Wikipedia != Authoritative? 783
Frozen North writes "Recently, this article in the Syracuse Post-Standard caused a stir by dismissing Wikipedia as an authoritative source, and even suggesting that it was a little deceptive by looking too much like a "real" encyclopedia. Techdirt suggested an experiment: insert bogus information into Wikipedia, and see how long it takes for the mistake to be removed. Well, I did that experiment, and the results weren't good: five errors inserted over five days, all of which lasted until I removed them myself at the end of the experiment."
Favourite funny wikipedia pages (Score:2, Interesting)
I tend to find that the more academic or obscure a topic the higher the quality of the page is.
bleh (Score:3, Interesting)
Worse, it's subject to the biases of whoever writes the article. I've seen some pretty bad stuff, horribly biased, passed off as a real encyclopedia author. It also sucks that people around here tend to insert Wikipedia links, thus inferring that they're somehow authoritative in any way. They're not.
Wikipedia != encyclopedia.
Wikipedia == blog
not very surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
How about another experiment? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would be very interested in the results.
Oftentimes, Wikipedia articles are updates the same day that events happen. This is one advantage over *any* "real" encyclopedia.
And not in-depth either (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia Errors (Score:4, Interesting)
Alex Halavais did the same experiment [halavais.net], changing 13 things, and all of those were changed. He did most of them over the course of the same day from the same IP, so they got caught.
Wikipedia is a tool, nothing more. If you believe everything you read on the internet, well, you get it.
You know, when I was in school ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually... (Score:3, Interesting)
With amount of people reading slashdot there's a possibility of many pranksters who didn't have any motivation to deface etc sites now have such motivation...
Be careful slashdit! May as well introduce the new slashdot effect.
Kuhn model of science (Score:5, Interesting)
WIkipedia, IMHO, is the epitomy of that concept: if you get enough people on the Internet to write a common text, and go to great lengths to democratize the process, then you will get the generally accepted "truth". Even scam busters like Snopes often resort to the line of reasoning "this sounds too much like an urban myth, therefore it's an urbam myth" variant on the same theme.
Don't get me wrong-- I love the WIkipedia. In my book, it's enough truth to get you through the day, and that's all I really need 98% of the time.
Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
There's thousands of pages in Wikipedia dealing with up-to-the-minute descriptions of cultural phenomena that won't make it into the Britannica for years, if ever.
But.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Then users will have a choice between the bleeding edge and possibly factually incorrect or the stable
version that's had some kinda of audit done on it. Another straw man argument exposed for what it is
Simon.
Yeah (Score:2, Interesting)
Despite the fact that Al writes newspaper articles which are reviewed by one or two other people and thinks these are unbiased truth, he thinks that wikipedia articles written and then reviewed by one or two other people are full of lies. Sure, if someone tries to sneak errors into wikipedia they can do it, just as someone could sneak errors into the newspaper or britannica if they wanted to.
The is a common misconception about what an encyclopedia is. It is not a place to cite as a source in a research paper, rather a place to get an overview of a subject. everything you find in an encyclopedia you need a source for before you can quote it in a paper, so in that sense it really doesn't matter if there are a couple of innacuracies because then you just can't find them in a primary source so that's it, end of story. The funny thing is Britannica and every other major encyclopedia has a huge disclaimer about how there is no guarantee of the accuracy of the information contained, yet Al continues to insist on it being gospel truth.
Lastly, for those who don't know, September 15th-20th is going to be one of the biggest moments in the history of Freedom. Wikipedia will hit 1 million articles, firefox 1.0 will be released, Adbusters starts their blackspot sneaker marketing blitz (which I don't necessarily agree with). In our country if you take a rich man, strip him ass naked and throw him in the middle of the woods, then in a week or two he will be relatively well off again. If you take a poor ignorant man and do the same then in a week or two he will be just as poor. Knowledge and social savvy is what separates the classes in the United States, not money itself. Information is a key foundation of knowledge. Wikipedia aims to bridge the information gap between the rich and poor, and if this Al Fasoldt guy can't see the good in that then there really isn't anything more that can be said for Wikipedia.
"Money Vector" is always felt upon Free Stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Anytime you have something that is both useful and free, and where it is competing with a paid product, you will always have the force of that paid product felt upon the free product.
Personally, I love Wikipedia. But this article is good in that it forces us to pay attention to the problem and try to fix it.
Re:surprising? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also it is worth pointing out that one should never cite sources in a paper from an encyclopedia, rather you should find the sources the encyclopedia gets its facts from and cite those. Anyone who has ever failed a paper for getting all of their facts from the encyclopedia, be it Britannica or Wikipedia, will know what I mean by this. So in this sense it doesn't even matter so much because if a Wikipedia fact isn't true then one just won't be able to find it in a primary source so citing it in a paper incorrectly won't be an issue. The problem is that teachers lie to little kids and brainwash them in thinking that an encyclopedia is an unquestionable source of all truth, when really nothing could be further from the case.
The source of all Wikipedia's problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
An article approval mechanism is under development and in testing at the test Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (you'll need to get an account to see it, mind you, and much of the user interface is currently in Finnish, but... :)
Re:How about another experiment? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you repeat a lie often enough... (Score:4, Interesting)
Kjella
Re:Case in point. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How about another experiment? (Score:3, Interesting)
THE SITE AND ALL INFORMATION, PRODUCTS, AND OTHER CONTENT (INCLUDING THIRD-PARTY INFORMATION, PRODUCTS, AND CONTENT) INCLUDED IN OR ACCESSIBLE FROM THIS SITE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND (EXPRESS, IMPLIED, AND STATUTORY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF TITLE AND NONINFRINGEMENT AND THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE), ALL OF WHICH BRITANNICA EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW. YOUR USE OF BRITANNICA.COM IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK."
This is from the disclaimer on the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Re:But.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I notice now that Nupedia no longer exists, sadly.
Re:Censorship (Score:2, Interesting)
Watched like a hawk... (Score:5, Interesting)
But I agree with what you said... if the wiki is considered unauthoritative, then it is more likely that people will scrutinize and correct the content. But the problem is that eventually this behaviour will result in the belief that the wiki is authoritative. I guess the best thing to do is to continuously raise this issue in order to provoke people to be discerning with respect to the wiki content.
Re:surprising? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I added an entry about myself (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:surprising? (Score:5, Interesting)
From an academic perspective, Wikipedia suffers the same problem that most of the Internet suffers: the information provided has no pedigree. There is a loud debate going on these days about the high costs of publishing academic papers. One of the points that is seldom made is that printed journals provide a pedigree for the articles that is hard to forge: the article was authored by a certain person, published on a certain date, said whatever it said. Far too much of the content that is quoted from the Internet is simply untraceable. It cannot be reliably attributed to anyone, it can often be changed at will, often by someone other than the original author.
Appeal to Authority Fallacy (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, accepting authority as truth is actually the first impediment to critical thinking. Maybe the students should be learning critical thinking skills in a logic class instead of from a librarian? If she said she teaches them research skills, then fine, but that's not the same thing as critical thinking.
I never use the wikipedia as a final word on anything. It's just a nice, *free* place to *start* my research. Sometimes the content is totally useless and other times it's very helpful.
Re:Your sig (Score:3, Interesting)
As for agnosticism, it would require the agnostic not to start with any preconceptions but he can have leanings toward the $RELIGION that he believes most likely.
I would also argue against those who say atheism is not a religion. It is a religion, and has the set of gods {} (the empty set), whereas agnosticism does not define the set of gods.
Re:Your sig (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Democratic, and you get as many votes as you wa (Score:4, Interesting)
Tthe "entry despots" you talk about get away with it mainly because the entirety of Wikipedia is now too large for any single group of individuals to police, so they can enforce their will by making multiple reversions, thereby making the cost of altering "their" page so much more higher. Everyone else finds the exercise so annoying they can no longer be bothered.
In which case, the process becomes less of a dialogue to reach a mutual agreement and more of a battle of wills to see who is the most rabid.
Re:surprising? (Score:4, Interesting)
Freud was not correct on most of his major theories, that is a fact that most research oriented psychologists will agree on. By most, I should say, somewhere in the neighborhood of 90%. Many therapists will agree that Freud's methods of psychotherapy were not useful in facilitating a lasting recovery.
That said, he was a very intelligent man. He was a brilliant physiologist, and had a lot of very insightful things to say regarding the human condition. I cannot emphasize enough that he was very competent and intelligent.
Now, what is the real problem with Freud? The fact that so many people mistook him for a psychologist. He was, as I said, trained as physiologist, primarily studying brain disease. His pre-therapy work was wonderful. He was not a psychologist, and his later delvings into human behavior should have been treated as philosophy, not psychology.
Unfortunately, this was at a time when psychology was in its infancy, and still had a long ways to go. Today Freud would be considered a philosopher, but certainly not a research psychologist.
As for Jung, he was a student of Freud, and although he agreed on many points, he did not on others. Still, the same applies to him (in general), and his philosophy has not stood up to scrutiny.
peer review doesn't always work (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree, however, that Wikipedia has a better model.
Re:One way around it... (Score:2, Interesting)
a) People would then begin to focus on the controversial commentary rather than the content and this could simply turn Wikipedia into another rant site.
b) The arguments would simply shift to what constitutes commentary and real content. After all, the "entry despots" already consider their biased opinions to be fact, not commentary.
c) What happens when you use up the quota in the commentary space? Does new commentary simply "bump" the old commentary, or does the first contributor get first say? I can see problems with both approaches.
Re:Your sig (Score:3, Interesting)
I have heard these positions (below) hotly debated, but just for the sake of popularizing them (because I think they make sense), here they are.
Agnosticism is the idea that there may or may not be a metaphysical realm existing outside the physical universe in which supernatural forces such as gods, angels, and demons can exist. Agnostics generally believe that, if this metaphysical realm does exist, it exists orthogonally to the physical universe and the two cannot interact at all, or only can interact in a very limited set of non-testable circumstances (death and migration of the "soul" from one to the other, for instance). Therefore, since no testing of such interactions is possible, it is not possible to verify or deny the existence of such a realm. Based on this, agnostics generally hold that it is of little value to choose one way or another regarding a belief in such a metaphysical realm...it's instead better to keep one's beliefs about such a thing open-ended.
Strong agnostics hold that this particular feature of orthogonality between the metaphysical and the physical universes is fundamental; it cannot change or be circumvented, and therefore not only is the issue open, but it always will be.
Weak agnostics hold that the metaphysical and physical universes are not fundamentally orthogonal--only based on our current state of awareness and knowledge. Weak atheists believe that someday, some particular confluence of events could occur that could allow enough testable interaction to decide the issue...it's that currently we lack the information necessary, but it will not necessarily always be so.
An analogy is often presented alongside agnosticism to better understand it. Given a sealed box, one is asked to form a judgment about whether the box is empty, containing only its own interior, or if there is something in the box (air, a ball, whatever). An agnostic is akin to someone that believes it is worthless to form an opinion regarding the interior of the box without any further information. If humanity has not yet developed the means to test the box (by shaking it, spinning it, opening it, etc), but the weak agnostic believes that someday we will be able to run these tests and perhaps make a determination. If there is something about the box that makes it fundamentally untestable, it will not yield any information to us about its interior no matter how advanced our technology gets, then the person is a strong agnostic. (It is worth pointing out that this box analogy is simply that--an analogy--and is only useful in this discussion insofar as these impossible states of existence for that box hold up. In other words, it would be silly to start discussing this box as if other features of boxes in general were relevant to understanding agnosticism...the other features of such a box are irrationally not relevant, as in the case of every analogy having only one salient feature worth drawing parallels to.)
Atheists believe that there is no metaphysical realm beyond the physical universe, and therefore no gods, demons, angels, and the like.
A weak atheist agrees that there is nothing fundamental that prohibits the existence of such a metaphysical realm, and that, while it could exist, it doesn't. This argument usually adheres to the idea that such a realm could not exist orthogonally to our physical universe, and therefore it would be testably present in some way if it did.
A strong atheist believes that such a metaphysical realm not only does not exist, but is fundamentally prohibited. This position is often philosophically intertwined with a belief that if something is fundamentally unobservable, then it effectively does not exist. This variant of this viewpoint is also often intertwined with a kind of relativity.
For example, if at the moment of our big bang 16 billion years ago, there was another big bang 32 billion light years away, the edges of these two universes would just now begin to interact. Before that interac
Re:I added an entry about myself (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:people arent skeptical enough (Score:2, Interesting)
Not quite. Wikipedia is not the symptom, it's an attempt at a cure. An increasing number of Wikipedians -- especially among the frequent contributors -- insist on citing verifiable sources in all articles. It is true that the average Joe visiting Wikipedia is not be skeptical enough. However, the average Wikipedian (i.e., a long-term contributor) possesses a healthy skepticism and respect for the truth.
Article writers who, desperately wanting to appear clever to their readers, encourage "experimenting" by intentionally making bad edits aren't helping matters. Instead of advocating vandalism, why not encourage readers to become full-fledged, healthily skeptical Wikipedians?
Re:Your sig (Score:3, Interesting)
I've experience deja vu. That feeling is associated with the Matrix. Therefore, the Matrix is real.
No, I'm not being cute, I'm making a point. Many religious leaders claim there belief comes from an internal feeling. Research has been done, and those feelings are, indeed, real, and Cat Scans and MRIs show certain activity. The origin of those feelings is a matter of some debate, but people really do feel uplifted, enlightened, happy, etc. The studies have advanced far enough that researches can use stimulus to induce the religious feeling in people on a fairly repeatable basis. Looks to be some chemical release triggered by situational settings.
Anyway, facsinating stuff. Imagine learning that Deja Vu isn't proof of the Matrix, but just some chemical reaction in the brain. Then what would happen to organized religion?
How do you deal with conflicts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Afghanistan is a nice example. Ask different ethnic groups about afghanistan, the answers are radically diverse. who will you believe? Theyll just keep deleting their articles forever.
For really conflicting facts, there should be a way to enter two different versions. Readers could then either choose or read both, knowing that thats conflicting information. That way the Wikipedia can be a source of information from BOTH sides. I'd take such an encyclopaedia over Britannica anyday.
Re:Part of the Problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's so simple (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, that's your opinion - but I'm somebody working at the coalface of history, and I don't see it. (Intertwined? Sure, sometimes. Irrevocably? Not in the least.) You haven't demonstrated anything other than the most superficial knowledge of the way history is actually done, so I'm not moved by such bland assertions. (Feel free to prove me wrong on that point, BTW.)
I fail to see how more details can come to light.
Well, of course they can - but again, this just shows you don't understand anything about how history is done. Do you think the US government, for example, conducts all of its discussions in public? It's my impression that they do not. "Details" of those discussions will eventually come to light, and may prove illuminating. Or not.
From which biased historians will pick elements that fit their pre-conceived view of events, and print millions of copies of books, with aid from their national governments, dwarfing and ridiculing information produced by anyone of contrary oppinion. That is the way it works.
That statement alone tells me you have had no contact with academic history. Very, very, very few academic historians sell (or even print) millions of books. They are ecstatic if they ever sell thousands of books. The rest of your statement is just rubbish. Sorry, you're talking through your hat. But I guess there is a reason why you chose the nick IgnoramusMaximus - why let knowledge get in the way of a good argument, hey?