http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in _World_War_II states Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. By Frederick Taylor, page 262-266, see bibliography There were an unknown number of refugees in the Dresden, so the historians Matthias Neutzner, Götz Bergander and Frederick Taylor have used historical sources and deductive reasoning, to estimate that the number of refugees in the city and surrounding suburbs was around 200,000, or less, on the first night of the bombing. Is this wrong too, or am I misunderstandign what you are saying?
It's time to face some facts. Wikipedia should be no more authoritative as an encyclopedia as Slashdot comments are about technology and current affairs. The basis on which Wikipedia is founded is indistinguishable from the political viewpoint of Anarchism, the idea that without leadership and expertise, a collection of people can be collectively wiser than any individual.
The difference is that we don't have examples of Anarchism working, it's mostly just theoretical claims. But we do have Wikipedia.
Where is the evidence to support your "facts"? The evidence so far shows that Wikipedia is comparable to other encyclopedias.
there's a considerable number of factual articles on subjects you've never heard of which are little more than a couple of lines followed by the Wikipedia disclaimer:
"This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
What really happens is the article is never expanded, because of the human need to improve something only if that person has a stake in its improvement, and that improvement is recognised.
But why is this a problem? An online encyclopedia doesn't have the limitations of a paper encyclopedia - even if the stub articles are useless, they aren't weighing down the rest of the articles. Well, it's a problem if you spend your day clicking "Random Article" - perhaps it needs an "Ignore Stubs" option - but that's not how most people use an encyclopedia.
Face it, would you rather take over somebody's half finished, buggy computer program which has no documentation or would you rather start again and do it properly?
Sometimes I improve a new stub article by wiping the content and starting again. Your point?
Even if you do create a great article, there's no stopping any number of morons from turning your well-thought out and considered article with full references into a mishmash of non-sequiturs and out-and-out false statements. Nobody's on your side because as long as the dreaded "NPOV" is observed, no-one could care less about the effort you put in.
Examples please. (You're surely not going to make claims without evidence, are you?)
The problem comes when you want some vital information.
If my life depending on it, I would check Wikipedia, I would look at the sources it cites. I would check other sources too. If it is vital, I would do this with any encylopedia, not just Wikipedia. I'm not sure what you mean by who would you speak to - the people you would check with would be the original researchers in that area, not the encyclopedia author. That goes for Wikipedia or Britannica or whatever else.
I'll believe in democratized scholarship when I believe in democratized rocket science or democratized car mechanics or democratized aircraft piloting.
Wikipedia does not claim to be original research like science - it's an encyclopedia.
I'll tell you for free, I already know that there are articles on Wikipedia which are largely or completely fictional.
The big problem here is new articles - the article in question was created 29 December, and now, only a few days later there are a lot of edits taking place, with people discussing the fact that this article may contain false information (I don't know if that is you or not?).
I've certainly seen very dubious new articles created - they tend to get fixed up in time though, the problem at first is that no one else finds the articles.
This is a problem, but that doesn't mean Wikipedia as a whole is a joke.
I bet that it will be quickly fixed up - meanwhile, the articles in newspapers and so on will still be presenting the false information.
Views that are demonstrably false are reported simply because they are "the views of some people" and so are deemed to have some kind of intrinsic merit.
Examples, please, where false views are presented as fact.
If you mean it's reported that some people have those views - well of course, what's wrong with that? Supposing I want to learn about Intelligent Design - either the current issues in America, where it is taught, or what it claims - you are saying that Wikipedia should not have anything about it?
Actually it doesn't. What you see is only what is left after deletionists have had a go at things, personally I have had more than 30 percent of my new articles on the VfD (vote for deletion) and some were also deleted.
Examples? Without them, we have no idea whether it was wrong for them to be deleted. In particular, Wikipedia is not the place for original research, so if you were writing about your own research, then this would be way the articles are deleted - and rightly so.
Even more have been changed for hardly any good reasons, such as changing British English spelling into American English spelling.
I agree that people who make changes that have no point are annoying - but this doesn't detract from the end result, it just makes it more confusing for editors looking through the history.
Does an article on, say, geoids on the Earth require a chapter on flat earth theories to "balance" things out?
No, it doesn't. Do you have an example where pseudoscience is presented as science under the alibi of NPOV, or are you just completely misunderstanding the way that an Wikipedia works?
That the war is known as "Yom Kippur War" is a fact, and hence neutral. A point of view would be the opinion that it should be called that - but that's not what Wikipedia is pushing. Neutral in this context does not mean "not causing offence", it means unbiased opinions.
And yes, Africans probably care more about staying alive than reading Wikipedia. To anyone considering donating to Wikipedia: your money would be better spent in the hands of an AIDS-related charity or a broad-action organization. Believe it or not, people can still starve to death even if they can look up Calculus in Wikipedia.
Strawman. No one is claiming that every single article, or even most articles, are useful to starving Africans. But education is useful even in the poorest countries. You talk about AIDS - consider how big a problem it is that people think contraception is a sin, and have no way to know the dangers of not using condoms.
Too many experts are turned away by the teeming, uninformed Wikipedians who tear down useful contributions under the mistaken notions of "balance" or "being informative." Look at Panera Bread [wikipedia.org]; 25% of the article is unequivocal information, the other 75% are advertisement and random facts. It also doesn't use proper paragraphs, and the entire article lacks structure. This is a typical Wikipedia article, but you see many of the same flaws in "Featured" articles. People don't know what to write in this supposed "encyclopedia," nor how.
Can you show me where in the history of that article useful additions were made, only to be reverted afterwards?
Wikipedia should charge an annual fee of $10. Everybody who paid can modify, and everyone else is just anonymous readers.
It seems a bit backwards that the people who put in the hard work of writing it are the ones who have to pay, and the readers who benefit get it for free...
One of the major points of Wikipedia is that anyone can contribute - no one's going to pay money (even only a small amount) to correct a mistake they see.
although I have no clue what was trollish about my post
Probably any of:
- Referring to humanism, atheism and agnosticism as religions.
- Humanism could be, though it's more accurately considered a philosophy - but that's irrelevant as no one's advocating teaching humanism in science lessons.
- Atheism as a religion? Well evidently I'm not going to convince you, but calling atheists religious without any good argument is bound to get you labelled as a troll. And again, irrelevant - even if you characterise atheism as a dogmatic belief that God doesn't exist, no one is arguing that atheism should be taught in science lessons either.
- I've never heard agnosticism referred to as a religion - that's someone saying "I don't know if there's a God". It's not surprising that people may have thought you were just trolling here. And yet again, no one's advocating teaching agnosticism (if that were possible). - Not understanding what a theory is. If you really don't, then please go to learn what a scientific theory is. This comes up so many times on Slashdot, it's hard to believe people still don't get it. - No one's forcing religious belief - even if you define "lack of religion" as a belief, people are still free to believe and learn about ID, including in schools. Just not in science lessons. - Claiming that "We don't have 100% proof that this is true" is on an equal level to "We don't have any evidence for this whatsoever". Honestly, I'd hope you were trolling here;p do you really consider them to be comparable?
I'll believe you when you say you were sincere in your posting, but with some many outrageous claims, on many cliched points that have been made time and time again, and aren't even relevant to the issue of teaching evolution in science lessons, it's not surprising that people mistook you for just trolling.
Last time I looked, they weren't teaching that there isn't a God in schools, so your (absurd) claim that "believing God doesn't exist" is a religion is irrelevant anyway.
Man, then He-Man better keep a closer eye on his bio
It looks like He-Man already has been keeping a closer on his bio - "most powerful man in the universe"? Using words like "evildoers"? Such POV edits are why people shouldn't be editing their own bios in the first place!
It seems like everyone is jumping on Wikipedia this week. Seriously, who's writing these talking points?
People who are used to being able to write their biased opinionated pieces, choosing which facts to stick to or not, and having their material read by large numbers of people, without having to worry about any criticisms, let alone having to defend their work with discussion and by supplying evidence.
Okay, maybe I'm reading too much into this - but the way in which various people have been attacking Wikipedia makes me wonder whether these people are simply terrified of a system where what they write can be edited by anyone else. They don't know how to deal with that model - so they attack it.
The Penny Arcade [ http://www.penny-arcade.com/2005/12/16 ] had this interesting line: Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions. I'll leave aside defending that point (his entire rant is nothing that hasn't been debated far better on Slashdot a million times before) - but I can't help wondering if this rant is due to a bad experience of him entering some information, and getting pissed off when it got reverted, even though it may have been reasonable to revert it (giving the tone of his article, it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case).
I've seen the "I edited on Wikipedia and idiots reverted it" plenty of times on Slashdot before, which means nothing without knowing what those edits are. But it wouldn't surprise me if some journalists or self-obsessed bloggers just can't understand the model of someone being able to edit what they write.
Another interesting point is that people are able to attack Wikipedia so easily because its edit history is available for all to see (see also The Register's article - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/17/jimmy_wale s_shot_dead_says_wikipedia/ - where they trawled through the history to find a change that was reverted less than a minute later!)
Imagine if the edit history of sites like Wired or The Register were available for all to see - we might find plenty of mistakes and intersting things also.
Simple: because it shows the anonymous masses got it wrong, which undermines the very foundation of Wikipedia.
Yes, that's why it's not possible to edit Wikipedia pages, unlike normal webpages, because everyone knows that Wikipedia is 100% correct.
Oh wait.
What you claim is really the complete opposite - the philosophy behind Wikipedia acknowledges that presented information can be incorrect, and that's the whole point of allowing people to edit it.
If nothing else, what does it say for the accuracy of the vast majority of Wikipedia biographies about people who *don't* closely monitor their own entries?
If that person doesn't closely monitor it, then someone else will remove the vandalism.
It's kind of circular - if there was more of a balance in male and female, then male geeks would have better experience if interacting with the opposite sex.
It goes further than that too - all of the alledged examples of guys stalking, being persistant, mistaking friendly interaction, or girls complaining of too many guys after them - that would go too if it wasn't so hard for a guy to find a girl in his workplace or social circles. (And to be honest, I disagree that geeks are more likely to mistake friendly interaction - non-geeks tend to be very persistent at chasing girls, whilst geeks if anything are more likely to be shy; the problem is that with so few girls, they often end up taking any opportunity they can.)
If they are using mysapce.com at a library they are wasting resources. A lot of those people standing in line waiting for a computer actually have something important to do
Like posting to Slashdot!
Heaven forbid that those time-wasting MySpacers should prevent you from getting First Post...
Can't we just let the dead rest in peace anymore? I loved both my C=64 and my Amiga, but they're history. This is just marketing/branding, it has nothing to do with the original products, nor it's spirit.
You could say the same about MacOS - nothing to do with the original, and classic MacOS is history. But you don't get people posting "Let it die!" to every Mac article.
The point is that brand names can be important, even if the technology is different.
Also, this is nothing to do with the Amiga - when Escom sold off the Commodore brand, the Amiga brand was sold off separately, and is now owned by a company with the same name.
The same thing happened to Amiga, too: just remember the late "Amiga" computers (I'm putting that in quotes on purpose), which really were just standard PCs with AMD processors - but with a hefty price tag.
I've followed the Amiga's history fairly closely, and I've never heard of any such Amiga branded PCs - do you have a link?
There were some Commodore branded PCs however (though by that time the Amiga brand and Commodore brand were owned by separate companies).
But guess what, I'm an Opera user, and I notice highly rated comments that are positive to Opera all the time on Slashdot. Heck, I've even posted pro-Windows comments that are modded up. I'm a Windows user (and an Opera user), you see. The key here is to not come across as an asshole.
I didn't say that other things don't get modded up - of course, sometimes pro-Opera statements do get modded up. But I do notice things like "Why should I use Opera when Firefox exists?" getting modded up all the time, whilst the same question in the reverse might risk being Flamebait. You are right that the key is not to come across as an asshole - but then, well phrased and reasoned arguments against Apple find themselves getting modded down, unless they end with "Hey don't get me wrong, I'm a Mac user and I love Apple, I'm just saying..."
Why of course. This is a simple (NPOV) fact. Why would it be modded down? On the other hand, people who claim that copyright infringement is theft should be modded down, because they are simply wrong. Worse yet, they could be lying and intentionally trying to confuse the issue. And before you reply: Yes, copyright infringement is against the law. I know that. We all know that. But it is not theft!
Wait a minute. Are you saying that the people who called this theft are the very same people who mod down people who call copyright infringement theft?
Of course it's not the same people, I never suggested that - the point is about the groupthink effect. As you say, that copyright infringement isn't theft should be a NPOV theft - and if there wasn't any groupthink effect, such a post would get modded up in all articles. But when it's Apple software, it gets modded down. Sure, there's no one moderator behaving inconsitently, but as a group, Slashdot either rewards certain opinions, or sometimes suppresses even NPOV facts, in some contexts.
Do you have any evidence of this?
Unfortunately I didn't keep a note of the article, so you'll have to take my word for it;)
By the way, I notice that even your post was modded up. YOU ARE PART OF THE GROUPTHINK AREN'T YOU!!!!111
The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic? That's an endorsement alright!
Both had 4 "serious errors". Wikipedia had 162 "minor errors", compared to Britannica which had 123.
If your point is that Britannica is better than Wikipedia, then yes, great, this report supports you.
But I don't think anyone's disputing that. What's being disputed are the claims that Wikipedia is entirely useless "because anyone can edit it". This article refutes that claim. An increase of 30% in minor errors is a significant difference, but it is nowhere near enough for us to go from "trusted source" to "useless" - especially when both have the same number of serious errors.
Another good thing about Wikipedia is that it is open about the fact that anyone can edit it, and so people realise they have to be careful about accepting things as fact. Britannica doesn't do this - people assume everything can be trusted, when in fact, that is not the case.
The question I'm asking is why Britannica still has so many errors, when people are paying good money for it...
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields. The also desperately need sub-editors who can polish the language to make whatever useful information that is submitted clear.
In which case, it's YetAnotherEncyclopedia done like all the others, so why bother?
Wikipedia already has a system when people who make bad edits repeatedly get warned, and then banned.
How would your moderation system be an improvement?
It might automate things, but that comes at the risk of complicating things, and running the risk of people being banned for being unpopular.
Plus, it doesn't really automate things, as people still have to do the work of moderating. Might as well spend that effort manually reporting people to be banned.
Then why is slashdot one of the most popular discussion sites on the web ?
Because many people still read most or all comments (rather than just the highly moderated ones), and a lot of people are prepared to post against the popular groupthink opinion (we aren't all karma-obsessed).
I can't remember reading many discussions where a few people make the same point, and then hundreds of others unanimously agree with them. This is why I think its ridiculous when people talk about the slashdot "groupthink".
The point wasn't about the discussion, it was about the moderation. There are certain views which will always get modded up ("Apple/Linux/Firefox are great!", "Tell me why I should use BeOS/Opera when I could used Apple/Linux/Firefox?", "Copyright infringement isn't theft" [although amusingly, the one time I saw an exception to this when it was modded up posts saying that piracy of Apple software was theft - clearly the Apple groupthink outweights the piracy groupthink!]), and opposing views get modded down.
The problem is, how would a moderation system be used on Wikipedia? On Slashdot, this groupthink isn't so much a problem because you can still see all the comments, but it would be a problem if your moderation affected whether you can post.
This system already actually exists anyway - if you vandalise articles, you get banned. I don't see how changing it to a moderation system changes anything - that makes it worse, as it means that people who post unpopular edits could also be banned (currently, an admin will check the history to see that there is genuine vandalism).
Think how many times here you've read the word "groupthink" here - that's a lot of people who aren't part of the "groupthinking".
The fact that you made the post to which I'm replying reinforces this. The fact you're (currently) at +5 reinforces it further. I don't agree with your comment. Personally, I think its an effort to use a personal gripe with the slashdot moderation system as a means of promoting a personal "political" belief in lack of restrictions on personal behaviour (which I personally think is a very valid and important principle in many areas).
I'm not complaining about your moderation - you've obviously hit some sort of chord somewhere - but I find it very interesting that the very fact you've been moderated to +5 invalidates the point you were making.
Not really - all this means is that "Slashdot has groupthink" is itself an opinion which is part of the Slashdot groupthink;)
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in _World_War_II states Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. By Frederick Taylor, page 262-266, see bibliography There were an unknown number of refugees in the Dresden, so the historians Matthias Neutzner, Götz Bergander and Frederick Taylor have used historical sources and deductive reasoning, to estimate that the number of refugees in the city and surrounding suburbs was around 200,000, or less, on the first night of the bombing. Is this wrong too, or am I misunderstandign what you are saying?
If everyone could edit out the trolls, Usenet would be a lot better.
It's time to face some facts. Wikipedia should be no more authoritative as an encyclopedia as Slashdot comments are about technology and current affairs. The basis on which Wikipedia is founded is indistinguishable from the political viewpoint of Anarchism, the idea that without leadership and expertise, a collection of people can be collectively wiser than any individual.
The difference is that we don't have examples of Anarchism working, it's mostly just theoretical claims. But we do have Wikipedia.
Where is the evidence to support your "facts"? The evidence so far shows that Wikipedia is comparable to other encyclopedias.
there's a considerable number of factual articles on subjects you've never heard of which are little more than a couple of lines followed by the Wikipedia disclaimer:
"This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
What really happens is the article is never expanded, because of the human need to improve something only if that person has a stake in its improvement, and that improvement is recognised.
But why is this a problem? An online encyclopedia doesn't have the limitations of a paper encyclopedia - even if the stub articles are useless, they aren't weighing down the rest of the articles. Well, it's a problem if you spend your day clicking "Random Article" - perhaps it needs an "Ignore Stubs" option - but that's not how most people use an encyclopedia.
Face it, would you rather take over somebody's half finished, buggy computer program which has no documentation or would you rather start again and do it properly?
Sometimes I improve a new stub article by wiping the content and starting again. Your point?
Even if you do create a great article, there's no stopping any number of morons from turning your well-thought out and considered article with full references into a mishmash of non-sequiturs and out-and-out false statements. Nobody's on your side because as long as the dreaded "NPOV" is observed, no-one could care less about the effort you put in.
Examples please. (You're surely not going to make claims without evidence, are you?)
The problem comes when you want some vital information.
If my life depending on it, I would check Wikipedia, I would look at the sources it cites. I would check other sources too. If it is vital, I would do this with any encylopedia, not just Wikipedia. I'm not sure what you mean by who would you speak to - the people you would check with would be the original researchers in that area, not the encyclopedia author. That goes for Wikipedia or Britannica or whatever else.
I'll believe in democratized scholarship when I believe in democratized rocket science or democratized car mechanics or democratized aircraft piloting.
Wikipedia does not claim to be original research like science - it's an encyclopedia.
I'll tell you for free, I already know that there are articles on Wikipedia which are largely or completely fictional.
No, you tell us if you want us to believe you.
The big problem here is new articles - the article in question was created 29 December, and now, only a few days later there are a lot of edits taking place, with people discussing the fact that this article may contain false information (I don't know if that is you or not?).
I've certainly seen very dubious new articles created - they tend to get fixed up in time though, the problem at first is that no one else finds the articles.
This is a problem, but that doesn't mean Wikipedia as a whole is a joke.
I bet that it will be quickly fixed up - meanwhile, the articles in newspapers and so on will still be presenting the false information.
- End poverty ...
- Bring about global peace
Views that are demonstrably false are reported simply because they are "the views of some people" and so are deemed to have some kind of intrinsic merit.
Examples, please, where false views are presented as fact.
If you mean it's reported that some people have those views - well of course, what's wrong with that? Supposing I want to learn about Intelligent Design - either the current issues in America, where it is taught, or what it claims - you are saying that Wikipedia should not have anything about it?
Actually it doesn't. What you see is only what is left after deletionists have had a go at things, personally I have had more than 30 percent of my new articles on the VfD (vote for deletion) and some were also deleted.
Examples? Without them, we have no idea whether it was wrong for them to be deleted. In particular, Wikipedia is not the place for original research, so if you were writing about your own research, then this would be way the articles are deleted - and rightly so.
Even more have been changed for hardly any good reasons, such as changing British English spelling into American English spelling.
I agree that people who make changes that have no point are annoying - but this doesn't detract from the end result, it just makes it more confusing for editors looking through the history.
Does an article on, say, geoids on the Earth require a chapter on flat earth theories to "balance" things out?
No, it doesn't. Do you have an example where pseudoscience is presented as science under the alibi of NPOV, or are you just completely misunderstanding the way that an Wikipedia works?
That the war is known as "Yom Kippur War" is a fact, and hence neutral. A point of view would be the opinion that it should be called that - but that's not what Wikipedia is pushing. Neutral in this context does not mean "not causing offence", it means unbiased opinions.
And yes, Africans probably care more about staying alive than reading Wikipedia. To anyone considering donating to Wikipedia: your money would be better spent in the hands of an AIDS-related charity or a broad-action organization. Believe it or not, people can still starve to death even if they can look up Calculus in Wikipedia.
Strawman. No one is claiming that every single article, or even most articles, are useful to starving Africans. But education is useful even in the poorest countries. You talk about AIDS - consider how big a problem it is that people think contraception is a sin, and have no way to know the dangers of not using condoms.
Too many experts are turned away by the teeming, uninformed Wikipedians who tear down useful contributions under the mistaken notions of "balance" or "being informative." Look at Panera Bread [wikipedia.org]; 25% of the article is unequivocal information, the other 75% are advertisement and random facts. It also doesn't use proper paragraphs, and the entire article lacks structure. This is a typical Wikipedia article, but you see many of the same flaws in "Featured" articles. People don't know what to write in this supposed "encyclopedia," nor how.
Can you show me where in the history of that article useful additions were made, only to be reverted afterwards?
Wikipedia should charge an annual fee of $10. Everybody who paid can modify, and everyone else is just anonymous readers.
It seems a bit backwards that the people who put in the hard work of writing it are the ones who have to pay, and the readers who benefit get it for free...
One of the major points of Wikipedia is that anyone can contribute - no one's going to pay money (even only a small amount) to correct a mistake they see.
although I have no clue what was trollish about my post
;p do you really consider them to be comparable?
Probably any of:
- Referring to humanism, atheism and agnosticism as religions.
- Humanism could be, though it's more accurately considered a philosophy - but that's irrelevant as no one's advocating teaching humanism in science lessons.
- Atheism as a religion? Well evidently I'm not going to convince you, but calling atheists religious without any good argument is bound to get you labelled as a troll. And again, irrelevant - even if you characterise atheism as a dogmatic belief that God doesn't exist, no one is arguing that atheism should be taught in science lessons either.
- I've never heard agnosticism referred to as a religion - that's someone saying "I don't know if there's a God". It's not surprising that people may have thought you were just trolling here. And yet again, no one's advocating teaching agnosticism (if that were possible).
- Not understanding what a theory is. If you really don't, then please go to learn what a scientific theory is. This comes up so many times on Slashdot, it's hard to believe people still don't get it.
- No one's forcing religious belief - even if you define "lack of religion" as a belief, people are still free to believe and learn about ID, including in schools. Just not in science lessons.
- Claiming that "We don't have 100% proof that this is true" is on an equal level to "We don't have any evidence for this whatsoever". Honestly, I'd hope you were trolling here
I'll believe you when you say you were sincere in your posting, but with some many outrageous claims, on many cliched points that have been made time and time again, and aren't even relevant to the issue of teaching evolution in science lessons, it's not surprising that people mistook you for just trolling.
Last time I looked, they weren't teaching that there isn't a God in schools, so your (absurd) claim that "believing God doesn't exist" is a religion is irrelevant anyway.
Man, then He-Man better keep a closer eye on his bio
It looks like He-Man already has been keeping a closer on his bio - "most powerful man in the universe"? Using words like "evildoers"? Such POV edits are why people shouldn't be editing their own bios in the first place!
It seems like everyone is jumping on Wikipedia this week. Seriously, who's writing these talking points?
e s_shot_dead_says_wikipedia/ - where they trawled through the history to find a change that was reverted less than a minute later!)
People who are used to being able to write their biased opinionated pieces, choosing which facts to stick to or not, and having their material read by large numbers of people, without having to worry about any criticisms, let alone having to defend their work with discussion and by supplying evidence.
Okay, maybe I'm reading too much into this - but the way in which various people have been attacking Wikipedia makes me wonder whether these people are simply terrified of a system where what they write can be edited by anyone else. They don't know how to deal with that model - so they attack it.
The Penny Arcade [ http://www.penny-arcade.com/2005/12/16 ] had this interesting line: Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions. I'll leave aside defending that point (his entire rant is nothing that hasn't been debated far better on Slashdot a million times before) - but I can't help wondering if this rant is due to a bad experience of him entering some information, and getting pissed off when it got reverted, even though it may have been reasonable to revert it (giving the tone of his article, it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case).
I've seen the "I edited on Wikipedia and idiots reverted it" plenty of times on Slashdot before, which means nothing without knowing what those edits are. But it wouldn't surprise me if some journalists or self-obsessed bloggers just can't understand the model of someone being able to edit what they write.
Another interesting point is that people are able to attack Wikipedia so easily because its edit history is available for all to see (see also The Register's article - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/17/jimmy_wal
Imagine if the edit history of sites like Wired or The Register were available for all to see - we might find plenty of mistakes and intersting things also.
Simple: because it shows the anonymous masses got it wrong, which undermines the very foundation of Wikipedia.
Yes, that's why it's not possible to edit Wikipedia pages, unlike normal webpages, because everyone knows that Wikipedia is 100% correct.
Oh wait.
What you claim is really the complete opposite - the philosophy behind Wikipedia acknowledges that presented information can be incorrect, and that's the whole point of allowing people to edit it.
If nothing else, what does it say for the accuracy of the vast majority of Wikipedia biographies about people who *don't* closely monitor their own entries?
If that person doesn't closely monitor it, then someone else will remove the vandalism.
It's kind of circular - if there was more of a balance in male and female, then male geeks would have better experience if interacting with the opposite sex.
It goes further than that too - all of the alledged examples of guys stalking, being persistant, mistaking friendly interaction, or girls complaining of too many guys after them - that would go too if it wasn't so hard for a guy to find a girl in his workplace or social circles. (And to be honest, I disagree that geeks are more likely to mistake friendly interaction - non-geeks tend to be very persistent at chasing girls, whilst geeks if anything are more likely to be shy; the problem is that with so few girls, they often end up taking any opportunity they can.)
If they are using mysapce.com at a library they are wasting resources. A lot of those people standing in line waiting for a computer actually have something important to do
Like posting to Slashdot!
Heaven forbid that those time-wasting MySpacers should prevent you from getting First Post...
Can't we just let the dead rest in peace anymore? I loved both my C=64 and my Amiga, but they're history. This is just marketing/branding, it has nothing to do with the original products, nor it's spirit.
You could say the same about MacOS - nothing to do with the original, and classic MacOS is history. But you don't get people posting "Let it die!" to every Mac article.
The point is that brand names can be important, even if the technology is different.
Also, this is nothing to do with the Amiga - when Escom sold off the Commodore brand, the Amiga brand was sold off separately, and is now owned by a company with the same name.
The same thing happened to Amiga, too: just remember the late "Amiga" computers (I'm putting that in quotes on purpose), which really were just standard PCs with AMD processors - but with a hefty price tag.
I've followed the Amiga's history fairly closely, and I've never heard of any such Amiga branded PCs - do you have a link?
There were some Commodore branded PCs however (though by that time the Amiga brand and Commodore brand were owned by separate companies).
But guess what, I'm an Opera user, and I notice highly rated comments that are positive to Opera all the time on Slashdot. Heck, I've even posted pro-Windows comments that are modded up. I'm a Windows user (and an Opera user), you see. The key here is to not come across as an asshole.
;)
;)
I didn't say that other things don't get modded up - of course, sometimes pro-Opera statements do get modded up. But I do notice things like "Why should I use Opera when Firefox exists?" getting modded up all the time, whilst the same question in the reverse might risk being Flamebait. You are right that the key is not to come across as an asshole - but then, well phrased and reasoned arguments against Apple find themselves getting modded down, unless they end with "Hey don't get me wrong, I'm a Mac user and I love Apple, I'm just saying..."
Why of course. This is a simple (NPOV) fact. Why would it be modded down? On the other hand, people who claim that copyright infringement is theft should be modded down, because they are simply wrong. Worse yet, they could be lying and intentionally trying to confuse the issue. And before you reply: Yes, copyright infringement is against the law. I know that. We all know that. But it is not theft!
Wait a minute. Are you saying that the people who called this theft are the very same people who mod down people who call copyright infringement theft?
Of course it's not the same people, I never suggested that - the point is about the groupthink effect. As you say, that copyright infringement isn't theft should be a NPOV theft - and if there wasn't any groupthink effect, such a post would get modded up in all articles. But when it's Apple software, it gets modded down. Sure, there's no one moderator behaving inconsitently, but as a group, Slashdot either rewards certain opinions, or sometimes suppresses even NPOV facts, in some contexts.
Do you have any evidence of this?
Unfortunately I didn't keep a note of the article, so you'll have to take my word for it
By the way, I notice that even your post was modded up. YOU ARE PART OF THE GROUPTHINK AREN'T YOU!!!!111
It would appear so
The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic? That's an endorsement alright!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
Both had 4 "serious errors". Wikipedia had 162 "minor errors", compared to Britannica which had 123.
If your point is that Britannica is better than Wikipedia, then yes, great, this report supports you.
But I don't think anyone's disputing that. What's being disputed are the claims that Wikipedia is entirely useless "because anyone can edit it". This article refutes that claim. An increase of 30% in minor errors is a significant difference, but it is nowhere near enough for us to go from "trusted source" to "useless" - especially when both have the same number of serious errors.
Another good thing about Wikipedia is that it is open about the fact that anyone can edit it, and so people realise they have to be careful about accepting things as fact. Britannica doesn't do this - people assume everything can be trusted, when in fact, that is not the case.
The question I'm asking is why Britannica still has so many errors, when people are paying good money for it...
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields. The also desperately need sub-editors who can polish the language to make whatever useful information that is submitted clear.
In which case, it's YetAnotherEncyclopedia done like all the others, so why bother?
And your proposal is that we use an unreliable source to find a list of alternative reliable sources?
No, we use a source which I know from experience is usually reliable, to find a list of sources which themselves may or may not be reliable.
If I go direct to other sources, we don't necessarily know that they are reliable anyway.
If I want a quick overview, I can find better information elsewhere online than on Wikipedia.
Examples?
Wikipedia already has a system when people who make bad edits repeatedly get warned, and then banned.
How would your moderation system be an improvement?
It might automate things, but that comes at the risk of complicating things, and running the risk of people being banned for being unpopular.
Plus, it doesn't really automate things, as people still have to do the work of moderating. Might as well spend that effort manually reporting people to be banned.
Then why is slashdot one of the most popular discussion sites on the web ?
;)
Because many people still read most or all comments (rather than just the highly moderated ones), and a lot of people are prepared to post against the popular groupthink opinion (we aren't all karma-obsessed).
I can't remember reading many discussions where a few people make the same point, and then hundreds of others unanimously agree with them. This is why I think its ridiculous when people talk about the slashdot "groupthink".
The point wasn't about the discussion, it was about the moderation. There are certain views which will always get modded up ("Apple/Linux/Firefox are great!", "Tell me why I should use BeOS/Opera when I could used Apple/Linux/Firefox?", "Copyright infringement isn't theft" [although amusingly, the one time I saw an exception to this when it was modded up posts saying that piracy of Apple software was theft - clearly the Apple groupthink outweights the piracy groupthink!]), and opposing views get modded down.
The problem is, how would a moderation system be used on Wikipedia? On Slashdot, this groupthink isn't so much a problem because you can still see all the comments, but it would be a problem if your moderation affected whether you can post.
This system already actually exists anyway - if you vandalise articles, you get banned. I don't see how changing it to a moderation system changes anything - that makes it worse, as it means that people who post unpopular edits could also be banned (currently, an admin will check the history to see that there is genuine vandalism).
Think how many times here you've read the word "groupthink" here - that's a lot of people who aren't part of the "groupthinking".
The fact that you made the post to which I'm replying reinforces this. The fact you're (currently) at +5 reinforces it further. I don't agree with your comment. Personally, I think its an effort to use a personal gripe with the slashdot moderation system as a means of promoting a personal "political" belief in lack of restrictions on personal behaviour (which I personally think is a very valid and important principle in many areas).
I'm not complaining about your moderation - you've obviously hit some sort of chord somewhere - but I find it very interesting that the very fact you've been moderated to +5 invalidates the point you were making.
Not really - all this means is that "Slashdot has groupthink" is itself an opinion which is part of the Slashdot groupthink