Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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
...math and physics articles will forever be incomprehensible to mere enthusiasts.
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..
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?
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!
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.
Building Secure Microsoft ASP.NET Applications ?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You've them K-things mixed up a bit. Knol is some sort of a project of Google, and is probably unrelated to the cute polar bear Knut. Whoever modded you informative is almost certainly a noted Wikipedian though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deleted
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.