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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?
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
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..
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.
He has just a slight vested interest in pimping his wares, here.
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.
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.