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Wikipedia lacks a process of scholarly review ! So, What Would Jimbo Say or Do? - Jimbo Would probably Sucked, hard !
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After nine months of dedicated work on writing a several articles within my area of expertise (geomorphology, hydro-geology, hydrology, hydrography, environmental geography; and especially : rivers, rivers ecology, rivers flora & fauna, Dinaric karst rivers, fields, mountains, ecology - and related themes), I finally decided its pretty much enough for me. I was harassed, insulted and humiliated to such an extent that I asked my self is this website really what it say it is or place of sadistic manifestation of egomanias, where sociopaths who can't cope with their Admin prerogatives wage wars for fun...--Santasa99 (talk) 20:56, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
As I said, I am no longer in the role of content generator, after my works are exposed to the wonks and twiddler and procedural whack-jobs. I became a content defender and that means that time I could spent finding new and interesting facts or finding original sources or otherwise "making the world a better place" ;-) (or at least an entry or two) is being spent explaining "this" and "that", "I got clearance for that photo as the matter a fact it's my pic", and "yes, I believe word "scenic" is a neutral point of view, after all it's just a bunch (body) of water flowing downhill following the path of least resistance, goddammit !", and so on. Every time I try to make edit/entry, I have to spend 20 hours or 20 days defending it.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that content creators are relatively rare beasts on Wikipedia. Content commentators less so. Content critics are a dime a hundred, and content vandals lurk in every corner. Wikipedia allows the vandals and the Admins run lose on the creators equally, while the commentators fill the void with chatter. It is, a failure; as Jason Scott nicely explained in his "The Great Failure of Wikipedia" at ASCII.textfiles.com.
Feydey just made my point with an outpouring of creativity offering help, all in spirit of cooperation, but NO thanks...--Santasa99 (talk) 23:31, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that “ ‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is “infested with moonbats.” (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. “The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks,” Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia.
For all its protocol, Wikipedia’s bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was briefly a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration. “User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written deposition. “His views on climate science are singular and narrow.” A decision from the arbitration committee was three months in coming, after which Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day parole. The punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin, with two thousand pages on his watchlist—a feature that enables users to compile a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to them. He says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best page on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user who spends the most time on the site—or who yells the loudest—wins...excerpt by Stacy Schiff
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.
On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they’ve come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.
Other encyclopedias work similarly, just on a much smaller scale: a large group of people write articles on topics they know well, while a small staff formats them into a single work. This second group is clearly very important — it’s thanks to them encyclopedias have a consistent look and tone — but it’s a severe exaggeration to say that they wrote the encyclopedia. One imagines the people running Britannica worry more about their contributors than their formatters.
And Wikipedia should too. Even if all the formatters quit the project tomorrow, Wikipedia would still be immensely valuable. For the most part, people read Wikipedia because it has the information they need, not because it has a consistent look. It certainly wouldn’t be as nice without one, but the people who (like me) care about such things would probably step up to take the place of those who had left. The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around!
Letters Special Smart mobs? Wise crowds? An open access internet encyclopedia that heals itself? File it all under 'flying saucers', say Register readers.
But something is changing since we last wrote about Wikipedia a year ago. Even project founder Jimmy Wales has been obliged to admit its entries are "a horrific embarrassment". Readability, which wasn't great to begin with, has plummeted. Formerly coherent and reasonably accurate articles in the technical section have gotten worse as they've gotten longer. And most interesting of all, the public is beginning to notice.
While a year ago, misgivings in our postbag were swamped by 'pediaphiles rushing to defend the project, the ratio has flipped. While Wikipedia still has its defenders, there's a palpable relief that its shortcomings are finally being given the criticial eye. Mainstream media coverage of Wikipedia until now has rarely portrayed it as anything other than a miracle, and either ignores or rapidly glosses over quality issues.
Nicholas Carr, who drew attention to the deep problems with and religious enthusiasm for Wikipedia with his essay The Amorality of Web 2.0, has noticed the same thing in his mailbag. It's been unexpectedly positive, he says.
"Most of my correspondents have that sense of relief that it's being criticized," he told us last week. "People are naturally skeptical, but have come to fear their skepticism. Now people are being emboldened to be skeptical. It's a nagging voice they've been trying to ignore."
Britannica spokesman Tom Panelas also finds that the "taboo of criticizing" Wikipedia in the press - by "reporters who have suspended disbelief and become embedded", isn't widely shared by the public. More from the Britannica shortly, but first, your letters.
One reason for the change over twelve months soon becomes apparent from your missives. While we focused on the bad writing last week, the reliability of the entries is more serious. We increasingly hear of experts who attempt to contribute to the project being repelled. If you're an expert, and you want to help Wikipedia, be prepared for months of fighting - usually with people who don't know what they're talking about.
As Jason Scott put it -
"This is what the inherent failure of Wikipedia is. It's that there's a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of triddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can prove something, you're now in the situation that anybody can change it."
"And while that's all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way, it's when you realize that the people who are going to change it could have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see where we are." [see 'The Great Failure of Wikipedia' Pt.1 and Pt.2.
Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff has watched one entry deteriorate over time, and it's a perfect example. As he writes here, the entry for Data General's AViiON servers was rife with howling errors, and the Data General article still is. Although he pitched in to help - he was a product manager on the AViiON - it was hard work.
"It's also interesting to observe in the main Data General article how many "futzing around" edits there are. A link polished here, a comma there, etc. Yet this article as a whole is incredibly poorly organized with no real narrative flow. And what storyline exists is wrong in significant ways; it's not even internally consistent," he writes.
"The whole lock-in or no lock-in paragraph is 75% nonsense (it seems to imply that DG went to Unix because it couldn't afford to develop a SQL database? Yet, further down the article correctly notes that DG HAD a SQL database already.) The AViiON section mixes timeframes and contains multiple out-and-out errors, etc. (I suspect that the first couple of sections source their information largely from Soul of A New Machine and seem fairly accurate and cogent, but then it falls apart.) But that would all take work and expertise to fix."
"Easier to twiddle than create," he concludes.
"There's a special skepticism and habits of mind that good editors have, and it takes a long time to learn, and you can sense it when it's absent," suggests Britannica's Tom Panelas. "A hundred amateurs will miss important errors that one trained professional will find."
This doesn't come as a surprise to anyone except the project's fans, for whom it is a religious endeavor. But the ex-Pedians proliferate.
- By Andrew Orlowski -
I am glad you are writing about this subject. At first I thought Wikipedia was a great idea and started writing about the subjects I know with an academic take on them. As I have been close to some political movements and am pursuing an academic career in political history, I figured I would have something to contribute.
In the end I couldn't recognise my articles after about a week, and a few months later there was nothing left of them, having sufferd zillions of re-edits, irrelevant sentence adding and re-writes due to NPOV actually meaning MPOVNSE -my point of view, not someone elses.
So as you can imagine, as I didn't really feel like wasting my time, I just gave up and let the idiots who THOUGHT they knew something about the subject or those with a vested interest in making things look good take the helm.
- By Misha Dellinger -
Collective intelligence? Er, Don't you mean collective stupidity?
None of us is as dumb as all of us or "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups" - Despair.com
- By Henry Schlarb -
Your Baby Washington example highlights the problem I've always wondered about with the "you can fix it yourself" attitude - if you don't know about a subject then you won't know that it's incorrect. And if you already know enough about a subject to be able to recognise and correct an incorrect wiki entry, then you probably won't need to be looking it up in the first place.
Which means that since anyone needing accurate information cannot rely on it, the only real use for wiki as it is now is for "experts" to show off their knowledge and/or pour derision on others for their lack thereof. Although the people who are actually expert in anything useful will of course not be participating as they'll be too busy getting paid for their expertise to write entries for real encyclopedias - the success of wiki relies on people willingly putting themselves out of a job out of the kindness of their own hearts!
That said, if I ever need to know anything about Klingon, wiki will be the first place I look... right after I hurl myself in front of a moving train.
- By Matt Javes -
calculated by taking its average and then dividing by the number comprising it. As far as he was concerned, any sizable group had less intelligence than a flatworm....
- By JB Kelley -
I once heard that the way to calculate the collective intelligence of a group was to take the intelligence of the least intelligent member of the group and divide by the number of members in the group... That could explain alot about the quality issues with wikipedia :-)
- By Stacey Millions -
I tend to regard Wikipedia as the ultimate monkeys generating Shakespeare experiment, so I'm largely in agreement with you. As for Britannica, though, one thinks of Christopher Tietjens in Ford Maddox Ford's Some Do Not - with a hobby of logging all the errors in it.
- By George Jansen -
Glad to see the rubbish that is Wikipedia is finally being highlighted. With an encyclopedia you are talking about *absolute* quality. If your encyclopedia is meant to be a serious reference work then nothing should come higher than quality and the accuracy of entries. Wikipedia is fatally flawed because of its "come hither" approach - there is no system of peer review, no system to rate and appraise the quality of entries and no system to determine the fitness someone has for editing or creating entries.
- As Carr said "...an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best." -
The fact that Wikipedia lets people write rubbish and then legitimises the propagation of said rubbish makes us all poorer. Wikipedia is letting itself stand for insularity, trivia and subjectivity. It seems pretty unlikely to me any serious an encyclopedia needs entries on something as pitiful as "Klingon" - another cultural cul-de-sac which also, quite frankly, demonstrates the hold suburban America has on these reference works.
Unfortunately by its nature, Wikipedia under-estimates the effort actually involved in creating an authoratative encyclopedia - a true encyclopedia is an enormous undertaking by any measurement. Single entries may take months to write before they are even sent for review by people with legitimate expertise, either through their experience or qualifications.
Just having a keyboard and Internet connection shouldn't grant that kind authority. Perhaps Wikipedia should look to the world of peer-reviewed journals to get an appreciation of how knowledge needs to be filtered and distilled and even argued over before what your writing is fit for consumption.
- By Kevin Hall -
I believe that the tone of the article is quite demeaning and misses out on the one indisputable quality that Wikipedia has brought into being. Now, thanks to the convergence of a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards, and after more than two millennia of breathless waiting, we finally have a modern, technologically advanced and incredibly complex version of the stables of Augias.
One can only wonder, amazed by this Babel tower of Klingonesque beauty, if and where from will our modern Heracles will emerge, to transform this gem of astounding impurity into something worthy of the name "encyclopaedia".
As for me, I won't hold my breath for it.
- By Pascal Monnett -
Few excerpts with several letters from:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/24/wikipedia_letters/page3.html
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/31/060731fa_fact
http://www.aaronsw.com
Horst Prillinger - "...Wikipedia generates noise, not knowledge. Previous encyclopedias were well-researched and contained precise information that could be trusted to be correct. Wikipedia, on the other hand, contains a large amount of errors, omissi.."
This coming from someone I have learned to know as a fierce defender of open access to knoledge, the state of Wikipedia must be really bad indeed. In general, I fancy the idea of a public space where you can share your knowledge, and what is more, find interesting information. However, if Wikipedia works this way, it is really a place of opininion and not of knowledge. The basic principles of scientific work *must* apply for a publication which calls itself "encyclopedia".
Wikipedia, the free "online encyclopedia" has been hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Anybody can access it free of charge, anyone can add to it, and there's any entry for everything. Right?
It turns out that the great advantage of the Wikipedia, the wiki format, which allows everybody to add/edit everything, is also its greatest disadvantage. There are a few topics that I care about, a few of which I actually contributed to the German version of Wikipedia. Watching these entries change over the past few months, I noticed the following tendencies:
Most contributions are poorly researched, or not researched at all. Accuracy depends mostly on the one website from which the contributor copied the information. A substantial amount of Wikipedia entries contains information that I know to be incorrect.
There is no editorial selection. Some entries just grow and grow because some enthusiast who has no sense for what's important and what's not keeps adding pointless stuff to some entries.
Due to extensive linkage within Wikipedia itself, a growing number of badly researched, incorrect Wikipedia articles is pushing down well-researched specialist websites in Google rankings.
Text and concepts for Wikipedia entries are often blatantly copied from other websites. To avoid instant recognition, the text is sometimes rewritten, adding inaccuracies, inconsistencies or even errors. Due to the nature of the content and the open format of Wikipedia, no copyright holder can do anything about this.
Wikipedia generates noise, not knowledge. Previous encyclopedias were well-researched and contained precise information that could be trusted to be correct. Wikipedia, on the other hand, contains a large amount of errors, omissions and superfluous trivia.
Basically, what is happening here is the building of a parallel World Wide Web inside the wikipedia.org domain and calling it an "encyclopedia", which is a total perversity. Just making it searchable and giving it an encyclopedia-like structure doesn't make its content any less fluffy, error-ridden and amateurish than any other website.
I hope that in a few years it will be so bloated that it will simply disintegrate, because I can't stand the thought that this thing might someday actually be used as a serious reference source. Because in its current form, it's not to be taken serious at all.
Robert McHenry on the Encyclopedia entry
Reading the entry on "encyclopedia" leaves one with the impression that it was written by someone who had no previous knowledge of the subject and who, once he got into it, found it did not interest him very much. He browsed here and there in one or more reference works and noted what seemed important, but had no understanding of the cultural and historical contexts involved. In other words, it is a school essay, sketchy and poorly balanced.
The article is of modest length at 2,000 words (compare Britannica's corresponding article at about 26,000 words). The longest discussion of a particular work is of Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, hardly an encyclopedia at all. The 120-odd words on Browne contrast oddly with the treatment given what was arguably the most influential encyclopedia in European history: "The French translation of [Chambers] was the inspiration of the Encyclopédie, perhaps the most famous early encyclopedia, edited by Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot and published from 175 [sic] to 1772 in 28 volumes, 71,818 articles, 2,885 illustrations." Was it famous for the number of its illustrations, one is left to wonder? (And by the way, the full first edition had 35 volumes.)
A cynic might conclude that the whole article exists chiefly as a context for this paragraph: "Traditional encyclopedias are written by a number of employed text writers, usually people with an academic degree. This is not the case with Wikipedia, a project started in 2001 with the goal to create a free encyclopedia. Anyone can add or improve text, images, and sounds ... By 2004 the project has managed to produce over a million articles in over 80 languages."
Overall mark: 5/10
· Robert McHenry was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1992 to 1997
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"Kiss me up & down !"
- – Santasa
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