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....
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.
Wikiality bites.
So says Stephen Colbert.
Britannica should also check its facts about elephant populations. I heard it has tripled.
All of them.
What?
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.
...is even self-aware
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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
"all because of the idea that "the wisdom of the mob" is infallible."
The same holds true for the wisdom of the 'elect', history has shown that their needs to be a deep suspicion of both, able and intelligent people are just as bone-headed and misguided as anyone else, but this bone-headedness always has to wait for the next generation to look back from the current one to see how hopelessly naive they were. Many experts of the past were just as ignorant and barbaric as any other man, its just that experts can hide their own misguidedness and stupidity behind the ignorance of laity and their current positions of authority.
i think this is a standard problem with knowledge. every reference work was written by people living at a certain time in a certain culture. wikipedia should be better than most when it comes to heated issues (politics, sex, emacs/vi) because of the base of editors being global. however, as you say, if the big chief editor of an article supports a certain ideology, it can be difficult to make headway.
this is however a standard caveat. one cannot read a version of the eb from colonial times without being painfully aware of the fact. the brockhaus of 193x is even worse.
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
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? :) ~~~~
The Britannica article has nothing negative to say about circumcision either:
u mcision
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9082690/circ
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
Thanks for demonstrating this in your own opinion piece.
Because if it was written in citizendium, it must be true and there is no need for editing.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
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.
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?
"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"
Seriously, it took you a problem with editors to figure that out? I would have expected anyone on Slashdot to recognize that immediately.
Am I too old or something? Are all "those damn kids" being taught that Wikipedia is now an acceptable source to quote without verification?
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
About five years after my circumcision, my father - having one of his occasional lapses in disinterest in us kids - attempted to teach me how to wash the foreskin to avoid the nasty infections he had there. After that, I never regretted not having one. Thanks, Dad! I have difficulties understanding people who take it so seriously that they campaign against it. But do feel free to talk about it.
Just one thing though. Do not ever again mention male circumcision in the same paragraph as female genital mutilation, unless you are talking about complete penis removal. It is akin to comparing a summer camp to a Nazi concentration camp: an obscene error in magnitude that makes light of people's suffering.
I take it you haven't seen the common botch jobs on circumcision? "Bowing", pain during erections... and complete penis removal are potential complications. It's hard to draw any parallel between men and women. Female circumcision is definitely sinister and not a good comparison... maybe the best anatomical parallel would be to remove the clitoral hood and make a girl wear a g-string backwards for the rest of her life. It would seriously affect sensitivity of her clitoris. My point is only that just because your doctor got it right, don't assume that other doctors do. Honestly, I think unless medically necessary, circumcising a child of any gender should be illegal.
I see you know absolutely nothing about anatomy. The foreskin is the same structure as the clitoral hood. Removal of the clitoral hood, a form of female genital mutilation, is the direct female equivalent of removal of the foreskin. The foreskin contains 66% of the erogenous nerves of the penis, 50% of the mobile tissue (without that it is MUCH more likely for the female to get sore during intercourse). Only your ignorance makes it seem to be an obscene error in magnitude (that is to not say there aren't forms of FGM that are worse than the one mentioned, but that doesn't make circumcision not evil).
You know why people compaign against it? Because it was done on us when we were infants, without our consent or any ability to reverse the damage done. It is the ONLY cosmetic medical proceedure allowed to be performed on a child with a parents preference.
Even a small amount of HONEST research will reveal that circumcision is an evil practice.
It was started in the english speaking world as a cure to masturbation - because at the time (late 1800s) masturbation was considered the root of all evil. Dr Kellogg and a few others got everyone to start cutting off foreskins - Dr Kellogg also encouraged applying carbonic acid to the clitoris for the same reasons. Infact FGM was practiced in the united states within living history - see the book "The Rape of Innocence" by Patricia Robinett - a woman born in kansas in the 50s who had most of her labia and her clitoris removed.
So before you godwin the thread again, know what the fuck you're talking about.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
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!
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.
Feel free to post a link to this article and your revisions, and we'll corroborate your sources and repair the article.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Circumcision is child abuse.
As far as research into circumcision, there has been an article from the BBC that showed that circumcision helped to cut HIV risk.f ings/aids/434880.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/background_brie
Well, the only reason I'm aware of is in the Old Testament that circumcision was prescribed for the Israelites. Many Christians have continued this practice because it was said to be more sanitary and was originally prescribed by God and thus intrinsically not a harmful practice.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live