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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."
How many of those errors were purposefully introduced? Encyclopedias and map makers do that all the time to see if others are plagerizing.
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.
Concise but rich. You've really summarized the problem of Wikipedia, and all peer-dictated fora, quite elegantly.
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.
A great many, the problem with the "wisdom of the mob" theory is exactly that- the mob. Information unfavorable to cultural biases will be left out of the encylopedia - take the article on circumcision and the article on penis - there are a few fanatics (including an administrator and a member of arbcom) who use the rules to bludgeon people to keep information (that is clearly verifiable [read: medical studies]) out of those articles (and related ones) because it casts circumcision in an unfavorable light (and appropriately so - it's no more medically appropriate 99.9999999% of the time than female genital mutilation). The bias is subtle, one of withholding information, and the people enforcing the bias are very good at making it look like they're in the right - all because of the idea that "the wisdom of the mob" is infallible. there are definantly other articles that this is true about as well.
Wisdom of the Mob fails when Fact contradicts Culture.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
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.
Yep. A similar problem occurred with me when I tried to edit the Christopher Columbus page. Try including quotes from his journal that show he intended to forcibly enslave the native Arawaks, or attempt to write about what Columbus did when he first met them, and it just gets deleted. Instead, the article tries to show him as some well-meaning Christian who found gold in rivers, or politely asked where he could find it. When I queried this many times on the talk page, the response I got was along the lines of, "Yes, we know he enslaved them, and we know he went after gold, but let's not get too caught up on these aspects, because Columbus wasn't unique in doing this." So you have an article where the word slave is mentioned once, and there is not one statement regarding the actions that Columbus and his men undertook to use the Arawaks as slaves to find gold.
I used to love Wikipedia, but that incident made me realise it's nothing more than a starting point to get a very basic idea of a subject and then move on.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
The Britannica article has nothing negative to say about circumcision either:
u mcision
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9082690/circ
I don't think the Wikipedia is that great for that sort of thing:
1) The admins delete a lot of stuff fairly arbitrarily and sometimes even for false reasons (to paraphrase: it only takes a very small community to delete stuff).
2) There does not appear to be an easily accessible history of deleted stuff.
And what are the odds that the wikipedia will last longer than paper from the 1900s?
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!