Vanity of Article Writers, ...a time to cast away stones Options

[GlassBeadGame]

I have been struck lately by the growing smugness of "article writers." Those who avoid wonkery and administraton for the creaton or "improvement" of articles on Wikpedia. To hear them say you would thing they were creating some great works of literature. I got to tell you I don't see it. Even among our FA artistes. They use this activity much in the same way "vandal patrols" or policy wonks use the stuff they do for playing the game that is Wikipedia.

At best I'd say is "Well pretty good for a sand painting made in a sandbox surrounded by pre-schoolers flinging rocks and spraying down the place with pressure hoses...but come back tomorrow." Wikipedia articles, even FAs, are no great shakes. Certainly they don't justify the sense of self-entitlement these prima donnas pretend. Nor do they make up for the many levels or irresponsibilty directed at people outside the project that results from their work.

The only thing of any value in Wikipedia is it partially functions in the the same task Wikia Search fails at, collecting a list of manually generated sources (very imperfectly vetted) and indirectly returning them on the top of search request. You don't need article writers for this task at all.

[Emperor]

For a while I made it a game to pick apart the featured article of the day. It wasn't all that difficult to find glaring errors, if I already knew something about the subject. For topics where I had no prior knowledge, Wikipedia articles seemed perfectly plausible. On the other hand, Wikipedia is often better than the other crap on the internet.

As the owner of another website that lives on user-generated content, I can honestly say that I love article writers.

[Luís Henrique]

For a while I made it a game to pick apart the featured article of the day. It wasn't all that difficult to find glaring errors, if I already knew something about the subject. For topics where I had no prior knowledge, Wikipedia articles seemed perfectly plausible.

But isn't this part of the problem?

When I read an article about, say, Thailand, or the proccess of refining iron ore, or emphysema, I wonder whether they actually make any sence, as it superficially seems, or if they are full of lies, pranks, urban legends, fantasies, like those about subjects I have some actual knowledge.

Luís Henrique

[Milton Roe]

But isn't this part of the problem?

When I read an article about, say, Thailand, or the proccess of refining iron ore, or emphysema, I wonder whether they actually make any sence, as it superficially seems, or if they are full of lies, pranks, urban legends, fantasies, like those about subjects I have some actual knowledge.

Luís Henrique

Sure, but you have that problem about most of what you learn in life, since you're hardly ever going to able to get your summaries directly from the greatest experts in the world, Charlie Rose style (how I envy that man his job).

In the real world, gaining most knowledge is sort of like learning a new word in your vocabulary. You hear it once, this perfectly cromulent word, but you've never heard it before. Still from the way it's used, you begin to have some idea of what it means. As it's used more and more, you realize that your ignorance does not mean it wasn't cromulent, it must means YOU hadn't encountered it. But now you're aware of it.

Studies show that when 3 year-olds are exposed to an articificial word, it only takes about 5 usages for them to hone in on its meaning pretty well, and that they do it rather like tracking an animal by scent. It doesn't start out perfect, but descends through the categories, until they nail it.

Again, in the real world, you don't get to find out about iron ore refining from the bored steelworker sitting next to you on some transoceanic flight on which he wants to talk. Instead, you sort of need to know, don't have access to the net, and so you ask the people around you: "Know anything about iron ore refining"? And you get back something like: "A little. I dunno how they get the dirt out, but I know they have to take the iron oxide, mix it with coke in big furnace, and heat the blazes out of it till the carbon takes out the oxygen and molten iron is left. Then they blow pure oxygen through to get rid of more carbon, to get steel." So you still have an incomplete picture, but you know more than you did. Later you find the thing is self-heating and is called a blast furnace. And you learn out they get the dirt out, and so on and so on. That's Wikipedia, too.

In some ways, as has been said by many people, one problem is that we expect too much of Wikipedia. If we could just fix the vandalism and defamation, we'd be left with sort of what you get from a very large roomful of decent, random people on any subject. And that's no small thing. It's bound to beat hell out of what you "know" just on your own.

[Luís Henrique]

It's bound to beat hell out of what you "know" just on your own.

That would be the case of, for instance, Babelfish. You put a completely unintelligible text in a language you don't know, and it comes back with some garbled, but useful information. At least you get to know that the text is about the fishing industry in the Pacific, instead of about Human Rights in Rumania.

But this is because you have a reference, ie, your own language, that you know well.

The problem with Wikipedia is not that it contains incomplete, or outdated, or confusely written, information. It is that it often contains apparently complete, apparently up to date, and even well written information, that does not match the real world.

Luís Henrique

[Milton Roe]

It's bound to beat hell out of what you "know" just on your own.

That would be the case of, for instance, Babelfish. You put a completely unintelligible text in a language you don't know, and it comes back with some garbled, but useful information. At least you get to know that the text is about the fishing industry in the Pacific, instead of about Human Rights in Rumania.

But this is because you have a reference, ie, your own language, that you know well.

The problem with Wikipedia is not that it contains incomplete, or outdated, or confusely written, information. It is that it often contains apparently complete, apparently up to date, and even well written information, that does not match the real world.

Luís Henrique

In other words, as Josh Billings famously says: "It ain't the things you don't know that hurt you, so much as the things you know, that just aren't so."

Well, part of the cure for THAT is to look at the thing differently, as everybody has been saying. It appears to be complete and updated, but you just have to realize that appearances are deceiving. As with what Cliff Clavin says in Cheers, you have to take everything in Wikipedia cum grano salis until you get a vetting from an expert, and then you're fine.

But this can still be useful, especially AFTER the vetting. For a reasonably stable sprotected article, it can be a nice shortform to (say) tell an enquiring reporter from the New York Times (I have actually done this on one occasion) that the article on so-and-so is actually pretty good, as of yesterday when I checked it last, and contains no major errors of fact. So go read THAT.

Last week I was reading the TALK page on some physics topic and there was a question from a new IP user who was obviously an academic. He had a quibble but too much of a newbie to be WP:BOLD and WP:FIXIT. I welcomed him to Wikipedia, agreed with one part of this protest but asked if he was sure that the other was an equally important effect in nuclear physics, and he came back and said: "Well, you're right, we should fix the one thing and mention that the other is an effect, but perhaps not the major one." By God, it was CONSENSUS (albeit between two people on a very arcane subject). So I helped him with the change and Wikifying the reference he had brought, and his last comment (now by email, in his own name from an academic institution) was "Thanks, now I can refer my students to this article with a clear conscience."

LOL. He's very far from understanding Wikipedia. I sent him links to WR, Professor Wikipedia, warning him about addiction and politics, and told him he couldn't tell his students anything except that the article was pretty good AS OF DATE VERSION X. But that much was useful. It shouldn't have been necessary, but of course we have no flagged revisions, so here we are. But that's better than nowhere, inasmuch as there wasn't another free online source either of us found which was as nice a summary of the single topic.

A main problem with Wikipedia is that there are very many people in the world who are very uncomfortable with ambiguity. One sees them working in computers, logic, math, etc, because they hate fuzziness, and most of the world is actually pretty fuzzy. These people, who are very much like Religious Fundamentalists (in fact, Fundamentalists of all kinds share a common heritage of binary thinking), just go apeshit about texts that are partly right and partly wrong. Instead of being thankful that in some (not all) circumstances, they beat total ignorance.

The other part of the cure is to know when Josh is irrelevant. In other words, in some time-sensitive life-threatening situations Josh Billings is right; and in others (where you have time to check things out and the consequences are not high for erring in the meantime), Josh is wrong. It takes wisdom to know the difference, and the wisdom itself is NOT in Wikipedia. Too bad. Suck it up. So you don't want to have to apply the same critical skills or skepticism that you would for any manuscript or rumor. Not my problem. Your problem. For being so lazy that you think you should have to work to get anything from a blob of free advice from a bunch of people you don't know well.

I have a odd fantasy in which I see Jon Awbrey driving around in the countryside of a foreign land, needing directions. He stops to ask a random person on the road. Then proceeds to quiz him about his background, how sure he is about what he's saying, and some hard questions about whether or not he's being sent in the opposite of the right direction, just for the lulz. It ends up something like "Go *&^% yourself, you &^%$in' tourist!" And "No, you go *&% yourself, you advice-giving clueless noOb of a fake expert!! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/boing.gif)"

Comical if it doesn't come to blows.