I was describing the difficulties of digital archiving. The difficulties of paper archiving are obviously different, and not denied.
You said, "The paper will still be around then." The point is, it won't be unless you take care to keep it around; even tossing it in warehouses still takes money to rent the warehouse, much more then keeping a digital copy.
Project Gutenberg has been producing thousands of copies of their archives on DVD
That's nice for Project Gutenberg. What does that have to do with the Library of Congress?
The point is, you can make a thousand copies of a digital archive very quick, and store them in geographically distant places for free; the libraries will be happy to keep a copy safe. If you send a copy to every major library in the world, and encourage them to make copies, it's more unlikely for the digital archive to get destroyed then any one paper archive that could just burn to the ground.
Obviously the PG DP method can be modified by not doing OCR and merely making the image of the page available as the starting point.
Yes, and once in a while for material we have absolutely lousy copies of, we do so. But it's painful; there's no reason not to do as much mechanically as possible.
Perhaps if you want to access a page, you have to do some typing/editing of another page.
Then you're going to get crap. At best, you've got unmotivated proofers just trying to get through the computer; at worst, people will pound at the keyboard until it lets them in. Inviting people to help you works much better than trying to force them.
Yeah, exactly. Ask NASA how frequently they "refresh" their archive, and whether it was enough to save it all (short answer: Not even close.)
And if it had been on paper, it would cost a small fortune to store, and probably most of it would have got thrown away right there. It would have had to have been bound to have had any chance of surviving, and kept from flood, fire and mold, which would have been much harder, because of the much greater volume. Odds are "not even close" would have been true for paper, too. Several terabytes of data is just plain hard to store in any format.
Project Gutenberg has been producing thousands of copies of their archives on DVD, making it virtually impossible that losing one or two or three servers could destroy the data. If the LoC put this data on DVD and sent or sold one to every library (or even to only government depositiories), that would make it massively rudundant in the way that hard to copy paper can be only at great expense.
That's OK, I worked for a financial firm on an app that generated an Excel spreadsheet with the output from the program, which at one point was being sent to Bangalore, printed out and keyed back in. Of course, maybe they printed it out and then shipped it... I wouldn't be surprised.
I used to work for a company that got sales reports on their products from various stores. Most of them would print it out from their computer and fax it to us, and we would enter it into our computers from their fax. A few would email us a spreadsheet; so we'd print it out, and enter it into our computers from the printout.
they put effort into changing the format from paper to Jpeg or whatever.
Feist says that just effort doesn't a copyright make; it requires creative input.
Project guttenberg has their small print because of editing
Reread the small print. It's not a copyright license, it's a trademark license. If you remove the Project Gutenberg trademark from the etext, you can do whatever you want with it. (Assuming it's not one of the rare ones that's still under copyright, but the author gave the right post it.)
All digitally enhanced and edited to give you a better happier feeling of your government
The LoC would have their reputation destroyed among the librarian and researcher communities if they were caught doing that; and they would be, because hard-core researchers would notice any significant changes in the text and go back to the microfilm and original text copies.
Librarians tend to be among the strongest anti-censorship groups in America. There's never been any insinuation that the Library of Congress was having its strings pulled by the forces in power. I trust the Library of Congress to be a neutral provider of information much more then, say, the Washington Post or the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I can see a lot of places (libraries primary example) that will no longer carry or supply this type of information, because the government will supply it to us.
Most libraries are part of government. Why should you trust your home-town library more than the Library of Congress?
I was thinking about digging up old National Geographics, scanning the text and photos, and posting that online. It would make for a great distributed project.
If you're willing to scan them, Distributed Proofreaders (http://www.pgdp.net/) is willing to correct the OCR and even have people assemble them into HTML, provided you're willing to let Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/) post them.
In 7 years we'll be able to read about black Monday.
Nope; everything from 1909 to 1922 is only in the public domain because it was grandfathered in in the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Newspapers that were published in 1929 will be in the public domain in until 1929+95 years. So in 2025 you'll be able to read about Black Monday.
An 80-year blind spot practically ensures irrelevance.
Only to someone who's forgetting history. Some of the issues will be surprisingly relevant; some will only matter to those who study history. It doesn't mean that once something is a hundred years old, it doesn't matter; the roots of current events are in matters more then a century old, often many centuries old.
American English has come a long way since 1836. The When attempting to scan older material, the OCR was probably rendering text that read akin to l33t.
Not really.
"But what Plutarch can this age produce, to immortalize a life so noble? May some excellent historian at length be found, some writer not unworthy of his subject; but may his employment be long deferred!"
It's not American, but that's from a book published in 1808 in Britain, edited from text written in the 17th century. The grammar may be a little unusual, but OCR programs don't notice grammar.
Yef, we could recalibrate the OCR for the early fontf, but the text ftartf to look ftrange.
That's not hard. It would be easy to get the OCR to recognize the long-s (which does in fact look different from the f); even if you don't, post-processing (dictionary lookups to see if f or s is valid at a point) can clear up many cases, and for those it doesn't, well, you're going to have to check and fix the OCR anyway.
(This is not theory; Distributed Proofreaders (http://www.pgdp.net/) has and uses such a post-processor.
The proper role of government is to preserve the constitutionally-limited negative (which do not require the enslavement of others) rights of citizens.
That is, if you're a libertarian. Then there would be no roads or schools, of course, and no forms of finacial support. Of course, you'd be free to beat your kid, because child services is just infringing on the rights of rich folks to keep thier money.
The government has no business encouraging or discouraging any legal activity.
The government of the people and by the people should have the people's interests at heart. That includes us not all dying due to global warming, or (even if you don't believe in that) the world's economy being crippled by the end of fossil fuels. (Come soon or come late, there's only so much of it out there. Given that demand keeps going up, simple logic tells us that it's going to run out some time in the not-so-distant future.)
Because they have no internal power source their read/write range is very limited (read: 2-8 inches from an RFID antenna/reader combination).
And what happens when you crank up that power on that RFID antenna/reader? The tag doesn't know distances, it responds to a sufficent amount of radio energy, and its response goes to the end of the universe. Even if it's infeasible to activate the tag at a certain distance, some with a sufficently large enough antenna can read it at that distance.
So most of the RFID that's being proposed is battery operated? This would have to be, since getting within 2-8 inches isn't enough for even Wal-Mart to read you as you exit the store.
According to Bruce Schnider (sp? the cryptology guy) unpowered RFIDs have been read at much greater distances than they were designed for with the right equipment.
Why are there so many people defending Wikipedia on this?
Because his tone is that of mockery. At the start, middle and end of his article, he treats the Wikipedia contemptously, based at best on one article.
Wise people, when they fail to understand "why would anyone believe this", realize that's a failure in their thinking. He instead blames cultural relativism, a nice easy boogy man to blame. They believe it can be done because they don't understand that there is right and wrong. Perhaps instead I do it because I find the Wikipedia a useful resource already.
The article is wrong.
The article is not wrong. It gives one date as authorative where there's honest historical question, just like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica did. It evinces a little confusion in the body of the text about the date. That is not great, but the article as a whole is still useful and generally correct.
People are going to college in greater numbers than ever, but it's no coincidence that employers here are finding it harder and harder to find good employees, and they're finally outsourcing, to countries where the culture, language, and society are giant barriers. Know why? it's because we are under-educating ourselves out of the global market.
Can you site any sources for that? Because I've always understood that outsource was done because the US is a first-world nation that requires buisnesses to treat the workers fairly well, whereas they can outsource to India at a fourth the price.
Half of the students in American graduate schools are foreigners, and those graduate schools are considered among the best in the world. So obviously, not all of American education is bad.
while our teachers are still telling kids 'you're going to fail, we want you to quit this course to make us look better',
That's antedotal evidence; I've never heard any teacher say that, nor have I ever heard of any teacher saying that. I think your experiences alone are insufficent to draw a conclusion from.
But the article in Wikipedia seems to have gotten not less but more wrong over time.
As someone else pointed out, that happened as the article got much longer and much more detailed. It's much like a program; whenever you add stuff, you add new possiblities for bugs, and you've got to debug again. The article is not monotonically worse; it's longer, more detailed, more informative. The question is whether Wikipedia will keep this length and improve the details.
I'll take that as your answer to the question of whether or not you RTFA. He actually did mention that it can be useful for some purposes if you can recognize its limitations. What he was criticizing was that some people do not recognize those limitations.
It is true, unfortunately, that many encyclopedia users, like many encyclopedia reviewers, have low expectations. They are satisfied to find an answer to their questions. I would argue that more serious users, however, have two requirements: first, an answer to their questions; second, that those answers be correct. Of course, this may be just me.
Or are you so dense you cannot understand basic concepts?
Are you so dense that you can't read? He's saying the whole idea is fundamentally flawed, not that it has some limitations.
Ok, if you are going to be that dense, name another example of a large scale open source encyclopedia.
Superimpose on this intellectual preparation the moist and modish notion of "community" and some vague notions about information "wanting" to be free, et voilà!
You don't think that there's any other volunteer community orientated projects releasing information on the net? How about Debian, or Project Gutenberg?
BTW, that sentence reeks of disdain and contempt, not attitudes of an unbiased investigator. The OED says the word modish has "disparaging implication"s, that is, "speaks of or treats slightingly". The use of that word alone shows bias.
In the real world, we do address the problems within a democracy everyday.
Can you read? I wasn't talking about democracy, but the system behind democracy, the concept that people matter and can make intelligent choices.
In the case of controversial topics the situation is much worse. Entrenched parties would alternate a 'correct' version much like groups of taggers covering over each others stuff.
"would" indicates that you don't know about it. In reality, what does happen is that frequently near the start of the article's creation, there's alternating version; then calmer heads prevail. For many of the really contentious pages, the parties having pounded out neutral text acceptable to both sides. In practice, it can wok.
Thats called being critical of something. Not having an obvious bias.
A professional reviewer that I read once wrote that when he first got a job reviewing, he was told to start with a summary paragraph, then write one paragraph telling what was good about a product and one paragraph about what was bad. While he writes longer reviews now, he has always followed that rule, except for one where the product was so bad that he put the bad before the good. But he still wrote the good.
Doing that shows that you actually considered the item and saw where it succeeded and where it failed, instead of just writing a slam. A book review that says "Do people actually read Dan Brown? Evidently so. Why? It's very hard to say." is going to get ignored by Dan Brown readers, and just about anyone but people who would never read Dan Brown in the first place.
Had he described every entry in the Wikipedia that would be one long ass article. Instead he chose one that illustrated his points effectively.
You can prove anything that way. That there exists a foo with property bar does not mean that every foo or most foos has propery bar.
He was not criticizing the content of the Wikipedia but the system behind it. Do you understand the difference between the two?
Again, if he was criticizing the system behind it, he should have included other projects with similar systems and how they failed and succeeded.
In any case, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. There are many criticisms of the system behind democracy, but the proponents of democracy don't need to go through and refute them one by one; they can point to the success of the system. All his opinions on the system are really irrelevant, one way or another; the only question is how well does it work.
There is a tendency world-wide, but particularly in the U.S. for people to defend their opinions with a fervor not unlike going to the battlements with a broken beer bottle.
Give me a break. Compare "Anti-French sentiment in the United States" with "Anti-American sentiment", and figure out who is defending their opinions with fervor.
Mr. McHenry's positions are not biased. He is merely pointing out facts.
First place, pointing out facts can be biased, depending on how you selected your facts. Secondly, the article is clearly biased: try
Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step: [...] Does someone actually believe this? Evidently so. Why? It's very hard to say.
or
Superimpose on this intellectual preparation the moist and modish notion of "community" and some vague notions about information "wanting" to be free, et voilà!
Well before he started looking at the encyclopedia, he was mocking the principles behind it and wondering who could believe in them. Gee, I'm not surprised that he didn't like what he saw when he finally actually looked at it.
And notice that he judges it based on one article. You can't judge an encyclopedia based on one article. I could check the quality of the Britannica by looking at the article on aleph-one, find that they say that it's equal to the continuum of the real numbers (which is completely wrong) and sit back and say Britannica sucks, but how realistic would that be? To accurately judge anything, you have to take a representative sample with a sufficently large sample size, and he didn't even come close.
At which he self-righteously set back and did no more looking. In research, you should set your suspicions aside and actually study the issue and look at the facts. Instead, he made his decision on Wikipedia, which is obvious from the tone of the first half of the article, he looked at one solitary article of Wikipedia, and quit looking. That's not research; that's just opinion.
If the article on Alexander Hamilton had been correct, would he have continued looking until he found a bad article he could rag on? Did he in fact look at several articles until he found one he could rag on? Given the quality of his article, I'm not sure the answer to both questions would be yes.
how does having actual real world experience in the field count as bias?
If Larry Wall comes up to me and tells me that Perl is better than Python, or Chuck Moore tells me how great FORTH is, I'm not going to put much weight into those opinions. If you've put your heart and soul into something, you're going to have some bias against its competitors, especially those that work on principles extremely different from those you put your heart into.
Just as importantly, did you read the article?
"Every so often there were rhapsodic explanations of why the Interpedia, as a noncommercial and collaborative project, was ipso facto superior to all existing encyclopedias, all of which were published for [shudder](sic) profit and all of which had their origin in [shudder](sic) print."
and
"Does someone actually believe this [the principles behind Wikipedia]? Evidently so. Why? It's very hard to say."
and
"Superimpose on this intellectual preparation the moist and modish notion of "community" and some vague notions about information "wanting" to be free, et voilà!"
There's really no chance that someone who writes those sentences is going to find that Wikipedia is a good or useful thing. In fact, given the article as written, he judges Wikipedia before even looking at it.
And note that he looked at one article. If we look at one article of Britannica, we can find "Francis" Zappa (wrong) or that a topological three dimensional sphere is a solid ball (wrong; it's just a shell), or that aleph-one is the cardinality of the real numbers (wrong; both it and its negation are equally consistent and either can be taken as true within a particular system of mathematics.) An honest researcher would have tried to take a sample, not just one article.
Slashdot Mirror
I was describing the difficulties of digital archiving. The difficulties of paper archiving are obviously different, and not denied.
You said, "The paper will still be around then." The point is, it won't be unless you take care to keep it around; even tossing it in warehouses still takes money to rent the warehouse, much more then keeping a digital copy.
Project Gutenberg has been producing thousands of copies of their archives on DVD
That's nice for Project Gutenberg. What does that have to do with the Library of Congress?
The point is, you can make a thousand copies of a digital archive very quick, and store them in geographically distant places for free; the libraries will be happy to keep a copy safe. If you send a copy to every major library in the world, and encourage them to make copies, it's more unlikely for the digital archive to get destroyed then any one paper archive that could just burn to the ground.
Obviously the PG DP method can be modified by not doing OCR and merely making the image of the page available as the starting point.
Yes, and once in a while for material we have absolutely lousy copies of, we do so. But it's painful; there's no reason not to do as much mechanically as possible.
Perhaps if you want to access a page, you have to do some typing/editing of another page.
Then you're going to get crap. At best, you've got unmotivated proofers just trying to get through the computer; at worst, people will pound at the keyboard until it lets them in. Inviting people to help you works much better than trying to force them.
I can show you whatever I want and you can't see it once you're done and I revoke access.
Brute force solution: digital camera. If you can see it, you can copy it.
Yeah, exactly. Ask NASA how frequently they "refresh" their archive, and whether it was enough to save it all (short answer: Not even close.)
And if it had been on paper, it would cost a small fortune to store, and probably most of it would have got thrown away right there. It would have had to have been bound to have had any chance of surviving, and kept from flood, fire and mold, which would have been much harder, because of the much greater volume. Odds are "not even close" would have been true for paper, too. Several terabytes of data is just plain hard to store in any format.
Project Gutenberg has been producing thousands of copies of their archives on DVD, making it virtually impossible that losing one or two or three servers could destroy the data. If the LoC put this data on DVD and sent or sold one to every library (or even to only government depositiories), that would make it massively rudundant in the way that hard to copy paper can be only at great expense.
That's OK, I worked for a financial firm on an app that generated an Excel spreadsheet with the output from the program, which at one point was being sent to Bangalore, printed out and keyed back in. Of course, maybe they printed it out and then shipped it... I wouldn't be surprised.
I used to work for a company that got sales reports on their products from various stores. Most of them would print it out from their computer and fax it to us, and we would enter it into our computers from their fax. A few would email us a spreadsheet; so we'd print it out, and enter it into our computers from the printout.
they put effort into changing the format from paper to Jpeg or whatever.
Feist says that just effort doesn't a copyright make; it requires creative input.
Project guttenberg has their small print because of editing
Reread the small print. It's not a copyright license, it's a trademark license. If you remove the Project Gutenberg trademark from the etext, you can do whatever you want with it. (Assuming it's not one of the rare ones that's still under copyright, but the author gave the right post it.)
All digitally enhanced and edited to give you a better happier feeling of your government
The LoC would have their reputation destroyed among the librarian and researcher communities if they were caught doing that; and they would be, because hard-core researchers would notice any significant changes in the text and go back to the microfilm and original text copies.
Librarians tend to be among the strongest anti-censorship groups in America. There's never been any insinuation that the Library of Congress was having its strings pulled by the forces in power. I trust the Library of Congress to be a neutral provider of information much more then, say, the Washington Post or the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I can see a lot of places (libraries primary example) that will no longer carry or supply this type of information, because the government will supply it to us.
Most libraries are part of government. Why should you trust your home-town library more than the Library of Congress?
I was thinking about digging up old National Geographics, scanning the text and photos, and posting that online. It would make for a great distributed project.
If you're willing to scan them, Distributed Proofreaders (http://www.pgdp.net/) is willing to correct the OCR and even have people assemble them into HTML, provided you're willing to let Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/) post them.
Why couldn't the LoC just do this with things after 1923?
Because your local library is paying thousands of dollars to the copyright holders to do that.
In 7 years we'll be able to read about black Monday.
Nope; everything from 1909 to 1922 is only in the public domain because it was grandfathered in in the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Newspapers that were published in 1929 will be in the public domain in until 1929+95 years. So in 2025 you'll be able to read about Black Monday.
An 80-year blind spot practically ensures irrelevance.
Only to someone who's forgetting history. Some of the issues will be surprisingly relevant; some will only matter to those who study history. It doesn't mean that once something is a hundred years old, it doesn't matter; the roots of current events are in matters more then a century old, often many centuries old.
American English has come a long way since 1836. The When attempting to scan older material, the OCR was probably rendering text that read akin to l33t.
Not really.
"But what Plutarch can this age produce, to immortalize a life so noble? May some excellent historian at length be found, some writer not unworthy of his subject; but may his employment be
long deferred!"
It's not American, but that's from a book published in 1808 in Britain, edited from text written in the 17th century. The grammar may be a little unusual, but OCR programs don't notice grammar.
Yef, we could recalibrate the OCR for the early fontf, but the text ftartf to look ftrange.
That's not hard. It would be easy to get the OCR to recognize the long-s (which does in fact look different from the f); even if you don't, post-processing (dictionary lookups to see if f or s is valid at a point) can clear up many cases, and for those it doesn't, well, you're going to have to check and fix the OCR anyway.
(This is not theory; Distributed Proofreaders (http://www.pgdp.net/) has and uses such a post-processor.
The proper role of government is to preserve the constitutionally-limited negative (which do not require the enslavement of others) rights of citizens.
That is, if you're a libertarian. Then there would be no roads or schools, of course, and no forms of finacial support. Of course, you'd be free to beat your kid, because child services is just infringing on the rights of rich folks to keep thier money.
The government has no business encouraging or discouraging any legal activity.
The government of the people and by the people should have the people's interests at heart. That includes us not all dying due to global warming, or (even if you don't believe in that) the world's economy being crippled by the end of fossil fuels. (Come soon or come late, there's only so much of it out there. Given that demand keeps going up, simple logic tells us that it's going to run out some time in the not-so-distant future.)
Because they have no internal power source their read/write range is very limited (read: 2-8 inches from an RFID antenna/reader combination).
And what happens when you crank up that power on that RFID antenna/reader? The tag doesn't know distances, it responds to a sufficent amount of radio energy, and its response goes to the end of the universe. Even if it's infeasible to activate the tag at a certain distance, some with a sufficently large enough antenna can read it at that distance.
So most of the RFID that's being proposed is battery operated? This would have to be, since getting within 2-8 inches isn't enough for even Wal-Mart to read you as you exit the store.
According to Bruce Schnider (sp? the cryptology guy) unpowered RFIDs have been read at much greater distances than they were designed for with the right equipment.
Why are there so many people defending Wikipedia on this?
Because his tone is that of mockery. At the start, middle and end of his article, he treats the Wikipedia contemptously, based at best on one article.
Wise people, when they fail to understand "why would anyone believe this", realize that's a failure in their thinking. He instead blames cultural relativism, a nice easy boogy man to blame. They believe it can be done because they don't understand that there is right and wrong. Perhaps instead I do it because I find the Wikipedia a useful resource already.
The article is wrong.
The article is not wrong. It gives one date as authorative where there's honest historical question, just like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica did. It evinces a little confusion in the body of the text about the date. That is not great, but the article as a whole is still useful and generally correct.
People are going to college in greater numbers than ever, but it's no coincidence that employers here are finding it harder and harder to find good employees, and they're finally outsourcing, to countries where the culture, language, and society are giant barriers. Know why? it's because we are under-educating ourselves out of the global market.
Can you site any sources for that? Because I've always understood that outsource was done because the US is a first-world nation that requires buisnesses to treat the workers fairly well, whereas they can outsource to India at a fourth the price.
Half of the students in American graduate schools are foreigners, and those graduate schools are considered among the best in the world. So obviously, not all of American education is bad.
while our teachers are still telling kids 'you're going to fail, we want you to quit this course to make us look better',
That's antedotal evidence; I've never heard any teacher say that, nor have I ever heard of any teacher saying that. I think your experiences alone are insufficent to draw a conclusion from.
But the article in Wikipedia seems to have gotten not less but more wrong over time.
As someone else pointed out, that happened as the article got much longer and much more detailed. It's much like a program; whenever you add stuff, you add new possiblities for bugs, and you've got to debug again. The article is not monotonically worse; it's longer, more detailed, more informative. The question is whether Wikipedia will keep this length and improve the details.
Or are you so dense you cannot understand basic concepts?
Are you so dense that you can't read? He's saying the whole idea is fundamentally flawed, not that it has some limitations.
Ok, if you are going to be that dense, name another example of a large scale open source encyclopedia.
You don't think that there's any other volunteer community orientated projects releasing information on the net? How about Debian, or Project Gutenberg?
BTW, that sentence reeks of disdain and contempt, not attitudes of an unbiased investigator. The OED says the word modish has "disparaging implication"s, that is, "speaks of or treats slightingly". The use of that word alone shows bias.
In the real world, we do address the problems within a democracy everyday.
Can you read? I wasn't talking about democracy, but the system behind democracy, the concept that people matter and can make intelligent choices.
In the case of controversial topics the situation is much worse. Entrenched parties would alternate a 'correct' version much like groups of taggers covering over each others stuff.
"would" indicates that you don't know about it. In reality, what does happen is that frequently near the start of the article's creation, there's alternating version; then calmer heads prevail. For many of the really contentious pages, the parties having pounded out neutral text acceptable to both sides. In practice, it can wok.
Thats called being critical of something. Not having an obvious bias.
A professional reviewer that I read once wrote that when he first got a job reviewing, he was told to start with a summary paragraph, then write one paragraph telling what was good about a product and one paragraph about what was bad. While he writes longer reviews now, he has always followed that rule, except for one where the product was so bad that he put the bad before the good. But he still wrote the good.
Doing that shows that you actually considered the item and saw where it succeeded and where it failed, instead of just writing a slam. A book review that says "Do people actually read Dan Brown? Evidently so. Why? It's very hard to say." is going to get ignored by Dan Brown readers, and just about anyone but people who would never read Dan Brown in the first place.
Had he described every entry in the Wikipedia that would be one long ass article. Instead he chose one that illustrated his points effectively.
You can prove anything that way. That there exists a foo with property bar does not mean that every foo or most foos has propery bar.
He was not criticizing the content of the Wikipedia but the system behind it. Do you understand the difference between the two?
Again, if he was criticizing the system behind it, he should have included other projects with similar systems and how they failed and succeeded.
In any case, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. There are many criticisms of the system behind democracy, but the proponents of democracy don't need to go through and refute them one by one; they can point to the success of the system. All his opinions on the system are really irrelevant, one way or another; the only question is how well does it work.
There is a tendency world-wide, but particularly in the U.S. for people to defend their opinions with a fervor not unlike going to the battlements with a broken beer bottle.
Give me a break. Compare "Anti-French sentiment in the United States" with "Anti-American sentiment", and figure out who is defending their opinions with fervor.
Mr. McHenry's positions are not biased. He is merely pointing out facts.
First place, pointing out facts can be biased, depending on how you selected your facts. Secondly, the article is clearly biased: try
Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step: [...]
Does someone actually believe this? Evidently so. Why? It's very hard to say.
or
Superimpose on this intellectual preparation the moist and modish notion of "community" and some vague notions about information "wanting" to be free, et voilà!
Well before he started looking at the encyclopedia, he was mocking the principles behind it and wondering who could believe in them. Gee, I'm not surprised that he didn't like what he saw when he finally actually looked at it.
And notice that he judges it based on one article. You can't judge an encyclopedia based on one article. I could check the quality of the Britannica by looking at the article on aleph-one, find that they say that it's equal to the continuum of the real numbers (which is completely wrong) and sit back and say Britannica sucks, but how realistic would that be? To accurately judge anything, you have to take a representative sample with a sufficently large sample size, and he didn't even come close.
What he found confirmed his suspicions
At which he self-righteously set back and did no more looking. In research, you should set your suspicions aside and actually study the issue and look at the facts. Instead, he made his decision on Wikipedia, which is obvious from the tone of the first half of the article, he looked at one solitary article of Wikipedia, and quit looking. That's not research; that's just opinion.
If the article on Alexander Hamilton had been correct, would he have continued looking until he found a bad article he could rag on? Did he in fact look at several articles until he found one he could rag on? Given the quality of his article, I'm not sure the answer to both questions would be yes.
how does having actual real world experience in the field count as bias?
If Larry Wall comes up to me and tells me that Perl is better than Python, or Chuck Moore tells me how great FORTH is, I'm not going to put much weight into those opinions. If you've put your heart and soul into something, you're going to have some bias against its competitors, especially those that work on principles extremely different from those you put your heart into.
Just as importantly, did you read the article?
"Every so often there were rhapsodic explanations of why the Interpedia, as a noncommercial and collaborative project, was ipso facto superior to all existing encyclopedias, all of which were published for [shudder](sic) profit and all of which had their origin in [shudder](sic) print."
and
"Does someone actually believe this [the principles behind Wikipedia]? Evidently so. Why? It's very hard to say."
and
"Superimpose on this intellectual preparation the moist and modish notion of "community" and some vague notions about information "wanting" to be free, et voilà!"
There's really no chance that someone who writes those sentences is going to find that Wikipedia is a good or useful thing. In fact, given the article as written, he judges Wikipedia before even looking at it.
And note that he looked at one article. If we look at one article of Britannica, we can find "Francis" Zappa (wrong) or that a topological three dimensional sphere is a solid ball (wrong; it's just a shell), or that aleph-one is the cardinality of the real numbers (wrong; both it and its negation are equally consistent and either can be taken as true within a particular system of mathematics.) An honest researcher would have tried to take a sample, not just one article.
If enough people believe that the world is flat, that won't make it so.
But if enought people believe the world is flat, that's what's going in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, too.