The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

Hugh Pickens writes "Episteme, a magazine about the social dimensions of knowledge, has a special issue on the epistemology of mass collaboration, with many of the articles focusing on Wikipedia. One of the most interesting articles is by Lawrence M. Sanger on the special role of experts in the age of Wikipedia. Sanger says the main reason that Wikipedia's articles are as good as they are is that they are edited by knowledgeable people to whom deference is paid, although voluntarily, but that some articles suffer precisely because there are so many aggressive people who 'guard' articles and drive off others (PDF), including people more expert than they are. 'Without granting experts any authority to overrule such people, there is no reason to think that Wikipedia'a articles are on a vector toward continual improvement,' writes Sanger. Wikipedia's success cannot be explained by its radical egalitarianism or its rejection of expert involvement, but instead by its freedom, openness, and bottom-up management and there is no doubt that many experts would, if left to their own devices, dismantle the openness that drives the success of Wikipedia. 'But the failure to take seriously the suggestion of any role of experts can only be considered a failure of imagination,' writes Sanger. 'One need only ask what an open, bottom-up system with a role for expert decision-making would be like.' The rest of the articles on the epistemology of mass collaboration are available online, free for now." Sanger was one of the founders of Wikipedia, and of its failed predecessor Nupedia, who left the fold because of differences over the question of the proper role of experts. Sanger forked Wikipedia to found Citizendium, which we have discussed on several occasions. After 2-1/2 years, Citizendium has a few tenths of a percent as many articles as Wikipedia.

Comments

Wikipedia Experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation Needed

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[sycodon]

Ref

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[d3m0nCr4t]

How symbolic of you to post that on tinypic.com! :p
Yours?

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

NSFW!!

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[budgenator]

You was teased a lot in gym class weren't you?

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

The average is usually below the best and above the worst. People "know" different truths. That wouldn't be much of a problem if only proven facts could be entered into Wikipedia, but Wikipedia actually uses a simple truth-by-discussion approach, weighed by the dedication which people are willing to put behind their point of view. This approach is cemented by the "no original research" rule. A citation is not proof, just a deference to an external evaluation mechanism. It is therefore no surprise that any one Wikipedia article isn't at the top of its field. Wikipedia's strength is the collection, not the individual factoid. It doesn't need the experts to achieve average results for the whole, as long as it can keep the other end away too.

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[mdwh2]

That wouldn't be much of a problem if only proven facts could be entered into Wikipedia, but Wikipedia actually uses a simple truth-by-discussion approach, weighed by the dedication which people are willing to put behind their point of view.

No, it's about verifiable sources. You shouldn't be discussing what's true, you should be discussing what's supported by references. That's a fundamental Wikipedia policy.

This approach is cemented by the "no original research" rule.

Allowing original research would give the problem you claim exists - as then you would have people claiming that what they say is true based on their "research", despite a lack of any sources.

A citation is not proof, just a deference to an external evaluation mechanism.

What would constitute a proof?

It is therefore no surprise that any one Wikipedia article isn't at the top of its field.

Well, if the worst that can be said of Wikipedia is that it's not the number 1 best reference, I don't think that's too bad for something that's free on the web.

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would constitute a proof?

A proof is reasoning which anyone can follow and come to the stated conclusion, which is thereby proven. It can only rely on other proven facts and methods. Most notably, a proof does not require trust. "He said it and therefore I believe it" is not proof. An actual proof constitutes original research and, unless it is in itself noteworthy, will therefore not find its way into Wikipedia.

At first sight, Wikipedia's approach looks like it's about verifiability, but a citation is not proof. It can reference a proof, but in the relatively few cases where a piece of information on Wikipedia is supported by a citation, it's usually a mere reference to external authority. In addition to the rules, the editing process discourages any other way. Leaving the barrier to entry low is what sets Wikipedia apart from other efforts to accumulate knowledge. Weighing expertise higher than dedication isn't necessarily better, because it's fundamentally the same principle. After all, who's an expert?

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[TheoMurpse]

An actual proof constitutes original research

Sounds like someone needs to re-read what the scientific method actually accomplishes.

Nothing is ever proven via the scientific method. Things are disproven, and what is left is lent credence. Anything else would be an error in affirming the consequent.

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me: A in B.
You: A not in C, therefore A not in B.
Me: Not only is that a non-sequitur, the premise is wrong as well. You're only considering the strictly empirical aspects of science.

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[mdwh2]

At first sight, Wikipedia's approach looks like it's about verifiability, but a citation is not proof.

It's still not clear to me how you would prove it? Sure, this works for logic such as a mathematical proof, but what about the vast amount of other information? How would you prove - without being able to just rely on citations - that someone was born on a particular date, for example? Or the age of the Universe?

An actual proof constitutes original research and, unless it is in itself noteworthy, will therefore not find its way into Wikipedia.

If you mean the reader must do the original research, then that defeats the point of having an encyclopedia. If you mean the editor does the original research, then you're relying on "He said it and therefore I believe it" (since how can you trust he did the original research?) If you rely on a reliable source doing the original research, then that's a citation, which is how Wikipedia does work.

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the age of the Universe?

The age of the Universe is unknown. We have theories about it and as long as these theories are presented as such, all you have to do is show that these theories exist and perhaps lend some credence to them by listing empirical findings which support them.

Things like dates of birth or population counts should be backed by references to the most authoritative documentation possible. Although that isn't proof in the mathematical sense, it is still better than citing a newspaper or other "unofficial" sources which might even have used an earlier version of Wikipedia as their source. However, most information in Wikipedia is not backed by any form of citation at all. Induced by the way the articles are created and amended, "I know this" is the modus operandi of Wikipedia, despite its lofty goal of verifiability. Instead of appreciating how useful the result of this obviously flawed process is, Wikipedia itself is trying to increase the quality by moving away from the model where everybody's an editor.

If you mean the editor does the original research, then you're relying on "He said it and therefore I believe it" (since how can you trust he did the original research?)

A proper proof does not rely on trust. You can verify it yourself, if it is presented to you. Of course most readers will not even read a proof, but it is there and speaks for itself if you need it. It is apolitical, unbiased and, if it is correct, irrefutable. It doesn't need a source to lend it credence. A correct proof from an AC is as good as a correct proof by Einstein.

If some fact is not accessible to proof methods, the source(s) should be chosen such that they are authoritative and/or verifiable by others. Verification is a whole lot harder than with an actual proof, but at least you're not basing an article in an encyclopedia on the word of someone in a press agency. The authoritative sources could still lie or be duped, but that's as good as it gets with that kind of information.

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[mdwh2]

The age of the Universe is unknown.

Exactly - but I would still expect an encyclopedia to tell me what the current best estimates of its age are. This isn't something that is "proven", but you can give citations for what various scientists say.

So, how would this be "proven" using original research, instead of citations?

Things like dates of birth or population counts should be backed by references to the most authoritative documentation possible.

Which is a citation. Which is what would be used on Wikipedia.

it is still better than citing a newspaper or other "unofficial" sources which might even have used an earlier version of Wikipedia as their source

Wikipedia doesn't allow any source - the requirement is reliable sources. So if an unreliable source is quoted, then that's a problem with not following the system. It's not clear how your suggestion is any different to what is meant to be done on Wikipedia? Note, often the problem is that telling what constitutes a "reliable" source is not trivial - but again, I don't see that you are suggesting anything to solve this problem. Saying "it should use the most reliable sources possible" is a statement of the obvious, and is what people already should be trying to do. But unfortunately, sometimes a newspaper is the best that someone can find for some things.

A proper proof does not rely on trust. You can verify it yourself, if it is presented to you.

So Wikipedia should contain complete instructions on how to independently verify something? It's an encyclopedia, not a manual to teach you how to do everything.

But if you mean, contain a reference to something that tells you how to verify it yourself - then that's a citation, and again, is exactly what sbould be done on Wikipedia.

A correct proof from an AC is as good as a correct proof by Einstein.

Again, this is nothing new. The whole point of Wikipedia is that it shouldn't matter who the editor is - what counts is whether it's proven with sources.

If some fact is not accessible to proof methods, the source(s) should be chosen such that they are authoritative and/or verifiable by others.

You mean just like already happens on Wikipedia? Verifiability is the fundamental requirement for inclusion on Wikipedia.

So all in all, I'm still unclear what on earth you are suggestion. For things that can be proven (like mathematics), Wikipedia already presents the proofs. For things that can only be shown with a source, Wikipedia rules are that you should give a source.

(If instead you're quibbling that a lot of material on Wikipedia is unsourced - the general consensus is that it's okay to have material there so that other people can find sources, or remove it - then that's a separate issue.)

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you reread my initial comment, you'll see that I'm not complaining (except about that "no original research" rule excluding proofs). I'm also not suggesting that I can show you a better way. I merely give an observation about the dynamics of Wikipedia. The citation-is-not-proof discussion is a rather unimportant tangent. I acknowledge right there in my first comment that Wikipedia accepts information without proof, but I could have made clearer that that is necessarily so. The observation that Wikipedia has to deal with conflicting information is the basis for the other assumptions. That's all I was going for with the proof bit.

Wikipedia can, by the way it is constructed, not expect to be an excellent and reliable encyclopedia. The two main factors are: 1) The "wisdom of the idiots" is part of the wisdom of the crowds. A collaboration of differently qualified people with equal authority is not going to achieve optimal quality (although it might still surpass any other approach in total value.) 2) Verifiability is unachievable without alienating the users who contribute the majority of the material. "Citation needed" is a (perhaps strategically necessary) ideal, but not the reality and certainly not sufficiently enforced to become a barrier to entry. The lax requirements set Wikipedia apart and make it work. On the other hand, the way Wikipedia actually works alienates experts, people who have proven themselves in the real world and expect not to have their input overridden by someone who comes in from the street and can change what they've written, often making it worse, with the same ease as they changed what was there before. Wikipedia still turns out to be a useful resource.

I think it's a tradeoff between breadth and quality, and my totally unproven and unsubstantiated opinion is that Wikipedia is very close to the optimum for its use-case and that trying to bring more experts on board will cause an extraordinary amount of infighting, politicizing, struggling for recognition and bureaucratic behavior which is so common in academic circles. It would drive ordinary users away who edit because they "know" but can't be bothered to back up or even check their facts. It's better to take Wikipedia as the informal poll of public opinion that it is (with some zealotry-induced bias) than to ruin it in an attempt to make it more accurate. If you need a reliable source of information, there are other options.

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[mdwh2]

If you reread my initial comment, you'll see that I'm not complaining (except about that "no original research" rule excluding proofs).

But that rule doesn't exclude proofs - it only excludes a proof that isn't also backed with a verifiable source.

Articles for mathematics for example do give proofs as well. I can't think of a case where it is necessary to have a fact in an encyclopedia, that could be proven by text in the encyclopedia, but suspiciously doesn't have any reliable sources for it. Far more likely in that case is the risk that a proof is erroneous. There's a reason why in science, we trust things like peer-reviewed studies, rather than just assuming a scientist is right. If you have stumbled across a new proof, shouldn't your priority be to publish it in a paper, and not edit Wikipedia?

On the other hand, the way Wikipedia actually works alienates experts, people who have proven themselves in the real world and expect not to have their input overridden by someone who comes in from the street and can change what they've written, often making it worse, with the same ease as they changed what was there before.

But earlier, you said "a proof does not require trust", so why should it matter if someone is an expert? We should go by what they write - whether it is supported by reliable sources - and not by trusting them because they claim to be an "expert". If they can provide the "authoritative" sources for what they claim, then they won't have a problem. There's only a problem if they expect what they claim to be taken on trust "because I'm an expert". And as I say, if they're dealing with their own original research, they're better off publishing that through the normal routes, not trying to get it into Wikipedia - this is no different to any other encyclopedia. Britannica doesn't accept original research papers, AFAIK.

Do you have evidence of pages where experts were alienated? The only thing I've seen is people put off because they think they shouldn't have to provide sources, or they fear that someone might edit what they write (even though there's no evidence that what they write will be made worse).

my totally unproven and unsubstantiated opinion is that Wikipedia is very close to the optimum for its use-case and that trying to bring more experts on board will cause an extraordinary amount of infighting, politicizing, struggling for recognition and bureaucratic behavior which is so common in academic circles

I agree here, but:

It would drive ordinary users away who edit because they "know" but can't be bothered to back up or even check their facts.

I think "experts" are just as likely to fall foul of this. If there was an influx of experts, who also brought with them reliable sources, I don't think there'd be infighting, nor do I think they will have trouble getting their information put in. My experience is that material that is sourced is far less likely to be removed, than the "I know it but can't be bothered to source it" material. Yes, it's true that a lot of material is allowed on Wikipedia that isn't referenced, but that doesn't mean it displaces material that was sourced. (Sure, it can happen sometimes that you get an idiot who thinks his unsourced version is better than a sourced version, and there aren't enough editors watching to undo his edits, but this is in violation of fundamental Wikipedia policies; there are ways to raise the issue to get other editors to look at it, and they will prefer the sourced version.)

But as soon as you get experts expecting their edits to be accepted simply because they are experts, then you're going to get the infighting, and they're just as bad as any other user who claims to know something, but can't back it up.

Re:Wikipedia Experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience is that a lot of people with wiki-edit-cred are lazy. They either do the above or resort to deletionism with little review of content. (A lot of good, relevant, and useful info does disappear simply because there are very limited or no sources cited. And on some subjects they're not always easy to find.)

It would be a lot better if they could at least do some of the research to build a stump article into something more useful and find proper sources to back up the material, or make the topic into a redirect to already existing relevant articles.

I always thought an advantage to the wiki concept would be that you could start out with a little bit of knowledge, make it available, and others could snowball upon that with the better information they may have. But instead it seems you have to have a pretty detailed write-up to get going in the first place. This is outright contraditory to the advantages that the wiki-format seems to offer.

Got a better way to do things?

[Protonk]

Larry Sanger, the expert at making an online encyclopedia. We love to talk shit about Wikipedia here on /,; talk about how Knol is going to beat it or how Citizendium is better or how you wouldn't use it as a source (duh). But when push comes to shove, do we have any good competing models of how an online encyclopedia should be made?

Do we have any good reason to trust Sanger as anything other than a provocateur? What is the meat of the analysis? That open editing and cooperation is what explains wikipedia's success? I'll agree with him there. And that control of articles or processes by internal "experts" is damaging to that open editing and cooperation? I'll take two, please. He's the big problem.

We don't really know how to make a reasonably reliable, open and comprehensive encyclopedia without some deference to "local fiefdoms". We just don't. People don't contribute for money or fame. They don't have marching orders on which articles to keep free from vandalism or improve to featured status. They control their own production. Where that is the case they will bring themselves to edit on subjects they like and edit those articles in order to bring the distribution of coverage to their liking. We have to allow a little of that because it is those people who keep it from being a nuthouse. Those people spend 20-30 hours on wikipedia a week. They watch recent changes to keep subtle vandalism out. They fight back against civil POV pushers. They are an absolute necessity.

To they come with drawbacks? Hell yes. There are probably thousands of people who have avoiding wikipedia as editors because their first edits were reverted--even though they might have been productive. I find lots of those reversions and usually don't get a cooperative attitude from editors when I call them on it. Those people make subtle cultural distinctions (I like this and not that). Those people form cliques and cabals. Those people make processes and bureaucracy.

But I don't have a better way of organizing all of that free labor. Does Larry? Do you?

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Protonk]

Lulz. "He's the big problem" should read "Here's the big problem. I fail at previewing.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Spy Hunter]

Sanger has been saying stuff like this ever since he started Citizendium, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Citizendium sucks.

I think the problem is evident in his statement quoted in the summary: "Without granting experts any authority to overrule such people, there is no reason to think that Wikipedia'a articles are on a vector toward continual improvement". Well, unless you count the fact that collectively Wikipedia's articles have quite obviously been on a vector toward continual improvement since Wikipedia started. Wikipedia's article quality is not monotonic, but it is increasing. Under what metric is Wikipedia not getting better? Larry, stop speaking in generalities and point us to some actual evidence that Wikipedia articles are not increasing in quality.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[vitaflo]

Yeah there really isn't a much better way. I ran into this recently on an article on Wikipedia on the Super Nintendo release date. I was a video game reviewer in the early 90's and have a letter signed by Nintendo's PR firm stating I was getting a review system before launch (which was a pretty typical thing for them to do). The letter was dated the same date as when the Wikipedia article said the system was actually released.

Given this evidence I scanned the letter and posted it to let them know their date was off. Their response was that they couldn't use the letter as proof the date was wrong because they only used published sources of information. Unfortunately the only published sources they had were a handful of websites currently online that had the wrong date written down (no doubt copied from each other).

At first I was taken aback by this as it was a bit odd that they would turn down physical evidence, but after thinking about it, it was obvious they didn't know me from Adam and can't just take people's word for things at face value, otherwise people could "prove" whatever they wanted. Those kinds of check and balances probably produce entries that aren't always perfect, but it's a lot better than the alternative in my mind.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, unless you count the fact that collectively Wikipedia's articles have quite obviously been on a vector toward continual improvement since Wikipedia started.

This is not obvious at all. Let alone "quite obvious". Indeed, it is false.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Terminology Man]

I think that there IS a better way to design an on-line encyclopaedia, you can find it here: http://www.terminologyforum.com/fenris/index/lang/page?UILang=en. I specially designed this platform to enable experts in their fields to contribute their knowledge, putting put it in the public domain (where it belongs), and taking credit for doing so. Wikipedia is faced with its inherent contradictions, and it trying to pedal back from its original concept. The Open Terminology Forum website is designed to allow conflicting opinions to co-exist, and everything stays on record. Domains can be created in the Open Terminology Forum website as needed, and languages can be added. The next domain planned is computers. Want to join?

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Darkness404]

One of the main problems of Wikipedia is it has firm guidelines on what it is and what it is not. There is a ton of information that could be released on Wikipedia but isn't because it isn't 100% verifiable or contains "specialty information". Now, I see where the editors are coming from, but similarly, for the average person interested in something (say a video game) there isn't any one major source of information about each one other than Wikipedia. Sure, you can find loads of reviews, a few walkthroughs, all the gameshark codes you want, and perhaps even a ROM or two of it. But as for real information on the game, that goes beyond that, you have to sort through mountains of Google searches with no real way that you can easily find it. Stuff like that I believe belongs on Wikipedia but keeps getting taken down from editors.

Sure, I have no objection to vandalism being taken down, but the biggest flaw I see in Wikipedia is a lot of content gets deleted for no reason (face it, storage and bandwidth is dirt cheap).

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Protonk]

[Citation needed]
You can say a lot of things about wikipedia, but if you say that the majority of articles are worse off now than in (say) 2002, you'll be full of shit. You can point to some good articles in the past that have degraded from random edits. Or articles which have been subject to turf wars. But on the whole, there is improvement.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Jack9]

You can "prove" things via publishing that letter in a book. The people with money still successfully control information through Wikipedia. What a waste.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Published sources" often means newspapers. But journalists aren't experts at the subject they're writing about and that means they simplify, misunderstand, or get it wrong. But it's published, so wikipedia has to trust it.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Spy Hunter]

OK, we've got assertions going both ways. Now where's the evidence? I don't want anecdotes, I want a quantitative survey of a large number of articles. Until that exists, this argument is going nowhere.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Yuuki Dasu]

We love to talk shit about Wikipedia here on /,; talk about how Knol is going to beat it or how Citizendium is better or how you wouldn't use it as a source (duh). But when push comes to shove, do we have any good competing models of how an online encyclopedia should be made?

Well, I don't recall seeing full support here on /. for Knol or Citizendium. There seemed to be people on both sides of the aisle getting their voices heard. Many people attacked Wikipedia for its shortcomings, which you yourself agree exist. So, too, did many people attack the upstarts, with the standard arguments that come out whenever we discuss project forks or restarts here. Finally, there were people who had reasonable criticism for the upstart projects themselves.

However, Wikipedia itself has been extensively criticized throughout its history; famously, its ability to accumulate knowledge and remove vandalism works "only in reality, not in theory." So on that note, how can we say that we know that those systems are inherently that much worse? Many would argue, as you yourself hint, that Wikipedia's supremacy is eminent in its dominance, and in its success. Yes, Wikipedia has orders of magnitude more content than its competitors. Please consider, though, the possibility that this is simply the result of first mover advantage and network effects.

Wikipedia came on to the scene to find a fresh niche to fill. Earlier sites existed with similar goals to describe and categorize life (see: everything2 and h2g2), but Wikipedia had a slightly different defined goal (be "the free encyclopedia") and software to ease the processes of collaboration and presentation. It took off like a shot and quickly established itself before it really had competition.

Today, Wikipedia has somewhere around 2.8 million articles and a dedicated community. It seems immediately obvious to me that it's impossible today to compete with Wikipedia from square one; any competitor would need to fork the project or have their own equally impressive database. A database that size needs a huge support structure, not only in infrastructure but also in terms of volunteers/workers to police content. It's not possible to get those things all at once. There might be enough people out there who would be interested in helping a different project, but there's no way to get in touch with all of them. New talent either joins up with Wikipedia, or becomes disinterested when they don't fit with that group.

Wikipedia got where it is because it was good enough at the right time. It does a lot right. It does some things wrong. It's not perfect. But then, I don't have to tell /. about technically inferior products dominating the marketplace due to familiarity...

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Hal_Porter]

An improvement towards what though? Most articles have settled down to reflect the viewpoint of the people that watch them. If you agree with that viewpoint, that's an improvement. If you don't it's not and you give up citing, editing or reading them.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Given this evidence I scanned the letter and posted it to let them know their date was off. Their response was that they couldn't use the letter as proof the date was wrong because they only used published sources of information. Unfortunately the only published sources they had were a handful of websites currently online that had the wrong date written down (no doubt copied from each other).

Not that you necessarily care right now, but you could consider sending the scanned copy of the letter to the published sources. Wikipedia is supposed to be an aggregation of published information on the web. You need change the sources, not it itself.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Beetle B.]

One of the main problems of Wikipedia is it has firm guidelines on what it is and what it is not.

Actually, I wish. It's simply not true. They may have a few core rules (e.g. the one you complain about) that are quite rigid, but overall there is virtually no rule in Wikipedia that is not subject to modification - including by certain senior people at Wikipedia - when circumstances dictate it.

Don't take my word for it - I got it from the horse's mouth. He says it in so many words.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[DerekLyons]

Given this evidence I scanned the letter and posted it to let them know their date was off. Their response was that they couldn't use the letter as proof the date was wrong because they only used published sources of information. Unfortunately the only published sources they had were a handful of websites currently online that had the wrong date written down (no doubt copied from each other).

Indeed, because I had a related problem. A series of related articles I wished to edit had considerable problems. I worked on the item described in one of the articles while I was in the Navy, I had the unclassified manuals at one elbow, at the other elbow I had a stack of expensive reference books... All were trumped because a handful of websites all referenced the same handful of coffee table books - and disagreed with me.
 
 

At first I was taken aback by this as it was a bit odd that they would turn down physical evidence, but after thinking about it, it was obvious they didn't know me from Adam and can't just take people's word for things at face value, otherwise people could "prove" whatever they wanted. Those kinds of check and balances probably produce entries that aren't always perfect, but it's a lot better than the alternative in my mind.

Except there aren't any checks and balances - there is only whether or not the guy you discussing the issue with has more time on his hands and whether or not he can quote an interpretation of policy that supports his position. Your story is one of how the checks and balances fail.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[crossmr]

Except wikipedia doesn't believe it belongs on wikipedia, it is why it is taken down. If you want to start a wiki about various games and include all the infinite detail and trivia about it, you can. You can even get it linked in the external links. There is a certain subset of the population of editors who can't seem to tell the difference between an encyclopedia and everything every written, said, thought and just made up about a subject ever. That being said the 10,000 sub articles on pokemon needs to be nuked from orbit. Articles are meant to provide all the information the average person would find useful about a subject. Someone who is not a world of warcraft player, which is something 99.998% of the population of the world, doesn't remotely care what spells some paladin gets access to at level 27. It isn't remotely useful to their understanding of the subject. Articles are usually made by players, but not for players. Try being objective.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[skroops]

I agree that Wikipedia editors shouldn't accept your letter as evidence to change the article. But I would think that out of everyone involved with the article, who would seem to have an interest in having the correct information, somebody would take the initiative to get a correction published. As those sources are credible enought to be cited, then they should be credible enough to judge your evidence.

Someone should send the scan to the websites, along with an explanation about the situation.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[DerekLyons]

Sure, I have no objection to vandalism being taken down, but the biggest flaw I see in Wikipedia is a lot of content gets deleted for no reason (face it, storage and bandwidth is dirt cheap).

Which is why they just completed a six million dollar fund raising campaign. With cheap disk space, and cheap bandwidth, and volunteers doing the work... where is the money going?
 
Setting that aside, the problem isn't the cost of disk space or bandwidth - the problem is the unseen cost of maintenance. Every article on Wikipedia requires some portion of an editors time to maintain accuracy, completeness, coherency, etc..., and to clean up behind vandals. And there are only so many editors at any given time. Too many articles means rot accumulates in the corners and moves inward. Too many articles means too many stubs that remain untouched. Too many articles means an increasing number of articles that say the same thing from different points of views.
 
And frankly, based on a daily random sampling of articles, Wikipedia seems to be losing the battle.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[BrookHarty]

Those kinds of check and balances probably produce entries that aren't always perfect, but it's a lot better than the alternative in my mind.

This is also why articles are deleted on wikipedia, the editors are biased by their cultural knowledge. If its believed to be correct by their peers, then an alternate and possibly correct view cant be published due to the editors belonging to the same peer group.

This is really difficult area when it comes to politics, groups/clubs, companies, history, ethnic, gender, minority, etc. You only get one side. Thus the reason it cant be used in colleges, its mass agreement by a very common peer group. And a good portion of the editors are very close in its peer groups.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[0123456]

An improvement towards what though? Most articles have settled down to reflect the viewpoint of the people that watch them. If you agree with that viewpoint, that's an improvement. If you don't it's not and you give up citing, editing or reading them.

And for non-controversial subjects, that generally results in a pretty good article.

For controversial subjects, if the article is bad it's normally because policies aren't being followed: for example, the 'Apollo Moon Hoax' article (whatever the title may be today as it gets renamed regularly) has been a disaster zone for years, but that's primarily because it's an enormous violation of WP:UNDUE.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[chromatic]

[Citation needed]

Indeed; can you provide citations that Wikipedia's aggregate quality has improved?

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Protonk]

WP:EPR
Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies

Dig in. Or we could look at the increase in "Featured" articles and "Good" article stats, though the latter is not a community process but an individual process.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Hal_Porter]

The trouble is, lots of things can become controversial. Best example is "The Medieval Warm period". As far as I can tell everyone who looked for evidence of this in things like ice core temperature records found it. Unfortunately the fact that the average temperature of the Earth has been warmer in the past is awkward to people who claim that the current warming is unprecedented and an iminent disaster. So the Medieval Warm period article gets attacked by people trying to claim that the warming back then never happened.

And if you look at the article today, it frankly doesn't make any sense. On the one hand the intro says that the MWP never happened. The if you look the "By Region" section it clearly did. And the talk page is a complete warzone with MWP believers quoting The Telegraph, MWP disbelievers quoting sites like realclimate. Unfortunately the MWP disbelievers have got arbcom to label all the sources that are hostile to them as unreliable sources.

Frankly you're better off ignoring Wikipedia and looking at primary sources, i.e. people that actually looked for evidence.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us redefine "broadband" to mean transfer rates above 28.8 kbps, so that everyone may have broadband.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, "wikipedia doesn't believe it belongs on wikipedia"?

Great, Now I'm going to have to update the Wikipedia page that lists all things that aren't listed in Wikipedia again.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[dargaud]

There are probably thousands of people who have avoiding wikipedia as editors because their first edits were reverted--even though they might have been productive.

Yup, besides some spelling corrections, one of my only contributions to wikipedia was to start a missing page (several links to it but no content). After a few days it got deleted: "Not enough context to identify article's subject". And deleted pages don't even have a history...

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Tom]

You should have posted the article to your blog, and then told some gaming magazine to link to it in some "no idea what to write today" newsbit. Then you could've cited that as a secondary source and bingo.

Laughable, isn't it?

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Tom]

Indeed, because I had a related problem. A series of related articles I wished to edit had considerable problems. I worked on the item described in one of the articles while I was in the Navy, I had the unclassified manuals at one elbow, at the other elbow I had a stack of expensive reference books... All were trumped because a handful of websites all referenced the same handful of coffee table books - and disagreed with me.

Those stories are probably legion. I've had problems having facts corrected on Wikipedia articles where I was the primary source (one about me in person, one about a project I lead) - and could easily prove so.

But to Wikipedia, if three newspapers all quote the same source that got, say, my birthdate wrong, that is "more reliable" than me sending in a scanned, signed and confirmed by a notary, copy of my birth certificate. In fact, that would be entirely discarded as a "primary source".

And that's why Wikipedia usually gets it right on common and readily available articles, and has a 50/50 on articles about obscure topics (other than nerdy geek stuff).

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new around there. Any self respecting wikipedia editor knows that the first step is to add the letter to your website. THEN you, as user slartibartfast, add it to wikipedia and provide your website as a reference.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[RichiH]

I know where you are coming from and I agree that the problem exists. Been there, it bit me, too. Hopefully, I never bit anyone else!

The thing is that, as of right now, we do not have a better system. Hopefully, we will come up with one at some point, but you need to draw the line _somewhere_. And no matter what system we come up with, there will always be situations in which the existing checks and balances fail.

PS: If those other books are better references, wouldn't it have been possible to let others know the ISBNs with which they head to a library or something?

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[samael]

Well, unless you count the fact that collectively Wikipedia's articles have quite obviously been on a vector toward continual improvement since Wikipedia started.

Citation Needed.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[bjourne]

I've been in the same situation. I tried to correct some articles with obvious biases but got stuck in endless edit wars with those article guardians. It is extremely frustrating when you know that you are right, can cite secondary sources citing primary sources but are still reverted. A common tactic of "them" is to first ask for sources, then better sources and then claim that the fact is irrelevant to the article anyway. They are experts at wasting your time and making your editing experience frustrating. They also have more ties with the wiki-management so their viewpoint always prevail.

But here is the thing, to Wikipedia it doesn't matter if you like the process or not. It takes your edits that does not challenge the article guardians viewpoint and discards the rest. You get heavily biased articles that are still full with facts. The end result is articles that are improving at the cost of thousands of pissed of and frustrated editors. But the amount of people that wants to waste their time with Wikipedia is infinite which keeps the process working. I stopped contributing years ago because it was just to excruciating, others have taken my place which is what keeps Wikipedia going.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[grumbel]

Articles are meant to provide all the information the average person would find useful about a subject.

By that argument most articles about physics and math could be deleted, because they are pretty much completly useless for somebody not working in that field.

An encyclopedia is a concept that is based around the limitations of paper, Wikipedia isn't printed on paper and therefore should not follow the same restrictions.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[grumbel]

And there are only so many editors at any given time.

Well, yeah, because the rest of them got annoyed over that deletionism and just isn't contributing to Wikipedia any more. The whole problem with deletions is that they happen without a valid logical reason, they happen in a non-democratic manner (i.e. number of people writing the article doesn't help against a single admin wanting to delete it) and they quite often happen on articles that are quite useful.

I have stumbled across interesting articles that got deleted later on far more often then about articles being vandalized.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[CarpetShark]

Yeah there really isn't a much better way.

There IS, and there was. The original wikipedia concept was simple: let people edit EQUALLY, and if someone edits badly, it can be undone using the article's history.

This is now being abused, by people who act as self-appointed** guards rather than equals.

** self meaning them as individuals, or the wikipedia nazis as a collective.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take your WP:UNDUE and raise you a WP:WOTTA

--some dude who could have had a 3-digit ID if he didn't like to be an AC ;-)

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi there, Larry! Don't you think it's time to sign up for an account on Slashdot? :)

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[anss123]

On the one hand the intro says that the MWP never happened.

From Wikipedia intro:
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region, lasting from about the tenth century to about the fourteenth century.

From Wikipedia intro in 2005:
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was an unusually warm period in history lasting from about the 10th century to about the 14th century.

???

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Teancum]

Wikipedia has been moving quite a bit of effort into developing the non-English language wiki projects, and has been getting some professional staff time to helping those efforts. I'm not saying that I agree with the growing professional bureaucracy of the Wikimedia Foundation, but it is something that has been happening.

Also, even with bandwidth and disk space costs dropping, the growth of bandwidth and disk space has been increasing faster than the economic costs have been dropping. There has also been many more higher resolution images added to articles and features such as video being added to articles that are chewing up these resources as well.

There are some effort to help reduce the cost of maintenance in terms of identifying stable versions and formalizing the article review process so a random vandal can't make wild changes without going through the review process. Some of this is perhaps due to article bloat, some of it is due to pressures by people like Larry Sanger (who still has at least some supporters at Wikipedia), and an attitude of generally improving the overall quality of the project.

Writing a high quality article is hard work, and that is perhaps the largest barrier to getting more improvement as it takes somebody willing to put that sort of effort into the process.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[ultranova]

Except wikipedia doesn't believe it belongs on wikipedia, it is why it is taken down.

Wikipedia, not being a living being, is utterly unable to believe anything. Some deletionist scum, on the other hand, can only get it up by exercising petty power by deciding what article stays and what goes. It's the closest the ever get to wielding power over life and death (I hope).

This is why I no longer contribute to Wikipedia and resist the impulse to correct any mistakes I notice: the reward is having my work deleted or reverted by some antisocial cretin who got kicked out from the Neo-Nazi party due to his excessive authoritarianism and has no other outlets for his resulting frustrations.

Mod me flamebait, it doesn't change the truth.

Articles are meant to provide all the information the average person would find useful about a subject.

Today's featured article is about Thomas Cranmer, a archbishop of Canterbury in the early 1500's. The average person is unlikely to find that information at all useful for any purpose.

Someone who is not a world of warcraft player, which is something 99.998% of the population of the world, doesn't remotely care what spells some paladin gets access to at level 27.

Someone who isn't a historian, which is something 99.998% of the population of the world, doesn't remotely care about who led a subset of English church half a millennium ago.

It isn't remotely useful to their understanding of the subject.

It isn't remotely useful, period.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Teancum]

I think the #1 drawback from h2g2 is the commercial license of the content and the crazy way that you give up ownership of the content. Wikipedia wisely started out with the GNU Free Document License... while imperfect in a number of ways at least kept ownership of the content with the contributors.

Similar projects of other kinds have been started by a number of other groups, of which one of them started just a little while after Wikipedia was a user-contributed encyclopedia done by the Open Directory Project folks using the same software as the ODP. That project never really got anywhere, in part because it didn't offer anything new or original that wasn't already being done elsewhere.

That really would have to be the selling point for an alternative to Wikipedia: It would have to offer something that would be obviously of much greater value to the contributors that Wikipedia already doesn't offer. I don't know what that might possibly be.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the soft underbelly of Wikipedia right now. The WMF board does seem to be responsive to the needs of the Wikipedia community (and the other sister projects), and there are some policies in place to help keep that responsiveness as well. Still, if there were to be a board that the community didn't like, a fork in the community could easily happen. I very nearly lead a fork of the Wikibooks community due to problems with the WMF board, but the problems were eventually dealt with and overcome. The Spanish language edition of Wikipedia did have a major fork occur.... a fork that seems to continue even today with even some mild antagonism between the two groups.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

YES! Now I've got broadband too!!!

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[budgenator]

While I agree with what you are saying for the most part, it's also easy for a reasonably intelligent person to quickly recognize articles that are contentious mess of personal agendas from articles that are substantive.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[crossmr]

By that argument most articles about physics and math could be deleted, because they are pretty much completly useless for somebody not working in that field.

I agree. I feel that some math and physics articles delve in to far too much detail on proofs, etc.

An encyclopedia is a concept that is based around the limitations of paper, Wikipedia isn't printed on paper and therefore should not follow the same restrictions.

We're not going to run out of paper no. But we're going to run out of the ability to manage articles that grow even more and more. I could easily see some articles become novel length piles of garbage if people were allowed to run free with them. the equivalent of hundreds of pages. Would you want to try and edit that? How useful would an article be if people could just endlessly add every piece of trivia or original thought they had about a subject to it. How useful is an article that contains "facts" that you can't click on a link to verify someone with a reasonable amount of authority has actually stated? It becomes little more than a fan page about a subject when it becomes an unending deluge of unsourced tidbits about a subject.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[crossmr]

Wikipedia, not being a living being, is utterly unable to believe anything.

If you don't have the intellectual capacity to understand that I was talking about wikipedia as its community of editors then I can't wait for the rest of what you have to say..

Some deletionist scum, on the other hand, can only get it up by exercising petty power by deciding what article stays and what goes. It's the closest the ever get to wielding power over life and death (I hope). This is why I no longer contribute to Wikipedia and resist the impulse to correct any mistakes I notice: the reward is having my work deleted or reverted by some antisocial cretin who got kicked out from the Neo-Nazi party due to his excessive authoritarianism and has no other outlets for his resulting frustrations.

mmm insults against faceless people. We're really getting to it now. Obviously you had some pet page you created that was deleted for some reason. Things are not made better by endlessly adding to them. Do you think when a director shoots a movie that he includes every last take and scene he shot in the final product? No. In order to create a good body of written work things need to be taken out. This applies to articles and to the encyclopedia as a whole.

Today's featured article is about Thomas Cranmer, a archbishop of Canterbury in the early 1500's. The average person is unlikely to find that information at all useful for any purpose.

Nope, but the average person who might be interested in him (for whatever reason) will likely find only an adequate amount of information about him and not an endless list of everything he had for breakfast throughout his entire life.

Someone who isn't a historian, which is something 99.998% of the population of the world, doesn't remotely care about who led a subset of English church half a millennium ago.

Actually there may be a number of students in university classes who could care a great deal about him, christians may find themselves interested, etc. But that is besides the point. I was making a point about excessive detail in articles. You're trying to compare that to an article about a minor historical figure. Two very different things. An article on World of Warcraft is quite appropriate. It is a notable subject. Delving into minutia with raiding strategies, item guides, etc isn't.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[wisty]

A vector towards "good enough" is good enough for me.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[jc42]

[c]an you provide citations that Wikipedia's aggregate quality has improved?

Certainly. I found several of them by just reading this discussion. And a quick scan of the messages below this one shows several more. And there have been many other /. discussions with similar citable claims. But don't use the /. search thingy; it ain't worth a damn. Use google. ;-)

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[grumbel]

But we're going to run out of the ability to manage articles that grow even more and more.

If Wikipedia wouldn't scare of the people actually writing and editing the articles it wouldn't have a problem with maintaining them.

I could easily see some articles become novel length piles of garbage if people were allowed to run free with them.

If an article is of bad quality you mark it with one of those 'citation missing', 'npov' and whatever markers to give it a chance of improvement. If there are too many of those articles, Wikipedia is free to move them to an unstable/unreviewed/whatever branch. "Fixing" the problem of to many articles by deletion is doing far more harm then good, because it pissed of everyone that actually cared about the article.

How useful would an article be if people could just endlessly add every piece of trivia or original thought they had about a subject to it.

Much more useful then a non-existent article. When you don't run out of paper there just isn't a reason to restrict the information you want to collect, one might argue about reorganizing stuff, about splitting articles of and such, but just deleting the information really doesn't accomplish anything useful.

Deletionist cause far more harm then vandals ever did.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[bwalling]

But when push comes to shove, do we have any good competing models of how an online encyclopedia should be made?

The lack of an obvious solution doesn't mean a problem doesn't exist.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Kjella]

Indeed, because I had a related problem. A series of related articles I wished to edit had considerable problems. I worked on the item described in one of the articles while I was in the Navy, I had the unclassified manuals at one elbow, at the other elbow I had a stack of expensive reference books... All were trumped because a handful of websites all referenced the same handful of coffee table books - and disagreed with me.

The real problem here is that the best sources are not online. On wikipedia an online reference is worth so incredibly much more because it's verifiable - not as truth but as something others can read. Seriously, if you quote page 234 of the operations manual, how many would ever check that? How many even have the book or would hunt it down at a library? Most likely, none of the them know if you're bullshitting them or not.

I know it's the long way around but you need to find or make credible online sources that reference the offline sources, then make the argument that your online sources are better than the ones currently used. Otherwise you'd see a lot of book spamming on wikipedia, where all the answers are in the spammer's book. Because of the delay from addition to fact checking plus the costs, it'd be an impossible problem. It's fair enough to reference famous books like Porter's book on Porter's theory but in general it would only undermine wikipedia.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[crossmr]

If Wikipedia wouldn't scare of the people actually writing and editing the articles it wouldn't have a problem with maintaining them.

No editor or even group has the ability on a volunteer basis to manage hundreds of thousands of word articles on a subject. It isn't practical.

If an article is of bad quality you mark it with one of those 'citation missing', 'npov' and whatever markers to give it a chance of improvement. If there are too many of those articles, Wikipedia is free to move them to an unstable/unreviewed/whatever branch. "Fixing" the problem of to many articles by deletion is doing far more harm then good, because it pissed of everyone that actually cared about the article.

Endlessly adding unsourced trivial and personal opinion to an article doesn't improve its quality. The only way to improve that is remove it.

Much more useful then a non-existent article. When you don't run out of paper there just isn't a reason to restrict the information you want to collect, one might argue about reorganizing stuff, about splitting articles of and such, but just deleting the information really doesn't accomplish anything useful.

Deletionist cause far more harm then vandals ever did

again you've confused an encyclopedia with a record of all human thought.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[grumbel]

A single source telling something different might not be enough to make a final call on a fact, after all the source could just be honestly wrong, it however should be enough to cast some doubt on the data and thus require further research. Especially when it comes to release dates it shouldn't be that hard to verify, there should after all be a plenty of magazines from back then that printed something about it.

Anyway, the real crux here isn't so much the policy itself, but the reaction to your request on the Talk page, which basically starts with "...Wikipedia's verifiability policy requires...". That might be all correct, but it also kind of misses the point, since the interesting part isn't what Wikipedia requires, but what the actual facts are. Way to much time is wasted in such discussions about policy instead about worrying how one could verify the actual data in better way. Now sure, the reply in the Talk page was a very mild one, one that I normally wouldn't even complain about, but in many cases, especially when it comes to deletions and larger edits, such discussions can get extremely annoying and unproductive, because one party just misses common sense and throws mindlessly some Wikipedia rules around (which aren't really hard rules in the first place, but just guidelines) while the other tries to get some fact figured out. And well, in the end the party that cares about the fact is just pissed of and no further research is done on the topic and that is really a thing that needs to change.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[JasterBobaMereel]

...and where do they put the copy of your Birth certificate? The document is copyright to the issuer and cannot be reproduced without written consent (it is not yours) so cannot be stored on Wikipedia or On Commons and so is not a valid reference ....

Even if you are the best and primary source of facts, what you put on Wikipedia is at best hearsay since you cannot prove you are you .... simple solution is to publish your autobiography and use it as an authoritative source ...

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Hal_Porter]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

Initial research

The Medieval Warm Period was a time of warm weather around 800-1300 AD during the European Medieval period. Initial research on the MWP and the following Little Ice Age (LIA) was largely done in Europe, where the phenomenon was most obvious and clearly documented. It was initially believed that the temperature changes were global. However, this view has been questioned; the 2001 IPCC report summarises this research, saying "...current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of 'Little Ice Age' and 'Medieval Warm Period' appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries". The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) states that the "idea of a global or hemispheric "Medieval Warm Period" that was warmer than today however, has turned out to be incorrect" and that what those "records that do exist show is that there was no multi-century periods when global or hemispheric temperatures were the same or warmer than in the 20th century". Indeed, global temperature records taken from ice cores, tree rings, and lake deposits, have shown that, taken globally, the Earth actually averaged slightly cooler (by 0.03 degrees Celsius) during the 'Medieval Warm Period' than in the early- and mid-20th century

Of course if you scroll down you to the By World Region bit of the article you find

North Atlantic

The last written records of the Norse Greenlanders are from a 1408 marriage in the church of Hvalsey â" today the best-preserved of the Norse ruins.

A radiocarbon-dated box core in the Sargasso Sea shows that the sea surface temperature was approximately 1 ÂC (1.8 ÂF) cooler than today approximately 400 years ago (the Little Ice Age) and 1700 years ago, and approximately 1 ÂC warmer than today 1000 years ago (the Medieval Warm Period).[6]

During the MWP wine grapes were grown in Europe as far north as southern Britain

i.e. the MWP seems to be quite real in the North Atlantic and Europe.

North America

The Vikings took advantage of ice-free seas to colonize Greenland and other outlying lands of the far north.[11] The MWP was followed by the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling that lasted until the 19th century, and the Viking settlements eventually died out. In the Chesapeake Bay, researchers found large temperature excursions during the Medieval Warm Period (about 800â"1300) and the Little Ice Age (about 1400â"1850), possibly related to changes in the strength of North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.[12] Sediments in Piermont Marsh of the lower Hudson Valley show a dry Medieval Warm period from AD 800â"1300.

So the MWP and LIA seems quite real in North America.

and if you read Other Regions, it seems to be real there in Africa, the Antarctic, Japan and the Pacific Ocean too. All of which disagrees with the IPCC/NOAA quotes in the summary.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[jbolden]

Well a written well researches article with an editorial viewpoint you disagree with is quite often a quite valuable research tool. Wikipedia is an informational reference, editorial viewpoint doesn't matter much.

Further in all fairness Wikipedia seems to do a pretty good job in trying to control editorial bias.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[jbolden]

The best is the type of discussion now going on thousands of places. Early on the argument was whether Wikipedia could create a viable encyclopedia, Wikipedia vs. Encarta essentially. A few years ago the argument was about Wikipedia vs. Britannica. Now the question is Wikipedia vs. specialized encyclopedias in their specialty.

That's progress.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[jbolden]

It sounds like a specialized game wiki encyclopedia is what you want to create. That can be created. Wikipedia links quite freely to specialized wikis as the best source of information.

So create one and start creating the content you want.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[D Ninja]

We love to talk shit about Wikipedia here on /,;

Hmmm...where can I find this Slashcomma site? Are there as many dupes posted as there are on Slashdot?

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

With cheap disk space, and cheap bandwidth, and volunteers doing the work... where is the money going?

$130K - Board expenses, including D&O insurance

$472K - Executive director expenses. Includes salaries for Executive Director and Deputy Director; some fundraising and travel expenses; consultants and contractors; staff and volunteer development

$2.7M - Technology. Includes salaries for technical staff, servers, bandwidth and contractor expenses.

$1.6M - Office & Admin. Includes salaries for finance/admin staff, audit fees, fundraising expenses, office rent, office supplies, bank fees, etc.

$595K - Outreach programs. Includes salaries for program staff, public outreach expenses, communications expenses.

$357K - Legal.

$96K - Wikimania. Includes travel for board, advisory board and staff.

Gee, that was hard. Took all of 2 minutes to find this info.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[anss123]

Hmm... as far as I can tell Wikipedia makes it clear that they are taking statements from a "2001 IPCC report" (whatever that is) in the first example. That the report conflict with statements about NA later on is not in itself a problem. Wikipedia tries to present multiple viewpoints with the aim for that elusive [[WP:NPV]].

The article does not seem like an amazing piece of writing though and is only rated C-class by Wikipedia itself. Such articles are expected to have problems, until someone takes the time to fix them up....

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[grumbel]

No editor or even group has the ability on a volunteer basis to manage hundreds of thousands of word articles on a subject.

Thats why you split things up into readable and manageable thunks.

Endlessly adding unsourced trivial and personal opinion to an article doesn't improve its quality.

Strawmen argument, I never mentioned huge amount of unsourced trivia. The point isn't to flood the articles with bad information, but leaving in good articles available and quite frequently that doesn't happen because an article isn't "notable enough" due to an completly arbitrary criteria.

That aside, most trivia is trivial to verify by just watching the movie, reading the book or playing the game or using the device, yet it is often near impossible to find a printed-on-paper source for it.

again you've confused an encyclopedia with a record of all human thought.

You are confusing Wikipedia with a paper encyclopedia. Beside "...given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." is a quote from Jimmy Wales and I think that guy should know a thing or two about Wikipedia, to bad that his wording isn't actually implemented in policy to stop the deletionist.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Simetrical]

Which is why they just completed a six million dollar fund raising campaign. With cheap disk space, and cheap bandwidth, and volunteers doing the work... where is the money going?

You can just read the various financial statements on the Wikimedia Foundation's website. For instance, you can look at the page 2008-2009 Annual Plan Questions and Answers:

What's the upshot here: how much bigger is this year's budget compared with last year's? Where are you spending more, and why?

Planned spending totals $5.9 million, which is an increase of $3 million over the 07-08 projected actuals. The single biggest increase is hardware purchases deferred from 07-08, that total $965K.

The second-largest increase is $510K for fundraising expenses: this includes three new positions (Head of Major Gifts, Head of Community Giving, and a Development Associate), as well as an allocation for fundraising expenses (technical help with the database, design support, usability and A/B testing money, fundraising related travel, an allocation for events, etc.).

Other significant increases include increased hosting costs (+$200K), funding for five new technical staff and contractors (+$375K), strengthening our "program" (mission-related) work by hiring staff for public outreach and partnerships roles, plus a Chief Programs Officer (+$221K), an increase in travel costs (+210K), and a new allocation for staff and volunteer development (+$113K).

I'm pretty sure there were links to explanations of why Wikimedia needed the money all throughout the fundraiser.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Tom]

I didn't say I have a solution.

But when it is this obvious, you can't close your eyes and go "lalalala", pretending that there isn't a problem here.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[e2d2]

I don't have a better way but I do know one thing - I used to enjoy reading the encyclopedia as a kid. The way some of the articles on wikipedia are written I'd be surprised if a today's "kid" did the same.

For instance, let's look at boolean logic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_logic

If a kid came and read that would they be wowed into mathematics or would they turn tail and run at the sight of all the "truth"?

Sometimes I wonder if people lose sight of the educational aspect of wikipedia, instead intending it to be a massive brain dump of "truth" (whatever the hell that is), setup as a place to argue said truths with others. Not every article on wikipedia suffers from this, just far too many.

Can someone please make education fun again?

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[ivucica]

Even worse is deleting articles on some subjects. Example is OpenTibia Server which is an MMO with minimum of 1000 servers with a minimum total of 15,000 players at any particular moment. Citation here. Now the funny thing is...

article got deleted for notability reasons, among other things :)

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some great specialized online reference works that use the "cathedral" approach to good effect. As a mathematician, Planet Math comes up frequently, and it has a very well-defined, terse style which is usually much more clear than Wikipedia's mathematical muddles. On the other hand, I am always very happy when the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has relevant articles, since it takes a very scholarly approach which details the full history of the subject for millenia. When all three sources, Wikipedia, PlanetMath, and the SEP have info on the subject I want - pure bliss, I have a hope of getting it without having to dig into the original papers.

I would hope that other subject areas have similar quality online references. Maybe it is just too difficult to get specialists from many different fields to work together on one of these encyclopedias, so we will end up these large "chunks" of information available to people who know where to find them. The great thing is the internet makes these available for free.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't. 1) You're not suppose to do first hand research. 2) You can't use wikipedia as your reference.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[ultranova]

>

If you don't have the intellectual capacity to understand that I was talking about wikipedia as its community of editors then I can't wait for the rest of what you have to say..

It is not community who decides to delete a page or reverse an edit, it's an individual editor. The tendency of Wikipedia editors to take some article as their "own" and guard it jealously is infamous, and repeatedly referred in this very discussion.

We're really getting to it now. Obviously you had some pet page you created that was deleted for some reason.

Like I said: I've had my work deleted or reverted once too many times to bother anymore. It's not an issue of pet page but a general feeling of "fuck this shit, I'm outta here."

Things are not made better by endlessly adding to them. Do you think when a director shoots a movie that he includes every last take and scene he shot in the final product? No. In order to create a good body of written work things need to be taken out. This applies to articles and to the encyclopedia as a whole.

Actually, Hitchcock did just that. Not that it matters; we aren't talking about prose, we are talking about an encyclopaedia, a collection of information. An encyclopaedia is made better by adding information to it. You aren't supposed to read through it all, as you are in a novel, but only the bits that interest you.

Nope, but the average person who might be interested in him (for whatever reason) will likely find only an adequate amount of information about him and not an endless list of everything he had for breakfast throughout his entire life.

So now the criterion has changed from "not interested in the subject", as it was for WoW paladins, to "interested in the subject". Funny how that goes.

I was making a point about excessive detail in articles.

No, you said that someone who isn't a WoW player isn't interested in the abilities of WoW paladin class of certain level. Well, you're absolutely right: they won't be. I'm not, for example. However, using that as a criterion for deleting said details is foolish, since doing it consistently means deleting pretty much all information about anything; after all, few people are interested in the details of something which doesn't interest them even in general.

You're trying to compare that to an article about a minor historical figure. Two very different things.

No. Two things which might interest some people, but for most people couldn't care less. In fact I'd say that there are likely more people interested in the details of WoW gameplay than the details of the history of English church.

An article on World of Warcraft is quite appropriate. It is a notable subject. Delving into minutia with raiding strategies, item guides, etc isn't.

"Notable" is almost as ingenius as "interstate commerce" in that it can mean exactly what the editor wants it to mean. And just as the interstate commerce clause, it too is used to justify arbitrary abuse of authority. Or, as the saying goes: "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and petty power corrupts all out of proportion to actual power."

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[jwilty]

But apparently creating your own website, publishing your letter, and then referencing it as a source would be just fine.

That is the problem with many of the edits of Wikipedia - their definition of a source is murky at best and negligence at its worst. I don't think every post/edit must have a source, but don't reject one because the current article references some random myspace page and the change contradicts it.

If it were up to me, I would only accept textbooks/journal articles as valid sources and relegate everything else to the "See Also" category (I know that textbooks and journal articles can be wrong, but presumably there was some sort of review process that doesn't exist for most other forms of reference).

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, I have no objection to vandalism being taken down, but the biggest flaw I see in Wikipedia is a lot of content gets deleted for no reason (face it, storage and bandwidth is dirt cheap).

Which is why they just completed a six million dollar fund raising campaign. With cheap disk space, and cheap bandwidth, and volunteers doing the work... where is the money going?

They could save some bandwidth by fixing their images. I see plenty of PNGs that use 16 or fewer colors which could be stored as tiny files using 4-bit color...but instead they use 32-bit RGBA color instead, just so they can have an alpha (transparency) channel. Without exception, these images look like crap with anything other than a white background, so I don't understand why they're transparent.

There are also a fair number of photographic images stored in PNG format which are 6-10 times bigger than an equivalent JPEG.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Lars T.]

During the MWP wine grapes were grown in Europe as far north as southern Britain

And today wine grapes are grown as far north as southern Sweden - more proof that it is warmer today than during the MWP.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia's articles have quite obviously been on a vector toward continual improvement since Wikipedia started. Wikipedia's article quality is not monotonic, but it is increasing. Under what metric is Wikipedia not getting better?

Yep. The hope and premise of Wikipedia (that the structure would ensure freedom and excellence) has been proven incorrect by the freaks, obsessives, and power addicts, but there aren't enough of those people to ruin the whole thing.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Lars T.]

PS: In Werder, Brandenburg, Germany, clearly further north than London, wine has been grown even during the Little Ice Age.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Lars T.]

Even worse is deleting articles on some subjects. Example is OpenTibia Server which is an MMO with minimum of 1000 servers with a minimum total of 15,000 players at any particular moment. Citation here. Now the funny thing is...

article got deleted for notability reasons, among other things :)

Easy - Google proves nobody but the users talk about it, thus it is not notable.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[shutdown -p now]

Citation Needed.

Sure, here is the reference I've found for that on Google!

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[ivucica]

I disagree that this is a valid reason for deleting a part of human knowledge and history. Or do you mean that having 37,142 currently connected players at the time writing is not notable?

Compare this to Tibia having 49,320 player currently connected players at time of writing. A quick Google search would also make an observer believe only its players talk about it... until you see that the founders of the company go to conferences together with representatives of Sony Online and other competition, and that there are TV reports in Poland about effect of Tibia.

But number of players isn't all that different, is it? There are times when Tibia has about 20,000 concurrent players.

Numbers tell me that OpenTibia is remarkably notable. Numbers tell me that OpenTibia has an enormous worldwide community; somewhat dispersed compared to Tibia, and not as organized (since there isn't a single company running the show), but it is quite remarkable success for an "emulator" of a server.

There is a lot of much less notable, much less used software out there which has an article, and there are many stub articles which stay stub for a long time ... yet they are not deleted. Because someone talks about it?

Hundreds of comic book character articles deserve to exist, although the character appeared in one or two issues, and there is almost no fan-fic nor fan-art, nor any kind of discussion on the internet... But OpenTibia, with a vibrant and active community, deserves is not notable just because "only users talk about it"? Who better than the users?!

Understand, this is not a coherent community, and OpenTibia does not offer a complete product (doesn't offer a client, for example) so naturally there won't be reviews in any magazines, there won't be TV reports on it, there won't be ... well, only its users and developers will talk about it. Should someone approach a Linux/FLOSS magazine to write an article about it in order to be Wikipediable?

Another important thing: "third party sources". How do you define third party? Aren't all those thousands of players, who actually just play the game and are not affiliated with developers, third party? Isn't host of OtServList.org, who doesn't work on OpenTibia, pretty much third party? Isn't host of OtServNews.org, who isn't working on OpenTibia code, also third party? Aren't article authors on OTSN.org, occasionally players or hosts of unaffiliated servers, also third party? Where does "third party" begin and end?

So once again: 37,000 vs 49,000? One is notable just because there is a TV report about it ... the other is not? One deserves an article ... the other does not? I find deletion of OpenTibia article on two separate occasions quite bad judgement on Wikipedia's administrators' part, and there is very little that can make me change my mind.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[TheoMurpse]

The distinction is in the deletion of "unusually" in the modern article, suggesting that there has been a shift in bias within the article against the theory of current global warming as an unprecedented event from a bias in favor of the theory.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[maxume]

Pretty much. Wikipedia will persist until somebody comes up with a better way of making a Wikipedia-like thing.

It won't be real shocking if that thing ends up replacing Wikipedia in place. One reasonable thing would be to allow people to create different cabal-bureaucracy-networks inside of the same ecosystem (by letting users mark other users as ignored or trusted). A better Wikipedia could then grow underneath whatever Wikipedia happened to be on top at the moment.

Much of the criticism of Wikipedia amounts to "It isn't X", and of course, there isn't really anybody trying to make it "X", so the criticism degenerates into a complaint that "X" doesn't exist for free, which usually isn't very interesting.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Lars T.]

Yeah there really isn't a much better way.

There IS, and there was. The original wikipedia concept was simple: let people edit EQUALLY, and if someone edits badly, it can be undone using the article's history.

This is now being abused, by people who act as self-appointed** guards rather than equals.

** self meaning them as individuals, or the wikipedia nazis as a collective.

You are right, this abuse is much worse than the abuse by various vandals !

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[shutdown -p now]

for the average person interested in something (say a video game) there isn't any one major source of information about each one other than Wikipedia.

Actually, there is - it's Wikia. For games at least, game-specific Wikia wikis are typically much more informative than the corresponding WP article. Whenever I buy a new game and need info on that, the first thing I do today is go to Wikia and search for the game title... more often than not, I find what I want.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[crossmr]

It is not community who decides to delete a page or reverse an edit, it's an individual editor. The tendency of Wikipedia editors to take some article as their "own" and guard it jealously is infamous, and repeatedly referred in this very discussion.

And with that you've shown a fundamental misunderstanding of wikipedia. Only in the case of a speedy deletion does 1 person decide to delete something. Even in that case a regular editor first tags it as a concern as meeting a criterion for that and then an administrator reviews that request. The rest of the articles are put to a community discussion for deletion where over 5 days people debate if the article should stay. The only situation in which a single person might decide all by themselves to delete something is in the case of a blatant attack page or nonsense.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[CarpetShark]

You are right, this abuse is much worse than the abuse by various vandals.

Since your comment was wrong, I fixed it for you, like a good wikipedia editor ;)

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[crossmr]

Thats why you split things up into readable and manageable thunks.

Should we include one: "Editors Mad ramblings about subject X"?

Strawmen argument, I never mentioned huge amount of unsourced trivia. The point isn't to flood the articles with bad information, but leaving in good articles available and quite frequently that doesn't happen because an article isn't "notable enough" due to an completly arbitrary criteria.

That aside, most trivia is trivial to verify by just watching the movie, reading the book or playing the game or using the device, yet it is often near impossible to find a printed-on-paper source for it.

Yes, that is your point. If something isn't notable that means it hasn't received significant coverage in reliable third party sources. Without significant coverage in reliable third party sources there can't be an article about it because wikipedia doesn't keep articles which are based significantly on primary sources. Notability is not such a crazy and mystical idea like some people seem to treat it. As for trivia, I've never once read any of the trivia on wikipedia and felt that a single word of it has given me any greater understanding of the subject. Knowing that the Bugletown Cockknockers once name dropped Einstein in a song they played at Little Joe's Saloon in 1997 just does nothing to help me understand him further. Most of that trivia can only be sourced to primary sources as can most aspects of things like video games, novels, and other fiction. That is one of the reasons it isn't appropriate for there.

You are confusing Wikipedia with a paper encyclopedia. Beside "...given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." is a quote from Jimmy Wales and I think that guy should know a thing or two about Wikipedia, to bad that his wording isn't actually implemented in policy to stop the deletionist.

The sum is not necessarily the same as all the individual parts. And following your logic this thread should probably have its own article on wikipedia. How about the clothes I'm wearing today? I could take a picture and upload it. I could make an article about what I wear each and every day. If you want to talk about all human knowledge we have to talk about everything everyone has ever thought and that just isn't practical, So lines had to be drawn. Otherwise we'd be overwhelmed with articles about people's cats and the bowel movements they had the night before. The fact is if you can actually tie a couple of reliable sources to a subject you can get an article about it on wikipedia if they contain more than a couple words. Hell even if you don't you can get some things kept there if you get a handful of non-obvious friends to muddle a discussion in to no consensus.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[daemonburrito]

For instance, let's look at boolean logic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_logic [wikipedia.org]

If a kid came and read that would they be wowed into mathematics or would they turn tail and run at the sight of all the "truth"?

Hmm. Maybe I'm not representative, but I think I'd be wowed.

If it's all the set theory that you have a problem with, I personally think kids would get more out of math if they were introduced to sets (and even number theory) at the same time they're learning arithmetic. I'm pretty sure I would have.

Elementary math pedagogy is just behind the times, imho.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[anaesthetica]

An improvement towards what though? Most articles have settled down to reflect the viewpoint of the people that watch them.

I would venture that the change in Wikipedia articles over time is neither teleological nor asymptotic. There is no Platonic ideal article toward which each Wikipedia article progresses. Nor are the changes over time increasingly incremental as Wikipedia articles become more complete or comprehensive in their treatments of the plethora subjects.

Because knowledge is created, the facts of the material world change, and the theories we have explaining those changes are improved as new paradigms arise, there is no ideal end state for Wikipedia or its article. Judging them in terms of an imagined ideal as your criteria for assessing Wikipedia's improvement is an argument loaded against Wikipedia (indeed against any type of encyclopedia).

The more important criterion is that of attribution. Are articles steadily more based on reliable published sources? Do they represent all reliable sides of an argument or issue, instead of presenting one specific view as correct? Do articles avoid original research or unique syntheses of existing research?

Sanger's argument is off-base from the start, because his premise is whether Wikipedia has an alternate standard for The Truth. Fortunately, The Truth is not Wikipedia's project. Wikipedia's project is to have a comprehensive, verifiable, NPOV encyclopedia of extant knowledge.

If you don't agree with the viewpoint of an article, AND you have published information that needs to be added to an article to better balance its discussion of a subject, by all means edit. If you don't agree with the viewpoint of an article, but disagree simply on the basis of your opinion, it's likely that the people who watch over the article are going to be wary of your edits. Sometimes those article-watchers stray too far into feelings page ownership, and everyone realizes that's a problem. But in general, they're concerned with preserving what consensus on article quality has been hammered out over the course of editing and discussion on the talk page.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[grumbel]

If something isn't notable that means it hasn't received significant coverage in reliable third party sources.

Wrong, simple example is homebrew development on game consoles, receives close to zero coverage in mainstream press, because gaming press depends on advertising money and gaming companies don't like them reporting about things that can be used for piracy. That doesn't make them less noteworthy, it just makes it near impossible to find any "notable sources", because only real sources are blogs, wikis and other community based stuff.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Lars T.]

I disagree that this is a valid reason for deleting a part of human knowledge and history. Or do you mean that having 37,142 currently connected players at the time writing is not notable?

Yes, it isn't notable. Period. And hoping it could become notable by spamming Wikipedia won't help either.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen.

I can vouch for this based on first-hand experience in trying to reason with several Wiki Nazis over rules that **they** define based on their own personal **opinions** - not logic or fact!

There was a time when I used to rely on Wikipedia as a one-stop-shop for everything but now I find myself having to Google because articles have vanished. The problem with this approach is that the material I end up finding is often written by the individual/person that I am trying to find out more about (or their product) instead of having access to an objective peer-reviewed article on Wikipedia.

This so called "improvement" is all due to **subjective** Wiki Nazis that think that some articles are more worthy than others.

-Andreas Toth

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[crossmr]

Except that isn't true. Dark Alex was featured in an article on the BBC. There are plenty of articles which have covered various facets of homebrew. They haven't covered them in the exhaustive detail that some people want, but that doesn't mean they haven't been covered to some degree. The article will end up based on what the reliable sources have published, not some exhaustive collection of every iteration of firmware ever released or dreamed up for some platform. Reuters, Washington Post, BBC, PCworld, EEtimes and ign have all run information about homebrew as examples. Primary sources aren't prohibited, unfortunately in the case of something like homebrew, there is no primary source for it since its not made by a single company. Once you establish notability with secondary sources you can use primary sources to flesh out some information, but if you have only 2 secondary sources and 57 citations pointing to primary sources the article is relying too much on primary sources.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[e2d2]

Actually I agree with the set theory. I wish I'd had been taught that earlier in life to be honest. If I had my way they'd teach number theory first and get into some of the history when it can be visualized better.

Maybe it's just my disappointment in the public education I got :-) I didn't learn math could be enjoyed until I was actually out of school and just picked up a few Dover books.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[daemonburrito]

Same here.

Digressing a bit: I came around to thinking this way about math education by experimentation made possible with the web. If the subject is something we wish to truly understand, we can now pursue lots of different paths and find out which one "clicks" with how we learn. Things started making a lot more sense after number theory and sets.

I bet a study watching what paths subjects take would be valuable for educational psychology.

Yes, mods, totally offtopic.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I disagree with most of what you say, but I would very much like to punch you in the face for that awful director analogy. Hard.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[igames]

Well said, I have spent a substantial number of years studying online communities and the way that "knowledge" emerges in them. While it is a noble effort on the part of wikipedia to allow the common man to contribute to collective knowledge, when push comes to shove politics always overrules contribution, and in many cases even data-backed facts. But that's the story of humanity, and I don't think anyone has a better model, as long as we're still human IMHO

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[igames]

It all depends on what one sees as improvement, don't you think?

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[not flu]

But the amount of people that wants to waste their time with Wikipedia is infinite which keeps the process working.

This is blatantly false - world population is finite, the number of people online is a fraction of that and people who can ever be bothered to write on Wikipedia is a smaller yet fraction of that.

The more effort is discouraged the worse the results will be - and they will never be perfect, whatever that may mean.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[grumbel]

They haven't covered them in the exhaustive detail that some people want,

Yes, and thats exactly the problem. What you get from the news is something along the lines of "homebrew exists", well, duh, I already new that, thats not something on which you can base a useful article about the topic. The details are what makes the information useful, everything else is just generic blabla.

In this case the software itself is the primary source, everybody can just load it up and try it out. Its easy to verify the facts for anybody who is actually using it. Just as it is easy for everybody to verify some facts about the movie or book by watching it.

Relying on a middle man as secondary source is just utter nonsense bureaucracy and turned a badly written, but useful article, into a completly useless one.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than the above getting the birthdate wrong wikipedia quoted a few British newspapers as the source of some information on wikipedia which was quoting a false article in wikipedia itself.

(Thankfully they have realised Bono is from Glasnevin and not where fanboys want him to be from)

(and they refer to Elle Mcpherson having two different dates of birth)

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[crossmr]

Except as a primary source, what can it tell us? Product X exists, it has Y features and it was released on Z date. Big whoop. Wikipedia isn't a webdirectory or product comparison website or a webhost, which is all that could be done with that. If people started giving opinions on which piece of homebrew was better, etc then it would become original research. Its much easier to put a link to a main clearinghouse for homebrew and let people go there and read about the thousands of home brew apps to their hearts content. Knowing that RockingDude87 made a little application to blow up blocks with another colored block in 2004 for a school project doesn't give us any greater understanding of homebrew as a whole.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[grumbel]

Wikipedia isn't a webdirectory or product comparison website or a webhost,

What exactly do you expect? Its software after all and knowing a bit about when it was first released, how it developed over time and what features it has now and on what systems it runs is almost everything you would want to know. Heck, most pages about movies, books and whatever don't really do much more then that.

Its much easier to put a link to a main clearinghouse for homebrew and let people go there and read about the thousands of home brew apps to their hearts content.

Except that doesn't work. History gets easily lost, since many projects don't keep a perfect track record over past versions. In case of homebrew things might get shutdown due to lawsuits or disappear for other reasons. Also the creators webpage might not exactly be very NPOV.

Knowing that RockingDude87 made a little application to blow up blocks with another colored block in 2004 for a school project doesn't give us any greater understanding of homebrew as a whole.

You are again trying to argue a strawmen again. Look for example at the pandora battery, kind of a 'big deal' in the PSP homebrew scene, yet Wikipedia currently doesn't mention it with a single word.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[crossmr]

Also the creators webpage might not exactly be very NPOV

and if that is the only source, how is wikipedia going to make it npov? if we write something that doesn't jive with what the only source available says, its unsourced.
So we're back to editor opinion. You can't have it both way.
The problem is that you don't seem to know what you want and how to go about getting it.

You are again trying to argue a strawmen again. Look for example at the pandora battery, kind of a 'big deal' in the PSP homebrew scene, yet Wikipedia currently doesn't mention it with a single word.

Am I? You're arguing for total inclusion. If you don't think that information belongs then you're admitting your argument has no basis. That there is in fact a line for inclusion and some things are on one side of it and others are on another side.

As yes there is no article on the pandora's battery because the only source is the battery itself. Nothing else. Wikipedia doesn't keep articles based entirely or mostly on primary sources. All that we can say about it would be little more than a stub. Its a battery that puts a psp into service mode. It can be made through a soft or hard mod. Wikipedia isn't a howto guide so those methods can't be overly detailed there. End of article. If you like I'll print out this comment and mail it to you so you can put it in a safe deposit box and keep it for perpetuity. I'll forward the article to your home address for anyone interested in learning about the battery. As I've also pointed out if you're worried about information being lost, start a wikia about it. Wikipedia isn't alone its part of the wikimedia foundation which provides free wikis on any subject. They'll last just as long as wikipedia and you can link them from the wikipedia article. Regardless of whether or not wikipedia is a paper encyclopedia the community decided there is a threshold of inclusion and some subjects or information on subjects doesn't meet that criteria. There are plenty of ways you can preserve that without it being on wikipedia. With the other wikis available, wikipedia will never open up to every thought ever thought. So you can either work with that or rant on slashdot. In the time you spent here you could have written a glorious article about pandora's battery on a brand spanking new PSP homebrew wiki.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[grumbel]

and if that is the only source, how is wikipedia going to make it npov?

Its not the only source, you also have plenty of blogs, forums and all that stuff, but those of course isn't accepted for stupid reasons.

Am I? You're arguing for total inclusion.

I never argued for total inclusion, I argued against crazy deletionism.

As yes there is no article on the pandora's battery because the only source is the battery itself. Nothing else.

Its information that everybody with a PSP can verify if he wants to. That stuff is even sold on Amazon.

As I've also pointed out if you're worried about information being lost, start a wikia about it.

I consider splits and forks and stuff a part of the problem, not the solution.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Peeteriz]

There is no disagreement there - the article states that 'there was no global or hemispheric warming' and that 'there was a local warming in the area around north atlantic'. European Atlantic coast is a culturally sensitive area for us; but it is irrelevantly small in climatic scale. The 'other regions' part and the other reseach cited there claims that everywhere else in the world there were only minor unrelated fluctuations in temperature, and that the medial warm period was a purely local phenomenon

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[Janek Kozicki]

you [...] give up [...] reading them.

huh? I read a wikipedia article just once. If I see a mistake I just correct it and forget it. I'm not reading it once per week, that would be a stupid waste of time.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[ivucica]

Did I spam it?

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[crossmr]

Its not the only source, you also have plenty of blogs, forums and all that stuff, but those of course isn't accepted for stupid reasons.

Because anyone can go out and in 5 minutes fire one up to say whatever they want. Yes, that is a very stupid reason. Wikipedia is a popular destination. It has to be protected from abuse.

I never argued for total inclusion, I argued against crazy deletionism.

Didn't you quote wales about the sum of all human knowledge? Which is it?

Its information that everybody with a PSP can verify if he wants to. That stuff is even sold on Amazon.

But not something a random editor without a PSP can verify. We don't write articles just for people who own a psp and want to order a battery to test it to verify the content of an article. Should we say "Sure.. include that trivia about warcraft. Anyone who wants to buy a PC, a warcraft subscription, expansion packs, and spend 472 hours grinding can verify that fact"

I consider splits and forks and stuff a part of the problem, not the solution.

A split or fork in this case is nothing different than having more articles on a subject. You already agreed that we should have 500 page articles and split stuff off. What is the big difference if the content is linked from the main body of the article or in the external links? The link is still on the page. People can still get the info in the same amount of clicks.

Re:Got a better way to do things?

[BoothbyTCD]

I often wonder what people mean when they say things like this. What viewpoint are people settling on in the article I read today about combustion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion ? Or yesterday's featured article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cranmer ? You can go find an edit war or some other form of abuse, but the vast majority of articles are more like the ones above. I you go looking at the article on creationism and then exclaim in shock and amazement that people are fighting over it you are being a bit disingenuous. Most of the things I look up don't fall into that category though. I am far more worried by the trend to deletionism then worried about the quality of the articles that are actually there.

I usually read the discussion or history

[rolfwind]

to get where the controversy in the articles/subjects are, so as not to be led astray by any one current revision. I don't get the big deal about doing that extra bit of work.

Expert FAIL

[QuantumG]

The purpose of Wikipedia is to approach consensus, not truth. The purpose of experts is to forward their own agenda ;)

People who think either Wikipedia or experts are interested in the truth are likely to be confused.

Re:Expert FAIL

[Protonk]

The purpose of Wikipedia is to approach consensus, not truth.

I guess. This kind of critique gets pretty old. The whole point of moving away from "THE TRUTH" was to suggest that no one editing on wikipedia has access to "THE TRUTH". I'm not an expert. You're not an expert. Sure, we probably have our areas of expertise, but they aren't verifiable in a pseudonymous editing environment. In the absence of that verification, we have to trust references, not people. If I say "believe me, this is THE TRUTH", the right response is "Wikipedia isn't interested in THE TRUTH, do you have a source for that."

It's cute to twist that around, but neither you nor I are Steven Colbert. We won't make it anywhere near as funny. To misread it to think "Oh, wikipedia is only interested in groupthink" is to miss the point. Lots of so called experts come on wikipedia and demand that people listen to them on the basis of their alleged expertise. When people (rightly) refuse to listen to them, those people storm off to /., their blog, or their cat and declare that Wikipedia is only interested in groupthink. Lots of time groupthink does grip wikipedia--just like any other organization. People see comments from editors they know and trust and respond accordingly. New people are often distrusted. These aren't features unique (or even uniquely salient) to wikipedia. They are features found in any community, large or small. Conflating the existence of groupthink with some underlying community desire> to govern through groupthink is inaccurate.

Really, we don't mind the truth, so long as it has a little blue superscripted number after it.

Re:Expert FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed.

And there's a reason an encyclopedia such as Wikipedia should not be about printing The Truth, and I can sum it up in one word. [[God]]. There are plenty of other articles, but that's enough. :P

In the absence of Truth, which is necessarily going to be fought over, we have Facts, which have the positive property of being True without being about The Truth.

Re:Expert FAIL

[Comatose51]

I agree and would add another dimension to what you've said. A great deal of knowledge/truth are interconnected so even a non-expert in one area can detect inaccuracies or even outright lies in another when it contradicts what he knows in his area of expertise. Wikipedia has this web of inter-connection in place because of its links and citations. This, I think, pushes Wikipedia or any grand system of knowledge towards "the truth" because reality cannot be inconsistent or self-contradictory so neither can any representation of "the truth". A lie or false statement somewhere can undermine the entire system. We see this happening in science and other fields as the experts in those fields work out the inconsistencies. This also happens to an extend on Wikipedia.

Re:Expert FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it gets old but it is none the less true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Global_warming&limit=5000&action=history

5000 edits in about a year (nearly 500 in the last month)? Seriously? How in any way could that article be taken seriously. How at any moment could you know who edited last (other than also diging thru history tabs and who does that)? Is it currently slanted in one direction or another?

I also picked that one as it is a good one of group think. Question ANYTHING about the subject and its get out the pitch forks and get a rope.

Some subjects lend themselves to facts others to opinions. For example how many tracks are on the last Metallica album is a 'fact'. What Lars did in relation to Napster can be up for opinion.

Re:Expert FAIL

[ocularDeathRay]

The purpose of Wikipedia is to approach consensus, not truth.

I guess. This kind of critique gets pretty old. The whole point of moving away from "THE TRUTH" was to suggest that no one editing on wikipedia has access to "THE TRUTH". I'm not an expert. You're not an expert. Sure, we probably have our areas of expertise, but they aren't verifiable in a pseudonymous editing environment. In the absence of that verification, we have to trust references

the solution has been right under our noses the whole time!... lets just have the guys at Britannica write our consensus for us. Think about it.. then you never have to question the source of our info, cause the REAL experts are taking care of us.

personally I think all this wikishit is a load of tree hugging hippie crap. I am still using my 1994 CD-ROM version of the World Book encyclopedia because it sounded a lot more official than the names of the people writing wiki. I mean if I need to know the main industries of Sudan, I don't want to hear it from CaPtAinSwampA$$, I want it from a big faceless corporation I can trust.

Re:Expert FAIL

[timmarhy]

nonsense. Wikipedia is meant to contain fact.

Re:Expert FAIL

[TubeSteak]

Wikipedia has this web of inter-connection in place because of its links and citations. This, I think, pushes Wikipedia or any grand system of knowledge towards "the truth" because reality cannot be inconsistent or self-contradictory so neither can any representation of "the truth".

Facts + interpretation = "truth"
Interpretations are subject to inconsistencies and self-contradictions.
Give us facts and please keep "the truth" to yourselves.

Re:Expert FAIL

[0123456]

nonsense. Wikipedia is meant to contain fact.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

"The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth"

I'm not surprised that the people who whine the most about Wikipedia don't understand what it's meant to do.

Re:Expert FAIL

[BrookHarty]

The purpose of Wikipedia is to approach consensus, not truth.

And one way is to shut out the people who don't agree.

Re:Expert FAIL

[S77IM]

Lots of so called experts come on wikipedia and demand that people listen to them on the basis of their alleged expertise. When people (rightly) refuse to listen to them, those people storm off to /., their blog, or their cat and declare that Wikipedia is only interested in groupthink.

If they were really such experts, they should capable of citing adequate evidence to back up their claims.

Re:Expert FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

From my experience, facts have the possibility of being argued as vehemently as interpretations. All it takes is one person with the power to mis-state a fact and prevent anyone else from changing it.

Re:Expert FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

personally I think all this wikishit is a load of tree hugging hippie crap. I am still using my 1994 CD-ROM version of the World Book encyclopedia because it sounded a lot more official than the names of the people writing wiki. I mean if I need to know the main industries of Sudan, I don't want to hear it from CaPtAinSwampA$$, I want it from a big faceless corporation I can trust.

Funniest shit I've ever read on /. so far. Mostly because it's so true. And I'm captain swamp ass...

Re:Expert FAIL

[grumbel]

My problem is that many Wikipedia admins seem to interpret verifiability as in "was printed on paper somewhere", instead of just as what the word says. There are plenty of topics where a blog or another Wiki is a much more trustworthy and much easier to verify then mainstream press (homebrew software on consoles for example), yet linking them as source gets dismissed or articles even deleted.

Re:Expert FAIL

[roguetrick]

Actually it means Captain's Wampa Cash

Re:Expert FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and when you need some of "your facts" included in Wikipedia, just post it to your own blog and cite that?

Re:Expert FAIL

[grumbel]

Such stuff would be easy to figure out, because you wouldn't only have to fake the fact, but month or years of blog posts and comments that make your blog believable.

The most elegant way to fake facts of course is to simply edit Wikipedia, wait till a ton of newspapers just code Wikipedia and then take in turn use that to justify the original edit, fun stuff, that nicely demonstrates of trustworthy paper publications are.

Re:Expert FAIL

[VJ42]

I am still using my 1994 CD-ROM version of the World Book encyclopedia because it sounded a lot more official than the names of the people writing wiki. I mean if I need to know the main industries of Sudan, I don't want to hear it from CaPtAinSwampA$$, I want it from a big faceless corporation I can trust.

Really? For info like that I go to the CIA World Factbook as I trust that over Wikipedia, and it's not 15 years out of date.

Re:Expert FAIL

[Lars T.]

Perhaps it gets old but it is none the less true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Global_warming&limit=5000&action=history

5000 edits in about a year (nearly 500 in the last month)? Seriously? How in any way could that article be taken seriously.

So you think something with lots of edits by anonymous users can't be taken seriously - and that coming from an AC.

Re:Expert FAIL

[sarkeizen]

The whole point of moving away from "THE TRUTH" was to suggest that no one editing on wikipedia has access to "THE TRUTH". I'm not an expert. You're not an expert. Sure, we probably have our areas of expertise, but they aren't verifiable in a pseudonymous editing environment. In the absence of that verification, we have to trust references,

Couple of things I'd say. "THE TRUTH" seems to be a bit of a red herring. An expert or even the general agreement of experts is not guaranteed to be "THE TRUTH". To me, the better idea is to talk about Wikipedia representing 'best and current evidence'.

I'm sure there are many reasons why this doesn't happen but two I notice on a regular basis are:

i) The evidence isn't available for free on the internet: This works in two interesting ways. The first is good and current evidence (One could even argue 'the best evidence') isn't available to feed the article and second it keeps references from being validated. I've personally corrected references which referred to data that did not exist and persisted for about a year just because nobody owned the textbook in question.

ii) The person reviewing the evidence is not competent to do so. To restate a mantra about textual criticism: "References must be weighed not counted". It's trivial to point to a study where the conclusion doesn't support the data. It's easy to find a book (textbook or otherwise) that makes a fallacious argument. Often due to (i) references are made on journal article abstracts alone. Abstracts often leave out important data (RR, P, n, error values, etc..) and again it's trivial to find one that makes a stronger case textually than it does experimentally. This is actually an important and separate case to the "nobody is an expert point". You do not need to be an expert in biophysics to spot a strawman argument even if it's about biophysics. You do not need to be an expert in the treatment of cancer to realize that a result set is more suggestive than conclusive. You *DO* need to have a background in logic, statistics and critical thinking. In my experience editing Wiki articles I'd say that these things are absent enough to deter me from much involvement.

I get that all organizations practice groupthink to some degree. Well known physicists have an easier time getting published in one of the Physical Review journals than I would. That said there's an interesting dichotomy between journal publishing and wiki editing when I want my article published (or my edits not revoked) in the first case I have to deal with someone who not only has some knowledge of logic, statistics and critical thinking but also someone who has access to a significant portion of the published work on the subject and quite possibly has worked in the field. On the second case I have to argue with someone who may not hold any of these qualifications (Imagine trying to explain a problem with the ANOVA on a study to someone with no statistics background?). Not only that but I can be refuted by terrible studies with lousy controls and plain stupid error margins because the reviewer can see those studies on the internet but can't see the ones I'm referring to. Worst, I send them a cite from the article or the entire thing in PDF (possibly jeopardizing my subscription to the database) and they still consider the former more authoritative because they are not fit to judge.

I'm not defending the so-called experts who appeal to the "believe me" standard but I am pointing out that there are plenty of people in field who see the prospect of posting to the Wiki and it's naive ideas about references as an uphill battle with little payoff.

To put it in a Colbert-ish way: "When faced with the decision between putting a Wikipedia editor through Medical school and simply letting a Wikipedia article be inaccurate. I expect most experts choose the later."

Not learning from failure... apparently

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sanger was one of the founders of Wikipedia, and of its failed predecessor Nupedia"

There is a reason why he failed; "Without granting experts any authority to overrule such people, there is no reason to think that Wikipedia'a articles are on a vector toward continual improvement," writes Sanger

And all I have to say is ... so what? Articles at wikipedia frequently link to great off site expert resources. Not only that you have a wealth of choices of where you can get your information from, you're not limited to just wikipedia. If wikipedia was the only encyclopedia on earth his point might make sense. But given the level of alternatives and 'competitors' and number of wikipedia's contributors, there's a point where an article is more then good enough as a starting point.

The difference between experts and amateurs
in many instances is not large and for the most part negligible in many area's of knowledge, in other areas not so much.

Not only that, experts frequently get things wrong, the idea that experts are monolithically better then amateurs and other experts also has serious problems. Given that there has always been contention about certain areas of knowledge, take history for example: How much important stuff is/was and is possibly currently being omitted from history by "experts" for any number of reasons that might bias their testimony?

Wikipedia works because it has information people want. Experts frequently cull information they deem 'unworthy' of documenting, there's a whole host of articles on wikipedia about culture and entertainment stuff that would not normally be in a regular encyclopedia.

Truth be told, Wikipedia is an excellent study in the controversial nature of knowledge. Experts are frequently wrong, the history of mankind is one of the constant error in the expert world.

Re:Not learning from failure... apparently

[teh moges]

I agree, experts are just as likely to disagree, especially on controversial issues.

As well as that, what constitutes an expert, and has a ranking system been setup, because I haven't got my number yet.

I would fee qualified to write an article on cluster analysis, which is a form of statistics, but not on other statistical methods. So, in order for such an expert system to be setup, either I would need to say what I'm an expert in (which would result in a situation no different from wikipedia now), or someone would need to look at all my references and decide for themselves (which is prohibitively expensive given the size and scope of an encyclopedia). So in order for it to work, you need people self-authorizing themselves to edit articles, which is exactly what wikipedia does now. Its not perfect, but its been shown by a few attempts to do the 'expert' thing that any benefits aren't worth the losses in information.

If you are using wikipedia as the only reference, you are going to get burned, much the same way as if you use anything as your only reference (big media, little media, conspiracy media, outdated books, articles that have been rebutted but remain published, websites with yellow text on a black background). Wikipedia is the starting point to learn about something, but it surely isn't the ending point.

Re:Not learning from failure... apparently

[BrookHarty]

Wikipedia works because it has information people want. Experts frequently cull information they deem 'unworthy' of documenting, there's a whole host of articles on wikipedia about culture and entertainment stuff that would not normally be in a regular encyclopedia.

Not really. Its the peer groups idea of what is "worthy".

Take the mens rights article. Since there are no national mens rights movements. None that are a non-profit or officially accepted to speak as an Acceptable source for documentation. The major sources are infotainment reporters such as Glenn Sacks. The largest group of loosely related sites are Men going their own way (MGOTW), but its article and links on Mens Rights are often deleted due to the "popularity" concerns.

None of the active editors are familiar with Mens Rights issues, the websites, and often some are active in Womens Rights. And such think that mens rights articles are an attack on womens rights.

People have to backdoor issues in with Fathers rights, as its more media friendly. There are movies about fathers seem to get the approval under popular mainstream references.

The "personal belief" issue of Wikipedia editors is the reason older and mature editors are needed. The young editors with no life experience and knowledge cant recall the events of more than a couple decades of life experience. They had to use what they learned so far, maybe from college or personal experience which isn't always realistic as a whole.

Thats big reason the Simpsons, Futurama and any media is always allowed, everyone can agree, it just happened.

Re:Not learning from failure... apparently

[Tom]

Not only that, experts frequently get things wrong, the idea that experts are monolithically better then amateurs and other experts also has serious problems. Given that there has always been contention about certain areas of knowledge, take history for example: How much important stuff is/was and is possibly currently being omitted from history by "experts" for any number of reasons that might bias their testimony?

Sources?

No, seriously, come on. You're making a bold claim there. I know of a guy who trolls any place he can get to with his "knowledge" that 300 years of medieval history are fake and all the experts are in on the conspiracy.

At least he provides some evidence for his claim that I can check for myself.

Re:Not learning from failure... apparently

[Anonymous Coward]

The only good expert ... is one that can back up their claims with good references. That's the nature of a real expert -- not that you should automatically believe what they say, but that they've got the reasons and documentation at their fingertips. It's still your decision what to believe, and it's all about that documentation rather than the authority. In that respect anyone can become an "expert" if they put enough effort into it (I'm thinking of that guy that put together enough information to figure out the way that the first atomic bombs were really put together). In the scientific literature people don't say "Oh, that's so-and-so, an expert in the field. No more need be said." That's a recipe for disaster.

"Citation needed" is all the expertise that wikipedia really needs, and its result (that list of citations) is the most valuable part of wikipedia because people can read the sources and make their own call.

It's true that system and the people putting wikipedia together are fallible (just like in the scientific method), but wikipedia is emulating the best technique we've found so far to get rid of the unfounded fluff. Designating "experts" and giving them a special status is both unnecessary and potentially destructive for the reasons you list. "Show me, don't tell me" is supposed to be the way forward, not "Sit down and shut up because I'm an expert and you aren't."

Epistemology - the new Communication Studies

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't get through Calc II, so I switched from physics major to bio. Couldn't make it through O-Chem, so I switched to Psychology. Then, Stats killed me, so Now I study epistemology in the philosophy department. Now, I study the nature of knowledge, in the disciplines that I couldn't cut it in.

Watch this!

Plato would disagree with your foundationalist approach to externalism, instead, your truth is an artificial distinction between fabilism and a-prior coherentism.

also, P-->Q tf ~Q-->~P

I'm smart, right?

Does it have a topic to cover this

[Anonymous Coward]

Does God use warez? Does God download movies? Music (besides Amy Grant)? Does God steal software? Is God a pirate? Does God have plans for the Pirate bay warez hackers? Does God use GPL software? Does God have DSL or cable? Does God have a cap?

The Wikipedia is getting better

[Ex-Linux-Fanboy]

It is my feeling that the Wikipedia is getting better. The community has put rules and procedures in place that make the place more pleasant to edit. In the mid-2000s, there were some issues where people could edit their own biography, and people could be obnoxious, flame and stalk other editors.

Since then, policies and procedures have been put in place. You can no longer get in to edits wars without [[WP:3RR]] stopping you. You can no longer belittle editors who disagree with you without getting blocked for [[WP:NPA]]. You can no longer edit the article about your small open-source project without getting slapped for [[WP:COI]]

Yes, these policies are not perfect, and yes a lot of articles still have unverified claims, and yes, like any democracy, it sometimes takes time and insanely excessive discussion to get to consensus. But the process on Wiki works and the new policies minimize the problems with articles. Did I mention that it's against Wikipedia policy to control articles on the Wiki, as per [[WP:OWNERSHIP]]

Re:The Wikipedia is getting better

[HartDev]

I think that with the gouching that goes on in College textbook markets is worth taking from Wikipedia and if someone does not think it is credible then the professors at the colleges or universities could either debunk it or sanction it. I would be more than happy to work on something like that with my University teachers, I think a lot of big whigs are getting mad cause they are raking in less dough.

Re:The Wikipedia is getting better

[Anonymous Coward]

It is my feeling that the Wikipedia is getting better. The community has put rules and procedures in place that make the place more pleasant to edit.

So it's merely more comfortable to edit, not that the information is better.

Re:The Wikipedia is getting better

[techno-vampire]

But the process on Wiki works and the new policies minimize the problems with articles.

Does the process stop editors from banning known authorities on a subject as vandals because they dared to correct the editor's pet page? I ask, because I know it's happened at least once, and said authority has never been able to get the ban lifted.

Re:The Wikipedia is getting better

[DerekLyons]

Since then, policies and procedures have been put in place. You can no longer get in to edits wars without [[WP:3RR]] stopping you. You can no longer belittle editors who disagree with you without getting blocked for [[WP:NPA]]. You can no longer edit the article about your small open-source project without getting slapped for [[WP:COI]]

Yeah, all those things have been rolled into one meta game - WP:TAA. (Wikipedia:Toss Around Acronyms) The end result the is the same - the win goes to he who has the most time on his hands.
 
 

Did I mention that it's against Wikipedia policy to control articles on the Wiki, as per [[WP:OWNERSHIP]]

Yeah, that's part of WP:NRETISRG. (Wikipedia:Not Really Enforceable Though It Sounds Real Good.)

Re:The Wikipedia is getting better

[Tom]

Since then, policies and procedures have been put in place. You can no longer get in to edits wars without [[WP:3RR]] stopping you. You can no longer belittle editors who disagree with you without getting blocked for [[WP:NPA]]. You can no longer edit the article about your small open-source project without getting slapped for [[WP:COI]]

That's the rules.

And then there's their application.

I've seen pages nominated for deletion again and again until finally a delete went through. I call that the deletion lottery, you can win it on almost any article that's not frontpage material.

We've all seen random edits made, reversed, re-made and it was pretty clear that persistance is often more important than rules, knowledge, or even fact.

And I have first-hand experience of how "well" these rules are sometimes enforced. I've had a COI case where you're told to contact an editor with your problem. Did that. His reply took so long that the monkeys were long done with their "work" before he woke up. Thank you, I'll certainly go that recommended route again.

No, the rules are nice in theory, but they don't work because idiots are usually experts in abusing rules for their personal profit, while experts are often idiots in rule-abusing.

Re:The Wikipedia is getting better

[Simetrical]

You can no longer edit the article about your small open-source project without getting slapped for [[WP:COI]]

Unless you edit anonymously or pseudonymously, in which case other editors can be blocked for saying who you really are, and their edits oversighted so that not even sysops can see the evidence. You'd think COI would be an exception, but as far as I can tell, it's not.

Re:The Wikipedia is getting better

[Anonymous Coward]

if someone does not think it is credible then the professors at the colleges or universities could either debunk it or sanction it.

You do realize that Wikipedia articles are only as good as the current version, don't you? Someone could "debunk" an article, fix all its problems - and then have it all undone by the next editor who doesn't know the subject, has a POV agenda, or some other problem. There's no way to ensure that an article that is in good shape won't degrade.

a common human social phenomenom

[Anonymous Coward]

"Science progresses funeral by funeral." It is often the case that people who have been involved in an organization, a field, or community for many years develop a sense of ownership, and act as gatekeepers to try to inhibit newcomers trying to institute change. Sometimes this is for the better, as when the ideas, or the newcomers themselves, aren't very good. Other times, the old guard is just getting in the way of something or somebody which would take them out of their comfort zone, and (perhaps) expose them for not having kept up with new developments.

There's the old crack: "He said he had 15 years of experience, but it turned out to be 1 year of experience repeated 14 times." Or, more charitably, 3 years of experience followed by 12 years of coasting.

It's usually good for an organization or community to have a mix of old-timers and fresh blood.

So what?

[Kral_Blbec]

I for one find it annoying to hear about people ragging Wikipedia about its accuracy. Its not meant to be a replacement for actual experience and training. Its a quick crash course. Its meant to be fast, easy, and relatively accurate. Some topics are going to be better, some worse.

If your looking for information about some opensource project, it probably is pretty good. If you looking for a definition of some obscure abbreviation, your pretty good. If your looking for information about religion, what in the world are you starting at Wikipedia for?

I dont care if experts are writing it or not, because anything important I wouldnt trust/rely on a single source anyway even if it was written by an "expert"

PS. I do find it crazy how obsessed some people are with it though. Personally the only changes I usually make are grammatical errors.

It isn't "experts" that are needed...

[catbutt]

Wikipedia does pretty well by tapping into wisdom of crowds. But what it really needs is a good karma system to get more quality out of it.

You may complain about the quality of the comments on slashdot, but compare it to somewhere without any karma system. (this article sums up the problem with pure anonymity, and quite humorously so) Slashdot's system is not perfect, but it is a start in the right direction. I wonder how much wikipedia could be improved with a really good system. For instance, people with low karma would have their changes not show up immediately by default, or would be flagged as questionable, or what have you. People who didn't have a history of posting "good" stuff would tend to have few eyeballs ever see their stuff. There is a ton that could be done. It's tough to make it ungameable, but not impossible.

Re:It isn't "experts" that are needed...

[SIR_Taco]

It's not so much the karma...
Wikipedia just lacks CowboyNeal

Re:It isn't "experts" that are needed...

[Anonymous Coward]

" wonder how much wikipedia could be improved with a really good system. For instance, people with low karma would have their changes not show up immediately by default, or would be flagged as questionable, or what have you. People who didn't have a history of posting "good" stuff would tend to have few eyeballs ever see their stuff. "

I'm not sure a karma system would work, it would skew heavily in the favor "I agree so I will mod you up" kind of system that slashdot has. A lot of comments "insightful" and "informative" are rated by mods who don't have a clue but "it sounds insightful/informative, I agree with what you are saying, even though I might not have a clue"

Not only that, like DIGG you could 'game' the karma system. Kind of how sellers on ebay leave each other feedback.

Re:It isn't "experts" that are needed...

[catbutt]

Gaming it is, as I mentioned, a difficult but solvable problem. Note that google algorithmically defeats things like link farms (most of the time). Same thing.

It also isn't necessarily about "rating things up". If you make an edit, and it tends to stay for a good while unchanged (or mostly unchanged) on a high traffic page, that is an indication that your edit was "approved" and can earn you karma. This of course is how wikipedia already works (good edits stay around), but it could be enhanced by adding a reputation/karma system to it.

Re:It isn't "experts" that are needed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia does pretty well by tapping into wisdom of crowds.

Sure. Go find how well Wikipedia is covering the global temperature decrease since 1998. Or since 2001. Mass deception, mass misediting.

Re:It isn't "experts" that are needed...

[Anonymous Coward]

I browse at -1. Do you? I ask because there are a lot of things that are modded down that the moderators have no business modding down. (And lately I've seen several people talking about moderating and also talk about how they only browse at 1, 2, or whatever. What business do they have moderating if they can't be bothered to see ALL the posts? All that does is makes sure anything unfairly modded down stays that way.)

Sure, the most egregious posts wind up at -1 and a lot of the really good posts get modded up. But some really decent posts wind up as "-1, disagree" and horseshit (often coming from people who obviously did not RTFA) is rated as "+5, agree".

Re:It isn't "experts" that are needed...

[junglee_iitk]

I don't know if you have actually given 18 hours a day to Wikipedia. I have (expert enough :p), and I can tell you right now that Wikipedia already has karma system.

Now it is well established in Wikipedia "groupthink" that quality counts more than either. But the crux lies in the question: Who decides the quality?

Re:It isn't "experts" that are needed...

[AaronLawrence]

This is why Slashdot should make moderators (default) browse at -1. But it doesn't, you have to change it yourself and then remember to change it back.

Still, they are very cautious about tinkering with their moderation system, and fair enough, it is one of the best on the web and has had a lot of thought put into making it balanced.

Re:It isn't "experts" that are needed...

[catbutt]

I did not say wikipedia was in need of a karma system. I said wikipedia was in need of a good karma system. What I see is just lame. (btw, I do a fair amount of editing on wikipedia, but not 18 hours a day...geez, get a life! ;) )

I gave a very brief description of what a good one might do. Think how much vandalism would be reduced if 90% of people browsed with recent edits (by people without a strong history of "lasting" edits) suppressed. And those who actually liked to fix vandalism would have those changes called out to them? But this doesn't just apply to vandalism, it applies to everything.

As for who decides quality, well, who decides the quality of anything, ultimately? Who decides who is an expert? In the case of Britannica, it isn't the president or chief editor, since if the public thinks the product is crap and don't buy it, they will be out of a job. There is a very complex network of responsibility....the buck never actually stops anywhere.

A proper karma system can formalize this, but in a much more efficient way.

The best analogy I can make is PageRank in Google....who decides what page is more "important" than another?

Re:It isn't "experts" that are needed...

[junglee_iitk]

Well not anymore :) Had to use this. Edit wars did the rest :)

I guess the problem, and corresponding success of Wikipedia is that it is, actually, just mirror of life. With so many people, it has turned into something mediocre and on average, reliable.

To me, it means it is not fun anymore :)

PS: Did you find all those cabals which include admins and bureaucrats etc.?

Experts are few and want to be paid.

[TheNarrator]

Even leaving out the political issues, Experts are few ,and when well known, consider charging a lot for their work and would probably only devote time to getting published in a scholarly journal rather than some random website.

It would be like running an open source project where the only people who are allowed to work on it are those people who hold a PHD or are certified to have 10 years experience programming with a major corporation.

Re:Experts are few and want to be paid.

[Protonk]

Even leaving out the political issues, Experts are few ,and when well known, consider charging a lot for their work and would probably only devote time to getting published in a scholarly journal rather than some random website.

It would be like running an open source project where the only people who are allowed to work on it are those people who hold a PHD or are certified to have 10 years experience programming with a major corporation.

nail, meet head.

Re:Experts are few and want to be paid.

[EGenius007]

I think you're misrepresenting the quality of expert that is required for the bulk of improvements.

For example, when we elect officials to local government, we don't necessarily expect them to have a law degree and relevant experience. We simply want them to have a minimal skill set and a drive to serve. Ideally, we like when there's a large enough group meeting that set of criteria that we can then use a democratic process to pare this down to only the most qualified (or, more accurately the most popular) candidate(s).

Perhaps Wikipedia (or a fork) could benefit from a similar process. Editor-experts could be chosen from interested candidates by public referendum, serve for a set period of time, and thus implant a sense of responsibility (and hopefully credibility) to a specific article or group of articles.

What's that expression? Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

Re:Experts are few and want to be paid.

[DerekLyons]

Even leaving out the political issues, Experts are few ,and when well known, consider charging a lot for their work and would probably only devote time to getting published in a scholarly journal rather than some random website.

Not true at all - I know many experts (keep in mind that expert and academic are not synonyms) that would love to edit the Wikipedia. But each and every one has ultimately been driven from Wikipedia by various forms of asshattery.
 
 

It would be like running an open source project where the only people who are allowed to work on it are those people who hold a PHD or are certified to have 10 years experience programming with a major corporation.

And that's a problem - how? It reduces the pool available for participation, sure. But the project is still open source and thus forkable by any individual who cares to do so.

Sour grapes?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that Sanger was a co-founder of Wikipedia and always has this point of view about Wikipedia makes me want to read his article even less -- he is obviously not objective about the experience -- perhaps there is a valid point to make here, but the fact that Sanger is the author leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

How can Wikipedia be taken seriously...

[pongo000]

...when articles are tagged with the dreaded "primary sources" tag? In case you're not familiar with this tag, it basically states that the integrity of an article is in question because there are not enough cites from secondary sources (no, not a typo) as opposed to primary sources!

Anyone with an academic background will recognize this acceptance criteria as anathema, as primary sources are usually the only sources that count when it comes to rigorous research. That said, a comment earlier about Wikipedia articles striving for validity through consensus rather than rigorous research now makes it very clear to me what is going on. At the least, Jimmy should be honest and clearly indicate to users that Wikipedia is more a compendium of collective wisdom rather than factual content.

Re:How can Wikipedia be taken seriously...

[Protonk]

Anyone with an academic background will understand the difference and the reason behind the policy. Substantive original research takes time, expertise and effort. There is a reason we have long training periods for PhDs--we try to ensure those people are capable of conducting research independently. When you can't verify who people are, you have to limit the amount of "original research" they can do.
It is just a different kind of writing than an original paper. People who make it out to be anti-academic or sneaky miss the boat entirely.

Re:How can Wikipedia be taken seriously...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is by design. [[No Original Research]] is a foundational principle of Wikipedia.

Re:How can Wikipedia be taken seriously...

[Anonymous Coward]

"People who make it out to be anti-academic or sneaky miss the boat entirely."

Stupid, populist, mob-like, and ignorant are better terms.

Re:How can Wikipedia be taken seriously...

[Simetrical]

...when articles are tagged with the dreaded "primary sources" tag? In case you're not familiar with this tag, it basically states that the integrity of an article is in question because there are not enough cites from secondary sources (no, not a typo) as opposed to primary sources!

Wrong. Wikipedia permits primary sources, and you can find them all over the place. What it does not permit is original research. You need to publish your work elsewhere before it can be cited on Wikipedia.

Re:How can Wikipedia be taken seriously...

[DerekLyons]

That makes no sense whatsoever. The grandparent is discussing the skill of the writer, but the value of the reference.

What we need...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is a Bachelor of Douchebag Arts in Expertry.

Some hard evidence of Wikipedia's failure

[Anonymous Coward]

First, take a look at this discussion by an expert. (We now pause for the know-nothing kooks to ridicule Kyle Gann, claiming he's not an expert: Gann has of course written scholarly books on the subject of his expertise published by major academic institutions. Finished with the crackpot character assassination yet? Good, let's continue.)

Now take a look at the Wikipedia article on the Chicago School of Economics. Does it contain any hint that the Chicago School's prescriptions were put into practice in Chile and failed so spectacularly that the country went into a major recession?

Now take a look at the article on Alexander Hamilton. What birth date is cited? is there more than one? Do they differ? Does the Wikipedia article contain any discussion of a problem Hamilton's birth date? Do any of the Wikipedia contribution even give an evidence of realizing there's a problem with Hamilton's birth date?

Lastly, ask yourself how knowledge gets amassed in the real world via real scholarship. In real scholarship, there is no one single source of knowledge: instead, many different scholars publish different books and different articles, each providing alternative viewpoints. Eventually these differing viewpoints tend to converge on a single interpretation, as demonstrated by the overwhelming number of citations of scholarly books and articles by one particular group of authors and many fewer by all other authors (the familiar power law distribution observed in the long tail et al).

Exit question: does Wikipedia show any sign of recognizing this basic reality of the way scholarship gets done in the real world? (We now return you to your regularly scheduled insults and personal attacks and shower of acid contempt by people who can't even spell or use punctuation properly.)

Re:Some hard evidence of Wikipedia's failure

[PatrickThomson]

Gann's an expert in his field, and yeah, ok, being a music critic could probably lend enough authority in the field of knowledge, expertise, etc. However he holds up UO3 as an example which I also agree with as a professional. I don't see his relevance to your other points, though, because I didn't RTFM.

As for the chicago school of economics, a contributor on the discussion page for the CSE points out that the work was emplaced primarily by the actual school from which it was named and the staff therein, rather than being an example of the outcome of that particular fiscal model. The credibility of this comment is unknown. It also implies that there used to be a small section on chile in the page for the CSE which got removed. Currently, no similar reference exists on the page for the UoChicago. There are a few scattered references to articles calling chile a guinea pig, so why not make the edits yourself?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Chile contains no references to chicago and discusses only a mild recession with plausible causes. Maybe the corruption is endemic. Whenever I read those four words, though, the simpler example always comes to mind...

As for Alex, the version of the article before any edits made after your comment http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alexander_Hamilton&oldid=268770550 follows the usual format of the discussion of the life and works of notable historical characters, in that the first paragraph after the contents panel discusses his birth, the arguments for both dates and the common consensus amongst most historians.

I am a chemist. I have never studied or taken an interest in history or economics. I don't know if what I'm saying is true. Therein lies the danger of wikipedia. It would be easy for me to slip into opinions, rather than sticking to facts. And I just realised I spent 20 minutes researching a counterargument to an AC.

Citizendium

[Secret Rabbit]

"""
After 2-1/2 years, Citizendium has a few tenths of a percent as many articles as Wikipedia.
"""

It's not about quantity, it's about quality.

Re:Citizendium

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted further down, but I figure it's worth posting again.

Wikipedia - Homeopathy vs. Citizendium - Homeopathy. What quality?

Re:Citizendium

[Anonymous Coward]

No. I don't go to Wikipedia looking for quality. That's not the point. If I want quality, I ask a reference librarian and spend hours or days doing a literature search. Wikipedia is, and should be, about quantity. I don't trust every fact and equation on Wikipedia, but I do trust it to give me a coarse summary of pretty much any topic I can think of. Given the summary, I can decide whether I need more accurate information or in-depth analysis. If so, I go to the library.

The reasons are actually quite simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those with the most time on their hands wins.

Re:The reasons are actually quite simple.

[Simetrical]

Those with the most time on their hands wins.

Unless they get blocked for policy violations by an uninvolved sysop, or get banned by ArbCom for tendentious editing. It doesn't matter how many buddies you get to spend all day with you trying to argue that the Illuminati control the world or whatever. If the broader community thinks you're being jerks about it, you're going to lose sooner or later. And Wikipedia is too big for anyone to take over the community without being caught.

But on a smaller scale, what you say has some truth to it, of course. Details get worked out by compromise, and that gets decided article-by-article in no small part by how many people there are, how willing they are to compromise, and how long they're willing to argue. You're not going to get Wikipedia to admit that the moon is made of green cheese, but you can certainly change the emphasis of an article significantly.

Mod up.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is absolutely correct.

It doesn't really matter if the people guarding articles are experts or not, or whether the other people who are trying to edit the article are experts or not. What matters is that somebody with enough free time to outlast the others will keep or gain control of the article and everybody else will eventually lose interest or give up in frustration and the article will became essentially the property of the person with nothing better to do than try to own it.

So many Wikipedia articles eventually fall into that particular category of worthlessness.

Experts?

[Orion Blastar]

What qualifies someone to be an expert?

You cannot prove that you have degrees on the subject, but many list PHDs even if they never earned any of them. Wikipedia's staff had many members that got exposed as frauds.

When you cite a reference, they can quickly dismiss it by saying the source is not a reliable source. For example if it was not a liberal web site like the Huffington Post but rather the CATO institute, chances are the citation will be removed as well as the text that explains it. The same way for technical articles, apparently an OS/2 fan base is not a trusted source on OS/2 but IBM got rid of their OS/2 pages to base OS/2 history on. Luckily I was able to find a Unix Programming book that cited OS/2 2.0 used Amiga technology in exchange for Amiga using REXX technology. The IBM pages that talked about the exchange of technology are gone, and no web site mentions it anymore. But it is important history to learn that IBM licensed the Amiga technology to make OS/2 2.0 and above.

But anyway yeah people watching articles like a hawk and then instantly reverting it, even if the points are valid and have a reliable citation are but one of the many problems that Wikipedia suffers from. I call them as "Armchair Experts" because they lack knowledge, wisdom, and an education on the subject (no college courses or degrees on the subject) and act as an expert from their armchairs using their computers to bully and bash and revert their way into the articles.

I call such people as the Thought Police who accuse us of Thought Crimes and quickly revert the articles even if it was a valid edit that cited reliable sources and had a neutral point of view.

Re:Experts?

[Viridae]

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." - Niels Bohr

meh

[blool]

The only fork that will work at this point is one that has laxer deletionist/notability standards. Notability could be determined by weather the article has a potential audience, not weather it meets some arbitrary standard of notability. Same with citation requirements, sections of an article that are contested would be marked as such, but not necessarily removed.

No.

[S3D]

Experts want recognition of their efforts. It should not necessarily be money. It could be some kind of "elite" account, credits, reputation system etc. Of cause no expert would want his contribution be mutilated by opinionated teenager or some crank with agenda. The problem is how to identify experts. Some ID system like OpenID based on the university/corporate site/homepage or like could be useful.

Problem is not lack of experts...

[Choad Namath]

The problem with wikipedia isn't a lack of experts, it's a preponderance of self-appointed "experts." The place is crawling with people whose only qualification is having way too much time on their hands. The whole hierarchy of wikipedia seems to be populated with people like this.

Re:Problem is not lack of experts...

[ausoleil]

They have another "qualification:" the need to show off how smart they are, irregardless of whether they actually know of what they are talking about.

Re:Problem is not lack of experts...

[GrahamCox]

I take your point but I think the other main problem is that for every expert there's a passive-aggressive hitler-type who will "guard" articles for no reason other that it makes them feel big. I have been on the receiving end of several of these types, moreso recently, despite now only very occasionally contributing even though there are several topics I can quite rightly claim to be an expert in. A few years ago I contributed heavily to WP and I think I added something of value, but I got very pissed-off with the battles I ended up getting drawn into against my will simply because in practice the concept of 'consensus' is in fact very rarely applied.

Nowadays I just can't be bothered 99% of the time, and I suspect I'm not alone. The system that WP has built for itself actually doesn't serve the best interests of the encyclopaedia, so me feeling is that already WP's best days are behind it.

Recently I happened to look something up and noticed that the article had been vandalised about four days previously. I reverted the change without logging in because it was a quick fix and self-evidently non-controversial. I was reverted almost as soon as I clicked the Save button, and had a rude message dumped on my current IPs "talk page". If that's the way bona fide contributors (even anonymous ones) are treated nowadays then there's no real future for the project. Anyone with a double-digit IQ could see the change I made was reversion of crude vandalism and was made in good faith. Editors like me who once cared about the veracity and quality of WP are staying away in droves.

Re:Problem is not lack of experts...

[Anonymous Coward]

So say we all!

Why is this man so obsessed with credentials?

[doom]

(1) There isn't any particular reason to think that credentialed experts are going to want to volunteer their work for free on wikipedia. Close it off to amateurs, and wikipedia will likely shrivel.

(2) There isn't any evidence that wikipedia is any more unreliable than any other encylopedia -- what studies there have been show them to be roughly comparable.

(3) The problem with volunteerism isn't the average quality of the volunteers -- the actual problem is subversion. As wikipedia, and things like it, grow in importance, than the ability to game the system will grow in importance, and well-funded flacks will overwhelm the volunteers (First, imagine that a Karl Rove has hired dozens of people to open hundreds of accounts, all of which build up their reputations until they're needed to control politically sensitive material. Second, imagine that the Chinese government has decided to take control of the page about China, rather than block the site.)

My prediction: there will come a time when internet anonymity has become more trouble than it's worth, and we'll insist that we know who our volunteers are.

Re:Why is this man so obsessed with credentials?

[bbtom]

"Close it off"? Anyone can edit on Citizendium. The expert Editors just play the role of judging whether or not material in their particular area of expertise is accurate or not.

There is a simple reason for this: Stephen Hawking knows more about astrophysics than me or most other dorks who hang out on the Interwebs all day long.

Re:Why is this man so obsessed with credentials?

[doom]

I sincerely hope that Stephen Hawking isn't wasting his time editing at citizendium, he has better things to do.

For all wikipedia's problems, it is a provable fact that the level of expertise of it's volunteers is adequate for writing introductory level articles. The technical articles at wikipedia may not be perfect, but they are as good or better as the ones from more professional sources...

So, once again, why the obsession with credentials?

Re:Why is this man so obsessed with credentials?

[doom]

Just to hammer the point home: in evaluating someone's opinion about economics, it's far less important whether they have a credentialed degree in the subject than knowing who pays their salary.

Lack of expertise is not the problem (and certainly vandalism is not a serious problem): the real problem is propaganda and subversion.

Citizendium is not without issues

[Suddenly_Dead]

Perhaps associated with its culture of 'experts', or perhaps simply its low population. One needs look no further than the Homeopathy article, which on Wikipedia is strongly rooted in reality, but on Citizendium is largely controlled by one Homeopath editor (who has been banned from Wikipedia for pushing his unsupportable POV), and leans towards promotion and advocacy.

Re:Citizendium is not without issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I was interested in Citizendium for a while, but it turned out that some of the editors were there because their sympathetic views on chiropractic, homeopathy or UFOs didn't get proper recognition on Wikipedia. I was expecting an expert-driven encyclopedia, not a refuge for crackpots. Another big issue was Sanger's insistence on the whole thing being "family-friendly" (US-style version). Wikipedia has many faults but is somehow manages to keep crackpots and puritans at bay.

Nice going... LAWRENCE

[tbird81]

I nearly thought about taking it seriously, until I saw Larry Sanger's name there. What a joke.

Experts are selfish, there's an eye-opener.

[Turzyx]

I've spoken to a number of colleagues about Wikipedia; in fact itâ(TM)s quite a recurring topic here. They all harp on about the inaccuracy of the articles as if the creators of Wikipedia are claiming all their material is 100% fact.

The reality as we've discussed here, is that they are not of course, but the main problem is not the inaccuracies of the articles, it's the point-blank refusal of additional experts to even entertain the idea of sharing their knowledge and why should they? The people with the knowledge and expertise to make coherent contributions to Wikipedia have likely spent years in academia or employment gaining their knowledge through experience and hard work, why should they simply give it away?

Experts are selfish, and they are also the worst people for criticising Wikipediaâ(TM)s accuracy and doing nothing to help correct it.

as the song says...

[thephydes]

....experts, sexperts choking smokers don't you think the joker laughs at you....

Book references

[DrYak]

I worked on the item described in one of the articles while I was in the Navy, I had the unclassified manuals at one elbow, at the other elbow I had a stack of expensive reference books... All were trumped because a handful of websites all referenced the same handful of coffee table books - and disagreed with me.

Two things :
- Unlike the parent which had a letter, but from the point of view of other wikipedia could as well have been forged, you have references in *UN*-classified original manuals written by the Navy themselves. As they are not classified, they can be checked by any other user. It *IS* a reliable source. In addition, as it is written by the original maker of the thing, it could be considered as fist hand source, even better that website conveying second hand information.
So the situation isn't the same as with the "I have a letter".

- Ok, if the other users don't want to simply edit the date, maybe write a couple of lines saying that the commonly found data on the web and the manuals from the original source seem to disagree, citing your source.

Re:Book references

[DerekLyons]

So the situation isn't the same as with the "I have a letter".

The end result was the same - my edits were rejected because they didn't match the commonly, and easily, available sources.
 
 

Ok, if the other users don't want to simply edit the date, maybe write a couple of lines saying that the commonly found data on the web and the manuals from the original source seem to disagree, citing your source.

Well, it was more complex than the date - it was essentially an entire rewrite of half a dozen articles. On each, on the talk page, I noted my sources - and the same person (who had written all the articles and had most of the edits on them) promptly reverted my changes. (This was prior to 'citation needed'.) So I went to the talk page and explained that not only had I worked on this weapon in the Navy, but I had researched them for nearly twenty years and wished to share that research - and was promptly hit with the "no original research" hammer. (Never mind that any comprehensive historical article on the Wikipedia contains the same level of original research.)
 
Between that and several other examples of asshattery, I realized I didn't have time to fight one fool with too much time on his hands, let alone half a dozen or so. I left Wikipedia and have never been back.

Re:Book references

[Teancum]

This sounds more like a Wikipedia editor who is violating the "WP:OWN" standards in an aggressive manner. It happens far more often than many Wikipedians care to admit, but for some types of articles it can be a real pain to get changes to happen.

Writing on Wikipedia does take a bit of a thick skin and strongly defending your contributions to a certain extent. When you have a POV pusher or somebody who is upset with changes to "their" article, it can be even worse.

Knowing your argumentative style here on Slashdot, it doesn't surprise me that other users on Wikipedia may have found you to be a little rough to work with as well. Still, that by itself isn't a reason to completely revert edits by somebody trying to make meaningful contributions.

The military history guys that I've dealt with seem to be a pretty level headed bunch, with some of them having incredible depth to their experience and knowledge of the topics they have written about. You might be surprised if you came back to see who is involved with these articles right now. Often all it takes is to stand up to the more belligerent editors and calling their bluff.

For "guard" read "wanker."

[EWAdams]

I added something that was a) true; b) supported by references; c) well-written; d) not inflammatory or controversial to a certain article. I took my time and did it carefully. Foolish me -- someone who was clearly the self-appointed owner of that article removed it within minutes.

Re:For "guard" read "wanker."

[21mhz]

Prooflink?

More articles != better

[Haeleth]

How many of the articles on Wikipedia that are missing from Citizendium are cruft like blow-by-blow retellings of individual episodes of children's cartoons, or two-line stubs on insignificant elementary schools, or bot-generated template "articles" on American locations that contain nothing more than a few statistics regurgitated from census data?

We need to remember that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a repository of all the random facts and assertions that anyone was ever able to keep from being deleted. One could produce an encyclopedia by taking a subset of Wikipedia.

(Now wait for all the people who didn't bother to read this far to assume that I'm a Citizendium user. I'm not. I've never even visited Citizendium to the best of my knowledge, while I use Wikipedia almost daily.)

"common sense"

[Tom]

Yepp, that's one of the many problems with Wikipedia.

It does great in summing up what's been called "wisdom of the crowd". I think we used to call that "common sense", but that's less of a buzzword.

The problem with "wisdom of the crowd" is that Wikipedia 1009 AD would have stated "the earth is flat" as a fact, and linked to many sources for the claim, even though experts had known for well over a thousand years that it isn't so.

The greatest strength of Wikipedia - that anyone who knows something can come in and add it - is also its greatest weakness - any fool who thinks he knows something can come in and add it. And there's no credibility system whatsoever. Einstein's opinion on relativity is, to Wikipedia, equal to Joe the barkeeper's. In fact, if we assume that Joe has less to do with his time, and spends more of it roaming around Wikipedia, his opinion will probably prevail.

Finally, Wikipedia actively alienates experts with its policies against primary sources and original research. That "secondary sources" are anything but reliable when you've become so popular that your secondary sources regularily use you as their source - well, we've just seen how that works out. And that wasn't the first event of this kind.

So, when you dig your teeth into what's good and what's bad about Wikipedia, the astonishing result you pretty much have to arrive at, is that your university professor was right: You can use it to quickly look up something for a start, but if you want to have anything solid that you can actually refer to, look up primary and secondary sources, not Wikipedia.

Liberal bias

[Tsagadai]

The original article is just arguing for enforced liberal bias. This guy just wants wikipedia to become the Soviet Union which gave him wet dreams as a boy.

Re:Barf

[CarpetShark]

Woosh

News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Breaking news! Wikipedia competitor criticises Wikipedia! News at 11!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

is this an aggressively guarded article ..

[viralMeme]

"some articles suffer precisely because there are so many aggressive people who 'guard' articles and drive off others (PDF)"

Is this an example of a guarded article. Are these statements even remotely historically accurate. As such the current guardian of that page can't even find any verifiable citations.

'Consumer versions of Windows were originally designed for ease-of-use on a single-user PC without a network connection, and did not have security features built in from the outset.'

'Windows NT and its successors are designed for security (including on a network) and multi-user PCs, but were not initially designed with Internet security in mind as much since, when it was first developed in the early 1990s, Internet use was less prevalent'.

Lessons in humility

[carvalhao]

Anyone who claims himself to be an expert in some matter is either: a) Trying to leverage some influence over someone who needs the knowledge he claims to have; b) Too dumb to look at himself in the mirror.

If there is one thing that we have been taught by thinkers and confirmed by experience is that the more you know, the more you become conscious that you DON'T know. Humility is certainly a general good indicator if expertise.

I recomend reading "The Undercover Economist" for a layman's explanation on the (ab)use of supposed expertise.

Re:Lessons in humility

[bbtom]

So, you think there are no experts at all? That's bullshit. It may take work to identify experts, but they do exist: Stephen Hawking does know more about physics than some random kid on the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee does know more about the process of creating the World Wide Web than pretty much anyone else.

That's not to say they are infallible sages, gods or geniuses. But there are people who know what they are talking about a lot better than others. It seems ridiculous not to build that principle into online knowledge communities like Wikipedia.

The Role of Experts In Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG R U SRS!

Never underestimate the power of ...

[Anonymous Coward]

being in the right place at the right time

Wow : WP threads on /. are getting interesting...

[zijus]

Hi.

A long while ago, I contributed to WP quite a bit. I stopped being subject to WikiStress. I learned one thing at that time : when WP things gets on your nerves, just get a break. Then, one realise that an article is no one's little pet. And now one can come back to an article and forget about it easily. Many people who claim to be specialist or to be especially rightful, should take a WikiBreak... and come back later. No, later than that. Now, contributions starts being good.

I also observed /. threads about WP : They where rather poor, often being aggregation of blatantly incorrect statements. Reason IMHO was that not so many actually contributed to WP, thus ignoring what I now can read in this thread : WP is not a school yard, there are rules, these rules can indeed be gamed, WP is no one pet's toy : being a so called expert does not yield special status, consensus is indeed the driving thing in WP - not The Truth - and so on...

That's a lot of good comments in one single WP /. thread. Pleasantly surprising. I suppose WP is getting actually known by people. Nice!

Z

"Expert" != "shadowy propagandist"

[danaris]

The purpose of experts is to forward their own agenda

I'm not sure how tongue-in-cheek you're trying to be here, so if you are, then this is directed at the people who really believe this.

This is honestly one of the biggest and (to me) scariest and most incomprehensible problems with the American consciousness right now: the belief that not only do they, the average Americans, know better than the experts in their fields, but that those experts are, to a man, interested solely or primarily in putting forward their own "agenda"—which is necessarily something other than "educate people" or "show the truth".

What reasonable basis is there for believing that everyone who's highly educated is somehow trying to subvert society to some nefarious end??

Dan Aris

Re:"Expert" != "shadowy propagandist"

[mounthood]

What reasonable basis is there for believing that everyone who's highly educated is somehow trying to subvert society to some nefarious end??

You should read "Cargo Cult Science", by Richard Feynman. It's insightful, a great read, and will answer your question.

http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html

Re:"Expert" != "shadowy propagandist"

[QuantumG]

Most all experts are peddling a pet theory that they hope will go mainstream and carry them into the history books.

This is common knowledge.

Re:"Expert" != "shadowy propagandist"

[danaris]

Most all experts are peddling a pet theory that they hope will go mainstream and carry them into the history books. This is common knowledge.

"Common knowledge"? Really?

Everyone who's highly educated has some pet theory that they're trying to push?

I think you need to loosen your tinfoil hat, mate. Or maybe just get your head out of your butt long enough to realize that there are more experts in their fields than just those high-powered researchers who are close enough to any cutting edge to come up with controversial theories.

Dan Aris

Re:"Expert" != "shadowy propagandist"

[QuantumG]

Again, you're missing the point. If someone calls themselves an expert, they most likely have something controversial to push.

I'm not calling myself an expert here ;)

Re:"Expert" != "shadowy propagandist"

[lawpoop]

One of the scariest things to me is how many millions of people have been slaughtered by those who know "The Truth".

Re:"Expert" != "shadowy propagandist"

[danaris]

One of the scariest things to me is how many millions of people have been slaughtered by those who know "The Truth".

There's a big difference between "the truth" and "The Truth." It's not a good idea to get them mixed up.

Dan Aris

Re:"Expert" != "shadowy propagandist"

[lawpoop]

There's a big difference between "the truth" and "The Truth." It's not a good idea to get them mixed up.

That's not a solution. The people who are capable of seeing the difference aren't the mass murderers. You and I may be able to handle these ideas, but it seems as if humanity on the whole is not. Evil megalomaniacs such as Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin regularly capitalize on this idea of "the truth" and then hell on earth is unleashed.

I'm perfectly happy of getting rid of the idea of One True Truth, to prevent the slaughter of innocents.

Guarding Articles

[GargamelSpaceman]

Guarding articles takes effort which can't be sustained indefinately. The guarder will get tired of polling the article and eventually relent allowing the content to be changed.

A script that looks for changes and puts it back when some are found would be detected and the account terminated or IP banned. Guarding articles requries a human, and a human will stop caring, or will at worst care only about a few articles.

Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

But on the whole, there is improvement.

False, false, false. Demonstrably false.

You want proof? I'll give you solid, undeniable proof. Pidgey is a Pokemon. In February 2007, Pidgey had his own page at Wikipedia. You could go there and see a small template(since deleted) explaining to you what Pidgey is and various other pieces of information about him. It was objectively a useful resource.

Pidgey no longer has a page. Pidgey has a paragraph. A rather short and dry affair devoid of even the most basic image. One can learn very little about Pidgey from reading it. Objectively, when it comes to Pidgey, the quality of information on Wikipedia has nosedived spectacularly in two years.

"A page for every Pokemon" was once used as a derogatory remark about Wikipedia. Ironically in fact, as it represented a hug strength of the new encyclopedia. But evidently, some faceless Wikipedia bureaucrats took exception to the remark and to the Pidgey page, and decided to all but expunge Pidgey from Wikipedia. There are probably no longer any images of Pidgey on the entire site. He has been subjected to the digital equivalent of a book burning.

And for what? Being a Pokemon? Does being a cartoon character or a children's toy or anything else automatically make something unworthy of a few kilobytes of page space on the the supposed repository of all the world's knowledge. The sad fact is that answer to that question is a resounding YES.

Pokemon was MASSIVE. I saw it consume people. It is still played, almost religiously at cons and the like. It is, more so than the Transformers, the quintessential example of marketing a toy line. If a future researcher wishes to investigate the Pokemon phenomenon, Wikipedia, as a resource, will be less than useless.

Wikipedia page quality, to my mind, peaked in 2006. It has been in slow decline since. An army of bureaucrats and opinionated zealots now hold nigh every page hostage to their whims. When a supposedly factual encyclopedia has the wrong start date for World War 2 for over 5 months, questions must be asked. The answers to those questions are that Wikipedia has, objectively, seen a decline in the quality of its articles, and overall structure, over time.

Re:Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[Lars T.]

Your whole post shows you confuse quantity with quality.

Re:Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Quantity over quality is really the core principle of wikipedia, and the major reason the site is so successful.

Re:Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[not flu]

You obviously failed to read the last paragraph.

Re:Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[WNight]

Objectively, when it comes to Pidgey, the quality of information on Wikipedia has nosedived spectacularly in two years.
[...]
If a future researcher wishes to investigate the Pokemon phenomenon, Wikipedia, as a resource, will be less than useless.

Your whole post shows you confuse quantity with quality.

Idiot. Read it again.

Re:Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[Lars T.]

You sure are right - the fact that there was a Wikipedia article for every fucking Pokemon would have told future researchers a lot about the Pokemon phenomenon and its fans - why this would improve Wikipedia is still lost on me.

Re:Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[WNight]

How it would hurt Wikipedia is also beyond you, yet you're a deletionist anyways. Maybe you're just an asshole.

Re:Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[Lars T.]

How it would hurt Wikipedia is also beyond you, yet you're a deletionist anyways. Maybe you're just an asshole.

Maybe because "assholes" find it easier to maintain one article instead of a couple of hundreds for every Pokemon, every Digitation, every Yu-Gi-Oh Card. How many vandalisms did you fix on those Pokemon pages? More importantly: how many did you miss fixing?

Re:Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[WNight]

So the pages are worthless, but now you're concerned about the quality of them...

Bullshit.

I'd find it easier to maintain one article of all US presidents. I mean, what have they done except eat donuts and sit in meetings, occasionally starting some wars. A page for each! And most of their stupid cabinet, etc. What a waste. I should be to cut it down to a five-page article without sacrificing details anyone but an imbecile or someone into American history could care about.

Re:Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[Lars T.]

So now you claim that each and every Pokemon has the same importance as a President of the United States. Sure, go on making a point - it may not be the one you want, however.

Re:Wikipedia IS Getting Worse

[WNight]

Oh yes, I was very clear to state that Bill Clinton is Squirtle, Bush is ... whichever one sounds the funniest. The equivalence is EXACT. Did I call you an idiot yet?

My point is that you don't have any good reasons for your actions. Like all other deletionists you're just a jerk kicking over other people's sandcastles because you can. If you actually wanted to be helpful you'd participate in the discussion, which is largely interrupted if the page is simply deleted. You've all convinced yourselves that you're doing more for Wikipedia by deleteing articles than writing them.

Democracy vs idiocracy

[guruevi]

Wikipedia is more of an experiment in some type of direct Democracy/Demarchy (where the whole world rules) while Citizendium is an experiment in Meritocracy (where only the smart rule)

We see the results after a few years. Wikipedia has a much higher level of quality even though there are a lot of bad things about it. Citizendium might be more factually correct on some issues but the problem is that it doesn't have the vast amount of resources Wikipedia gives. Which one is better is a matter of choice. If you give negative points for anything that is not existing, Wikipedia wins. If you don't care that it's not there but what is there is correct then Citizendium is more correct. In the end Wikipedia will be more correct on current culture, things that are evolving constantly and new items while Citizendium will get things that are more scientific better. I think the two should merge some articles and things that are a matter of fact (history, mathematics, chemistry) should be better locked down on Wikipedia. On the other hand our understanding of matters is continually improving even on history but the fact is that even historians keep on rewriting history. Eventually Bush and Hitler will be good (or not-so-bad) guys to certain generations and within a few hundred years we'll have explored the sub-sub-quantum physics as well. It's all evolving and no knowledge is permanent even if they were a matter of "fact", it's all in the eye of the observer.

Great post, and more thoughts

[MoxFulder]

Well, good summary, I very much agree!

I like to think of myself as one of those careful, involved editors who spends my free time "tending" and improving articles on my major areas of interest and expertise.

What I've never understood about Sanger's argument is... what is it in Wikipedia's current model that /prevents/ experts from using their expertise?

What makes an expert?

I'd guess that an expert knows many reliable sources of information that they can use as references in their edits, to correct inaccuracies and add new material. Wikipedia encourages that!

I also expect that experts have superior writing skills and can summarize information in their area of expertise effectively. Wikipedia encourages that too!

Finally, I expect that experts are used to defending their conclusions and evidence in a rational but skeptical setting, so they should be well-prepared to convince their fellow editors when disputes over content and emphasis arise (as is inevitable!). Wikipedia encourages that kind of debate too.

So... what exactly ARE the aspects of Wikipedia that hinder expert contributors? It's an honest question by me. Can anyone point out any specific issues or cases they're aware of?

Who's more reliable than the source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the course of the last seven year I've broken several stories in the Tween/Teen Entertainment genres and continually butt heads with the Wiki's.

Each month I see traffic from Wiki referral links that users post - only to see they have been removed. Just about every example listed here by those of you with complaints I've experienced. As we gravitate towards New Media, how can Wikipedia expect info to pass their scrutiny in such specialized categories.

I've been told 'audio is not trustworthy' in regards to the 250 plus interviews I have posted over the last 7 years. Many that contain a lot of information about people they have little on. How can what someone say in an audio interview be not trustworthy? Are they claiming that it's not the real person?

The part that gets me is historically I've got a strong track record and that earns me nothing (yet they will source TMZ)? Just last month, I broke the story of a girl leaving Interscope Records act The Clique Girlz. It's easy to document with fan sites that I was the first to write about it (and you can see the it's not true claims by fans as well). Within 36 hours an 'audition' for a new member was found at Craigs List and I also aquired an actual PDF of a casting call. It got posted a Wikipedia and then taken down. A week later, the girl who left posted a YouTube video saying she left the group. Even though it's documented a full week prior where the story came from her video is more 'reliable' (thus that aspect of the truth is not sourced to me)? After writing a story about it and generating some pressure they've accepted a short paragraph about her.
http://tommy2.net/content/?p=2245

There is also the story of up and coming YouTube star Savannah Outen who's Wikipedia was removed citing 'not a significant' person - despite having no record contract and having a song at Radio Disney that was the most requested song of the day - the same day the Jonas Brothers released their new album... not to mention over 100,000 YouTube subscribers.
http://tommy2.net/content/?p=2252

On the flip sides, Teen Pop Groups from early 2000 such as Play and Dream Street are documented and members have page bios at Wikipedia yet their is not one source used? So after someone has made some mainstream success we through out sourcing (since this is specialized and their isn't any)? It's become a game of 'we say' what's acceptable even on undocumented facts. They've turned into skeptics that believe it they didn't see it, it didn't happen which is the theme that can be seen in several of these posts.

Re:Who's more reliable than the source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops... that sentence "After writing a story about it and generating some pressure they've accepted a short paragraph about her." should have been the last line about Savannah Outen - not The Clique Girlz. Sorry - my bad.

Simple - an online wikipedia court

[unity100]

to which experts can take the contested and faulty articles, and the editions can be decided by input from admins, experts, and people.

you cant fight something that is solidly proven, and anyone still fighting such an edit will probably be extremists/radicals in wikipedia.

Definitions please!

[Hordeking]

Mister Sanger, please define "expert". For example, there are a lot of "experts" who insist on shouting down opposition to global warming theories by other "experts", claiming they aren't experts at all. Some of those "experts" are also directly responsible for inventing the "internet" that needs to be scrapped.

You're an admin on Wikipedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should we care what an insider like you thinks?

{{COI}}

Makes perfect sense

[Anonymous Coward]

What he's saying is that experts shouldn't out-expert experts who think they are more expert than them, but that instead experts should out-expert experts who think they are more expert than them.

And that Wikipedia is characterized by "radical egalitarianism [...] freedom, openness, and bottom-up management". Yeah, right. No hierarchies here, do you see any hierarchies? SAY AGAIN?

Citizendium sucks??? Yes, differently.

[Roadkills-R-Us]

I think the *real* problem is far more basic. The *name* "Citizendium" sucks. "Wikipedia" sounds much cooler, and rolls off the tongue much easier. Additionally, it ties in with "encyclopedia", with which we're all familiar, with sub-vocalized associations such as "Encyclopedia Britanica" and other brands we generally respect.

"Citizendium" sounds like a bad science fiction movie title.

Understand what is knowledge

[kentsin]

Having more then one answer to a problem, or having a set of different view for a single issue is consider the single form of correct knowledge.

Wikipedia simply wrong wanting to provide one single set of answer.

BS

[Orig_Club_Soda]

So we are going to have "experts" who aren't necessarily right or factual, but they have a rubber stamp on their ass by the "system". History is interpretation. Science interpretation. Politics is cover-up. Its all subjective.

Well that seals it

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that seals it no more frikin Wikipeadia for me never found it any good any how never found REAL information on there just a continual chain of links to links to links to links to links and on and on and on and on ect ect ect ect