Observer Gives Wikipedia Glowing Report

JaxWeb writes "The UK newspaper The Observer is running an article about the open encyclopaedia Wikipedia. The article, 'Why encyclopaedic row speaks volumes about the old guard,' gives Wikipedia a glowing report and mentions some of the issues which have recently occurred regarding the project, including the need to lock the George Bush article in the run up to the election, and Ex-Britannica editor Robert McHenry's comments, as previously mentioned on Slashdot."

Finally

[GregoryKJohnson]

It's nice to see a traditional media outlet take a favorable---not just arms-length "hmm"---view of Wikipedia. I hope others follow suit.

Locking Articles

[Gob Blesh It]

Why do the Wikipedia admins need to lock popular, topical and controversial articles from editing? Is it because these articles somehow attract more vandals than well-meaning passersby and contributors?

Or is it just that these popular, topical and controversial articles make Wikipedia's fundamental flaws more obvious?

Maybe The Observer should be a wiki, too

[hunterx11]

From TFA:

According to the laws of aerodynamics, the bumblebee should not be able to fly. Yet fly it manifestly does, albeit in a stately fashion. So much for the laws of aerodynamics.

Erm, whoops [sciam.com], yes they should be able to fly. Their cliché is outdated.

Re:Locking Articles

[DrLZRDMN]

By locking them they fix a problem therefor making it not a flaw. However I do agreee that locking is not good. These articles re more likely to be fixed as well, because people know that they are a target. once I needed to look at the GWB article for a school assignment and it was vandalised, the article was gone except for something like "stupidest president". I reverted it because I needed to do work but if I didn't someone else would have, soon. Vandalisam of lesser articles is more damaging because they will go unnoticed for longer.

What makes Wikipedia interesting

[Solr_Flare]

Is that the wikipedia is designed around the original intent of the Internet in the first place. Nevermind what the internet has become in the modern era, it was originally designed to share and consolidate information from all its users. The Wikipedia is designed specifically to facilitate that. And, while in its default mode, it does leave itself open to people who want to make an arse of themselves, there are plenty of counter measures and options to such problems. All in all, it is satisfying to see the success of the project purely because it is nice to see the internet used for what it was intended for and do it well.

Re:Finally

[DrLZRDMN]

And when you find some thing, you fix it. Because something is wrong or vandalised, that dosen't make it wikipedia's fault it makes it the authors fault and yours for not doing something. Vandalism and inacuracies will be fixed do to the wiki nature. If the magazine sighted specific problem areas such as articles that have been vandalized or are innacurate, they would be fixed with in about an hour.

Re:Locking Articles

[Gob Blesh It]

Yes, I've seen obvious vandalism--and I mean obvious--on articles ranging from black hole theory to obscure Norwegian towns. Until I'd come along, they'd typically gone unreverted for weeks or more. And yes, I did revert them, but once you've read that a world-renowned figure skater was a member of GNAA, how can you trust anything you read on that site--especially when vandalism isn't always quite so obvious?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Maybe The Observer should be a wiki, too

[Random832]

The aerodynamicists revised their assumptions - the question is, can encyclopedists do the same?

Not just "political", any contentious issue.

[khasim]

Wikipedia is useful for some things, but when it comes to contentious political issues, it's pretty lousy.

It's lousy for anything that people get upset about. It's useful for looking up historical names and dates and events.

That is all.

Well, it's also useful for playing games with pages that you don't agree with until they get locked.

Re:Not just "political", any contentious issue.

[Gob Blesh It]

"It's useful for looking up historical names and dates and events."

Are you sure about that? More times than I care to remember, I've seen statements like: "Keira Knightley (born March 26, 1985 ...) ... made her film debut at the age of 11 in A Village Affair (1994)."

This does not exactly inspire trust.

My thoughts on Wikipedia

[xXunderdogXx]

Many people when first informed about the concept of Wikipedia scoff at the idea that you can get factual information from a medium that is open to everyone. Normally I just agre with them that it is a problem that requires some effort to combat.

Recently I've changed my whole view on reading information online, due mostly to thinking about the Wikipedia concept. Consider Wikipedia to be analogous to asking a classmate a question like "What does ecology mean?" or "Could you explain a null modem?"

Nobody would decry this as a fruitless effort to gain information, because it is quite possible that your friend knows a lot of information on the subject in question. So you take that information at face value, knowing that there is a possibility he's wrong. If the information "feels right" or "feels wrong" that's all you can tell. It then becomes a starting point for deeper investigation, not the final word on anything. In the end it raises another very important question: Who do you trust to have the final word on something?

Re:Locking Articles

[FooAtWFU]

You verify it. Wikipedia has a big fat disclaimer about how it makes no guarantees of validity. If your topic matters, then look it up somewhere else in addition to Wikipedia, and see if the facts seem to match. If you're doing research for something important, do not rely on Wikipedia alone- heck, if you're doing a major research paper or something, you shouldn't be using an encyclopedia, let alone Wikipedia.

You can also check the page history. Find an old version, see the "diff" between it and the current version, notice what stands out.

Wikipedia is a bit like the Internet in general. Some information is right, some is probably wrong (whether due to ignorance or malice). But unlike the Internet, anyone can edit Wikipedia to fix something. Now, they can also edit it to break something, but if they do it in a systematic fashion they have a rather high chance of getting caught, tracked down, and banned. We've had a variety of users like that in the past.

Wikipedia is a "convenience" source. It's excessively convenient. It can provide a useful summary of information, and you can then know what other information you ought to look up.

Re:Locking Articles

[Anonymous Coward]

how can you trust anything you read on that site...?

Same way you trust anything you read/see/hear anywhere, on the internet or elsewhere: you don't. Never ever rely on a single source of information, always use multiple sources, preferrably orthogonal to each other, preferrably including a source that opposes your culture (e.g. a communist Chinese source if you're American).

Re:Locking Articles

[ThousandStars]

The parent post precisely describes why Wikipedia shouldn't be considered a reliable post. The obvious vandalism isn't the worst part, because most readers will be able to discern it. Subtle vandalism is more insidious and ultimately compromises the integrity of articles sufficiently to make it useless to those uninformed about a particular subject -- which is the whole reason to have an encyclopedia in the first place.

Like the columnist, I'm excited about Wikipedia as an idea and unimpressed with its implementation. Without having real editors, however, it's hard to take it seriously.

Re:life before Wikipedia?

[FooAtWFU]

Architecture? According to our server page [wikimedia.org], we have five database machines (one master and four slaves), six Squid caches, and 23 Apache and memcached machines (to render pages). There are also two "other" machines for things such as images and NFS storage, and three Squid caches to be installed over in France (I believe they were donated there).

I'm fairly sure Jamesday is exxagerating regarding "200 or 500" servers; there are about ten servers currently being ordered for this quarter.

Re:Heh

[skybrian]

But isn't having more people contributing to Wikipedia supposed to be a good thing? Why isn't this "extra work" a nice problem to have?

a deeper comment about society

[argStyopa]

What you are seeing in the Wiki fights is simply a microcosm of the conflicts that have permeated western societies since, well, the rise of humanism.

Who is authority? Who defines truth? Why should I believe them?

In our pseudo egalitarian society, we can no longer even really understand WHY someone would obey a king, or the concept of Divine Right, except insofar as the king-as-thug interpretation, since he's got all the military power and can threaten us. But the fact was that a great many people believed the king was the king because he DID have the divine right to be there.

What we see in Wiki is the ultimate in relativism - the 'consensus' decides what's truth, which I think we can all agree is patently absurd. But relativism has so overtaken our societies that no fact can simply be stated without dissent anymore. I that sense, Wiki is merely a symptom, not a disease of itself.

As the author states, if you use it, you vote for its validity. If you don't, you don't. Personally, I use Wiki all the time, and particularly for 'hot topics' I find it constantly plastered with bias and political correctness. (But then again, so are articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica - more subtle perhaps, but there is a probably bias inherent in any extended presentation of just about anything.)

Wiki is a useful friend who knows something about everything - you can ask him or her whatever you want and probably get a right answer. It doesn't mean Wiki should be held in the standard of a bibliographic reference tool, any more than a useful friend would be.

Re:How else?

[Stormy Dragon]

The real problem is how they've chosen to define "perfection". Like any evolutionary system, Wikipedia will evolve into the state best fulfilling it's selection criteria.

And unfortunately, Wikipedia's selection criteria is not accuracy, but popularity. It works well in situations where there's a high degree of correlation between the two, but fails miserably in cases where there's not. Cases such as issues where there's a lot of controversy (i.e. politics) or issues where there is some fact that's commonly believed to be true even though it isn't.

Re:Locking Articles

[yppiz]

Locking is done as a last resort in the face of persistent vandalism. When a page is locked, ordinary users (anon and registered) cannot edit it. However, administratores can still edit the page. Additionally, the parallel discussion page for the entry is still editable.

Except for one exception - the front page of the Wikipedia - locks are never permanent, and usually last for 1 to 3 days. This small amount of time is enough for revert wars to cool off and for most vandals to lose interest in the page.

I haven't looked at these articles recently, but typically, even entries on controversial topics like Osama bin Laden [wikipedia.org] are unlocked most of the time.

I have thought about why articles are rarely locked - it's not just that the community values contribution, but also that the technology makes it so easy to undo vandalism, that many vandals lose interest. Additionally, by giving vandalism a rather short life on popular pages, which is by definition where vandalism would be the most visible, it discourages others from doing the same. The lifespan of vandalism on a popular page is measured in minutes.

The site makes it easier to undo an edit than to create it. If there weren't a version history and a revert feature, I suspect that vandalism would be a much greater problem.

--Pat / [e-mail]

Re:Wikipedia is anti-science

[FooAtWFU]

Generally, the quality of WP will converge to the mean of all users, a college education

You presume that each edit would bring the quality level average closer to that of the person who edits it. But really, if I'm ignorant about a certain topic, I'm not going to go through the article about it and "bring it down to my level", so to speak. In the real world, at least some people can realize that the other person writing the article is more informed than they are, and will not clobber the article in the manner you seem to suggest they will.

And Wikipedia is not about "science". It notably makes several provisions against "original research". Science and research should not be conducted on Wikipedia, though the progress of science and research elsewhere may be reported as such.

You do have the right idea about how Wikipedia is good as an introduction to an area, but certainly not a comprehensive guide to a topic. It's not supposed to be. It's just an encyclopedia, for crying out loud, not the end-all and be-all of reference works. If I want to learn the intimate details of a topic, I don't run to Britannica, or Encarta, either.

Re:Locking

[Citizen of Earth]

Why don't they implement a 'sandbox' where new additions go, getting published after a certain period of time and where previous authors can vote against the addition?

A problem with a straight-up voting mechanism is member bias. For example, if you were to post articles on Slashdot where one said "Bush is evil", it would be modded up whereas "Bush not so bad" would be modded down because of the makeup of Slashdot users: probably 50% lefty, 25% center, and 25% righty. The mods will represent the opinion of the lefties the greatest.

Re:Not only George Bush article

[AnuradhaRatnaweera]

Do you intend to say that an article about politics is more likely to be written objectively if done by a single person with a single person's biases?

Of course not. What I mean is that a model where a single article written by many is not going to work, because everybody will try to push their views into the article.

Many people writing many articles and letting the reader do the judging is the only way I can think of. And the media is, or at least supposed to be, doing exactly that.