- it is also famous for arbitrary decisions, using a star chamber of editors, about what is worthy of inclusion. The webcomic world is up in arms about arbitrary, nonsensical decisions involving comics. Will Citizendium take the advice of people knowledgeable in their fields about what should and should not be included? Or will that be left up to some uber-editor who may or may not have prejudices against the topic?
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I guess this is sort of random, and I'm pretty ill-informed about these sorts of things, but it seems to me there are two separate issues. Accuracy and credibility, which do not always have anything to do with one another. THis is pretty clearly stated with the New York Times example. Vandilism in Wikipedia, in the end, does not seem to affect accuracy because someone's just going to fix it as soon as they notice it. However, seeing that koala have a diet composed primarily of donuts will reduce credibility, even if it's fixed half an hour later. However, I'd argue that due to Delphi effect or other such things, having a larger number of people contributing is generally more accurate, and certainly more scalable, than an editor sytem. Even if it's not true, if the whole accuracy measurement is correct, then Wikipedia isn't bad for accuracy and it's certainly bigger and has more information than Britanica. In the end, it seems to me that all having the editor does is put a stamp on it that says "I'm J. Random Editor and I approve this article." It adds authenticity, but not necessarily accuracy.
If you want to capitalize on wikipedia's flaws then why not make a collection of the funniest vandalizations..
Wikipedia is great. But it has so much community momentum that it can't change in certain ways (people have tried!).
To implement the changes that Citizendium implements, you've gotta start a new project.
You got that mixed up somehow. I'm talking about certifying CVs at 10 minutes/CV.
As to articles, you'll recall that WP wasn't built in a day. In fact, it was built over 5 years. To expect anyone else to be able to replicate or improve that in anything other than years is silly. But we've got time. If this takes 2 years or 3 or 10, we're here for the long haul.
Zachary Pruckowski
Citizendium Executive Board
One of the top administrators at Wikipedia goes by the name of Essjay. In an article by Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Essjay is described as follows in the July 31, 2006 issue of The New Yorker magazine:
"One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a private university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005.... Essjay is serving a second term as chair of the mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat, and a checkuser, which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz, and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C. chat channels, where users often trade gossip about abuses they have witnessed."
The information in The New Yorker came from his user page that he developed over the previous year. He pushed all the correct Wikipedia buttons: he said he was gay, an expert on Catholocism but an elder in a liberal Protestant church, he and his partner had both a cat and a dog, and he was past 30 but not yet 40. From credentials like this, and from his mind-boggling level of activity on Wikipedia, he became administrator, bureaucrat, checkuser, oversight, and last month was named a community manager at Wikia.
Perhaps because he is employed by Wikia now, Essjay has coughed up his real name. He doesn't have two PhDs, and he isn't a tenured professor. He's a 24-year-old living near Louisville, Kentucky. The New Yorker, famous for its fact-checking, got it all wrong.
Incidents like this illustrate the limitations of the Wikipedia approach. It's not an encyclopedia, but rather it's a video game that escaped from its box, and is now influencing real people in the real world.
> 4. A source of information that you can cite in a school paper as being reasonably authoritative and reliable
Citing any encyclopedia as a source tends to take a full grade off a paper. When doing research, think of an encyclopedia as a kind of reverse bibliography and nothing more.
Actually serious academic community bans the use of ANY encyclopedia. Sure you are encouraged to use them in your research, but you should note cite them for accuracy. Though I do take issue with some professors who don't want me to cite it at all, when I'm only citing them to indicate where I got an idea.. ie I don't like to plagurise.
And who picks the editors? In hot topics like politics or religion could it be the editor who does the hijacking? Maybe not by changing the page directly, but by not making the proper edits in a timely manner? Presumably editors would need to be considered experts in their given field. How do you pick an expert for religion? politics? hell even something like economics? Of course these problems plague all sources of information, which is why it's important to use multiple sources even when something like wikipedia or this new one look to be so complete.
Wikipedia will always, by nature, be more reactive to world events than Citizendium. Minutes after a major event occurs, the related wikis are updated. Once articles have been tied down and relegated to an editor, it falls to the editor to react to changes in content relevance. If that "editor" consists of the entire earth's population (minus jerkweeds that have been banned), high, real-time relevance is maintained. Thus, Wikipedia becomes an extension of news media, adding immense value to a news story by supplying rich background information and hypertext access to related material.
Graffiti will always be a known issue, but the very fact that Wikipedia has a huge volume of contributors ensures that graffiti will be short-lived. If traffic fell, it would have to employ the same artifice as Citizendium, locking down articles because there aren't enough to people passing through every section of the database to keep graffiti life expectancy to a minimum.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
I want to read wikipedia because it's user contributor content. The model is such that vandilism fades over time with enough input from the masses. With the editor based model, I'm back to getting my news filtered through small groups of self-styled elites - just like the crap that comes out of the rest of the traditional mass media (NYT, WP, BBC, ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN).
You have to trust someone(s) at some point, I vote for the masses.
The link you supplied goes to a page that states, "This Wikipedia page is currently inactive and is kept primarily for historical interest."
I'm aware that the German Wikipedia is working on the vandalism problem, but do you have a better link?
Who are these "trustworthy" central editors? And why can't I have a Wikipedia with edits applied from only those editors who I trust, or who my trusted friends trust?
--
make install -not war
1. In the original article, it states that qualifications to be an editor on Citizendium are currently being accepted on an honor basis (i.e. if you claim to be a professor they just accept that). When I signed up to be an editor, I had to send email from my @nasa.gov email and link to my CV. 2. Some comments have complained that you have register to see the articles. That's because it's not open to the general public yet. They're testing things on a closed pilot program first. So, stay tuned!
Don't dismiss the Citizendium just because Wikipedia is trying out an "editor system". Citizendium is really quite interesting and unique for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to Responsibility and Respect of Expertise.
1) The Citizendium introduces the concept of personal responsibility. People are asked to use their real identities so that reputations are on the line (as they should be, because reputations are also on the line when siting sources).
2) The Citizendium will demand in its editors the same qualifications that would qualify that person as an expert outside the encyclopedia. This is a crucial variation of the Wikipedia "editor system" that you linked to. It will require a great deal of work on behalf of its administrators, but will make the Citizendium respected by professionals.
ITYM getting AltaVista users to switch.
Interestingly, you cannot read Citizendium's privacy policy unless you sign up and log in. Defeats the purpose, doesn't it?
Also, you can't even contact the editor about it.
where's all that Karma?
"Wikipedia is the best source of what the masses believe is true at any given time."
Paraphrase. I don't know who said it first, and perhaps a little better than I remember it. But the point is that Wikipedia has an IQ of 100. To claim that blatant mistakes in Wikipedia will eventually be corrected is, I think, statistically unlikely.
Where Wikipdia is especially good is in straight factual information with no need for "interpretation." For example, where is Barcelona, Spain? It gives you latitude and longitude; you can check it with Google Earth and correct if necessary. Sometimes Wikipedia will give a coordinate in the middle of the ocean, It's not always accurate, but it is easily verifiable. It's also good where it has 'incorporated' text from other sources. For example, much of the historical information on Roman civilization is from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, still considered one of the best efforts ever produced. It is in the public domain. Wikipedia copied it. An interesting point when 'studies' show Wikipedia's error rate better or worse than Britannica.
Where Wikipedia is especially poor and unreliable is in political issues and debates. Tenacity and anger count far more than accuracy. Extremists tend to win these battles because they are so adamant and, for them, so much is at stake for them to ensure Wikipedia "gets it right." Antagonists accuse their opposite of "changing history," because, of course, God's on their side. Anyone who uses Wikipedia to learn accurate information on political issues is, as Cowboy Neal says of using Slashdot polls, insane.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
This is yet another glossed over project that copies - 'forks'. "The reasons for doing this now and not before are complex and not ready for discussion" ; see 'we waited for the source material to be available so we could ride on someone else's wave'. Come on....idealists say forking creates better products - what about the sustainability of forking re the trail of resentful people it leaves who provide the inspiration and talent to get these ideas off the ground in the first place? I'm all for improvement - but this is just copying, creating 'your own product' and then trying to hijack the talent from the original project - see Joomla.
Is it only me, or is anyone else dumbfounded by the assertion that soliciting people with .edu accounts to screen content edit proposals in their purported area of expertise will somehow make the content less biased? Can anyone who has been on a university campus in the last thirty years honestly say this with a straight face?
I used to be really, really skeptical of wikipedia, but they proved me wrong. The community editing thing actually works. Ten year olds posting infantile graffiti is a non-issue, in my experience, and bias actually does seem to flatten out when the whole world can edit anything that you say.
The main problem that I still see on the fringes of the Wikipedia experience is ad copy about products and other vanity copy posted by interested parties staying up because no one is interested enough in the specific person or thing to find the time to write a real article to replace it and it's not quite obvious or offensive enough to just delete. Not a big problem.
You can't cite encyclopedias, full stop. It's as simple as that. An encyclopedia gives references though, you simply go and read them (to confirm they do in fact make the statements claimed) and then cite them.
Surprise surprise that this has popped up here within 24hrs, what a non coincidence.
Monitor is ON.
C.
I predicted very early in the development of the Web that editors would be essential to its success. Here's why:
(1) The Wikipedia approach to gathering collaborative information is inherently flawed, as this article points out. The temptation to post erroneous or slanderous material is just too strong for some. Review by a subject-matter qualified editor is the only workable solution.
(2) Google's approach to indexing information on the Web is also flawed. By relying only on popularity and other questionable statistics, a search on Google is just as likely to bring up articles that are wildly off-base as it is to display those that are relevant. Regular review and reclassification by human editors would improve the results by an order of magnitude.
(3) People can't write. 90% of the Web sites out there could use some serious help with writing. Spelling and grammar are atrocious. Organization is nil. News services have employed editors for this reason for many years.
(4) It's too easy to automate the generation and submission of ad-related or disruptive pseudo-information on the Web. While spam filters can help, and they're getting better all the time, only a real human editor can reliably discern the difference between real and fake input.
Disclaimer: Yes, I am an Editor. And proud of it.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
An even higher bar to pass is the fact that Wikipedia comes up in the top search results for almost every major search engine for (likely) thousands or hundreds of thousands of topics, both popular and obscure. Hell, "George Bush" (both of them!) outrank whitehouse.gov on Google.
I'm trying to imagine a Slashdot headline WIthout typos.
Support the FairTax
How anyone can think that another community-based encyclopedia can succeed, while Wikipedia already exists, is beyond me. The accurate, edited resource that people are looking for is called "books." Unsurprisingly, you can use Wikipedia (and Google) to find them.
For religion editor: I understand Ted Haggard is looking for a job.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
There's one thing I hope is addressed by the editor system: bias. Let's say that, on an article on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the editor ends up being a former Israeli general. Qualified? Certainly. Highly biased in favor of Israel? Undoubtedly. Can anyone take a guess as to whether bias will be very apparent in the resultant article?
I'm not sure what the solution to this is. But I worry about this sort of thing in an "editor" system. Perhaps on articles that aren't deemed "controversial", you can have a single editor, but on articles that are deemed controversial (as judged by moderators who haven't been involved in the article), you need multiple editors, and only content that they can reach consensus on can be published. Do you think this would work?
Monkeywrench Ex Machina.
...always leads to entertaining, if wildly inaccurate conclusions.
"Such a statement -- "no reason that they even need to be collaborative" -- may be regarded by some Wikipedia devotees as heresy, but I think it hits the nail on the head. The purpose of such a project is defined by the quality of the information it produces. Collaboration is a possible means to that end, but collaboration itself is not the point."
If this is the premise upon which the conclusions are based, well, no wonder the author and I disagree. In fact, I question the sanity of someone who intimates that the purpose of any endeavor is somehow defined after the result is measured. Not only is that a serious case of putting the cart before the horse, it's also claiming the cart is a carriage magicked out of a pumpkin and that the horse is a unicorn.
Actually, if it was one's goal to create a reliable, reasonably accurate online encyclopedia, one would absolutely not create such an overtly collaborative system. Reliability requires strictures on contributions that Wikipedia just does not have. Editorial control. Trusted contributorship. Limited access. You can't control the output unless you control the input.
The fact is that the author, given to fits of divination of purpose ex post facto, defines the goal as to create an authoritative online information base, points to the graffiti and says, "you failed".
The fact is that Wikipedia was not an attempt to create an online encyclopedia.
Some would say "What?! No!!! It HAS to be because that's what popped out the end!!" Here's your pumpkin carriage, here's your unicorn, now go put them together wrong and go play in traffic.
My guess, if we are going to be given to fits of attempting to assess purpose from result, is that Wikipedia was an experiment to see if a truly open environment could achieve reliable results, with the "creation of an encyclopedia" merely as the conditions of that experiment. Put another way, could a reasonably reliable, reasonably encyclopedic repository of information be built with no restriction on contribution? Would the readership, given authorship, take ownership?
If this was indeed the purpose, did it not succeed? Hence the fallacy of guessing the purpose from the result. I can just as easily provide a scenario where the diametric opposite is the result, and be completely justified in the conclusion.
When it comes to bias, Wikipedia is just as gullible as very other published work in the world. If you have an author write a book, then it is very unlikely that that book will not be colored by the authors bias. If you have ten authors to a book, you get their ten biases. If you have a million authors, well, you get the mean of their million biases in the book.
That one million authors that Wikipedia has, is not a randomly distributed sampling of humankind. Most people do not have access to computers and those that do, do not speak English. Instead, Wikipedias authors come from mostly American middle-class youths with enough time on their hands to contribute to Wikipedia. There is nothing inherently bad with that, but it means that the bias is shifted towards an American point of view. Americans, naturally, have an American point of view. If you research the articles about the Iraq war, you will find that their bias have changed alot since 2003. Just like the American view of the war has changed alot since then. Or if you know some foreign languages, you can consult articles about the Iraq war in a non-English language. Not suprisingly, there will be some stunning differences on how what information is provided.
The standard response from Wikipediaists is that Wikipedia has a "neutral point of view" rule, meaning that articles should only contain facts and that all "views" should come from attributed sources. But such a rule totally misunderstands what bias is all about. Bias is all about EXCLUDING information that harms your bias and INCLUDING information that favors it.
So, Wikipedia is not what "Humanity Has to Say," it (the English version) is what Wikipedia contributors have to say. You are able to read a lot of great and factual things about maths, physics, medicine and other hard sciences. So please do not accept Wikipedia as an unbiased source for any topic that may be biased, it is not.
Football Odds
If you credential only those who have proven themselves trustworthy, you greatly limit the universe of both good and bad contributors. If you lose all those uncredentialed good contributors, you've lost the ability to keep up with the growth in bad contributions awaiting review.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Is this a new record for the longest /. article?
Sorry for the off-topic Q. ;)
I love Wikipedia vandalism though, where else can you find out that "William Howard Taft Was the Best President Ever and in No Way a Dick?" as I did last weekend?
I really hope you are modded up for that comment. You are so absolutely right, but there is a fairly simple solution (that you yourself suggested).
There are enough experts in the world on any topic for there to be a large plurality of editors for any given article. I say that there doesn't even need to be a dichotomy between "controversial" and "non-controversial"; just attach a plurality of editors to *every* article. If they are all given approval rights, the consensus element of Wikipedia still remains intact in The Citizendium, but now at two levels (the user and editor level). The set of editors for a topic will have to find a way to agree, or a higher power (perhaps Sanger himself in some cases) will have to step in to resolve the disagreement. I suspect that a large group of experts will eventually be able to stabilize almost any article's content with sufficiently neutral language. Heck, it happens on Wikipedia all the time; the only difference is that once this stabilization takes place on the Citizendium, it will have the tacit approval of [hopefully] well-regarded experts in the relevant field.
The problem is that most people can't agree on what is vandalism and what is cold hard fact. For example, look at this link. It got reverted pretty fast but the facts are clearly true.
More importantly your premise is entirely flawed as regards #3 and #4. Once you're out of about the sixth grade, an encyclopedia (whether Wikipedia or Britanica) is not good enough for a school paper. If you need to be 100% sure your data are accurate, you have to do more research than looking something up in an encyclopedia.
You may be able to cite Britannica without "sounding silly" but you can't cite it without BEING silly. An encyclopedia is only a starting point for research.
But using personal experience as an example, say you're due to get cataract surgery. Wikipedia is sufficient here (was for me) even though the article does in fact contain an inaccuracy or two: No eye shield was applied to my eye, nor a patch. And the word "usually" is especially egregious, as without a crystaline lens or IOL you will not be able to see at all!
The article about the IOL contains an inaccuracy as well; it says "The [post-surgical] recovery period is about 2-3 weeks". I had to use antibiotics for 3 weeks, an NSAID drop for four, and a steroid for about 5 or 6.
But these are minor; wikipedia filled my needs here, as they would anyone curious about cataracts and their removal.
When contrasting Wikipedia and Britannica, writers (you included) miss a main point, which is that Wikipedia is far, far more wide ranging in its choice of topics. Try finding a track listing for Ted Nugent's Stranglehold (let alone Joe Byrd and the Field Hiuppies' American Metaphysical Circus) in Britannica!
However, if your new encyclopedia lists tracks of old vinyl albums a side at a time, rather than a CD at a time (with Wikipedia it even does this for albums that were never remastered digitally) It will have my readership.
BTW, my Wikipedia user name is my real name. My slashdot user name used to be my real name but I changed email addresses and forgot my password; damn I think it was 4 or 5 digits. I'm AC today as I'm at work and don't have a clue what my PW is; in the days before computers I'd have written it down.
There are enough experts in the world on any topic for there to be a large plurality of editors for any given article. I say that there doesn't even need to be a dichotomy between "controversial" and "non-controversial"; just attach a plurality of editors to *every* article.
That's already the idea. The same person can't write and approve an article. Approval must be done by a plurality of uninvolved editors, or by a committee of editors collaborating on an article. Thus there would need to be several "Israeli generals" operating in unison, and they'd need to do so without another military history person noticing.
I don't see any difference in the end products here. I'm not going to Citizendium in a paper any more than I'm going to cite Wikipedia, or Brittanica. Primary sources, or reliable secondary sources, are what my profs look for. I use Wikipedia all the time, if I want to know what phylum ducks belong to or where in the hell Djibouti is. In that sense, I don't see where official edits help; to me, that only means that as soon as I see a grammatical error, I can't fix it. Not to mention that starting up a new project takes a lot of time and personpower, and until then, Wikipedia will remain far more comprehensive.
Having read a number of articles on Wikipedia, I disagree with the idea that it is a better source of information. Most of the writers of the articles seem to have the attitude of "Hey, I am a contributer. Yeay me!" Not to mention that the writers give themselves way too much credit for their writing abilities, and it shows. The quality of writing is mediocre at best and the content is only slightly better than that, being just a random littering of factoids. Many of the technical articles are summaries with a complete lack of cohesion or connecting of ideas within the articles. One gets the idea that the writers didn't learn the basics of writing theme papers in school. I would not consider wikipedia to be reference material, nor would I cite it in a paper.
Some might argue that Wikipedians are too proud to take content from what they see as an upstart, and for now, perhaps they are correct. However, if that project becomes more respected, accepted, and used, it will simply accelerate the day that it becomes accepted practice to start moving content from that project over to Wikipedia. The idea behind using the GFDL is that information can thrive, flourish, and be distributed; just as Citizendium has used Wikipedia articles as a base for their own, so too someday will we gladly use good, free-use content that their project generates. I, for one, expect that Citizendium will be able to produce (albeit relatively small amounts of) well-researched, well-written prose that will probably surpass what is currently at Wikipedia, and I eagerly look forward to integrating that content into "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit."
No Wikipedia is NOT slightly less accurate than Britannica, it's very very inaccurate. The study that wikiphiles like to quote was a stitch-up designed to show Wikipedia in the most favorable light.
OMG!!! Did you even read the Register article? Did you happen to notice the sources for said article? The only two significant sources for the article were the editor of Nature magazine, who published the article stating that Wikipedia and brittanica were roughly the same in accuracy... and Brittanica!!! All the bashing over the article was done by Brittanica lackeys! C'mon you have got to be kidding me. You're claiming this as proof? Show me independent studies, not an emotional article from a hack of an IT news site.
Brittanica may be right, but you've not sited a primary source which can be used to confirm this, and as such have fallen into the "bear trap" yourself.
Most of the time Wikipedia varies between mediocre and deeply flawed. Yes there's lots of interesting trivia in there but there are also gaping flaws that the unwary won't pick up on.
Perhaps you should site some examples? The whole argument about Wikipedia centers around siting sources and having proper references. You have given none, therefore you are as about as reliable as you say wikipedia is.
Nor can you avoid Wikipedia by just putting -wikipedia and -wiki in your search engine: there are at least 965 domains that scrape Wikipedia and more are being setup by the day.
That's a technical issue I can't speak to, but just because someone annoyingly crawls every website in existance doesn't mean that it has any direct affect on article accuracy. You don't even have a very good correlation to work with here either.
Will Citizendium avoid the bear-trap that Wikipedia has fallen into? It depends very much on how much control the editors really have. It also depends on whether Citizendium's contributors continue to do so when they have no guarantee that their work ever sees the light of day.
The bear trap is making Wikipedia out to be a flawed attempt at the be all end all repository for human knowledge, and that's what you are doing here. Brittanica and Wikipedia are two different ways of trying to achieve the same goal, of creating an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is not the codex of ultimate wisdom and knowledge. It's a summary of significant points of fact in time and the world, and is meant to give you, the reader, a place to start in your quest for knowledge. However, the wise researcher knows to question everything, including the encyclopedia. Britannica has sources for every article, and if Wikipedia doesn't have a source for information, the article will tell you that it lacks a source and posts a note asking for someone who wants to update such a page.
Britannica's philosophy is a closed system of researchers and scholars working for a company that is out to make money. Their advantage is also their disadvantage, in that not just anyone can edit their articles. A centralized authority keeps the jokers and morons out, but it is subject to bias, no matter how hard they try. Also, I absolutely hate that brittanica.com is a pay site. Knowledge should be free.
Wikipedia's philosophy is an open system of researchers and scholars donating their time to create a free and open site that anyone can read. Their advantage is also their disadvantage, in that anyone can contribute. They have moderation controls in place to help this out. It's still a problem with heated articles about current political figures who want to cast themselves in a heroic light, despite the dumb shit they've done. Noise is a problem but I frequently read several articles to learn something new I never knew about, and get a good starting point for more research. Despite complaints I continue to see, I've never seen anything like COWBOYNEAL IS TACO'S BITCH in any article, nor have I read anything to lead me to believe there's severe bias or tremendous amounts
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Apparently I can't manage the html tag for an accented e, so I'm no better than they are.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Your solution really only moves the problem a level. Someone could be found who will disagree with anything, so the onus is on the person who decides whether something is controversial or not. In some cases controversy is clear and should be treated from a balanced point of view (your Israel-Palestine example). In other cases the controversy is obvious, should be mentioned, but is not worthy of a dissenting editor, for example evolution, and then there are even more convoluted cases like global warming. Whomever decides who and how many editors a global warming article has, gets to choose the slant.
Such projects as Citizendium could start by taking Wikipedia content, marking it as "unapproved", and having a swarm of editors go through them. And they can then go through new edits and approve those. I can totally see traditional encyclopaedias doing this - publish a subset that is approved by the editors, and charge money for it. I expect that the GNU Free Documentation License allows this.
And one of these "edited Wikipedia" projects could have editors selected by reputation, sure, and it would sure be a useful experiment at least.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
Not to mention that, soon as those quality articles become publicly accessible, they will be referenced and cited from on Wikipedia...
You could probably just do as wikipedia does now... put a big obvious "bias" tag on the top and don't remove it until the person who raised the objections drops them, after either the original editor changes things or another expert with less bias (nobody has none) comes along and fixes it.
Or perhaps even hide the entire page and replace it with the bias note, let the article only be seen on the edit page or after agreeing that you understand it may not be accurate until the bias is gone. That way there *would* be issues with the site still, but all the "issue" pages would be carefully marked so that you could be sure anything that *wasn't* marked was in fact perfectly fine, even to use as a serious source where a printed encyclopedia would be acceptable.
The problem with an editor system is that it will discourage the creation of stub pages containing limited information, resulting in fewer contributions and fewer contributors. The only place where I could see that an editor system would be useful is for pages that are already well-established. On the other hand, Wikipedia's article locking mechanism already serves this function, so I'm a little skeptical that Citizendium will be better enough to generate a critical mass of interest.
http://outcampaign.org/
It would be easy enough for Wikipedia to implement the following levels of protection:
Freeze - last-certified-accurate version is what shows up by default, user has to click "see additional changes" to see the latest version
Delay - latest version at least 24 hours old OR latest certified-accurate version, whichever is later, shows up by default. user has to click to "see additional changes" to see latest version.
Administrators, editors who are "authorities on a subject matter," or even all editors with accounts older than, say, a month, could be allowed to certify articles as accurate.
This would greatly restrict the impact of Colbert Nation vandalism, as people would not want their account's certification-privileges suspended.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You are not supposed to cite from *any* kind of encyclopedia. Wikipedia, Webster, etc. are a start but in the end you should only cite original work.
Your list of 4 purposes left out the most important one: settling dinner-table arguments. That's what I use Wikipedia for.
It is weak to cite encyclopedias in research papers, but all research has to start somewhere. Wikipedia (as well as other encyclopedias, treatises, etc.) is primarily useful to a student researcher as a general subject overview. It provides concepts, keywords, pointers to related entries, and occasionally links to more authoritative sources. So, even though references to Wikipedia may not show up in a final paper, it may have been instrumental as a jumping-off point.
I've been using it a couple of weeks now and it is seriously cool. Get it at http://gnosis.clearforest.com/
I find it sad that the "citizen's encyclopedia" is only editable by some elite "experts". What exactly does the citizen part of the name mean, because it sure seems like only these so-called experts are the citizens. Why not say only land-owners can edit the encyclopedia, since an ivory tower education is just about as arbitrary.
1) Citizendium takes what is great about wikipedia, that they initially trust everybody to contribute responsibly, and turns it on its head by saying that nobody is trustworthy unless they prove themselves. Citizendium does not introduce the concept of personal responsibility, they introduce the concept of peer pressure and reputation.
2) I don't care about who wrote the page. What I care about is that the page is accurate and informative and well written. In other words, I don't care whether the smurfette33 that wrote the page on Riemann sums is a Ph.D or child prodigy. Meanwhile I'll know that the Citizendium's page will be written by Xinghua and be impossible to read because "page write self very good". As a reader, the only time I would ever care about who wrote the page is if the facts were wrong so other things the same person wrote can be re-checked. It boils down to Citizendium being written by irovy towers for ivory towers.
I doubt that wikipedia is really supposed to be anything more than a reasonably accurate resource. I mean, it's really not it's intended purpose to be a peer-reviewed, academically acceptable authority on any given subject. That doesn't mean it isn't useful though. If you want info on anything from math to anime, it has it. And, yes, may people want pages on specific harry potter characters.
This is why I'm fine with citizendium and wikipedia; both fill completely different niches. If I look up "petersen graph", for example, I don't really give a shit whether it's peer reviewed or not, I just want some accurate facts about it. On the other hand, if I'm looking for a source to cite in a philosophy paper, I'm going to stay the hell away from wikipedia.
Right, I suspected that multi-editor approval might already be implemented, but I wasn't sure. Even if it wasn't implemented yet, it would be trivial to do so given an existing personnel infrastructure.
Obviously, the key is getting enough diligent editors involved with the project. You have posted about the scalability of Citizendium in this thread, and I do believe that the model is sufficiently scalable. However, it will require a great deal of work to generate that much support among qualified editors. Good luck.
ENCYCLOPEDIAS ARE NOT AUTHORITATIVE SOURCES.
You already can't cite Brittanica if you're writing an academic paper at anything above maybe high school level. You can't cite Wikipedia either. They *already* have parity in that regard.
> Wikipedia has over 1.6 million articles just in English
s ._the_Space_Mutants
Gosh, whatever would we do without articles like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailor_Crystal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_and_Hart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons:_Bart_v
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I agree. The reality is that there is no way to completly avoid bias in any statement, as the US media demonsrates -- journalists, like Wikipedians, are extremely careful to limit their statements to "facts", and yet their statements still end up communicating a biased argument.
The difference with Wikipedia is that it reflects the bias of as many people as possible, instead of just one journalist. That's why it's probably a closer expression of the consensus of the human commons than anything else available.
As you say, it doesn't represent all of humanity because not all humans have access to computers, internet, etc. The way to improve that situation is to *increase* the number of people who can edit it, not decrease it. Hopefully, it will eventually become an even better record of the current state of human discourse, and continue to mirror the strengths and shortcomings of that discourse.
No jokes, please
"Vandilism in Wikipedia, in the end, does not seem to affect accuracy because someone's just going to fix it as soon as they notice it."
Sounds like the "thousand eyes make bugs shallow" argument. We'll see if it works for both.
"Britanica. In the end, it seems to me that all having the editor does is put a stamp on it that says "I'm J. Random Editor and I approve this article." It adds authenticity, but not necessarily accuracy."
Except for the fact that I can look up the qualifications of "J. Random editor". I can't even find the editor, let alone their qualifications in Wikipedia.
Don't be stupid. Anybody can edit it. However, only certain people can approve an article. When it comes time to submit papers, law briefs, or business proposals to these people in "Ivory Towers" (AKA, functional members of society), they will require that you cite information from reliable sources (sources composed of editors who are respected in their fields). And with good cause; I would certainly expect that if I were going to make an important decision based on that information! When that time comes, you will be able to cite the Citizendium or say the Britannica, but not the Wikipedia. If you cite the Britannica, you will be citing a work authored by people whom you obviously dislike. Whereas, if you cite the the Citizendium, you will be citing the consensus of many people, and merely with the approval of those same people whom you dislike.
When I read this post, I started getting frustrated; how could someone really not understand that the author just left out a word? I started inspecting the post to see who would take more time to reply than it would have taken to understand the sentence. Hmm, the subject is "Moo" and it's a three digit UID... odd for someone who can't figure out that the missing word was... "What?"
The subject.
You got me.
It's the "radical collaboration" that created the critical mass in Wikipedia, and I'd also add, they were the first to achieve it (thus gaining the primary marketing position), and lightning almost always doesn't strike twice.
Citizendium is doomed to never achieve critical mass, as any elitist endeavor in the Open Age never does.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
The anonymous nature of Wikipedia is also flawed. Even a handle isn't going to help. At least with sources like a dictionary/encyclopedia I can see who's involved and trace them back to their qualifications. That also means that everyone has a stake in the quality of the resulting work.
"I would trust a fact from the New York Times more than a fact from Bob's Bait And Tackle Shop And Technology Blog."
NYTimes, Reuters, AP, the rantings of the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton, what difference does it make? If you read something in the newspaper, see it on TV or the internet, your reaction must be:
"That is very interesting, I wonder if it is true."
Trusting your fellow man and believing what he says are social virtues, but you never want have someone say to you after the house of cards has collapsed:
"And you believed them?"
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
What we need is an accepted target for all graffiti. Like chickens. Dudes already know about chickens, so we'll all just assume that article is bunk. Then every other article will be fine because all the graffiti will be in the chicken article.
Flickr already does it, and I've used it to find relevant images for Wikipedia articles.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Two points. First, Wikipedians will be too damn proud to replace their own hard work with the improved versions that CZ creates. Second, since we have unforked Wikipedia, there is an excellent chance that we will be using a CC license for all our new, non-WP-sourced articles. You may then debate among yourselves whether WP can then use those articles.
Why not have the editors approve single versions of an article on Wikipedia? These verified version could be marked with a star or something at the history page. If you wanted to ensure that you wouldn't see vandalism, or you just didn't care for super-up-to-date information, you could just change to "approved mode". This way, all the articles you looked at would be viewed in the (perhaps older) editor/administrator approved version. Anyone would still be allowed to edit, but if was vandalism it would never be approved. If it was not, it should just be verified and then you have a newer approved version of the article.
Pardon my crappy English.
The issue isn't so much that it is wrong (although it seems to be vandalized fairly regularly), but that several people who apparently got their notion of what quantum mechanics is from popular publications have repeatedly "corrected" the article on points which were, in fact, originally correct. An example of this is the usual discussion of Einstein and Quantum Mechanics, which is frankly complex enough that it either deserves an article of its own or a mention in a related article such as "The EPR Paradox" or "Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics", but whose treatment in the Quantum Mechanics article is almost completely superficial (for instance, it conflates "Quantum Mechanics" with "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics"). Frankly, it shouldn't be in the article at all; the article should link to the appropriate specific articles, and this should discuss the issue.
Another example is the statement that quantum mechanics is important on the scale of the atom or in macroscopic quantum systems. This is so ignorant it's not even funny. Quantum mechanics provides the best-known basis for all microscopic systems, yes, but in statistical mechanics this often spills over into macroscopic systems. Examples of this spill-over including such every-day things as electrical conduction in room-temperature metals, with special emphasis on the nature of semiconductors in use in every computer used to view the article. It is also necessary to explain why it is impossible to walk through walls (electrical repulsion between electrons is part of it, but the Pauli Exclusion Principle provides a large part as well).
I just know some fans of Wikipedia are going to ask why I didn't go in and fix all these problems if I saw them. The simple answer is: I don't have time. I have a job. I've just scratched the surface of what's wrong with this article, and fixing it would be time-consuming. I'm much better off writing up my research results and sending them to a peer-reviewed journal with my name on it than trying to keep an article on Wikipedia from sliding into mediocrity, especially when I, personally, have much better written, more precise, references that cover more material. Yes, they cost (much more) money. You get what you pay for.
I'm just going to say that this article, combined with the original topic, convince me to not use Wikipedia for anything, not even to satisfy casual curiosity. For that, I *might* use the links given in the end of each article, but that's about it. I just don't know how much folklore I'm absorbing even in established articles.
For those who claim Wikipedia is too inaccurate and too often the solitary source people use to get their information, don't forget the various news agencies, blogs, and library books from umpteen years ago where they also may be getting their information. Never inaccuracies (or anachronisms) in any of those, no-sir-ree.
Do You Experiment?
If this was Wiki, someone could fix the incorrectly capitalized I in the title.
I think NOT wikifying websites is more dangerous.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Funny you should mention philosophy papers and wikipedia; crooked timber posted a brief piece a few days ago on David Chalmers's brief attempts to make some contribution to the 'pedia in ~2005:
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/04/wikipedia/
(For those who want to read the piece and aren't exactly up to speed on academic philosophy: Chalmers is one of the big figures in contemporary philosophy, and in particular is an important figure in contemporary work on consciousness. For those who aren't up on their cinema: the "Marshal McLuhan" line is a reference to Woody Allen's _Annie_Hall_; at one point in the movie, Allen is arguing about McLuhan's work with some guy in line for a movie, and Allen pulls McLuhan in from off screen.)
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
As a nearly three-year editor on Wikipedia, I call b.s. on this.
I would have no issue with incorporating pieces of content from Citizendium if it is indeed an improvement over comparable content in a Wikipedia article. No issue at all.
And Wikipedia already has articles built from CC content, which under a particular CC license, is indeed compatible with GFDL.
I do find it interesting that Mr. Sanger seems bent on attacking all Wikipedians, as if we're all the same person, and that person is only as he describes. I believe that's called prejudice.
That's not a good way to market an alternative.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I tried searching the site, just to see what information they have available, but was told I had to sign up for an account first ...
So, I have to give you at least some of my personal information before I can see anything on the site?
NEXT!!!
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Good luck to the Citizendium guys on managing to get enough editors to get a number of pages to blessed state of even 5% of Wikipedia's estimated 1.6 million (in English).
As a side note, there are some topic that are so controversial that you'll probably never manage to find someone in the field who can give an unbiased summary.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
A real encyclopedia rests on authority, that is its sole reason for existance.
... witness the massive number of (citation needed) links and the growing number of actual citations, particularly on articles of academic import.
... as if you were an authority ... without any evidence that you *are* an authority on this matter. Or, for that matter, any evidence whatsovere.
... why are you even reading the entry? To fix it? Why bother? The same idiot that messed it up in the first place may well be back in an hour to revert your changes.
Interestingly, I often prefer not to rest on authority. Being an academic, I prefer citations wherein I can verify for myself the data in the primary source.
Note that in Britannica, one is expected to rely on the accuracy of the article's editor. In wikipedia, it is expected these days that article editors cite their sources
I do not claim that Wikipedia serves the same function as Britannica. It has both advantages and disadvantages. The fact that articles generally cite their sources is a huge advantage to any academic.
Defending Wikipedia is the most direct way to show that you are an idiot. Simply using Wikipedia, as a reader or an editor, for more than five days demonstrates how worthless it is as a resource, and particularly as a replacement for a real encyclopedia.
What's interesting is that you state this with authority in your voice
Which, of course, is exactly what you claim is wrong with Wikipedia.
if you are well enough versed in a subject
I *am* an authority on a few subjects (and would happily show my credentials to anyone who cared), and I have written several wikipedia articles on topics close to my expertise. They are, in general, full of careful citations; I give them the same attention to academic honesty, verifiability, and evidential support that I do my published work.
What you claim has not at all been my experience with the articles I've contributed to. I check in on them periodically, and only very rarely find edits that concern me in any way.
You are making a bunch of contentions without support or verifiability ( exactly the crime you accuse Wikipedia of), and those contentions run quite contrary to my own experience as a Wikipedia user and contributor.
Are you going to waste the rest of your life policing an ever-changing page of folk-wisdom?
Whatever. Keeping an eye on the pages I care about as an authority takes about an hour per month.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Linking to a satirical, fake news article in theonion.com as evidence of the unreliability of citing Wikipedia as a source; I applaud your brazen audacity sir.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
the problem with Wikipedia
You just deleted the inactive articles, right? The "CZ live" articles appear to be forks of their wikipedia counterparts (like Wheat). Unless you rewrote from scratch, it's still a fork.
My life is an open book ... up to a point.
Good point.
This will never work.
Unless you happen to think the open directory project is particularily successful.
http://dmoz.org/
Truth is, when you put one, or even a few editors in charge of something, most of them are biased, then they eventually tire of whatever they've been put in charge of (unless they're getting PAID for their efforts.)
Wikipedia's strength is in the effortlessness with which new talent can get involved in the process.
I wonder what the turnover rate is on wikipedia for people who edit/enforce accuracy of well established pages...
If a chair is thrown in a forest, and there are no witnesses, did Ballmer still do it?
That article was the best nap I ever took. Perhaps a tad long winded even?
Anyway, given even some of the safety features, Wiki's not safe from it's own admins.
Ex - Evil Inc web/print comic entry.
My own alternative to Wikipedia, that I've been working on for six months or so and begging for people to come and help contribute:
http://opencycle.vacommunity.net/
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
My biggest issue with Wikipedia is that the Nazi's will remove any article posted after a period of time. I've personally had over 80% of the new pages I created deleted as have many of my collegues siting "Content not of significant value to warrant a page."
I find this infuriating. I wrote a whole page about AST Computer, at one time a Top 3 PC manufacturer. I worked there for several years and wrote a full article on the company history, its rise to fame and its demise. Deleted after 2 weeks siting "Not a significantly known company." That's insane! Who decided that? Someone who obviuosly knew nothing about that subject matter. I wasted a good couple hours of my life for nothing!
I certainly won't waste any more of my time making content for them. I'm done.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Excellent comment.
For something like this, there may actually be no real solution. Objectivity is a nice idea but probably impossible to achieve in practice. Different people have different axioms that make up their worldview, and what is true to one is not true to another. And most people will try and cry that their view is the balanced, objective one.
There would also be a likely clustering of viewpoints. Allowing say, a pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian page to be edited by each is a nice idea but still vulnerable to one side pretending to be the other in order to sway people looking at both sides in order to find a balanced viewpoint.
I don't think there is a solution that one site can provide. That's why the more controversial a subject, the more caution I have in relying on wikipedia. Best to do a bit of searching around yourself, and throw a healthy amount of distrust google's way as well.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
That's a moot point in the case of an encyclopedia. The assumption must be that someone that comes to such a tertiary source has not the means to do such detailed checking. I would not dream of using any encyclopedia as a source in its own right for serious work (unless a historical reference to a victorian edition, for example), but I might use it to locate secondary sources and use their citations if need be. Or just to gain an overview of a subject for interest's sake.
What's interesting is that you state this with authority in your voice ... as if you were an authority ... without any evidence that you *are* an authority on this matter. Or, for that matter, any evidence whatsover
A good point but I think "authority" is overstating my expression of opinion slightly. I do stand by the assertion that if one uses both WP and a decent print encyclopedia for any length of time it becomes clear that the only thing WP has going for it is that it's near to hand where most people work these days. Try it and see, would be my advice.
What you claim has not at all been my experience with the articles I've contributed to.
I have done several entries on historical and political issues as well as simple ones on specific towns and places and I can assure you that the level of entropy is high there. Regardless of that, since I do not know which articles you edited your qualifications are meaningless; which is the problem with using WP as an encyclopedia, especially in these days of paid shills and astroturfing.
You are making a bunch of contentions without support or verifiability
I suggest that you can verify them for yourself by looking up almost any article on Northern Ireland, for example.
Keeping an eye on the pages I care about as an authority takes about an hour per month.
Good for you. In a real encyclopedia, the errors just naturally stay out after they've been fixed. That seems a clear advantage to me.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
regarding "For many purposes, but particularly in academia, Wikipedia may not be considered an acceptable source. [citation needed]", this was added by a user who also added this message to the article "Citation" and made other similar edits on the same day. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions /68.229.243.248 contributions). Thus, I suspect that this call for citation was added as somewhat of a joke. Additionally, this sentence has now been cited.
Someone who believes The Register is a more authoritative source than Nature argues how Britannica is vastly more reliable than Wikipedia.
Except it appears that every year, the rules for what constitutes {{fairuse}} on English Wikipedia become stricter, and swaths of images get speedied. Some people who edit Wikipedia fear that it will become Wikipedia policy to have zero images in articles about major motion pictures.
My direct personal (and recent) experience differs from that which you are describing.You must not edit a lot of articles whose subject is a non-free copyrighted work.
So what this article is implying is that everyone should switch to Citizendium because there is too much "graffiti" in Wikipedia. If we applied this same logic to the world, namely in larger cities, then we'd all be living in caves because of "too much graffiti" everywhere else. Come on, lets be serious -- graffiti is NOT a big enough problem to spend many man hours trying to develop elaborate systems to "solve" because its already solved!
{{sofixit}}
Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes -- they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page , or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome.
----
Seriously though, when you see a problem like that fix it yourself. You think Wikipedia sucks? Then help it not suck by clicking that edit link every once in a while. Why is such a big deal when -- dear god no -- something on the Internet isn't 100% accurate? Websites from Slashdot to CNN get shit wrong all the time and you have no option to correct them.
The ban on encyclopaedias is not a universal ban: there are some abstruse topics where an encyclopaedia is simply the only accessible source (one that I've hit against recently is Luwian language). The principle is that for any claim, people should always cite a source as proximate as possible to the topic of the claim. It's rather rare that an encyclopaedia will be the most proximate source available. If you're citing the source for an idea of your own, though, it makes perfect sense to me (as a professor) that an encyclopaedia might sometimes be that source.
Could some people that strongly artue about why wikipedia is bad in principle, and therefore becomes less and less good with more and more people using it. This is a kind of truth that doesn't comply with what happens in the real world. I think those people are in a "all or nothing" frame of mind (make an encyclopedia fit in that) and for each time i hear that wikipedia becomes worst and worst, some actual examples would do no bad.
I certainly hope that no editor would be forced to waste his or her time certifying fan-cruft like these. A system that required editors to waste their time like that would be a very bad system; editors should be free to choose. But I see no problem with the existence of such articles, if the fanbase is big enough.
Another big problem is the Citizendium policy on "obscene" material. The goal as stated by Larry Sanger is "Basically, and this is a position I look forward to articulating and defending, I think the Citizendium should be family-friendly" (see http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,49.0. html).
:)
That statement led to the longest thread on their forum, and for good reason. A lot of subjects are going to be severely censored on Citizendium because they are not (in Larry Sanger's opinion) family friendly. This includes articles in areas like gender studies, homosexuality, illegal drugs, criticism of religion, etc.
It's also clear from his posts that Citizendium is "his". He often repeats that if you do not like the policy, there is no point in discussing it but you should find another project. Perhaps he should rename it Sangerendium to avoid confusion
Wikipedia is not good enough only for those people so anal retentive that they feel the need to whinge about it in their blogs. For the rest of us Wikipedia is just great the way it is. My only concern is that the people with the power to change the way wikipedia functions will get pressured into doing some of the stoopid things the anal-retents have been suggesting.
that goes something like, if someone breaks a couple of windows, and nothing happens, they may break some more, or do other damage, because they see nobody's watching.
Thing is, as you get more people involved with WP, you have more eyes watching. As vandals find their attacks repeatedly and quickly erased, they move on. The watchers generally stay. Pride of ownership, and all that. So over time, you might end up with a system that has even less vandalism, especially as word of mouth spreads among the vandals that they are having no success.
I think one way to address the problem of vandalism (or the credibility of data in general) would be to color code entries based primarily on their date of entry. Those sections that stood the test of time will show up in a darker color going toward black to lend its content gravity. This coloring algorithm could also include the 'confidence level' of the author, i.e. a long time member who has made several 'good' entries will get darker colors by default, while an anonymous entry will initially be assigned with a bright red color.
Obviously this should be a toggleable (that a word?) function which can be switched on to quickly see potentially inaccurate data. Imho a function like that would boost the productivity of using Wikipedia quite a bit while at the same time exploiting the advantage it has over paper based encyclopedias.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Citizendium seems like a great idea, however I'm a tad annoyed at the implication, on the front page, that to be an expert on a subject, you have PHDs.
==We want expert involvement, but most of our hundreds of contributors are "authors," not "editors," and most lack PhDs. Many lack any degrees at all. The project is expert-led, not experts-only!==
I'm sorry but an advanced degree is a nice indicator of knowledge and ability when you are fresh out of school. However in the real world you will find that there are many experts on many subjects that do not hold an advanced degree. In addition, these real world experts are likely to know more than the PHD. I am not trashing the degrees. They are exceptional accomplishments, however I do question the attitude that the degree is everything.
It ends up admitting that the conventional, old-skool, way of creating a reference book was indeed correct, that we really do need a final, singular referee who can sign off on the text within. So we've come full circle. Congratulations.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
then there are even more convoluted cases like global warming. Whomever decides who and how many editors a global warming article has, gets to choose the slant.
I agree -- with global warming, there's debate about whether there's even any real debate, so deciding whether or not to include dissenting editors becomes a controversial decision itself. Shame, that.
This effort attempts to provide the notion of attribution to "online freely available information" (OFAI) that Wikipedia lacks. For technical information and for reference purposes this is certainly important, although it should not be confused with accuracy of the information presented. First, it is worth saying that despite this drawback, Wikipedia is remarkable in providing a relatively high level of accuracy on many topics, without attribution. In a sense, human nature being what it is, the lack of attribution may be at times more conducive to accuracy than attribution just as it adds a level of noise to the Wikeipedia "signal".
The basic concepts behind the "content broker" ideas here raise some interesting issues. One is the notion that attribution ultimately leads to accuracy. Another is that assuming this is so, who will be designated as the ultimate authority for the "officially sanctioned version of reality" and how will they be chosen. It would seem that the latter is not as well addressed and one could use the "published" draft version on Biology as a very good example. I did not find the names of the authors, presumably withheld since it is still only a draft. However, I personally found it rather disorganized and failed to provide an adequate context for the understanding of how several extremely important historical ideas in Biology emerged. It did not do a good job of conceptually unifying the diverse subdisciplines of Biology or how they emerged in a historical context. It utterly failed to emphasize the primacy of the Darwinian concepts particularly as they relate to contemporary evolutionary biology (not that my having a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from a prestigous US uniersity necessarily fully qualifies me to advance criticism). Consequently, I found it difficult to imagine what general audience this "officially sanctioned version" would serve. There was no attributin given to the figures used. I found the use of footnotes as opposed to citations weak, although there were some useful hyperlinks provided in the footnotes. It felt as if it were written by committee.
In the Wikipedia model the "version" evolves in large part out of consensus and use. I see this being a much more structured, more formalized and more slowly evolving enterprise under the "content broker" model since it would involve a limited number of "experts". It would seems as if the approach will necessarily require multiple official sanctioned pages for a single topic to satisfy critics who shall surely emerge from academia or instead be prepared for multiple communities of Citizenpedias that compete for attention on the net. The former would seem to require a much more elaborate framework of protocols to weed out fairly/honestly/ruthlessly? "not officially sanctioned versions of reality". The latter could certainly be useful and interesting as ever more clearly defined alternate versions of reality are brought forth, although it is difficult to envision just how this necessarily improves accuracy.
No doubt the Republican and Democratic sanctioned versions of "the versions on global climate change might ultimately make good fodder for the Daily Show, which one may wonder might not prompt politicians to step in and have the government act as the final arbiter of the officially sanctioned version. Given the new push to monitor everyone's every move and thought while on the net, this will perhaps be the only ultimately evolutionarly stable outcome and the Brave New World will emerge in which the Gregorian calendar will be replaced by the officially sanctioned one in which it is always 1984 and there will always be perpetual war against perceived terrorists, extremeists, fanatics, etc and hence a need to keep the population in a constant state of agitation so that problems can be created faster than they can be solved.
My sense is that if one perceives OFAI as valuable, it might be worth considering a more broadly conceived notion of a registry of federated "content brokers", rather than an
Yes, entrenched editors who barely edit but have been "squatting" for years have clogged them up. DMOZ is now woefully out of date, and full of SEO spam, the only active editors being SEO people. DMOZ was good 4 or 5 years ago, but has crumbled away since. Today, it is a feeble shadow of its former self.
I see no reason why Citizendium would not suffer exactly the same fate.
At the bottom of the
Actually serious academic community bans the use of ANY encyclopedia.
Any SERIOUS adademic ccommunity doesn't ban the use of ANY type of source.
What you are talking about is undergrad classes, where they are trying to teach you to develop research skills, RATHER than always looking things up in an encyclopedia.
Hell, what if you're writing a paper ABOUT encyclopedias?
What if you're writing a history paper and just happen to metion something like the Bessemer Process and it's effect on the economy? The obvious question is then: "What is the Bessemer Process?" You're supposed to cite hard to find original sources rather then an easy to find source out of pure elitism?
Your paper isn't about the details of the Bessemer Process, it's just supplemental information to answer an obvious question. Just give one, easy to find reference and you're done. The concept of citing original sources for everything is silly.
If you talk about an octagon, it really is sufficient to cite an encyclopedia article that describes what an octagon is. There's no sense forcing your reader to find ancient texts in languages they don't speak simply because you don't understand when original sources are important, and when they are not.
Life is too short to proofread.