Observer Gives Wikipedia Glowing Report 224
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Finally (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Finally (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Finally (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Finally (Score:2)
So, Britannica business plan... (Score:2)
2. ?????
3. Profit!!
I think it might be step 2 that's stopping them....
Re:Finally (Score:3, Interesting)
Locking Articles (Score:5, Insightful)
Or is it just that these popular, topical and controversial articles make Wikipedia's fundamental flaws more obvious?
Re:Locking Articles (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Locking Articles (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Locking Articles (Score:2)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:2, Funny)
Agreed. None of the figure skaters in GNAA are all that good and they'll take any opportunity to overstate their achievements.
articles can be messed up unintentionally too (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:2)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:2, Interesting)
The observer is the sunday version of the guardian.
Re:Locking Articles (Score:2)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:2)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:2)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:2)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Locking Articles (Score:5, Insightful)
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 / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Re:Locking Articles (Score:2)
A dedicated vandal can just refresh the article every minute and if anyone reverts him, he can revert it back. With controversial topics it's slightly different - people would start changing the article, while not understanding the topic and the controversy sufficiently, then become angry when someone rev
Re:Locking Articles (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Locking Articles (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Locking Articles (Score:3, Informative)
Glowing report? More like optimism. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Glowing report? More like optimism. (Score:4, Informative)
Nonsense. He says he and countless others use it all the time. He says he finds the articles useful and more timely than EB's. He cites the articles of George Bush and Sollog and Tsunami as examples of Wikipedia's enormous success. He even begins the article by comparing Wikipedia to the bumblebee: all of our theory says that it shouldn't work, but it does. This is not a man waiting for things to get better; it is a man who thinks things are great now. Perhaps you only read the last paragraph where he says that someday it will as invaluable and popular as Google. That hardly means he isn't praising its current state. RTFA next time.
Re:Glowing report? More like optimism. (Score:2)
How else? (Score:3, Interesting)
That premise is a tautology given the assumption that "perfection" is attainable by any means.
Re:How else? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 common
locked articles (Score:4, Funny)
And hey, look! We've locked the article again, since it's been featured on Slashdot. Lovely. :)
Heh (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Heh (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Heh yes, it is /.'ed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Heh yes, it is /.'ed (Score:3, Interesting)
Performance issues these days are mostly due to uneven apache load balancing. We're working on it.
Re:Heh yes, it is /.'ed (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia /. (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, if you want to get more interesting, Yahoo! Japan got us pretty well once or twice after lin
Re:Wikipedia /. (Score:2)
Whilst I don't doubt that wikipedia is useful to a far wider audience (and receives more hits) than slashdot, your logic neglects to take into account where alexa's page ranking comes from. It is apparently taken from "aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users" [alexa.com] - is the proportion of slashdot visitors with this toolbar going to be lower than that for wikipedia or other sites, given slashdot's target audience?
Maybe The Observer should be a wiki, too (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
If he had only consulted the Wikipedia. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If he had only consulted the Wikipedia. (Score:2)
Fix "occilating" to "oscillating"
I'd do it myself, but I trust nothing on Wikipedia, including spelling. If you care, then you fix it.
Re:If he had only consulted the Wikipedia. (Score:3, Informative)
Your reason for not fixing it yourself Doesn't Make Any Sense, BTW.
Re:Maybe The Observer should be a wiki, too (Score:2, Insightful)
The Pet Goat (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not just "political", any contentious issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you sure about that? More times than I care to remember, I've seen statements like: "Keira Knightley (born March 26, 1985
This does not exactly inspire trust.
Re:Not just "political", any contentious issue. (Score:2)
Argh! (Score:2)
Re:Reasons for editing Wikipedia (Score:5, Funny)
I always think of Wikipedia as being quite like the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You'll find out a lot from reading it, if not always what you actually wanted to know...
Re:The Pet Goat (Score:2)
But then you have 'facts' like, "G.W.B. sucks", which some wanker out there will consider a fact, since people seem to have a pretty skewed vision of what a fact is these days. God bless relativism, where one mans opinion can be his version o
The bumblebee argument (Score:3, Informative)
In truth, the only reason such a "proof" exists is that the laws were applied incorrectly; the scientists involved used the explanations for single-foil flight (i.e. birds' wings.)
Whether they did so accidentally or as a joke remains the domain of speculation, but the truth is that the laws of aerodynamics can account for bumblebees quite nicely.
What makes Wikipedia interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What makes Wikipedia interesting (Score:2)
OTOH, you can see the currency and objectivity of the corporate approach to information control with this query [britannica.com]. At least it gives you an answer quickly.
Re:What makes Wikipedia interesting (Score:2)
life before Wikipedia? (Score:4, Interesting)
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:life before Wikipedia? (Score:3, Funny)
-BB.
Re:life before Wikipedia? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:life before Wikipedia? (Score:2)
Hehe, that gave me a chuckle. Like you though, I'd love to see a Slashdot interview on the capacity planning and technical side of Wikipedia, both to inform us and to oil the donations machinery.
Not knowing your architecture, your mention of 40 servers possibly turning into 200 or 500 got me worried. I sure hope that the huge majority of these are caching machines spread across the community, otherwise you have a severe problem. The sort of non-scalability that those 3 numbers
Re:life before Wikipedia? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm fairly sure Jamesday is exxagerating regarding "200 or 500" servers; there are about ten servers currently being ordered for this quarter.
Re:life before Wikipedia? (Score:3, Informative)
The Paris squids began serving their first content today.
Who's the "well-known crackpot"? (Score:4, Interesting)
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].
Re:Who's the "well-known crackpot"? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Who's the "well-known crackpot"? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, Sollog denies that it means "Son of light, light of god" and says it's derived from "sol" and "logos", giving a meaning of "the word of the sun" (which is clearly mentioned in the Sollog [wikipedia.org] article).
The Sollog/Wikipedia incident was covered on Slashdot back on December 14, 2004 [slashdot.org].
Re:Who's the "well-known crackpot"? (Score:2)
Why was the George Bush article locked? (Score:2)
Re:Why was the George Bush article locked? (Score:3, Informative)
Locking (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Locking (Score:2)
Re:Locking (Score:3, Insightful)
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
My thoughts on Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
For an example of some of the real problems (Score:4, Interesting)
wikipedia is run by rightwingers (Score:2, Funny)
Re:wikipedia is run by rightwingers (Score:2)
To digress, I think almost every human is a greedy hypocrite. I just think we ought to admit and build governmental and administrative infrastructure to deal with it.
Admitting it is the first part.
Re:wikipedia is run by rightwingers (Score:2)
I just think we ought to admit and build governmental and administrative infrastructure to deal with it.
So Wikipedia should be a government operation? Without the ultimate free market (is that rightwing enough for you?) that the internet is, Wikipedia would never have happened.
Boycot anything if you'd like. I, for one, doesn't boycot leftwing music and media. I just read NYT critically and enjoy U2 without letting Bono influence my being a conse
Scribes and Theocrats (Score:3, Interesting)
a deeper comment about society (Score:4, Insightful)
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:a deeper comment about society (Score:2)
I find that for contentious issues, it at least presents both sides of the argument. For instance, look at the UN entry. It discusses criticism and reform of the organization and it actually mentions the Oil-For-Food corruption scandal, unlike most major news outlets which bury that story.
Re:a deeper comment about society (Score:2)
This is the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in days.
Wikipedia is anti-science (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
No way will it converge to the mean. (Score:2)
That would only be true if each person was wandering around Wikipedia editing perfectly good articles down to their own level of ignorance. While that concept is comedy gold, it's not reality. Ordinary people encountering a Wikipedia article about something they're ignorant of will read it an learn, not edit it destructively.
Re:Wikipedia is anti-science (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Wikipedia is anti-science (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
Clown College (Score:3, Funny)
Guardian vs. Observer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Guardian vs. Observer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Guardian vs. Observer (Score:2)
"The Observer is what one might call 'The Guardian on Sunday' ".
Man, you scared me there, I thought you were going to say it was like The Guardian on Acid.
My brane almos' 'sploded. 8^)
John Naughton (Score:3, Informative)
John Naughton, who wrote the article, writes regular articles on the internet, software and related matters in the Observer's business section. He is one of the few journalists in the UK who really "gets it", and is also the author of the book "A Brief History of the Future" (published 1999) about the history and future of the Internet.
In fact his journalism is only a sideline to an academic career.
His Observer articles can be found archived at http://www.briefhistory.com/footnotes/ [briefhistory.com].
His blog is at http://www.skillbytes.co.uk/memex/ [skillbytes.co.uk].
Britannica is just pissed (Score:3, Funny)
"real" encyclopedias missing the point (Score:2)
Oh the irony. (Score:3, Informative)
Article hogs (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Article hogs (Score:3, Informative)
I edit Wikipedia articles regularly, and its weak spot IMO is not vandalism - blatant or sneaky, vandalism is easier to rectify than content disagreements. Read the page history of "Clitoris" and "Male circumcision" for instance - edit wars of almost operatic tenor, but no vandalism. But Clitoris is in decent shape after the wa
Re:Not only George Bush article (Score:3, Insightful)
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.