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User-Generated Content Vs. Experts
Jay points out a Newsweek piece which suggests that the era of user-generated content is going to change in favor of fact-checking and more rigorous standards. The author points to Google's Knol and the "people-powered" search engine Mahalo as examples of the demand for more accurate information sharing. Quoting:
"User-generated sites like Wikipedia, for all the stuff they get right, still find themselves in frequent dust-ups over inaccuracies, while community-posting boards like Craigslist have never been able to keep out scammers and frauds. Beyond performance, a series of miniscandals has called the whole "bring your own content" ethic into question. Last summer researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the reference site's users make more than 50 percent of its edits. Perhaps more notoriously, four years ago a computer glitch revealed that Amazon.com's customer-written book reviews are often written by the book's author or a shill for the publisher. 'The wisdom of the crowds has peaked,' says Calacanis. 'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'"
Because experts are never wrong. Infact, did you know experts always completly agree?
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Maybe someone will start a tech news site where users can submit stories, and editors pick the most accurate ones for posting... It can even feature user-run moderation for comments -- kinda like "digg up" and "digg down".
Anyone wanna start such a site?
Newsweek implicates Wikipedia in "not everything on the Internet is true" shocker!
web 3.0? is the web 2.0 hype over already? Now that I was starting to get into the bandwagon and to enjoy it..........
> Last summer researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the reference site's users make more than 50 percent of its edits
Wtf. Why is this 'secret elitism' ? IIRC, the story was something along the lines that what happened typicall was that a large 'plain text' commit tended to be submitted by an actual expert, and then hundreds of small commits were made by this 1% that was to wikify the text, format it nicely, add references etc.
To me, that sounds more like a 'secret janitorial staff' than a secret elitism.
Big media companies are finally starting to "get" the Internet and join the information age by finally making meaningful contributions online.
Wisdom of crowds is far from dead though... and may I say let's not get in the habit of referencing "Web 3.0" PLEASE.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
including ones that are held to be non-fiction eg. Bible, Koran, Book of Mormon, Scientology and many others.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The article says, basically, that the experts are advertising supported. It will all fall apart as web advertising collapses again. Thank you, Adblock Plus!
Besides, with all but the newest and pre-release products, I get much better information reading a spec-sheet and browsing user opinions than I do from an expert review.
The author points to Knol as an example of the demand for more accurate information.
The Knol story is a case in point. The user-generated media claims he is a cute, cuddly baby bear cub, but the reality is that Knol now has 6-inch claws, and they have had to limit his contact with his human zookeepers.
This is going to be a case of "Your betters know better", which simply will not fly. I will take wikipedia with its inaccuracy any day, over a closed publication model with a range of possible slants to its subtle editorializing and crafty omissions, all created by funding requirements.
No, thank you. I'll pass.
enefesdi bhootparamdi
if a thing is worth doing at all, it's worth doing right. -- H.S. Thompson
Everyone knows that only 4 out of 5 experts agree!
paintball
Back to Web 0.0.
Time to dust off ye ole World Book!
paintball
...math and physics articles will forever be incomprehensible to mere enthusiasts.
Yeah. Sounds like an argument from an old-school media to keep itself relevant.
"Seriously, guys, you need US to editorialize your un-filtered information! We know what's good!"
Damn, if these "Periodicals" come out daily, we'll call them newspapers; and weekly ones we'll call magazines. Heck even some of the highly technical ones we'll call Journals.
Shit, then people can go to school to become writers/authors or even Journalists. I bet a whole industry can sprout up from this. If the content is good enough, I'll even pay for it. I wonder if they can deliver it to my doorstep every morning by 7am, so I can read it with my morning coffee.
Probably. The biggest 'problem' with wikipedia and it's ilk is that it takes readership away from the monetised publishers who previously held sway on the provision of information.
Yes, sometimes it sucks. But sometimes books do too, and the edition on your shelf won't magically correct its errors and ommisions if you wait a few days. For that you need to buy a new edition, and hope the problems are gone.
...but I'm sort of getting tired of user generated content and user powered free-for-alls. Everyone likes to hail Web 2.0 as a revolution in democracy, but it really isn't. It's who screams loudest, and who can afford the opportunity cost of sitting around all day reverting edits, creating their own Digg army, or spamming links all over the place. And everyone is doing it now, so the time it takes to find something worth reading, watching or listening too isn't worth it even when the price is free. It's one of the reasons I find myself coming to Slashdot to actually find articles, instead of Digg/Reddit/etc. And on a larger scale, I actually find myself going back to "old media." Picking up a newpaper (or at least reading something with an editor online, like the NYT), listening to NPR, getting a subscription to Wired, buying CDs and box sets of old shows, and so on and so forth.
-- Aaron
mob justice maybe, but certainly not wisdom. this nonsense has turned the internet into one big soap box with very little meaningful content.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'
Truly talented, *compensated* people. Thank god that capitalism is finally in charge. They had take the elections but I just new it had to be media too.
The fact that 1% of users do 50% of the edits at wikipedia should not surprise anyone. There are 2 things that a "user" can do at a wiki: read or write. Reading is much easier and faster than writing (duh). So you'll expect a lot more reading to go on, than writing. The "surprise", apparently, is that this writing is not distributed evenly among users who both read and write. In fact, this one data point suggests a power law may be at work here, e.g. 1% of users do 50% of edits, 2% of users do 75% of edits, 4% of users do 87.5% of edits, ... Now what would be so surprising about finding a power law in an organic, social phenomenon like a wiki?
Actually, I find this 1/50 statistic for wikipedia quite impressive. I would have thought--mod me down, I don't care--that there would be even fewer industrious wiki-heads doing even more of the editing. (And hey, don't forget, a lot of this editing *is* simply tedious work that most of us cannot bother with.)
--
Statistics? Sure, just tell me what you want me to prove..
Anonymous Delivers. Prove me wrong.
Buzzwords discovered during a quick reading:
Netizen
choice fatigue
Web 3.0
wisdom of the crowds
What the hell is "choice fatigue" anyway? Are users overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data aggregated by Google and the like? Is the author implying that we're too lazy/tired/inept to handle more than one or two obvious sources of information? A combination of both? These trend stories only hold weight when constructed with ambiguous phrases, hurried research, and lack of in-depth explanations. He damns Amazon, Wikipedia, and craigslist in a matter of four sentences using flimsy support at best. Dark days for the internet heavyweights indeed.
Also: when will the "Web x.0" label finally die? This is a serious question. At the current buzzword usage rate, we'll arrive at Web 10.0 by 2015. So the tech trend story authors will either have to qualify the phrase using several paragraphs, assume readers understand all 10 evolutions of the web, or stop using it altogether. If it's the latter -- oh god please let it be the latter -- then at what number will it stop: 4.0, 5.0, 6.0? Anyone want to take bets?
Nobody has even agreed on what they mean by "Web 2.0", or for that matter whether it even exists! So let's not even start talking this crap, please.
(FYI, I am a Web Developer and Software Engineer for a corporation with a big online presence, so please don't try to tell me that I don't know what I am talking about. You will be wasting everybody's bandwidth.)
But with all that aside, this is still a bunch of garbage.
Quote: "User-generated sites like Wikipedia, for all the stuff they get right, still find themselves in frequent dust-ups over inaccuracies..."
SO WHAT??? According to university studies, they STILL got just as much right as the "Gold Standard" of encyclopedias, Encyclopedia Britannica... at a small fraction of the cost!
This is not an endictment of Wikipedia. It is merely a statement that someone wants to make more money in the same business, and is betting that they can do so by paying "experts" to write the material.
BUT...
The existing statistics say that they will FAIL! They might make a (very slightly) better product... but at a higher cost than most users will be willing to pay. So... they will get some corporate support and so on, maybe a small amount from the academic community. Big deal. They will not out-compete Wikipedia because they will not be in the same market. Even if they want to be.
And let's just ignore the "Web 3.0" horsepucky, shall we? I really hate it when people deliberately waste everybody else's time.
It's too expensive for one thing. Take for example the medical field. How much of the body of knowledge is "Level 1 Evidence"? You'll find that only a small proportion of what is in a medical textbook meets this standard, because it requires a formal review panel of experts systematically analyzing properly undertaken studies with blinding and so forth, and even then you have to take it with a grain of salt most of the time. It's just so terribly labour intensive that the job has to be restricted to narrowly defined, very important areas of interest.
Ordinary people are much better than experts at offering real, useful knowledge with everyday applications. People are after coalface experience and are getting it for nothing. Hard to beat that.
Also, when it comes to current affairs / intelligence, nobody trusts a commercial or government agency on these things anyway. At least they won't for long, because you get to see how useless their information is.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
This story and others like it are part of a move by publishers and the traditional media to undermine a phenomena that they are terrified of because it makes them less relevant to many people. While Wikipedia is imperfect it is still no worse that the traditional media, which has always been vulnerable to corrupt editorial manipulation, marketing scams and shoddy journalism.
and i make sure never to submit information from my expertise to those filthy websites with user-generated content. Otherwise,
they might become expert-generated content sites and that would be wrong.
When i graduated from school i made a pledge: A pledge that i would only use my knowledge and skills for my own monetary benefit and the benefit of those who employee me. Sometimes, it's hard because i enjoy using my skills and contributing, but i manage. Otherwise, information could be gotten without paying anyone, and who would that benefit? The information would be worthless and therefore useless!
He's implying that because of the failure of some web communities in keeping out "drama" that the web will revert to a centralized editorial authority.
The problem is..... it's gonna happen the opposite way.
Wikipedia's next step is to make a functioning and bug free GUI for it's editor to increase the amount of people that edit.
This would increase the size of the governing pool of moderators. You could then do votes on the edits themselves and automate the process. Moderators would get slightly more weight then normal users cause there's a lot less of them. Then get the organizations of the various topics to become moderators on that topic or category. I'm sure if they actually reached out to scientific communities to help with cataloging things it would help on the site with fact checking. And to avoid floods from normal users (the 'wikiality' scenario made prudently clear by Colbert) you could simply look at ratio's of edits. If the ratio is way above other articles you know the normal users are flooding. Moderators aren't likely to flood something with 100,000 votes....
So basically the Internet is gonna see an evolution by more processing and calculating web applications that arise from Solid State Hard-drives, ridiculous amounts of memory, and multi core CPUs. Web applications that work on media are especially thriving from the hard drive market right now. Once SSD comes on the scene with cheaper drives and they replace normal disk hard drives the database intensive area of the code will suddenly have a lot more write capacity as read gets memcached and write has more time but is able to achieve an even faster write. Essentially this would allow anywhere from 5 to 10 times more writes at capacity then compared to today's "reasonable" setup for a 3k server. This would make it cheap for startups with ideas to actually experiment and create competition.
Back to the article though... "Revenge of the Experts". I guess being able to skip over a topic in a general format while sounding like you're explaining the most difficult thing in the world falls into the category of being an "expert". How can you expect people to explain the finer details of what and why in between commercials.
Myself, I think I'll stick to letting everyone contribute. That way I can see all the expert views as well as all the interesting notes and crackpot additions that non-experts add. Since Wikipdia started limiting contributions I've found it a lot less useful and less enjoyable to use. If I wanted to read a smaller, more limited, more expert opinionated, source I would grab the encyclopedia off my shelf. What made Wikipedia great was it's huge amount of information with stuff you wouldn't find in the encyclopedia. It gave you one heck of a place to start with and then through your own research you could sort through the information provided to see what was from experts, what was interesting side material experts wouldn't tell you about, and what was just crap. Rather than censoring non-expert material it's better to highlight expert material while leaving everything available.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The university I work at expenses academics' time at £50 ($100) per hour to include expenses. Wikipedia is very large, which is one of its key virtues. Hiring people just to read and yes/no each article at $100 an hour would be extremely expensive, to say nothing of actually validating facts. You'd need a lot of Google AdWords clicks.
I would wager part of Wikipedia's success is due to it's charitable design. I think if someone works for $100 an hour, it would be easier to get them to work pro bono on your project, than to get them to work for $30 per hour on your project, because with money comes obligation and inconvenience.
Of course, Britannica can attract experts because you can put 'edited Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Aphids' on your resume - but you can only do that with projects with established name recognition, which a new website would not have. How many people outside of Slashdot have heard of Citizendium?
Just my $0.02.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
What does Amazon's book reports have to do with the GPL'd Wikipedia ?
Since you didn't provide any evidence how am I suppose to believe you?
Could you link to the conversations you had with these 13 year olds (and proof they are 13?) to support what you were saying? You didn't which leads me to believe you're making it all up so far.
If that's really what Web 3.0 is going to be, it will fail. Adding an editorial layer DOES NOT SCALE.
It's hard to imagine that we'd give up all the truly valuable contributions from the wisdom of the crowds, of which there is actually quite a bit, in order to filter it through an editorial layer which by it's very definition would result in a much, much smaller pool of knowledge. That idea is essentially nonsense.
Filmo The Klown
'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'
You, as in old media like Newsweek, have built nothing; Newsweek is just yearning for the good old days where people just believed whatever shit you published.
Sure, there will be "expert" content on the web, but people will use it as just another data source; "the pendulum" isn't going to swing back. A Stanford professor writing on insomnia gives a different perspective, but he won't automatically be more trusted because people have figured out that many experts have their own biases and prejudices, not to mention lucrative corporate contracts.
It's kind of telling that Newsweek thinks that Larry Summers is a recommendation for "expert content"; given his history at Harvard, he has no credibility selecting expert content.
Then you're obviously not really an enthusiast.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Coalface? Is that a new corporate management-speak buzzword like "low hanging fruit?"
The primary issue the author of the article has with Wikipedia and the like is that there is no authoritative voice checking the edits. I think there's a simple solution here. A large part of Wikipedia's content is something taught in colleges. Why doesn't Wikipedia ask professors who specialize in the area in which an article is to review the article periodically. I think many professors would not have a serious issue doing this. To insure impartiality, there could either be multiple professors checking one article or a requirement for agreement between the professor and a Wikipedia editor. When a user goes to a reviewed Wikipedia page, he will have the option of either viewing the reviewed version, or the latest version. The default can be the latest reviewed version.
Is this ideal? Probably not. I'm sure it would be abused, but the abuses would probably be less than there are now. It will work especially well in the sciences. In history and other subjects open to interpretation there will be more problems, but solvable I'm sure. And I think professors are generally willing to help (and a lot do help write for Wikipedia). For articles that are not of scholarly nature I'm sure something else can be thought of (journalists maybe?).
gimme a break. this whole web 2.0 thing was a meaningless buzzword. Someone wake me up when we reach web 10.0.
Its still using browsers to talk over port 80 with IPv4. we are still web 1.0.
Bloody marketers.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
for all the achievements mankind have accomplished, it is still not able to weed out murderers, fraudsters, criminals.
but, there is no alternative to it. you havent been able to create a civilization out of 'experts'.
same goes for user generated content. it will always have its flaws, it will always improve itself. but in the end, what user generated content accomplishes will be bigger and deeper than expert generated content, at any given time.
Read radical news here
Slashdot had an editorial layer with moderation and metamoderation ages ago. To me, ranking quality content (or in Slashdot's case, quality comments) isn't particularly new, or "Web 3.0".
While I would very much like to publish dead-tree books, I provide all my material online, free at least as-in-beer, so more readers can benefit from it than would be the case if I charged money for it. Another reason is that most traditional publishers would require that I assign them the copyrights to my books, something that I'm loathe to do.
But a fellow Kuro5hin member named lonelyhobo said:
I find his position perplexing. The only difference, in terms of accomplishment, between what I do now and traditional publication, is that a publisher's editor might stamp his seal of approval on my essays, and bookstore patrons might pay money for what they now can get for free.But is that what it really means for writing to be notable? I claim that it's not. For one thing, there are many, many books published every year, that even manage to earn their publishers and authors some good money, but that are in no way notable or memorable. At best they're a pleasant way to pass the time.
In my writing, I aim to make a positive difference in the lives of others, whether they are fellow software engineers or fellow mentally ill people. And I have plenty of reason to believe that I have accomplished just that, and many times over.
A little while ago someone attempted to write up a Wikipedia article about me. Of course my many troll friends from Kuro5hin jumped all over it, vandalizing it - it seems I attended "the Batman school of junk touching" - and recommending it for deletion. In the deletion discussion the case was made that I wasn't notable, because not many publications written by others could be found in which my writing was discussed.
I mostly stayed out of the debate, but I did jump in a couple times to point out how hard I work to educate the public about mental illness. I have receved literally thousands of grateful email messages as a result - but for reasons that must be obvious, I couldn't post them.
The consensus of the debaters is that, because few others have discussed my work, I must not be notable enough to merit a Wikipedia article. Considering the difference I know my essays and articles have made in the lives of others, I assert that that is just plain wrong.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Then again, what you describe is just a way of doing things, meant to address key questions that are actively disputed. Being a scientist does not necessarily mean being pedantic. Furthermore, the level of detail that you propose is in reality pertinent only for real specialists directly involved with the related problem. For example, whether aspirin for myocardial infarction should be chewed or swallowed is a small detail that probably changes mortality by (say) 0.4%. This is trivial for the average reader, even for most doctors. It is true that many interventions are frequently helpful for 1 out of 100 patients treated (number needed to treat). There is a sig somewhere (paraphrasing) "If a topic is clear and in order then it is no longer worth researching".
The question is whether in fact wikipedia or similar sites address this need. I think not. By definition, the bleeding edge of science is quite messy, which is part of the point of actively researching it. The general public (which is me, for example, concerning computer science), is quite happy to learn things that are relatively well-established. Then again, I think that too frequently the problem is not purely a scientific one (wikipedia should not get the earth's distance from the sun wrong), but usually a moral/social one.
Depends. The superiority of the scientific method is mostly a question of principle. The general public tends to have certain misconceptions, especially where counter-intuitive results are involved. That does not mean that everyday experience is worthless. Quite the contrary. However, it cannot be integrated into a system of coherent, formally validated propositions. It is, quite simply, incompatible and can range from pure genius to idiotic. You can never know which is which...
In my opinion, the whole Web 2.0 idea is based on the assumption that 60 million monkeys banging on typewriters will eventually produce Shakespeare's plays. Thanks to the internet we know this not to be the case. Certainly everyone can contribute in small niches, especially regarding some specialized interests (for example, obscure hobbies). On the other hand, the average usually beats 50% of the population (an astounding truth that we often fail to realize!) and the output of many people editing and authoring at the same time is usually not that bad but never pure genius, either.
P.Truth is the internet collaboration much more effective and rewarding then the ivory tower luddites.
I think this has way more to do with social status, power and hierarchy then 'accuracy' especially when it comes to biographies, politics, etc, how could you ever be certain you're getting the 'truth' from an 'expert' who's economic livelihood, etc, can be easily threatened.
This is so funny coming from Newsweek. After all, they hired Karl Rove, who is known for his truthfulness.
I think anyone who rolls up their sleeves and contributes to Wikipedia for a while will come across people who spend all their time doing such illustrious things as changing categories on hundreds of articles or combing through articles and placing notices, rather than contributing actual content.
Surely 1% of users making 50% of the edits is exactly the kind of long-tailed distribution one would expect from a site like Wikipedia? How is that evidence of "secret elitism"?
There are 10.0 kinds of web users, those who understand binary and those who are tired of this joke.
When we finally get people to agree what RAID-6, 7, 8, and 10 are.
Hey, looks like nobody's invented RAID-9 yet. MARKET OPPORTUNITY!
...won't you have the same thing as what is being proposed?
Oh wait, the wikipedia policies need to change to make legally responsible such editing.
I think I've added one short entry, made <10 edits throughout my history. I'm not interested in contributing, but if find something a) blatantly wrong or b) missing completely, I make minor edits. I guess that makes me part of those 99%, and I don't think that distribution is strange at all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I can only assume people are reading that as "99% of users are prevented from making edits half the time" which is absurd.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
IMHO, the biggest achievement of Wikipedia is that it raised the bar considerably for other, traditional media. Here in Germany, the 'Brockhaus' encyclopedia recently announced that it won't be publishing books anymore, but change to an online model. (I think that was discussed here a few weeks ago.) So either this new online edition is much better than Wikipedia, or it'll go bust pretty soon. Same holds true for most 'traditional' media, especially newspapers; if they don't offer content that is much, much better than what is aviable for free online, they won't last. And it seems to me that the best guarantee to that end is editorial quality. So bring it on! Time will tell and user will decide which model is going to last.
Why is it users vs. experts? Couldn't some of the users also be experts? It is my understanding that this is generally how things like Slashdot and Wikipedia work. There are a large number of users using these sites, each of which have their own area of expertise (or none). When you come across something you know to be incorrect, you amend it. On Slashdot, by posting a reply. On Wikipedia, by editing the text.
I think the users _vs._ experts is based on a false dichotomy. There isn't a group of experts that is distinct from the group of users. The users are potentially all people, including the experts. If anything, a system that uses a select number of "experts" is _limiting_ the total expertise they have, compared to an open-to-all system. And I think it shows. I find Wikipedia a lot more informative than any traditional encyclopedia I remember using, and Slashdot to give much more accurate information than, say, computer magazines sold in stores here.
Sure, Slashdot gives you a lot of misguided and downright wrong posts, but at least you get many people's input on the issue, and, often, a correct post, as well. By contrast, something written by a single "expert" is, in my experience, just as often wrong or misguided, but you don't get the benefit of seeing other people's input, let alone corrections. It annoys me no end when I read ignorant or factually false statements in computer magazines or news papers. These folks are misinforming the masses, under the guise of being experts!
In the end, of course, it depends on how good your "experts" and your "users" are. But it is certainly not a given that "experts" will do better than "users". In fact, many user-driven sites are built in such a way that wrong statements can be pointed out and corrected, which, in my experience, makes them do _better_ than a system where you trust the experts.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I trust nobody who refers to "Web 3.0." Or who suggests that the demand for Google Knol, which, you know, doesn't actually exist, is evidence of anything at all.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Sorry about my ignorance. I see it a lot and never knew where to ask.
Thanks!
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
the Pareto Principle (aka, the 80/20 rule)
Actually this is not the Pareto Principle. See the Wiki article on Pareto efficiency for details. Pareto-optimality, as it's referred to in social choice and economic theorizing, concerns making comparisons between two "states of the world." If State A improves the lot of one person and leaves everyone else's situation unchanged, the the "strong" Pareto principle says that State A ought to be preferred by "society." (A weaker form requires only that state B not be chosen.) Another word for the Pareto principle is "unanimity," since Pareto improvements (I'm better off, no one else is worse off) should be acceptable to everyone in a society.
In an abstract free market, transactions among perfectly informed buyers and sellers should reach a Pareto-optimal distribution of prices and quantities. Nevertheless Pareto tells us nothing about distributional issues. As the famous economist Amartya Sen once wrote, "the world can be Pareto optimal and still be perfectly disgusting." One of the most profound findings of social welfare theory is that it's possible to select any Pareto-optimal distribution of prices and quantities, then choose a distribution of incomes that achieves the desired result.
it takes readership away from the monetised publishers who previously held sway on the provision of information
And you have just hit the nail squarely on the head.
This Newsweek article is really just a poorly veiled attempt to criticize wikipedia and the entire blogosphere as a bunch of ignorant amateurs, while "We, the Experts" know best about everything, and therefore you should listen to us.
It's an attempt by the old media (Newsweek, NYTimes, Chicago Tribune, CBS, etc) to regain some influence and stature back from the internet "mob."
The same "mob" that shredded (as the most obvious example) CBS "expert" review of Bush's "National Guard documents." Then you have the New Republic Baghdad Diarist Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle. Even the Weather Channel fits this category (http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20080303175301.aspx).
And you have this snort-worthy should-be-classic: http://bp3.blogger.com/_cwUF9NJJBIM/R811ijgSvUI/AAAAAAAABPY/JDnxychGgJg/s1600-h/suncorrex.jpg
Newsweek: "Sure, go ahead and read wikipedia. Just be sure to come back to us for the "truth.""
It all boils down to a bunch of "experts" pushing their own agendas, getting upset that a bunch of "Joe Six-packs" would dare question them.
-john
Slashdot: you'll not find a more wretched collection of villainy and disreputable types...
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/IIRC/
IIRC it means "If I Recall Correctly"
You're kidding, right? Apparently you've missed out on Margaret Jones, or James Frey, or the entire bogus memoir industry that produces crap like this with the help of a ghost writer. I work for a publisher, and simply put, they rarely fact-check. Instead, what they do is send prerelease books to reviewers. The hope is that the reviewers will be smart enough to catch glaring errors. How knowledgeable the reviewers are depends somewhat on the audience of the book. College textbooks typically go to professors and grad students. Trade paperbacks can go to pretty much anybody, but usually quotable people or professional book critics.
In any case, this is exactly the same mechanism that Wikipedia uses: throw it out there and see if anyone catches something. As a practical matter, publishers cannot fact-check. They do not have the resources. The only books I would depend on fact-checking for are the ones that claim to do so as a principle of their cognitive authority: dictionaries and encyclopedias. The imprint I work for publishes several hundred textbooks a year, and reprints darn near a thousand. We have a little over 200 employees. See what I'm getting at?
Even scientific articles are "fact-checked" this way: throw it out there. Typically the reviewers are peers, and quite knowledgeable. This works better than with trade publishers because the reviewers have specific knowledge about that particular field. But does the publisher fact-check themselves? No! I should add that the pay scale for reviewers goes up depending on the relative reliability of the reviewers. Reviewers for scientific reviewers are often paid in the several hundreds range. Reviewers for college textbooks in the low hundreds (sometimes in trade for other goodies), and trade paperback reviewers, not much, if anything. Often it's for the privilege of seeing pre-release stuff.
There's only one kind of publishing where fact-checking (aside from dictionaries, etc.) is done as a rule: journalism. But there have been many scandals there as well. There was a study mentioned in the book Trust Us, We're Experts that said that nearly half of the Wall Street Journal's article's were simply slightly modified press releases. And the Wall Street Journal is regarded as one of the more reliable papers! I think I only need to mention cable TV journalism for you to see where I'm going with this.
The publishing industry is not reliable. They're in it for the money. Books like Frey's sell just as well, if not better, than the real ones. Just look at the demand for O.J. Simpson's book-- a book that never even claimed to tell the truth! People want something juicy, and the publishing industry is happy to give it to them. Sorry, ptrourke, your premise is false.
Web 3.0??? WTF?!1!!!?
Enough already!!!!
that contributing more makes you elite.
I'd say the world could use more of that kind of elitism.
It's the elitism which attaches more weight to the opinions of people who know certain other people, or who have lots of money, or who have admittedly impressive accomplishments in other fields that is questionable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Much of the problem with Wikipedia and Craigslist comes from anonymity. Wikipedia carries anonymity to the point of absurdity - not only are individual contributors anonymous, the "admins" and "sysops" are anonoymous. Craigslist is drowning in a flood of spam because they don't do anything to validate accounts.
One of the simplest ways to cut down on the problem is to require a cell phone number to get an account. The signup system then texts a password to the phone. GMail used to do that, when they were trying to be be less evil than Hotmail. Craigslist desperately needs it. Yes, you can buy more SIM cards and create multiple identities, but each new identity will cost $50 or so, which tends to throttle spammers.
Well, yes, this general idea sounds pretty good. Now that we've got ways of generating lots of raw content, and found that doing so has actually led us down an interesting path, it is time to take another step and look at ways to make the content better.
But calling that "Web 3.0"??
I don't think so. This is much more like going to Web 2.0.1 Which is certainly important but definitely just another incremental step in the evolution of the intarweb.
Emgee's future chronology for making the tubes better:
no effective "D" in "DHTML"
partial page fetching;
formations of communities of content maintainers
where we will be at the end of the next step
ability to start relying on accuracy of content
maybe through "wish switch" mechanisms or virtual keyboards, etc
maybe through direct stimulation of visual cortex
[Thanks for another fun Saturday morning mental exercise. So much better than the cartoons!]
Yes, I did mean to say something else, but not quite that either. How about, "Not everybody agrees on what it is, or whether it even exists..."
As for the rest... you see, from a developer's point of view, in my geographical region anyway, the consensus (if you can call it that) "definition" of Web 2.0 is nothing at all like you describe! Rather, it is a set of techniques or UI methods used for building and interacting with web sites.
See what I mean? I am a professional in the field, and you and I (and my peers) do not even agree on what it means...
You can argue all you want (and be as sick as you want) about the Web 2.0 hype. But don't blame the people who pipe up and say, "Hey! There's nothing different about that! We were doing it 5 years ago!" They are telling the truth. If you want to claim that it is as "real" as Santa Claus, fine. It is a concept, and we can agree on that. But I do not think that even Santa Claus is a good analogy, becauae you seem to be describing something like Christmas, while my experience and perception of it has been much more like Halloween... lots of people going around in masks and costumes, pretending that things are not what they really are.
Researchers have also discovered that less than 1% of scientist produce more than 50% of the papers in top scientific journals. Clearly the system of peer review fails to address the hidden elitism of scientific work.
This very old, and very well known, fact that Wikipedia contriputions follow Zipf's Law (i.e. power-series distribution) gets repeated every six months as some conspiracy or cabal. What it amounts to is that a few Wikipedia users are very interested in contributing, and a lot more people are only slightly interested (or not at all). FWIW, I write that as someone in that top 1% of contributors (and can testify that my secret overlords have been seriously delinquent in paying the bribes).
Buy Text Processing in Python
It's simply a case of grouping people by their own choices. You put all the flat earthers together and sell them flat earth compasses and pretty crystals.
Those who actually go out and observe the real world will realise the truth, can if they wish, manufacture flat earth compasses and pretty crystals to sell to the flat earthers. Then head off for a cruise on their yacht knowing they aren't going to fall off the end of the world.
You see, you don't have to worry about who the experts are. Everyone has their own experts.
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You clearly have no idea how reviews of actual science are done.
I have, at this moment, four papers to review for the top conference in my field. I will get paid nothing, and neither will the reviewers of my paper. No reputable conference or journal that I'm familiar with pays reviewers; it's an expected part of being a scientist.
The articles are also by no means "thrown out there"; they're given to a primary reviewer who's a recognized expert in that area, and he or she selects several additional reviewers who he knows to be sufficiently knowledgeable in that area that they'll be able to understand and effectively evaluate the work. This is, effectively, selection of experts by experts, and it's utterly crucial to the peer review process. Simply "throwing it out there" would be a mess.
Unless by "scientific articles" and "review by peers" you're talking about pop-sci magazine articles or something. Calling a piece in Wired a "scientific article" is an enormous stretch, and an actual scientific article goes through a very, very different review process than the one you suggest. One which - not coincidentally - relies heavily on authenticated experts.
Imagining that democracy can replace expertise fits the currently-trendy memes very well, but it's a fantasy. A million monkeys on a million typewriters might crank out Hamlet, but no number of monkeys is going to recognize and select Hamlet, or any other worthwhile piece of writing. Leveraging the work of non-expert crowds is very powerful, but it's not a magic bullet that can solve everything, and it's sheer populist fantasy to imagine that it is.
Dissemination of intelligence to help transcend the ignorance and providing something informative for the decision making process and redesign of the worlds systems with participation in Self Government.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
So these 'experts'... they work for free? Come on, if you had to decide between writing your next article for a well known scientific magazine or writing a wikipedia article...
See? That's the way you do it!
Who are considered the experts? The dip$hit$ on CNN and MSNBC? Those folks could get a fact right if it bit them in the @$$!!! I think User generated stuff is more accurate than the drivel they peddle.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
it's all about understanding that participation in UGC is multi-layered. just like in FOSS projects, in Wikipedia, human search, crowdsourcing sites, etc, some people are hard core contributors while others are bug-reporters, fact-checkers, type-correctors, forwarders, etc etc etc. In each of these systems different people can contribute to different degrees their time, skills, and efforts. On these terms, experts are not different form lay people.
Thanks. I thought it might have that meaning, I just didn't know the exact words.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
The crowd has shown itself quite capable of teaching, and now the focus should be getting the crowd to be capable of researching. If you believe anything from any expert after seeing it only once you are letting the system break down right there. The most traditional of research cultures have shown that a second reference or more is essential, trying instead to promote the authenticity of the 'expert' in mainstream culture is doing all of academia a disservice.
It kidda has been said already, but I'd just like to stress it: crowds can't be bribed.
Now, crowds can be fooled in a closed information system. Can they be fooled in a wikified information enviroment? Would the iraq war had happen if the american people read wikified news about the weapons of mass destruction?
largely, i think various fields seem to find themselves stuck in circular dependencies when searching for new ideas. life on mars is a great point: this doesn't contain carbon, it can't be remnants of life.
i'm not saying that everyone should be labeled "expert", but i do think that many of the ideas that get ignored because they're "implausible" should be given a second glance. as one great literary character once said: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
The Internet is a true marketplace of ideas. Left to accordant forces, Interment users' eyes will gravitate where they want. The explosion of user generated forums was in large part a reaction to the lock down on choice and participation that had existed since forever. Now, if there is a demand for additional content and services that provide an expert editorial buffer - great - there's room for that too, especially if its free. But I do think the author of Newsweek article is a bit gung ho in heralding the "Return of the Expert." According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is still the ninth most popular web site in the world and holding. About.com - the proclaimed prototype for the expert filtered site - is not even in the top 100 and barely in the top 200.
"...researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the reference site's users make more than 50 percent of its edits."
Researchers? What a bunch of morons. This is exactly the sort of ratio you'd expect on a large public entity. Maybe they missed the class where the Pareto Principle was discussed.
Let me get this straight:
User Generated Content is Crap, because Corporations and Politicians etc pay people to put false Informations in the Content... So the better idea is to have Corporations and Politicians pay people to write the complete content?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes