Co-Founder Forks Wikipedia 382
tmk writes "Larry Sanger, first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, plans to fork the project. In Berlin he announced the start of Citizendium — the citizen's compendium. Main differences: no anonymous editing, and experts will rule the project. Members of Wikipedia were not amused."
Strange logic (Score:5, Insightful)
if the current base is really so bad and unreliable as he makes it look, this will result in taking over everything bad but shutting out the broad mass of eyes that could spot a error and correct it.
Even worse, seeing the much lower editor/article ratio, i cannot see how he thinks to ever archive some kind of quality census. A random article browsed there will be with a very high likelyhood just a copy of the wiki article. So trying to get people to think its more reliable (and thus view it with less suspicion/ less "thinking") is a bit like cheating the user.
Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy isn't using the information to crush opposing opinions, he's just offering a different filter, without destroying the original. That's creative, additive, not destructive. There are a lot of definitions of freedom - some of them involve having the capability to make informed decisions. It looks at the offset that having this new Wikipedia fork will increase at least that kind of freedom, rather than subtract anyone's freedoms.
Ryan Fenton
Who decides who is an expert? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, experts have also known to be wrong. In the sciences, there are great debates. Einstein turned the world upside down afterall, and none of the previous experts would have had it right. In history, there are debates, and theories that are hotly contested - such as the thought that Egypt didn't have iron tools to make the pyramids, even though iron has been found in the great pyramid insitu (in place).
And different experts have different biases.
How will different viewpoints get across? In the wiki, at least, as an informed user, I can look up the discussions and history of pages. I don't have to depend that the latest page is 100% correct nor do I expect it to me.
It seems to me that any furhter chase for perfection is like chasing a rainbow for that pot of gold.
reliability? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I think 99% of the claims are bullshit. You have political people out there who claim Wiki is bogus because the articles don't match up with their agenda. I think the majority of the claims probably have to do with subjective, delusional interpretations of that nature.
That notwithstanding, I've still never really found Wiki information to be significantly inaccurate. Maybe I am not looking in the right places, but even when an entry is defaced, it's pretty obvious and often it's quickly corrected. I still don't think there is any encyclopedic source anywhere that is as dynamic and comprehensive (and probably willing to be updated based on consensus discussion among a wide variety of participants).
So is this notion of Wiki being a questionable information source warranted? Or is this some ambiguous claim that seems to be passed on and on without much substance behind it?
Abandon Ship? (Score:5, Insightful)
It does seem to me, however, that this is an overreaction to some of the bad press that Wikipedia has gotten over the last year or so. If you listen to the news media, wikipedia is an untrustworthy haven for trolls, flamers, liers, Colbert-elephant vandals, and so on. While it is true that Wikipedia isn't perfect and no one should base a research paper on it, in my experience the quality of information has actually been quite good. So I don't think there's really a huge problem to be addressed. Which means there's not much to gain by forking it. (I assume by "fork" they mean "we're going to steal all the hard work that's been denoted so far so that our new product doesn't have to start from scratch.")
On the other hand, what do we have to lose with the new version of wikipedia? To my mind, the most important aspect of Wikipedia was transparency in contradistinction to authority. Instead of being based on authority (e.g. if it's in Britannica, it's in true because it's Britannica and presented with a set of polished, edited, and reviewed "facts", when you look up something on Wikipedia you get the whole process. You see the front page, the article itself, but also have access to the discussions that go into that page. If something is controversial you see the controversy. This affords a kind of meta-information every article that opened up a whole new kind of information from enyclopedias. No longer just a static repository for authoritative information, it became a dynamic view into the process of cataloging information.
The new citipendium or whatever (clumsy name) threatens to reverse all of that. What made wikipedia revolutionary was it's rejection of "experts" (e.g. authority) in favor of democracy. Clearly the initial anarchy had to be toned down. Instituting onymity may be a great advancement. But closing it to "experts" is a huge step back.
It seems like a repudiation of the very heart of the open philosophy. Isn't this move akin to someone taking Linux and "forking" it into closed source OS? No matter how good the resulting OS could be, haven't you torpedoed the philosophical basis of Linux by doing so?
If you only care about a good OS (or, by analogy, a good encyclopedia) then I guess there's no reason to be worried. But if you care about the open source movement, then this is cause for grave concern indeed.
-stormin
Re:once again "openness" fails (Score:5, Insightful)
Completely the opposite. The openness allows someone with a "better idea", yet to be proven, to attempt to prove it better, without having to start from scratch.
Re:Strange logic (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at the concept (starting with a 1:1 mirror of wikipedia, adding all new articles from wikipedia, mirroring wikipedia changes in imported articles that havent been changed locally) it makes no sense.
"""
This is true, IF this is the way that they first launch it. If they are smart, they'll snag and fix (a lot of it if not all), then launch.
"""
but shutting out the broad mass of eyes that could spot a error and correct it.
"""
I think you're missing the point. That being that it _is_ the broad mass of eyes that have produced that peice of crap in the first place. I cannot tell you how many articles I've found on wikipedia that are completely full of crap. And since I don't have the time to sit around and watch for when someone comes along and changes it back or to something equally false, the few that actually know something can't make things right.
"""
Even worse, seeing the much lower editor/article ratio, i cannot see how he thinks to ever archive some kind of quality census.
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1) The editing ratio is moot if things are correct.
2) Experts of a field can output quality much more readily than non-experts. So, who cares if fewer people are looking at it? The people that _are_ looking at it actually know something.
"""
So trying to get people to think its more reliable (and thus view it with less suspicion/ less "thinking") is a bit like cheating the user.
"""
1) It is/will be more reliable b/c experts will be going through and fixing the errors.
2) People (in general) do NOT go through the wikipedia with suspicion but take it as absolute fact. Furthermore, wikipedia is do little if anything to change this perception. So, it isn't really this guy who is/will be cheating the user, but wikipedia. It is this guy that's making moves to _fix the problem_.
Re:once again "openness" fails (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Having an Wikipedia alternative where a real (I hope) expert watches entries like this and provides good solid data and knuckle draggers are not allowed to correct the "expert" with pop culture bullsh1t can only be a good thing.
Don't get me wrong, I still love the Wiki... I just don't understand why the bad vibes.
$diety bless Wikipedia [i-bless.com]
Re:Not a wiki? (Score:1, Insightful)
"A wiki (IPA: [w.ki] or [wi.ki] [1]) is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration."
Funny, but the option for registration of authors is clearly part of the defintion. Nowhere else in the article is it claimed that any crackpot who wants to register should be allowed to do so.
Fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Abandon Ship? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:reliability? (Score:4, Insightful)
There may be variations on this theme where enough details are wrong to call the article into question, but it seems like an article would have to be really, really wrong for it to fail in the encyclopedia's mission -- to provide a general background on a wide variety of subjects.
Grammar and writing quality is a bigger problem, IMHO, and that really can't be solved without an army of copy editors.
of course it's a wiki (Score:1, Insightful)
Perhaps you should instead use a new term for that model. Free and Unrestricted Content -Ki?
Experts need 'personal space', too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, the "experts" you know are a lot more polite than the ones I'm familiar with. I think that if anything, someone who thinks of themselves as an expert is more likely to wipe out information which they perceive to be 'incorrect;' intellectual debates can get pretty heated, after all.
I think the only way that an expert system could work is if edit rights are restricted to certain individuals, allowing each person to basically have their own article about a particular controversial topic. For instance, if you looked up string theory or evolution, there would be several different articles to choose from on string theory, written by several distinct "experts," each with different backgrounds and expressing a different perspective on the issue. It's a big mistake to let one expert have edit rights on content written by someone else whom they disagree with, and expect them to just play nice.
Maybe the string theorists would get along and let each others' work be; perhaps the evolutionarians would as well. But how do you think the article on Islam is going to work? I could think of people who might both be well-described as "experts," who nonetheless might have little tolerance for the opinions or work of the other. People kill each other over philosophical disagreements, where religion and politics are involved -- do you really think that they wouldn't revert each other's stuff online?
I think it's a mistake to try to cram too many different viewpoints into one article. This is the trademark of an encyclopedia, to be sure -- one article per entry -- but it's one of the reasons why encyclopedias traditionally aren't used for real research. It's just not possible to have one monolithic article for each topic and still preserve the context and flavor of each argument; to have an honest discussion of a contentious issue requires that you give each of the different viewpoints a separate space in which to express their argument, and then read them each in context.
Any 'expert system' which lets one 'expert' overwrite another is probably going to have just as many revert wars as the layman's Wikipedia; the only difference might be the grammar level used in the ad hominem attacks in the discussion pages. Being an 'expert' doesn't instantly make people respectful of dissenting views; if anything, my experience has taught me the contrary. The more developed someone's opinions on something are, the less likely they are to accept the dissenting point of view as valid. There are exceptions to this, but they're somewhat rare.
My ideal system would be one where I could go to a topic and see a consensus-based general introduction, which would be publicly editable and have a tracked history. This would allow me to get an idea of the "man on the street" perspective -- it might not be correct, and it might be totally at odds with what scientists or experts think at the same time, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of value. (E.g., it would be helpful to know of the wide gap today between the scientific consensus on global warming and the hoi polloi; the latter is important even if it's wrong, just because it's widely held.) Separate from this would be the 'expert articles.' The expert pages would each have a single author (which might be a real person, a psudeonymous entity, or a group of people acting as author -- for example a committee), and express a particular viewpoint. I would be free to agree or disagree with these, and they might contradict one another. That's the nature of knowledge.
Re:reliability? (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed.
Wikipedia can reliably be consulted for the date of the Boston Tea Party, where the first nuclear tests happened, and can even give a reasonable account of the Triple-Entente and the outbreak of WWI.
You won't, of course, be able to find out if George Bush is indeed the worst president ever, whether Britney and K-Fed are getting divorced, or which is better, Coke or Pepsi.
I don't have any problem with that.
Pure ego (Score:3, Insightful)
This really sums up 95% of the opposition to Wikipedia. (The other 5% comes from people who actually contribute to Wikipedia and whose opinions, therefore, actually count for shit.) It's petty egotism.
The contents of any given article are either factually correct, well-organized, and well-written, or they are not. And as far as Wikipedia goes, there are some really excellent articles and some really awful ones, and a bunch of relatively mediocre articles in between. There are some areas -- the physical sciences and European history, for example -- which are generally pretty good, and there are some areas -- biographical articles in general -- which are of much lower quality overall. Some articles, like the ones on quantum chromodynamics, are mostly maintained by people who have the necessary expertise, but who seem to think they're writing for people who already have expertise in the subject.
The bottom line, though, is that a good article is a good article whether it is written by a PhD or a "bored 17-year-old". The expert is more likely to be able to write an article off-the-cuff, while the 17-year-old is going to have to do more research to write the same article, but either way, the end result stands or falls on its own merits. There is such a thing as expertise, but there is also such a thing as a well-informed layman. Arguably, encyclopedias are written for laymen and other non-experts: a professional particle physicist isn't ever going to look up fermions in an encyclopedia.
The sad part is that experts could make a significant contribution to Wikipedia (and many, in fact, do), but that's only possible if they don't stomp in the door with raging egos expecting lay users to just roll over because some random netizen claims to have an advanced degree -- a claim that often made falsely anyway. That's appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy. If you are an expert and you are interested in educating the public then you should be willing to take the time to back up your arguments with evidence and, most importantly, do so calmly and politely even when not everyone else is. If you're not interested in educating the public -- and doing whatever it takes to accomplish that task -- then Wikipedia doesn't need you. Neither does anyone else, in fact. Go masturbate with your ego somewhere else.
Wikipedia is as successful as it is because it invites active public participation, and simply being able to participate as a peer is the incentive that drives contributors. Encyclopaedia Britannica is as successful as it is because it pays experts to participate. Citizendium offers neither money or treatment as a peer. It doesn't take an expert to see that Citizendium will be authoritative... and very nearly devoid of content.
Reputation system was a good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
All they'd need to do is create a verification system where you could submit your credentials and identifying information (if you wished), then tag your user id with an "expert" tag that linked to your areas of expertise. They wouldn't necessarily even need to give those experts more power, just identifying them in the revision history would cause their version to survive (sometimes being reverted back to) unless it was too radical or misinformed (which can still happen even with experts).
Re:Hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Pardon my skepticism, but there appears to be no-one watching the ruling experts and making sure they actually are experts on the fields of the said articles. As the current front page of Citizendium states, just about anyone will be able to become one, and they'll mainly be there to resolve content disputes. Lack of self-judgment unfortunately isn't constrained to anonymous users on Wikipedia either.