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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
If an encyclopedia purposefully says something incorrect, it has lost credibility for a poor reason. For example, if I want to know what the NP problem is, I don't consider it acceptable that an encyclopedia purposefully lied to me just to mess with its competitors.
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
I'm glad something is documenting every minutae of our popular culture. Popular culture of the past is fascinating, and often tells you a lot more about what it was really like to live in the time than journalistic or encyclopedia articles or the works promoted to "high culture" of the period.
For example I love old newspaper strips from the turn of the century to the Great Depression. They're endlessly fascinating, ofen very well written and draw you into a world that is very similar yet completely different than our own. They're also incredibly difficult to find, even some of the ones that were enormously popular (like Buster Brown or Mutt and Jeff), and there is almost nil written about them. Someone else might find this in Old West dimestore novels, or minor Victorian theater, who knows. What I wouldn't give for the "fanboys" of the past to have documented every minutae, because there are a lot of great works have simply faded into obscurity because they were considered "throwaway pop culture" at the time.
That's the beauty of Wikipedia; it's limitless and only takes a small community (even of one) to decide something is relevant. If it's something you don't find interesting then there's no reason for you to bother with it. And who knows? In fifty years an article about Fanboyism, Buffy characters or the Slashdot effect may be extremely treasured information to someone else.
By the way how long did it take The Beatles or Charlie Chaplin to make it to Britannica's pages?
FYI, Britanicca is not a collection of popular culture or slang terms. It is an encyclopedia.
But that's completely untrue, isn't it? Hundreds of articles are deleted from wikipedia every day because they're deemed by editors to be irrelevant or of interest to too few people.