I don't see the need for clear expression here, as I always assume this to be implicitly true
But it's precisely because other people don't make that enlightended assumption that there's a need for clear expression, especially in those siutations where there's known social pressure to conform to particular points of view.
I'd expect most people to do the same, especially if they present a view on an open forum rife with flames.
But a lot of people don't exercise the same sophistication, especially Impressionable Youth(TM). The most insidious prejudices are those to which it simply never occurs to anyone to question.
Why would I have to be physically ill to be uncomfortable with an image? At what level do I have a right to express and act on my discomfort?
You can express your discomfort, fine. No problem. What I'm asking is that we don't make the blanket assumption that everyone else should share that opinion, and we should express our opinions in a way that makes that distinction clear. And the degree to which you couch that dislike does matter: in a political debate, about, say, missile defense, consider the difference between "I believe my opponent's position is wrong and would ulitmately weaken our national defences" and "My opponent's position gives aid-and-comfort to the enemy and she is a traitor." In both cases, dislike is being expressed, but one statement is appropriate to civil discourse and the other is not, unless the speaker produces evidence to show their opponent is literally commiting treason.
Its unfortunate that people die in violent ways, but lets step back a minute and ask ourselves if people get beaten to death is really due to homophobia or something else. Frankly anyone beating someone else to death has some serious psychological and or developement issues [Emphasis added].
Sadly, that's not true. Time and time again, we've seen members of group X rise up and attack and kill group Y, even though there is no evidence of the kind of psychological or developmental damage you describe, from Yugoslavia to Rwanda. Indeed, the most horrying aspect of these events is when people are brutally totured and/or murdered by former friends and neighbours. Identifying a group as subhuman outsiders can have lethal consequences, even if all concerned have no physological or developmental defects. The dynamics of this kind of violence are complex, but they are not as arbitrary as you imply.
The original poster did not say that everyone would get nauseated by looking at the pics.
Bzzt. Wrong. Look at the entire post again:
And they managed to screw up even further. Read that text, and imagine you're an innocent (horny) teenager who initially wanted to go to the Idol site. But what's this ? "there is a US site with a similar address which contains adult content which is not suitable for minors". Wow ! Take me there man ! [clicky] Ewwwwwww ! That's GAY ! [cue millions of (male) teenagers getting sick].
The poster asks you to imagine you're a generic horny teenager looking for porn. And generic horny teenagers -- the entire population in question -- are freaked out by an image of gay porn. It never even crosses the poster's mind that there might be a lot of people who either a) enjoy gay porn or b) aren't freaked out by accidentally viewing it. The rhetorical flourish of "millions...getting sick" is simply that subset of everyone who takes the normal, natural revulsion to the point of nausea (actually I don't really believe there's any evidence to suggest that the the poster doesn't believe those millions are anything but the vast majority, if not all, of the original horny males who click the link. Either way, the implication is that normal teenagers get freaked out by gay porn.) It's exactly that kind of casual homophobia (i.e. that gay sex is automatically considered an abomination) that has made it okay to use 'gay' to mean crap, or refer to someone you dislike as a 'fag', and ultimately to justify targetting gays for bullying and worse.
Finally, to those who note that some people don't like any pornographic images so it's not fair to single out an adverse reaction to gay porn, we're specifically looking at a self-selecting population that apparantly is pursuing hetrosexual porn, which frequently includes images of erect penises, anal sex and even female homosexuality. This material is so enjoyed that it can help bring them to orgasm. Yet, one misplaced extra set of male genitilia is supposed to disgust them to the point of nausea? Please.
You know, I happen have absolutely nothing against appendectomies (or any surgery, come to think of it), and childbirth. In fact, I think these are great things having undergone them myself--but if you think I have any comfort level watching either of them, you're missing a clue.
Do you claim that a single image of these things would make you physically ill? There's a huge difference between noting a dislike and attributing a level of revulsion so great that vomiting is an appropriate response.
And I don't think you automatically believe everyone else shares your dislike, let alone the nasuea. (Indeed the Discovery Health channel relies on lots of people with the opposite view:) ).
And as I noted elsewhere, people don't get beaten to death because they like watching paint dry or washing dishes, but people have been beaten to death for being gay. That gives us a responsibility to make sure we're not contributing to an environment where it's okay to hate gays because everyone knows what they do is disgusting: rhetorical (and not so rhetorical) flourishes that exaggerate a personal dislike into universal revulsion are not okay.
If you dialed down the self-righteousness a tad, you would see that I'm not objecting to personal preferences: I objecting to the assumption everyone else shares your personal preferences. If you doen't like gay sex images, fine. I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with their assuming everyone else should be revolted by gay sex images too. I also have a problem with people claiming they've nothing against homosexuals, but are happy to claim that very idea of what they actually does makes them physically ill.
In summary: I'm not asking anyone to like looking at gay sex acts. What I am asking them to do is accept that some people do, and those people don't deserve to have the basic elements of their sexuality discussed in the same terms people normally use to describe eating maggots on explotative TV shows.
And let's be honest here. We're not talking about some debate room abstractions. People don't get the shit beaten out of them because they don't like coffee, or octopus, but they do get the shit beaten out of them because they're gay. That means that responsible people will take care of the words they use, and ensure they're not contributing to the kind of world where 'gay' is an insult, and homosexuals are abominations who deserve waht they get .
Yes, but you don't assume everyone else should feel as you do, or that's it's an ideal response in yourself. In fact, you'd probably be careful to reign in that reaction around, say, children, so as not to lay down the groundwork of a freak out when the time comes for them to be exposed to someone else (or themselves) getting an injection.
What I'm unhappy about is the reinforcement of the idea that the socially correct response to gay sex by anyone who isn't Out is disgust. There's a difference between expressing a personal preference, and expecting everyone to share that preference, as the original poster clearly did. That's the line between 'not my cup of tea' and intolerance.
So if you looked at a picture of someone eating octopus, and you got literally nauseated, you wouldn't think that was something of an overreaction? At the very least, you wouldn't assume that many other people have the same reaction.
Not thinking something is your cup of tea is one thing, reacting with physical naseau is another -- don't forget, people used to cite the same reaction to interracial marriage. Don't confuse a social, taught, preference with a personal preference. The original comment reinforces the notion that gay sex should reflexively treated as disgusting by anyone who doesn't publicly identify as gay, and that's not cool.
There's quite a gap between toleration and participation.
Yes, and looking at a picture isn't 'participation.' If you're literally nauseated by the very concept of man-on-man anal sex (which, bluntly, isn't that mechanically different from hetrosexual vaginal penetration, let alone hetrosexual anal sex) then maybe you're not as tolerant as you think, even if some of your friends are gay. (Again, you don't have to go far to find biased people who proclaim that they can't be biased against X because some of their friends are X, so much so that the phrase "some of my best friends are..." has become a joke in the gay, lesbian and bisexual communities. (Try googling on the phrase). In fact, so well worn is the phrase, that at this point I can't tell if you're trolling or not.
There's also quite a gap between "not wishing to have members of class X segregated into ghettos by the police" and genuine tolerance, which why the tail end of the "Some of my friends are X..." trope traditionally runs "...but I wouldn't let my daughter marry one." If your 'tolerance' can't pass this sniff test, well, you may not despise gays, but have to admit you've got some hang ups.
How many people, you think, who have nothing against gays, still get nauseated from looking at pictures of guys porking each other up the arse?
If they actually have nothing against gays, then I would say the number is zero. Feeling intense disgust just by glancing at a picture of a common sex act between two men is something. It's like people who say "I've nothing against blacks/asians/hispanics/jews/women/gays, but [insert bigoteed statement here]."
'know, if he were a code monkey, it wouldn't bother me in the least--but he is a journalist, first and foremost.
Y'know, I remember at Linuxworld in NYC in, oh, 2000 or 2001, when one of the/. editors, in response to a question, flatly rejected characterising themselves as journalists, and so laughed at the idea that they should learn standard journalistic craft skills. I'm sure some geek, somewhere, has it on DV.:) It's not that he despised journalism, he just didn't think slashdot was a news organization.
Let the 'geek' editors be what they really are--reporters
But they're not reporters, except on rare occasion. Reporting means going out and doing original research and interviews, not processing reports generated by other people.
Slashdot is not a news organization, it's a news digest, in the same way that the Utne Reader, however good it may be, is not Newsweek.
What slashdot needs is a good copyeditor, and a better search engine that can let the editors spot dupes easier.
Okay, but the point is that there is an exisiting legal mechanism for going after such companies that can pursued instead of people whistling dixie and waiting for some 'tarrif' to be imposed,
Once again: H1-B workers, by law can't be paid less than a US worker in a similar job: the wage level is certified, and if neccesary raised, by the local state department of labor.
They found out that you can either hire a domestic techie for 50-80k/yr or hire an imported techie for 25-35k/yr.
If that's happening, then you already have legal options without needing new legislation for tariff's on imported labor: H-1B's are, by law, supposed to be paid in line with US workers -- one of the hurdles in getting a H-1B is getting the state's department of labor to sign off that the wage level is kosher. Most of the stories you here about dramatically underpaid foreign H1-B's turn out to be urban legends.
I was a H1-B for six years, and I was always paid in line with U.S. workers, both at my company and in the industry in general.
by McHenry's ridiculous standards which would render every encyclopedia useless--one bad article and you're out
McHenry explicitly discusses his methodology, versus that of a professional, formal, review so that it can be clear that he is not saying that one bad article is cause for dismissal. McHenry is using the Hamilton article to give a concrete illustration of his concerns regarding the process behind the Wikipedia. He could have spoken in purely abstract terms, but that would have been both boring and less useful.
The free software movement is 20 years old this year. It began in 1984 with RMS' announcement of the GNU project.
I agree with you: the free software movement should be in EB. Again, I don't believe the EB is perfect, or the Wikipedia should be condemed for one bad article. What I'm saying is that I agree with McHenry that the traditional encyclopedia process is more likely to produce articles which are better than mediocre than Wikipedia in its current form.
Granting people the freedom to do useful things with the work continues to be important to them and to me, and that makes me enjoy the Wikipedia all the more.
Mozilla wouldn't exist without the free movement, yes. I love free and open source software -- but I don't expect consumers to have the same priorities. They don't care about the process by which the software was created, they just want software that works, and that's one of the reasons Linux still lags behind Windows and OS X on the desktop. In the same way, if the Linux wants to make inroads on the desktop it needs to care about things that many developers don't care about, and even dislike: witness the sneering references to "point'n'drool' interfaces here when the matter of GUI's come up. And note that even in this arena, there is a division between the open source movement and the free software movement, broadly along the lines of utility versus ideology.
At least with computers we can pay attention to keeping things in free formats and periodically copying data
Doing that requires continual periodic maintainance to copy all that data, and maintainance is always the first thing to go when it's budget crunch time. Just because we have a good idea as to how to preserve electronic data doesn't mean it'll get done, or even if our idea will turn out to be correct in century or so. On the other hand, I know that all I have to do preserve an acid-free book for that length of time is keep it clean, dry and out of direct sunlight.
Perhaps, someday, EB will come around to describe this issue.
To be fair, this is where the Wikipedia could win, covering a breadth of topics that EB et al can't match due to lack of resources. Still, there's something to be said for a trimmed down, selected, knowledge base: note the huge number of IT efforts, from search engines to agents to mail filters, that are all about reducing the amount of stuff we have coming in, in the name of getting a better signal to noise ratio.
Perhaps the future is a high-quality core of traditional articles that give a survey of human knowledge, published by EB and its descendants, floating in a much wider topic sea of mediocre articles generated by Wikipedia and its descendants. For many purposes, mediocre is going to be adequate, anyway.
I hope you won't deny us the fruit of your gift to tell us exactly what day it will be acceptable and proper to publish these articles.
Sure. While magazine and newspaper articles and even popular books can of course be pretty much contemporaneous, most historians usually let about 5 to 10 years go by before attempting to publish scholarly analysis of current events. This is probably a pretty good rule of thumb for textbooks and encyclopeda entries too.
what kind of control I have over dead tree copies is unclear
No, what kind of control you have in dead tree land is crystal clear, thanks to centuries of law and actual case work on copyright. Uncertainty is focused on electronic material, not printed.
I'm willing to live with a snapshot of a free work, because it comes with the freedoms to share and modify.
Fine. Good for you. But most people's priorities will center on the utility and reliability of the information, just as most users just want to have Mozilla to look at web pages and will never so much as look at a line of source code. If Wikipedia's goal is to become a resource for a broad range of people, their priorities will have to take precedence over yours.
There are a lot of people who do worry that publishing in restrictively-licensed journals is a bad idea...The lessons from the 1960 and 1970 US census data compression debacle are key.
And professional librarians have also voiced deep concerns about the archivability of electronic media, due to physical media failure and format obselesence. This and the census issue highlight the value of dead trees, not the opposite. A good acid-free paper book can last centuries. Can you say the snapshot you take tonight of the Wikipedia database will do the same?
How do they justify doing any research for their articles if they don't "do research for readers"?
They do research for readers, plural. The result of that research is the encylopedia. They don't do research for readers, singular. That's like asking why you can't ring up Microsoft and demand they create some custom word templates just for you, just because you bought Word.
the 2nd criteria should still be met: One of those nerds isn't some dictator telling the other nerds how to act.
I shouldn't have mentioned criteria 2 without fleshing out my thought -- Criteria 2 fails because the opinions are often not developed independantly -- as you point out, lengthy and often heated discussions can accompany editing decisions. Again, to quote from the Publisher's Weekly summary: Independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader. You don't have to be a dictator to be an opinion leader. I don't think you can both cheer the collaborative nature of a Wiki, and then appeal to the crowd theory to give authority to those reuslts.
the group who participates in the Wikipedia is considerably more diverse than many examples given in the book, such as a crew of US submariners (ALL of whom were likely American 18-35 year old males).
Yes, but the submariners were likely being asked questions about a specific subdomain of knowledge. A general encylopedia, by its nature, aims to cover all domains, at least in passing, and so it's reasonable to expect a broader base of contributers if crowd theory is to hold.
"the Wikipedia falls down most strongly on point (4)...One individual can partially or completely overwrite, in an atomic fashion, other opinions..." But how often does this happen?
It happens every time anyone edits any article, not just in the contentious articles. Fundamentally, the wiki mechanism does not facilitate opinion aggregation but instead operates through atomic modification. For example, a numeric value in wikipedia articles is not the average of all the numbers submitted by all contributors, it is simply the value chosen by the person doing the last edit.
The discussion pages are a great tool where different views can be and are gathered using threaded discussions.
But the discussion pages are not intended for the casual user: that stated goal of the Wikipedia is polished, reliable, individual articles. If you must plow through an edit history, that's who knows how long, to find out what you want to know, then something is Broken.
Traditional encyclopedias solve this dilemma the same way the Wikipedia does: through revision, the writing style and the factual content are improved.
Traditional encylopedias also does things that Wikipedia does not: to pen the first draft, it hires expert authors, familiar with both the subject matter and the basic tenants of scholarship and preferably those also skilled at writing. Then the articles are edited by professional editors, also scholars, less familiar with the subject matter, but more skilled at writing. Then stable editions are published with the reputations of the publishing company, editors and contributors riding on it. It's not a perfect system, but the vast majority of traditional article first drafts are going to start somewhere between mediocre and good, and move toward good, while Wiki articles tend to start between poor and mediocre and move toward mediocre. Again, I agree with you that many articles improve, but the fear is that we're simply seeing a regression toward the mean, not a true global improvement in article quality.
Talented writers can and do contribute to the Wikipedia.
Sure. But a) these writers are greatly outnumbered and b) these writers are the most likely to have their articles reduced to high school level pablum.
Furthermore, there are many profesional authors and editors who don't have much formal training.
Again, sure. I'm one. I was using the existence of formal high level training to indicate that there's more to good writing than what people knocked out for their high school English composition class.
we may be forced to make tools in the future to protect things like the Wikipedia.
I think we're not so far apart.:) I should say that I like Wikipedi
The practical outcome of this for me is that too many encyclopedias I've seen fail to address important social movements of the day (like the free software movement, encouraging an ethical approach to computer software, and the only significant challenge to one of the largest monopolies of our day--Microsoft's proprietary software), or they are updated too infrequently to talk about things I want to learn more about (like the recent goings-on and the history of the anti-war movement).
Encyclopedias have never pretended to be magazines, newspapers or journals. They don't contain this material for the same reasons college history text books next semester won't contain an analysis of the Iraq war, or a biology text book won't have anything about the recent discovery of "hobbit" skeletons: apart from the logistics of dead-tree production (and which are irrelevant in the case of publications with online versions), it's just too soon to write about these in the context of text books chapters and encylopedia articles. Time gives both the detachment and additional information not available in the heat of the moment to write accurate articles.
If Wikipedia is trying to cover these things as well, it's an interesting experiment, but as the battles over articles such as the Rove entry shows, it has it problems and it's not what an encylopedia does.
Someone else compared it to difference between stable releases and nightly builds. Sure, with EB, I only get stable releases, but with Wikipedia, I only get nightly builds. And, as with software, for most people, for most purposes, the stable build is a better bet.
Other practical considerations are left out too: What if I want to make a copy of EB in case EB goes away?
If you bought a dead trees EB, then it's yours. even if they company goes belly up, no one's going to come and take your pages of high-quality printed reproduced text and images. But for Wikipedia, if those servers stop responding, either because of a problem at your end or theirs, it's gone: very few people will have the wherewithal to cache a local copy of the database, and then of course there's the issue of staying up to date with the always changing database.
If you're talking about preserving the information in EB for posterity or whatever, etc, etc, I would point out, for example, that most scientific research is published in copyrighted journals, and people don't worry that we're going to lose that knowledge even if Nature and Science went bust.
Contacting EB has not produced the kind of feedback I was looking for, including pointers to primary sources and essays written by people in the know on topics I care about.
I'm not surprised. The EB editorial office isn't there to do research for readers. They've produced an article, the rest is up to you.
In summary, if you're expecting an encylopedia to replace the role of journals and magazine articles then EB and its ilk are not for you. On the other hand, if you're looking for something that hews closer to the notion of authoratative shcholarship that encylclopedias traditionally extoll, EB is going to be a safer bet.
First, while that's a thought-provoking idea, and one that may be true in some domains, it's far from universally accepted. Indeed, it is trivial to see that crowds can be wrong on occassion: witness the majority of US citizens who believed that there was a proven direct link between Iraq and 9/11, despite the statements of both the 9/11 Commission and the White House to the contrary.
However, for now, let's accept Surowiecki's theory as kosher. Significantly, he only grants the crowd superiority over the individual if the following conditions are met (from the Publisher's Weekly review):
"Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions.
I could argue that the profile of the average Wikipedia contributer is predominantly skewed towards a young, techno-phillic, middle-class, white, male living in the U.S., so the 1st and 2nd criteria are not being adequately met, but I don't have to, because the Wikipedia falls down most strongly on point (4).
This is because the Wikipedia system does not aggregate opinions. One individual can partially or completely overwrite, in an atomic fashion, other opinions. Yes, there's a revision history, and a user could review all contributions and form an aggregate opinion that way, but this is a time consuming burden on the reader, and the stated objective of the wikipedia is to produce polished, individual articles. (It's worth noting that Everything2's model of keeping individual contributor's write-ups separate and intergrating the display of multiple write-ups into the site's standard modus operandi supports this kind of aggregation better than Wikipedia's).
they are usually started by people who do have an interest in (and therefore hopefull some knowledge of) the subject.
But that's not enough to produce good articles, not by a long shot. First, as you note, an interest in a subject is no gaurantee of any actual knowledge. Second, (as I noted elsewhere), a good article that rises above the mediocre requires not just a firm grasp of the subject matter, but an ability to write well. These are two seperate skill sets, and most people don't have both.
The quality of the first revision of an article is nearly always significantly better than if a random monkey was selected to write an article on a random topic.
If wrong information is being given, this is not really the case. If I'm asked for directions on the street and send people in the wrong direction, they're worse off than if I'd shrugged my shoulders or started speaking gibberish. But even if correct information is being given, we're talking about the difference between "appalling" (monkeys) and "poor" (most contributors). There's a reason why writing is taught beyond the universal high school level and why there are professionals around who make a living only because they write better than most.
My point is that it is not neccesarily cause for celebration to say that most initial articles are better than if monkey's wrote them, because there's still a long way to go to "good" or "great" and in between is the great sandbar of mediocrity, which Wikipedia is now making great speed toward. Without a change in methodology, Wikipedia will never get off that sandbar.
As I noted, there is virtual barrier that the first author be familiar with what he writes about.
But there is in fact noreal barrier, beyond having a browser and an internet connection. You may operate according to some self-imposed restrictions, but there is nothing in the structure of the Wikipedia to enforce this, and as we found out when netiquette collapsed under the weight of AOL'ers in the mid 1990's, such virtual barriers are meaningless.
you should be arguing that there should be a higher barrier for that initial submission.
Lowering the effort required to produce something does not automatically increase the quality of the product. Indeed, it has been known to worsen the average quality of the product, flooding the arena with crap. We've seen this happen with email: when distributing a company-wide memo required much more effort than clicking 'send', my day was unlikely to be wasted reading about someone's free kittens. Thus, it is far from axiomatic that "the Wikipedia model for revisions is better" because of the low effort required for submitting corrections.
But the Wikipedia does fundamentally have better promise to evolve into something grander.
True. But it's not going to fulfill that promise with its current structure. Otherwise it's entirely possible that something grander will simply mean "better than the average contributer could write themselves" or in other words, "mediocre".
The harsh truth is that most submissions start off worse then mediocre, so while the editing process dramatically improves many articles, producing a very encouraging looking trend in these early days, the Wikipedia needs a mechanism that will allow it to escape diminishing returns or it will spiral towards mediocrity. I suspect that whatever than mechanism is, it will involve raising barriers to accepting corrections, not lowering them.
Good Lord! A thoughtful, well-reasoned, comment, that accepts the criticism and acknowledges the fundamentally experimental nature of the project, instead of treating the Bazaar analogy like it came down on stone tablets, while in a measured manner making a case for supporting said project?
The vast majority of pages tend to get better over time. Check it out for yourself with the random page link.
The point is that you and the Britannica editor are, sadly, both correct. The Britannica editor spoke of regression toward the mean and a trend toward medicority. You state that the vast majority of papers tend to get better over time: true, but this is true beause the vast majority of articles start off worse than mediocre. This is not surprising: understanding a subject well and writing well are two orthoganal skills sets that must both be present to write an article better than mediocre. Most people miss the mark on at least one skill set.
It's like PowerPoint. PowerPoint templates have mostly eliminated the real dregs of presentations: I never go to a conference nowadays and and see pages of illegible handwritten text on cloudy transparancies. But, as Edward Tufte argues, PowerPoint has also wiped out the high end: presentations all have a terrible sameness: a title page followed by an endless parade of bullet points.
If Wikipedia can not escape its regression toward medocrity, it will become of use, certainly, but it will not reach the stellar heights of its advocates' ambition.
the only reason that some views are much more biased than the views of the average wikipedia reader is a combination of apathy, laziness, or the lack of a sufficient number of readers who would "equilibrate" the article.
And that, right there, is why Britannica and its brethern win. When something is wrong or slanted in Britannica, no-one blames the readers. It's an editor or contributer who gets the rap.
Most readers/users of any product are not going to give a crap about contributing to that product, (and indeed, why should they? People have other things to do with their time, like using that information). If your formula for accuracy relies on a seachange in human behaviour, then I would suggest that formula has a serious design flaw.
Even when I'm making casual enquiries, I still like to get answers that are correct.
As even the article author admitted in his introduction, accuracy and fact checking in print encyclopedias is "not thoroughgoing" because it's just too big a job.
I think you misread this: I did too on the first pass. He's not saying it's impossible to be accurate or fact check thoroughly when compiling an encylopedia. What he's saying is that reviewing an encylopedia, print or electronic, can not be done comprehensively:
I know as well as anyone and better than most what is involved in assessing an encyclopedia. I know, to begin with, that it can't be done in any thoroughgoing way. The job is just too big. Professional reviewers content themselves with some statistics...
Presumbably, if a good sample of articles check out, then the process used to create the encyclopedia was valid.
I think this would be an *excellent* thing to happen to little Johnny. It would be anobject lesson in the importance of critical thinking
Sure, if little Johnny is doing a paper and is likeley to be corrected by his teachers. But what if its not for a paper? How does little Johnny know what he doesn't know, i.e. that the information is wrong? In any case, as was noted elsewhere, the danger is not with subjects like the Holocaust, which are watched liked hawks for now (but in a 100 years, who knows?), but lesser known areas which don't get as much scrutiny.
The ex-Britannica's example of the Hamilton birthdate is a good one: armed with the power of critical assesement you might notice there are internal inconsistencies in the article, but you would chalk that up to poor writing or research on the part of contributers, not a fundamental ambiguity in the historical record.
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I don't see the need for clear expression here, as I always assume this to be implicitly true
But it's precisely because other people don't make that enlightended assumption that there's a need for clear expression, especially in those siutations where there's known social pressure to conform to particular points of view.
I'd expect most people to do the same, especially if they present a view on an open forum rife with flames.
But a lot of people don't exercise the same sophistication, especially Impressionable Youth(TM). The most insidious prejudices are those to which it simply never occurs to anyone to question.
Why would I have to be physically ill to be uncomfortable with an image? At what level do I have a right to express and act on my discomfort?
You can express your discomfort, fine. No problem. What I'm asking is that we don't make the blanket assumption that everyone else should share that opinion, and we should express our opinions in a way that makes that distinction clear. And the degree to which you couch that dislike does matter: in a political debate, about, say, missile defense, consider the difference between "I believe my opponent's position is wrong and would ulitmately weaken our national defences" and "My opponent's position gives aid-and-comfort to the enemy and she is a traitor." In both cases, dislike is being expressed, but one statement is appropriate to civil discourse and the other is not, unless the speaker produces evidence to show their opponent is literally commiting treason.
Its unfortunate that people die in violent ways, but lets step back a minute and ask ourselves if people get beaten to death is really due to homophobia or something else. Frankly anyone beating someone else to death has some serious psychological and or developement issues [Emphasis added].
Sadly, that's not true. Time and time again, we've seen members of group X rise up and attack and kill group Y, even though there is no evidence of the kind of psychological or developmental damage you describe, from Yugoslavia to Rwanda. Indeed, the most horrying aspect of these events is when people are brutally totured and/or murdered by former friends and neighbours. Identifying a group as subhuman outsiders can have lethal consequences, even if all concerned have no physological or developmental defects. The dynamics of this kind of violence are complex, but they are not as arbitrary as you imply.
The original poster did not say that everyone would get nauseated by looking at the pics.
Bzzt. Wrong. Look at the entire post again:
And they managed to screw up even further. Read that text, and imagine you're an innocent (horny) teenager who initially wanted to go to the Idol site. But what's this ? "there is a US site with a similar address which contains adult content which is not suitable for minors". Wow ! Take me there man ! [clicky] Ewwwwwww ! That's GAY ! [cue millions of (male) teenagers getting sick].
The poster asks you to imagine you're a generic horny teenager looking for porn. And generic horny teenagers -- the entire population in question -- are freaked out by an image of gay porn. It never even crosses the poster's mind that there might be a lot of people who either a) enjoy gay porn or b) aren't freaked out by accidentally viewing it. The rhetorical flourish of "millions...getting sick" is simply that subset of everyone who takes the normal, natural revulsion to the point of nausea (actually I don't really believe there's any evidence to suggest that the the poster doesn't believe those millions are anything but the vast majority, if not all, of the original horny males who click the link. Either way, the implication is that normal teenagers get freaked out by gay porn.) It's exactly that kind of casual homophobia (i.e. that gay sex is automatically considered an abomination) that has made it okay to use 'gay' to mean crap, or refer to someone you dislike as a 'fag', and ultimately to justify targetting gays for bullying and worse.
Finally, to those who note that some people don't like any pornographic images so it's not fair to single out an adverse reaction to gay porn, we're specifically looking at a self-selecting population that apparantly is pursuing hetrosexual porn, which frequently includes images of erect penises, anal sex and even female homosexuality. This material is so enjoyed that it can help bring them to orgasm. Yet, one misplaced extra set of male genitilia is supposed to disgust them to the point of nausea? Please.
You know, I happen have absolutely nothing against appendectomies (or any surgery, come to think of it), and childbirth. In fact, I think these are great things having undergone them myself--but if you think I have any comfort level watching either of them, you're missing a clue.
:) ).
Do you claim that a single image of these things would make you physically ill? There's a huge difference between noting a dislike and attributing a level of revulsion so great that vomiting is an appropriate response.
And I don't think you automatically believe everyone else shares your dislike, let alone the nasuea. (Indeed the Discovery Health channel relies on lots of people with the opposite view
And as I noted elsewhere, people don't get beaten to death because they like watching paint dry or washing dishes, but people have been beaten to death for being gay. That gives us a responsibility to make sure we're not contributing to an environment where it's okay to hate gays because everyone knows what they do is disgusting: rhetorical (and not so rhetorical) flourishes that exaggerate a personal dislike into universal revulsion are not okay.
If you dialed down the self-righteousness a tad, you would see that I'm not objecting to personal preferences: I objecting to the assumption everyone else shares your personal preferences. If you doen't like gay sex images, fine. I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with their assuming everyone else should be revolted by gay sex images too. I also have a problem with people claiming they've nothing against homosexuals, but are happy to claim that very idea of what they actually does makes them physically ill.
In summary: I'm not asking anyone to like looking at gay sex acts. What I am asking them to do is accept that some people do, and those people don't deserve to have the basic elements of their sexuality discussed in the same terms people normally use to describe eating maggots on explotative TV shows.
And let's be honest here. We're not talking about some debate room abstractions. People don't get the shit beaten out of them because they don't like coffee, or octopus, but they do get the shit beaten out of them because they're gay. That means that responsible people will take care of the words they use, and ensure they're not contributing to the kind of world where 'gay' is an insult, and homosexuals are abominations who deserve waht they get
.
Most heterosexual people find pictures of men porking women nauseating, too.
There's a multibillion dollar porn industry, as well as quite a bit of academic research, that would disagree with you,
feel ill when I see someone getting a needle...
Yes, but you don't assume everyone else should feel as you do, or that's it's an ideal response in yourself. In fact, you'd probably be careful to reign in that reaction around, say, children, so as not to lay down the groundwork of a freak out when the time comes for them to be exposed to someone else (or themselves) getting an injection.
What I'm unhappy about is the reinforcement of the idea that the socially correct response to gay sex by anyone who isn't Out is disgust. There's a difference between expressing a personal preference, and expecting everyone to share that preference, as the original poster clearly did. That's the line between 'not my cup of tea' and intolerance.
So if you looked at a picture of someone eating octopus, and you got literally nauseated, you wouldn't think that was something of an overreaction? At the very least, you wouldn't assume that many other people have the same reaction.
Not thinking something is your cup of tea is one thing, reacting with physical naseau is another -- don't forget, people used to cite the same reaction to interracial marriage. Don't confuse a social, taught, preference with a personal preference. The original comment reinforces the notion that gay sex should reflexively treated as disgusting by anyone who doesn't publicly identify as gay, and that's not cool.
There's quite a gap between toleration and participation.
Yes, and looking at a picture isn't 'participation.' If you're literally nauseated by the very concept of man-on-man anal sex (which, bluntly, isn't that mechanically different from hetrosexual vaginal penetration, let alone hetrosexual anal sex) then maybe you're not as tolerant as you think, even if some of your friends are gay. (Again, you don't have to go far to find biased people who proclaim that they can't be biased against X because some of their friends are X, so much so that the phrase "some of my best friends are..." has become a joke in the gay, lesbian and bisexual communities. (Try googling on the phrase). In fact, so well worn is the phrase, that at this point I can't tell if you're trolling or not.
There's also quite a gap between "not wishing to have members of class X segregated into ghettos by the police" and genuine tolerance, which why the tail end of the "Some of my friends are X..." trope traditionally runs "...but I wouldn't let my daughter marry one." If your 'tolerance' can't pass this sniff test, well, you may not despise gays, but have to admit you've got some hang ups.
How many people, you think, who have nothing against gays, still get nauseated from looking at pictures of guys porking each other up the arse?
If they actually have nothing against gays, then I would say the number is zero. Feeling intense disgust just by glancing at a picture of a common sex act between two men is something. It's like people who say "I've nothing against blacks/asians/hispanics/jews/women/gays, but [insert bigoteed statement here]."
'know, if he were a code monkey, it wouldn't bother me in the least--but he is a journalist, first and foremost.
/. editors, in response to a question, flatly rejected characterising themselves as journalists, and so laughed at the idea that they should learn standard journalistic craft skills. I'm sure some geek, somewhere, has it on DV. :) It's not that he despised journalism, he just didn't think slashdot was a news organization.
Y'know, I remember at Linuxworld in NYC in, oh, 2000 or 2001, when one of the
Let the 'geek' editors be what they really are--reporters
But they're not reporters, except on rare occasion. Reporting means going out and doing original research and interviews, not processing reports generated by other people.
Slashdot is not a news organization, it's a news digest, in the same way that the Utne Reader, however good it may be, is not Newsweek.
What slashdot needs is a good copyeditor, and a better search engine that can let the editors spot dupes easier.
Abuses do happen
Okay, but the point is that there is an exisiting legal mechanism for going after such companies that can pursued instead of people whistling dixie and waiting for some 'tarrif' to be imposed,
Once again: H1-B workers, by law can't be paid less than a US worker in a similar job: the wage level is certified, and if neccesary raised, by the local state department of labor.
They found out that you can either hire a domestic techie for 50-80k/yr or hire an imported techie for 25-35k/yr.
If that's happening, then you already have legal options without needing new legislation for tariff's on imported labor: H-1B's are, by law, supposed to be paid in line with US workers -- one of the hurdles in getting a H-1B is getting the state's department of labor to sign off that the wage level is kosher. Most of the stories you here about dramatically underpaid foreign H1-B's turn out to be urban legends.
I was a H1-B for six years, and I was always paid in line with U.S. workers, both at my company and in the industry in general.
by McHenry's ridiculous standards which would render every encyclopedia useless--one bad article and you're out
McHenry explicitly discusses his methodology, versus that of a professional, formal, review so that it can be clear that he is not saying that one bad article is cause for dismissal. McHenry is using the Hamilton article to give a concrete illustration of his concerns regarding the process behind the Wikipedia. He could have spoken in purely abstract terms, but that would have been both boring and less useful.
The free software movement is 20 years old this year. It began in 1984 with RMS' announcement of the GNU project.
I agree with you: the free software movement should be in EB. Again, I don't believe the EB is perfect, or the Wikipedia should be condemed for one bad article. What I'm saying is that I agree with McHenry that the traditional encyclopedia process is more likely to produce articles which are better than mediocre than Wikipedia in its current form.
Granting people the freedom to do useful things with the work continues to be important to them and to me, and that makes me enjoy the Wikipedia all the more.
Mozilla wouldn't exist without the free movement, yes. I love free and open source software -- but I don't expect consumers to have the same priorities. They don't care about the process by which the software was created, they just want software that works, and that's one of the reasons Linux still lags behind Windows and OS X on the desktop. In the same way, if the Linux wants to make inroads on the desktop it needs to care about things that many developers don't care about, and even dislike: witness the sneering references to "point'n'drool' interfaces here when the matter of GUI's come up. And note that even in this arena, there is a division between the open source movement and the free software movement, broadly along the lines of utility versus ideology.
At least with computers we can pay attention to keeping things in free formats and periodically copying data
Doing that requires continual periodic maintainance to copy all that data, and maintainance is always the first thing to go when it's budget crunch time. Just because we have a good idea as to how to preserve electronic data doesn't mean it'll get done, or even if our idea will turn out to be correct in century or so. On the other hand, I know that all I have to do preserve an acid-free book for that length of time is keep it clean, dry and out of direct sunlight.
Perhaps, someday, EB will come around to describe this issue.
To be fair, this is where the Wikipedia could win, covering a breadth of topics that EB et al can't match due to lack of resources. Still, there's something to be said for a trimmed down, selected, knowledge base: note the huge number of IT efforts, from search engines to agents to mail filters, that are all about reducing the amount of stuff we have coming in, in the name of getting a better signal to noise ratio.
Perhaps the future is a high-quality core of traditional articles that give a survey of human knowledge, published by EB and its descendants, floating in a much wider topic sea of mediocre articles generated by Wikipedia and its descendants. For many purposes, mediocre is going to be adequate, anyway.
I hope you won't deny us the fruit of your gift to tell us exactly what day it will be acceptable and proper to publish these articles.
Sure. While magazine and newspaper articles and even popular books can of course be pretty much contemporaneous, most historians usually let about 5 to 10 years go by before attempting to publish scholarly analysis of current events. This is probably a pretty good rule of thumb for textbooks and encyclopeda entries too.
what kind of control I have over dead tree copies is unclear
No, what kind of control you have in dead tree land is crystal clear, thanks to centuries of law and actual case work on copyright. Uncertainty is focused on electronic material, not printed.
I'm willing to live with a snapshot of a free work, because it comes with the freedoms to share and modify.
Fine. Good for you. But most people's priorities will center on the utility and reliability of the information, just as most users just want to have Mozilla to look at web pages and will never so much as look at a line of source code. If Wikipedia's goal is to become a resource for a broad range of people, their priorities will have to take precedence over yours.
There are a lot of people who do worry that publishing in restrictively-licensed journals is a bad idea...The lessons from the 1960 and 1970 US census data compression debacle are key.
And professional librarians have also voiced deep concerns about the archivability of electronic media, due to physical media failure and format obselesence. This and the census issue highlight the value of dead trees, not the opposite. A good acid-free paper book can last centuries. Can you say the snapshot you take tonight of the Wikipedia database will do the same?
How do they justify doing any research for their articles if they don't "do research for readers"?
They do research for readers, plural. The result of that research is the encylopedia. They don't do research for readers, singular. That's like asking why you can't ring up Microsoft and demand they create some custom word templates just for you, just because you bought Word.
the 2nd criteria should still be met: One of those nerds isn't some dictator telling the other nerds how to act.
:) I should say that I like Wikipedi
I shouldn't have mentioned criteria 2 without fleshing out my thought -- Criteria 2 fails because the opinions are often not developed independantly -- as you point out, lengthy and often heated discussions can accompany editing decisions. Again, to quote from the Publisher's Weekly summary: Independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader. You don't have to be a dictator to be an opinion leader. I don't think you can both cheer the collaborative nature of a Wiki, and then appeal to the crowd theory to give authority to those reuslts.
the group who participates in the Wikipedia is considerably more diverse than many examples given in the book, such as a crew of US submariners (ALL of whom were likely American 18-35 year old males).
Yes, but the submariners were likely being asked questions about a specific subdomain of knowledge. A general encylopedia, by its nature, aims to cover all domains, at least in passing, and so it's reasonable to expect a broader base of contributers if crowd theory is to hold.
"the Wikipedia falls down most strongly on point (4)...One individual can partially or completely overwrite, in an atomic fashion, other opinions..." But how often does this happen?
It happens every time anyone edits any article, not just in the contentious articles. Fundamentally, the wiki mechanism does not facilitate opinion aggregation but instead operates through atomic modification. For example, a numeric value in wikipedia articles is not the average of all the numbers submitted by all contributors, it is simply the value chosen by the person doing the last edit.
The discussion pages are a great tool where different views can be and are gathered using threaded discussions.
But the discussion pages are not intended for the casual user: that stated goal of the Wikipedia is polished, reliable, individual articles. If you must plow through an edit history, that's who knows how long, to find out what you want to know, then something is Broken.
Traditional encyclopedias solve this dilemma the same way the Wikipedia does: through revision, the writing style and the factual content are improved.
Traditional encylopedias also does things that Wikipedia does not: to pen the first draft, it hires expert authors, familiar with both the subject matter and the basic tenants of scholarship and preferably those also skilled at writing. Then the articles are edited by professional editors, also scholars, less familiar with the subject matter, but more skilled at writing. Then stable editions are published with the reputations of the publishing company, editors and contributors riding on it. It's not a perfect system, but the vast majority of traditional article first drafts are going to start somewhere between mediocre and good, and move toward good, while Wiki articles tend to start between poor and mediocre and move toward mediocre. Again, I agree with you that many articles improve, but the fear is that we're simply seeing a regression toward the mean, not a true global improvement in article quality.
Talented writers can and do contribute to the Wikipedia.
Sure. But a) these writers are greatly outnumbered and b) these writers are the most likely to have their articles reduced to high school level pablum.
Furthermore, there are many profesional authors and editors who don't have much formal training.
Again, sure. I'm one. I was using the existence of formal high level training to indicate that there's more to good writing than what people knocked out for their high school English composition class.
we may be forced to make tools in the future to protect things like the Wikipedia.
I think we're not so far apart.
The practical outcome of this for me is that too many encyclopedias I've seen fail to address important social movements of the day (like the free software movement, encouraging an ethical approach to computer software, and the only significant challenge to one of the largest monopolies of our day--Microsoft's proprietary software), or they are updated too infrequently to talk about things I want to learn more about (like the recent goings-on and the history of the anti-war movement).
Encyclopedias have never pretended to be magazines, newspapers or journals. They don't contain this material for the same reasons college history text books next semester won't contain an analysis of the Iraq war, or a biology text book won't have anything about the recent discovery of "hobbit" skeletons: apart from the logistics of dead-tree production (and which are irrelevant in the case of publications with online versions), it's just too soon to write about these in the context of text books chapters and encylopedia articles. Time gives both the detachment and additional information not available in the heat of the moment to write accurate articles.
If Wikipedia is trying to cover these things as well, it's an interesting experiment, but as the battles over articles such as the Rove entry shows, it has it problems and it's not what an encylopedia does.
Someone else compared it to difference between stable releases and nightly builds. Sure, with EB, I only get stable releases, but with Wikipedia, I only get nightly builds. And, as with software, for most people, for most purposes, the stable build is a better bet.
Other practical considerations are left out too: What if I want to make a copy of EB in case EB goes away?
If you bought a dead trees EB, then it's yours. even if they company goes belly up, no one's going to come and take your pages of high-quality printed reproduced text and images. But for Wikipedia, if those servers stop responding, either because of a problem at your end or theirs, it's gone: very few people will have the wherewithal to cache a local copy of the database, and then of course there's the issue of staying up to date with the always changing database.
If you're talking about preserving the information in EB for posterity or whatever, etc, etc, I would point out, for example, that most scientific research is published in copyrighted journals, and people don't worry that we're going to lose that knowledge even if Nature and Science went bust.
Contacting EB has not produced the kind of feedback I was looking for, including pointers to primary sources and essays written by people in the know on topics I care about.
I'm not surprised. The EB editorial office isn't there to do research for readers. They've produced an article, the rest is up to you.
In summary, if you're expecting an encylopedia to replace the role of journals and magazine articles then EB and its ilk are not for you. On the other hand, if you're looking for something that hews closer to the notion of authoratative shcholarship that encylclopedias traditionally extoll, EB is going to be a safer bet.
Crowds are often smarter than individuals
First, while that's a thought-provoking idea, and one that may be true in some domains, it's far from universally accepted. Indeed, it is trivial to see that crowds can be wrong on occassion: witness the majority of US citizens who believed that there was a proven direct link between Iraq and 9/11, despite the statements of both the 9/11 Commission and the White House to the contrary.
However, for now, let's accept Surowiecki's theory as kosher. Significantly, he only grants the crowd superiority over the individual if the following conditions are met (from the Publisher's Weekly review):
"Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions.
I could argue that the profile of the average Wikipedia contributer is predominantly skewed towards a young, techno-phillic, middle-class, white, male living in the U.S., so the 1st and 2nd criteria are not being adequately met, but I don't have to, because the Wikipedia falls down most strongly on point (4).
This is because the Wikipedia system does not aggregate opinions. One individual can partially or completely overwrite, in an atomic fashion, other opinions. Yes, there's a revision history, and a user could review all contributions and form an aggregate opinion that way, but this is a time consuming burden on the reader, and the stated objective of the wikipedia is to produce polished, individual articles. (It's worth noting that Everything2's model of keeping individual contributor's write-ups separate and intergrating the display of multiple write-ups into the site's standard modus operandi supports this kind of aggregation better than Wikipedia's).
they are usually started by people who do have an interest in (and therefore hopefull some knowledge of) the subject.
But that's not enough to produce good articles, not by a long shot. First, as you note, an interest in a subject is no gaurantee of any actual knowledge. Second, (as I noted elsewhere), a good article that rises above the mediocre requires not just a firm grasp of the subject matter, but an ability to write well. These are two seperate skill sets, and most people don't have both.
The quality of the first revision of an article is nearly always significantly better than if a random monkey was selected to write an article on a random topic.
If wrong information is being given, this is not really the case. If I'm asked for directions on the street and send people in the wrong direction, they're worse off than if I'd shrugged my shoulders or started speaking gibberish. But even if correct information is being given, we're talking about the difference between "appalling" (monkeys) and "poor" (most contributors). There's a reason why writing is taught beyond the universal high school level and why there are professionals around who make a living only because they write better than most.
My point is that it is not neccesarily cause for celebration to say that most initial articles are better than if monkey's wrote them, because there's still a long way to go to "good" or "great" and in between is the great sandbar of mediocrity, which Wikipedia is now making great speed toward. Without a change in methodology, Wikipedia will never get off that sandbar.
As I noted, there is virtual barrier that the first author be familiar with what he writes about.
But there is in fact no real barrier, beyond having a browser and an internet connection. You may operate according to some self-imposed restrictions, but there is nothing in the structure of the Wikipedia to enforce this, and as we found out when netiquette collapsed under the weight of AOL'ers in the mid 1990's, such virtual barriers are meaningless.
you should be arguing that there should be a higher barrier for that initial submission.
I'm not making any prescriptions here, actually.
lowers the effort required to submit corrections.
Lowering the effort required to produce something does not automatically increase the quality of the product. Indeed, it has been known to worsen the average quality of the product, flooding the arena with crap. We've seen this happen with email: when distributing a company-wide memo required much more effort than clicking 'send', my day was unlikely to be wasted reading about someone's free kittens. Thus, it is far from axiomatic that "the Wikipedia model for revisions is better" because of the low effort required for submitting corrections.
But the Wikipedia does fundamentally have better promise to evolve into something grander.
True. But it's not going to fulfill that promise with its current structure. Otherwise it's entirely possible that something grander will simply mean "better than the average contributer could write themselves" or in other words, "mediocre".
The harsh truth is that most submissions start off worse then mediocre, so while the editing process dramatically improves many articles, producing a very encouraging looking trend in these early days, the Wikipedia needs a mechanism that will allow it to escape diminishing returns or it will spiral towards mediocrity. I suspect that whatever than mechanism is, it will involve raising barriers to accepting corrections, not lowering them.
Good Lord! A thoughtful, well-reasoned, comment, that accepts the criticism and acknowledges the fundamentally experimental nature of the project, instead of treating the Bazaar analogy like it came down on stone tablets, while in a measured manner making a case for supporting said project?
On Slashdot?
My head just exploded.
The vast majority of pages tend to get better over time. Check it out for yourself with the random page link.
The point is that you and the Britannica editor are, sadly, both correct. The Britannica editor spoke of regression toward the mean and a trend toward medicority. You state that the vast majority of papers tend to get better over time: true, but this is true beause the vast majority of articles start off worse than mediocre. This is not surprising: understanding a subject well and writing well are two orthoganal skills sets that must both be present to write an article better than mediocre. Most people miss the mark on at least one skill set.
It's like PowerPoint. PowerPoint templates have mostly eliminated the real dregs of presentations: I never go to a conference nowadays and and see pages of illegible handwritten text on cloudy transparancies. But, as Edward Tufte argues, PowerPoint has also wiped out the high end: presentations all have a terrible sameness: a title page followed by an endless parade of bullet points.
If Wikipedia can not escape its regression toward medocrity, it will become of use, certainly, but it will not reach the stellar heights of its advocates' ambition.
the only reason that some views are much more biased than the views of the average wikipedia reader is a combination of apathy, laziness, or the lack of a sufficient number of readers who would "equilibrate" the article.
And that, right there, is why Britannica and its brethern win. When something is wrong or slanted in Britannica, no-one blames the readers. It's an editor or contributer who gets the rap.
Most readers/users of any product are not going to give a crap about contributing to that product, (and indeed, why should they? People have other things to do with their time, like using that information). If your formula for accuracy relies on a seachange in human behaviour, then I would suggest that formula has a serious design flaw.
Researchers should not be using encyclopedias.
Even when I'm making casual enquiries, I still like to get answers that are correct.
As even the article author admitted in his introduction, accuracy and fact checking in print encyclopedias is "not thoroughgoing" because it's just too big a job.
I think you misread this: I did too on the first pass. He's not saying it's impossible to be accurate or fact check thoroughly when compiling an encylopedia. What he's saying is that reviewing an encylopedia, print or electronic, can not be done comprehensively:
I know as well as anyone and better than most what is involved in assessing an encyclopedia. I know, to begin with, that it can't be done in any thoroughgoing way. The job is just too big. Professional reviewers content themselves with some statistics...
Presumbably, if a good sample of articles check out, then the process used to create the encyclopedia was valid.
I think this would be an *excellent* thing to happen to little Johnny. It would be anobject lesson in the importance of critical thinking
Sure, if little Johnny is doing a paper and is likeley to be corrected by his teachers. But what if its not for a paper? How does little Johnny know what he doesn't know, i.e. that the information is wrong? In any case, as was noted elsewhere, the danger is not with subjects like the Holocaust, which are watched liked hawks for now (but in a 100 years, who knows?), but lesser known areas which don't get as much scrutiny.
The ex-Britannica's example of the Hamilton birthdate is a good one: armed with the power of critical assesement you might notice there are internal inconsistencies in the article, but you would chalk that up to poor writing or research on the part of contributers, not a fundamental ambiguity in the historical record.
Best. Troll. Ever.
I tip my hat to you, sir!