Wikipedia Corrects Encyclopedia Britannica 381
javipas writes "Despite all the controversy about Wikipedia's work model, no one can argue the potential of a project that has so effectively demonstrated the usefulness of the 'wisdom of crowds' concept. And that wisdom has detected a large number of mistakes in one of the most revered founts of human knowledge, the Encyclopedias Britannica. Among the wrong information collected on this page are the name at birth of Bill Clinton and the definition of the NP problems in mathematics."
Score +5 (Troll) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Score +5 (Troll) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Score +5 (Troll) (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad most of the administrators think they know more than you, simply because they read an article on the subject. The others are all to happy to demonstrate the Wikipedia caste system to you.
[citation needed [wikipedia.org]]
Re:Score +5 (Troll) (Score:5, Funny)
"After the Flood, these kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia." [citation needed]
I mean, what the fuck?
"There is debate whether this migration happened over land with lower sea levels during the post-flood ice age, or before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart, or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters." [citation really fucking needed]
Kangaroos crossing thousands of miles of ocean on rafts.. I'm not sure these guys are strictly adhering to their anti-pot-smoking policy.
Re:Score +5 (Troll) (Score:4, Funny)
[citation needed] [xkcd.com]
Are These Mistakes Or Intentional? (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, I understand that the Encyclopedia Britannica is meant to be an authoritative source, but is it possible that some inconsistencies or errors were introduced in a similar manner?
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No, and I'll explain why I think so.
The important difference between Trivial Pursuit and an encyclopedia here is that Trivial Pursuit's answers are just a short phrase or small set of words. You cannot copyright the answer (because facts are not copyrightable), but you can copy the set of questions and answers because aggregating
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Wikipedia administrators regularly abuse their power - in any way possible. Th
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There was Ikkyu's classic discussion - unfortunately, overly censorious admins much like yourself wiped and locked it [wikipedia.org] - again to hide their own abuses.
You have admins like SlimVirgin, who run around abusing the admin tools to hide things [wikipediareview.com] (she's also one of the most prolific liars and frauds when it comes to banning anyone she disagrees with for any reason).
There's another cl
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Sorry to say it, but Tycho's commentary is as full of pseudo-intellectual bullshit as the rest of his writing. He's clever, but rarely insightful.
And how am I denying the problem? Wikipedia most certainly has problems. Right there. People have been abused, and that's sad. I try and correct it where I can. Sometimes Jimbo makes a ruling that I find supremely ill-advised. Hopefully that will change with time.
The biggest (solvable, not fundamentally rooted in the problems of the real world a la Israel and
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The "Cons" are - it's completely worthless. It's a mess, and anything that might get referenced on a regular basis is something on which wikipedia's listing should ABSOLUTELY NEVER BE TRUSTED.
WP needs a vast overhaul. It needs the lead
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sorry, i couldn't help it.
Britanicca is useless. (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, where's the articles on Fanboy [wikipedia.org]? Or the List of minor Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters. [wikipedia.org] (and for that matter, detailed summaries [wikipedia.org] of individual episodes [wikipedia.org]) Or for that matter, where's the article on the Slashdot effect [wikipedia.org]
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it does not have enough content.
talk: I hate wikipedia. It's at best a well spoken gentleman in a pub. It sounds right but I can't be sure.
(captcha: deserves)
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Re:Britanicca is useless. (Score:5, Funny)
Fixed that for you.
Re:Britanicca is useless. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Britanicca is useless. (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, where's the articles on Fanboy? Or the List of minor Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters. (and for that matter, detailed summaries of individual episodes) Or for that matter, where's the article on the Slashdot effect
I'm glad something is documenting every minutae of our popular culture. Popular culture of the past is fascinating, and often tells you a lot more about what it was really like to live in the time than journalistic or encyclopedia articles or the works promoted to "high culture" of the period.
For example I love old newspaper strips from the turn of the century to the Great Depression. They're endlessly fascinating, ofen very well written and draw you into a world that is very similar yet completely different than our own. They're also incredibly difficult to find, even some of the ones that were enormously popular (like Buster Brown or Mutt and Jeff), and there is almost nil written about them. Someone else might find this in Old West dimestore novels, or minor Victorian theater, who knows. What I wouldn't give for the "fanboys" of the past to have documented every minutae, because there are a lot of great works have simply faded into obscurity because they were considered "throwaway pop culture" at the time.
That's the beauty of Wikipedia; it's limitless and only takes a small community (even of one) to decide something is relevant. If it's something you don't find interesting then there's no reason for you to bother with it. And who knows? In fifty years an article about Fanboyism, Buffy characters or the Slashdot effect may be extremely treasured information to someone else.
By the way how long did it take The Beatles or Charlie Chaplin to make it to Britannica's pages?
Re:Britanicca is useless. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Britanicca is useless. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Britanicca is useless. (Score:5, Interesting)
1) The admins delete a lot of stuff fairly arbitrarily and sometimes even for false reasons (to paraphrase: it only takes a very small community to delete stuff).
2) There does not appear to be an easily accessible history of deleted stuff.
And what are the odds that the wikipedia will last longer than paper from the 1900s?
Re:Britanicca is useless. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also, it's hard to imagine Britannica being unable to find loads of mistakes in Wikipedia.
Funny... (Score:2)
You forgot a step: No caching (Score:3, Informative)
Dynamic pages -> excessive memory usage -> swapping -> disk failure
You forgot a step: No caching -> repeated regeneration of dynamic pages -> excessive memory usage -> swapping -> disk failure. Robust content management systems, such as SLASH, Scoop, and MediaWiki, can handle loads of anonymous users because they use cached pages [kuro5hin.org], or static pages that represent a materialized view [wikipedia.org] of the dynamic page.
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Although your argument makes sense (Score:3, Interesting)
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Reference, please?
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ok lets compare the number of wiki errors (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ok lets compare the number of wiki errors (Score:5, Funny)
you're talking about e. e. cummings again, aren't you?
A novelty but nothing more. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A novelty but nothing more. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A novelty but nothing more. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A novelty but nothing more. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, to me and most people Wikipedia really is far more valuable than Britannica - simply because we have no access to Britannica. And I also think the vast majority of wikipedia pages are quite good - at least the ones anybody is interested in. Certainly a much higher S/N ratio than the Internet at large. I even have a downloaded copy of wikipedia on my PocketPC, it's amazing how rarely I can not settle issues or questions that arise by consulting it.
For every good example... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wisdom of crowds is a pretty good concept, but in reality it turns out that the crowds aren't always so wise.
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The point (Score:2)
Actually, I don't think the article really has a point, except to have fun. But every joke has some message as well, even if you have to make it up yourself.
Wikiality bites (Score:5, Funny)
So says Stephen Colbert.
Britannica should also check its facts about elephant populations. I heard it has tripled.
Nice, but doesn't the Britannica have Copy Editors (Score:2)
Purposeful (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Purposeful (Score:5, Funny)
I love irony.
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Re:Purposeful (Score:5, Insightful)
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A Bit Biased (Score:2, Insightful)
Both Wikipedia and EB have their place. Wikipedia is great for getting a quick overview of something while you're sitting at your desk, or looking up random information like the plot of an individual TV episode. EB is better at having a bit more academic cred (at the very least, EB's mistakes are actual
The first rule about errors .. (Score:2)
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Sources... (Score:2)
Features (Score:2)
and wikipedia (Score:2, Funny)
A Very Old Dispute (Score:2)
It is kind of funny to see this come up now, given that this has been a very old dispute between Wikipedia and Britannica.
Slashdot has already had at least [slashdot.org] three [slashdot.org] articles [slashdot.org] in the past few years on this topic.
It's not the crowd, it's the 3-4 people... (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't sound like a big deal, until you realize that it's the fringe stuff that can be consulted the most by adults, particularly those who consider themselves well educated.
How many big fish in little ponds have axes to grind? More than most of us suspect, I'm guessing.
On the other hand... (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot citation (Score:5, Informative)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.
This article has been tagged since July 2007.
Seriously though, if you're interested in the details behind this comment, see the article about it in wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
Re:Slashdot citation (Score:4, Funny)
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Old news, please disregard (Score:5, Insightful)
The most convenient solution wins (Score:5, Interesting)
Since wikipedia creates a community for users, it means people will link in to wikipedia more than any other encyclopedia (communities create links.. and links create higher page ranks).
If some other encyclopedia wants to be king, then they have to increase their page rank. The other encyclopedias will have to create communities and create reasons for people to link to them, in order for them to increase their popularity on google.
Since people usually choose the most convenient option, and since wikipedia is the most convenient option available on google for our mice to clicky dicky, the convenient option will win. It's not the fittest or the strongest that survive, but rather the most convenient solutions [z505.com] that survive.
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The funny thing is - I see Wikipedia linked on the web extremely rarely. I don't think that really explains Wikipedia's high page rank.
OTOH, Wikipedia is almost perfectly designed to spam Google. It's full of keywords, and linked keywords, and every pa
Not a reliable source (Score:3, Interesting)
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Each to their own I guess
The Encyclopedia Britannica has often been junk. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not true in my experience. In my experience, Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen used high-pressure tactics to sell encyclopedias to poor, uneducated people by telling them that their children needed an encyclopedia to become educated. Educated people knew it was better to go to the library.
EB has always been full of inadequate articles that were inadequate because the EB wanted to seem comprehensive, so it had a lot of articles, but didn't want to use a lot of expensive paper, so there was never enough space.
A good example was the EB article on Barbara McClintock [wikipedia.org], 1983 Nobel Laureate in Medicine for her amazing, pioneering work in genetics. Quote from Wikipedia: "In 1930, McClintock was the first person to describe the cross-shaped interaction of homologous chromosomes during meiosis. During 1931, McClintock and a graduate student, Harriet Creighton, proved the link between chromosomal crossover during meiosis and the recombination of genetic traits."
Why did it take 53 years for Barbara McClintock to win her Nobel Prize? Because other scientists had difficulty believing that genetic elements could jump from chromosome to chromosome.
I haven't looked at an EB article in the paper edition in many years, but at one time the EB article about Barbara McClintock was short, maybe 600 words, and gave no idea of the fact that her scientific papers are so extensive they require 40 feet or more of shelf space.
The EB article about Barbara McClintock was subtly misleading in other ways, also.
From the Wikipedia article: "The importance of McClintock's contributions only came to light in the 1960s, when the work of French geneticists Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod described the genetic regulation of the lac operon, a concept she had demonstrated with Ac/Ds in 1951."
Apparently because the controlling purpose of the EB has been to reduce amount of paper required, and apparently because the EB has always been more about creating a way for salesmen to be intimidating than about excellence, a lot of the EB articles have been worse than useless, because they are misleading.
The EB has been a vicious business run for profit, in my opinion. The articles have always been lacking in excellence, because excellence would have cost more.
Earlier Slashdot article: (Score:2)
Pre-Wiki EB Corrections (Score:4, Funny)
Wiki is now operating at the level of a 9 year old.
OTOH, perhaps Wiki will have an article on how often
Yes, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Conservapedia points out Wikipedia's bias (Score:3, Funny)
put up a link in their "Breaking News" section to their page listing examples
of Wikipedia's strongly liberal bias (you did know that, didn't you? Wikipedia
is SIX TIMES MORE LIBERAL THAN AMERICA! (as reported by Wikipedia on their
page about Conservapedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia [wikipedia.org] )).
As of 11PM PST, July 23rd, Conservapedia has a link to the bias page at the top of
their "Breaking News" section on their home page. But here's the direct link:
http://www.conservapedia.com/Bias_in_Wikipedia [conservapedia.com]
A few choice examples:
A devastating critique of Wikipedia by Fox News describes the impact of Wikipedia smears on popular golfer Fuzzy Zoeller.
Wikipedia is sympathetic to Fidel Castro in its entry about Cuba.
Wikipedia's entry for the Renaissance denies any credit to Christianity, its primary inspiration.
Plus 63 more! Enjoy.
Wikipedia is getting better (Score:5, Insightful)
Over all I'm positively surprised at Wikipedia's ability to continually get better, work on not only the content but also the form factor.
A greater emphasis on references and citations has greatly contributed to some articles.
There are a few problems, such as the fact that important and well known scientists are still reluctant to contribute.
Overall though, Wikipedia is continually evolving and getting better, which is a whole lot more than can be said about Britannica or any other encyclopedia which have pretty much kept to their centuries old methods ideas.
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Like me - I'm not important or well known but I simply got fed up with edit wars and so I've given up Wikipedia and a few musical artists are probably the poorer for it
9/10ths science expertise is beneath the waves (Score:2)
You probably didn't mean it quite the way you wrote it, but it's worth correcting anyway for the benefit of other eyeballs.
The accuracy of scientific reporting does not have a strong correlation with the public visibility of the scientist doing it, in general. In some cases, the well known scientists are not the important ones at all, but merely those who are best at self
Oh no! (Score:2)
Why Britannica is better (Score:2)
When some makes an error in Britannica, almost nobody finds out.
See the problem here? You have to be an author, and not a user, for this to be considered a "feature".
Britannica's business model is broken (Score:3, Interesting)
I once paid for on-line access to the full Britannica encyclopedia. I kept it for a while, and then cancelled my subscription. It didn't worth it for me. Perhaps other people would find it useful, but it's simply not for me. When I cancelled my subscription, I specifically told them that free sites like Wikipedia have put them out of competition, and it makes no sense to charge for access to their articles. Not only that, but I would say that for some articles (eg about computing) I would very much prefer Wikipedia or other sources even if the full Britannica was freely accessible, and I'm sorry to have to say this. I am not sure how Britannica makes money nowadays, but I'm afraid their business model is broken in our era. They have to adapt or die.
That said, Wikipedia is not perfect (and I do contribute [wikipedia.org] and sometimes donate nowadays, although I was somewhat more critical in the past), but it's better than many of the alternatives. What could make Wikipedia work better would be a more volunteerist-cooperative ethic among its many members. Perhaps its lack thereof is a result of its publicity: It has become so big that people outside the Internet volunteerist culture have joined and use it for purposes other than creating a good education resource. There is also little coordination between the different language communities. However, the publicity of Wikipedia has made the world of wikis and Internet collaboration (in the open source way) more known to the masses, and this is a significant achievement. Wikipedia is now a good resource and I'd like it to remain as such or become better.
Pros and Cons (Score:4, Insightful)
TWW
And so the errors of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet that Wikipedia editors sectetly read the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Re:Errors (Score:5, Funny)
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And trust nme, I know about these things - I have a degree in Nonexistentiology from May-Dupp University.
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Re:Errors (Score:5, Interesting)
Wisdom of the Mob fails when Fact contradicts Culture.
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The same holds true for the wisdom of the 'elect', history has shown that their needs to be a deep suspicion of both, able and intelligent people are just as bone-headed and misguided as anyone else, but this bone-headedness always has to wait for the next generation to look back from the current one to see how hopelessly naive they were. Many experts of the past were just as ignorant and barbaric as any other man, its just that experts c
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this is however a standard caveat. one cannot read a version of the eb from colonial times without being
Re:Errors (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. A similar problem occurred with me when I tried to edit the Christopher Columbus page. Try including quotes from his journal that show he intended to forcibly enslave the native Arawaks, or attempt to write about what Columbus did when he first met them, and it just gets deleted. Instead, the article tries to show him as some well-meaning Christian who found gold in rivers, or politely asked where he could find it. When I queried this many times on the talk page, the response I got was along the lines of, "Yes, we know he enslaved them, and we know he went after gold, but let's not get too caught up on these aspects, because Columbus wasn't unique in doing this." So you have an article where the word slave is mentioned once, and there is not one statement regarding the actions that Columbus and his men undertook to use the Arawaks as slaves to find gold.
I used to love Wikipedia, but that incident made me realise it's nothing more than a starting point to get a very basic idea of a subject and then move on.
Re:Errors (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, it took you a problem with editors to figure that out? I would have expected anyone on Slashdot to recognize that immediately.
Am I too old or something? Are all "those damn kids" being taught that Wikipedia is now an acceptable source to quote without verification?
Wisdom of experts is no better (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9082690/circ
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Thanks for demonstrating this in your own opinion piece.
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Just one thing though. Do not ever again mention male circumcision in the same paragraph as female genital mutilati
Re:Errors (Score:5, Insightful)
You know why people compaign against it? Because it was done on us when we were infants, without our consent or any ability to reverse the damage done. It is the ONLY cosmetic medical proceedure allowed to be performed on a child with a parents preference.
Even a small amount of HONEST research will reveal that circumcision is an evil practice.
It was started in the english speaking world as a cure to masturbation - because at the time (late 1800s) masturbation was considered the root of all evil. Dr Kellogg and a few others got everyone to start cutting off foreskins - Dr Kellogg also encouraged applying carbonic acid to the clitoris for the same reasons. Infact FGM was practiced in the united states within living history - see the book "The Rape of Innocence" by Patricia Robinett - a woman born in kansas in the 50s who had most of her labia and her clitoris removed.
So before you godwin the thread again, know what the fuck you're talking about.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/background_brie f ings/aids/434880.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Well, the only reason I'm aware of is in the Old Testament that circumcision was prescribed for the Israelites. Many Christians have continued this practice because it was said to be more sanitary and was originally prescribed by God and thus intrinsically not a harmful practice.
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Because the right keep your body safe from harm trumps the right to impose your stupid supernatural beliefs to anyone else, including your own children.
Re:Willy (Score:5, Funny)
It's a repeat of "bloggers are journalists" (Score:3, Insightful)
Hang on (Score:2)