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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.
Citation Needed
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?
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.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"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.
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]]
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.)
Those with the most time on their hands wins.
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 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.
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.
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.
The end result was the same - my edits were rejected because they didn't match the commonly, and easily, available sources.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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
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
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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?
My bicyles
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.
Read radical news here
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.