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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.'"
> 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.
>Because experts are never wrong. Infact, did you know experts
>always completly agree
That's not much of an argument. Of course experts disagree - but either side knows far more about a given topic than the average Joe 12-pack on the internet. Unfortunately, experts don't have nearly the free time of Joe 12-pack. Meaning in many cases the well-meaning but uniformed will engage in editing wars with the true experts and there's no way to prevent someone from reposting the same crap over and over.
Brett
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
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.
While there is some truth in that, the problem here is more subtle. Stated simply it is:
How do we tell that this person is an expert? What actually distinguishes them from another user?
This is a serious problem because there are a whole lot more people who claim to be experts than there are who have anything useful to contribute. The "wisdom of the crowds" never really existed - crowds are quite stupid - but Wikipedia 'solves' the problem of finding the experts by building a system where you don't need to bother, and (here's the important bit) nobody has ever come up with anything that works better. Nothing will change until/unless somebody does come up with a better solution.
It's "peer-review" but we are all the peers.
After all, what were "experts" before they became experts, except "users"?
Or, to put it another way, an expert is a user who other users call "expert".
You are welcome on my lawn.
The summary seems to suggest that merely paying people will automatically elevate their content to a realm of professionalism and accuracy. That's silly. If anything paying people introduces potential conflicts of interest etc.
This looks like the common mistake where people assume that something is worth more if they paid more for it. Or it may be a flimsy attempt to commercialise sites like Wikipedia, I'm sure many business types salivate at the prospects of "monetizing" such a huge site - well, it's huge *because it's good* - Wikipedia never even had to advertise, users flocked to it because it was useful, and that's testament to the fact that the system "works".
Personally I don't think there is even a problem that needs to be solved. GP is exaggerating badly, as is the summary (I didn't RTA). On the whole, Wikipedia works incredibly well - really, it's 'nothing to see here, move along', focusing on the 0.0001% of problem areas and blowing it out of proportion to suggest an epidemic of problems suggests sensationalism or an ulterior motive to me.
I don't see anything wrong with 1% making 50% of the edits at all, that is a natural distribution for projects of that nature, you see the same pattern in open source development, and it's not a bad thing at all. Actually I would've been surprised if the pattern had been anything else. We don't judge the content based on stats about the nature of the editing process, we judge the content on the content, and it's good, very good. Not perfect, but nothing is.
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.