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[P]
Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism

By lsanger in Op-Ed
Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 12:42:24 AM EST
Tags: Internet (all tags)
Internet

Wikipedia has started to hit the big time. Accordingly, several critical articles have come out, including "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia" by a former editor-in-chief of Britannica and a very widely-syndicated AP article that was given such titles as "When Information Access Is So Easy, Truth Can Be Elusive".

These articles are written by people who appear not to appreciate the merits of Wikipedia fully. I do, however; I co-founded Wikipedia. (I have since left the project.)

Wikipedia does have two big problems, and attention to them is long overdue. These problems could be eliminated by eliminating a single root problem. If the project's managers are not willing to solve it, I fear a fork (a new edition under new management, for the non-techies reading this) will probably be necessary.


Let me preface this by saying that I know Wikipedia is very cool. A lot of people do not think so, but of course they are wrong. So the following must be taken in the spirit of someone who knows and supports the mission and broad policy outlines of Wikipedia very well.

First problem: lack of public perception of credibility, particularly in areas of detail. The problem I would like to point out is not that Wikipedia is unreliable. The alleged unreliability of Wikipedia is something that the above (TechCentralStation and AP) articles make much of, but that is not my point, and I am not interested in discussing that point per se.

My point is that, regardless of whether Wikipedia actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia, it is not perceived as adequately reliable by many librarians, teachers, and academics. The reason for this is not far to seek: those librarians etc. note that anybody can contribute and that there are no traditional review processes. You might hasten to reply that it does work nonetheless, and I would agree with you to a large extent, but your assurances will not put this concern to rest.

You might maintain that people are already using Wikipedia a lot, and that that implies a great deal of trust. This is true, as far as it goes; but people use many sources that they themselves believe to be unreliable, via Google searches, for example. (I do so all the time, though perhaps I shouldn't.) Perhaps Wikipedia is better described as one of those sources regarded as unreliable which people read anyway. And in this case, one might say, there's no problem: Wikipedia is being read, and it is of minimally adequate and increasing reliability. What more could you ask? In other words, why does a perception of unreliability matter?

I am willing to grant much of this reply. I think merely that there are a great many benefits that accrue from robust credibility to the public. One benefit, but only one, is support and participation by academia. I am on the academic job market now and I felt it was necessary to explain my views about Wikipedia's credibility for potential employers. A great many of my colleagues are not at all impressed with the project; but more about that in a bit.

Another benefit accruing from robust public credibility is even more widespread use and support by teachers, schools, libraries, and the general public--precisely the people who want to use what they believe to be a credible encyclopedia. To the extent that the project is not reaching, and being supported by, these people, it is not succeeding as well as it might.

Perhaps you might also maintain that, while Wikipedia does not now have a reputation for reliability, it will eventually, once enough studies proving its reliability are done, and once people are more familiar with the concept behind the project. This is hard to argue with; but it is also hard to support, because it involves predicting the future, and the future, when it comes to public opinion, is extremely unpredictable. It would be better to do something to help guarantee a reputation for reliability.

Wikipedia has another sort of credibility problem, mentioned in passing above, and I fear that time is not a solution to this problem, the way it might be to the foregoing one. Namely, one can make a good case that, when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven. If the project was lucky enough to have a writer or two well-informed about some specialized subject, and if their work was not degraded in quality by the majority of people, whose knowledge of the subject is based on paragraphs in books and mere mentions in college classes, then there might be a good, credible article on that specialized subject. Otherwise, there will be no article at all, a very amateurish-sounding article, or an article that looks like it might once have been pretty good, but which has been hacked to bits by hoi polloi. (Am I sounding elitist enough for you yet? Just wait.) One has only to compare the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy to Wikipedia's Philosophy section. From the point of view of a specialist, let's just say that Wikipedia needs a lot of work.

Second problem: the dominance of difficult people, trolls, and their enablers. I stopped participating in Wikipedia when funding for my position ran out. That does not mean that I am merely mercenary; I might have continued to participate, were it not for a certain poisonous social or political atmosphere in the project.

There are many ways to explain this problem, and I will start with just one. Far too much credence and respect accorded to people who in other Internet contexts would be labelled "trolls." There is a certain mindset associated with unmoderated Usenet groups and mailing lists that infects the collectively-managed Wikipedia project: if you react strongly to trolling, that reflects poorly on you, not (necessarily) on the troll. If you attempt to take trolls to task or demand that something be done about constant disruption by trollish behavior, the other listmembers will cry "censorship," attack you, and even come to the defense of the troll. This drama has played out thousands of times over the years on unmoderated Internet groups, and since about the fall of 2001 on the unmoderated Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has, to its credit, done something about the most serious trolling and other kinds of abuse: there is an Arbitration Committee that provides a process whereby the most disruptive users of Wikipedia can be ejected from the project.

But there are myriad abuses and problems that never make it to mediation, let alone arbitration. A few of the project's participants can be, not to put a nice word on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated. So, for any person who can and wants to work politely with well-meaning, rational, reasonably well-informed people--which is to say, to be sure, most people working on Wikipedia--the constant fighting can be so off-putting as to drive them away from the project. This explains why I am gone; it also explains why many others, including some extremely knowledgeable and helpful people, have left the project.

The root problem: anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise. There is a deeper problem--or I, at least, regard it as a problem--which explains both of the above-elaborated problems. Namely, as a community, Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated). This is one of my failures: a policy that I attempted to institute in Wikipedia's first year, but for which I did not muster adequate support, was the policy of respecting and deferring politely to experts. (Those who were there will, I hope, remember that I tried very hard.)

I need not recount the history of how this nascent policy eventually withered and died. Ultimately, it became very clear that the most active and influential members of the project--beginning with Jimmy Wales, who hired me to start a free encyclopedia project and who now manages Wikipedia and Wikimedia--were decidedly anti-elitist in the above-described sense.

Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they will--at least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversy--be forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts. This is not perhaps so bad in itself. But if the expert should have the gall to complain to the community about the problem, he or she will be shouted down (at worst) or politely asked to "work with" persons who have proven themselves to be unreasonable (at best).

This lack of respect for expertise explains the first problem, because if the project participants had greater respect for expertise, they would have long since invited a board of academics and researchers to manage a culled version of Wikipedia (one that, I think, would not directly affect the way the main project is run). But because project participants have such a horror of the traditional deference to expertise, this sort of proposal has never been taken very seriously by most Wikipedians leading the project now. And so much the worse for Wikipedia and its reputation.

This lack of respect for expertise and authority also explains the second problem, because again if the project participants had greater respect for expertise, there would necessarily be very little patience for those who deliberately disrupt the project. This is perhaps not obvious, so let me explain. To attact and retain the participation of experts, there would have to be little patience for those who do not understand or agree with Wikipedia's mission, or even for those pretentious mediocrities who are not able to work with others constructively and recognize when there are holes in their knowledge (collectively, probably the most disruptive group of all). A less tolerant attitude toward disruption would make the project more polite, welcoming, and indeed open to the vast majority of intelligent, well-meaning people on the Internet. As it is, there are far fewer genuine experts involved in the project (though there are some, of course) than there could and should be.

It will probably be objected by some that, since I am not 100% committed to the most radical sort of openness, I do not understand why the project that I founded works: it works, I will be told, precisely because it is radically open--even anarchical.

I know, of course, that Wikipedia works because it is radically open. I recognized that as soon as anyone; indeed, it was part of the original plan. But I firmly disagree with the notion that that Wikipedia-fertilizing openness requires disrespect toward expertise. The project can both prize and praise its most knowledgeable contributors, and permit contribution by persons with no credentials whatsoever. That, in fact, was my original conception of the project. It is sad that the project did not go in that direction.

One thing that Wikipedia could do now, although I doubt that it is possible in the current atmosphere and with the current management, is to adopt an official policy of respect of and deference to expertise. Wikipedia's "key policies" have not changed since I was associated with the project; but if a policy of respect of and deference to expertise were adopted at that level, and if it were enforced somehow, perhaps the project would solve the problems described above.

But don't hold your breath. Unless there is the equivalent of a revolution in the ranks of Wikipedia, the project will not adopt this sort of policy and make it a "key policy"; or if it does, the policy will probably be not be enforced. I certainly do not expect Jimmy Wales to change his mind. I have known him since 1994 and he is a smart and thoughtful guy; I am sure he has thought through his support of radical openness and his (what I call) anti-elitism. I doubt he will change his mind about these things. And unless he does change his mind, the project itself will probably not change.

Nevertheless, everyone familiar with Wikipedia can now see the power of the basic Wikipedia idea and the crying need to get more experts on board and a publicly credible review process in place (so that there is a subset of "approved" articles--not a heavy-handed, complicated process, of course). The only way Wikipedia can achieve these things is to jettison its anti-elitism and to moderate its openness to trolls and fools; but it will almost certainly not do these things. Consequently, as Wikipedia increases in popularity and strength, I do not see how there can not be a more academic fork of the project in the future.

I hope that a university, academic consortium, or thinktank can be found to pursue a project to release vetted versions of Wikipedia articles, and I hope that the new project's managers will understand very well what has made Wikipedia work as well as it has, before they adopt any policies.

--Larry Sanger

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Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism | 408 comments (381 topical, 27 editorial, 0 hidden)
+1 FP (2.00 / 8) (#5)
by Nosf3ratu on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 03:00:07 PM EST

And solely for this gem:

Let me preface this by saying that I know Wikipedia is very cool. A lot of people do not think so, but of course they are wrong.

Truer words have not been spoken in a while.


Woo!

LOL I'm sorry (2.65 / 20) (#7)
by Dr Gonzo on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 03:08:12 PM EST

After reading your article it turns out that it is very thoughtful, well-written and pretty much lines up with what I have seen on Wikipedia.

The radical nature of the openness and acceptance there has led to total chaos in several spots. One needs look no further than the talk section of the GNAA article for an exemplar of this attitude. People like the GNAA and I sit back and laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all as "serious" Wikipedians argue on both sides of the matter about something which is clearly a turd and doesn't belong in any serious academic work. The arguments drag on and on not only because the GNAA helps it along but because people on Wikipedia are so blindly committed to "NPoV", objectivity and other related ideology that they fail to recognize truly worthless content for what it is.

Similarly, I read Slashdot a lot and notice an awful lot of the kookier users who come out of the woodwork there using Wikipedia as a resource to back up their ludicrous arguments or theories or whathaveyou. I can only surmise that these same people (or other people of the same mind) also contribute to Wikipedia. The truism that 50% of all people are of below-average intelligence rings true on Wikipedia, and the brighter minds who are experts in particular fields don't have the time to waste on constantly revising their articles every time some crackpot takes a crap on them.

While some may look at the real trolling that goes on there, the type perpetuated by the GNAA, as the destructive force attacking Wikipedia, it is only a symptom. People like that come in and mock the system because the system is so ludicrously broken in the first place.

Wikipedia seemed like such a good idea when I first heard about it because I got the idea into my head that it was mostly academics contributing to it and most people didn't bother writing on things they knew little to nothing about. In retrospect, that seems laughable and naive, because the truth of the matter is that any idiot can and does contribute to articles in subjects they they know nothing about and the fact that it's been designed to be as easy as possible to do this just lowers the bar further. I would like to see something like an academic consortium take up the cause and create a closed-contribution version of the whole thing, but with the size the collection of articles has grown to now, it's probably a model that wouldn't scale.

"I felt the warmth spread across my lap as her bladder let loose." - MichaelCrawford

Two Problems (2.69 / 13) (#9)
by joecool12321 on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 03:11:50 PM EST

The article by Robert McHenry misses the point in a phenominal way. In order to demonstrate the flaws of the system, one would need to show where an earlier edition said something to the effect of, "There is a lack of clarity regarding the birth date of Hamilton. While we know his birth month and day, there is some debate over the exact year. Dates vary between 1755 and 1757, but as Hamilton himself used 1757, that will be the date of reference used in this article." was deleted. Had he submitted such a change himself, the article would have been somewhat better.

As for statements of opinion, shall we reject "The New Encyclopedia Britannica" because it says, "Korean artists were generally inferior to the Chinese and Japanese in technical perfection and precision"? I won't even bother to list the host of other errors in that edition on a single topic: Korea.

Anyway, the point is that until one demonstrates that good information is regularly being destroyed by bad information, one has not built a case for the need for change.

The second problem is one of authentication. What stops me from signing the name of one of my professors to an article, or claiming credentials I do not have?

Elistism (1.81 / 11) (#12)
by Uber Banker on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 04:03:40 PM EST

Excellent point. +oo FP. The reason democracy fails so hard is because we all have an equal vote.

Wikipedia (1.30 / 10) (#18)
by mikepence on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 05:11:33 PM EST

Wikipedia was nothing less than the web story of the year. If there were a K5 Best Technology of 2004, it would get my vote.

Agreed (2.55 / 20) (#23)
by dharma on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 05:54:08 PM EST

This is the first article I've read on this site actually worth reading.

I once considered submitting some articles to Wikipedia on the topics I am an expert on (graduate degrees in physics and electrical engineering with research experience in both field) but after I looked through the site I realized I didn't have the time or patience to deal with the fools that inhabit the project. Most of the technical articles read as if they were written by a pretentious undergraduate that just finished freshmen physics or some high school kid with too much time on his hand and too little education.

No one I know in academia (at least in the technical fields) bother contributing and I know many people in academia (including Jackson from E&M fame and van Trees from signal processing). Why would an expert bother contributing his valuable time to a project that can be ruined any random idiot on the 'net? People love to compare Wikipedia to Open Source but guess what: bad, incorrect code doesn't compile. Bad, incorrect information on the 'net lives on and non-experts hardly ever notice the mistake.

good criticism of wikipedia recognizes this: (1.69 / 13) (#27)
by circletimessquare on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 06:11:21 PM EST

it is here to stay

and that's a good thing

wikipedia is democratic in its derivation way before it is elitist in any aspect, and that democratic heart of the project is its source of greatest power and promise

in fact, any problem wikipedia has can probably be traced to some sort of residual elitism somewhere: amongst a contributor, or what a questionable rule promotes in contributor behavior

and i would assert that those who doubt the very ability of wikipedia to survive and prove very useful, in fact, useful in a way that has much to do with the promise of the internet itself, are elitists themselves

there is never a silver bullet, there is only a set of rules which minimizes elitism and mischief, no set of rules will remove it completely, as we are talking about human beings being the engine here, you can't remove the human being from the equation

but that doesn't mean a good set of rules shouldn't be fine tuned until it reaches a sweet spot that minimizes mischief and elitism the most effectively

i think the biggest detractors of wikipedia are in the end only the usual sort of negative types who confuse themselves just being overly critical as somehow being useful or wise

of course criticism is important, but it shouldn't prove caustic to the very promise of something like wikipedia in the end, or it fails to be valuable criticism


The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

more whining from useless academics (2.08 / 24) (#30)
by Delirium on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 06:35:49 PM EST

I've read Larry Sanger's Wikipedia articles: they're mostly crap. Even his philosophy articles—the field in which he has a PhD—are remarkably poor, consisting essentially of cobbled-together lecture notes that are incredibly biased to his particular pet views. This is the reason they've mostly been deleted.

The simple fact of the matter is that credentials are no guarantee of competence. A huge percentage of academia is filled with professional bullshitters, and they seem to be pissed off that Wikipedia is doing an end-run around their nonsense.

Hey Larry, how about this: (1.04 / 23) (#32)
by JChen on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 07:16:34 PM EST

How about you damn elites, you creme de la academia, stop being such snobs? I want to learn, yes, but I don't want to listen to your highly decorated speech patterns. I want to get to point A to point B without taking a detour into bookworm-land. Make it fun, make it exciting, and stop jerking your intellectual sperm all over what otherwise could have been a fine article for those ignorant of your field to begin with. Quid pro quo, Larry: don't expect us to respect you when you spit at us from the ivory towers of your own imagination.

Let us do as we say.
participation (2.83 / 12) (#33)
by minerboy on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 07:49:02 PM EST

I agree with most of your assertions. One other issue about Academicians is that they will not receive any recognition for contributing to wikipedia. This is mostly because their stodgy peers will pay no attention to this kind of work. This means that contributing to wikipedia is essentially charity work for them, and they can't afford to spend inordinate amounts of time on it. So, if someone insists on posting nonsense, there is just not worth it to argue with people who seem to have almost unlimited amounts of time.



if you don't know who larry sanger is (2.50 / 8) (#35)
by Fredo Gombachul on Thu Dec 30, 2004 at 09:29:26 PM EST

here's the wikipedia article on larry sanger.

maybe there's no problem (2.38 / 13) (#40)
by circletimessquare on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 02:16:05 AM EST

as anyone who has actually been to an institution of higher learning can easily attest to, just because you are very knowledgable on a subject just doesn't mean you are also a very good communicator

a good encyclopedia entry in any subject demands a level of brevity and directness that is actually more important than anything a superspecialist in a given subject matter can bring to the dinner table

additionally, anyone who goes to an encyclopedia is usually looking for something between a dictionary and a textbook: a rough overview of a subject

therefore, your average college kid could cover the majority of such needs rather effectively, and can fact-check the majority of such needs rather effectively, as they aren't scaling the peaks of the subject matter, they are just describing to us the landscape

why try to redefine the purpose of an encyclopedia with wikipedia then?

so it would seem the lack of academia input is not really a problem for wikipedia in the end

and if the subject is really esoteric? or contentious?

well there you go again: you are asking wikipedia to serve something that is not it's function

i am certain that if i were investigating the higgs boson, there is plenty that i cannot find on wikipedia

but if i was actually interested in some of those esoteric things about a higgs boson, you have to admit that my knowledge would be beyond the encyclopedic sampling-the-subject-matter level of interest, and therefore i wouldn't even being using wikipedia in the first place... again, don't ask wikipedia to be something it's not

same with contentious issues

take the subject of abortion

does anyone actually believe you are going to find an impartial treatment on the subject matter of abortion ANYWHERE, nevermind an online democratic encyclopedia? would wikipedia's handling of the subject of abortion be worse than say, the encyclopedia britannica?

by asking wikipedia to be impartial and authoritative on a contentious subject matter, you are asking wikipedia to do something no book or human can actually do, so why the impossibly standards?

so maybe all this hoopla over wikipedia's "problem" isn't really a problem after all


The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

Average (1.75 / 8) (#41)
by vera on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 02:17:04 AM EST

That wikipedia is in such a state should come as no surprise given the mediocrity democracy breeds in everything it touches. If it's to ever be of any real use, it does need to discriminate heavily in favor of elitism. Good luck getting the ball rolling on that.

Hey Larry! (1.63 / 19) (#44)
by grendelkhan on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 02:29:15 AM EST

Hey, Larry---why are you writing about Wikipedia when you yourself proved incapable of sticking with the project? Since your departure, it's grown tremendously, the power structure has changed (Board, Arbitration Committee), the category system has been implemented, providing a totally different kind of structural organization... it's not really the same place that you left. I take issue with the idea that your understanding of Wikipedia carries some kind of added weight because you were a contributor two and a half years ago.

Hell, I take issue with the idea that there even is a governing structure. Pretty much everything is done by consensus. Almost all of the structure has been put in place by whoever got there first, a sort of House that Everyone Built At Once. It certainly ain't the House that Larry Built.

Either go back and contribute, or stop talking smack about a project you're no longer involved with.

--grendelkhan
-- Laws do not persuade just because they threaten --Seneca

What Wikipedia needs, (2.75 / 12) (#45)
by gyan on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 02:35:23 AM EST

 among other things, is an audit.

 Pick

 1)10 most popular articles.
 2)10 randomly selected moderate-to-high traffic articles.
 3)10 randomly selected low traffic articles.

 Compare against 'reputable' encyclopedias. Then compare all references against primary sources.

 Judge on accuracy, comprehensiveness, lucidity, and presentation.

 Present results.

 Repeat every couple of months.

 A German magazine did something of the sort.

********************************

well (2.25 / 4) (#46)
by reklaw on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 02:37:03 AM EST

I love Wikipedia, but I'd also like to have a reviewed-by-academics version. Why? So I can finally cite it in my damn essays without getting "is this source reliable?" written there, that's why.
-
what you seem to want wikipedia to be ... (2.22 / 9) (#52)
by pyramid termite on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 03:43:08 AM EST

... is more like a traditional encyclopedia ... we have those already ... and those of us who are aware of what's available for reference materials know this

there's two things where wikipedia truly shines ... they cover recent and computer related subjects that aren't going to be in a print encyclopedia ... and they offer online links where people can get more information ... they also list reference works, which i think should be expanded for each entry


On the Internet, anyone can accuse you of being a dog.

The problem (2.62 / 8) (#58)
by Khendon on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 05:47:44 AM EST

The problem is - how do you know who's an expert and who's a troll trying to sound like an expert?

Wikipedia is the turtle, not the hare (2.50 / 10) (#64)
by zecg on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 07:40:56 AM EST

Academia has its own problems, and egos are one of the worst. I agree that many entries in fields requiring highly specialized knowledge (which, arguably, are what make encyclopedias useful) would profit from experts. However, I've known some experts who were incapable of assigning proper value to their own contributions and giving an unbiased overview of the theme. And what happens when two of them (presumably equally meritorious) meet on a subject and each tries to put a spin on it to stress his own work?
Other than that, go visit the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy you've linked. You'll find the following:
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) needs your support. Over 950 professional philosophers are donating their time and labor to collaboratively write, referee, and maintain our reference work. To cover the annual costs of administering and supporting this volunteer effort, Stanford University has partnered with the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) for the purpose of building an endowment for the SEP. While the library organizations attempt to raise $3 million for the SEP over the course of 3 years (primarily from libraries at academic institutions offering degrees in philosophy), we here at Stanford hope to raise $1.125 million from private individuals and corporations during that same time period.
An encyclopedia that "needs our support" to "remain free" does not exactly inspire confidence regarding its longevity.
Wikipedia, as I see it, is the turtle and not the hare. It is knowledge slowly accruing in a completely open environment - there are bound to be setbacks, since it gives a chance for participation to all the lonely loonies of the world. But I'm unsure that it would work better any other way. You do? Well, its content is free, isn't it? So, as I understand, anyone can take a snapshot and use it to build a better system. The point is, this knowledge should never again be lost and never again should we be made to pay for it.

This would be interesting if it were in true (2.57 / 19) (#66)
by jwales on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 07:56:05 AM EST

Larry's comments betray a complete ignorance of the project and a total lack of understanding of how it works and how it is changing over time.

He accuses me of something that most people would surely find shocking, and he offers -- of course -- absolutely no evidence for it.  I am not anti-experise in any fashion, and neither I nor the community at large hold the views that he ascribes to us.

We are in the process of building a review process which he would be welcome to comment on -- if he cared to do so.  Instead, he makes up complete falsehoods about us and posts them here.  As I say in the title -- his criticisms would be interesting -- if they were in any way true.

I'm very disappointed in you Larry.  In the past, I thought you were someone who was committed to getting it right, doing your homework, and engaging in rational dialogue for mutual understanding.

Why don't you join the mailing list and discuss these issues, instead of posting publicly on issues about which you know nothing -- having had zero association with the project or me for years - and embarassing yourself?

It isn't anti-elitism, it's the wrong focus. (2.81 / 16) (#69)
by Metasquares on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 09:05:15 AM EST

What I have seen when editing Wikipedia is not an anti-elitist community. What I have seen is a community that grants recognition and status to its members based not on expertise, but rather on time. Everything from winning edit wars to sysop status is based on some measure of time (# of edits, # of edits in a given time period, how long one has been involved, etc.), which is why I left: Not only did I disagree with the community on this point, but I myself had no time. Oddly enough, what is consuming so much of my time is work on a research paper on applications of the Situation Calculus, a type of diachronic reasoning used in AI. It felt as if I had lost status on Wikipedia as I gained more knowledge.

Thanks (2.50 / 10) (#72)
by lsanger on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 09:20:41 AM EST

I forgot to acknowledge a long kvetch about Wikipedia by Jason Scott, which was part of the inspiration for the above essay. But actually, I've been wanting to write the above essay for a long time.

Thanks (again) for the opportunity, Kuro5hin.

Larry Sanger

The problem of expertise (2.88 / 18) (#73)
by J T MacLeod on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 10:08:27 AM EST

I understand what you say, and I tend to agree with you, but there is a major issue that prevents me from agreeing completely, or enough to think the Wikipedia project should take a "defer to expertise" stance:  Idiocy and egotism among experts.  

Sadly, many experts are still capable of holding their own biases in their fields of knowledge, and would use any policy that would defer to them as the final authority to inject their personal biases into the work.  

While Wikipedia's stance on presenting every side of an issue can help alleviate that, certainly crackpot experts could provide just as much of a problem as the one you (rightly) describe.  

Wikipedia seems, to me, to be society's present best chance to rise above the current acedemic principle of respecting only the work of someone with a PhD, and encouraging high standards of research and writing among society at large.  It will need time to reach the goal of acceptance--far, far longer than it would if it took the policy you describe--but I think its ultimate potential would be limited in such a case.  

Not all reference books are expertly peer-reviewed (2.42 / 7) (#75)
by scruss on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 10:51:11 AM EST

I used to work for a reference publisher of note. One year, a C-something-O decided it would be really cool to have a word that they really liked go out in the biggest-selling dictionary.

Over the heads of the lexicographers, this word was inserted. A big advertising campaign (well, by reference publishing standards) was initiated.

As a sign of karmic retribution, the printing works caught fire before the books were shipped. Unfortunately, the fire didn't harm the store which held the new dictionaries. The dictionaries went out, sold in droves (despite being only one headword different in about 100,000), and the lexicographers and editors grumbled into their teacups.

That C-something-O did get the boot shortly afterwards, so there's some justice in the universe.

No, I really do design windfarms.

The Age of Participation (2.18 / 11) (#86)
by xnuzboss on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 02:20:03 PM EST

In the Postmodern world in which we now find ourselves, expertise without experience is always suspect, so Wikipedia is an ideal symbol of the new age. Postmoderns, Pomos, distrust institutions and their assumed authority in a top-down, Modernist world. This is a a given. Asking, therefore, a Postmodern creation to surrender — in any way — to the authority of a Modernist institution is intellectual homicide.

Wikipedia is just fine, and the more the "experts" squawk and complain, the greater the evidence that it is so. This is the Age of Participation, and self-correction will ultimately win out, because experience, not expertise, is the new authority. Only Modernists fear being shouted down, because they fear power and try to control it through logic and reason (and laws and rules). Pomos have no such fear, for they see the artificiality of Modernist power structures and rightly say, "Bullshit."

Long live Wikipedia!

So it's, 'Listen to Me, I'm an Expert!'? (2.30 / 13) (#88)
by Kasreyn on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 02:30:30 PM EST

*wonders if you're even listening to yourself*

Just to get into the spirit of things, I'm going to include some cheerful abuse of the non-elite masses in my comment.

How, praytell, will one of your laudable wikipedia subject experts prove their expertise to the clod-hopping proles who apparently comprise the remainder of the user base? There's a limit to the number of us dirt-under-the-nails hicks that can be dazzled by sextasyllabic words, you know. Do you plan to have some sort of digital certification process? A link next to a contributor's name so you can read all about his Master's Degree in Agricultural Engineering (otherwise known as the Cow College Combo)? Intellectuals love to present their credentials before engaging in a discussion. I see you couldn't resist this urge, yourself!

In short, I think your entire argument is full of hot air. I don't see a problem with Wikipedia. I've contributed to several articles and when my contributions were effective, they were kept, and when they were incorrect or ineffective, they were gone within hours. Facts should not be given different valences based on the people submitting them. This concept is so basic that I have to wonder if you're trolling.

Also, articles attacking Wikipedia have the same range of motivations as any other subject - from honest reporting to jealousy. If you think Britannica et al are ripping into it now, just wait until wikipedia starts doing to their business what the Open Source movement has done to the webserver and web browser markets. That will be the real test of the dead-tree encyclopedias' "elitism".

As for elitism on Wikipedia, I disagree that you can both cherish "experts" as well as giving a respectful ear to others (who you managed to avoid *quite* calling "idiots" - nice touch!). Attention is a finite resource. If you pay more of it to "experts", less of it gets divided amongst the mouth-breathing masses. I will agree that the more abstruse articles on Wikipedia have a rather spotty quality. I would submit that the same effect holds true for print encyclopedias, simply on a higher degree of accuracy. Peer review is all well and good, but if you write an article on something so obscure that only you know about it, it doesn't matter whether the article is for a peer-reviewed paper edition encyclopedia or a mob-reviewed digital edition encyclopedia: in neither case will anyone be able to make any valuable critique or commentary.

The difference is that, at least for now, the traditional encyclopedias have a greater ability to get "expert" opinions on demand. If someone submits an article on the pheromone secreted by the legs of a rare South American stick bug, they can call up an entomologist and pay him for his time to track down an expert on the bug, then pay HIM for his time to review the article - or write one. Wikipedia won't have that sort of power until its web of contributors grows quite a bit.

If you start releasing "vetted" versions of wiki articles, sooner or later your monocle-polishing "vetters" are going to want to be paid. That or, tired of constantly correcting the missteps of the nearsighted non compos mentes submitting all the articles, they will demand that you place more controls on who contributes... and there goes the entire idea. In any case, I would like to give a stilted, upper-crust nasal laugh at your idea of an "official policy of respect". Unless you have a plan of action, you just go on writing policy ideas while us thud-and-blunder types go on writing an encyclopedia.


"Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgement Day:
We never asked to be born in the first place."

R.I.P. Kurt. You will be missed.
OT: Hi Larry! Go Bucks! (1.14 / 7) (#93)
by MicroBerto on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 02:54:29 PM EST

I personally love Wikipedia - I've used it a lot in my academic career. Had I known that it was started by a fellow Buckeye, I would have helped promote it even more than I have! Thanks Larry, you're a great guy, and Go Bucks! -berto
Berto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Bertoline - My comic strip
Yet another problem (2.41 / 12) (#98)
by godix on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 03:02:06 PM EST

People on a website that get spammed about your pet project might get annoyed and intentionally go fuck up a few entries. Good luck finding out which ones.

"Yeah, we rocked the vote all right. Those little bastards betrayed us again."
- Hunter S. Thompson on the 2004 election.
Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat (2.60 / 5) (#104)
by jolly st nick on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 05:01:54 PM EST

First, let me say I love the Wikipedia, although I do not entirely trust it. I think Mr. McHenry's attack on the Wikipedia was rather selective. It is amazing the number of well informative and well written articles that it contains. The article did get me thinking, however.

I think it would be hard to reconcile the positive value of wikipedia's community created nature with something like central academic board. However, I think it would possible to create decentralized boards. I'm not a contributor, so I don't have a lot of credibility, but it seems to my outsider's eyes is that it should be possible to allow any number of self appointed, self governing entities to act as authorities.

The function of an authority would be to bless versions of articles. When viewing an article, you could see whether any authority has reviewed an article and blessed it, and which prior versions had been blessed by an authority. Take historical articles. If the Republican National Committee or the Socialist Workers Party wanted to create authorities to bless versions of articles that support their of history; fine. If the Wikipedia organizers wanted to invite a bunch of illustrious academics to form an authority for the purposes of blessing historical articles, great. If I and a buch of my friends are history buffs and are getting annoyed by trolls modding our work, we could form an authority to bless our own work.

When searching for an article, I could limit my results to versions approved by set of trusted authorities. If I'm looking at an article, I could see who had blessed it and whether there were prior versions that were blessed by different authorities.

If I understand correctly, the wiki software keeps all prior versions of an article, so it would not be that difficult to add somethign like this in my opinion. What would really be cool, but probably difficult, would be if different authorities could branch articles, to avoid having to fight with other folks over the head branch.

Good points (2.61 / 13) (#105)
by cdguru on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 05:05:00 PM EST

Certainly, if what Wikipedia is after is "official" recognition of it being an accurate and reliable source something needs to be done. But, I don't think that is what is sought after at all.

Wikipedia is more like "the People's Encyclopedia" where all views are tolerated as "diversity" and it is something that can belong to everyone. So, when you write an article about the Earth being flat or how humans decended from a dying race from another galaxy, you can be sure that you "own" that little part of the greater whole. You don't need to be an "expert", acknowledged in any particular field as having some knowledge about it. People can then help you with your article to make it more readable. But the entire point is that the content of articles do not necessarily have a one-to-one correspondence to any particular version of reality.

Contrast this with Encyclopedia Britannica. They are unlikely to have an article that is very far outside the "mainstream" of academic thinking. WHen they had their "web experiment" which I believe persists somewhat to this day, they would have far more "current" content than the printed version. So I do not believe there is a correlation between "currency" and "academic mainstream". Nor would I necessarily exclude controversial opinions as they exist in this "academic mainstream" as well as they exist outside of it.

An appeal for "expertise" in Wikipedia is pointless - it is designed to be something composed by non-experts, contributed to by "the community at large" and not reviewed in any formal manner. To try to introduce experts and reviews into this process simply dooms it from the beginning.

However, as long as it is "The People's Encyclopedia", it is not as credible an academic resource as a reviewed collection of articles.

How to fix? Don't - Wikipedia doesn't view this as a flaw.

Trolls are extremely difficult to deal with (2.57 / 14) (#107)
by paranoid on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 06:31:32 PM EST

I am not in a position to guess about the future of Wikipedia, but I can admit that currently it lacks an efficient mechanism to deal with trolls.

Vandals are easy. Someone adds profanity to an article, he is reverted within an hour. Someone repeats this, the IP is banned. There is little reward in trying to work around the ban, since there is very little satisfaction (Wikipedians don't react emotionally to this, their comments usually amount to "rv vandalism").

One much more serious problem is a group of users, who do not value logic and pluralism of opinions, but only care about their extremist position. Quite often their position may appear to be "traditional", i.e. they are against NPOV (neutral point of view) of a particular article. For example, a user found the "Zoophilia" article and set on a quest to expose the dangers of animal abuse there. Another user came to "Paedophilia" and decided to make a point that any sex with a child automatically scars them for life and children are not capable of consent. Or a user finds "Soviet Union" article and feels an urge to explain to everyone that it was a totalitarian nightmare.

The problem with such users is not that the point they make is totally devoid of merit, it's that they appear to be completely incapable of understanding the idea of neutrality, of presenting conflicting viewpoints in the same article in a factual manner without endorsing any of them.

These users are immune to persuasion. Any attempt at rational discourse is futile, as anyone of you who argued with a moron is aware of. It's said "Don't mud-wrestle with a pig. You'll both get dirty and the pig loves it". That's the problem. When such a pig "attacks" a Wikipedia article, other users feel obliged to respond in a polite and rational way (according to the policies), even though many of them must realise that they are mud-wrestling with a pig. We can show facts, give references, build cohesive logical arguments, but in the end we can't make that troll change his opinion one iota.

I agree that the idea of building an Open encyclopedia should not be taken to mean that we let everyone in and tolerate them even when their company becomes unpleasant. I'd appreciate if there was an easier way to "kick" people who seem not to be useful contributors, but mere trolls. Unfortunately, I do not think that this is simple to do and someone may argue that this can cause more harm than good (e.g. if a sysop discovers a topic that he has a strong opinion about and bans people for disagreement). But the problem is real.

Expertise requirements on Wikipedia (2.50 / 8) (#108)
by Fred Bauder on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 07:01:16 PM EST

Experts are welcome to participate on Wikipedia, but it is never enough to wave your formal qualifications and then exhibit a nasty attitude if other Wikipedia users do not defer to you. An expert , like other users, is expected to be able to cite published authority for their edits. Academically trained people ought to be able to do this, after all, a part of their training is gaining familiarity with the literature in their field. If an expert is willing to do this and participate in the give and take on the talk pages attached to articles, they should expect to thrive and enjoy their work on Wikipedia. And be respected and honored by other Wikipedia users.

Encouraging public posting on own site? (1.20 / 5) (#110)
by Gutza on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 07:07:10 PM EST

Rusty, come on! Sure, you'll rebuke by saying that you hadn't specified the site where they should make things public, but it's still a tad too obvious, you coming into the discussion on that side of the fence.

Who's your vendor, who's your vendor? — Scott Adams
time is K5
Wikipedia is not an Enlightenment encyclopedia (2.28 / 14) (#111)
by oska on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 07:49:54 PM EST

I found this article a very turgid read - if I hadn't known who Larry Sanger was and thought it might be worth learning his opinion on Wikipedia I wouldn't have bothered reading through his pompous Comic Book Guy sytle prose. Indeed, through his writing style and his presented argument against Wikipedia Sanger comes across as someone who is desperately seeking credibility in the academic world and is trying to shake off his perceived problems of association with the Wikipedia project. Beyond drawing that conclusion I found very little perceptive criticism in the article.

The problem is that Sanger, despite protesting that he realises how cool the project is, still doesn't get it. Wikipedia should be celebrated for what it is, not for it's perceived short-comings in comparison to the authoritativeness of conventional encyclopedias.

For me, wikipedia is a text version of the conversations that you take part in in ordinary life. A lot of anyone's knowledge is gained through what they learn from talking to other people. Not in authoritative university lectures or tutorials but at picnics, at dinner parties, in bed, at work etc. These conversations are largely non-authorial, just people relating interesting facts they have heard, or "telling it like it is". In these conversations, people engage with a discourse in many ways. Somtimes they enthusiastically agree with what is being said and applaud it and add to it. Or they have some slight disagreements which they throw into the conversation. Or perhaps they disagree more strongly and turn the conversation into an argument. Much the same thing takes place on Wikipedia.

The material in Wikipedia may not be the truth but it is certainly a collective perception of the truth which in itself is a valuable resource. Because Wikipedia does not pretend to the utopian Enlightenment ideal of an authorative telling of the truth it often better portrays a richer tapesty of truths.

The truth itself is un-communicable, as the whole mystical tradition agrees. But a variety of people collaboratively telling their truths can often lead to a great store of knowledge and even wisdom.

Sanger reminds me of fundamental christians who want to maintain that the Bible is the product of one single authoratitive voice, that being the voice of the ultimate knower of reality, God. Instead we know that the Bible, like many religious bodies of learning, is the distilled voice of many contributor's perceptions of truth.

I'm writing this off the cuff and feel like I'm probably starting to sound too grandiloquent myself, so I'll stop here. I guess my final word is that despite modelling itself on an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is something radically different and should be appreciated on its own grounds.



I largely agree (2.76 / 25) (#115)
by Estanislao Martínez on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 08:39:21 PM EST

This article very much reflects a large amount of the things that I find wrong with Wikipedia.  Let's put this from my perspective: I have studied Linguistics extensively, and am a dissertation away from a Ph.D.  What do I see when I look at Wikipedia's articles on this topic?  I see articles "written" by an aggregation of people who seem to have studied it only as far as an Intro to Linguistics course, and thus do nothing but repeat the simplifications offered by their introductory textbooks; but since they don't understand the topic in question, they do it wrong.  People who don't know how to define basic terms in a way that's both appropriate to the target audience and technically accurate (a very difficult skill).  Articles which don't have any narrative thread and read like they were  put together by a dozen people randomly writing paragraphs without reading what others did (well, because that's how it happened!).

There's another kind of scenario I've seen, which is related to the "trolls" theme in the article, but not quite.  Wikipedia has an unrecognized problem with cranks on obscure topics.  Much ink is spilled by Wikipedians about how when somebody goes into some popular article and edits it into something very tendentious, it is caught quickly and reverted.  What is not much discussed at all is cases where cranks go into an article that's not popular at all and alter it, to suit their ideology and/or political agenda.

I have an example in mind.  It is the Wikipedia article on the Taíno, the first Native American peoples that the Spaniards had extensive contact with in the New World.  The Taíno were decimated by disease and cultural assimilation in the 16th century, and thus have been extinct for over 400 years.

There is, however, a group of Puerto Ricans, based in New Jersey, who call themselves the "The Jatibonicù Taino Tribal Band of New Jersey", claim to be Taínos, and seek to achieve tribal nation status with the US government.  These people obviously have a large interest in propagating a false version of New World colonial history, and they have edited the Wikipedia article to hedge the claims of Taíno extinction with things like "it is popular scholarly opinion", and insert their blatantly fabricated story into the article.

The Taínos are a pretty obscure topic.  The only countries where the general population cares to know much about them are Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.  In most of these it's a topic that's taught very early on in elementary school, and which captivates people's imagination, and thus is subject to constant representation in the popular culture.  The result is that most people know all they want to know about the topic, and never feel like they have a need to look it up in an encyclopedia.  But the crucial point now is that the balance of power in the Wikipedia article favors the fake "Taínos".  They have much more of an interest in presenting a false version of history in the Wikipedia article, than other people do in eliminating outright fabrications from it.  The people who could correct it just don't have enough at stake to dedicate the amount of time required.

For a bit more of information, see the discussion pages for Taino (without the accent on the "i") and Taíno (with the accent).

--em

Wikipedia the problems (2.37 / 8) (#120)
by Onion Blastar on Fri Dec 31, 2004 at 10:30:51 PM EST

#1 Many of the critics of Wikipedia are either technophobes or the type that refuses to contribute to it to help solve the reliability problems. I had a friend, now an ex-friend, who would rather use a 26 year-old version of an Encyclopedia than Wikipedia, and she also used a 26 year-old version of a dictionary than some web based Dictionaries (Like Webster's, etc), and I found that communicating with her ended up being like talking a different language because she was using different definitions of things and not understanding the more modern terms. Anyway she is of remedial intelligence and cannot face the truth about herself and is having problems using computers anyway, they give her migraines apparently. I would classify her as a Librarian type who worships books, yet doesn't seem able to absorb the knowledge from them and apply it to the real work and cyber world. In which case, I have found, that some Wikipedia critics are in the same category as my ex-friend.

#2 Who is foolish enough to trust anything posted on the Internet? I mean really. The Internet is not the real world, and Wiki web sites can be scribbled over by people posting to their own inner voices. This is not a problem with Wikipedia, but a problem with Wiki, in that it needs credible editors to filter out those inner voices or at least translate them into something more credible and understandable if it is indeed factual.

#3 Just about anything can have a Wikipedia entry. At what point does Wikipedia reject entries? The GNAA and Maddox both have entries, but the real Encyclopedia does not. Perhaps Wikipedia should have a "Popculture" or "Cyberculture" section for entries such as these which people can filter out in their searches? Having these Popculture or Cyberculture topics just adds more fuel to the fire of people trying to burn down Wikipedia's credibility.

#4 Too bad libraries, colleges, and other institutions do not volunteer to help out with Wikipedia to edit entries and keep things credible.

#5 Hot topics, like Intelligent Design and certain Religions, get scribbled over by the bashers of those topics. For example, ID is called a Pseduoscience by people opposed to it, and a Science by people who are for it. So what will the official final and edited version say?

#6 People won't want to donate to a project where their contributions get edited out, objected to, and they are told they are wrong. Many just leave and then badmouth Wikipedia on other web sites. So what is the real market to which Wikipedia is trying to reach? The readers or the writers or the editors, perhaps all three? Has any sort of marketing been done on Wikipedia at all, or is it going to end up like the Dotcoms and go bust? Trying to market to everyone is a certain business failure. So Wikipedia needs to learn what type of people need their services and market towards them. Obviously librarians, technophobes, etc and those who say Wikipedia lacks credibility will never be marketed towards. So perhaps the market would be to those who are knowledgeable, know how to use a computer and the Internet, perhaps has a college education or 10 years of work experience, have a bit of a writing background or writing skills, knows how to be objective and can use a neutral point of view, you know, the Al Gore type. ;)

#7 Offline searching should be an option, is there going to be a finalized version that can be burned to ISOs to make CDs or DVDs and then software for most platforms to search those CDs/DVDs for information? Perhaps sales could be for pre-burned CDs and DVDs like many Open Sourced companies seem to offer as an alternative to downloading the files.

#8 Perhaps have a critic's corner to move those comments written by Trolls, Bashers, etc and have it on a seperate link to the topic so people can see what the member feedback says, and a disclaimer that it may not actually be factual. That way there is no "censorship" but people are allowed to keep their comments in a sort of "sandbox". As a matter of fact, why not allow members to write in a "sandbox" this way and then have editors pick the best comments to be included in the topic if they are found to be factual, objective, netural point of view, etc.

#9 Spin off two versions of Wikipedia, the credible one where all facts have been checked, etc, and an unchecked one in which members can scribble over it. Give the user the option of searching either one, and they have the option to search the credible version or the unchecked version or both.

#10 Have a contest for best submitted articles. Each submitted article will have a $5USD submission fee, and the winners will win a certain percentage of the collections, with the rest going to Wikipedia. Have college professors judge each category, that can research the facts.


[ Support your local anonymous online communities ]
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encyclopedia of Tlon (2.14 / 7) (#124)
by anonymous cowerd on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 01:25:59 AM EST

It never occurred to me before, but after reading this article (particularly em's comment, et seq.) I now realize that surely at least a good fraction of one percent of the stuff of Wikipedia have to be pure creations - no more materially true, and no less lovely and meaningful, than the contents of the fabled Encyclopedia of Tlön.

Think about it! Those passages could easily be the most valuable part of all the Wikipedia.

The problem for us readers, now, is to find them.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@ij.net

"This calm way of flying will suit Japan well," said Zeppelin's granddaughter, Elisabeth Veil.

Confusion over Wikipedia and Postmodernism (2.25 / 8) (#129)
by mn worker on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 05:38:00 AM EST

A number of comments have attempted to relate Wikipedia to postmodernism. While the approaches being taken to this are interesting, I suggest 1) these critiques are something less than postmodernism, and 2) a postmodern interpretation of Wikipedia can address the criticisms raised in this article.

When we suggest that the value of Wikipedia is in its presentation of multiple perspectives - truths - we have not strayed far from the much-maligned Truth. When we suggest that Wikipedia ought to be valued by certain communities because of its multitude of perspectives, what we find is no less a meta-narrative. And while it may be this embodiment of an agenda of allowing all voices to speak appeals to a certain liberal aesthetic, the aesthetic preferences of kuro5hin contributers seem decidedly unintersting in the context of this article.

Perhaps more interesting is the author's implicit perscription of those communities of value with which the values of the Wikipedia community ought to accord.

It seems redundant to debate whether academia will accept Wikipedia as an authority, or even as a legitimate participtant in scholarly discourse. Wikipedia is not peer reviewed, and is not otherwise written by authors recognized as legitimate participants in scholarly discourse. No more so does one cite or seriously interact with the opinion of an undergraduate amateur in one's Thesis; it simply isn't done.

If Wikipedia is to be recognized as a legitimate participant in scholarly discourse in academia, then by all means we must establish something approximating a panel of experts - masters to us peers - to lend legitimacy - respectability - to our blind grasping.

But that the Wikipedia community ought to undertake to obtain this legitimacy is not so clear. Consider that I am not a student of history. While I have an interest in historical topics in so far as they interesect my fields of interest, I am by no means a student of history.

A student of history participates in a very specific community of value, a community in which I do not participate. In that community, it may be essential to know the date and hour at which Walter Cummings was born; I do not dispute the legitimacy of this value in this community. But I nonetheless recognize that in the communities of value in which I participate, the date and hour at which Walter Cummings was born has at best trivial value. It so happens that we do value knowing who Walter Cummings was and specifically the contents of his psychological expositions, but the exact date and hour at which he was born is inconsequential in our community.

I welcome participation in discourse about Walter Cummings with students of history. In the finest liberal aesthetic sense, our multitude of perspectives may together offer insight to participants from both communities.

But what I do not welcome is for the community of value of students of history to dicatate to our community of students of psychology, the process, procedures, and content of our collaboration if these stipulations consort to inexoribly disrupt our own values.

We will not collaborate as a community so far as in that collaboration we cease to be a community, becoming instead an oligarchy of value-masters and value-slaves. If the terms of your participation in our community are that you become the moderators and masters of the community, we reject your participation, for that is no community at all.

Academia. I see that community as I make my way into the factory where I earn my worth. Its gates are always closed.

I don't see the problem (2.50 / 12) (#151)
by vadim on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 12:21:00 PM EST

No encyclopedia is reliable, Wikipedia included. And no encyclopedia should be used for anything but a starting point.

I use it for mainly two things: Refreshing my memory about forgotten issues, and finding a starting point. I'll give two examples.

Some time ago we decided we'd like to make coffee. So we promptly bought a pressure type coffee percolator, some ground coffee and tried to brew something from it. It was crap.

So, I went to Wikipedia, read the page on coffee, googled around a bit based on the info found, and ended getting toasted beans and a coffee grinder. The info I found also helped me understand everything should be as clean as possible, and that my percolator needed to build some pressure to work properly. So I tried again, and got decent coffee out of it. I also intend to try with a french press, based again on some info I got from Wikipedia.

The second example is that I pretty much forgot the little I knew about trigonometry and went to the Wikipedia page to refresh my memory.

The articles might not have been written by some specialist in coffee, or an eminent mathematician. I don't expect Wikipedia to contain all there is to know about coffee or math, or even to contain 100% correct information. However, Wikipedia is just fine for finding some starting points, or to refresh my memory about concepts I already knew.

Incidentally, the paper encyclopedia I have on my shelf is expensive and composed of 15 pretty big books. Despite that, it's crap as a starting point for understanding how to brew coffee. It explains what it is, but contains no pointers. Not even references to methods of brewing it. I can certainly find the entry for "percolator", but no references to it under "coffee" for some reason. Some nice people decided to add their little bit of knowledge by writing a bit on their favourite drink. Meanwhile, the encyclopedia on my shelf will continue sitting there, being as useless as before.


--
<@chani> I *cannot* remember names. but I did memorize 214 digits of pi once.
Impossible to cite (2.20 / 5) (#153)
by p3d0 on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 02:11:26 PM EST

On a related note, one problem I see with Wikipedia is that it's impossible for a publication to cite a Wikipedia article, because that article could change afterward, thereby eliminating (or at least drastically altering) the material the publication is trying to cite.
--
Patrick Doyle
My comments do not reflect the opinions of my employer.
what about the tech....!!!!???? (2.50 / 6) (#157)
by D440hz on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 03:45:03 PM EST

it seems to me and my very humble opinion, that
the discussion here is missing a crucial point.

beyond the discussion of preference as to how data will be collected and analyzed, the most significant part missing here is the fact that the wikipedia engine is available to use and modify by any body who wishes to do so.

The simplest solution for the academic body
is to create a moderated wikiengine based site (call it acapedia if you so wish) in which the academic discourse of specialized peers takes place, no trolls accept for academic trolls.
Than the discussion here will be of true value.

the public would greatly benefit from such a site in which an active academic discussion takes place. the visibility of such discussion would be very interesting.

i wonder if the academic ivory towers are actually interested in making such an effort, i have worked in academia for several years on web presence, apart from some minor (if very noble) examples, academia does not make information and discourse easily available. in fact it seems the notion that the information should be kept only for available to specialists is the norm.

the article was well written. but in a sense it seems to be a dull point of view (apologies to larry sanger, who i respect for his work)
the couldhavebeen shouldhavebeen idea is irrelevant now, the technology is availiable to modify and use by anybody. it is left for academia  to decide if the will make a serious effort to make quality information avaliable to the public for free, or will they continue the tradition of some byzantine court, smirking with diapproval at the revolting peasant outside.

If you cant take the joke you shouldnt have joined.

D-440Hz

so what? (2.20 / 5) (#160)
by CAIMLAS on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 06:52:55 PM EST

One has only to compare the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy to Wikipedia's Philosophy section. From the point of view of a specialist, let's just say that Wikipedia needs a lot of work.

So what? So don't look at it from the perspective of a specialist. The wikipedia philosophy entry is more than adequate, in my opinion, for an online encyclopedia. Not terribly good for a college-level course, no. But it does seem to be every bit as thorough - or at least approachingly so - as many of the big-name encyclopedias (britannica, world book, etc.) that are available in public high schools and libraries.

Specialists have specialized encyclopedias for a reason - it's not practical or realistic to expect an encyclopedia that covers many different topics to delve into the more complex workings of the topic. It'd be impossible to fit the damn things on shelves; as it is, most encyclopedias have a difficult time fitting on a single shelf row.

Additionally, specialists also have trade journals, publication archives, and various other things of that ilk.

I will agree that wikipedia's credibility is an issue with the 'education' croud - high schools, colleges, and their ilk. In my mind, the problem lies predominantly in the mind of the educators, as American educators (the people that would predominantly get a use out of such a resource, being as it is in English, etc.) tend to be fairly poorly educated (education having nothing to do with schooling, of course). I think you're not giving wikipedia a fair chance in the least.

Additionally, it would seem you've got vested interests in a fork. You were one of the co-founders, and have since left the project: why did you leave? Or were you ousted? Wouldn't it be beneficial to your inflated ego (and even your viability as an academian) if there was such a community, founded or conceived by you in existence, instead of one that was once under your control - yet no longer?

Not to fire the flames under your feet before you've taken off your socks, but you having not offered much defense of your departure from wikipedia doesn't bode well for these complaints you've made. Could you not have moved your vision along within wikipedia itself (with an established name), having been a person of high status within the organization?
--

Socialism and communism better explained by a psychologist than a political theorist.

On Experts (1.66 / 6) (#165)
by pHatidic on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 10:05:16 PM EST

lsanger: You are a philosophy Ph.D. if I remember correctly, which means you are supposedly an expert in philosophy. However it is clear that you either haven't read or don't understand On Liberty by Mill, which is an important philosophical text. That is, if the opinions of an expert can't stand up to the questioning of a ten year old kid then the person probably really isn't an expert at all. Freud was not an expert at psychology but was hired to write articles for EB. Maybe if he had to defend his papers 'on the talk page' he would have been exposed for the fraud that he was.

What constitutes an expert is very difficult to define, and certifying someone as an expert in something impossible.

Within a year and a half from now there should be new technology available to solve the problems about trolls and other things you complain about. I could go into details now, but I'll save it for a full length article for later.

Scholar.Google. Vs. Www.Google (1.40 / 5) (#168)
by leoaugust on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 10:50:44 PM EST

As many people have already pointed out, the core of the reason against "expect(ing) Jimmy Wales to change his mind" is the unjustified blending of two disparate universes.

  • There is proposed Wikipedia.
  • There already is a Wikipedia.
The www.* is much bigger and popular than scholar.*
Even if you love spending most of your time in "scholar," it is wrong to expect that most of the other people also do the same.
And yes, "experts" do write in scholar.*, because most of them are from peer-reviewed journals.


The eyes cannot see what the mind cannot see.

Though interesting, (1.28 / 7) (#169)
by stpna5 on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 11:33:05 PM EST

Wikipedia is infested with bogus material and severely erroneous information; at least the English language version. Unfortunately the veracity of anything under the umbrella of the site is subordinate to the hall monitor mentality of staffers who ultimately control the content submitted by the vast army of its allegedly open source contributors.

Evolving. (1.00 / 10) (#172)
by davibennett on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 02:00:14 AM EST

First of all a lot of the specific points strike me as valid and important. But (big but here...) the overall validity depends on the context in which we examine the project. To me certain domains have been a great success. For many details of computer technology, especially emerging technology wikopedia is often a first place to go. The arguments are frequently good and they merge in well with more extensive sources (<- the existence of these other sources is important!) This provides a faster easier to use resource than google, much less clutter. And as Wikopedia is to philosophy in comparison idealized standard encyclopedias, these are to xml or firewalls in comparison to Wikopedia. So at least within a limited set of domains Wikopedia has proven to be a success. The method *can* work. In many others a lot of the entries are adequete, in still others as you say they of an "interesting" nature. Now if Wikopedia were to claim to be *the* referance we would have a serious problem. But a huge number of referances are availible, the academic world is slowly unlocking though they remain reluctant to share their resources, to redesign the mechanisms used to present research. Quite frankly we've had the capacity to archive all papers for over a decade. A serious lobbying effort could have shifted the huge federal funds that currently indirectly support journals to a system that started out imitating existing publications and peer reviews (without the huge cost of paper publication and the huge cost of storage and organization) then evolved to more sophisticated forms of organization and linkage including journals created days after a new problem area was defined. One strength of this would be that not only would Stanford have a more complete set of publications than it now has, Foothill community college down the road would have the same and so would a researcher in Kenya. We have not seen the research community rally behind this. So as a related note no matter how good the resource it would be criticized because it is a threat just as some journalism reduce blogging to a set of rightwing fanatics. But we shall agree that in some, perhaps many areas Wikopedia not only fails to meet not only academic standards (not really a goal,) but even (in places) minimal standards of popular referance veracity. So indeed if he has a teacher who is somewhat intelligent some 6th grader is going to lose some points because some modern troller inserts the "history of the bathtub" by that classical American troller Mencken. We might also get history inspired by Franklin and Twain. So checking sources is a good lesson. And we all need to do with the most trusted. Wikopedia is one source among many. I personally would not commit much to it because I want editorial control. But it's easy enough for me to insert a link perhaps with a brief explanation at an appropiate place in an article. If you insist on Wikopedia as a central reliable source you can build a shadow of another system within it. You can use the same engine. You can also evolve engines that represent knowledge better. Certainly a philosophy encyclopedia would benefit from the "argumentation" systems that were such a rage in AI and hypertext in the early nineties? Wikopedia is a valuable resource as it exists. And it is a fascinating experiment. It evolves, one is curious to see what shapes this organization takes. People who dislike it can certainly involve themselves in the definition and the reworking. And examining it frozen at certain places, watching articles change, the intense social flows... And the "ontology" (newest AI buzzword, essentially meaning hierarchy only really cool if done in xml though you're really cool if you say lisp s=expressons are better...) Wikopedia is this model and set of links (heterarchial not hierarchial so maybe not an ontology) of all these words and ideas and things someone thought was important. It's a model of the world in many respects more extensive and powerful than that of traditional encyclopedias. I suspect not many of them lists Japan's "cell phone culture" which incidently as it's evolving in Asia may have an effect exceeding that of the PC or net. It's a "swarm" creation, a first experiment. It may indeed be heading for a deadend, but it remains a revolutionary step and (I don't mean to sound elitist here, but...) much of academia won't recognize it's historic importance until a few years from now people do their thesis on the subject. As for it's flaws work with it, become part of the history or build your reliable little domains and link them to all the knowledge bases (including Wikis) which can be extended by them. For most of us Wikopedia is not a center, it is an event which may or may not successfully evolve into the new shapes of hypertext. As a general rule many of the really valuable works will be snatched up and evolve and I have to say it, I forgot who wrote it, but I thought it really cool: In the future every little kid when they start school will start their own encyclopedia and they will keep adding to it all their lives... ...and their great grandkids will someday look at a drawing of a rainbow and what a six year old said about it... ...and no it won't pass peer review (except maybe among the committee of grandmas) but quite possibly the addition written 15 years later will or the link... And that first colored rainbow is what wikopedia is and in large part the medium is the message, the spontaneous creation, organization, reorganization... A lot of it may be about discovering what can go wrong, but that is a key part of a truly scientific approach. Other things will emerge. - David Bennett davibennett@yahoo.com

Evolving (redone) (2.44 / 9) (#174)
by davibennett on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 02:29:28 AM EST


This time I might manage carriage returns.

First of all a lot of the specific points strike me as valid and important. But the overall validity depends on the context in which we examine the project.

To me certain domains have been a great success. For many details of computer technology, especially emerging technology wikopedia is often a first place to go. The articles are often good and they merge in well with more extensive sources (<- the existence of these other sources is important!)

This provides a faster easier to use resource than google, much less clutter.

As Wikopedia is to philosophy in comparison idealized standard encyclopedias, these are to xml or firewalls in comparison to Wikopedia.

So at least within a limited set of domains Wikopedia has proven to be a SUCCESS.

The method *can* work.  And the result is a valuable if somewhat specialized encyclopedia.  Incidently it probably cost much less to produce than any other method and is updated and corrected more rapidly.

In other areas a lot of the entries are adequete, in still others as you say they of an "interesting" nature.

Now if Wikopedia were to claim to be *the* referance we would have a serious problem. But a huge number of referances are already availible,

And now even the academic world is slowly unlocking though they remain reluctant to share their resources, to redesign the mechanisms used to present research.

Quite frankly we've had the capacity to archive all papers for over a decade. A serious lobbying effort could have shifted the huge federal funds that currently indirectly support journals to a new system...

... a system that started out imitating existing publications and peer reviews; without the huge cost of paper publication and the huge cost of storage and organization; then evolved to more sophisticated forms of organization and linkage including journals created days after a new problem area was defined.

One strength of this would be that not only would Stanford have a more complete set of publications than it now has, Foothill community college down the road would have the same and so would a researcher in Kenya.

We have not seen the research community rally behind this. Indeed it is stil regarded as a threat in many circles.  In them energy is devoted to explaining why it can't work, not making it work.

So no matter how good the resource it would be criticized because it is a threat; just as some journalists reduce blogging to a set of rightwing fanatics, a part is used to represent the whole.

But we shall agree that in some, perhaps many areas Wikopedia not only fails to meet academic standards (not really a goal,) but even minimal standards of popular referance veracity.

So if he has a teacher who is somewhat intelligent some 6th grader is going to lose some points because some modern troller inserts the "history of the bathtub" by that classical American troller Mencken. We might also get history inspired by Franklin and Twain.

This may sound brutal, but checking sources is a good lesson. On the net we can double or triple check in the same time in takes to walk to a bookshelf and look up an entry.  

Wikopedia is one source among many. For many things it's a good starting point or adequete referance.

I personally would not commit much to it because I want editorial control. But it's easy enough for me to insert a link perhaps with a brief explanation at an appropiate place in an article.

It is easy for serious academics to build good referances for their domain.  They can use the same engine. They can also evolve engines that represent knowledge better. Certainly a philosophy encyclopedia would benefit from the "argumentation" systems that were such a rage in AI and hypertext in the early nineties.

Wikopedia is a valuable resource as it exists. And it is a fascinating experiment. It evolves, one is curious to see what shapes this organization takes. People who dislike it can certainly involve themselves in the definition and the reworking. And examining it frozen at certain places, watching articles change, the intense social flows...

It is also an "ontology" (newest AI buzzword, essentially meaning hierarchy only really cool if done in xml though you're really cool if you say lisp s-expressons are better...) Wikopedia is this model and set of links (heterarchial not hierarchial so maybe not an ontology) of all these words and ideas and things someone somewhere thought was important.

It's a model of the world in many respects more extensive and powerful than that of traditional encyclopedias.

I suspect not many of them lists Japan's "cell phone culture" which incidently as it's evolving in Asia may have an effect exceeding that of the PC or net.

Wikopedia (like SMS) a "swarm" tool, a first experiment. It may indeed be heading for a deadend, but it remains a revolutionary step and (I don't mean to sound elitist here, but...) much of academia won't recognize it's historic importance until a few years from now people do their thesis on the subject.

As for it's flaws work with it, become part of the history or build your reliable little domains and link them to all the knowledge bases (including Wikis) which can be extended by them.

For most of us Wikopedia is not a center, it is an event which may or may not successfully evolve into the new shapes of hypertext. As a general rule many of the really valuable works will be snatched up and evolve.

I read an idea that is really cool:

In the future every little kid when they start school will start their own encyclopedia and they will keep adding to it all their lives...

...and their great grandkids will someday look at a drawing of a rainbow and what a six year old said about it...

...and no it won't pass peer review (except maybe among the committee of grandmas) but quite possibly the addition written 15 years later will or the link...

That first colored rainbow is what wikopedia is and in large part the medium is the message, the spontaneous creation, organization, reorganization...

A lot of it may be about discovering what can go wrong, but that is a key part of a truly scientific approach. Other things will emerge.

- David Bennett davibennett@yahoo.com


Who is an expert? (2.85 / 14) (#181)
by apparatus on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 06:39:24 AM EST

Larry, You present some good points. The bulk of your argument seems to be that expert opinion should hold some esteemed trump stature. The problem that I see with this is how to decide who an expert is. Perhaps by credentials, but these are often times difficult to verify over the internet. Even if credentials could be verified, they alone do not guarantee expertise. Without naming names, I can think of a few globally recognized individuals with diplomas from prestigious institutions that seem to have very little, if any, expertise. I believe that a stronger trump card is reputation. The community as a whole should decide who's knowledge is reputable. I suppose in a way this is true expertise. Listing diplomas, appointments, title, etc. does not make one an expert. There was an internet community called experts exchange a while back that implemented this well. Perhaps wikipedia could implement a community reliability ranking not only of the article, but also of the submitter(s).

Fundamental "Problems" with Wikipedia (2.53 / 13) (#184)
by DrRobert on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 12:16:22 PM EST

As someone who has no vested interest in Wikipedia other than occasional use, I think the main aspect of the debate about "problems" with Wikipedia lies in the fact that everyone has a different concept of what it should be and therefore any deviation from that results in a "problem". Wikipedia will never be an encyclopedia in the sense of other encyclopedias. It will never be a scholarly journal, but this does not mean it is not practical. If Wikipedia decided what the purpose was and clearly stated it, then there would be less debate. A statement of purpose of the Wikipedia would probably need to abandon the notion of experts, truth, and relative cultural importance and simply default to being useful.

Encyclopedias, reference books, textbooks, and journals have inertia; they have a certain resistance to change and they emerge in a quantized fashion, representing the an opinion of the state of some subset of knowledge average of some period of time to average out the noise. Because these sources have this inertia they serve as a cultural calibration standard, a "trail of bread crumbs" to that we can culturally assess our position and move on. Wikipedia can never serve this function and so will always receive a certain disdain or lack of respect in that it can never serve as a landmark. Even the metaphor of a snapshot is too generous because (on a cultural scale) the content is too malleable.

There are really no experts, certainly not as related to the mass cultural opinion. You can have two professors with identical training, identical publication records, and identical credibility within a field who would write completely opposing articles; this happens in courtrooms daily. If a person is the first to have an idea, he will always be shouted down by the masses because (based on Thomas Kuhns writings) science does not progress by accumulation facts, it progresses by the political struggle and marketing of ideas.

All writings in Wikipedia are the result of someone's political views and cultural ideologies. Everything is based on someone's perceptions.

So the "problems" with Wikipedia would be lessened if:

Wikipedia stated clearly with a disclaimer (linked at the top and bottom of each page) that listed exactly its purpose and clearly expressed the assumptions that do not hold for wikipedia.

There are no experts.

There is no truth for wikipedia to asymptotically approach.

If there were truth that was free from personal ideology or motive, Wikipedia would not approach it because it is free to float with cultural whim.

One thing that might be better than constant editing is to simply publish all the articles. If there are two opposing views on a subject, publish them both and any debate. This would require a minor (technologically speaking) increase in storage, but the resulting work would have some inertia. Many academic journals are headed in this direction now. A good system of organization and links would insure that neither article would be seen as definitive, but both together would be seen as valuable.

Another possibility: have everyone be able to submit their views and have an editor compile them into a single coherent article which has a gzipped file attached contain all the source emails and debate. These changes would make Wikipedia an unsurpased research tool.

Wikipedia is trying to use the superior ability of newer technology to replicate an editorial process and structural style like paper encyclopedias. By including all the discussion and all the opposing view points you no longer have to worry about elitism or attitutes etc. These are things that regular encyclopedias cannot do, so why limit the wikipedia in these ways. Perhaps the limitation of the structure of the information is part of some cry for "old school" legitimacy.

This would eliminate the "problems" that cause debate about Wikipedia. The one true problem is that Wikipedia seems to be striving to be branded by society with some arbitrary mark of "legitimacy". Striving for this mark in no way makes Wikipedia more useful and prevents it from quelling some of the debates that hinder its advance.

With certain caveats, wikipedia is useful, as is every other reference source, although the caveats are a little different. Wikipedia should advertize itself as a virtual crowd around a water cooler where you can ask a question and get one or more detailed answers, which you take with a grain of salt.

Of course, I'm certain all this has been said before, but I'm new.

Um... (1.72 / 11) (#187)
by trhurler on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 02:26:04 PM EST

Let me get this straight. You allow people to do almost anything they want, then tell them "but respect your elders"?! I mean, that's the same basic message, if not in the same words.

Western society has more or less proved that this doesn't work. It is an experiment on a far grander scale than you could ever hope to equal, and one of its many interesting results is that if people are given freedom to do as they will, then respect really does have to be earned, and some people just won't show it even when it is earned - and that there are enough of these last sort that you can't just treat them as exceptional cases - banning them won't work, and so on.

The real problem is the utter lack of credibility your average person ascribes to academics in non-science fields. In other words, most people KNOW that philosophers who are still arguing about foundationalism vs coherentism are basically full of shit, and that whatever degrees they may have are a function of jumping through hoops and playing the game right rather than being an "expert" at anything whatsoever. Except, I suppose, the history of bad philosophical thought. Now, admittedly, your average person may never have heard of foundationalism or coherentism, but if you explained them, he'd regard you as an idiot right away, even if he lacked the stones to say so, and he certainly regards academic philosophy as a bunch of bunk. Which it is, in any case. And philosophy is by FAR not the worst of the academic disciplines. Consider sociology, for example - a "science" without any meaningful results, ever. Every two bit mediocrity with the persistence and drive to keep slamming his head against that wall until someone opens the diploma door for him can be found with a sociology degree, a history degree, a philosophy degree, or whatever.

Admittedly, even if these disciplines WERE respectable, many would not give that respect. BUT, as it stands, only three kinds of people give it, and these are small categories. The first, of course, is those who aspire to these fields. The second is people stupid and/or ignorant enough and gullible enough to be easily swayed by appeals to authority without actually inspecting the authority in question with any degree of fervor. The third, and largest by far(but still a minority, I'd guess,) is people who just can't stand the thought that these institutions would be full of charlatans. They are so invested in the greatness of their society, so insistent upon optimism, so unwilling to criticize, that they simply will not accept the obvious, even when it is presented in clear terms.

The last real academic "experts" on most of the humanities and social sciences, in such fields as there ever were any real experts, died a long time ago. These days, the few people who have good ideas are marginalized because those ideas don't fit any of the existing orthodoxies and taxonomies, and the rest are basically historians of their subjects, mindlessly repeating the words of long dead men with a reverence they certainly never earned. Anyone who considers such people "experts" on anything meaningful to our existence as human beings is either very naive, very stupid, or both.

--
'God dammit, your posts make me hard.' --LilDebbie

clarify my point (2.33 / 3) (#188)
by D440hz on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 02:56:39 PM EST

i think i have not presented my point to effect.

is there really a problem? what is this disucssion really about? can anything useful come out of it?

it boils down (again) to technological issue, and its implamentation. expert opinion are free to formalize their own environment, using the same modified tools.

Wikipedia, is above all else a discussion tool.
i really dont understnad the problem, or rather i think the focus here is in the wrong direction.

Let the Ivy leagues invest some of the hugh cash amounts they have in a wikilike site, and then we will judge the merit of it all.

To complain about something without doing anything about it, (while having the capability) is really so unproductive. It is also tends to make the arguments pretty weak.

dont change wikipedia, create an alternative. then we will have the ability to value the "expert" vs "nonexpert" argument based on its value, not on some sentiments whether there is or isnt such a thing as expertise.
D-440Hz

Scratching my head (2.50 / 6) (#190)
by epepke on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 04:02:02 PM EST

So, let's see if I have this straight. Wikipedia is this experiment in social democracy. Now, with the Internet, we can have this wonderfully democratic process, and it will result in something that's just great, and everyone will love it, and everything would be just peachy.

Only it doesn't really work out that way, which you would have known if you had talked to any teacher at all over the past 6000 years.

And so, now, you hope that some of those people will just voluntarily agree to fix Wikipedia and make it all better, for free, because it's not as if they haven't been trying to keep their own enterprises going duirng the period when you were bitching about your taxes, and pretty much all of the other time for the past 6000 years when people were sometimes trying to burn them down and stuff.

Is that, basically, it?


The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.--Terry Pratchett


why i must jettison a poo (1.00 / 21) (#191)
by Your Moms Cock on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 04:29:26 PM EST

from my bum: it is required of a normal functioning body that waste materials be expelled from the intestines through the rectal cavity, eventually emerging from the anus; the waste matertials are jettisoned from the browneye and equilibrium becomes restored.....until NEXT TIME!!!!!!


--
Mountain Dew cans. Cat hair. Comic book posters. Living with the folks. Are these our future leaders, our intellectual supermen?

You tried this, remember ? (2.66 / 9) (#192)
by Eivind on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 05:20:12 PM EST

Hi Larry !

Remember you tried this ? Let me quote from the wikipedia entry: Nupedia was an online encyclopedia project founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia lasted from March 2000 until September 2003, and is mostly known as the predecessor of Wikipedia. Nupedia was characterized by an extensive peer review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to professional encyclopedias. Before it ceased operating, Nupedia produced 24 articles that completed its review process (three articles also existed in two versions of different lengths), and 74 more articles were in progress.

Fact is, people contribute to projects if you make the projects fun and the barriers to entry low. Nupedia was exactly the oposite. Getting a single article published there meant going trough a process with something like 379 steps, and by the way in no way shielded you from having to argue the merits of your article with the "unwashed masses". Instead it made what on Wikipedia is easy, effortless and rewarding into a real chore.

It's a wonder anyone ever went trough with it at all, 24 articles after more than a year online says everything about the appeal of such a project.

If you want people to put up with onerous reviews and a shitpile of bureaucracy, you have to pay them for it. It's simple as that. You can continue for another 5 years, complaining that your Nupedia was the rigth thing and wikipedia is "wrong", but thing is, wikipedia is growing and improving with every day while nupedia gets more and more forgotten with every day.

An example of academic abuse (2.80 / 10) (#195)
by gmol on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 06:24:52 PM EST

Let me preface my comment to say that I have only made a few contributions to Wikipedia, but I use it a lot and think it is very cool.

The gist of your article (IMHO) opinion comes across as that (accurate) specialized knowledge can be marred, under wieght of (innaccurate) mass opion.  I can appreciate the sentiment, but let me provide you with a counter example which in my opinion is a far greater threat to legitimacy (and usefulness) to the masses.

Read this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography

The article is non-encyclopediac at best, you may not be able to tell, allow me to explain why.

The author who submitted the article first, has also put pictures of himself, links to advertisements for texts which the same author has written, regarding his own original 'research'.  This is blatant violation of NPOV policy, and hardly in the spirit of an encyclopedia.

Follow the links and you will find that they are largely uninformative.  Take a look at the link to another article (by the same author) apparently having something to do with a type of equation, you won't be able to find that term in Mathworld.

This is an example of someone writing an article about a 'specialized field', which does not actually exist, and yet (despite my attempted changes) no one really seems to mind.  Yet the original author benefits by free advertising to his texts and citations from an (mostly otherwise) reputable source.  Part of it doesn't really matter, since I doubt anyone reads the article anyway, but there seems to be a problem when it can be demonstrated that the rules can be broken, as long as it is for 'specialzied knowledge' that people don't really care about.  I abstained from any further comment on this family of articles, as my opinion could only come across as biased.

On the other hand, my example may support Larry's position, as I have 'specialized knowledge' that is demonstrably accurate, but that most other wikipedians don't know/care enough for such knowledge to be incorparated into the Wikipedia.


Larry's recent Wikipedia activity (1.54 / 11) (#196)
by Fennec on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 06:47:03 PM EST

"Larry's comments betray a complete ignorance of the project and a total lack of understanding of how it works and how it is changing over time."

You can view the contributions of Larry Sanger's account on the English Wikipedia. Since December 12, 2002, he has made exactly one edit to a Wikipedia: project page (which he summarized in his own words as "Don't much like categories"), and a few random contributions to his user page. That's it.

He's effectively been away from the project for over two years. I don't think he's really all that qualified to comment on how to restructure its internal processes and basic philosophy.

The real problem - PLAGIARISM (2.45 / 11) (#198)
by foon on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 08:01:44 PM EST

Here is an interesting Usenet post of recent vintage. The author of the post maintains a website with detailed information on roads and highways, which is copyrighted. A direct, unattributed copy of one of his pages was posted to Wikipedia as an article by a third-party. Naively believing that Wikipedia was concerned with intellectual property issues, and also wanting the information to be freely circulated, he changed the Wikipedia article to correctly acknowledge its sources, and also informed the perpetrator of the plagiarism that he had been caught. The Wikipedia staff has deleted his modifications, and there is still no acknowledgment of the true authorship of the article. Other readers of the newsgroup misc.transport.road have discovered that almost every article about United States roads and highways on Wikipedia contains plagiarized content from public websites, many of which are operated by group readers. Now this is just one narrow subject: The exact amount of unattributed copyrighted material on the site may be impossible to determine at this point. But given the lack of safeguards, its not surprising that, just as proprietary code has been illegally slipped into open-source products such as Linux, plagiarized text has seeped into Wikipedia in unknownn quantities.

If the Wikipedia is ever to be remotely legal, much less trustworthy, a strict copyright review process such as any legitimate publisher has should be instituted, and rigorous documentation of sources should be required on all articles. All existing content that has not passed throuh a review process should be removed, and the operators should realize that they may be held liable for damages to copyright holders whose work has been infringed.

Hay, do you guys have a working search? (1.33 / 9) (#204)
by aphasia on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 09:11:04 PM EST

If so, can you have a talk with our boy rusty? I think he could use a few pointers.

"You have *huge* brass balls. Tex would be jealous." --ti dave

Your real problem is... (2.00 / 5) (#230)
by student on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 09:09:27 AM EST

The people who use Wikipedia are like people everywhere else?

If you can solve that problem, please let us know!

¤¤¤¤¤¤
Simon's Rock College of Bard, a college for younger scholars.

Live editing by newbies is wikipedia's strength. (2.57 / 7) (#231)
by yath on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 09:29:38 AM EST

The attraction of editing Wikipedia is that real people will read your changes, and be informed by you, immediately. And if you're not too full of yourself, you can appreciate the likelihood that if someone changes YOUR edits, the article will be even better, and the world is still improved through your actions.

If you take that away, Wikipedia will die. Period. The experts-only encyclopedia has been tried, and it didn't work. You can't mess too much with the current system without breaking it.

There are several ways this can play out:

  1. Wikipedia continues as it is, well-known but marginalized and maligned. Result: A good encyclopedia, but not as good as we'd hope.
  2. Someone creates a fork of Wikipedia, reviewed by experts. Result: Wikipedia gets competition. Perhaps it receives less editing. Efforts are split, and again, things aren't as good as we'd hope.
  3. Wikipedia changes its policy. This would be a real gamble. Wikipedia's strength lies in attracting masses; if you give administrators too much power, will they use it well, or will they become tin-pot Napoleons and drive away people who make clueless-newbie edits?
  4. A miracle occurs.
I guess I'm hoping for #4, as the first 3 are either no better than the current situation, or disastrous.

If you gave a number of trusted users the ability to mark a particular version of each article "approved", it might do the trick. It would be important to keep most-current article the default. Otherwise, I think the motivation to edit would wane. But if you wanted to, you could log in and decide to view only "approved" articles.

wikipedia is exploratory (2.66 / 6) (#234)
by drquick on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 10:46:33 AM EST

lack of public perception of credibility, particularly in areas of detail
If it's just a perception of unreliability why change it? It would be very bad if the price to get a perception of reliability would be to become populist or even unreliable. the review process in wikipedia is ongoing. Do we realy need a point of no more reviewing? That would not be more reliable in my opinion. Many so called reliable sources are themselves full of errors and biased facts. I for one don't need yet another open source - or actually open facts - project that is trying to be like old technologies. We must explore what networked knowledge can give not mimic what an eatablished encyclopedia already can do. I don't care if conservatively thinking minds can't accept wikipedia.
the dominance of difficult people, trolls, and their enablers
I agree this is a problem. I've seen much of it in GPL linux software projects. Someone with enough leverage will throw out perfectrly good code, SW architecture and features just because he wants to feel important or promote his own little snippet of code that breaks something bigger. This issue seems to me as a very big problem. But does it disqualify wikipedia? I am inclined to suport the anti-elitist approach since elites are aften self appointed. I think that he real experts will win in the long run. wikipedia is sitll an obngoing project and will hopefullyu always be so. If snotty wannabees sabotage the work of experts will they in the long run be able to do so? I have some faith in a natural evolution of of a dynamic networked system like wiki. Elites cannot dictate truths in wikipedia - at first glancde that's a huge drawback - but in the long run power will gravitate to the experts. Not just the self appointed experts with a huge ego, but real experts. the project participant's respect for expertise will have to evolve with time not be dictated. This is what makes wikipedia interesting to me. A seed of knowledge will attract the experts later on too.

So who counts as an expert? That's the true problem. Also in academia where that problem is not properly addressed.

Who is elite? (2.57 / 7) (#235)
by neurogeek on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 10:46:34 AM EST

How could the Wikipedia decide who is "elite"? I'll provide an example from my own area of study. There is some controversy surrounding the use of cochlear implants to treat deafness, particularly in children. Consider this group of five "experts": a representative of the company who manufatures the device; a PhD scientist who sudies the effects of these implants in an animal model; a surgeon who implants the device; an official at a school for deaf children; and a deaf teenager who has recieved an implant and is unable (or unwilling) to use the device. All 5 have some special knowledge of the cochlear implant, and there are disagreements, both of opinion and of fact, among them. How would the Wikipedia decide which of these experts was more likely to give a reasonable edit?

It's a matter of architecture (2.20 / 5) (#240)
by Ethanol on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 11:24:27 AM EST

You can't change the sociology of wikipedia's users by fiat, and the idea of declaring a new key principle and enforcing it "somehow" is almost laughable. What's needed is an alteration to the social architecture of the site. Here's my suggestion: Add a way to stamp a given version of an article as having been "approved", "peer reviewed" or whatever--I don't like either of these terms, but surely someone can think of a better one. A relatively small circle of reviewers, who would be nominated and elected by the community as a whole, invited to particpate by the heads of the project, or both, would be the only people with the authority to "approve" an article. There is no dramatic change to the way wikipedia works. Anyone can edit any article at any time. But if, at some time in the past, an article was approved by one of the reviewers, then the article will always contain a link to the last approved version, the ID of the reviewer who approved it, and the date of the approval. If you look up Philosophy, for instance, and see a link at the top to the "most recent approved version of this article", you can click that to get the peer-reviewed article. (There might be an alternative URL or a cookie that could be set by people who prefer to always see the most recent approved verison rather than the most recent edit. In their case, instead of seeing the link to "most recent approved version" they'd see a link to "most recent version" that they could follow if they wanted to.) The beauty of this is that it plays to Wikipedia's strengths. You're not discouraging the addition of new information; you're simply adding a new datum: This version of this article has, or has not, been peer-reviewed. A user may prefer the lively chaos of Wikipedia and never bother to follow the "approved version" links--but the links would be there for those who did want them.

general remarks (3.00 / 6) (#243)
by Pakaran on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 11:46:05 AM EST

I see nothing wrong with an "approved edition" except that there aren't that many academics willing to put in the time to make one, that there would be a need for more paid editors (which the project perhaps can't afford at this point), and that it might cause the current contributers to feel left out; in addition, an "approved edition" such as that of h2g2 would not be likely to be updated as frequently.  It would also be unlikely to include allegedly biased coverage like the election controversies article (which Jimbo Wales himself has criticized).  However, some would argue that that article deals with a legitimate issue which academics have covered, and which is being discussed by politicians.  Certainly this issue wouldn't be covered up-to-the-minute in an approved edition.  Whether it should be is an interesting issue.  

Another point Larry makes is giving too much credence to vandals.  I think folks like SOLLOG are tolerated even when they begin to harrass project members, and that their rights are emphasized even when they begin to drive legitimate contributers out.  Read the near-megabyte of archives of the above page (and some material on that page has been removed.  

Sollog in particular has been making threats against the site co-founder Jimbo Wales.  He has made homophobic and/or outright bizarre remarks on talk pages and made efforts at self-promotion of his self-alleged paranormal abilities.  He has linked his own anti-WP site, which includes site co-founder Jimbo Wales' personal information and previously included character assassination on Jimbo's family, from various articles in a very likely attempt at pagewank on behalf of his various commercial sites, including an adult site focused on death.  If you want links to the above, which I will not promote, please by all means contact me using the username "windrunner" and the domain "gmail.gooGOL.KOM".  

Another user, SPUI, has been allowed to remain in the community despite one of his earlier edits being the linking of Last Measure from the site's sandbox.  This user also admits on his user page to being a member of the GNAA, but is now making good edits.  

We are all elite in our own minds (2.78 / 14) (#245)
by weave on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 11:57:09 AM EST

Defering to an expert is such a problem because those who are at a level below the expert fail to realize that they are lacking in knowledge in the area. In severe cases, those who are grossly incompetent are so badly afflicted that they lack the facility to realize they are, well, idiots. In their mind, they are the expert for whatever reason and will defened their view with great vigor.

This is not my own theory, but one that I have grasped on to question my own competency when I get too cocksure.

Some of my favorite quotes that I believe are relevant to this discussion (i.e., I'm admitting I'm not the expert here!):

"It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense."

-- Miller, W. I. (1993). Humiliation. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

-- Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man. (London: John Murray)

Re: Who is an expert? (2.66 / 3) (#246)
by emmerson on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 12:10:25 PM EST

My thoughts exactly.

It would seem that a mechanism would have to exist to easily and conveniently make editorial decisions based on the ranking of contributors.  Some sort of weighted voting I suppose.

Is anyone acquainted with such a technology?

Does it really work, or not? (2.50 / 12) (#250)
by cjames53 on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 12:38:53 PM EST

Excellent article.

But I question one of your most basic premises: that Wikipedia works. When judging the success or failure of any project, you must compare your achievements against the project's goals. Having a web site that gets lots of hits and lots of contributions is not a measure of success.

Pretend Wikipedia doesn't exists, and imagine you were embarking on a new project, a collaborative web-based encyclopedia. What would your goals be? There are four key words here: "free", "collaborative", "web-based" and "encyclopedia". Each of these suggests a set of goals, aka "requirements" in the software project-management world.

Here's the problem. I think Wikipedia has achieved three of the four goals: It's free, it's collaborative, and it's web based. But let's look at the fourth. What are the requirements for an encyclopedia?

An Encyclopedia is:

  • Comprehensive: Articles on every subject of interest to virtually anyone.
  • Complete: Each article covers the topic
  • Accurate: Each article is accurate and factual, or where there are issues of controversy or opinion, the various points of view are laid out clearly.
  • Indexed and cross-referenced: Articles on related topics are cross referenced, and there is a way for authors to identify keywords for an index.
  • Readable: Articles are written with a tone, language and style that can be understood by the typical person, i.e. a person who is otherwise unacquainted with the topic.

I will assert, and I believe your own article states the same, that Wikipedia simply fails to achieve the status of "Encyclopedia". It is complete, comprehensive and indexed, but it is not accurate or readable. It does not meet the minimum requirements you would set for such a project.

Here's where I disagree with your reasoning:

...one can make a good case that, when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven.

You are assuming that only specialized topics have reliability problems. I disagree: I believe every topic in an encyclopedia is a specialized topic. Whether it's an extreme specialty like mine (cheminformatics), or a widely-known topic like art, history, biographies, there is always somebody who is more knowledgeable than the rest of us, who should be given special recognition.

Knowledge is fundamentally elitist. It's not something you get to vote on, because 99% of the people don't have enough expertise in 99% of the topics to even vote responsibly.

Scientists have dealt with this issue for hundreds of years, via the peer-review process. It's not perfect, there's lots of politics, back-stabbing and so forth. But by and large, the good science makes it to the top of the heap, and the bad science is weeded out.

I'll echo the sentiments of many other respondents to your article: I would never bother writing for Wikipedia. I'm an expert in my field (cheminformatics) and have written extensively on the topic. When I found Wikipedia, I thought, "Hey, this is cool! Maybe I'll write an article..." But when I looked at what was there already, I discovered it was based on some of my writing without attribution, was badly written, and, more importantly, there was no mechanism by which I could say, "Hey, I happen to know something about this field." That was the first and last time I used Wikipedia.

I believe that Wikipedia could be a success if it added a peer-review process with the following features:

  • It incorporated a voting mechanism or peer-review process. When an article was changed, the new version would be available, alongside the old, and readers could vote. The new article would only supplant the old when a threshold was reached.
  • There must be an "override" mechanism where authors or groups of specialists could appeal to management to override the vote (i.e. when a group of "trolls" or a commercial attack out-voted the genuine specialists on a topic).
  • Specialty areas would have moderators. The moderators' votes would count much more heavily than the general public, and a moderator could override votes, ban certain readers from voting, etc.

I really hope that Wikipedia, or its successor whatever that may be, is a success one day. It's such a great idea. But until we come up with a mechanism that recognizes that all knowledge is specialized, it's going to be an elusive goal.

Craig A. James



A single accepted point of view? (2.88 / 9) (#251)
by MoebiusStreet on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 12:43:11 PM EST

Suggestions for improving this seem to involve some sort of "approval stamp" on articles. Unfortunately, in today's complex world there is not simply a single objectively true point of view. Many commentors have recognized this, and pointed to the impossibility of choosing who the expert(s) are when they frequently disagree.

I submit that in the spirit of open decentralization, there CANNOT be a single approval group or entity. Instead, there must be an allowance for multiples approvers, each with their own points-of-view (and yes, possibly agendas -- we all have them, may as well admit it)

Anyone should be able to set themselves up as an approving authority. We've got a zillion of them in the world today -- ANSI, ISO, ECMA, FDA, etc. Let any individual user decide which point of view they want to view as authoritative. Let me say that when one exists, I want to see articles that have been posted or vetted by the Republican approvers. Or some group from the AMA, or whatever

Let everyone put their ideas out as approvers not just as authors. Then the market will decide whose approval is valuable. Thus we get openness in at multiple levels.

how about open to those who demonstrate competence (2.33 / 6) (#255)
by dh003i on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 01:34:22 PM EST

How about...
  1. Only allow those with accounts to post.
  2. Accounts initially start off with a score of 0 on each topic.
  3. Accounts earn points (or lose points, going negative) as their owners demonstrate knowledge/expertise/understanding of various topics.
  4. Below a certain level, edits need to be submittted for approval. Below another level, individuals cannot post on a topic, due to their demonstrated ignornace of it.
  5. Below a certain overall average level, individuals cannot post at all, because they've demonstrated they aren't being constructive.
  6. Above a certain level, individuals are considered competent, supercompetent, or experts in various areas.
  7. When there are arguments in a field (e.g., in economics, between mainstream economists and Austrian economists), to support objectivity, editors and contributors should not take positions, but rather explain the positions of particular sides. They should be judged on how accurately they explain these differences, and compare and contrast.

Social Security is a pyramid scam.

Why do some projects get away with being elitist? (2.83 / 6) (#260)
by cribeiro on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 03:01:31 PM EST

One thing that caught my attention is that neither the author, nor any one of the comments did mention how do big open & free projects like Linux and Apache handle expertise. A few principles seem to be common:
  • It's a meritocracy (if there's such a word). Good code wins. Bad code gets out.
  • Patches are reviewed. No anonymous, unchecked code.
  • It's elitist to the extreme. Try to post a naive comment on any of the main dev lists out there, and you'll know for yourself what does 'flaming' means.
Let's face it - the best FOSS projects are run by a elitist gang of people. Only the best - I mean, the best - are accepted. The guys there may be nice in public, play and joke, but they take their work very seriously. Perhaps Wikipedia can learn some lessons from them... p.s. It's been a long time since I've last posted here, on K5. And I'm glad to be back, specially because this is a great article to debate.

Two kinds of Knowledge (2.66 / 3) (#262)
by jrincayc on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 03:10:31 PM EST

I believe that there are two distinctly different kinds of knowledge, history, and models.

History is what has happened. This type of knowledge is propagated by original sources, documents and the like. The key question with any history is, "Has it really happened?" To answer that question, you must know how the document originated. A document written by a college student in the 1970s about the industrial revolution is entirely different from a document written by an actual participant of the industrial revolution who only attended the equivalent of elementary school. The college student's version might have higher educational credentials, but it is less important because it is lacking important credentials of a different sort, such as first-hand experience. With history, who wrote the document and what they knew matters. The exact providence of a historical fact is very important, since there is no independent way to verify a historical fact other than different sources. Once it is wrong, only by careful research and examining the credentials of many documents can a historical fact be proved wrong.

Wikipedia has many such historical facts. In the Crushing by Elephant article there was the fact: "The last person to be officially executed in this fashion was put to death in India in April, 1947." Is this true? I thought it sounded somewhat implausible, so I tried to verify it in a library. I was unable to verify it, so I removed it. However, it is possible that the fact might be true, and I was merely unable to find a source for it. This is a problem with most historical facts. Wikipedia is currently very weak at dealing with this type of problem.

The other type of knowledge is models. (Don't get too hung up on the term. Others might use systems, methodologies, or theories to describe what I am calling models.) These consist of assumptions and their consequences. There is a quote that "All models are wrong, some models are useful." For example, Newton's model of physics is wrong when high speeds are involved, but, for say, building a car, it is very useful. The economic model of supply and demand is wrong for certain goods, but it is still useful for much else. The only possible problem is that a model might be inconsistent (or two or more models might be mutually inconsistent). The basic method for finding problems in models is to understand them, and then think about them. I have discovered mistakes made by people with PhDs (in physics) about physics by listening to a lecture, and then thinking about it (though, to be honest, the PhDs found more of my mistakes than I found of their mistakes). The other half of a model, its usefulness, is determined by testing it against the real world.

Wikipedia has many models in it. There are physics models and economic models and models of computers. Sometimes, mistakes are added (mistake) by ignorant editors. However, after thought, these can be corrected by less ignorant editors (fix). The key fact here is that Patrick did not know any more about elasticity that I did, he just thought about the example I gave, and realized that I had made a mistake. For all I know, he could have no credentials whatsoever, but he fixed a mistake.

My key point is, that for much knowledge, what matters is not the providence of the information, but the explanation that goes with the information. If the expert actually knows more than the layman, then the expert should be able to explain the flaw in the layman's reasoning and why the expert's method is better. If no expert can, then I consider the "expert's" knowledge highly suspect. Modeled knowledge is well served by Wikipedia, since it truly can be reviewed by non-experts.

So, historical knowledge will be poorly served by Wikipedia in its current form, but modeled knowledge will be well served by Wikipedia in its current form. I believe that this type of knowledge is far more important than historical knowledge. A vigorous debate between laymen and experts on equal footing will improve both Wikipedia's and humanity's overall modeled knowledge.

As for historical knowledge, Wikipedia could use some work.



thank you Larry (2.50 / 6) (#263)
by matusz on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 03:20:20 PM EST

I have been on wikipedia pretty much from the beginning, and this is very encouraging to see that You still do care after those years away and having not so good personal experience with it. I also thank you for the great thought-framework you created, even if the real-world result differs much from your expectations. To me it seems like a child that has proven healthy enough to live, grow and learn, but needs much bring-up. This requires patience and courage.

To comment on your essay:

I think wikipedia has grown too big to be directly altered by any single person (maybe with the exception of Jimmy deciding to close it after all, but I don't know if even he can do it anymore).

But it can be affected by something that it needs - by knowledge. I think that while creating an elitist project basing on wikipedia could initially lower the user-base overall expertise, the long-term results could be worth it, as long as the resulting articles are freely available to be copied back into wikipedia.

I wish You would start something like that, although I know that probability is low.

The other thing that could possibly affect it would be some periodical philosophical insight from you, provided you could write it knowing there will be no immediate results, but flaming and whining.

This essay seems like a good starting point, but it needs some polishing to get rid of preaching and wounds-tending. Would you agree to put it on wikipedia?

matusz


Thank God someone is finally saying this! (1.00 / 9) (#265)
by logicnazi on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 04:11:11 PM EST

This is commentary on wikipedia which is long overdue. As I myself have experienced at many wiki projects, especially wikinewe, there is an almost cult like anti-elitist mentality. Any change to the system which would give some group (frequent editors, those with enough experience whatever) more controll over the wiki than joe schmoe is deridided as against the wiki spirit. When did things change from trying to produce the best encyclopedia/news/whatever possible to religiously adhering to some idea of equality? Many of the posts responding to this message either exhibit the same blind religiousness and simply refuse to consider the possibility they might be wrong or are confused about the basic issue. Also I would point out it is completly hypocritical to critisize the article poster for not having enough expertise as an argument for allowing completly random people to add their own 2c to an encyclopedia. The problem, at least as I see it, is not about having low barriers to entry. I fully agree that every joe schmoe should be allowed to submit his edits. The problem is that the wiki community refuses to consider a tiered editing struture to approve these edits. Admitedly coming up with the proper review system is hard but take a look at wikinews. Every time someone takes a bunch of time to propose a tiered structure a bunch of people protest that it is anti-wiki. At the very least the wikipedia community needs to start addressing these points in a substantive matter instead of just accusing the position of being anti-wiki. I'm not sure if I should take all those questions of the sort 'who decides what is elite' seriously. Admitely there is a real issue here, but it is clearly a solveable issue since we manage to do so succesfully for scientific journals and real encyclopedias. However, It seems that many of these comments indicate a deep comitment to a sort of relativism about expertise (it's kinda like theology for the wiki-philosophy). So I will give the simple answer and hope that it satisfies everyone who isn't dogmatically commited to the opposite viewpoint. Basically you have two choices for who determines expertise. The first is a trust web in the style of PGP. This web is seeded with a couple of known wikipedia developers who then give editorial status to others they find trustworthy. The other option is to let the community as a whole decide who is worthwhile. Implement some sort of rating of edits/contributions and give those people who get a high enough karma editorial status. Personally, I prefer some combination of the two. Some level of adequate contributions should be necessery but not sufficent to gain editorial status and a group of developers can assign people to be editors in chief of certain areas of wikipedia.

Thank God someone is finally saying this! (2.66 / 9) (#266)
by logicnazi on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 04:11:54 PM EST

This is commentary on wikipedia which is long overdue.  As I myself have experienced at many wiki projects, especially wikinewe, there is an almost cult like anti-elitist mentality.  Any change to the system which would give some group (frequent editors, those with enough experience whatever) more controll over the wiki than joe schmoe is deridided as against the wiki spirit.

When did things change from trying to produce the best encyclopedia/news/whatever possible to religiously adhering to some idea of equality?

Many of the posts responding to this message either exhibit the same blind religiousness and simply refuse to consider the possibility they might be wrong or are confused about the basic issue.  Also I would point out it is completly hypocritical to critisize the article poster for not having enough expertise as an argument for allowing completly random people to add their own 2c to an encyclopedia.

The problem, at least as I see it, is not about having low barriers to entry.  I fully agree that every joe schmoe should be allowed to submit his edits.  The problem is that the wiki community refuses to consider a tiered editing struture to approve these edits.  Admitedly coming up with the proper review system is hard but take a look at wikinews.  Every time someone takes a bunch of time to propose a tiered structure a bunch of people protest that it is anti-wiki.  At the very least the wikipedia community needs to start addressing these points in a substantive matter instead of just accusing the position of being anti-wiki.

I'm not sure if I should take all those questions of the sort 'who decides what is elite' seriously.  Admitely there is a real issue here, but it is clearly a solveable issue since we manage to do so succesfully for scientific journals and real encyclopedias.  However, It seems that many of these comments indicate a deep comitment to a sort of relativism about expertise (it's kinda like theology for the wiki-philosophy).  So I will give the simple answer and hope that it satisfies everyone who isn't dogmatically commited to the opposite viewpoint.

Basically you have two choices for who determines expertise.  The first is a trust web in the style of PGP.  This web is seeded with a couple of known wikipedia developers who then give editorial status to others they find trustworthy.  The other option is to let the community as a whole decide who is worthwhile.  Implement some sort of rating of edits/contributions and give those people who get a high enough karma editorial status.

Personally, I prefer some combination of the two.  Some level of adequate contributions should be necessery but not sufficent to gain editorial status and a group of developers can assign people to be editors in chief of certain areas of wikipedia.

Statistical Fully Democratic Wikipedia (2.50 / 4) (#270)
by Hakkikt on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 05:30:49 PM EST

As our perceptions are limited, in some ways, our knowledge is always biased (because of experience, choices, agendas, etc.)
Everything is matter of opinion or consensus.

I think the only thing that escapes this condition it's mathematics, as it is a pure mind creation with a specific set of rules (logic). Others may not agree :)

So why can't Wikipedia be a multi-view encyclopedia?
This encyclopedia should be as diverse as the internet is.

Surely it's going to be source of debate and some "bad/unpopular" memes are going to infiltrate (racism, religious fanatism, intolerance), but it can be balanced with proper commentary, and some sort of poll where people can tell what opinion is more useful/accepted (this even may change in time).

Can we be so arrogant to think there's only one way to interpret every thing in life?
I think we shouldn't.


wasting experts' valuable time (3.00 / 11) (#282)
by bshanks on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 07:39:39 PM EST

i think one of Larry's points could be usefully extended.

Larry writes "nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they will--at least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversy--be forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts."

This argument, while accurate (the more that experts have to "waste" their time on this, the less they will participate, which is bad for Wikipedia), rubs many (including myself) the wrong way. My instinct is to think, "certainly it sucks to have to defend one's contributions, but how else can we assure quality? If the hoity-toity experts are unwilling to put in the same amount of effort that i am, there's not much that we can do, now is there?". This response, while also accurate (I think), ignores the reality that it really is a loss to the project when experts don't participate.

But there's another way to look at this. It's not just a matter of pampering the elitist experts so that they deign to contribute. Imagine that you own Wikipedia, and that an expert is one of your employees.

If you had a credentialed expert who agreed to spend a certain number of hours working on Wikipedia each week, you would want them to spend their time adding content that they consider important, and on making corrections to important but non-obvious errors that few others would be likely to detect.

You would NOT want to spend their time repeating the same arguments over and over about things that they are quite sure are obvious. Other people are qualified to take on this task. Since there are only a few experts, it is most efficient to have each expert focus on the things that only they can do.

So, it's not just a question of pampering the experts. It's a question of efficiently using their time. When their time is spent doing what someone else could do, this is not just unpleasant for them, it is inefficient for the project.


Just a freak coincidence. (2.00 / 3) (#284)
by i on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 08:01:08 PM EST

One Two. Enjoy!

and we have a contradicton according to our assumptions and the factor theorem

A few thoughts on wikipedia (2.71 / 7) (#286)
by thehero on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 08:53:45 PM EST

I have to agree with numerous other posts here and say that what Larry sees as problems with wikipedia, I think are, in fact, strengths. One should never fully trust any source regardless of who (expert or not) "approved" it or did not approve it. This is the real beauty of wikipedia, it teaches us to always question, to seek out other sources, compare and contras and be critical. Something our US society dearly needs to learn, in my opinion.

Also I don't believe there is such a thing as real objectivity...and beyond that, that objectivity is not even desirable.

"Objectivity is not possible if it means not taking a stand, not having a point of view. Because writing or teaching history inevitably involves choosing from a great mass of historical data what you will present, and your choice depends on your view of what is important to present, and that is affected by your social stance, how you think about race or class or war, etc. Therefore, to claim objectivity is not quite honest, because you can't help being subjective, so you may as well declare yourself openly, which allows your reader/listener to judge what you say, to measure that against other viewpoints and decide for himself/herself." -Howard Zinn

Perhaps than wikipedia can have one or more dissenting opinion sections for each article. A space for multiple points of view on a particular subject or definition.

On trolls-

Some aspects of the Indymedia project and other open web forums might be applied here, specifically the rating system for articles...(-2, -1, 0, +1, +2) this would allow for democratic troll monitoring and action...after a certain number of negative points from a certain number of different users, the change or article is hidden. The ratings system could also be applied to the wikipedia users themselves. If say I "fuck up" or "troll" several articles I could start receiving a poor user grade and after a while I will be restricted from changing articles or posting new ones. I have seen this system work rather well.

Wikipedia requires faith in other ordinary human beings, which is not easy I admit, but let us try and remember that education and access to knowledge as well as expertise are noting but privileges gained by economic statue and luck. Elitism is the believe that you are somehow better to more entitled that others because of your luck in economic status education and knowledge etc. The expert needs to teach, to pass on their knowledge, not to control that knowledge.

Wikipedia alive, it a learning experiment in information anarchism, it empowers every person who has access to it and above all it is fully democratic...which is refreshing, visionary and revolutionary.



Wikiproject: Fact and Reference Check (2.92 / 13) (#291)
by Synonymous on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 11:05:59 PM EST

You don't really need experts, at least not yet. You simply need a way to verify the facts.

What is holding the project back are a lack of smart foot/end note tags. How credible will Wikipedia be if each fact is crossreferenced with 5, 10, 20 external sources like academic journals, encyclopedias, books? Very.

Summary of 1,000 "arguments" (2.62 / 16) (#299)
by Estanislao Martínez on Tue Jan 04, 2005 at 04:40:22 AM EST

Third party observer: "One can produce a reference work of better quality than Wikipedia currently does by doing X."

Wikipedia cult member: "Doing X will not produce a perfect reference work, therefore, it's of no value.  And anyway, if there's an error in Wikipedia, it's your own fucking fault for not fixing it."

--em

Tech Central Station (2.77 / 9) (#305)
by sien on Tue Jan 04, 2005 at 07:11:02 AM EST

One of the cited articles is of interesting origin. It's written by a former head of Britannica, who obviously doesn't like how things like Wikipedia are threatening Britannica. It is also published by Tech Central Station.

Any article from Tech Central Station should be treated with some discretion. Tech Central Station is a Republican PR out fit. They are described in disinfopedia .

Is it any wonder that a PR firm that regularly attacks scholars like Juan Cole and Green theory should want to have things like wikipedia and disinfopedia discredited if they expose PR organs like Tech Central Station for what they are?

Wikipedia is a flawed concept (2.22 / 9) (#306)
by philstaite on Tue Jan 04, 2005 at 07:42:04 AM EST

The peer review process, i.e. when an article is reviewed by recognised experts, is the only thing that guarantees an academic article's validity.

The fact that Wikipedia eschews this in favour of an open approach means it's lack of reliability, perceived or otherwise, will always be under question; the perception is a direct product of it's approach and is utterly unavoidable.

Whilst "open source", for want of a better phrase, is an entirely laudable aim, it is just not applicable in all situations and to suggest that it is to ignore the reality in favour of an ideal.

Wikipedia vetting (3.00 / 8) (#312)
by fuzzyeric on Tue Jan 04, 2005 at 11:03:55 AM EST

It is common to portray and perceive academic topics as cut and dried, dessicated remnants of research from which all the humanity has been removed. While this impersonal (or perhaps, anti-personal) style has been common since the mid-1800s (and somewhat earlier), it is not the only style. Perhaps we might grasp that the Wikipedia more accurately reflects the nature of human knowledge -- multi-faceted, sweaty, and very poorly pigeonholed, somewhat like a bazaar. This may not make it more accurate in the eyes of an expert who has already invested in a collection of particular viewpoints. It is, however, a vastly more accurate representation of the nature of human knowledge than the dry representations which are common in encyclopedias. Certainly, it is the desire of the monk, steeped in the tradition of the Cathedral to cant the dogma in hushed and reverent tones and to present the work as that of the impersonal deity or church. Thus, the expert demands deference.

Contrariwise, it is clearly the case that while everyone may have their opinions on an issue, the vast majority of people are too ignorant to justify their certitude. Heck, half of all drivers are below average, but rather fewer than that seem to think that they are. (Source: various statistics with varying degrees of credibility that universally support the statement. Heh.) At a minimum, the desired goal suffers from a bootstrapping problem: there's no objective way to detect expertise. The only alternative, it would seem would to be allow users to specify who they think experts are and allow them to only see articles and edits by their supposed experts.

A particular failure of the wiki is the absence of a mechanism for representing that there are sharply divided expert factions for an issue and representing that a collection of (sub-) articles presents a survey of viewpoints. I.e., not sections in an article, a set of (sub-) articles referenced or transcluded into an article indicating multiple viewpoints. In this context, users may then select their expert(s) and only see positions espoused by their expert(s). Similarly, articles can be marked as "accepted" by a user's delegated expert and therefore is qualified for presentation to the user.

In other words... There's no objective mechanism for recognizing experts, especially on a topic new to the encylopedia. There's no mechanism for nonrepudiation of entries that may or may not have been submitted by the person signing them. There is not even a clear definition of expert. It would seem that the best that can be done is the specification of "my experts" or "my delegate for refereeing articles".

The reviewed restriction of the Wikipedia that you want to make is entirely in that camp. However, instead of the user indicating whom they believe, they are required to believe that the editors have made the correct choices. Maybe so and maybe not. This again would be trying to predict the future.

Sanger is off his rocker (2.12 / 8) (#317)
by dgrant on Tue Jan 04, 2005 at 02:11:45 PM EST

First of all, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written BY the people who read it, FOR the people who read it. If there it no article on some Philosophy topic, or if there is some very basic article in its place, then clearly there is no demand from the readership for such an aritcle. If someone is appalled by the lack of said article, then he or she should write one, otherwise I think the readers will be in ignorant bliss about the non-existence of said article.

Secondly, I have never experienced this anti-elitism you speak of. Maybe you went looking for it and found it, only after looking hard because you wanted to find it. I once corrected a bunch of articles written by a particular guy, because they weren't factually correct. I was an expert in the particular field of the articles and I corrected him. At first he was hesitant to believe me, but I proved my points on the Discussion board of one article, and he gained my respect. He also had a background in physics, and was a smart guy, and thus was able to understand the corrections I had made to the articles. Lastly, I have written several articles from scratch, which almost no one has touched. Clearly I am the only expert in those areas so far. I don't see anyone deleted my articles or doubting my expertise.

Are you the quack that tried to start Nupedia? That was an elitist project that was doomed from the start, whereas Wikipedia, an a-elitist (neither elitist nor anti-elitist) project was destined to floorish.

Trust (2.87 / 8) (#321)
by vadim on Tue Jan 04, 2005 at 03:53:38 PM EST

There several things here. First of all, who cares what the perception is? We should be more concerned about the reality. Second, Wikipedia perhaps can't be fully trusted. But so what?

Here's the thing. Perhaps it would be useful to live by the strict standards followed to securely verify PGP signatures, but nobody in practice does. There is actually very little you can seriously trust. For instance, take encyclopedias.

Let's take a look at the one on my shelf. It's made by some company called "Plaza & Janes", who I honestly have no idea who they are. It was bought after a door to door salesman (whose name I ignore) convinced my parents years ago it was a good thing to have for our homework. Apparently, it's endorsed by the University of Salamanca. While not very far from Madrid, Istill can't say I know what kind of place that is. I have no clue of what this endorsement means, either.

Surely it's been written by some competent people, though. Or so I would hope. The small list of names is completely useless to me. Two of them look like they were involved in the production of the text, the rest did something else. Surely this huge thing couldn't have been written by just two people, and if it was I doubt they know that much about it. A list of trusted experts is nowhere to be seen.

Why do I trust the contents of this thing? Well, after thinking about it, the best I can come up with is the same reason why I trust my bank's website: because it's got a signature from Verisign (who I hear bad things about), and Microsoft (who I dislike) trusts Verisign and included its certificates on the Windows CD, and I trusted Microsoft not to screw up... that is, not really sure why.

Okay, enough about that. Now let's try Wikipedia instead. It's clearly visible it's a collaborative project. It is writtenby a huge number I never heard about either. And it even has big disclaimers about the content.

However. First of all, I like the fact this is all being made clear to me. Second, unlike with the paper encyclopedia, I can actually develop some trust in it, oddly enough. For instance, I can go to the talk page and see if there's some controversy. I can also see who made what modifications and develop some trust in the authors. Granted, that's one messy and lengthy thing to do.

Third, I can actually complain, discuss, and/or fix things. If it turns out my paper encyclopedia says something that I consider obviously wrong, I have no recourse. Oh sure, I could try calling the producer, and wouldn't get anywhere, except ifit was some extremely outrageous issue the press would decide to discuss. It's not like bias is hard to introduce. Take religion for instance, plenty room there. Say, I'm sure there are plenty people who believe an encyclopedia should point somepeople think God doesn't exist. But my encyclopedia doesn't seem to include that, it merely describes the concept and various gods.

Now, of course Wikipedia isn't perfect. There's some bad stuff in it, and there will always be. However, I believe there are advantages to that approach. It doesn't try to be some kind of authoritative source, made by experts that aren't even listed anywhere. It doesn't hide disagreements. That's one reason why I use it a lot more often than the one on the shelf.
--
<@chani> I *cannot* remember names. but I did memorize 214 digits of pi once.

Wikipedia is not an academic resource. (2.75 / 8) (#340)
by Russell Dovey on Wed Jan 05, 2005 at 01:50:28 PM EST

Wikipedia is the world's first serious attempt at a  fully-automated many-to-many distributed teaching system. It's a teacher! It's not meant to support your thesis!

It's meant to help you learn about anything you want to, and allow you to teach other people about things in return.

I see this as the most important function of Wikipedia, one that is sadly overlooked because it is so obvious.

"Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light." - Spike Milligan

What's up with the media blitz? (1.25 / 8) (#341)
by Sesquipundalian on Wed Jan 05, 2005 at 11:01:54 PM EST

Since when does anyone care what fccking Larry Sanger thinks? I mean really? Everybody just started hating wikipedia in the last two weeks? This is like the 12th place I've seen the same crap about wikipedia being bad and I honestly don't get it. All of the anti-wikipedia sentiment I read here and in those other forums just ammounts to a huge pile of really lame whining about something that is A) good and B) free. Wutupwidat?

Any chance that someone with anti-wikipedia adgenda could just speak up and enlighten us as to what's really going on here? You know, something like; "Hi I'm a <INSERT tenured proff at XYZ University/ Executive at the Rand corporation/ one of the aliens from Area 51/ representative of 'da man HERE> and I'm experiencing a freak episode of self loathing because I'm such an anti-social jerk off and this is why I hate wikipedia and anything else that helps people for free..."

Come on, we'll all rate your comments very highly and you'll feel sooooo popular!


Did you know that gullible is not actually an english word?
Whats that noise? (1.75 / 4) (#342)
by largo on Thu Jan 06, 2005 at 08:16:21 AM EST

Oh, its the sound the point makes as you miss it by miles and whizz straight by.

Point 1 - You sound like a whinger, who's just annoyed because a bunch of internet nobodies didn't show sufficient respect to your shiny Phd. You may have a serious point, but whinging like a big girl isn't going to win you any friends.

Point 2 - You want a source of reference thats compiled professionally by experts? Hello, its called an encyclopedia. Wikipedia. Encyclopedia. Notice the subtle difference in spelling? Like astrology and zoology. Gee, do you think they could be different things?

Wikipedia is something entirely new - an attempt to see if accuracy can be arrived at through consensus - an implementation of the wisdom of crowds, if you will. Having any kind of editing or oversight process would render the whole thing totally pointless, and result in a free, rather crap encylopedia. As it is, I wouldn't necessarily trust the facts in Wikipedia as far as I could comfortably spit a rat, but I still think its a fascinating experiment.

Spike the Canon! Credibility is a Continuum (1.80 / 5) (#346)
by redelm on Thu Jan 06, 2005 at 07:24:29 PM EST

First, congrats Larry. Second, take a chillpill.

Wiki shatters publishing paradigms in much the same way as USENET, blogs, Linux & the Internet itself. All these egalitairian/network developments are deeply threatening to the establishment in/out model and have been called unreliable or worse. I loved the Britannica editurd's whinge. Reliability is a canard for it is purchased dearly at the price of omissions. NYT vs Drudge. Linux vs MS-Windows.

Trolls can be a problem best handled by things like Karma/metamod (USENET works without it) and growing some skin. In my experience, true experts are very confident in themselves, ignore the drooling trolls and actually enjoy the more cogent challengers. Only the posers gripe over form or credentials.



Mental Vomit Regarding Wikipedia (1.00 / 2) (#354)
by noise on Fri Jan 07, 2005 at 07:26:03 PM EST

True revolutions become standards...at least for a bit. Reality is cool and all... but the interface sucks.

Effect on Undergraduates (2.50 / 4) (#360)
by jcg on Sat Jan 08, 2005 at 02:55:03 PM EST

The Britannica is not a perfect encyclopedia, but I believe it's probably the best available in English. I'd say that most undergraduates across the country have, with a little effort, access to the on-line version. More than 90% of them, I'd guess, would go first and probably only to wikipedia for their encyclopedia-based needs. For many subjects, the information they'll find is considerably inferior. And for most of those, I don't see it getting better.

On reference works and expert opinions (3.00 / 8) (#361)
by Estanislao Martínez on Sat Jan 08, 2005 at 11:22:16 PM EST

Too many people have answered this essay by saying something like "Experts can be wrong or biased."  Yeah, no shit.  How come I never thought of that?

Anyway, getting back to the point, I will contend that these people are making two fundamental mistakes.  

First think they're getting wrong: an encyclopedia is a reference work, not a research work.  The way I'm using the words "reference" and "research" here is the following: reference work provides useful reports of expert opinion; research work (e.g. papers in peer-reviewed specialist journals) aims to improve expert opinion.

This translates into this discussion as follows: there is much talk (on both the pro and the contra side) about the "accuracy" of Wikipedia.  This is ambiguous, because there are two different ways in which a reference work can be said to be "accurate":

  1. It accurately reflects the truth.
  2. It accurately reflects expert opinion.

A lot of the things experts on some field believe today will turn out to be wrong.  Still, the job of an encyclopedia is to report those things, not to correct them.  A common problem with Wikipedia is that somebody will edit an article to say something that goes counter to expert opinion, and claim those opinions are wrong.  My point is that it is wrong for reference work to report those opinions, even if in the future it turns out that it was correct.

Now, the second mistake, which has to do with bias: a biased expert's opinion can still be very valuable.  Here's an example.  In the late 1920's, the Encyclopedia Britannica commissioned Edmund Husserl to write an article on Phenomenology, a philosophical school that Husserl himself had founded.  It goes without saying that Husserl was not exactly unbiased when it came to this topic-- he founded the phenomenological school.   The historical record, in fact, shows him to be biased: he at first asked his pupil Martin Heidegger to coauthor the piece with him, and when disagreements started to pop up, essentially ditched him.

So, the article was certainly biased.  Now, a very important question: was it useful?  Hell yes.  Even if it was an opinion that was not shared by everybody in the school, it was a very useful opinion to have set down.

There's a third thing I wish to stress: good editing is really important.  A lot of people have been eager to point out that just because you assign an article to an expert, that doesn't mean you'll get a good article.  Well, duh, you don't tell me.  The answer to this strawman, however, is that an encyclopedia is, to a large part, only as good as its editorial team is.  And one of the important tasks of editors is to figure out which experts are the ones that are good for handing out articles to.  Not any expert will produce a good article: after all, experts are primarily trained to produce research, not to write reference works.  Still, some of them will be good enough, especially under the guidance of a good editorial team.

--em

Community or Encyclopedia? (2.22 / 9) (#362)
by cribcage on Sun Jan 09, 2005 at 03:35:24 AM EST

Sanger's analysis is accurate. Moreover, these problems are cyclical: People refuse to take Wikipedia seriously because of its community problems, and its community problems are tolerated under the laissez-faire attitude that comes with not being taken seriously.

The underlying problem is that Wikipedia behaves as a community. Members call themselves "Wikipedians." They hold online elections and real-life meetups, and gossip with each other in IRC and on mailing lists. They're more interested in being a community than in building an encyclopedia.

This attitude breeds the anti-elitism Sanger criticizes. Participation is prioritized above knowledge. Many articles remain in constant battle because the community insists on treating all opinions as equal. They obsess over method to the detriment of the result. Accuracy, as a goal, takes a back seat behind the aim of representing different points of view. And because Wikipedia is seen as a third-rate reference, no one feels compelled to raise the bar.

It isn't a problem with the concept of an open-source encyclopedia. It's a specific problem with Wikipedia.

crib

Please don't read my journal.
Can someone change that first link? (1.00 / 3) (#365)
by Ta bu shi da yu on Sun Jan 09, 2005 at 04:31:55 PM EST

Larry forgot to add a http:// to the start of it.

---
AdTIה"the think tank that didn't".
ה
Opinions may get deleted- but facts often stay. (2.00 / 3) (#373)
by swisswuff on Mon Jan 10, 2005 at 05:40:42 PM EST

It is certainly correct to deplore "lack of professionalism" of some kind when discussing Wikipedia content. But then, professionalism in terms of knowledge is different for Wikipedia than it is for a specialized professional dictionary. Wikipedia connects "the common people" and the "trained people", it connects everybody with the few, the amateurs with the profis. It opens doors into new subjects. Wikipedia is where we all meet to exchange knowledge - to write, to read. There is nothing more important today than a portal for professionals to post and to read easily understandable information. If Wikipedia can explain a concept in simple terms, it succeeds. If Wikipedia can offer the correct keywords for anyone to continue a websearch using, say, scholar.google.com, or other literature databases or search engines, it succeeds. If Wikipedia forces an academic to explain something very carefully, it succeeds. If Wikipedia is able to provide the so-called "academics" with a system that they can use to work out their differences - and Wikipedia is far better at that than, say, writing E-mails is -, then Wikipedia succeeds. It is an illusion to believe that academics - or groups of academics - are less prone to trolling when it comes to views they oppose, than "normal people". Even academics tend to have a hard time to distinguish pure information - which is what Wikipedia should be about - and personal opinion or biased information. Such opinion or biased information is typically content on Wikipedia which anyone may delete freely. If anything, an opinion will survive on Wikipedia if it is argued well - but raw facts, clear details, will probably always stay in Wikipedia. It goes without saying that any commonly understandable information always is degraded - from any perfectionist point of view. That is the essence of a good explanation easy to understand, but it is also the essence of a perfectionist, that such apparent degradation could be inherent, to a certain degree, to good explanations. Wikipedia, however, has this great role of acting as a link for new areas of knowledge. Wikipedia can definitely help you getting started on a research project by providing correctly typed keywords, rough ideas about a subject or names of key players. That is quite good for a free project that features peer review on an all accessible basis.

So we all agree, there should be only one book! (3.00 / 6) (#375)
by nomentanus on Mon Jan 10, 2005 at 09:20:30 PM EST

Everyone disagrees about what the online encylopedia should be like, but everybody seems to agree that just one will do. This is just as absurd as saying that there should be one book in the world, and that anything more is confusing. Yet all those scrapping here seem to be in agreement about what seems to me most false - that one Wiki source of knowledge is enough.

There should be many forks to accomplish many different things. There should be expert encylopedias under strict conservative editorial control. There should be strictly academic (and non-academic) wikis where disagreement and novelty are fostered (call it progress). There should be wikis where those without "the right degree" who know, and have found that the academics are all wet, can post without being over-written as well.

Academic wikis would likely be very conservative and skip over a lot of knowledge, but I want to be able to go to one, being reasonably sure it's accurately sourced and contains what's well known. (That's not the same as being accurate or complete.) I also want the rest of the story, and views that aren't academically fashionable right now - anyone who's been in the academe knows that the winds of what's fashionable blow very strongly there, and often change suddenly.

So I also want some place to exist where ideas can filter up from whoever has them - academics already have a way to spread their knowledge and hypotheses. And I would like to see various technologies for weighing and valuing contributions to develop, and keep changing. That's a lot of forks, so let's get to it!

Just one book? NO WAY!

As for my experiences with Wikipedia, their "Neutral Point of View" so often becomes "the general uninformed prejudice on the matter". In one case what I wrote (taken from the book Black Hawk Down) was censored because it wasn't in the movie Black Hawk Down by people who probably didn't know there had been a book from which the movie was derived! That's sinking to an awfully low common denominator.

I won't be back to Wikipedia if there's any alternative, but it's been a brave and useful pioneer. Unfortunately, other similar projects such as Everything2.com seem to have copied this error and are far more likely to censor truths that contrast mere general prejudice and leave in anything that repeats commonly held fallacies. The internet should be doing more than just this - say some of the work Mersenne did, centuries ago. (Better trace back through deltas and identifiable authorship might help with this as well as a tolerance for novelty, originality or original discoveries.)

Let a thousand Wikis bloom, Google and it's successors will have to sort them out - which is a whole other discussion.

Wikipedia corrupts the morals of youth (2.25 / 4) (#379)
by jolly st nick on Tue Jan 11, 2005 at 10:21:45 AM EST

Which is probably the next argument we'll be hearing.

There's a certain population in K5 that will take a story, which might be reasonably well written but at the end of the day is just a blog entry after all, and kick it to death because it's not a friggin dissertation. It's inevitable that a story like this brings them swarming out of the woodworks.

What's the thing that really sticks in their craws? Simple:

Wikipedia is too much fun.

I mean, for chrissakes, you'd think the Wikipedia was going to put Brittanica and LexisNexis out of business.

Now, if we're not worried about that particular outcome, we might have a discussion about how Wikipedia could be made more useful (or even *gasp* more fun).

funny. (1.50 / 2) (#395)
by yllugkcin on Sun Jan 16, 2005 at 08:16:51 PM EST

There isn't even an Anti Elitism topic yet in wikipedia.

As a Dear Friend (TM) of Larry Sanger (1.33 / 3) (#399)
by The Cunctator on Sun Feb 06, 2005 at 12:30:46 AM EST

LMS refers obliquely and extensively to the problems he claims existed at the time of his leaving Wikipedia. Let's go to the videotape: I refer interested parties to [[The Cunctator/Bias Talk]] to see LMS's freak-out (IMHO--I believe he would label it something like trying to call a troll a troll) before he left the project. Unfortunately a lot of the related matter linked from the above page got eaten in the Great PHP Shift in 2002.

I also want to say this for the sake of the virtual history books: LMS leaving Wikipedia because the postion got defunded is much like an administration official resigning for personal reasons, to spend more time with his family, yadda yadda.

Since it would be rude and anti-elistist to call LMS a shmuck, I'll just say that he was the right man to start Wikipedia but was the wrong man to lead it once it left the starting gates and is utterly unqualified to make any knowledgable criticism of the project.

Wikipedia - why it will fail (2.80 / 5) (#400)
by Robert Brookes on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 11:28:27 PM EST

In summary (and I borrow phrases and sentences from what others have posted on the matter): From metasquares: "What I have seen is a community that grants recognition and status to its members based not on expertise, but rather on time." From cribcage: "The underlying problem is that Wikipedia behaves as a community. Members call themselves "Wikipedians." They hold online elections and real-life meetups, and gossip with each other in IRC and on mailing lists. They're more interested in being a community than in building an encyclopedia." The anti-elitism talks about is cultivated and desperately defended as it allows just about anyone with absolutely no qualifications who have a lot of time on their hands to become community "insiders" and control the activities of others. Who cares if anyone is reading the articles the wikipedians are having fun, right? Expertise and the amount of time required to become a respected member of the Wikipedia community are mutually exclusive. This demand for time screens out experts and allows officious (and oh so self important) bureaucrats with dubious qualifications to control the process. Kids, students (with either no social skills or no real academic commitment - with as a result lots of time), dossers and assorted unemployed or minimum wage bums have the one ingredient required to make it up the Wikipedia hierarchy ... time. As time passes the expertise level settles on the lowest possible common denominator. Without expertise Wikipedia will eventually self destruct. The process has already started ... the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Rules, expertise, and encyclopedic standards (3.00 / 3) (#401)
by Robert Brookes on Sun Mar 06, 2005 at 03:03:49 AM EST

This (below) is from a person 172 who was desysoped on Wikipedia:
I'd like to use the above claification as a chance to illustrate my salient point concerning expertise. My frustration was never that I'd failed to receive sufficient deference from 'non-experts'; the root of the problem was never my treatment. The problem is that there are mechanisms for enforcing some policies but not others.
Wikipedia has a court reprimanding users for breaking the 3RR and making personal attacks. But it lacks an authority reprimanding users for chronically undermining Wikipedia's progress with original research, POV nonsense, and ungrammatical prose. My suggestion on Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards was an alternative arbitration committee with public credibility, composed of qualified encyclopedists who have the calhones not to edit anonymously. (Such a review board would "kill two birds with one stone": making Wikipedia more "expert"-friendly and solidifying its public credibility.) However, other people may have better ideas, and my suggestion is certainly not the only one on the table warranting attention.
Since the behavior of contributors is influenced by the options afforded to them by Wikipedia's governance-- as behavior is rooted in process and structure in every organizations-- a formal organ on Wikipedia delegating a special role for **non-anonymous** professionals, academics, graduate students, etc. would have a profound, positve effect on the culture of Wikipedia. Right now, far more talk is generated when a serious user commits a faux pax (e.g., violating the 3RR or 'calling a troll a troll') than when a troll spews crap into an article. Here's the reason: Wikipedia has mechanisms enforsing rules of PROCESS (e.g., Wikipedia:No personal attacks and Wikipedia:Three revert rule enforcement) but lacks mechanisms enforsing rules of PRODUCT (e.g., Wikipedia:Manual of Style, Wikipedia:No original research, and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view). As a result, when a policy related to product is broken, the dispute usually stays on talk, handled only by a handful of serious editors actively watching the page; but when a policy related to process is broken, it will attract a huge contingent of users fussing over who reverted whom, how many reverts there were, and what did or did not constitute a revert. The rules are shaping a culture on Wikipedia utterly obsessed with process, but incognizant of product.
I'm not arguing that rules of process ought to be discarded. Instead, they ought to be supplemented by rules emphasizing and ENFORCING quality. I say "supplemented" because of the likelihood that far fewer good users would act rashly if already-existing rules mandating encyclopedic standards were enforced.
In short, I'm not laying out a detailed case for policy changes here. I'm just pointing to a problem that ought to be addressed. Right now the rules create a culture on Wikipedia resulting in large amounts of attention to some policies but a lack of attention to others. This asymmetry ought to be addressed, before more users committed to undermining NPOV, no original research, and stylistic conventions figure out how to accomplish their ends by exploiting the over-emphasis on other policy guidelines. Others may disagree with solutions that I am proposing. But that doesn't mean that the problem does not exist. If my proposals are wrong, please come up with better ways of handeling the problem. -172
What 172 confirms is that Wikipedia administrators (by and large) do not have the expertise to deal with anything other than three-revert-rule violations and personal behaviour breaches. Quality of articles therefore comes a poor second as a result.

Relevant Discussion on Meta-Wikipedia (3.00 / 2) (#403)
by cfp on Thu Mar 31, 2005 at 06:13:21 AM EST

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Academics

This lack of respect for expertise (3.00 / 2) (#404)
by trinsic on Tue Apr 19, 2005 at 06:23:08 PM EST

This lack of respect for expertise explains the first problem, because if the project participants had greater respect for expertise, they would have long since invited a board of academics and researchers to manage a culled version of Wikipedia (one that, I think, would not directly affect the way the main project is run). But because project participants have such a horror of the traditional deference to expertise, this sort of proposal has never been taken very seriously by most Wikipedians leading the project now. And so much the worse for Wikipedia and its reputation. I think that you are mistaking lack of respect for a lack of importance, the informed public have about so called experts. Personally I think this sounds more like a issue of titles and a perception of importance that experts seem to want and get from the general public. Thing is, its become clear to me that the title of expert does not mean a whole lot to me any more. I gain respect for myself based on my actions and how I effect others, NOT by any title society has given me. I dont really need anyone to tell me, true or false, that what I do makes a differnce, because I know deep down that I do. That being said Ill judge you buy your actions and if you make a differnce in my life based on what you have told me while I back that up with real world experince, not by some title that you feel you need to have to gain respect. This whole argument you are trying to present is based in the past. We dont need experts to tell us right from wrong, we can figure it out for our selfs using our ability to reason. I think the Expert mind set is proven that it can be faulty. Look at what happens when a good majority of people gain expert status on a particular subject matter. They start relying only on what other colleagues say and dont have to do and real work after something has been established as proven by an *expert*. Everyone is a expert in one field or another, I dont think it helps us get closer to the truth by relying on people that have a title that makes them think the a better then the rest of the smart people out there. Granted people work hard to get this status. But what is the real motivation? and does that effect the judgment of people in this day and age.

en (1.00 / 3) (#405)
by keleyu on Sat May 14, 2005 at 09:24:45 AM EST

If you cant take the joke you shouldnt have joined.

wikipedia (2.33 / 3) (#406)
by soart on Sat Jun 18, 2005 at 11:09:46 AM EST

That wikipedia is in such a state should come as no surprise given the mediocrity democracy breeds in everything it touches. If it's to ever be of any real use, it does need to discriminate heavily in favor of elitism. Good luck getting the ball rolling on that.
机票打折机票
hehe (1.33 / 3) (#408)
by soart on Mon Jun 20, 2005 at 11:42:15 AM EST

Oh, its the sound the point makes as you miss it by miles and whizz straight by.
机票打折机票
Last post! (none / 0) (#409)
by Patrick Chalmers on Sat Apr 22, 2006 at 12:45:27 PM EST


Holy crap, working comment search!
Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism | 408 comments (381 topical, 27 editorial, 0 hidden)
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