Wikipedia Corrects Encyclopedia Britannica 381
javipas writes "Despite all the controversy about Wikipedia's work model, no one can argue the potential of a project that has so effectively demonstrated the usefulness of the 'wisdom of crowds' concept. And that wisdom has detected a large number of mistakes in one of the most revered founts of human knowledge, the Encyclopedias Britannica. Among the wrong information collected on this page are the name at birth of Bill Clinton and the definition of the NP problems in mathematics."
Purposeful (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not the crowd, it's the 3-4 people... (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't sound like a big deal, until you realize that it's the fringe stuff that can be consulted the most by adults, particularly those who consider themselves well educated.
How many big fish in little ponds have axes to grind? More than most of us suspect, I'm guessing.
Re:Score +5 (Troll) (Score:5, Interesting)
The most convenient solution wins (Score:5, Interesting)
Since wikipedia creates a community for users, it means people will link in to wikipedia more than any other encyclopedia (communities create links.. and links create higher page ranks).
If some other encyclopedia wants to be king, then they have to increase their page rank. The other encyclopedias will have to create communities and create reasons for people to link to them, in order for them to increase their popularity on google.
Since people usually choose the most convenient option, and since wikipedia is the most convenient option available on google for our mice to clicky dicky, the convenient option will win. It's not the fittest or the strongest that survive, but rather the most convenient solutions [z505.com] that survive.
Re:Errors (Score:5, Interesting)
Wisdom of the Mob fails when Fact contradicts Culture.
Not a reliable source (Score:3, Interesting)
The Encyclopedia Britannica has often been junk. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not true in my experience. In my experience, Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen used high-pressure tactics to sell encyclopedias to poor, uneducated people by telling them that their children needed an encyclopedia to become educated. Educated people knew it was better to go to the library.
EB has always been full of inadequate articles that were inadequate because the EB wanted to seem comprehensive, so it had a lot of articles, but didn't want to use a lot of expensive paper, so there was never enough space.
A good example was the EB article on Barbara McClintock [wikipedia.org], 1983 Nobel Laureate in Medicine for her amazing, pioneering work in genetics. Quote from Wikipedia: "In 1930, McClintock was the first person to describe the cross-shaped interaction of homologous chromosomes during meiosis. During 1931, McClintock and a graduate student, Harriet Creighton, proved the link between chromosomal crossover during meiosis and the recombination of genetic traits."
Why did it take 53 years for Barbara McClintock to win her Nobel Prize? Because other scientists had difficulty believing that genetic elements could jump from chromosome to chromosome.
I haven't looked at an EB article in the paper edition in many years, but at one time the EB article about Barbara McClintock was short, maybe 600 words, and gave no idea of the fact that her scientific papers are so extensive they require 40 feet or more of shelf space.
The EB article about Barbara McClintock was subtly misleading in other ways, also.
From the Wikipedia article: "The importance of McClintock's contributions only came to light in the 1960s, when the work of French geneticists Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod described the genetic regulation of the lac operon, a concept she had demonstrated with Ac/Ds in 1951."
Apparently because the controlling purpose of the EB has been to reduce amount of paper required, and apparently because the EB has always been more about creating a way for salesmen to be intimidating than about excellence, a lot of the EB articles have been worse than useless, because they are misleading.
The EB has been a vicious business run for profit, in my opinion. The articles have always been lacking in excellence, because excellence would have cost more.
Re:Errors (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. A similar problem occurred with me when I tried to edit the Christopher Columbus page. Try including quotes from his journal that show he intended to forcibly enslave the native Arawaks, or attempt to write about what Columbus did when he first met them, and it just gets deleted. Instead, the article tries to show him as some well-meaning Christian who found gold in rivers, or politely asked where he could find it. When I queried this many times on the talk page, the response I got was along the lines of, "Yes, we know he enslaved them, and we know he went after gold, but let's not get too caught up on these aspects, because Columbus wasn't unique in doing this." So you have an article where the word slave is mentioned once, and there is not one statement regarding the actions that Columbus and his men undertook to use the Arawaks as slaves to find gold.
I used to love Wikipedia, but that incident made me realise it's nothing more than a starting point to get a very basic idea of a subject and then move on.
Re:Not a reliable source (Score:3, Interesting)
Each to their own I guess
Wisdom of experts is no better (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9082690/circ
Britannica's business model is broken (Score:3, Interesting)
I once paid for on-line access to the full Britannica encyclopedia. I kept it for a while, and then cancelled my subscription. It didn't worth it for me. Perhaps other people would find it useful, but it's simply not for me. When I cancelled my subscription, I specifically told them that free sites like Wikipedia have put them out of competition, and it makes no sense to charge for access to their articles. Not only that, but I would say that for some articles (eg about computing) I would very much prefer Wikipedia or other sources even if the full Britannica was freely accessible, and I'm sorry to have to say this. I am not sure how Britannica makes money nowadays, but I'm afraid their business model is broken in our era. They have to adapt or die.
That said, Wikipedia is not perfect (and I do contribute [wikipedia.org] and sometimes donate nowadays, although I was somewhat more critical in the past), but it's better than many of the alternatives. What could make Wikipedia work better would be a more volunteerist-cooperative ethic among its many members. Perhaps its lack thereof is a result of its publicity: It has become so big that people outside the Internet volunteerist culture have joined and use it for purposes other than creating a good education resource. There is also little coordination between the different language communities. However, the publicity of Wikipedia has made the world of wikis and Internet collaboration (in the open source way) more known to the masses, and this is a significant achievement. Wikipedia is now a good resource and I'd like it to remain as such or become better.
Re:Britanicca is useless. (Score:5, Interesting)
1) The admins delete a lot of stuff fairly arbitrarily and sometimes even for false reasons (to paraphrase: it only takes a very small community to delete stuff).
2) There does not appear to be an easily accessible history of deleted stuff.
And what are the odds that the wikipedia will last longer than paper from the 1900s?
Re:Score +5 (Troll) (Score:2, Interesting)
Although your argument makes sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Errors (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Errors (Score:2, Interesting)
Are These Mistakes Or Intentional? (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, I understand that the Encyclopedia Britannica is meant to be an authoritative source, but is it possible that some inconsistencies or errors were introduced in a similar manner?
Macropedia/Micropedia split is what ruined it (Score:2, Interesting)
But all that changed in the late 70s. My father bought a new edition and now there were two sets of volumes, the Macropaedia and Micropaedia. We had the old and new sets side by side for a while, and it quickly became obvious that the split was at best unhelpful. Time and again I'd look something up in one set, fail to find anything and have to go to the other. There was no apparent rhyme or reason to it. And in quite a few cases neither new set had the information contained in the older edition.
Then one day I came home from school and found the new edition wasn't on the shelves any more. It seems my father had looked up something - I no longer recall what it was but since he was a cardiologist and an avid reader of history it was probably something about medicine or history - and had been so appalled at what he found he dumped the entire thing in the trash.
We continued to use the old edition for a long time after that, but of course it got progressively more out of date and we eventually donated to some library. Sadly, I don't think there's really anything up-to-date that is comparable to what Britannica was before it was ruined. And I doubt there can be: We're no longer in the 19th Century, when an educated person could actually hold a significant fraction of human knowledge in their head. There's just too much information and not enough financial incentive to hire the huge editorial staff you'd need to organize and present it consistently.
My conclusion is that as our base of knowledge continues to expand the Wikipedia approach, flawed though it may be, is the only viable path forward.
Re:Errors (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Britanicca is useless. (Score:1, Interesting)
Hopefully archive.org will catch things. Perhaps it's a good idea to also 'freeze' wikipedia once or twice a year and create a snapshot?
Even creating a dead-tree version that can be geographically distributed to various libraries may be a good idea since, properly maintained, paper can last a long time. (Print it with non-acidic ink on cotton paper.) One strong EMP pulse or major solar flare event and all our electronics can be fried (see US-Canada Eastern Blackout), but at least the knowledge will be saved for future archaelogists.