Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?, From the New Yorker Options

[Newsvine]

Everything you'd like to know about Wikipedia and it's history.



http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/arti...0731fa_fact#top

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Everything you'd like to know about Wikipedia and it's history.



http://jizzz.newsvine.com/_news/2006/07/27...nquer-expertise

This is a lengthy, informative article.

When confronted with evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia, are wrong! As defenses go, this is the epistemological equivalent of “But Johnny jumped off the bridge first.” Wikipedia, though, is only five years old. One day, it may grow up.

“I’m very much an Enlightenment kind of guy,” Wales told me. The promise of the Internet is free knowledge for everyone, he recalls thinking. How do we make that happen?

As an undergraduate, he had read Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 free-market manifesto, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which argues that a person’s knowledge is by definition partial, and that truth is established only when people pool their wisdom.

...more data for the Wikipedia Ideology Project. I submit that between "the Enlightenment," Ayn Rand, Von Hayek, and the reference to John Locke in WP:NOT EVIL, we're getting a very coherent picture of the offical philosophy of the cabal.

The first step was a misstep. In 2000, Wales hired Larry Sanger, a graduate student in philosophy he had met on a Listserv, to help him create an online general-interest encyclopedia called Nupedia. The idea was to solicit articles from scholars, subject the articles to a seven-step review process, and post them free online. Wales himself tried to compose the entry on Robert Merton and options-pricing theory; after he had written a few sentences, he remembered why he had dropped out of graduate school. “They were going to take my essay and send it to two finance professors in the field,” he recalled. “I had been out of academia for several years. It was intimidating; it felt like homework.”

This is interesting. Merton and Scholes were the ones who got a Nobel Prize in economics (always a sign of incompetence in that field) for coming up with a formula for derivatives pricing, which later led to the bankruptcy of LTCM.

Even Wales has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia entry—eighteen times in the past year. He is particularly sensitive about references to the porn traffic on his Web portal. “Adult content” or “glamour photography” are the terms that he prefers, though, as one user pointed out on the site, they are perhaps not the most precise way to describe lesbian strip-poker threesomes. (In January, Wales agreed to a compromise: “erotic photography.”) He is repentant about his meddling. “People shouldn’t do it, including me,” he said. “It’s in poor taste.”

This post has been edited by Herschelkrustofsky: