Nitpicking Wikipedia's Vulnerabilities 545
tiltowait writes "A lot of Wikipedia critics point to hypothetical situations when giving reasons for not valuing the site. Wikipedia even has a 'Replies to common objections' article set up to field these. I'd rather look at some real examples of applying the same level of scrutiny to materials often held up as the Platonic ideal of 'scholarship,' such as peer-reviewed journals, conference papers, established journalism sources, monographs, and print encyclopedias. Even these have disclaimers because they can be can be vandalized or have their reliability and accuracy questioned. As dangerous as it is to trust unverified information, it can be just as bad to make prior judgments discounting information because the source happens to be anonymous. The above examples illustrate that all materials existing along a continuum of valuable information formats. Wikipedia articles can be useful for quickly obtaining factual overviews or as a starting point to further research. But that's just one librarian's opinion. How do tech-savvy people view Wikipedia?"
A better statement would have been... (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, Wikipedia probably contains more errors than EB, but it also contains many more articles. It would be interesting to know how these ratios compare.
Wikipedia Categories (Score:5, Informative)
So that's basically it, there is a spectrum of categories from where Wikipedia works well and has reliable information (mathematics, history and technology categories) to where it is just edit wars that get worse and worse (society and history categories). Wikipedia is fairly reliable about what ideas Godel had about mathematics, Wikipedia is completely unreliable if you are interested in reading about say France's Front National or Vietnam's National Liberation Front. Wikipedia has not gotten better over the years in this regard, it has gotten worse. There are left wing wiki encyclopedias like Demopedia [democratic...ground.com], Dkosopedia [dkosopedia.com] and Anarchopedia [anarchopedia.org], and right-leaning ones like Wikinfo [wikinfo.org], and I predict over the coming years these alternative wikis will become quite large.
One recent example I can give, one guy just popped up who is accusing virtually every left-wing or liberal person in the 1950's was a Soviet spy, and by virtually everyone I mean editing hundreds of biographies and inserting that they were spies. Doing this is fine if done in the right way, but he is a bit nutty or stubborn or whatever and he has a dozen people reverting his stuff but that doesn't do much good. Then we have Lyndon Larouche followers come in as well. Or way out communists saying nutty things. Wikipedia would probably be better off if these people all went off to their own respective wikis.
Re:Wikipedia rocks, BUT... (Score:5, Informative)
If you're allowed to cite any other web page, why can't you cite a Wikipedia article. As long as you put the date you accessed it in the citation, what information was on the page is even less ambiguous than the webpage.
Re:Wikipedia rocks, BUT... (Score:1, Informative)
Perfect example of a problem in Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the wikipedia article was BS. Pulling out a real text like "Fundamentals of Aerodynamics" by Anderson would confirm that the Newtonian and Bernoulli views are compatible, just two different ways of expressing the same phenomenon. But since anyone who thinks s/he knows something about something can edit a wikipedia entry we get entries like that, which spread falsehoods.
I personally avoid Wikipedia for that very reason.
I suggest to people that when they are interested in a phenomenon that they try to find a reputable website that focuses on **just** that phenomenon. For example, if you have a question in aerodynamics, look for an aero website. Et Cetera.
-everphilski-
Re:Editorial control (Score:2, Informative)
All you have to do to fix this problem is take the problem to the discussion page, or the talk page of the user who keeps reverting you. Simple enough. If they persist, get an administrator to help.
My thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
Last week I was a guest speaker for a group of education graduate students about Wikipedia (the course was on technology use in education; wikipedia was part of the curriculum). Before the lecture, sent them a few items I thought they should read - objective studies of Wikipedia's accuracy done by impartial, outside organization. Here's what I sent them:
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1) "A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles -- in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" -- when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-08-01/Featured_content [wikipedia.org]
PDF of research paper can be found at: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki. pdf [uiuc.edu]
2) An article comparing the WP to Brockhaus and Encarta has appeared in issue 21/04 of C't, a major German computer engineering magazine. It is titled
Full survey results can be found at: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/20 04-October/035339.html [wikimedia.org]
3) "As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects." - IBM study of Wikipedia - http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/results. htm [ibm.com]
4) Computer Science professor (and minor geek rockstar) Ed Felton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Felten [wikipedia.org]) posted in his blog about a
small-scale survey he did of Wikipedia: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=674 [freedom-to-tinker.com]
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As far as my personal interactions - as featured article director, I can say first-hand that we've been hitting really hard on the need to have inline cited sources in the article text. It's been an explicit requirement for featured articles for some time now (9-12 months or so). In many ways, this makes our content much more trustworhty than most other information sources.
Furthermore, purely from personal experience, I can say there's something to be said for the expert-hobbyist. For example, the "best" writer on wikipedia (in terms of number of featured articles written) is a 17 year old from New Jersey [wikipedia.org] who writes long, thorough, well referenced, accurate articles on, erm, British and the Bri
It does have its appropriate uses in academics. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Encyclopedia != Community (Score:5, Informative)
Not to nitpick, but NPOV is only one of three supreme rules, the other two being No original research [wikipedia.org] and Verifiability [wikipedia]. They must be all taken together, no one trumps the other.
So, if you're an expert, add a "Sources" section with references to back you up, that prove that your statements aren't just things that you believe, but are indeed the consensus of the experts in your field. "No original research" means that, in fact, Wikipedians explicitely are NOT equiped to judge whether something is an expert consensus or not. So, as long as you back your statement up with published sources (just as you'd do in an academic paper), you should be fine.
Also, if someone reverts you, and you know you're right, don't back down. Everyone on Wikipedia needs to be both bold and civil. Go to the "discussion" part of the article, explain that you're an expert, explain that you think this is also the consensus of other experts, and if they're being civil, they'll welcome your edits with open arms.
Re:Good for casual use; not for serious research (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Slashdo
Someone will probably modify the Slashdot article itself in the next five minutes. But the URL I give will retain unchanged forever. Of course, if the edit someone does in five minutes improves the information, my snapshot URL won't present the improvement. But then the future improvement isn't what your students read either.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Encyclopedia != Community (Score:3, Informative)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV#Pseudo science [wikipedia.org]
the task is to represent the majority (scientific) view as the majority view and the minority (sometimes pseudoscientific) view as the minority view (emphasis original)
If there's a minority view that the earth is flat (which I am sure there is), why _dosen't_ wikipedia discuss flat-earth ideas?
Secondly, a lot of the edits on wikipedia are done by students and faculty of academic institutions.
Yeah, but most (according the the grandparent) are done by a small cabal of losers. What's your point?
Finally, I'll note that you didn't actually address the charge that wikipedia is a community rather than an encyclopedia.
Re:How do tech-savvy people use it? Not at all. (Score:3, Informative)
OT: Re:Nailing theses to the library door (Score:2, Informative)
Being a librarian, I'm sure you've read Eco's The Name of the Rose. I read it in French while working in-country with a professor of Medieval French Culture, and I had a discussion with a historian at the Abby of Notre-Dame de Senanque where he claimed the story to be very caricaturial, which I assumed it to be.
But then we tried to see an original manuscript in the municipal library in Axe-en-Provence. We had been in libraries from Paris and Arras, all the way to Provence, and we were always able to study the manuscript firsthand. Of course, we had always done our homework, studied microfiche, etc., and only needed the manuscript for a few moments to inspect a few details. Well, the librarian in Axe was more of the archivist tradition. Her main complaint about us getting to see it was that she herself had only seen it once or twice.
From that time on, I've considered Eco's portrayal of librarians as gatekeepers more truthful than fiction.
Re:Good for casual use; not for serious research (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Encyclopedia != Community (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia is BOTH an encyclopedia and a community [wikipedia.org]. Just like Linux. Without the community there to find and fix bugs, and to contribute new code back to linux, it would just be shareware.
Re:Amusing read (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Encyclopedia != Community (Score:3, Informative)
Really? What is this [wikipedia.org] then?
Whose links are at the bottom?
Not to mention the discussion [wikipedia.org]...
Re:Enter Adam Smith.... (Score:3, Informative)
For example Google is paid for by advertising which adds a small cost to the products you buy. Public parks are paid for by your taxes. Church services: even if you never put something in the collection plate, you dog, you're still subsidizing it by the higher real estate taxes you have to pay because they don't pay any at all. And so on.
Some of the things you mention are exceptions that prove the rule, too: I doubt anyone thinks music recitals for which you pay are, as a rule, no better than those for which you do not. Occasionally the best artists play for free, but usually they don't, and the better they are the more their tickets cost. The only artists who play for free all the time and even at the top of their "career" are those in subway stations.
Secondly, I said things that are free end up worth their price (i.e. nothing). That's not to say that they can't start off being quite valuable, when there are significant barriers (of novelty, if nothing else, but often of technical knowledge) to participation, and only highly motivated and interested people participate. Remember when Usenet was mostly inhabited by people with PhDs, and a highly technical question on, say, operating system design could get a half-dozen answers in a few hours? Remember when folks put their real e-mail address -- sometimes their phone numbers -- at the bottom of Usenet posts? Or when your mail server got 5 e-mails a day for you, and each one was from a real person and worth reading? I'm guessing you know well enough that the demolishment of Usenet as a solid technical resources -- its replacement with, e.g. moderated fora like
And while perhaps
Finally, simply because things work OK is no reason to believe they couldn't work better with a better transaction model. Communicating by telegraph and Pony Express worked well enough in 1850, but that hardly means the Internet wasn't a big improvement. Just because we currently pay for things like roads, bridges and clean air through taxes and such, instead of figuring out a way to collect and distribute bazillions of micro-user fees all the time does not mean that things wouldn't improve, possibly dramatically, if we could.
Case in point: several communities with stifling traffic are struggling to find ways to implement some kind of micropayment scheme for use of roads, such as the FastTrak transponders used on the Bay Bridge and on certain Southern California roads. Experience has shown that a market (or in this case pseudo-market, since the price is rather artificially set) will allocate resources far more efficiently than any top-down one-size-fits-all solution. Once upon a time, when the population was lower and the traffic was lighter, these places could afford to just let folks use the roads for free once they'd been built. But zero cost meant people made unwise decisions, such as building sprawly communities where it was necessary for 150,000 people to drive
Re:Enter Adam Smith.... (Score:3, Informative)
But I still fundamentally disagree that free things are worthless. I don't buy your argument about church services - they are free. Ask a vicar/pastor/reverend if it's OK to come to his service without planning to donate to the collection. I can assure you he'll say it is, and even encourage you to come along. And church services continue to be available to people who pay no taxes, so I don't really buy the indirect payment argument.
Other things which are free: self-help groups. Mother-parent groups. Local bridge (the card game) clubs. Some public libraries. Public parks. I live in a society surrounded by things which are free, provided for the most part by the work of willing volunteers. (Aren't many fire services in the US built on volunteers? And this is the case for lifeboat services in the UK).
And back to usenet. Usenet *remains* a thoroughly useful forum. For example, comp.text.tex remains an excellent source of TeX knowhow. Has it reduced in worth due to dilution? Maybe a little. Not that I've particularly noticed. Will it 'end up' useless? Neither of us can see the future, but I doubt that very much.
Even the google point is questionable. Yes, I know that google is supported by advertising. Did you know that I use google hundreds of times every day without buying a single product? That sounds free to me...
We may be reduced here to arguing about definitions.
In my opinion, there is much in this world which is good, and free [including wikipedia, which is excellent for all it's not perfect]. I see no reason to believe that all that good, free, stuff, is going to necessarily deteriorate, and I find that a rather depressing prophecy.
Re:Encyclopedia != Community (Score:2, Informative)
- The article is clearly phrased in terms of what people believe ("Remote Viewing allegedly allows a viewer...") rather than stating it as fact.
- The rest of the article covers facts on studies that have happened, and what people have claimed.
Where's the problem? Are you suggesting that such articles should not even be allowed? Clearly, even if Remove Viewing is nonsense, it is a fact that people believe in it, and that people have tried to study it, and all of this belongs in an encyclopedia. Such facts may be useful to people who disbelieve in remote viewing, if they want to see what studies have been carried out, and attempt to discredit them.
For "loony opinions" to be represented, the page would have to be claiming that Remote Viewing actually existed. NPOV does not mean that their point of view should be presented as equally valid, it means that articles should be presented without bias, which is something I wish more authors would strive for.
Not true (Score:2, Informative)
To test the system, I searched for an entry that I assumed would be under the radar, something like the Nicaraguan electorial process. In there I changed the number of seats in the Nicaraguan system by a few seats and left it like that to see if anyone changed it back.
Result? My incorrect entry resided on Wikipedia for over a month, until I went in and fixed the error. During that time, its quite possible many a high school research used employed inaccurate data.
While its nice and all, there needs to be _some_ level of editorial process involved. Perhaps designate "moderators" per category like popular discussion boards do for each section.
Re:Encyclopedia != Community (Score:3, Informative)
I've found that the articles that I've looked at have been deep-linked to Public Museum's and University websites leading me to believe that over-educated, under-suppervised public servants do a lot of authoratative editing on the job and their spare time.