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."

How else?

[Random832]

'The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection,' sniffed EB's executive editor, Ted Pappas. 'That premise is completely unproven.'

That premise is a tautology given the assumption that "perfection" is attainable by any means.

The Pet Goat

[idiotnot]

There are editors for a reason -- throwing out a picture that's a central point of a goddamn Michael Moore hit piece shows that some of the content isn't what you'd call, "objective." In fact, it makes Fox News look like an example of journalistic integrity.

And it's not only this article. I was looking through a few things on Eastern Europe, specifically, the revolution in Romania in 1989. It's one thing to explain what happened -- it's another to assign motivations, for which you have zero evidence.

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

life before Wikipedia?

[Jamesday]

"Just as one day kids will wonder if there was life before Google". Well, I'd say it is good that Wikipedia is in the company of Google.:) And also in the top 100 English language web sites according to Alexa. I suppose it's certain that this experiment is doomed to be a flop.:)

I'm biased, since I'm one of the roots for the Wikipedia/Wikimedia servers.

I suppose I should ask: any interest in a Slashdot interview on the capacity planning and technical side of Wikipedia? That's my area... of course, that also means I'll say what we'd love to have donated (anyone got a couple of racks and 100 megabits/s spare?:)) Oh, sorry, I'm supposed to have a neutral point of view...:) Or is that I'm supposed to be serious in public? Never can get that straight...:)

Re:Locking Articles

[Gob Blesh It]

From what I've seen of Wikipedia, vandalism strikes obscure articles as much as it does the articles of the moment. Besides, if the article is really so popular, vandalism ought to be reverted within a timeframe approaching zero. Isn't that premise the entire foundation of Wikipedia?

That there is a need on Wikipedia to lock articles whenever traffic happens to spike indicates, to me, a serious flaw in the model.

Re:life before Wikipedia?

[Jamesday]

Servers? We have servers? You must mean the 40 servers which donations purchased in 2004. Thanks to those who donated.:) Now, if someone could just tell me when we'll stop growing so I can work out whether I need to plan for 200 or 500 by this time next year...:)

Re:Finally

[Gob Blesh It]

And what of everyone who read the article before someone more knowledgeable noticed the mistake and corrected it?

And please note I'm not talking of small errors of interpretation or language. I'm talking about honkers like "Prof. George Peabody [wikipedia.org] expanded on string theorist [wikipedia.org] Brian Greene [wikipedia.org]'s work to develop rope theory [wikipedia.org]" (paraphrased)--two months uncorrected when I read it on the Columbia University [wikipedia.org] article. You'll find shit like this scattered across the entire encyclopedia, if you're watchful.

Re:Heh yes, it is /.'ed

[Jamesday]

Holes today were an unruly crawler. The appropriate /25 is now firewalled at the squids. Yesterday two of the five database slaves were down for a while. Site was available but it was slower than usual on the database side.

Performance issues these days are mostly due to uneven apache load balancing. We're working on it.

Who's the "well-known crackpot"?

[FleaPlus]

From the article:

Then a well-known crackpot wrote a Wikipedia page about himself, only to have it, er, rendered more objective by other contributors. This drove him wild. Again the page was locked (in what seemed to me to be an admirably detached state) to prevent further vandalism.

Does anyone know who this is referring to?

On a side note, some time ago I tried to create an article [wikipedia.org] on the infamous AI crank Mentifex [nothingisreal.com], but Mentifex himself (who also frequents slashdot [slashdot.org]) ended up vandalizing the article repeatedly. It got so bad and was so difficult to maintain that in the end the article was simply deleted [wikipedia.org].

Locking

[FiReaNGeL]

Even if locking articles would fix the vandalism problem, it isn't the best solution IMHO.

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?

For an example of some of the real problems

[antifoidulus]

with Wikipedia, read this [wikipedia.org]. It seems there are some people who refuse to acknowledge that the other side may have some good points and they try to boil complex social problems into 1 sentence solutions. Now this is not nearly as popular an article as George W. Bush I am sure, but I would be willing to be that a 3rd grader is much more likely to do a report on homelessness than they are Bush.....

Scribes and Theocrats

[Baldrson]

One wonders what would have become of the Enlightenment had Guttenberg's press been instantly Wikified so that everything from Luther to Decarte had been subject to immediate editing, retraction and deletion by the the Roman Church, with their only recourse argument with armies of decons, friars, monks, priests, bishops and popes.

Wikipedia /.

[FooAtWFU]

Wikipedia is above Slashdot: it already routinely gets about a thousand hits a second, another hundred from Slashdot don't make much of a difference. In particular, if Slashdot links to some articles, then the visitors will be served the pages from one of the Squid caches, which isn't quite "free" but is pretty darned cheap in terms of resource consumption. It doesn't even touch that Apache or database machines.

Now, if you want to get more interesting, Yahoo! Japan got us pretty well once or twice after linking to something from their front page, which gave more than 400 extra hits per second; we survived. :)

Alexa's page ranking [alexa.com] also puts Wikipedia well above Slashdot.

Wikipedia is anti-science

[j_heisenberg]

this doesn't have to be bad, but it's a fact. Scientific practice around the world works by peer review. If you want to publish, your work is peer reviewed. If you want to get employment/government money, you are judget by peers with better credentials.

WP lets everyone edit (nearly) every page. The only distinction is time spent online. If you spend 4 hours, you can edit twice as much as with 2 hours. Generally, the quality of WP will converge to the mean of all users, a college education (considering that people with less skills pro'lly won't edit).

So if you want to "get a clue", WP is for you. If you are a bit above the noob in a topic, look elsewhere.

Re:Finally

[crazyeddie740]

Wikipedia is considering a "stable" version, consisting of articles that have gone through a formal peer-review process. The stable version would be locked down, but would be updated from time to time. Problem is, nobody is really sure how to go about doing this. I think this is a good place for the Encyclopedia Britanica to step in. They've been hit hard by the rise of the Internet. From the quote from TFA, it sounds like their trying to spread FUD about the Wikipedia. So apparently they find the Wikipedia a threat. They have experience at fact-checking articles, and have a staff of experts who could perform peer-review. The Wikipedia (with the exception of some images and other multimedia files) is available under the GFDL, which allows commercial use. So why doesn't Britanica just take Wikipedia articles, work the bugs out, and find a way of making a profit for their troubles?

Guardian vs. Observer

[hey]

Can somebody in the UK please explain the relationship between the Guardian and Observer newspapers. Thanks.

Re:Heh yes, it is /.'ed

[crush]

Holes today were an unruly crawler. The appropriate /25 is now firewalled at the squids. Yesterday two of the five database slaves were down for a while. Site was available but it was slower than usual on the database side. Performance issues these days are mostly due to uneven apache load balancing. We're working on it.

I love it! Unintentional poetry. (And no I'm not being snarky or rude or something, I really do like the images of "unruly crawlers" being stopped by "firewalls" at the "squids" while the "database slaves" collapse and there are continuing problems with the "balancing apaches".)

Re:Locking Articles

[legirons]

"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?"

Well, put it this way: I sometimes edit a "normal" wiki, without the page-locking feature. Thousands of pages are vandalised every hour. You can hardly get up for a coffee before the front-page is vandalised again.

Now, wikipedia is better than that, but mostly because it's got so many people tending it. I've seen vandalised articles, done a refresh, and seen it corrected within minutes. But that requires there to be hundreds of people constantly watching edits. I'm quite grateful to Wikipedia that they provide such a well-tended facility that I can use. Blocking IPs, "vandalism in progress" alerts and the like all help too, of course.

As to the contraversial articles, I think yes, they do attract more vandals than contributors. Some people just have nothing better to do (naming no names, but one criminal in particular). Other people might use scripts. Some people may even be paid to vandalise stories (I know the US government has a department of media relations whose job-description involves putting false or misleading stories into the international media, and it would be silly to think that some distasteful countries (again, naming no names, israel) didn't have people whose job it is to present certain topics in a favorable light)

Maybe they're just testing wikipedia. who knows? But I certainly find it surprising when they unprotect these contraversial articles - it must be a bit like opening ornamental gardens in a warzone, and just keeping teams of people ready to pick-up litter or replant beds, walking around behind the vandals as they do their work...

articles can be messed up unintentionally too

[raindrop#1]

I added some information to the wikipedia article about my home town a while ago. Some time later, I revisited it to discover that the article had become rather innacurate.

This wasn't the result of malicious action. What had happened was that a succession of well meaning people, despite knowing little about the subject, had edited the article in an attempt to improve the language. Each edit had subtly changed various sentences until, eventually, facts had become transposed and confused. The net result was that the article contained incorrect information.

I corrected the errors, but it did make me wonder how many other articles had suffered a similar fate. I guess this is a problem when you allow anyone to edit an entry, even when they have no expertise in that area. For popular articles it is not really an issue as the problems will be quickly spotted. But the inaccuracies in the article about my home town had stood for quite a while before I happened to spot them.

Re:Locking Articles

[FinestLittleSpace]

the guardian IS the observer.

The observer is the sunday version of the guardian.

Re:Wikipedia is anti-science

[Dr. Zowie]

If you want to get employment/government money, you are judget by peers with better credentials.

Not true. I make my living that way, and as part of my work as a scientist, I occasionally help to review articles for journals or sit on review panels for funding proposals to NASA. Those panels are not full of idiots, by any means -- but the people conducting the reviews are generally not any more senior or experienced than the people submitting the articles or proposing new research.

WP lets everyone edit (nearly) every page. ... [so] the quality of WP will converge to the mean of all users, a college education (considering that people with less skills pro'lly won't edit).

No, actually, that argument applies very well to the demise of USENET in the 1990s but not to Wikipedia. In the 1990s, America Online and other ISPs gave exponentially increasing numbers of ordinary people access ot USENET, and most of the interesting unmoderated fora were drowned in a sea of mediocrity and the signal-to-noise ratio dropped to where USENET was no longer useful to professionals and academics.

While it is not (formally) moderated, Wikipedia is a different type of forum. Most individual posts don't clog up the medium the way that FAQs (the questions, not the lists of answers), contentious idiots, and spam clogged up USENET.

It remains to be seen whether the noise level will rise enough to drown out the signal, but as Wikipedia gains notoriety it seems to be scaling pretty well.

Re:Locking Articles

[icebike]

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

You could have stopped right there. If it has no validity, it is worthless for its stated purpose.

Its very reason to exist therefore is violated and suspect, and its integrity nill. Anything that happens to be correct can not be discerned from that which is not. In short, a huge waste of time and effort.

Re:Finally

[RWerp]

The problem is, you may be doing fools work, as we say here in Poland. What's point of fixing some error on Monday, if on Tuesday somebody inserts the same error, or another one? People are generally willing to help, but if they know that their hard work of creating a good entry may be destroyed by a wanton vandal, they won't put much heart into it. This is something different than submitting patches to CVS.

Re:Scribes and Theocrats

[Anonymous Coward]

One wonders what would have become of the Enlightenment had Gutenberg's printing press been instantly Wikified, so that everyone from Luther to Descartes had been subject to immediate editing, retraction and deletion by the the Roman Catholic Church, and their only recourse argument with armies of deacons, friars, monks, priests, bishops and popes.

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

Article hogs

[rush22]

Then there's the problem of people so stubbornly committed to a Wikipedia article they've worked on that they will never let anyone else change anything but the smallest typo, (usually claiming expert knowledge--though that doesn't mean expert communication skills) Even if everyone on the talk pages says "this article is crap," or "I don't understand this part" or, god forbid, changes anything, the article hog will revert it back. It eventually just comes down to who can hold out the longest, and you end up with a poorly written article by one person, not a community. They may even have their facts straight, but that doesn't mean it's written well and easy to understand.

These people end up not just managing, but micromanaging the article and won't let anyone else get a word in edgewise. It's not really community-based when there's a dictator running the show.