"Microsoft and every other major vendor do not guarantee software upgrades as part of their maintenance contracts. But users view upgrades as the meat of their contracts. "
Your assumption is incorrect. Yes, many of our contributors are from western english speaking cultures. We also have a significant minority of east asians (Chinese and Japanese) and Eastern Europeans. Minority viewpoints do get represented. And on the english wikipedia, we tend to pull in some traslations from the other language Wikipedias.
An encyclopedia ia not a venue for original research. The Wikipedia guidelines explicetely say that Wikipedia is supposed to accept generally accepted facts. Rebellion has no place in Wikipedia, nor any other encyclopedia. Neutral tone is something that should be encouraged. Readers are supposed to make up their own mind. Call it orthodoxy if you will - I call it common sense.
Just to respond to one point you make - the guidelines explicetely encourage people to "be bold." As a personal anecdote - one of my very first edits after when I got there was to merge the seperate articles on Foundation Series and Foundation trilogy. Sure - other people had worked on both articles, and who was I to come along and merge them? But you know what - no one complained. As a result, the article (as it is now) is much better and more complete.
I try not to feed the trolls, but in this case, I'll make an exception
A) You say a lot of articles in your field of interest are seriously flawed, but fail to name it. Just a funny oversite, huh?
B) You don't need to be an 'expert' in a field to write an accurate description of its topics. Conversely, there are fields for which there are no PhD laden experts - find me an expert to write the anal sex article, please
C) "If you look up an article on Nuclear Weapons... you'll find exactly none of them written by anyone with... knowledge"" - Utter BS. You don't have to have detonated a nuclear bomb to know the history, or how they work.
There are very specific rules about protecting an article. It has to be done by someone uninvolved in the edit war. This helps enforce neutrality.
The only things an admin can do that a regular user cannot is protect a page, edit a protected page, or ban a user. Nothing is supposed to be done without "rough consensus" amoung participants. Polls are the most common way to do it. As admins, our votes don't count any more than anyone else's. In other words, the only thing limiting someone's "authority" is their willingness to participate.
I can't say specifically how many eyes see each article in Britannica or World Book. I *do* know that the typical way an article is written is that an expert writes it, and it gets looked at by a small number of editors - a number significantly smaller than that Wikipedia does.
As far as vandalism (which I assume you are implying when you say "the right eyes"), it gets quashed pretty quickly. Persistent vandals get banned pretty quickly. And because graffitti is cleaned up so fast, most people only do it once or twice before they realize it is pointless.
1) There is no acceptance mechanism. You make the changes and they immediately propogate into the database.
2) Quality is enforced our contributor base, which happens at several levels. At any given time, there are probably a half-dozen people looking at all the "recent changes", and anonymous (non-logged in) users get the most scrutiny. On top of that, the watchlist ensures that even if the change is not immediately spotted, someone watching the article will watch it.
3) Controversial articles tend to spark edit wars (or more specficially as you described, revert wars, where two people keep reverting the other person's changes). Edit/revert wars are ended by protecting an article. Edit war participants are encouraged to work out their differenes on the associated discussion page (every article has one). Any admin can protect an article, and once protected, only an admin can edit it.
With wackypedia, I get articles on gannets written by geeks complaining about nest wetting
As I said in a sibling post: Not everyone edits all articles - people tend to stick to what they know. Therefore, articles are generally edited by informed users. (B) A lot of Wikipedia's changes (50%, if I had to guess) come from a relatively small pool of very active contributors (200 or so), most of whom are very well educated. If you look up an article on Nuclear physics, you'll probably get something that was written by someone majoring in/with a BS in physics or chemistry. So it's not PHDs, but it's not Joe Q Average either.
As far as your claim that Wikipedia is a bunch of geeks and hackers - it's not true. While geeks make up a disproportately large portion of the contributors, but *most* of our contributors are not geeks or hackers. Off the top of my head, two of our most active contributors are an earth science graduate student and a Brit with a degree is psychology. In short - our contributors tend to come from all walks of life.
1) Logged in users have access to a "watchlist." It tells you when the articles you are watching were last changed. So if someone comes along and wipes out a years worth of work, it will be reverted very, very quickly (all changes are reverseble).
2) You make two mistaken assumptions. (A) Not everyone edits all articles - people tend to stick to what they know. Therefore, articles are generally edited by informed users. (B) A lot of Wikipedia's changes (50%, if I had to guess) come from a relatively small pool of very active contributors (200 or so), most of whom are very well educated. If you look up an article on Nuclear physics, you'll probably get something that was written by someone majoring in/with a BS in physics or chemistry. So it's not PHDs, but it's not Joe Q Average either.
The Wikipedia guidelines explicetely say "Wikipedia wants generally accepted facts". We recently had a contributor who added a large number of crank theories into articles presenting them as facts. (For example - "Albert Einstien was an incorrible plaguarist who got all of his great ideas by plaguarizing the documents he had access to while he was a patent clerk"). Essentially, we'll take a certain amoung of fringe theory, as long as it is presented that way. The user in quesiton, by the way, was banned about 2 weeks later for persistent trolling - the entire community wanted his gone.
(Full disclosure - I'm a wikipedia admin) - The premise of Wikipedia is that you can write an article on everything. Unlike major encyclopedias (which might go through 2 or 3 pairs of eyes tops), though, everything on Wikipedia gets peer reviewed many times over. I've seen articles where several dozen people who have modified it. In and of itself, that's an effective form of peer review.
Hawking has made several bets. You are thinking of his naked singularities bet (A naked singularity is a black-hole without event horizons) Hawking bet Roger Penrose(?) a subscription to Penthouse (I think) that they could not exist. He lost.
Jimbo Wales (founder / benevolent dictator of Wikipedia) was recently approached by a major publishing company about the possibility of a printed version of Wikipedia.
First of all, as much as I love America, it was not the first to emancipate its slaves. A bunch of countries in South America did it in 1821; Mexico - 1829; Britian - 1833; France and Denmark - 1848; and Holland - 1863.
Anyway, America *was* a purely capitalist society until about, oh, 1929. The Great depression hit, and everyone realized the system lacked any kind of checks and balances - these are the 'socialist' elements you are referring to. Social security, welfare, the SEC, the FDIC, the glass-stegal act, the new deal, the CCC, etc etc. These helped insure equity amoung the different players. Unfortunately, a lot of the changes have been rolled back in the last 10 years (both nominally and practically.
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft and every other major vendor do not guarantee software upgrades as part of their maintenance contracts. But users view upgrades as the meat of their contracts. "
In short, you're SOL if you bought one.
Your assumption is incorrect. Yes, many of our contributors are from western english speaking cultures. We also have a significant minority of east asians (Chinese and Japanese) and Eastern Europeans. Minority viewpoints do get represented. And on the english wikipedia, we tend to pull in some traslations from the other language Wikipedias.
Ah, that explains why it is prefaced by "As a personal anecdote"
An encyclopedia ia not a venue for original research. The Wikipedia guidelines explicetely say that Wikipedia is supposed to accept generally accepted facts. Rebellion has no place in Wikipedia, nor any other encyclopedia. Neutral tone is something that should be encouraged. Readers are supposed to make up their own mind. Call it orthodoxy if you will - I call it common sense.
Just to respond to one point you make - the guidelines explicetely encourage people to "be bold." As a personal anecdote - one of my very first edits after when I got there was to merge the seperate articles on Foundation Series and Foundation trilogy. Sure - other people had worked on both articles, and who was I to come along and merge them? But you know what - no one complained. As a result, the article (as it is now) is much better and more complete.
I try not to feed the trolls, but in this case, I'll make an exception
A) You say a lot of articles in your field of interest are seriously flawed, but fail to name it. Just a funny oversite, huh?
B) You don't need to be an 'expert' in a field to write an accurate description of its topics. Conversely, there are fields for which there are no PhD laden experts - find me an expert to write the anal sex article, please
C) "If you look up an article on Nuclear Weapons... you'll find exactly none of them written by anyone with... knowledge"" - Utter BS. You don't have to have detonated a nuclear bomb to know the history, or how they work.
There are very specific rules about protecting an article. It has to be done by someone uninvolved in the edit war. This helps enforce neutrality.
The only things an admin can do that a regular user cannot is protect a page, edit a protected page, or ban a user. Nothing is supposed to be done without "rough consensus" amoung participants. Polls are the most common way to do it. As admins, our votes don't count any more than anyone else's. In other words, the only thing limiting someone's "authority" is their willingness to participate.
I can't say specifically how many eyes see each article in Britannica or World Book. I *do* know that the typical way an article is written is that an expert writes it, and it gets looked at by a small number of editors - a number significantly smaller than that Wikipedia does.
As far as vandalism (which I assume you are implying when you say "the right eyes"), it gets quashed pretty quickly. Persistent vandals get banned pretty quickly. And because graffitti is cleaned up so fast, most people only do it once or twice before they realize it is pointless.
"Therefore, articles are sometimes written by cranks and zealots."
Articles are required to be written in a neutral tone. Articles that aren't are either written or deleted. Crack edits are quashed pretty quickly.
To answer your questions -
1) There is no acceptance mechanism. You make the changes and they immediately propogate into the database.
2) Quality is enforced our contributor base, which happens at several levels. At any given time, there are probably a half-dozen people looking at all the "recent changes", and anonymous (non-logged in) users get the most scrutiny. On top of that, the watchlist ensures that even if the change is not immediately spotted, someone watching the article will watch it.
3) Controversial articles tend to spark edit wars (or more specficially as you described, revert wars, where two people keep reverting the other person's changes). Edit/revert wars are ended by protecting an article. Edit war participants are encouraged to work out their differenes on the associated discussion page (every article has one). Any admin can protect an article, and once protected, only an admin can edit it.
With wackypedia, I get articles on gannets written by geeks complaining about nest wetting
As I said in a sibling post: Not everyone edits all articles - people tend to stick to what they know. Therefore, articles are generally edited by informed users. (B) A lot of Wikipedia's changes (50%, if I had to guess) come from a relatively small pool of very active contributors (200 or so), most of whom are very well educated. If you look up an article on Nuclear physics, you'll probably get something that was written by someone majoring in/with a BS in physics or chemistry. So it's not PHDs, but it's not Joe Q Average either.
As far as your claim that Wikipedia is a bunch of geeks and hackers - it's not true. While geeks make up a disproportately large portion of the contributors, but *most* of our contributors are not geeks or hackers. Off the top of my head, two of our most active contributors are an earth science graduate student and a Brit with a degree is psychology. In short - our contributors tend to come from all walks of life.
"WikiPedia is a great idea, but the actual implementation is still very immature and it in now way compares to a good encyclopedia. "
Could you please elaborate on that?
1) Logged in users have access to a "watchlist." It tells you when the articles you are watching were last changed. So if someone comes along and wipes out a years worth of work, it will be reverted very, very quickly (all changes are reverseble).
2) You make two mistaken assumptions. (A) Not everyone edits all articles - people tend to stick to what they know. Therefore, articles are generally edited by informed users. (B) A lot of Wikipedia's changes (50%, if I had to guess) come from a relatively small pool of very active contributors (200 or so), most of whom are very well educated. If you look up an article on Nuclear physics, you'll probably get something that was written by someone majoring in/with a BS in physics or chemistry. So it's not PHDs, but it's not Joe Q Average either.
How to cite Wikipedia
The Wikipedia guidelines explicetely say "Wikipedia wants generally accepted facts". We recently had a contributor who added a large number of crank theories into articles presenting them as facts. (For example - "Albert Einstien was an incorrible plaguarist who got all of his great ideas by plaguarizing the documents he had access to while he was a patent clerk"). Essentially, we'll take a certain amoung of fringe theory, as long as it is presented that way. The user in quesiton, by the way, was banned about 2 weeks later for persistent trolling - the entire community wanted his gone.
The Goatse article was Wikipedia's 7th most active article in February, with 24,425 hits.
(Full disclosure - I'm a wikipedia admin) - The premise of Wikipedia is that you can write an article on everything. Unlike major encyclopedias (which might go through 2 or 3 pairs of eyes tops), though, everything on Wikipedia gets peer reviewed many times over. I've seen articles where several dozen people who have modified it. In and of itself, that's an effective form of peer review.
IMHO (as a Wikipedia admin) what keeps that place running smoothly is a group of roughly 200 dedicated contributors, most of whom are admins.
As my EM prof put it - putting tin-foil into your microwave turns it into a spark plug, and god help you if the sparks strike any explosive elements.
Hawking has made several bets. You are thinking of his naked singularities bet (A naked singularity is a black-hole without event horizons) Hawking bet Roger Penrose(?) a subscription to Penthouse (I think) that they could not exist. He lost.
Bzzzt. Wrong.
Jimbo Wales (founder / benevolent dictator of Wikipedia) was recently approached by a major publishing company about the possibility of a printed version of Wikipedia.
That's the way every other business in the USA operates these days. Regular incomes don't impress the shareholders anymore.
Which is why many resorted to cooking the books. IMHO, there should be a cooperate death penalty just for that reason.
First of all, as much as I love America, it was not the first to emancipate its slaves. A bunch of countries in South America did it in 1821; Mexico - 1829; Britian - 1833; France and Denmark - 1848; and Holland - 1863.
Anyway, America *was* a purely capitalist society until about, oh, 1929. The Great depression hit, and everyone realized the system lacked any kind of checks and balances - these are the 'socialist' elements you are referring to. Social security, welfare, the SEC, the FDIC, the glass-stegal act, the new deal, the CCC, etc etc. These helped insure equity amoung the different players. Unfortunately, a lot of the changes have been rolled back in the last 10 years (both nominally and practically.
The correct quote is: "Florida?! But that's America's wang." --Homer Simpson