Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Corrects Encyclopedia Britannica
javipas writes "Despite all the controversy about Wikipedia's work model, no one can argue the potential of a project that has so effectively demonstrated the usefulness of the 'wisdom of crowds' concept. And that wisdom has detected a large number of mistakes in one of the most revered founts of human knowledge, the Encyclopedias Britannica. Among the wrong information collected on this page are the name at birth of Bill Clinton and the definition of the NP problems in mathematics."
Too bad most of the administrators think they know more than you, simply because they read an article on the subject. The others are all to happy to demonstrate the Wikipedia caste system to you.
Even if it were error free, Britanicca would still be useless - it does not enough content.
I mean, where's the articles on Fanboy? Or the List of minor Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters. (and for that matter, detailed summaries of individual episodes) Or for that matter, where's the article on the Slashdot effect
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
why so silent now? Oh thats right Wiki is brimming with incorrect information.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Yawn. I wonder how many errors are in wikipedia that no ones found or noticed yet.
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
This is the kind of thing that Wikipedians love to trot out to show how much better they think they are than traditional sources, but this "corrections" list is not actually very meaningful. Heck, I once caught a typo in The Economist - does that mean a publication I made would thus be more accurate and reliable than The Economist? No, it just means they messed up once. Hey, when you produce a large volume of text, it happens. The real question is, how often do they mess up compared to how often we mess up? And that is a difficult question to find the true answer to, but one thing is for sure: it's certainly not hard to find errors in Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy
Wikiality bites.
So says Stephen Colbert.
Britannica should also check its facts about elephant populations. I heard it has tripled.
Nice, but doesn't the Britannica have Copy Editors? Sounds like someone's gloating that they found a hanging semi-colon or something.
his name is Robert Paulson
How many of those errors were purposefully introduced? Encyclopedias and map makers do that all the time to see if others are plagerizing.
Okay, so where's the Wikipedia article listing all the times that someone found something wrong with Wikipedia, and corrected it with information from E.B.? I'm sure that's not an uncommon occurrence either.
Both Wikipedia and EB have their place. Wikipedia is great for getting a quick overview of something while you're sitting at your desk, or looking up random information like the plot of an individual TV episode. EB is better at having a bit more academic cred (at the very least, EB's mistakes are actual mistakes and not outright vandalism, which may or may not be true for Wikipedia). If I were to give up one, I'd keep WP in an instant.
But neither should be considered the definitive source for anything.
It's really not up to Wikipedia to correct another sources mistakes, only to note the conflict, unless verified by other sources. Though it's not on article space, it's a poor show. But getting to the main point, it's a bad idea to discredit Britannica when it's a source used throughout Wikipedia itself as a tertiary source.
Methinks they doth protest too much about EBs relative accuracy. It's almost like the individual Wikipublians think they are deserving of the same respect and reputation accorded to Brittanica contributors when, in fact, they are not.
It's good to see them correct some things. It's not like they haven't had errors before of course. However, wikipedia has some great features such as: always being online and free, covers 10000000 more topics, and doesn't come in a defunct hardback copy that takes 20 minutes to search by hand. Btw.. I still have my 1989 Encyclopedia Britannica and it looks great in the two sets of boxes in the basement.
I used to contribute quite a bit to Wikipedia, but got sick of the "god kings" that corrected me on which template to use, and then another one would say that the new template still wasnt what they would have done ....
The point is, Wikipedia aint just some joke Encyclopedia, that would be Uncyclopedia.
---
...is even self-aware
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
There is more drama in the Edit Discussion of any Wikipedia article than on daytime tv.
great
Sure Wikipedia might have some materials that is more correct than EB, and likely the reverse holds true too. Good research takes more than just having arbitrary contributions from a wide audience.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
A case in point is the article on Harry Potter and the deathly hallows which as has been mentioned earlier in slashdot itself, is full of spoilers, posted inside a day of the book having been released. A lot of people who stumbled onto that article while looking for details on the book must have felt cheated. Such a thing would never have been allowed to creep into any entry in a standard encyclopaedia.
Also as someone else noted, Wikipedia may be better off mentioning that there exists a different version of the information on Enclyclopaedia Brittanica on its own site than try and convert EB to its own set of facts.
ps: The redeeming qualities of wikipedia are ofcourse why I visit that site. As of today, the deathly hallows article comes with clear warnings on the stuff that I mentioned here.
For every good example, there apparently are several bad examples of this so called "wisdom of crowds." I'm not saying it doesn't work, but to pretend that it's the be all and end all of systems is just disingenuous.
Wisdom of crowds is a pretty good concept, but in reality it turns out that the crowds aren't always so wise.
It is kind of funny to see this come up now, given that this has been a very old dispute between Wikipedia and Britannica.
Slashdot has already had at least three articles in the past few years on this topic.
The Willipedia.com domain is already taken
"How to use this book: Look it up in wikipedia and then cite Encyclopedia Britannica." "Encyclopedia Britannica, How to Use." Encyclopedia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 24 July 2007 . What do you mean you can't find that article?
This doesn't sound like a big deal, until you realize that it's the fringe stuff that can be consulted the most by adults, particularly those who consider themselves well educated.
How many big fish in little ponds have axes to grind? More than most of us suspect, I'm guessing.
Please help metamoderate.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.
This article has been tagged since July 2007.
Among the wrong information collected on this page are the name at birth of Bill Clinton and the definition of the NP problems in mathematics."
Seriously though, if you're interested in the details behind this comment, see the article about it in wikipedia.
It's rare that I read an article on Wikipedia without finding some sort of error, whether it be a factual error or poor writing.
This is especially the case with topics that attract little interest, such as technical articles or articles specific to a certain region.
What's the point of an encyclopedia that covers everything from Plato to Pokemon if most of the articles are inaccurate?
This page has existed nearly since the beginning of Wikipedia. For a long long time it contained a disclaimer that it was just for the fun of it, and not to be taken too seriously. I think the disclaimer was taken off because it should be inherently obvious. Well apparently not to the submitter, who submitted what amounts to a flame bait story. Oh well, such is slashdot. Gotta get pageviews I suppose. But the submitter should have known better than to trump it up so much in the submission.
One of the reasons people reference Wikipedia a lot, and one of the reasons it is so popular, is that it has a very high page rank on google and other search engines. People are lazy, and whatever information pops up first after typing something into google will be what is clicked on, and of course referenced. Wikipedia is clicked on more so than other sources simply because Wikipedia has a higher page rank and is more conveniently available.
Since wikipedia creates a community for users, it means people will link in to wikipedia more than any other encyclopedia (communities create links.. and links create higher page ranks).
If some other encyclopedia wants to be king, then they have to increase their page rank. The other encyclopedias will have to create communities and create reasons for people to link to them, in order for them to increase their popularity on google.
Since people usually choose the most convenient option, and since wikipedia is the most convenient option available on google for our mice to clicky dicky, the convenient option will win. It's not the fittest or the strongest that survive, but rather the most convenient solutions that survive.
Well I'd gloat too if I found half of Britannica's colon hanging.
Ever since I was in middle school I was told that the encyclopedia was merely a starting point and not a reliable source. The nice thing about the Britannica was that it laid out a formal representation of what was known at the time it was written. Although it did not exactly cross our mind that it was wrong, we knew that it was not to be used as a basis of fact. Starting in the 80's, with the less formal style, I think it has become even less useful. This is also the problem with wikipedia. It is useful for pop culture, and some pop technical stuff, but I still go to mathworld when I want to know math, and britannica when I want to know history.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Really, this is the wisdom of a few intelligent people who care enough about promoting factual information.
My criticisms of Wikipedia still stand. It needs to promote a mentality of strict editorial control instead of the irrational pretense that anyone should be allowed to edit it. The idea of having a democratic process of what gets included and doesn't get included, coupled with the vague, arbitrary, and inconsistent standards of editorial control that currently exists is what is inhibiting Wikipedia.
Too many people have their hand in the jar, and too many of the people who do have their hand jar have incredibly stupid ideas.
The Slashdot story says, "... one of the most revered founts of human knowledge, the Encyclopedias Britannica."
That's not true in my experience. In my experience, Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen used high-pressure tactics to sell encyclopedias to poor, uneducated people by telling them that their children needed an encyclopedia to become educated. Educated people knew it was better to go to the library.
EB has always been full of inadequate articles that were inadequate because the EB wanted to seem comprehensive, so it had a lot of articles, but didn't want to use a lot of expensive paper, so there was never enough space.
A good example was the EB article on Barbara McClintock, 1983 Nobel Laureate in Medicine for her amazing, pioneering work in genetics. Quote from Wikipedia: "In 1930, McClintock was the first person to describe the cross-shaped interaction of homologous chromosomes during meiosis. During 1931, McClintock and a graduate student, Harriet Creighton, proved the link between chromosomal crossover during meiosis and the recombination of genetic traits."
Why did it take 53 years for Barbara McClintock to win her Nobel Prize? Because other scientists had difficulty believing that genetic elements could jump from chromosome to chromosome.
I haven't looked at an EB article in the paper edition in many years, but at one time the EB article about Barbara McClintock was short, maybe 600 words, and gave no idea of the fact that her scientific papers are so extensive they require 40 feet or more of shelf space.
The EB article about Barbara McClintock was subtly misleading in other ways, also.
From the Wikipedia article: "The importance of McClintock's contributions only came to light in the 1960s, when the work of French geneticists Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod described the genetic regulation of the lac operon, a concept she had demonstrated with Ac/Ds in 1951."
Apparently because the controlling purpose of the EB has been to reduce amount of paper required, and apparently because the EB has always been more about creating a way for salesmen to be intimidating than about excellence, a lot of the EB articles have been worse than useless, because they are misleading.
The EB has been a vicious business run for profit, in my opinion. The articles have always been lacking in excellence, because excellence would have cost more.
wikipedia is the new myspace, where is your entry? wiki mods thought they were better than me and keep deleting it.. but it'll stay eventually
EB was being corrected by others long before Wiki existed. A 9 year old corrected their statement that Mercury was the hottest planet. He correctly notified them that Venus was.
/. posts are wrong.
Wiki is now operating at the level of a 9 year old.
OTOH, perhaps Wiki will have an article on how often
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Correction: 80 feet of shelf space, not 40. See my 2005 comment, and a Slashdot story comparing EB and Wikipedia: Encyclopedia Britannica is much worse.
Britannica: hmm. Infinite?
I doubt Britannica's editor's let them accidentally kill people (rhetorically, at least). Wikipedia is probably more accurate for large, visible topics but equally (if not more so?) subject to painful bias on obscure subjects.
Flattery will get you nowhere.
This looks more like a person posting an opinion, rather than an error in an EB article.
In reaction to the Wikipedia page pointing out EB's errors, Conservapedia has
put up a link in their "Breaking News" section to their page listing examples
of Wikipedia's strongly liberal bias (you did know that, didn't you? Wikipedia
is SIX TIMES MORE LIBERAL THAN AMERICA! (as reported by Wikipedia on their
page about Conservapedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia )).
As of 11PM PST, July 23rd, Conservapedia has a link to the bias page at the top of
their "Breaking News" section on their home page. But here's the direct link:
http://www.conservapedia.com/Bias_in_Wikipedia
A few choice examples:
A devastating critique of Wikipedia by Fox News describes the impact of Wikipedia smears on popular golfer Fuzzy Zoeller.
Wikipedia is sympathetic to Fidel Castro in its entry about Cuba.
Wikipedia's entry for the Renaissance denies any credit to Christianity, its primary inspiration.
Plus 63 more! Enjoy.
There are a few minor issues I have with the new winds blowing over at Wikipedia, but these are not pressing enough for me to get all worked up over them.
Over all I'm positively surprised at Wikipedia's ability to continually get better, work on not only the content but also the form factor.
A greater emphasis on references and citations has greatly contributed to some articles.
There are a few problems, such as the fact that important and well known scientists are still reluctant to contribute.
Overall though, Wikipedia is continually evolving and getting better, which is a whole lot more than can be said about Britannica or any other encyclopedia which have pretty much kept to their centuries old methods ideas.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
i have seen answer.com showing up frequently on top.. and AFAIK it largely mirrors wikipedia articles (and may be adds something more of its own) so my question how and where does it get the incoming links for a high PageRank? do people point to answer.com URLs?
Wikipedophiles will be happy!
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
It's still full of long-haired, LSD-taking communist hippies.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
is, you don't talk about errors. You talk about things in need of correction. Or maybe reorientation. But to conced an error? Never.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
Of course I know the slashdot effect (we all do) but Farked, that's the first time I've heard that term. Which is even funnier because I host an arts and music website that was 'farked'. They actually drove the poor disk right into the ground, took me two days working with my hosting provider to recover the server and restore the site. I wasn't laughing so much then, but I probably would have if I'd heard that.
Quack, quack.
a project that has so effectively demonstrated the usefulness of the 'wisdom of crowds' concept
Except that the crowd in this case is those 0.1% of the users who actively contribute and actually know what they are talking about. The 'wisdom' of crowds is what elected a twit like George W Bush as well as the British Poodle; I wouldn't hang my hat on that one.
Britannica prints a 500 page book covering some of the errors it found in Wikipedia.
> There are a few problems, such as the fact that important and well known scientists are still reluctant to contribute. [My emphasis]
You probably didn't mean it quite the way you wrote it, but it's worth correcting anyway for the benefit of other eyeballs.
The accuracy of scientific reporting does not have a strong correlation with the public visibility of the scientist doing it, in general. In some cases, the well known scientists are not the important ones at all, but merely those who are best at self-promotion. And beware that the word "important" itself has a very different meaning within science and in society at large.
There is often good correlation with the publication record of the scientist (and that certainly results in visibility), but also quite often the correspondance is quite poor (many insightful scientists made their mark on science just once or only a few times), and in a few fields the correspondance is absolutely attrocious because of a semi-corrupt system of "papers for the boys" that makes a mockery of true science.
On top of that, remember that science is so intimately related with engineering that huge numbers of highly competent and qualified practitioners forgo the academic trappings of publication and do their science cloaked under the veil of company secrecy, so they may well be "important" but will not be "well known" in the slightest. And yet, we require their insight in Wikipedia as well.
So, I wouldn't have phrased it quite the way you did. We need scientific insight and strong logic backed by good citations, whatever the source.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
That obscure stuff often isn't in Britannica at all. And a lot of the articles about obscure stuff in Wikipedia are fine. I think the only sensible conclusion to draw from this and every other comparison that has been made between the two is that Wikipedia and Britannica each have their strengths and weaknesses, and neither one is indisputably better than the other. They're different. Wikipedia is most useful when you treat it as a source for references, rather than blindly trusting the words on the page. Of course, that kind of goes against human nature, but what can you do? :) ~~~~
Their Harry Potter0 entry mentions that some have attempted to get the books banned because they present the occult in a positive light, and are not appropriate for Christian children. Not to worry says Conservatpedia, the Vatican says its A-OK:
That has a rather Romish aura to it, which should come as no surprise since Conservapedia was created by Andrew Schlafly, son of notable Catholic Theocon Phyllis Schlafly.
This is well and fine, but since Conservapedia states at the beginning of its home page that it is:
and has used it connections to be promoted as a 'conservative' answer to Wikipedia in many publications, it's not going to sit well with the Evangelical Right to be told that contrary to what they've been taught, The Pope is not the horned beast of Revelations, but instead is the final word on what is or is not Christian.
Aside from their Satanic Ecumenicalist Agenda, Conservatpedia's content is so error laden, slanted, and generally so full of crap, many first time visitors think it is well crafted satire, and for good reasons.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
The Britannica article has nothing negative to say about circumcision either:
u mcision
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9082690/circ
who the fuck would look up a novel, the day after its release, in an encyclopaedia? What would they expect to find that doesn't count as a spoiler? How many pages it's got? Who the author was?
Barbara who?
So, I'm busy writing my school report, copying^hresearching the information in Wikipedia and EB. Now yo say that they are both wrong? So, now where should I go to crib^hresearch my paper? I only have 10 minutes left to do my paper, it must be at least five pages long, and it needs to include pictures!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The point is that when you find an error in Wikipedia, you can fix it.
Actually, I don't think the article really has a point, except to have fun. But every joke has some message as well, even if you have to make it up yourself.
{{stub}} {{wikify}}
{{advert}}
{{Primarysources}}
Wikipedia says it was Flavor Aid {{fact}}
Britannica is better than Wikipedia for one reason:
...
When some makes an error in Britannica, almost nobody finds out.
See the problem here? You have to be an author, and not a user, for this to be considered a "feature".
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica want to publish an addendum with corrections to Wikipedia. The problem is, that there ar not enough trees in Canada and Brazil to print the first volume...
Could be worse. Could be raining.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I once paid for on-line access to the full Britannica encyclopedia. I kept it for a while, and then cancelled my subscription. It didn't worth it for me. Perhaps other people would find it useful, but it's simply not for me. When I cancelled my subscription, I specifically told them that free sites like Wikipedia have put them out of competition, and it makes no sense to charge for access to their articles. Not only that, but I would say that for some articles (eg about computing) I would very much prefer Wikipedia or other sources even if the full Britannica was freely accessible, and I'm sorry to have to say this. I am not sure how Britannica makes money nowadays, but I'm afraid their business model is broken in our era. They have to adapt or die.
That said, Wikipedia is not perfect (and I do contribute and sometimes donate nowadays, although I was somewhat more critical in the past), but it's better than many of the alternatives. What could make Wikipedia work better would be a more volunteerist-cooperative ethic among its many members. Perhaps its lack thereof is a result of its publicity: It has become so big that people outside the Internet volunteerist culture have joined and use it for purposes other than creating a good education resource. There is also little coordination between the different language communities. However, the publicity of Wikipedia has made the world of wikis and Internet collaboration (in the open source way) more known to the masses, and this is a significant achievement. Wikipedia is now a good resource and I'd like it to remain as such or become better.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
will be corrected in the next edition. So the Encyclopedia Britannica even gets some 'wisdom of crowds' in addtion to their own editors. The best of two worlds, and it would not have been possible without Wikipedia. Hurray for competition, hurray for Britannica, hurray for Wikipedia.
I bet that Wikipedia editors sectetly read the Encyclopedia Britannica.
[group] points of inadequacies of [rival group]
> no reason for you to bother with it
Really? Please explain that to the administrators who
constantly mark articles for deletion as ``Not Notable''.
So much for establishing the ``sum of human knowledge''. An encyclopedia does not collect the sum of human knowledge. It collects the subset of human knowledge attributable to a reliable source. Anything about which two independent reliable sources have written several paragraphs is notable.
Wikipedia: 5
Britannica: 5,724,891
So much for the knowledge of crowds.
I bet that Wikipedia editors secretly read the Encyclopedia Britannica
The editors aren't coy about it. In some articles they explicitly quote the last edition of EB which is now out of copyright. Unfortunately, this is about 1919, but obviously is good for 19th century information!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I already reverted it, but sheesh. "Get a freakin' life!" was what it was replaced with. Sort of ironically.
A look at all of the long-lived episode guides (for other proprietary work) on Wikipedia would suggest that the decision with respect to Deal or No Deal (with which I am completely unfamiliar) was arbitrary.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Wikipedia can have great value when it's a first stop. But now that it invades half of my trips to google.com I can't help but resent its borg-like other half. It seems to be spidering across the internet like a turbo-charged DMOZ that thinks it's more destination than launch-pad.
There's even a category of categories dealing with television episode guides.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The truth in Wikipedia is in the process, not necessarily the final product. An encyclopedia may indicate the contriversial nature of a topic but by viewing the revision history and the day-to-day, month-to-month changes in an article you can actually SEE the controversey and that is the strength of Wikipedia. It's "Truth" is in the process not the content.
The pursuit of truth requires multiple sources of information. In reality no one source can be considered truth anymore then one can accurately navigate 3 dimensonal Space with only a single point. You need at least 3 (4 counting the passage of time if you are moving...) and as a former teacher I would require no less then 10 sources, even for a single page paper. Yes they can be redundant to a degree but I would expect 1/4 to 1/2 to be dissenting sources.
Apologies for poor spelling, still working on the first cup of coffee...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
``"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet
is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's
what we're doing." ''
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales
And no, it's not what they're doing. That's what Wikimedia and other wiki projects are doing. It's not necessarily what Wikipedia alone is doing. Why restrict knowledge based on some arbitrary number of references? To limit the amount of bullshit that sneaks into a respectable encyclopedia. There is a difference between knowledge and bullshit.
My name is Nimey, and I'm a nerd. Back in my preteen-to-teenage years I would pull out a volume of my World Book encyclopedia and just read articles at random (or sequentially) for fun. 'Twas a good way to learn stuff.
FTM, I'm so nerdy that I was known to pull out my Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and look at a few pages' worth of words and their meanings.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Episode guides run the risk of violating both the "free" and "encyclopedia" parts:
But that logic would apply to just about all Wikipedia articles, since they must be based on verifiable sources. I think that's a rather paranoid interpretation of copyright law, and one that would stifle any repeat of information whatsoever.
As for "encyclopedias are not indiscriminate collections of information", I don't see that that applies to TV programmes.
How much does it takes to correct an error in Britannica? Couple of discussions by a closed group, years and at least a forrest.
How much does it takes to correct an error in Wikipedia? It's a matter of seconds, by any individual. It takes a few keystrokes, couple of clics and that's it.
As a matter of fact, the same is true to introduce errors.
Episode guides run the risk of violating both the "free" and "encyclopedia" parts: a detailed episode guide on a wiki is necessarily a derivative work of the original series and may compete with its official episode guide, crossing into unfair use territory
I've never heard anyone go down that particular avenue of argument. I don't think it would come close to holding water. At best it seems like the kind of spurious argument that would be used to justify a SLAPP-ish harassment suit, and perhaps under the copyright laws of some other countries it might be a concern, but I've never seen anything like it happen in the U.S. A summary of a plot is not necessarily a derivative work of the original; the summary is a new work, and the other data in an episode list -- simple facts -- would probably be un-copywritable.
That screams of an ex post facto justification for an action that someone took based on a totally different rationale.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What I *NEVER* could figure out is why you would want 10ft of books in your house that you would only maybe look at once a year? When you could go read the SAME books for free at the library. 'for the children' i guess...
Roger Waters was born on Sept. 6, 1944. According to this Pink Floyd FAQ this is an error, and the correct birth date is September 6, 1943, as confirmed by Mark Fenwick, Roger Waters' manager. That is the date found in the wikipedia article Roger Waters.
One dubious source swapped with another. I think I'll stick to Britannica, which has an excellent track record, better than Wikipedia's dubious history of plagiarism, forgery, slander and editorializing.
technical writing / development
I think as a general principal, when you see anyone generalizing about the value of Wiki, that should be a signal of extreme bias. Proponents of systems where power and influence is concentrated in the hands of the few, view Wiki as a threat, and therefore will seek to discredit the resource as a whole. We need to promote the idea that our first response to these criticisms should be skepticism. If they're not going to bring up specific issues, the BS detector should immediately go off. Every time I've heard criticism, it's always been vague, ambiguous references to Wikipedia in general.
In my experience, Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen used high-pressure tactics to sell encyclopedias to poor, uneducated people by telling them that their children needed an encyclopedia to become educated. Educated people knew it was better to go to the library.
Wrong. EB articles were highly respected in the scientific community. Of course if one is an expert in math and wants to lookup something on category theory then one heads to the library. The same math expert, though would use the EB to lookup information on say, the history of aviation. It was a great honor to be invited to write an entry for the EB and most famous scientists readily acceeded. Have a look at the byline for many entries.
When my friends and I were younger, we were Trivial Pursuit fanatics, and one game, I was asked a science question (don't remember the exact question) but the answer listed was incorrect. I was so pissed that I actually wrote the manufacturers complaining, and I received a letter from them explaining that in some cases, incorrect answers and occasional misspellings were intentionally included to help combat copyright infringements. Should a competitor use the same questions and intentionally bogus answers, then proving infringement was easier.
OK, I understand that the Encyclopedia Britannica is meant to be an authoritative source, but is it possible that some inconsistencies or errors were introduced in a similar manner?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
So it's OK to offer episode guides to Buffy, SG-1 and Star Trek but not 'Deal or no Deal' why exactly?
Seems a completely arbitrary line is being drawn.
And wikipedia *is* an indiscriminate collection of information. It's based around the principle of last editor wins.. not best information, best referenced or anything else. If the last editor is a 13 year old showing off his l33t sk1ll2 then that's what sticks - because the people with real information have better things to do with their lives and nothing to prove.. so they give up on it - I've seen it happen multiple times.
Be sure to check out: http://www.wikipediareview.com/ http://www.wikitruth.info/ For uncensored information on Wikipedia.
Dude, where's my packet?
You have to remember that EB contains intentional mistakes, to catch those who would plagiarize its content.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If the staff at Encyclopedia Britannica had nothing better to do, I'll bet they could find a few problems with the content on Wikipedia. I'm amazed that this is even considered news worthy.
A One that isn't cold, is scarcely a One at all.
Does anyone else remember this transition? We always had a reasonably current Britannica in the house as I grew up. I remember using it for reports and such when I was a teenager and thinking that while the coverage of science stuff could be a bit deeper the quality and consistency of the articles was superb, certainly far superior to, say, Funk and Wagnall's, the "Reader's Digest" of encyclopedias.
But all that changed in the late 70s. My father bought a new edition and now there were two sets of volumes, the Macropaedia and Micropaedia. We had the old and new sets side by side for a while, and it quickly became obvious that the split was at best unhelpful. Time and again I'd look something up in one set, fail to find anything and have to go to the other. There was no apparent rhyme or reason to it. And in quite a few cases neither new set had the information contained in the older edition.
Then one day I came home from school and found the new edition wasn't on the shelves any more. It seems my father had looked up something - I no longer recall what it was but since he was a cardiologist and an avid reader of history it was probably something about medicine or history - and had been so appalled at what he found he dumped the entire thing in the trash.
We continued to use the old edition for a long time after that, but of course it got progressively more out of date and we eventually donated to some library. Sadly, I don't think there's really anything up-to-date that is comparable to what Britannica was before it was ruined. And I doubt there can be: We're no longer in the 19th Century, when an educated person could actually hold a significant fraction of human knowledge in their head. There's just too much information and not enough financial incentive to hire the huge editorial staff you'd need to organize and present it consistently.
My conclusion is that as our base of knowledge continues to expand the Wikipedia approach, flawed though it may be, is the only viable path forward.
I've long felt that one of the strong points of wikipedia is just that - the odd articles about things that are "not notable" or otherwise disparaged. For example (there are others, but this one is apropos, somehow), I remember (I think) a long and detailed page on "slashdot trolls" which seems to have disappeared. Perhaps it was "not notable", but there are a variety of internet/web trolling phenonema and they're not all the same, so someone interested in communication online may have just lost a very nice place to find things.
But then again, perhaps it was taking up too much space in the database.
When I was looking for a summer job in 1968, Brittanica was hiring college students for sales. They claimed that they only tried to sell to people who had already expressed interest. I don't know if that was true, but it makes sense: consider the alternatives.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"It was started in the english speaking world as a cure to masturbation."
That's ridiculous. Jewish people have been performing circumcisions for thousands of years, before the English language existed.
Everytime I see things like this, I laugh. I remember pouring through the encyclopedias for elementary school projects. There was no internet and the library was your number one resource centre. It is good to see how Wikipedia can actually do some good here. The one-upmanship that is ongoing, (to be a poster to first post on a topic, or to correct a mistake in a topic) gives some people a great sense of accomplishment, and though they aren't paid to do it, they can produce some real good material.
Mod parent up. Very interesting.
Oh no.....! It's already happened!
Creative Demolition
When I was a teenager, I went to EB training for sales, and went with salesman on calls. "They claimed that they only tried to sell to people who had already expressed interest" sounds like something they would say, but it was not true in an effective way. If a child returned an EB postcard from a magazine, that was considered family interest, and a chance to exercise some tricky talk.
When I discovered how dishonest it was, I got away from EB fast.
How many volumes would that add if they listed all Wikipedia factual errors ?
Ok, so the exact number is 2,997,961,386.257345. Perhaps they should have added roughly 3,000,000,000 esu. --Cantus
No, that wouldn't be correct. By convention, every digit you give for a constant is presumed to be accurate, unless you indicate otherwise. So, "approximately 3 billion" would be right, "approximately 3x10^9" would be right, and "approximately 3.000x10^9" would be right.
If by convention, every digit you give for a constant is presumed to be accurate, then "approximately 3.000x10^9" is an incorrect representation of 2,997,961,386.257345 using 4 digits of accuracy -- the correction should read, "approximately 2.998x10^9" assuming that by "accurate digit" we are rounding to the nearest value rather than using truncation or other common rounding methodologies.
Um... I feel the need to point out...
encyclopedias have never been very accurate, and their content is often old or culturally biased.
So as news, this feels like an advert for Wiki... or something. General tech we're great silliness perhaps. The echo chamber of media is full of such useless tripe.
There are times when I feel the urge to write "citation needed" on every single article on conservapedia, ...
You're confusing the wiki software with the wikipedia organization and its encyclopedia.
The "citation needed" bit is part of the wikipedia organization's standards of proof for entries in its own encyclopedia. They are trying to emulate an actual encyclopedia, acting as a secondary souce summarizing identified primary sources.
Any other organization using the wiki software to target whatever function they wish and implement whatever standards they wish.
Expecting Wikipedia's standards to be used on some other organization's wiki just because they use the same software is like expecting everyone using some text editor to use both the citation systems for legal briefs and scholarly journal entries, just because that text editor is used both by lawyers and professors.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... "Religiously biased and nonfactual" ... "Satanic Ecumenicalist Agenda"
I read fallacy of loaded words somewhere.
I see 57005 people
Firstly: it seems you are unable to understand what I was driving at, and obviously did not check out what the clown was spewing at The Jeremiah Project; the link which I posted using the term Satanic Ecumenical Agenda, did you? How about a straight up Google search then? Try {satanic ecumenical}; that lovely word pair "returns about 73,500" records. Searching {pope 666} returns "about 913,000" records. So not sorry that my satire hit you in such a sensitive spot, you refused to look at reality, and instead chose to just insult gratuitously.
Secondly, am I to assume by this that you belong in the Papal Bull camp with their Diet of Worms, instead of being a rooted in Luther's 96 feces nailed to the church door kind of guy? If yes, are you, as the Vatican Representative cited in the Conservapedia Harry Potter article also one who grew up with "fairies, magic, and angels in their imaginary world"? I did not start down that cavernous opening for sexual innuendos now did I?
Thirdly, why not address the point I was making: that Andrew Schlafly is NOT promoting Conservatism in his wikipedia, but instead is pushing his personal version (perversion) of theocracy.
Fourthly, I admit to being one faithless SOB. I no more believe in the Pope's holiness, than I believe that Pat Robertson actually speaks with god up in his tower. Pure crap, although maybe they believe it, and if they do, it is because they never grew out of their childhood fantasies of "fairies, magic, and angels", and this evolved into a present-day psychosis which is manifest in their belief that they alone have the ability to speak with god and be his earthly representative. Still, your reply of vapid hauteur is a strong indication that you swing a corked cross. Tsk tsk mister supposed to judge me not. Really fine testament; pissant poseur.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
You said, "EB articles were highly respected in the scientific community."
Didn't you mean, EB article authors were highly respected in the scientific community?
The problem often was that the authors were apparently told something like, "Write 400 words on your subject". But 400 words was just not enough to make sense. That was my experience of EB.
Note that we are both using the past tense.
All information channels have flaws. No exception.
However, I know of no media that have as good possibilities to verify the content as Wikipedia. You can check who wrote what, what else they have written, their experience, how much controversy or vandalism they have been accused of.
If you do not verify the content before you use it for anything serious, you are a fool.
If you use media where you cannot verify the content at all, you are an even bigger fool.
The EB article about Barbara McClintock was subtly misleading in other ways, also. yo, what's up with feet?
> Large plots of land that float?
... Comic books don't lie!
Why, yes, they do.
See dumb ass is you.
In reality however, large land masses DO sometimes float, particularly in the case of floods where the chunk of land has been washed out to the ocean, and is held together by large masses of tree roots, and sufficient vegetation to give the mass an overall SG of less than 1.
Read up on it.
- And stop drinking Pinoqachole.
The definition of wiki at wikipedia.org: "A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it."
Never mind who or how they edit the website, they're trying to pass off unsubstantiated garbage as the truth. Your freedom of speech doesn't make it true, and anyone is right to question what they have to say.
Where did you get the B.S. notion that you can opt out of supplying evidence for what you claim is true? Oh you're with the executive branch? Damn!