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 What will be the warning signs of the coming collapse? |
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| D.A.F. |
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QUOTE(Unrepentant Vandal @ Fri 7th September 2007, 7:24pm) 
A comment I made recently made me realise that Wikipedia will collapse when wikipedians realise their folly and begin to leave it in droves.
What will be the warning signs? How will we recognise that the end is nigh?
It will die a cold death, by losing its credibility bit by bit when honest members will continue being banned and dishonest POV pushers, lobbyists, political activists etc., will be the only so-called users of good standing remaining. |
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| Somey |
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Can't actually moderate (or even post)
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Personally, I'm sticking to my "Five-Phase Lifecycle Theory," which suggests that there won't be a quick collapse at all, but rather a gradual process of attrition resulting in stagnation and ultimately, breakup.
Right now we're firmly in the "Maintenance Phase," which I believe started about a year ago. Just for the record, the phases are:
- Formation
- Growth
- Maintenance
- Attrition
- Breakup
I expect the maintenance phase to last at least five years, and to be characterized by increased authoritarianism and regimentation - mostly in the name of curbing the tendency towards infighting, which in turn is being caused by too many people wanting control of various "important" topic areas. This will result in an almost social-Darwinian "shakeout," which will end with firm control of all worthwhile territories by whichever of the various groups, cabals, cliques (or whatever you want to call them) should "win" them. That will bring on the attrition, which will be expressed as mass "forking" of entire topic areas to other websites.
Jimbo's increasing interest in "open source" web-crawling technology may suggest that he himself has realized this as a distinct, even likely possibility - there's no company better positioned to take advantage of the WP breakup than Wikia, and combining "encyclopedic" content with human-filtered search results may be his primary scheme at this point. I'm not sure I'd even call it a bad scheme, to be honest, though obviously I'd rather someone else was in charge.
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| blissyu2 |
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the wookie
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I think that it will be a very long time before it is completely destroyed, and indeed I doubt that it will ever 100% disappear. However, it will change so that it is not what it is today. This is how I envisage the changes:
1) Wikipedia's integrity will weaken. Things like the various scandals that we have exposed, Wikipedia Scanner, and so forth, demonstrate it is not reliable as a reference.
2) People will fail to donate sufficiently to Wikipedia, thus meaning that they need to have a for-profit avenue of some kind. They either go to Google AdSense, or to wikia, or to having ads directly on the web site. Either way, it is going to cause problems.
3) People react towards them finding this for-profit enterprise, initially upset, then beginning to accept it, but it becomes very different.
4) Issues relating to abuse of their for-profit enterprise are raised, and real live law suits come out, in much higher numbers than before, because there is real money at stake, rather than "volunteers" and hence they are far more accountable.
5) Wikipedia finds ways to account for the various problems, and goes in to serious, permanent, damage control mode.
6) Wikipedia starts to cut down on usage of it, permanently deleting revision histories, leaving only the current version, minimising editing of articles, not allowing talk page messages, no more user pages or user talk pages, and doing everything that they can to minimise it.
7) Wikipedia eventually locks down completely, so that all that is left are the articles themselves. They may even delete all of the stubs, all of the part-finished ones.
8) Wikipedia tries to present this version positively, and eventually gets more funding, to start to rebuild it again. People come back, it has a revised form, it is very different to what it was before, it is controlled by different people, it is more professional, there is a hope for it.
9) This version tries to avoid controversy, but they keep on getting hit.
10) Eventually this version too falls under, and it is left as an archive only.
That's pretty much it. So it may be 10 years or more before it is just an archive, but its pages are destined to remain forever. In 1,000 years you will be able to find Wikipedia pages on the stupid lies that they told. But in 1,000 years they will be laughed about, rather than treated seriously. An annal in the historical report will be "Wikipedia was an example of why we can't trust what people say about history".
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| Wolfe |
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Hi, I'm sort of new here. I registered a while ago, but I never got around to posting until now. I basically don't edit Wikipedia (although I authored one small article a long time ago), but I'm interested in the whole idea and some of the less savoury aspects of Wikipedia bother me, which is how I found this place. I thought I might as well start now, because this topic is quite interesting.
I should say something about my background. Without wanting to give too much away: I'm a college professor in a rather arcane field, with a PhD from one of the top programs in said weird field. This is relevant because I've found Wikipedia to be quite accurate with respect to the articles on which I could be counted as an expert. It's certainly better than most other encyclopaedias in this regard.
I don't share the pessimism of many people here. I think that the wiki model works spectacularly well, if the right constraints are adhered to. To expect any encyclopaedia to be error free is to expect too much, and Wikipedia, while it has its problems, is not that bad. However, as posts in this forum justly complain, it is not as good as it could be, and there are obvious failings. If they are not addressed, then Wikipedia will limp on in a slow decline, until something else comes along.
That said, most of it isn't too bad, with the exception of some of the politically charged stuff and the problems with biographies of living persons, which Daniel Brandt has done so much to point out.
One of the main problems is that the wrong person is "in charge". I don't know Jim Wales personallly, and he's probably not a bad person, but letting someone who is an avowed member of the Ayn Rand cult run anything like this is a recipe for disaster. Ayn Rand is generally acknowledged as a terrible novelist, a bad philosopher, and a joke "intellectual" in academic circles. Her adherents like to paint this as some leftist or "collectivist" conspiracy against her ideas, but the truth is that she just isn't very good. Her followers tend towards the fanatical and are often incapable of taking any criticism. Even the most casual observer knows this is true of Wales and his lackeys.
In general, people who, like Randians and Libertarian minded people, are the wrong sort of folk to take charge of an entity like Wikipedia due to their tendency to have blind faith in free markets and freedom of expression to produce the best outcomes. It takes a lot of work and immense coercive power on the part of the state to ensure that the free markets most of us enjoy actually work to produce useful things. Free markets are finely honed legal entities with a myriad of rules.
This is the main problem with Wikipedia – those who are engaged in content disputes are in many cases the same people who are involved in setting the rules and enforcing them. That's just a recipe for corruption, and as usual, in a badly policed system, the worst candidates for authority rise to the top. In this case they are largely ill-educated POV pushers, or plain old obsessive nutcases. It's strange that Wikipedia should largely be run by Americans, since the USA was deliberately designed as a system of separate powers in order to prevent this sort of thing happening (even if it isn't living up to it these days).
In many ways, Wikipedia is the greatest book ever written by human beings. Certainly no other human work comes close to its scope and general level of up-to-dateness. "The Wisdom of Crowds" is real, and the sooner that effective ways of tapping it are realized, the better off we will all be. Wikipedia's problem is that it isn't set up in a way that will do this with maximum efficiency. The inmates are largely running the asylum, and it is testament to the power of decentralized authorship that the product is still quite good, even with its glaring deficiencies.
The naive utopianism of those in charge is the root cause of Wikipedia's problems. Either they need to go and be replaced with professionals, or it will flounder on until someone else starts a better system. If Wikipedia is to fulfil its potential, then Wales needs to leave for the good of the project. However, it strikes me that his ego will get in the way.
So if it does decline, then something better will come along. The only real problem is that, like MS Windows, it is a comparatively poor product that has become entrenched, so this will take longer than it should.
Anyway.. peace to all
W.
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| blissyu2 |
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the wookie
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First of all, welcome to Wikipedia Review! QUOTE(Wolfe @ Sun 9th September 2007, 6:53am)
This is the main problem with Wikipedia – those who are engaged in content disputes are in many cases the same people who are involved in setting the rules and enforcing them. That's just a recipe for corruption, and as usual, in a badly policed system, the worst candidates for authority rise to the top. In this case they are largely ill-educated POV pushers, or plain old obsessive nutcases.
Exactly. In most places, the rules are set in stone, and can only be changed by the person or people in charge, after meetings and such. On Wikipedia, the rules are in an article that anyone can edit at any time. Ted Frank recently was an example of someone who changed the rules so as to avoid any problems with him having a Conflict of Interest while editing an article relating to his professional work, so that he could make profit for himself. This kind of ludicrous situation wouldn't happen in most places. It is a situation that is repeated over and over again on Wikipedia. QUOTE(Wolfe @ Sun 9th September 2007, 6:53am)
So if it does decline, then something better will come along. The only real problem is that, like MS Windows, it is a comparatively poor product that has become entrenched, so this will take longer than it should.
That is probably true. MS Windows came about primarily as a stolen idea from Apple, which was needed and the world was ready for, but they did it so sloppily that when Apple's real version came out people were already interested in the sloppy version. Low prices and popularity became desired ahead of quality reliable products, and continue to be so. Computers keep on getting cheaper, and keep lasting for shorter periods of time before they have major malfunctions. Wikipedia is probably along the same lines, in line with the "now" society, the "disposable" society. As I said elsewhere, I think that Wikipedia's articles vary largely on subject type. - Best: "Cruft" articles, on TV shows, movies and fan-based articles, e.g. South Park
- Good: Purely factual entries with no other points of view e.g. currency
- Average: Clearly established historical events with small elements that are disputed e.g. The holocaust
- Poor: Controversial issues with 3 or more major points of view e.g. 9/11
- Horrible: Issues in which the official story is not widely believed (i.e. cover ups) e.g. Port Arthur massacre (Australia)
The sad thing is that Wikipedia has a tendency to push their worst articles at the expense of their best. They are always so keen on deleting the "cruft" articles, like Spongebob Squarepants and the like, and also to delete fringe theories, which are very interesting, whilst pushing some of the most horribly written articles that exist. |
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| Somey |
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Can't actually moderate (or even post)
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I'd have to agree, generally speaking... In fact, you could simplify it even more by just saying that there are "geeky" and "non-geeky" subjects, and the articles on geeky subjects are generally good, and the non-geeky ones bad.
Or maybe you could say that the quality of each article is often in proportion to its geekiness... it probably doesn't hold true in all cases, of course, but one might easily say that most biographies are non-geeky, along with articles on religion, economics, recent history, ethnographics, most areas of philosophy, and quite a few political subjects.
"Borderline geeky" subjects might include things like ancient history, literature, mathematics, and many of the physical sciences (at least the ones that the religious types aren't so interested in). In most of those areas I'd say WP is relatively good - what often happens is that one or two articles in a general topic will get warred over, but quality is acceptable overall, and of course the sheer number of articles is higher than a traditional encyclopedia.
One big exception IMO is probably military history and military "science" - this is one of the best topic areas on Wikipedia by far, and one would normally expect otherwise, given the amount of controversy involved. It's still a little too US-centric, but somehow they manage to keep most of the edit-warring under control, and there are a lot of extremely knowledgeable people writing this stuff. Maybe it's all being written by retired officers with nothing better to do, but they're doing a pretty good job of it!
See, there, I said something fairly nice about Wikipedia. Woo hoo! Of course, I'm obviously generalizing horribly here - this is really just the general impression I have personally.
YMMV, as they say.
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| blissyu2 |
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the wookie
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Actually, its not just its geekiness, what you can say really is whether "consensus" is a good thing for each article: On fan articles - consensus is great - they put in what everyone loves On purely factual articles - consensus is great - they put in everything you could possibly imagine (really uber long articles, but nonetheless good) On accepted historical facts - consensus is good, as its already been established, but of course some people disagree with that, but its still not too bad On things with multiple points of view - consensus CANNOT WORK. If you take something like 9/11 for example, there are at least 7 or 8 major points of view that simply don't work with each other. Anything to do with any war or conflict is the same. What you need to have is all experts being in one room and it being mediated by a neutral party - i.e. someone who doesn't know a thing about it. Get the facts, and account for every viewpoint. The problem is that Wikipedia has a tendency to ban experts, and they don't have a workable NPOV policy, so articles like this get ruined. They whinge that someone has a "POV" when of course everyone has a POV, and then they insist that the neutral person is the best person to write the article, when they actually don't know what they are talking about and are the worst person. So it all falls apart and ends up in constant conflict. The cover up articles are even worse, as they tend to invite people who like to just mass delete huge chunks of information, entire articles, put them on spam blacklists, oversight them, and so forth. Lockerbie bombing is another good example of course. Whilst JFK and Weapons of Mass Destruction now are not considered to be coverups - at the time they were! Also Children Overboard was another coverup which has been properly exposed now. And of course the related MV Tampa scandal is no longer considered to be a cover up. Wikipedia can argue until they are blue in the face that a respected encyclopedia wouldn't include anything that is not the official government line, but that is a load of bullshit while they are in there writing Biographies of Living Persons without their permission in a negative way and not even letting the living persons edit them. Respected encyclopedias regularly write articles that are not the official government line - at least when they are writing from other countries. Which government line are they going to pull? Ours or theirs? Or everyone's? Given that Wikipedia is international they have to decide which government to ally to if they are going to insist on portraying false government lines on articles. Do they ally with the government concerning that lie? Or the American government? Or none at all? There must be some degree of consistency, surely. There is a degree of geekiness, but overall that's not the biggest issue. Long-term, the issue is that with some articles the more people that contribute the worse it gets, especially if most of the people that are contributing don't know a thing about what they are talking about, and those who do know what they are talking about get banned. This is more of an issue with some articles than with others. |
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| Wolfe |
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One problem with articles that lack consensus is the idea that, if everyone were an expert, consensus would follow. Unfortunately, that is not quite true. In part, this is due to the design of academia, where you get rewarded for publishing new and contrarian material, rather than backing up a consensus. Of course, there aren't the wild conspiracies like the Moon landing hoax, but there is plenty of dispute, and much of it venomous, over many of the same articles that suffer on Wikipedia. Most problems with Wikipedia could be solved by tweaking its structure. The project really needs professional adminstrators who are prevented from making substantive edits, and whose job is merely to arbitrate and discipline. None of these people ought to be involved in making policy: they just enforce it. That's a pretty obvious separation of powers that most countries follow. What's killing Wikipedia is collusion. It's well known that the wisdom of crowds works best when each person approaches the subject as an individual. Once people start forming organized groups, you lose the benefit of decentralized authorship because there is cross pollution of information and groupthink. The ideal Wikipedia editor is someone who doesn't edit all the time, and who doesn't have the time or inclination to get involved in Wikipolitics. Editors should live in a private bubble, so to say. I guess what I'm saying is that the people that are now thought to be the most valuable contributors to the encyclopedia – those who make thousands of substantive edits – are actually the ones who are least valuable to the project. The encyclopedia really needs to be rid of them. They are the ones who get involved in politics, cabals and groupthink, and thus they are the enemies of the wisdom of crowds. If the goal of Wikipedia is to produce a great encyclopedia for readers, then a principle that has to be strictly adhered to is that editors have no rights. I mean that, no rights at all. The ban hammer needs to swing much more frequently than it does. Anyone suspected of collusion should be banned, and anyone who causes too much strife or edits too much should be banned as well. That is what is required to rescue the project: it needs to be made clear that it is not a community or an online role playing game, but a project that requires a little from a lot of people, rather than a lot from a few. The truth is that every individual editor is dispensable. There are always more fish in the sea. If you are spending hours every day editing Wikipedia, then the chances are that you are, unwittingly, damaging the project more than you are helping it. Larry Sanger is missing the point with Citizendium. He's trying to make people take more of a stake in the project by getting rid of anonymity, when he should be aiming to try to get every individual to take less of a personal stake in the project. Once people have a stake in the project. competition and hierarchy naturally follow, and the scum often float to the top. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) |
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| blissyu2 |
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the wookie
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Many of the most important subject matters are ones which people do not readily agree with. Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution was widely discredited at the time, and even now is hardly accepted as fact, yet it has become a very important theory in discussing species, humanity and many other aspects of who people are. Sigmund Freud's various psychiatric theories were widely discredited, and continue to be widely discredited, yet he is perhaps the single most widely quoted philosopher in history, and his theories are used in many other more established theories elsewhere. That there is no consensus to agree with it does not make something bad. In lower educational levels, everyone agrees with everything, but as time goes on it becomes more debatable. Fringe theories in any subject become prone to heated debate. In science, the theory of black holes (which is still just a theory, and will never be proven fact) has always been highly disputable, although nowadays it is considered to be okay to teach some elements of the theory to small children. The big bang theory is another highly debatable theory. But the difference is that when people are discussing, for example, chaos theory, you know that the language is so complex that the only people who will be debating it are EXPERTS in the field, or at least SEMI-EXPERTS, such that all dialogue is meaningful, and you end up with, yes, disputes, but not ones that end up with anything particularly ridiculous being listed. Whilst if you debate a similarly disputed issue in the humanities, the problem is that a bunch of idiots who don't have a clue what they are talking about jump in and insist that they know all about it. Look at people like Morton Devonshire and MONGO for example, who jump in to the whole "9/11 theories" when they actually have no clue about them, just like to delete the whole lot just out of ignorance. Experts are getting banned, expertise dismissed, and in the end the idiots are being pushed forward in the name of consensus and neutrality. If you write in a way that any idiot can understand, any idiot will have an opinion. If you then go by consensus, then you have the consensus of those idiots. What should be happening of course is that only experts should be writing on the topic, and it should then be dumbed down to a level that is acceptable to idiots, that they can understand. Part of the problem with Wikipedia is that it insists on every version being written in a way that is already dumbed-down, thus encouraging people who don't have a clue what they are talking about to over-ride actual experts. This is fine when its about simplistic issues like which Pokemon character is best against fire-based attacks. But it is not good at all when you are talking about why the Weapons of mass destruction lie was used to justify attacks on Iraq. Ultimately, what Wikipedia should be doing is encouraging people to demonstrate their biases, so that people can account for them. They might not necessarily get the most expert people in the world writing about a given subject, but as expert as they can get. |
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| Firsfron of Ronchester |
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Senior Member
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Thanks for your interesting and thought-provoking analysis, Wolfe. QUOTE(Wolfe @ Sun 9th September 2007, 8:47am)
Most problems with Wikipedia could be solved by tweaking its structure. The project really needs professional adminstrators who are prevented from making substantive edits, and whose job is merely to arbitrate and discipline. None of these people ought to be involved in making policy: they just enforce it. That's a pretty obvious separation of powers that most countries follow.
There clearly isn't a seperation of powers on Wikipedia. That alone has caused a lot of the abuse on WP. But how would preventing a class of adminstrators from making substantive edits prevent abuse of priveledges? I am not poo-pooing your idea (it's the first time I've heard this proposal), I'm just asking for further clarification. QUOTE
What's killing Wikipedia is collusion. It's well known that the wisdom of crowds works best when each person approaches the subject as an individual. Once people start forming organized groups, you lose the benefit of decentralized authorship because there is cross pollution of information and groupthink. The ideal Wikipedia editor is someone who doesn't edit all the time, and who doesn't have the time or inclination to get involved in Wikipolitics. Editors should live in a private bubble, so to say.
This is sort of opposite to the way I've been editing Wikipedia; I've worked individually, but I've usually asked for back-up or advice on how to write many articles, either because I lack the expertise, or because I start thinking that my writing may be unclear, and want a second opinion. The idea that I was colluding, killing Wikipedia, hadn't occurred to me. I see your point about avoiding groupthink. But wouldn't one way to avoid groupthink be to ask for outside opinion, outside the organized group? "Peer review" on Wikipedia is mostly a joke, with untrained individuals making recommendations on how to "improve" an article. That's not an academic's definition of peer review at all. But Wikipedia's "peer review" system, I think, is good for one thing (and one thing only): improving clarity. Someone who hasn't read the article before is much more likely to spot areas where the article needs to be clarified. QUOTE
I guess what I'm saying is that the people that are now thought to be the most valuable contributors to the encyclopedia – those who make thousands of substantive edits – are actually the ones who are least valuable to the project. The encyclopedia really needs to be rid of them. They are the ones who get involved in politics, cabals and groupthink, and thus they are the enemies of the wisdom of crowds.
I don't agree with this point. I think Wikipedia needs substantive edits, if only to clean up the mess that a collaborative editing system creates: articles which look like they were written by someone with Multiple Personality Disorder. Articles which are written in various styles, formats, and spelling conventions. Articles which go much too far in detail or are written too technically. There are a million of these articles, and they need substantial adjustments. Minor edits won't fix them. QUOTE
If the goal of Wikipedia is to produce a great encyclopedia for readers, then a principle that has to be strictly adhered to is that editors have no rights. I mean that, no rights at all. The ban hammer needs to swing much more frequently than it does.
I'm really surprised this part of your post hasn't received much attention yet. You really believe people should be banned more frequently? (edited for spelling) This post has been edited by Firsfron of Ronchester: |
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| Firsfron of Ronchester |
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Senior Member
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QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 9:45am)
Many of the most important subject matters are ones which people do not readily agree with. Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution was widely discredited at the time, and even now is hardly accepted as fact
Blissy, Evolution is accepted with remarkable consensus throughout the scientific community. No serious scientist disputes evolution. Among the general populace, there is very little debate about evolution, outside the provincial United States of America. |
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| Morton_devonshire |
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QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 9:45am)
...Whilst if you debate a similarly disputed issue in the humanities, the problem is that a bunch of idiots who don't have a clue what they are talking about jump in and insist that they know all about it. Look at people like Morton Devonshire and MONGO for example, who jump in to the whole "9/11 theories" when they actually have no clue about them, just like to delete the whole lot just out of ignorance. Experts are getting banned, expertise dismissed ...
You consider the people who promote 9/11 conspiracy theories to be "experts"? |
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| Rochelle |
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QUOTE(Morton_devonshire @ Sun 9th September 2007, 6:06pm) QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 9:45am)
...Whilst if you debate a similarly disputed issue in the humanities, the problem is that a bunch of idiots who don't have a clue what they are talking about jump in and insist that they know all about it. Look at people like Morton Devonshire and MONGO for example, who jump in to the whole "9/11 theories" when they actually have no clue about them, just like to delete the whole lot just out of ignorance. Experts are getting banned, expertise dismissed ...
You consider the people who promote 9/11 conspiracy theories to be "experts"? Of course they do. Basically everyone that gets blocked from Wikipedia is an expert. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif) No, just kidding. That wasn't nice. But it was somewhat true. |
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| Wolfe |
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QUOTE(Firsfron of Ronchester @ Mon 10th September 2007, 3:22am)
Thanks for your interesting and thought-provoking analysis, Wolfe.
YW. I'm glad you found some value in it. QUOTE This is sort of opposite to the way I've been editing Wikipedia; I've worked individually, but I've usually asked for back-up or advice on how to write many articles, either because I lack the expertise, or because I start thinking that my writing may be unclear, and want a second opinion. Asking for advice on how to write an article is fine. Wikipedia should really employ professional writers to give advice to editors on subjects like this. It's colluding on content that is counter to the principle of the wisdom of crowds. QUOTE The idea that I was colluding, killing Wikipedia, hadn't occurred to me. I see your point about avoiding groupthink. But wouldn't one way to avoid groupthink be to ask for outside opinion, outside the organized group? "Peer review" on Wikipedia is mostly a joke, with untrained individuals making recommendations on how to "improve" an article. That's not an academic's definition of peer review at all. But Wikipedia's "peer review" system, I think, is good for one thing (and one thing only): improving clarity. Someone who hasn't read the article before is much more likely to spot areas where the article needs to be clarified. As I understand it, the wisdom of crowds dispenses with the need for peer review. The whole point of it is that everyone is a peer. WOC won't work if that isn't the case. The problem occurs when people edit too much and seek others to help them support their edits (which is natural). The proper attitude one should take to Wikipedia is this: "I've seen something I think is wrong, so I am going to change it. But I am not going to come back every day to revert it if someone else changes it. Rather I am simply going to leave it. If, over time, it survives the scrutiny of thousands of individuals, then it was a good edit. If it doesn't, then that's just too bad. What I can't do is keep insisting I am right and attempting to "own" that part of the article". QUOTE I don't agree with this point. I think Wikipedia needs substantive edits, if only to clean up the mess that a collaborative editing system creates: articles which look like they were written by someone with Multiple Personality Disorder. Articles which are written in various styles, formats, and spelling conventions. Articles which go much too far in detail or are written too technically. There are a million of these articles, and they need substantial adjustments. Minor edits won't fix them. And Wikipedia should employ full time writers to clean up articles. I don't believe that there is such a thing as too much detail. What that usually means is that the article should be spun off into a number of sub articles. It's not like Wikipedia couldn't afford this. It's one of the most visited sites on the internet, and wisely placed Google ads would enable it to fund a large number of professional administrators and clean up crew. These people would not be contributing content, but just helping to organize the contributions of the amateur editors more efficiently. QUOTE I'm really surprised this part of your post hasn't received much attention yet. You really believe people should be banned more frequently? Yes. Every individual editor is dispensable. As I understand it, the WOC works like this: you have a jar with a certain number of jellybeans in it, and you then get everyone in a room to make one individual guess as to how many jellybeans are in the jar. Contrary to expectation, it turns out that the average guess is startlingly accurate. What messes this up is a situation where people are allowed multiple guesses and are allowed to start discussing the issue amongst themselves. In the first case, a very few people are likely to care a lot more than others and keep making more and more guesses, while everyone else gives up, and in the second case collusion will produce distortion via groupthink. Wikipedia would operate in an optimal fashion if everyone edited occasionally, but no-one individual or group of individuals edited excessively. That is, of course, an ideal situation. You can't force all readers to edit, and you can't prevent individuals from editing more than others. What you can do is prevent excessive editing of individual topics by simply banning people who do that for a month or so. The worst POV articles on Wikipedia content wise are not caused by thousands of editors making small edits to them, but by a small number of editors making thousands of edits to them in the context of POV wars. That's not the wisdom of crowds, but the folly of a few. |
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| Wolfe |
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QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 6:45pm)
Whilst if you debate a similarly disputed issue in the humanities, the problem is that a bunch of idiots who don't have a clue what they are talking about jump in and insist that they know all about it. Look at people like Morton Devonshire and MONGO for example, who jump in to the whole "9/11 theories" when they actually have no clue about them, just like to delete the whole lot just out of ignorance. Experts are getting banned, expertise dismissed, and in the end the idiots are being pushed forward in the name of consensus and neutrality.
I see the problem with the 9/11 conspiracies somewhat differently. You have two groups of people who are obsessed with the issue. The 9/11 truth movement take advantage of the open nature of the internet by having their relatively few members spam wikipedia and sites like digg with rubbish. People like MONGO see it as their own personal mission to wage war on the "truthers". Both groups are wrong, and both groups are damaging Wikipedia. Wikipedia policy should be to minimize the number of edits by each individual editor to each particular article and to maximize the number of editors who edit each particular article. At present, the entrenched "ownership" of certain articles by individuals or groups serves as a disincentive to casual readers to edit. But the whole point of the wisdom of crowds is that you want to encourage the casual editors to edit, and dissuade the obsessives. That way, the net of opinion is cast as wide as possible. If the obsessives were prevented from editing 9/11 articles, you would quickly find that the 9/11 Truth stuff would be marginalized, because most people don't believe it. It's the nutters who are trying to ensure that the article matches their own personal beliefs for all time who are corrupting the articles. And as we all know, the people who tend to win in these contests are the kind of control freaks who aren't representative of the general population. That's what I mean when I say that people who edit too much should be banned. |
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Looking over Winston Smith's shoulder
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QUOTE(Wolfe @ Mon 10th September 2007, 9:16pm) QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 6:45pm)
Whilst if you debate a similarly disputed issue in the humanities, the problem is that a bunch of idiots who don't have a clue what they are talking about jump in and insist that they know all about it. Look at people like Morton Devonshire and MONGO for example, who jump in to the whole "9/11 theories" when they actually have no clue about them, just like to delete the whole lot just out of ignorance. Experts are getting banned, expertise dismissed, and in the end the idiots are being pushed forward in the name of consensus and neutrality.
I see the problem with the 9/11 conspiracies somewhat differently. You have two groups of people who are obsessed with the issue. The 9/11 truth movement take advantage of the open nature of the internet by having their relatively few members spam wikipedia and sites like digg with rubbish. People like MONGO see it as their own personal mission to wage war on the "truthers". Both groups are wrong, and both groups are damaging Wikipedia. Wikipedia policy should be to minimize the number of edits by each individual editor to each particular article and to maximize the number of editors who edit each particular article. At present, the entrenched "ownership" of certain articles by individuals or groups serves as a disincentive to casual readers to edit. But the whole point of the wisdom of crowds is that you want to encourage the casual editors to edit, and dissuade the obsessives. That way, the net of opinion is cast as wide as possible. If the obsessives were prevented from editing 9/11 articles, you would quickly find that the 9/11 Truth stuff would be marginalized, because most people don't believe it. It's the nutters who are trying to ensure that the article matches their own personal beliefs for all time who are corrupting the articles. And as we all know, the people who tend to win in these contests are the kind of control freaks who aren't representative of the general population. That's what I mean when I say that people who edit too much should be banned. I'm sorry Wolfe but you're just wrong. The "Wisdom of crowds" assumes that truth is a majoritarian construct, but the history of the world shows the madness of crowds to be the norm since crowds are easily manipulated especially when objective facts are hard to come by and rumors abound. The Internet does not make this easier because we have to consciously filter a large amount of crap put there by people with an agenda - an agenda that may not even be rational. In this situation, the obsessives always win. Look at Usenet for an example of this: the place swarms not with people with knowledge but crackpots and paranoid schizophrenics. Knowledge is not a democratic process which is decided on by majority. Truth is not arrived at by many ignorant people as an emergent property. Your textbooks at college were not written by crowds, neither was your house or car built by whoever came in off the street and lent a hand. Why should you expect the very fabric of knowledge upon which we all rely suddenly emerge from many ignoramuses? Its simply preposterous on its face. Nobody would ever get into an airplane built by wikiengineers unless they were completely mad. Yet somehow we are supposed to approve of this massive intellectual virus that dominates the Internet search engines? This post has been edited by JohnA: |
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I'm very much with John on that. When I first arrived at WP, I assumed that people editing a particularly article would have a very good understanding of the topic, perhaps with some form of professional expertise. It became apparent that not only were most of the editors largely ignorant, but many of the people were simply warped! And they were getting away with it - protected by various pseudo-policies or their on-site social ability. Over 95% of editors weren't up to it, and almost every content edit I saw was poor. Simple as that. When an obvious expert and good editor arrives on the scene, I wanted them to own the article. I didn't want goons and fools getting in there debasing the text. And having a misleading, ill-informed pile of tripe sitting at the top of a google search. But the failed consequences were inevitable. Knowledge and education actually deteriorates as a result. This essay explains things better than I could here. |
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QUOTE(Xidaf @ Fri 7th September 2007, 11:31pm) QUOTE(Unrepentant Vandal @ Fri 7th September 2007, 7:24pm)
A comment I made recently made me realise that Wikipedia will collapse when wikipedians realise their folly and begin to leave it in droves.
What will be the warning signs? How will we recognise that the end is nigh?
It will die a cold death, by losing its credibility bit by bit when honest members will continue being banned and dishonest POV pushers, lobbyists, political activists etc., will be the only so-called users of good standing remaining. Sounds like a recipe for hotting up and becoming more popular not dying a cold death, when there is a power vacuum there is always siomeone to fill it and POV pyushers, lobbysits and activists are well motivated by pushing their own thing to keep it becoming m more and more powerful - as if dry, objectivity were ever popular anyway, SqueakBox (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/ph34r.gif) |
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QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 5:45am)
Many of the most important subject matters are ones which people do not readily agree with. Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution was widely discredited at the time, and even now is hardly accepted as fact, yet it has become a very important theory in discussing species, humanity and many other aspects of who people are. Sigmund Freud's various psychiatric theories were widely discredited, and continue to be widely discredited, yet he is perhaps the single most widely quoted philosopher in history, and his theories are used in many other more established theories elsewhere.
You aren't comparing Darwin with Freud are you? Darwin is one of the greatest if not the greatest scientist of all time. Most scientists agree with the full theory of evolution, even the few who believe in intelligent design still party adhere that there was also an evolutionary process. In short, the theory of evolution in full or in part is not disputed by any credible scientist. |
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QUOTE(JohnA @ Tue 11th September 2007, 7:05am)
I'm sorry Wolfe but you're just wrong.
Well that counts as an argument. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) QUOTE The "Wisdom of crowds" assumes that truth is a majoritarian construct, No it doesn't, at least on the sane reading of the phrase. All it means in its basic form is that crowds operating under certain circumstances are likely to produce more accurate results than individuals acting on their own. "More accurate" in this sentence means "closer to the truth", where truth is simple correspondence to the facts (or defined in some other independent fashion). The Wisdom of Crowds is neither a theory of truth, nor an epistemological theory. In short: it isn't a philosophical thesis, but simply an empirical claim, which is borne out by various experiments. QUOTE but the history of the world shows the madness of crowds to be the norm since crowds are easily manipulated especially when objective facts are hard to come by and rumors abound. Well, no one would doubt that is true in some cases, but it would be rash to assume it is true all the time. The Wisdom of Crowds thesis does not maintain that crowds are accurate all the time under any context, but that under certain conditions decentralized decision making can produce accurate results. In particular, there has to be no collusion or groupthink. The core idea of the WOC is that each individual appraisal, occurring independently of the appraisals of others, and averaged with all other similar appraisals is likely to produce an average result that is accurate. QUOTE The Internet does not make this easier because we have to consciously filter a large amount of crap put there by people with an agenda - an agenda that may not even be rational. There is far more truth than lies on the internet, just as there is far more truth than lies in everyday discourse, even if much of it is mundane. QUOTE In this situation, the obsessives always win. Look at Usenet for an example of this: the place swarms not with people with knowledge but crackpots and paranoid schizophrenics. But they need not win in every situation. In carefully regulated environments their influence can be nullified or minimized. Look, I'm not assuming that Wikipedia could ever end up as an infallible repository of information, but that it could be more accurate than it currently is if the people running it actually understood what they were supposed to be doing. QUOTE Knowledge is not a democratic process which is decided on by majority. Truth is not arrived at by many ignorant people as an emergent property. Whoever said that? I certainly didn't. You're confusing a theory of truth with an empirical claim about the accuracy of results, and bringing up emergence is irrelevant. QUOTE Your textbooks at college were not written by crowds, neither was your house or car built by whoever came in off the street and lent a hand. Why should you expect the very fabric of knowledge upon which we all rely suddenly emerge from many ignoramuses? College textbooks are a bad example, since unless the author is someone like Aristotle, most of the claims made in them are heavily dependent on the work of other authors. QUOTE Its simply preposterous on its face. So was the idea that the earth moved around the sun. The fact that some people found it preposterous did not count against its truth. I don't see the point of your argument anyway. Wikipedia is supposedly built upon the principle of the wisdom of crowds. The only problem is that Wikipedia implements it very badly, probably because the people who run it don't really understand the limits of the idea. My argument is simply that, in order to achieve its supposed goal on its own principles, Wikipedia needs to be reorganized. I'm not sure whether it would actually work in the long run, but that is no excuse for making a half baked attempt, as is currently the case. If you are going to conduct an experiment, you should always do it to maximize the chances of success. Wikipedia is not doing this right now. QUOTE Nobody would ever get into an airplane built by wikiengineers unless they were completely mad. Yet somehow we are supposed to approve of this massive intellectual virus that dominates the Internet search engines? Whoever suggested this? WOC works in some cases and not in others. It may work in the case of Wikipedia if it is given the chance to do so, which it currently isn't being given. As I said above. Wikipedia is pretty good when it comes to my area of expertise. It's certainly not wildly inaccurate compared to professional encyclopedias within the subject. |
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QUOTE(Morton_devonshire @ Sun 9th September 2007, 6:06pm) QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 9:45am)
...Whilst if you debate a similarly disputed issue in the humanities, the problem is that a bunch of idiots who don't have a clue what they are talking about jump in and insist that they know all about it. Look at people like Morton Devonshire and MONGO for example, who jump in to the whole "9/11 theories" when they actually have no clue about them, just like to delete the whole lot just out of ignorance. Experts are getting banned, expertise dismissed ...
You consider the people who promote 9/11 conspiracy theories to be "experts"? Experts in conspiracy theories perhaps. Here is actually where MONGO makes some sense, there is way too much spaces permitted on Wikipedia to those whole crappy conspirationist theories(something which won't be allowed in a true encyclopedia). It's pathetic that it is POV pushers like MONGO who are defending something which would be more defendable by others who don't have some ill intend. This post has been edited by Xidaf: |
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QUOTE(Xidaf @ Tue 11th September 2007, 11:30am) QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 5:45am)
Many of the most important subject matters are ones which people do not readily agree with. Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution was widely discredited at the time, and even now is hardly accepted as fact, yet it has become a very important theory in discussing species, humanity and many other aspects of who people are. Sigmund Freud's various psychiatric theories were widely discredited, and continue to be widely discredited, yet he is perhaps the single most widely quoted philosopher in history, and his theories are used in many other more established theories elsewhere.
You aren't comparing Darwin with Freud are you? Darwin is one of the greatest if not the greatest scientist of all time. Most scientists agree with the full theory of evolution, even the few who believe in intelligent design still party adhere that there was also an evolutionary process. In short, the theory of evolution in full or in part is not disputed by any credible scientist. That's funny, because Freud is much more influential in everyday discourse than Darwin has ever been. I remember the first time I read Freud. I couldn't understand what the fuss was about since I already understood almost all of it, simply from living in a modern society. I wouldn't call Darwin a great scientist either. The idea of natural selection is as old as the hills, and isn't particularly complicated. Darwin's contribution was simply to do the thousands of hours of work required to prove it beyond all reasonable doubt. QUOTE(Xidaf @ Tue 11th September 2007, 12:01pm) QUOTE(Morton_devonshire @ Sun 9th September 2007, 6:06pm) QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 9:45am)
...Whilst if you debate a similarly disputed issue in the humanities, the problem is that a bunch of idiots who don't have a clue what they are talking about jump in and insist that they know all about it. Look at people like Morton Devonshire and MONGO for example, who jump in to the whole "9/11 theories" when they actually have no clue about them, just like to delete the whole lot just out of ignorance. Experts are getting banned, expertise dismissed ...
You consider the people who promote 9/11 conspiracy theories to be "experts"? Experts in conspiracy theories perhaps. Here is actually where MONGO makes some sense, there is way too much spaces permitted on Wikipedia to those whole crappy conspirationist theories(something which won't be allowed in a true encyclopedia). It's pathetic that it is POV pushers like MONGO who are defending something which would be more defendable by others who don't have some ill intend. Just because something is a conspiracy theory does not make it false. Conspiracies can, and have, occurred. If individuals were prevented from obsessively editing the same article over and over again, I think you would find that the bad conspiracy theories would be relegated to minor importance. |
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QUOTE(Wolfe @ Mon 10th September 2007, 11:04pm) QUOTE(Xidaf @ Tue 11th September 2007, 11:30am) QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 5:45am)
Many of the most important subject matters are ones which people do not readily agree with. Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution was widely discredited at the time, and even now is hardly accepted as fact, yet it has become a very important theory in discussing species, humanity and many other aspects of who people are. Sigmund Freud's various psychiatric theories were widely discredited, and continue to be widely discredited, yet he is perhaps the single most widely quoted philosopher in history, and his theories are used in many other more established theories elsewhere.
You aren't comparing Darwin with Freud are you? Darwin is one of the greatest if not the greatest scientist of all time. Most scientists agree with the full theory of evolution, even the few who believe in intelligent design still party adhere that there was also an evolutionary process. In short, the theory of evolution in full or in part is not disputed by any credible scientist. That's funny, because Freud is much more influential in everyday discourse than Darwin has ever been. I remember the first time I read Freud. I couldn't understand what the fuss was about since I already understood almost all of it, simply from living in a modern society. I wouldn't call Darwin a great scientist either. The idea of natural selection is as old as the hills, and isn't particularly complicated. Darwin's contribution was simply to do the thousands of hours of work required to prove it beyond all reasonable doubt. Prior to Darwin the studies were more on inheritance than Darwin's natural selection. I disagree that he only ''proved'', he did more than this, he actually also introduce the evolutionist vision of animal behavior which has influenced behavioralists and shows much more expention and potential and used as a key for almost any observable behavior including in humans than Freud psychoanalism will ever do. QUOTE(Wolfe @ Mon 10th September 2007, 11:07pm)
Just because something is a conspiracy theory does not make it false. Conspiracies can, and have, occurred. If individuals were prevented from obsessively editing the same article over and over again, I think you would find that the bad conspiracy theories would be relegated to minor importance.
Perhaps, but in this cases, most of it have nothing to do with reality. Anyway, I'll discuss about this later. This post has been edited by Xidaf: |
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Look, let me make this very clear here - I live in Australia. What happens in America is of little concern to me - and that includes 9/11. I don't really care about it all that much one way or another. I have empathy, sure, but it doesn't affect me. It didn't happen here. I think that 9/11 is a localised American issue that had no business being in international news. It has, and I object to that. I get very irritated at that. I think that it has become far, far more important than it needed to have been.
Therefore, given that I have very little interest in it, I obviously don't know anything about the "9/11 truth movement" or any of the other movements. I don't know if it is true or not.
My passing interest is that it seems to be a complex issue, and whilst we can perhaps suggest some things that seem to be pretty obvious, there are a lot of unknowns, and henceforth so-called conspiracy theories belong in this kind of issue. Where there are unknowns, there are theories. This is fair and reasonable.
As for people being experts, obviously if you are pushing the theory yourself, then you are an expert on pushing the theory.
Please, guys, I get so fucking sick of people insisting that I am interested in something when I am not. I have zero interest in 9/11. I couldn't give a shit about it. I am interested in the war in Iraq because our country is involved in that. See the difference? Until Americans start to pay attention to what happens in Australia, I don't see why I should pay attention to what happens in America, in anything more than a passing way. I mean there are people that don't even know about PA or MV Tampa for heaven's sakes, two of the biggest issues in Australian history. So why should I care about something in America, in anything more than a passing way? I am sorry, Americans, but the world doesn't revolve around you. Many people like to be interested in their own country's affairs.
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QUOTE(jorge @ Tue 11th September 2007, 12:22pm) QUOTE(Kato @ Tue 11th September 2007, 11:17am) I must admit that at first glance, your post looks absolutely insane, Bliss. But then, I guess that for a lot of us, if we lived somewhere like Tasmania, we wouldn't care a lot about these things either. Fair dinkum, sport. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) What Blissy is missing of course is that the Iraq war probably wouldn't have happened were it not for 911. It's hard to tell really. Clearly Bush wanted to go into Iraq (he couldn't really have believed that they Iraq was related to 9/11, nor did anyone in the "intelligence community" genuinely believe in a threat from weapons of mass destruction, so far as I am aware). Were it not for 9/11, I'm sure that he could have found a pretext. |
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the wookie
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QUOTE(jorge @ Tue 11th September 2007, 9:52pm) QUOTE(Kato @ Tue 11th September 2007, 11:17am) I must admit that at first glance, your post looks absolutely insane, Bliss. But then, I guess that for a lot of us, if we lived somewhere like Tasmania, we wouldn't care a lot about these things either. Fair dinkum, sport. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) What Blissy is missing of course is that the Iraq war probably wouldn't have happened were it not for 911. No I am not missing that. That is why I have a passing interest. But I don't see the need to get all involved in it. I deliberately refuse to learn too much about American internal politics. If I want to learn about American internal politics, I'll go and live in America. I have enough difficulty dealing with our own politics. Now, if anyone wants to talk about how 9/11 was used as a cover up for the MV Tampa crisis, then that is something that I can get in to. Not that 9/11 was planned or anything, but just that it was used as a political scapegoat to hide the obvious tragedy of the MV Tampa crisis, and the guilt of the federal government (not to mention ASIO) in their handling of it. That is something that I know about. 9/11 itself, blah, I mean it had far too much publicity. I can understand it having that much publicity in USA, but seriously, if that had happened in Australia would anyone have cared? |
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QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Tue 11th September 2007, 1:27pm)
Anyway I am sick of this shit from Kato, I don't know why he's doing this, whatever, you pull things apart, twist things around, and then say nasty things. I don't care. This is not what we are supposed to be doing here. We're supposed to be here to pull Wikipedia apart, not each other. I don't like it at all. If you want to discredit me, then that's your business I suppose. It'll only make it easier for Grace Note and the others to make fun of everyone else here. If you just intended to make me depressed, then well done.
Listen Bliss. We've all been through this before. 1. "We're supposed to be here to pull Wikipedia apart" - the previous posts had nothing whatsoever to do with Wikipedia and were clogging up a good thread. 2. "I don't know why he's doing this" - because the previous posts had nothing to with wikipedia and were clogging up a good thread. 3. "It'll only make it easier for Grace Note and the others to make fun of everyone else here." - I'd rather they didn't. Which is why I called for a time out on some really woolly off topic comments about 9/11. 4. "This is not what we are supposed to be doing here." Exactly. 5. "If you just intended to make me depressed, then well done." Well sorry. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif) |
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τα δε μοι παθήματα μαθήματα γÎγονε
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QUOTE(Unrepentant Vandal @ Fri 7th September 2007, 7:24pm)
A comment I made recently made me realise that Wikipedia will collapse when wikipedians realise their folly and begin to leave it in droves.
What will be the warning signs? How will we recognise that the end is nigh? I've been thinking and I believe that it will be worth documenting and carefully analysing when it does happen, as the dying days and collapse will be of considerable value to several fields.
I've been skipping clicking on this thread till now, 'cause we've had so gawdawful many that sounded just like, but now that I've clicked the fatal click I see that there's a serious flaw in its very premiss. Haven't you been paying attention? Did you never hear of Jonestown or Heaven's Gate or Waco or a zillion other dead and forgotten mass cult suicides? Wikipediots will never "realise their folly and begin to leave it in droves" — Wikipedism is a terminal disease — those whose brains, or genes, or support networks do not cure them of it after the first crisis or two are almost certainly predisposed to a long degenerative decline toward eventual brain death. I think of some of the adminds and ediots I used to still chat with — who even a few months ago were still acting like ½way sensible, if ineluctably namby-pamby human beings — they have all become such BotBrains now that they swing their swords like Walking Dead Ninja Ghouls, without so much as a glimmer of conscience or a spark of consciousness about the meaning or purpose of their Once Hallowed, Now Hollow RobotRooles. Collapse? — the bridge over the chasm collapsed a good ways back, and Wile E. Coyote just hangs there in mid air, waiting to absorb the fact — QUOTE
¤Beep¤beep¤ — Zip-bang @√
``````````````Z................. Jonny (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif) This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: |
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QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Tue 11th September 2007, 1:44pm) QUOTE(Unrepentant Vandal @ Fri 7th September 2007, 7:24pm)
A comment I made recently made me realise that Wikipedia will collapse when wikipedians realise their folly and begin to leave it in droves.
What will be the warning signs? How will we recognise that the end is nigh? I've been thinking and I believe that it will be worth documenting and carefully analysing when it does happen, as the dying days and collapse will be of considerable value to several fields.
I've been skipping clicking on this thread till now, 'cause we've had so gawdawful many that sounded just like, but now that I've clicked the fatal click I see that there's a serious flaw in its very premiss. Haven't you been paying attention? Did you never hear of Jonestown or Heaven's Gate or Waco or a zillion other dead and forgotten mass cult suicides? Wikipediots will never "realise their folly and begin to leave it in droves" — Wikipedism is a terminal disease — those whose brains, or genes, or support networks do not cure them of it after the first crisis or two are almost certainly predisposed to a long degenerative decline toward eventual brain death. I think of some of the adminds and ediots I used to still chat with — who even a few months ago were still acting like ½way sensible, if ineluctably namby-pamby human beings — they have all become such BotBrains now that they swing their swords like Walking Dead Ninja Ghouls, without so much as a glimmer of conscience or a spark of consciousness about the meaning or purpose of their Once Hallowed, Now Hollow RobotRooles. Collapse? — the bridge over the chasm collapsed a good ways back, and Wile E. Coyote just hangs there in mid air, waiting to absorb the fact — Jonny (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif) I tend to agree, but I was not talking about this hardcore within a hardcore. Remember, most of Jimbo's followers didn't follow him to Jonestown... |
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QUOTE(Unrepentant Vandal @ Tue 11th September 2007, 10:44am)
I tend to agree, but I was not talking about this hardcore within a hardcore. Remember, most of Jimbo's followers didn't follow him to Jonestown …
That's partly why I find the distinction between Wikipedian (any editor, or maybe even just avid reader) and Wikipediot (dyed-in-the-wiki-wool true-blue believer) so useful. I'm just saying that most of the Wikipediots that I've been watching turn bluer and bluer day by day are really starting to scare me with their soul-less automaton behaviour. There's no Ghost in that Machine anymore … Jonny (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif) This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: |
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Well sorry, but the death of 3,000 people in the worst terrorist act is a very important matter, in essence Iraq invasion is another subject by itself. That you live in Australia doesn't change a thing, if you are not interested in a subject that much and not knowledgeable enough then don't make such insinuations which you have shown in this thread. Also I am skeptical of your honesty, the uses of the word ''so-called'' seems to imply doubt of it being conspirationist theory. Since we are at it, do you also believe in the so-called alien spaceship captured by the US army and Area 51? Afteral, those sort of trash which won't find any places in a true encyclopedia are given so much space on Wikipedia as long as it doesn't offend the ''established'' mass. QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Tue 11th September 2007, 2:58am)
Look, let me make this very clear here - I live in Australia. What happens in America is of little concern to me - and that includes 9/11. I don't really care about it all that much one way or another. I have empathy, sure, but it doesn't affect me. It didn't happen here. I think that 9/11 is a localised American issue that had no business being in international news. It has, and I object to that. I get very irritated at that. I think that it has become far, far more important than it needed to have been.
Therefore, given that I have very little interest in it, I obviously don't know anything about the "9/11 truth movement" or any of the other movements. I don't know if it is true or not.
My passing interest is that it seems to be a complex issue, and whilst we can perhaps suggest some things that seem to be pretty obvious, there are a lot of unknowns, and henceforth so-called conspiracy theories belong in this kind of issue. Where there are unknowns, there are theories. This is fair and reasonable.
As for people being experts, obviously if you are pushing the theory yourself, then you are an expert on pushing the theory.
Please, guys, I get so fucking sick of people insisting that I am interested in something when I am not. I have zero interest in 9/11. I couldn't give a shit about it. I am interested in the war in Iraq because our country is involved in that. See the difference? Until Americans start to pay attention to what happens in Australia, I don't see why I should pay attention to what happens in America, in anything more than a passing way. I mean there are people that don't even know about PA or MV Tampa for heaven's sakes, two of the biggest issues in Australian history. So why should I care about something in America, in anything more than a passing way? I am sorry, Americans, but the world doesn't revolve around you. Many people like to be interested in their own country's affairs.
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QUOTE(Xidaf @ Tue 11th September 2007, 2:30am) QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 5:45am)
Many of the most important subject matters are ones which people do not readily agree with. Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution was widely discredited at the time, and even now is hardly accepted as fact, yet it has become a very important theory in discussing species, humanity and many other aspects of who people are. Sigmund Freud's various psychiatric theories were widely discredited, and continue to be widely discredited, yet he is perhaps the single most widely quoted philosopher in history, and his theories are used in many other more established theories elsewhere.
You aren't comparing Darwin with Freud are you? Darwin is one of the greatest if not the greatest scientist of all time. Most scientists agree with the full theory of evolution, even the few who believe in intelligent design still party adhere that there was also an evolutionary process. In short, the theory of evolution in full or in part is not disputed by any credible scientist. We certainly shouldnt underestimate Freud though, he invented psychotherapy and still enormously influences it, but yeah Darwin is more comparable to that other great English scientist Isaac Newton whose theories while techniocally not entirely true (because ogff the theory of relativity) still have tremendous applications in the modern world, Squeak (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/ph34r.gif) Box QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Tue 11th September 2007, 12:11pm) QUOTE(jorge @ Tue 11th September 2007, 9:52pm) QUOTE(Kato @ Tue 11th September 2007, 11:17am) I must admit that at first glance, your post looks absolutely insane, Bliss. But then, I guess that for a lot of us, if we lived somewhere like Tasmania, we wouldn't care a lot about these things either. Fair dinkum, sport. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) What Blissy is missing of course is that the Iraq war probably wouldn't have happened were it not for 911. No I am not missing that. That is why I have a passing interest. But I don't see the need to get all involved in it. I deliberately refuse to learn too much about American internal politics. If I want to learn about American internal politics, I'll go and live in America. I have enough difficulty dealing with our own politics. Now, if anyone wants to talk about how 9/11 was used as a cover up for the MV Tampa crisis, then that is something that I can get in to. Not that 9/11 was planned or anything, but just that it was used as a political scapegoat to hide the obvious tragedy of the MV Tampa crisis, and the guilt of the federal government (not to mention ASIO) in their handling of it. That is something that I know about. 9/11 itself, blah, I mean it had far too much publicity. I can understand it having that much publicity in USA, but seriously, if that had happened in Australia would anyone have cared? 9/11 was unquestionably planned, but by Al-Qaeda/Mohammed Atta, not by the US governement (probably the silliest conspiracy theory ever to gain popular accpetance (especially in muslim communities). People would have cared less if it had happened in Australia or the UK and very little if it had happened in Honduras or a similar poor, small country, Squeak (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/ph34r.gif) Box |
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QUOTE(Somey @ Sat 8th September 2007, 4:36pm)
I'd have to agree, generally speaking... In fact, you could simplify it even more by just saying that there are "geeky" and "non-geeky" subjects, and the articles on geeky subjects are generally good, and the non-geeky ones bad.
Or maybe you could say that the quality of each article is often in proportion to its geekiness... it probably doesn't hold true in all cases, of course, but one might easily say that most biographies are non-geeky, along with articles on religion, economics, recent history, ethnographics, most areas of philosophy, and quite a few political subjects.
"Borderline geeky" subjects might include things like ancient history, literature, mathematics, and many of the physical sciences (at least the ones that the religious types aren't so interested in). In most of those areas I'd say WP is relatively good - what often happens is that one or two articles in a general topic will get warred over, but quality is acceptable overall, and of course the sheer number of articles is higher than a traditional encyclopedia.
One big exception IMO is probably military history and military "science" - this is one of the best topic areas on Wikipedia by far, and one would normally expect otherwise, given the amount of controversy involved. It's still a little too US-centric, but somehow they manage to keep most of the edit-warring under control, and there are a lot of extremely knowledgeable people writing this stuff. Maybe it's all being written by retired officers with nothing better to do, but they're doing a pretty good job of it!
See, there, I said something fairly nice about Wikipedia. Woo hoo! Of course, I'm obviously generalizing horribly here - this is really just the general impression I have personally.
YMMV, as they say.
Take a look a the face of this worldly wise, and mature wikiadmin... see the wisdom he brings to the wiki project. The face of the wisdom of WikiThe contributions this wise old boy is making |
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The theory of relativity is not a testament that Newton laws were not entirly true. It is not compleat that is all. In science, we patch what previous models don't entirly address what is observed in reality. In its own light the theory of relevaity is not compleat either. When they sent men on moon, Newton's laws were what made it possible not relativity, the utility of Einstein relatvity in common devices is pretty much recent (GPS). Evolution is not simply a theory, microevolutions is observable (e.g. bacteries), evolution in itself is more and more used in behavioral science, while it is true that Freud is very important, the theory of evolution has had such an impact in science that even the theory of relativity did not have. If you have physic courses in college, in many of those you can skip relativty for the comprehention of the subject. But in any biology courses what you observe and study to understand it fully you have to study organs in the perspective of evolution, even when studying animal behavior (sexual selection, coevolution etc.) Evolution is even considered to understand society. QUOTE(SqueakBox @ Tue 11th September 2007, 1:22pm) QUOTE(Xidaf @ Tue 11th September 2007, 2:30am) QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 9th September 2007, 5:45am)
Many of the most important subject matters are ones which people do not readily agree with. Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution was widely discredited at the time, and even now is hardly accepted as fact, yet it has become a very important theory in discussing species, humanity and many other aspects of who people are. Sigmund Freud's various psychiatric theories were widely discredited, and continue to be widely discredited, yet he is perhaps the single most widely quoted philosopher in history, and his theories are used in many other more established theories elsewhere.
You aren't comparing Darwin with Freud are you? Darwin is one of the greatest if not the greatest scientist of all time. Most scientists agree with the full theory of evolution, even the few who believe in intelligent design still party adhere that there was also an evolutionary process. In short, the theory of evolution in full or in part is not disputed by any credible scientist. We certainly shouldnt underestimate Freud though, he invented psychotherapy and still enormously influences it, but yeah Darwin is more comparable to that other great English scientist Isaac Newton whose theories while techniocally not entirely true (because ogff the theory of relativity) still have tremendous applications in the modern world, Squeak (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/ph34r.gif) Box |
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Looking over Winston Smith's shoulder
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QUOTE(Wolfe @ Tue 11th September 2007, 4:01am) QUOTE(JohnA @ Tue 11th September 2007, 7:05am)
I'm sorry Wolfe but you're just wrong.
Well that counts as an argument. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) Its a start. QUOTE QUOTE The "Wisdom of crowds" assumes that truth is a majoritarian construct, No it doesn't, at least on the sane reading of the phrase. All it means in its basic form is that crowds operating under certain circumstances are likely to produce more accurate results than individuals acting on their own. "More accurate" in this sentence means "closer to the truth", where truth is simple correspondence to the facts (or defined in some other independent fashion). The Wisdom of Crowds is neither a theory of truth, nor an epistemological theory. In short: it isn't a philosophical thesis, but simply an empirical claim, which is borne out by various experiments. Nope. Now you're stating things as if stating something unlikely magically makes it true. Wikipedia has not become "more accurate" over time. There is a visible intellectual entropy occurring where articles revert towards an unstable equilibrium between the few who know what they're talking about and the many who think that access to Google, Usenet or the voices in their head makes them experts. If the Wisdom of Crowds is an empirical claim then it should be in principle falsifiable. How would you go about falsifying a claim like that? Wikipedia is an excellent example of how WoC doesn't work. QUOTE QUOTE but the history of the world shows the madness of crowds to be the norm since crowds are easily manipulated especially when objective facts are hard to come by and rumors abound. Well, no one would doubt that is true in some cases, but it would be rash to assume it is true all the time. The Wisdom of Crowds thesis does not maintain that crowds are accurate all the time under any context, but that under certain conditions decentralized decision making can produce accurate results. In particular, there has to be no collusion or groupthink. The core idea of the WOC is that each individual appraisal, occurring independently of the appraisals of others, and averaged with all other similar appraisals is likely to produce an average result that is accurate. I'm sorry but that's simply false. Humans do not act in isolation, they act together in a social constructions be it political, religious or ethnic or whatever. Thus your notion that they are likely to produce "an average result that is accurate" is simply preposterous on its face. The history of mankind shows no evidence of this averaging going on. Instead, political, social, religious and philosophical movements wax and wane as crowds move from one fashion to another, one powerbase to another, one dominant personality to another. I think the problem is that you start from an article of belief (the WoC) and discount any evidence that contradicts that belief. It's a religious belief in other words. QUOTE QUOTE The Internet does not make this easier because we have to consciously filter a large amount of crap put there by people with an agenda - an agenda that may not even be rational. There is far more truth than lies on the internet, just as there is far more truth than lies in everyday discourse, even if much of it is mundane. Another statement of belief made without any evidence. QUOTE QUOTE In this situation, the obsessives always win. Look at Usenet for an example of this: the place swarms not with people with knowledge but crackpots and paranoid schizophrenics. But they need not win in every situation. In carefully regulated environments their influence can be nullified or minimized. Look, I'm not assuming that Wikipedia could ever end up as an infallible repository of information, but that it could be more accurate than it currently is if the people running it actually understood what they were supposed to be doing. Your assumptions are wrong. The administration of Wikipedia is not directed towards greater accuracy or scholarship because those two concepts are far-away countries about which neither Jimbo Wales, nor the merry band of teenage admins know nothing. Instead they focus upon something called "verifiability", "consensus" and byzantine rules imposed by people even more ignorant. QUOTE QUOTE Knowledge is not a democratic process which is decided on by majority. Truth is not arrived at by many ignorant people as an emergent property. Whoever said that? I certainly didn't. You're confusing a theory of truth with an empirical claim about the accuracy of results, and bringing up emergence is irrelevant. At least I'm not trying to posit a religious belief as an empirical claim when its nothing of the sort. QUOTE QUOTE Your textbooks at college were not written by crowds, neither was your house or car built by whoever came in off the street and lent a hand. Why should you expect the very fabric of knowledge upon which we all rely suddenly emerge from many ignoramuses? College textbooks are a bad example, since unless the author is someone like Aristotle, most of the claims made in them are heavily dependent on the work of other authors. As I said, you ignore all contrary evidence when it contradicts an irrational belief like WoC. QUOTE QUOTE Its simply preposterous on its face. So was the idea that the earth moved around the sun. The fact that some people found it preposterous did not count against its truth. But the notion of the Earth moving around the Sun did not emerge from any crowd. It was proposed by solitary individuals in the teeth of massive opposition that posited that so many brilliant minds guided by God could not possibly be wrong. The notion that the Earth moved around the Sun was not a popular idea at all. Once again you have provided an example of a truth that was not arrived at by a large number of people producing "an average result that is accurate". The large number of people were wrong. QUOTE I don't see the point of your argument anyway. Wikipedia is supposedly built upon the principle of the wisdom of crowds. The only problem is that Wikipedia implements it very badly, probably because the people who run it don't really understand the limits of the idea. My argument is simply that, in order to achieve its supposed goal on its own principles, Wikipedia needs to be reorganized. I'm not sure whether it would actually work in the long run, but that is no excuse for making a half baked attempt, as is currently the case. Or more likely Wikipedia is the experiment and its producing clear results counter to your prior beliefs. QUOTE If you are going to conduct an experiment, you should always do it to maximize the chances of success. Wikipedia is not doing this right now. It's difficult to see how. Wikipedia has hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of contributors. How big a sample does it have to get before reality dawns that the WoC is a 21st Century myth? QUOTE QUOTE Nobody would ever get into an airplane built by wikiengineers unless they were completely mad. Yet somehow we are supposed to approve of this massive intellectual virus that dominates the Internet search engines? Whoever suggested this? WOC works in some cases and not in others. It may work in the case of Wikipedia if it is given the chance to do so, which it currently isn't being given. As I said above. Wikipedia is pretty good when it comes to my area of expertise. It's certainly not wildly inaccurate compared to professional encyclopedias within the subject. Perhaps the reason that its "pretty good" when it comes to your area of expertise is because so few people have decided to exercise their "expertise". Have you considered that? "Pretty good" is not the same as good consistent scholarship, and Wikipedia ruthlessly expunges scholarship as anathema to NPOV. This post has been edited by JohnA: |
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Looking over Winston Smith's shoulder
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QUOTE(Wolfe @ Mon 10th September 2007, 9:02pm)
Asking for advice on how to write an article is fine. Wikipedia should really employ professional writers to give advice to editors on subjects like this. It's colluding on content that is counter to the principle of the wisdom of crowds.
As I understand it, the wisdom of crowds dispenses with the need for peer review. The whole point of it is that everyone is a peer. WOC won't work if that isn't the case. The problem occurs when people edit too much and seek others to help them support their edits (which is natural).
Or more likely because ignorance is also a point of view strongly held by many people. This is the first explanation that I've seen about WoC and its clearly an irrational reification of human thinking. QUOTE The proper attitude one should take to Wikipedia is this: "I've seen something I think is wrong, so I am going to change it. But I am not going to come back every day to revert it if someone else changes it. Rather I am simply going to leave it. If, over time, it survives the scrutiny of thousands of individuals, then it was a good edit. If it doesn't, then that's just too bad. What I can't do is keep insisting I am right and attempting to "own" that part of the article". The irrationality here is that everyone should know not to claim ownership of an article, that many people have a excellent grasp of the subtleties of the English language and that everyone can distinguish what is a good edit and what is not, and they magically agree with WolfeQUOTE And Wikipedia should employ full time writers to clean up articles. I don't believe that there is such a thing as too much detail. What that usually means is that the article should be spun off into a number of sub articles.
It's not like Wikipedia couldn't afford this. It's one of the most visited sites on the internet, and wisely placed Google ads would enable it to fund a large number of professional administrators and clean up crew. These people would not be contributing content, but just helping to organize the contributions of the amateur editors more efficiently. It could, but its not going to because that wisdom has yet to emerge from the crowds who are editing Wikipedia. I wonder why? QUOTE Yes. Every individual editor is dispensable. Also every college professor is similarly dispensable. All we need is a crowd of students to arrive at the truth by a process of averaging. Every aeroengineer is similarly dispensible. What we need is a large number of people who make very, very few changes. QUOTE As I understand it, the WOC works like this: you have a jar with a certain number of jellybeans in it, and you then get everyone in a room to make one individual guess as to how many jellybeans are in the jar. Contrary to expectation, it turns out that the average guess is startlingly accurate. Rubbish. There's a test waiting to be made. Guess the number of jellybeans in a jar - and the average will be startlingly inaccurate. QUOTE What messes this up is a situation where people are allowed multiple guesses and are allowed to start discussing the issue amongst themselves. In the first case, a very few people are likely to care a lot more than others and keep making more and more guesses, while everyone else gives up, and in the second case collusion will produce distortion via groupthink. Of course, iteration works against the WoC. I must write this down for future reference. QUOTE Wikipedia would operate in an optimal fashion if everyone edited occasionally, but no-one individual or group of individuals edited excessively. That is, of course, an ideal situation. You can't force all readers to edit, and you can't prevent individuals from editing more than others. What you can do is prevent excessive editing of individual topics by simply banning people who do that for a month or so. The worst POV articles on Wikipedia content wise are not caused by thousands of editors making small edits to them, but by a small number of editors making thousands of edits to them in the context of POV wars. That's not the wisdom of crowds, but the folly of a few.
No, that's how mobs tend to operate. And they tend to go for the targets which are most visible for maximum result. All of which shouldn't be a surprise to competent social scientists. Should it? |
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QUOTE(Kato @ Tue 11th September 2007, 3:10pm) QUOTE(JohnA @ Tue 11th September 2007, 8:24pm)
Nope. Now you're stating things as if stating something unlikely magically makes it true. Wikipedia has not become "more accurate" over time. There is a visible intellectual entropy occurring where articles revert towards an unstable equilibrium between the few who know what they're talking about and the many who think that access to Google, Usenet or the voices in their head makes them experts.
Well stated. I could locate countless examples of this. I think this key factor - that articles reach a stage when they actually get worse unless people are prepared to waste their lives in poisonous online squabbles with the ignorant - is one of the most terrifying aspects of WP. It is the trap. And good faith experts get lured into an awful task of Sisyphus. A thankless and ultimately doomed effort to protect the integrity of the work, which now sits at the top of every child's google search. And in the midst of this slavery, sweat beading down their faces as they fight off malcontents, misfits & lunatics to pay Jimbo's hotel bills, some absolute prick with a clipboard comes along and tells these people that they're "owning the article, maaan". Articles get worse. Get used to it. IMO Brilliantly deduced as is the case of an intellectual imperative; the articulation is immaculate. Without age limitations, there is a tendency for cabals to allow the inexperienced young people to take over, ergo; a general lack of wisdom ensues. Our society thrives on 30 second attention spans. Many young people today find it more entertaining to learn "guitar hero" rather than learning an actual art form or musical instrument. Further, without educational requirements there will always be the normal (i.e., “bell curve) default to the mean intelligence of any population. Average intellect will not demand the highest sophistication of or in anything. On the contrary, many young people want to revert articles to the lowest threshold of reasoning so they can better understand the work themselves. There are time tested reasons why most civilized nations and societies require that the hierarchy of their leaders attain a specific age before being allowed to take the highest judicial and executive offices. The Wikipedia is an inferior encyclopedia than what could be created by scholars. It is that simple. Add the fact that the youngest editors seem to be the ones most likely to act, in haste, to destroy the works of their elder counterparts, and there is war after war ending in a mediocre end product. "Consensus" intelligence cannot exist without a final decision making body. There are too many emperors without any clothes for Wikipedia to ever be truly up to the standards that schools and governments require of any benchmark for reliable resources. |
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τα δε μοι παθήματα μαθήματα γÎγονε
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QUOTE(WhispersOfWisdom @ Tue 11th September 2007, 8:34pm) QUOTE(Kato @ Tue 11th September 2007, 3:10pm) QUOTE(JohnA @ Tue 11th September 2007, 8:24pm)
Nope. Now you're stating things as if stating something unlikely magically makes it true. Wikipedia has not become "more accurate" over time. There is a visible intellectual entropy occurring where articles revert towards an unstable equilibrium between the few who know what they're talking about and the many who think that access to Google, Usenet or the voices in their head makes them experts.
Well stated. I could locate countless examples of this. I think this key factor — that articles reach a stage when they actually get worse unless people are prepared to waste their lives in poisonous online squabbles with the ignorant — is one of the most terrifying aspects of WP. It is the trap. And good faith experts get lured into an awful task of Sisyphus. A thankless and ultimately doomed effort to protect the integrity of the work, which now sits at the top of every child's google search. And in the midst of this slavery, sweat beading down their faces as they fight off malcontents, misfits & lunatics to pay Jimbo's hotel bills, some absolute prick with a clipboard comes along and tells these people that they're "owning the article, maaan". Articles get worse. Get used to it. IMO Brilliantly deduced as is the case of an intellectual imperative; the articulation is immaculate. Without age limitations, there is a tendency for cabals to allow the inexperienced young people to take over, ergo; a general lack of wisdom ensues. Our society thrives on 30 second attention spans. Many young people today find it more entertaining to learn "guitar hero" rather than learning an actual art form or musical instrument. Further, without educational requirements there will always be the normal (i.e., “bell curve) default to the mean intelligence of any population. Average intellect will not demand the highest sophistication of or in anything. On the contrary, many young people want to revert articles to the lowest threshold of reasoning so they can better understand the work themselves. There are time tested reasons why most civilized nations and societies require that the hierarchy of their leaders attain a specific age before being allowed to take the highest judicial and executive offices. The Wikipedia is an inferior encyclopedia than what could be created by scholars. It is that simple. Add the fact that the youngest editors seem to be the ones most likely to act, in haste, to destroy the works of their elder counterparts, and there is war after war ending in a mediocre end product. "Consensus" intelligence cannot exist without a final decision making body. There are too many emperors without any clothes for Wikipedia to ever be truly up to the standards that schools and governments require of any benchmark for reliable resources. Brilliant ∑ation, youse guys. In fact, this bit of 3-logue gets the 2die4 — QUOTE Per Angusta Ad Augusta In A Nut'sHell
Star Of Arete ``````````````Z................. Jonny (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif) |
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QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Tue 11th September 2007, 2:08pm)
What Mongo and MD do in their tin foil hat conspiracy theory opposition is one step removed from knocking down outright straw-men. It is an effort to seek out the worst arguments presented by those who disagree with you while avoiding more serious arguments. It is a form of intellectual dishonesty. WP is an excellent environment for such activity. Not to mention the distasteful smugness.
Worse arguments? Better arguments? ALL of the 9/11 conspiracy theories are complete rubbish. There are no serious arguments when it comes to those theories. There isn't a serious journalist in the world that gives an ounce of credence to any of those so-called theories. |
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QUOTE(JohnA @ Wed 12th September 2007, 4:24am)
Its a start.
Not really. It's just a feeble assertion so far. QUOTE Nope. Now you're stating things as if stating something unlikely magically makes it true. Wikipedia has not become "more accurate" over time. There is a visible intellectual entropy occurring where articles revert towards an unstable equilibrium between the few who know what they're talking about and the many who think that access to Google, Usenet or the voices in their head makes them experts. I said no such thing. You were confusing the issue between a theory of truth and a claim that some method of composition tracks the truth reasonably well. That is an elementary error. QUOTE If the Wisdom of Crowds is an empirical claim then it should be in principle falsifiable. How would you go about falsifying a claim like that? Wikipedia is an excellent example of how WoC doesn't work. Except it isn't. The whole point of my previous posts was that Wikipedia is not structured to provide an optimal test of the WOC. Your claim is equivalent to someone who complains that a car can never perform well when it hasn't been tuned properly. It may in fact never perform well, but we can't really know this until we test it under the best conditions we can. And I can't believe that people still buy into Popper. QUOTE I'm sorry but that's simply false. Humans do not act in isolation, they act together in a social constructions be it political, religious or ethnic or whatever. You're muddling the distinction between a group member acting as part of a group and being a group member who is acting on their own. The difference is as simple as that between people being allowed to vote on an issue without prior discussion amongst themselves, and voting after having had an extended discussion in an attempt to achieve consensus. QUOTE Thus your notion that they are likely to produce "an average result that is accurate" is simply preposterous on its face. The history of mankind shows no evidence of this averaging going on. Instead, political, social, religious and philosophical movements wax and wane as crowds move from one fashion to another, one powerbase to another, one dominant personality to another. I think you're confusing the WOC thesis with the claim that crowds are always wise. I don't think anyone is claming that. The WOC claim is that under certain conditions crowds can be wise. It's quite well attested that given certain conditions, crowds can produce an accurate result. Whether Wikipedia can do that remains to be seen, since some of the more obvious conditions required are not present in the current structure of the project. QUOTE I think the problem is that you start from an article of belief (the WoC) and discount any evidence that contradicts that belief. It's a religious belief in other words. Not at all. You are attacking a straw man. My claim is that Wikipedia in its present form is not optimally structured to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds. There are obvious faults in the way it is organized. My view is that it should be fixed as best we can, and then we will see if it works in this particular case. It might not, but we can't really be sure until it is attempted. QUOTE Another statement of belief made without any evidence. Actually, it's just common sense. Disagreement can only take place against a background of agreement on other matters. If we are going to disagree about whether pigs fly, then that presupposes agreement on the existence of pigs, the nature of flight and so on. The late Donald Davidson wrote a series of influential papers on this topic which are worth anyone's time. It's certainly a lot less silly than Popper. QUOTE Your assumptions are wrong. The administration of Wikipedia is not directed towards greater accuracy or scholarship because those two concepts are far-away countries about which neither Jimbo Wales, nor the merry band of teenage admins know nothing. Instead they focus upon something called "verifiability", "consensus" and byzantine rules imposed by people even more ignorant. And where do you see me defending the current administration? My argument is that it needs to be structured quite differently than it is. Certainly, Wales has to go. QUOTE At least I'm not trying to posit a religious belief as an empirical claim when its nothing of the sort. Neither am I. It's not my fault you made elementary errors and are now accusing me of making claims I did not make. QUOTE As I said, you ignore all contrary evidence when it contradicts an irrational belief like WoC. What's irrational about it? It's not a new phenomenon. You seem to be conflating the WOC thesis with some general belief in the eternal wisdom of the mob. The WOC thesis does not claim that at all. Again, it claims that under certain specified conditions, groups can be surprisingly accurate. Similarly, a well regulated free market can lead to an efficient distribution of goods. QUOTE But the notion of the Earth moving around the Sun did not emerge from any crowd. It was proposed by solitary individuals in the teeth of massive opposition that posited that so many brilliant minds guided by God could not possibly be wrong. The notion that the Earth moved around the Sun was not a popular idea at all. Which is not the point the comment was addressing. Try again please. QUOTE Once again you have provided an example of a truth that was not arrived at by a large number of people producing "an average result that is accurate". The large number of people were wrong. Again, you are conflating the WOC thesis with a general belief in the rightness of crowds. The WOC thesis does not state that. You are attacking a straw man. QUOTE Or more likely Wikipedia is the experiment and its producing clear results counter to your prior beliefs. Except my belief is that Wikipedia is not producing optimal results, and I suggested changes which I think will remedy some of the obvious problems. If that happened, we might find out whether it really works. Again, your argument is as feeble as the person who claims that a car will never run well and refuses to let it be tuned. QUOTE It's difficult to see how. Wikipedia has hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of contributors. How big a sample does it have to get before reality dawns that the WoC is a 21st Century myth? The size isn't the problem. It's the fact that the wrong rules are being used. QUOTE Perhaps the reason that its "pretty good" when it comes to your area of expertise is because so few people have decided to exercise their "expertise". Have you considered that? Not at all. The articles in question are some of the oldest on the site, and have been edited many many times. QUOTE "Pretty good" is not the same as good consistent scholarship, and Wikipedia ruthlessly expunges scholarship as anathema to NPOV.
Wikipedia is meant to be a popular encyclopedia, not an academic journal. You are complaining that Wikipedia does not meet standards that it never set out to meet. I can read Britannica and find what I consider to be obvious errors, but that doesn't stop it from being a good popular encyclopedia. This post has been edited by Wolfe: |
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QUOTE(JohnA @ Wed 12th September 2007, 4:53am) Or more likely because ignorance is also a point of view strongly held by many people. Oh for God's sake listen to yourself. You're obviously an undergraduate student who has done some philosophy who likes to use large words without quite being aware of their correct meanings. If anyone is to stand up on a pillar and berate the "ignorant", it's certainly not you, who seems incapable of grasping the logical structure of an argument. QUOTE This is the first explanation that I've seen about WoC and its clearly an irrational reification of human thinking. And there you go again. QUOTE The irrationality here is that everyone should know not to claim ownership of an article, that many people have a excellent grasp of the subtleties of the English language and that everyone can distinguish what is a good edit and what is not, and they magically agree with Wolfe If you're just going to throw around childish insults without engaging with the substance of a post, then you shouldn't expect to be taken seriously. The rest of your post is simply a waste of time. You keep making the elementary error of assuming that the WOC thesis applies to all instances of crowd behaviour. It doesn't, and I don't know anyone who has seriously claimed that it does. You also seem to think that I claim that Wikipedia will magically work if things are changed. I don't know that it will, but I think it is worth trying. The benefits of success would be great, and the price of failure would just mean that Wikipedia goes away, which is not such a big deal. All I have claimed that is changing the rules might make Wikipedia work better. Instead of thinking about them, you simply keep screaming that it won't. This seems to be because you have an opinion of yourself as an intellectual, which is quite obviously a case of massive self deception. Real intellectuals don't behave like that in my experience, although the ones you come across in popular culture often do. |
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Looking over Winston Smith's shoulder
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QUOTE(Wolfe @ Wed 12th September 2007, 11:32pm) QUOTE(JohnA @ Wed 12th September 2007, 4:53am) Or more likely because ignorance is also a point of view strongly held by many people. Oh for God's sake listen to yourself. You're obviously an undergraduate student who has done some philosophy who likes to use large words without quite being aware of their correct meanings. Oh dear, I'll try to dumb it down to the level of a college professor then. Its quite a chip on your shoulder that you have about people who don't swallow your arguments hook, line or sinker. QUOTE If anyone is to stand up on a pillar and berate the "ignorant", it's certainly not you, who seems incapable of grasping the logical structure of an argument. QUOTE This is the first explanation that I've seen about WoC and its clearly an irrational reification of human thinking. And there you go again. Here I go again, what? You have made statements which are supposed to be empirical but which avoid any meaningful criterion for falsifiability. You tapdance around the meaning of words and then berate others for your lack of intellectual substance I can't believe there are college professors out there who fail Popper and then expect the rest of us to be in awe of the nothing that replaces it. QUOTE QUOTE The irrationality here is that everyone should know not to claim ownership of an article, that many people have a excellent grasp of the subtleties of the English language and that everyone can distinguish what is a good edit and what is not, and they magically agree with Wolfe If you're just going to throw around childish insults without engaging with the substance of a post, then you shouldn't expect to be taken seriously. The rest of your post is simply a waste of time. You keep making the elementary error of assuming that the WOC thesis applies to all instances of crowd behaviour. It doesn't, and I don't know anyone who has seriously claimed that it does. Perhaps you'd care to specify in what limited circumstances the WoC does apply then it might not be such a trivial exercise squashing the rather expansive claims you make for it without actually specifying any examples. Unqualified metaphors referring to counting jellybeans do not add up to a substantive argument. QUOTE You also seem to think that I claim that Wikipedia will magically work if things are changed. I don't know that it will, but I think it is worth trying. The benefits of success would be great, and the price of failure would just mean that Wikipedia goes away, which is not such a big deal.
All I have claimed that is changing the rules might make Wikipedia work better. Instead of thinking about them, you simply keep screaming that it won't. This seems to be because you have an opinion of yourself as an intellectual, which is quite obviously a case of massive self deception. Real intellectuals don't behave like that in my experience, although the ones you come across in popular culture often do.
Wikipedia is not going away, professor. Wherever did you get the notion that it would? 50 years from now Wikipedia will still be infecting and polluting the historical record. My take on whether Wikipedia would work better is that it would have worked better if it hadn't been started by people who neither understood scholarship nor mass behavior. There are examples of collaborative works that are scholarly and pass muster for intellectual rigor but none of them at all use the WoC as a model - quite the reverse of the WoC would be a good way to describe those models. I don't have an opinion of myself as an intellectual, but I do have an opinion about you as an intellectual: feather-light pop-psychology and overwheening arrogance may make it in minor colleges in America, but they are not the same thing as intellectual prowess. |
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I don't believe I'll say this. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif) Please cool down guys. Lets just say that Wikipedia is a failure, you both agree don't you? |
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QUOTE(JohnA @ Thu 13th September 2007, 8:18am)
Oh dear, I'll try to dumb it down to the level of a college professor then. Its quite a chip on your shoulder that you have about people who don't swallow your arguments hook, line or sinker.
No. I just don't have much respect for people who cannot understand the structure of simple arguments well enough to actually respond to the argument given, and not some other argument which was not presented. That's quite a reasonable attitude, I feel, especially as I did you the courtesy of repeating it numerous times. QUOTE Here I go again, what? You have made statements which are supposed to be empirical but which avoid any meaningful criterion for falsifiability. And the idea that empirical statements must necessarily be falsifiable is a common enough idea, but is not necessarily true. Naive Popperianism just happens to be a distinguishing mark of so many pseudo-intellectual students. I'm at a loss as to what you expect, because the answer seems perfectly obvious. If Wikipedia is to work as an example of the WOC, then it must operate according to rules that prevent things like collusion, as I stated in earlier posts. Of course there would be much work to do on the specific rules and policies, and it would not be an easy task. Once this had been effected you would simply do what Nature did and compare it with other encyclopedias and expert sources, just the same as we would test any other encyclopedia. If the revamped Wikipedia ended up sucking in comparison, that would be good evidence that it didn't work. But we can't really know this without trying. I simply cannot see why you are making such heavy weather of such a simple claim. QUOTE You tapdance around the meaning of words and then berate others for your lack of intellectual substance. Prove it. I already caught you making several silly and pretentious statements, so you'll need to do a whole lot to make it even. QUOTE I can't believe there are college professors out there who fail Popper and then expect the rest of us to be in awe of the nothing that replaces it. I don't have time to give you a lesson in the philosophy of science, and I happen not to work for free. I'm content to simply point out that naive Popperianism has long since had its day, although there are some holdouts, and it remains more popular among non-specialists. If you don't believe me, you can read up on it yourself. After all, it has very little to do with the subject of this argument, especially since it is patently obvious how Wikipedia would be tested, even if Popper was right. QUOTE Perhaps you'd care to specify in what limited circumstances the WoC does apply then it might not be such a trivial exercise squashing the rather expansive claims you make for it without actually specifying any examples. What expansive claims would these be? Did I claim it was a universal panacea? Of course not. Did I claim it could be used to design aircraft? Of course not, although you seemed to think that this was a credible interpretation. The WOC works in many cases, especially those where the the final result can be expressed as a quantity. The popular Surowiecki book is a good introduction, and contains a wealth of references. It's also pretty well written. Many problems afflict collective decision making, the most obvious being problems of co-ordination and collusion. Even then, there is no guarantee it will work in all situations, and in particular there is no guarantee it will work in Wikipedia, but that does not mean it is not worth trying. It just seems to me that you've never heard of it, or if you have it is at most second hand. QUOTE Unqualified metaphors referring to counting jellybeans do not add up to a substantive argument. What on earth are you talking about? The jellybean experiment is extremely well-known and often repeated to amuse new university students. I'm surprised you've never heard of it. It's one of a series of experiments conducted back in the 50s IIRC to try to explain the phenomenon of market efficiency. Google it if you don't believe me. QUOTE Wikipedia is not going away, professor. Wherever did you get the notion that it would? 50 years from now Wikipedia will still be infecting and polluting the historical record. And you accuse me of making expansive and unprovable claims. What a hoot. QUOTE My take on whether Wikipedia would work better is that it would have worked better if it hadn't been started by people who neither understood scholarship nor mass behavior. There are examples of collaborative works that are scholarly and pass muster for intellectual rigor but none of them at all use the WoC as a model - quite the reverse of the WoC would be a good way to describe those models. For God's sake... we are not talking about an academic publication. Wikipedia is supposed to be a general purpose encyclopedia. A better and more expansive Britannica, if you will. If you think Britannica has intellectual rigour, then I have news for you. Britannica is specifically prohibited as a reference work in my courses (as is Wikipedia) for obvious reasons. But that doesn't mean that Britannica is a useless encyclopedia. It's perfectly fine for general non-scholarly use. I don't see much problem with most Wikipedia entries in this respect. Sure, some of them could be tidier, but they aren't complete disasters. You are trying to apply standards to Wikipedia that no other popular general encyclopedia would pass. Perhaps you would have a more realistic perspective on the project if you understood what it was actually trying to accomplish. A general purpose encyclopedia written in high academic style and depth would have the obvious flaw that hardly anyone would read it. I personally doubt that such a highfalutin' work could be written by the general public using collaborative tools, but the point is moot, since Wikipedia does not attempt to be such a work. And besides, your logical ineptitude in this thread is good reason to think that, were such a publication ever attempted, that you ought to be barred from ever participating in it. QUOTE I don't have an opinion of myself as an intellectual, but I do have an opinion about you as an intellectual: feather-light pop-psychology and overwheening arrogance may make it in minor colleges in America, but they are not the same thing as intellectual prowess. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/laughing.gif) I would rather die than live and work in the US, thank you very much. For the record, I can't recall offhand anything I said which is central to my case that could be described as a psychological claim, but I'm too lazy to look back. I'm still interested to see what answers you have to my original question other than "it won't work so why bother trying", and "I don't understand what the WOC means so I am going to confuse it with general mob behaviour and claim that it won't work". It's not my fault that you roared into this thread and then proceeded to misunderstand and misrepresent almost every argument I made, and then threw around some philosophical words to make yourself look smart (which they failed to do, because I happened to know you misused them). QUOTE(Xidaf @ Thu 13th September 2007, 9:01am) I don't believe I'll say this. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/smiling.gif) Please cool down guys. Lets just say that Wikipedia is a failure, you both agree don't you? I don't think we can say that until every means of saving it has been tried. But call me an optimist. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) But I'm done wasting my time with this guy. This post has been edited by Wolfe: |
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QUOTE(Wolfe @ Wed 12th September 2007, 8:48pm)
I would rather die than live and work in the US, thank you very much.
I would like to see this field tested. Somebody's holding in one hand a loaded gun to your head, and in the other hand a deed to a home in Bar Harbor, Maine, and a work visa, and you contend that you would say, "Please, pull the trigger." Yeah, right. I try to make my boastful dares somewhat serious. For instance, sometimes I'll offer to eat 2 pounds of liverwurst if I'm wrong about something. Greg This post has been edited by thekohser: |
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τα δε μοι παθήματα μαθήματα γÎγονε
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 12th September 2007, 9:54pm) QUOTE(Wolfe @ Wed 12th September 2007, 8:48pm)
I would rather die than live and work in the US, thank you very much.
I would like to see this field tested. Somebody's holding in one hand a loaded gun to your head, and in the other hand a deed to a home in Bar Harbor, Maine, and a work visa, and you contend that you would say, "Please, pull the trigger." Yeah, right. I try to make my boastful dares somewhat serious. For instance, sometimes I'll offer to eat 2 pounds of liverwurst if I'm wrong about something. Greg Oh noes !!! The never-ending, ever-spiraling ↑ward strain of having to spell Bar Harbour without the u — go ahead, Punque, end the misery now !!! Jonny (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif) This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: |
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Have you seen any improvement? Wikipedia will become more and more popular and will be more and more victim of its own popularity. How do you control something which increase in an exponential way? It attracts parasits, the only thing you can do is to do damage control. It's not that I do not believe in a community encyclopedia, I do not believe in Wikipedia. Can it change? Sure, there are many way to improve it, but the requested changes are so major that it's near impossible if not impossible under the current ''regime.'' So I reinterate that the only way is a true alternative, it should start from scratch. I might be wrong, but I seriously doubt it. QUOTE(Wolfe @ Wed 12th September 2007, 8:48pm) I don't think we can say that until every means of saving it has been tried. But call me an optimist. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) But I'm done wasting my time with this guy. |
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τα δε μοι παθήματα μαθήματα γÎγονε
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QUOTE(Wolfe @ Thu 13th September 2007, 1:48am)
It's perfectly fine for general non-scholarly use. I don't see much problem with most Wikipedia entries in this respect.
O Lost ! Jonny (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif) QUOTE(Kato @ Wed 12th September 2007, 10:31pm) QUOTE(Wolfe @ Thu 13th September 2007, 1:48am)
It's perfectly fine for general non-scholarly use. I don't see much problem with most Wikipedia entries in this respect.
Quick sample: - The entry for Madagascar has a large template at the top stating:
This article appears to contradict itself. Please see the discussion on the talk page. - The entry for Boris Karloff has a large template at the bottom stating:
Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. Before going on to carry a large trivia section. - And this which details "the adventures of captain Heris Serrano and the maturation of several wealthy Families' scions" is simply incomprehensible. I fear it may be the handywork of Dearborn Wacker.
Well, now, there's Dearborn Wacker going into Houlihan's, and there's Dearborn Wacker being carried out of Houlihan's … I can't be sure, but I think he's been outed there … Jonny (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif) This post has been edited by Kato: |
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QUOTE(Kato @ Wed 12th September 2007, 10:31pm) Quick sample: - And this which details "the adventures of captain Heris Serrano and the maturation of several wealthy Families' scions" is incomprehensible. I fear it may be the handywork of Dearborn Wacker.
No , not even Dearborn Wacker can drink that much liverwurst in one sitting. This is obviously the work of a mutant admiration society of e-licit biological cyberclones who were banished from Encyclopædia Dramamine for — what else? — overdosing on Dramamine™ … QUOTE Plot summary{{ ¡¡¡ Go Ahead Punk, Just Try To Spoil This Plot !!! }}As the novel opens, things are in disarray in the Familias Regnant. Lord Kemtre's monarchy has fallen as a result of the events in Hunting Party and Sporting Chance which led to the revelation of the King's illegal use of biological clones as [[political decoy|doubles]]; Lord Thornbuckle ("Bunny"; Brun's father) has taken the reigns of government. Crises abound: a young and foolish Family member disappears on the fractious and restless world of Patchcock; there are concerns that the drug supply for curing aging is being adulterated by the Benignity; and other concerns that Brun is somehow in danger. The Fleet, too, is restless and ill at ease; lurking and awaiting their chance is the Benignity of the Compassionate Hand (the "Black Scratch"), which has begun preparing an invasion. The recently rejuvenated and cured Lady Cecelia de Marktos has decided to channel her recently acquired youthful energy into breeding horses, using the Sweet Delight (legally now Heris's as a result of a bequest in Cecelia's will which was executed whilst Cecelia was incapacitated, but de facto Cecelia's) to visit the frontier world of Xavier (which specializes in horses), with the added complication of Brun aboard working as a low-level apprentice technician. Source. " Winning Colors", English-As-A-Turd-Language Wikipedia, 10 June 2007 UTC 16:35. Sounds like the author, Elizabeth Moon, plagiarized Catherine the Great's diaries en masse verba™. Jonny (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif) This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: |
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QUOTE(Wolfe @ Thu 13th September 2007, 1:48am) QUOTE(JohnA @ Thu 13th September 2007, 8:18am)
Oh dear, I'll try to dumb it down to the level of a college professor then. Its quite a chip on your shoulder that you have about people who don't swallow your arguments hook, line or sinker.
No. I just don't have much respect for people who cannot understand the structure of simple arguments well enough to actually respond to the argument given, and not some other argument which was not presented. That's quite a reasonable attitude, I feel, especially as I did you the courtesy of repeating it numerous times. I don't have respect for people who claim that the WoC would work and then back off every possible application of WoC to encyclopedia compilation, scholarship or accuracy. That's a shed-load of disrepect. The key point is that you make claims for WoC and decline every possible way that it can be tested despite claiming it to be an empirical position. QUOTE QUOTE Here I go again, what? You have made statements which are supposed to be empirical but which avoid any meaningful criterion for falsifiability. And the idea that empirical statements must necessarily be falsifiable is a common enough idea, but is not necessarily true. Naive Popperianism just happens to be a distinguishing mark of so many pseudo-intellectual students. I haven't made any case that falsifiability is the only criterion to decide on an empirical claim, only that it is one of the first. Perhaps you'd stop with the snide pseudo-intellectual bullshit about "naive Popperianism" and try to frame your claims in such a way as they can be tested. You know, simple empiricism. You may have to look up these terms, but I'm prepared to wait. QUOTE I'm at a loss as to what you expect, because the answer seems perfectly obvious. If Wikipedia is to work as an example of the WOC, then it must operate according to rules that prevent things like collusion, as I stated in earlier posts. Of course there would be much work to do on the specific rules and policies, and it would not be an easy task. Once this had been effected you would simply do what Nature did and compare it with other encyclopedias and expert sources, just the same as we would test any other encyclopedia. If the revamped Wikipedia ended up sucking in comparison, that would be good evidence that it didn't work. But we can't really know this without trying. But what Nature did was not test an empirical claim. Instead they framed their experiment to show Wikipedia in its best light and Britannica at its worst. See Unnatural Acts at Nature for more of this. So once again you make a claim that is easily disproved. Now what were we talking about again? QUOTE I simply cannot see why you are making such heavy weather of such a simple claim. Ah yes. The powers of Wolfe to provide no criteria for deciding whether Wikipedia will ever not suck. By not suck, I mean that there would be some methodology by which Wikipedia were to become increasingly scholarly and accurate. How does the WoC make any process requiring accuracy and scholarship more accurate? Inquiring minds would like to know. QUOTE QUOTE You tapdance around the meaning of words and then berate others for your lack of intellectual substance. Prove it. I already caught you making several silly and pretentious statements, so you'll need to do a whole lot to make it even. Ah yes, that was when I called you on the Wisdom of Crowds and asked you to provide an academic anologue that made sense. That was when you lost your cool perfessor and decided to push the "Overwheening Arrogance" button rather typical of pseudoscholars indulging in pissing contests. QUOTE QUOTE I can't believe there are college professors out there who fail Popper and then expect the rest of us to be in awe of the nothing that replaces it. I don't have time to give you a lesson in the philosophy of science, and I happen not to work for free. I'm content to simply point out that naive Popperianism has long since had its day, although there are some holdouts, and it remains more popular among non-specialists. If you don't believe me, you can read up on it yourself. After all, it has very little to do with the subject of this argument, especially since it is patently obvious how Wikipedia would be tested, even if Popper was right. Yes, of course it is. Its perfectly obvious that "naive empiricism" has also had its day, to be replaced with textual criticism and pop-psychology fads like the "Wisdom of Crowds". It all pays the same in academia, doesn't it? QUOTE QUOTE Perhaps you'd care to specify in what limited circumstances the WoC does apply then it might not be such a trivial exercise squashing the rather expansive claims you make for it without actually specifying any examples. What expansive claims would these be? Did I claim it was a universal panacea? Of course not. Did I claim it could be used to design aircraft? Of course not, although you seemed to think that this was a credible interpretation. No. Nor have you demonstrated any appetite for making the WoC rather than just Wikipedia in to a empirical case which could be tested. QUOTE The WOC works in many cases, especially those where the the final result can be expressed as a quantity. The popular Surowiecki book is a good introduction, and contains a wealth of references. It's also pretty well written. Many problems afflict collective decision making, the most obvious being problems of co-ordination and collusion. Even then, there is no guarantee it will work in all situations, and in particular there is no guarantee it will work in Wikipedia, but that does not mean it is not worth trying. If you check out the Surowiecki book in Waterstones you'll find it is between pop-psychology and religion. How very appropriate. QUOTE
It just seems to me that you've never heard of it, or if you have it is at most second hand.
I have heard of it, but I have filed it with "The Six Degrees of Freedom" myth as yet another popular cultural fallacy that will run and run, but only with people careless with facts - like you. QUOTE QUOTE Unqualified metaphors referring to counting jellybeans do not add up to a substantive argument. What on earth are you talking about? The jellybean experiment is extremely well-known and often repeated to amuse new university students. I'm surprised you've never heard of it. It's one of a series of experiments conducted back in the 50s IIRC to try to explain the phenomenon of market efficiency. Google it if you don't believe me. Oh dear. The Wisdom of Crowds and market efficiency (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/rolleyes.gif) QUOTE QUOTE Wikipedia is not going away, professor. Wherever did you get the notion that it would? 50 years from now Wikipedia will still be infecting and polluting the historical record. And you accuse me of making expansive and unprovable claims. What a hoot. Hooting is about all you can manage. Wikipedia won't be going away because it has become part of the historical record. Hoot! Hoot! Hoot! QUOTE QUOTE My take on whether Wikipedia would work better is that it would have worked better if it hadn't been started by people who neither understood scholarship nor mass behavior. There are examples of collaborative works that are scholarly and pass muster for intellectual rigor but none of them at all use the WoC as a model - quite the reverse of the WoC would be a good way to describe those models. For God's sake... we are not talking about an academic publication. Wikipedia is supposed to be a general purpose encyclopedia. A better and more expansive Britannica, if you will. If you think Britannica has intellectual rigour, then I have news for you. Britannica is specifically prohibited as a reference work in my courses (as is Wikipedia) for obvious reasons. But that doesn't mean that Britannica is a useless encyclopedia. It's perfectly fine for general non-scholarly use. I don't see much problem with most Wikipedia entries in this respect. Sure, some of them could be tidier, but they aren't complete disasters. The obvious reasons being that Britannica is unreliable and inaccurate? No? I would imagine that quoting an encyclopedia would be like quoting a second or third hand reference and therefore would be banned for that reason. Banning Wikipedia is not in the same league because not only is it derived but because of what its derived from. This post has been edited by JohnA: |
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QUOTE And besides, your logical ineptitude in this thread is good reason to think that, were such a publication ever attempted, that you ought to be barred from ever participating in it. Aw perfessor, and we were getting on so well. Its nice to know that I would be banned from any encyclopedia that you would be publishing, because if that were to ever happen, banning would mean that I knew the difference between scholarship of knowledge and the collection of facts by atomized individuals. Consider me pre-banned. Willingly. QUOTE QUOTE I don't have an opinion of myself as an intellectual, but I do have an opinion about you as an intellectual: feather-light pop-psychology and overwheening arrogance may make it in minor colleges in America, but they are not the same thing as intellectual prowess. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/laugh.gif) I would rather die than live and work in the US, thank you very much. You really really should stop yourself from making preposterous statements. It makes you look like a dick. QUOTE For the record, I can't recall offhand anything I said which is central to my case that could be described as a psychological claim, but I'm too lazy to look back.
I'd say that lassisitude in argumentation appears to be your defining characteristic. It must be so hard on the neck muscles keeping a head that large off the keyboard, so no wonder you don't have the energy to frame arguments properly or even check what you wrote before. QUOTE
I'm still interested to see what answers you have to my original question other than "it won't work so why bother trying", and "I don't understand what the WOC means so I am going to confuse it with general mob behaviour and claim that it won't work".
No actually my checking back shows no entry for confusing mob behavior with WoC and my statement to the effect that mob behavior and not the Wisdom of Crowds explains pretty much all of Wikipedia. QUOTE It's not my fault that you roared into this thread and then proceeded to misunderstand and misrepresent almost every argument I made, and then threw around some philosophical words to make yourself look smart (which they failed to do, because I happened to know you misused them). What you happen to think you know and what you know are clearly on opposite sides of the planet and unable to communicate. You should try counselling. I'll tell you where the Wisdom of Crowds will work - in cases where accuracy and reproducibility are not required to make a judgement. You must get an erection every time "X-Factor" comes on because that's the level that your Wisdom really makes a difference. |
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Come on guys, cut the crap, both of you.
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Here's what I wrote earlier about making Wikipedia work: QUOTE I don't think that the German Wikipedia (which is a _lot_ smaller than the English one) is having so much of a problem with 24 hour vandalism. Germans do culturally prefer to have clear rules and fewer ambiguities, but I don't expect this change to go smoothly even with them.
But the real stern test will be English Wikipedia, and the problem is not that the anon-edits should be curtailed, it's the fact that the admins are not up to the job of being encyclopedia editors (in the Britannica sense). Most of them are extremely academically mediocre and they get their sysop bit from being everything but actually scholarly, usually through politics and "gaming the system"
If I ran Wikipedia, I'd put every single article on it on a six monthly or yearly review cycle. If its still a stub after 6 months after creation, I'd delete it automatically. If it's an unreadable mess, I'd pare it down to a stub and put it on the "rewrite it or die" list of two months duration. I'd have a quality control box on every single article for completeness, grammar, readability, citations which people can vote for (including visitors) and every three months any article that doesn't have good quality in at least three of the categories, gets pared down to a stub and put on the "rewrite or die" list. Every editor will get a karma rating depending on the quality of the articles produced (automatically from the article quality), so editing an article which you don't know anything about the subject becomes a risk to your karma, reducing the amount of senseless fucking about with articles that happens at the moment.
People with low karma will only be able to edit the lowest quality articles, and people with high karma will be able to edit them all, so if you've got low karma better improve some articles and get your karma risen or face being able to edit fewer and fewer articles.
I'd purchase a large corporate license to turnitin.com and test all of the featured articles and a random sample of 5% of the others for plagiarism. Any article which has plagiarized sentences gets put on a special watch and the article authors warned and their karma reduced. If the plagiarism approaches 25% then it gets pared down to a stub and put into "RW or D"
I'd have an automatically generated list of the top ten or twenty contributors to each article, and I'd reward quality scholarship with prizes, attaboys and attagirls, featured contributors on the front page, scholarships to universities or paid holidays, and I'd let everyone know what wonderful authors we have on Wikipedia.
I'd have fewer editors as a result, but when someone says "I am a Wikipedia author" it will actually enhance their reputation as a good person rather than harm it.
Wisdom of crowds? Not at all. |
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