Wikipedia criticism, and why it fails to matter, vipulnaik Options

[Kato]

http://whatisresearch.wordpress.com/2009/0...ails-to-matter/

"Over the past few months, I’ve been collecting newspaper and magazine articles about the phenomenon of Wikipedia. (I’ve myself written two blog posts on Wikipedia here and here). Prominent among the Wikipedia critics is Seth Finkelstein, a consulting programmer who does technology journalism on the side and publishes columns in the Guardian. Seth’s criticism is largely related to the politics of getting people to work for free. The Register has published many news and analysis articles critical of Wikipedia, such as this, this, this, and many others. The Register points out the many flaws in Wikipedia’s editing system, and has been critical of what it terms the cult of Wikipedia."

This guy also writes:

Of course, this hardly completes the list of Wikipedia critics. There’s Wikipedia Watch and Wikipedia Review, both started by Daniel Brandt, a confirmed Wikipedia critic. There’s Robert McHenry, former Britannica editor-in-chief, who has written pieces critical of Wikipedia such as this and this. And there’s the self-described anti-Web-2.0 polemicist Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. One of the Wikipedia-critical pieces that often gets quoted is Digital Maoism: The hazards of the new online collectivism by Jaron Lanier.

Wikipedia Review started by Daniel Brandt? News to me.

[gomi]

His analysis is tremendously facile: don't bother to criticize Wikipedia because people will go to it anyway because it is always the first link on Google. Oh, and criticizing it might help it a little. Not exactly an incisive conclusion.

[Kelly Martin]

David Gerard has some choice comments on that post.

[Random832]

And apparently WR and WW are "trolling for ad-banner clicks" (hmm, maybe you'd get more if you had the ad banner somewhere people could see it)

This post has been edited by Random832: Tue 24th February 2009, 2:43pm

[Jon Awbrey]

And apparently WR and WW are "trolling for ad-banner clicks" (hmm, maybe you'd get more if you had the ad banner somewhere people could see it)

… it's subliminal, you fool …

ja ja

[dogbiscuit]

His analysis is tremendously facile: don't bother to criticize Wikipedia because people will go to it anyway because it is always the first link on Google. Oh, and criticizing it might help it a little. Not exactly an incisive conclusion.

Perhaps not facile, perhaps resigned. I thought the conclusion, though uninspiring was simply reiterating a view often pointed out on this forum:

a serious decrease or diversion of usage (and consequently, of editing effort) from Wikipedia can happen only in the presence of a competing resource that offers at least similar levels of ubiquity, ease of use and quick reference, and probably visibility in search engines.

In other words, every time some numbskull responds to a criticism with "fork your own version"* it is evident that it would have little effect - hence the intrigue as to what impact Knol might have (especially at the point where Google deem it has sufficient momentum that they can start downgrading Wikipedia and uprating knols).

In criticising his conclusion, you are just observing that the problems of Wikipedia are fairly obvious to anyone who has hung around here, given that the solutions tend towards the impossible (and hence the need for alternatives to simple criticism to undermine Wikipedia).

Perhaps the saving grace of the Web is that it is not long until the next great thing comes along. I don't think Wikipedia is an Amazon, Google or eBay, it lacks the astute management.

*You know who you are

[Jon Awbrey]

I posted this è-graved invitation …

Vipul,

I realize you may have better things to do with your time (then again, you did take time to write the above) but you could save yourself feeling like a really uniformed person when you read what you wrote again in a couple of months if you were to visit The Wikipedia Review and talk things over with some of the sadder budwisers there, folks who — through no real desire and not much fault of their own — found themselves forced to become acquainted with the Dimmer Side of Wikipedia, Inc.

Many Regards,

Jon Awbrey

[EricBarbour]

I feel compelled to post to the comments on that blog......

this

[Rhindle]

I feel compelled to post to the comments on that blog......

this

Someone already did. Gerard replied to it believing he is above WR discourse when that subforum is mainly just reflecting what he's saying and things he does. I guess he just insulted himself.

[Jon Awbrey]

My è-graved invitation didn't make it through somehow — could I possibly be banned already ??? — at any rate, I posted another comment:

Green Wiki-Peacers and Sports-Phishing Phans who are earnestly tracking which off-shore trawlers are netting the lyin's share of ad-banner fish might want to tackle some of the data at the end of this thread:

Spamalot — Or Not!

'Cause I know that David Gerard is really concerned about commericialization.

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

Actually, now that I've taken some time to explore Vipul Naik's other writings here and there on the Web, I think he's way ahead of the curve on where things are headed wiki-wise.

Translation — he must be partly a genius 'cuz he partly agrees with me.

For example, here's a couple of his philosophy statements on his GroupProps Wiki:

• GroupProps : What Makes Us Special
• GroupProps : What We Are Not

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

Some pretty lively discussion going on there — here's my latest 2¢ —

Just going by my own experience, the only thing that drives contributors away is their own experiences trying to develop high quality educational materials and practices in a place where that is obstructed by the actual agenda of the management and the real function of the site. Like most things in life where you do not listen to others ahead of time, you tend to learn these lessons the hard way.

But it can be a confusing time of transition as you try to reconcile the contradictory beliefs, the mental viruses, that you have allowed to infect your brain while working in a disinformational environment.

The purpose of a critical review enterprise, then, is not to pour cold water on the shipwreck victims, but merely to provide them with lifeboats, encouragement, and directions to shore.

Comment by Jon Awbrey — February 25, 2009 @ 4:26 pm

Okay, yeah, sometimes you have to slap the more hysterical ones around a bit. But I’m sure you’ve seen all the movies.

Comment by Jon Awbrey — February 25, 2009 @ 4:30 pm

[Jon Awbrey]

I continue to continue …

Personally speaking, I’m not really concerned with the volume of contribution to Wikipedia, any more than I’m concerned with the volume of contribution to Usenet.

When I first started surfing the Internet — I deliberately stayed off it until 1999 or so, partly because I was way too busy with other things and partly because I had seen the bad effects of BBS addiction on some of my acquaintances in the 1980s — the early WAIS gophers and later even AltaVista and Google would barf up tons of Usenet stuff on every search probe. You just don’t see that anymore — it all got slurped up by GoogleGroups, indexed differently, and tucked out of sight, I don’t really care what the details are — and all of that happened simply due to the self-preservative instinct of the major search engines.

That would be my Best-You-Can-Expect Case Scenario for the F00ture of Wikipedia.

Comment by Jon Awbrey — February 25, 2009 @ 6:21 pm

[Jon Awbrey]

[Repost. Hmmm, the Word-O-Press Bot seems to be rejecting any post where I link to my Wikipedia Review profile — I hope it's not using the Wik-I-Pedia MetaBadList as a censor or something like that.]

Somey Says, “I’m afraid Jon is right —”

Be afraid, be very afraid …

But seriously folks, let’s look at this from the perspective of an Educational Systems Designer. (I happen to know people with degrees in just that.)

What we’ve got here is a transitional object that is going through a transitional phase. I have reason to hope that it’s a brief transition, but that depends on your time frame. Depending on your scope and what aspects of the system you choose to inspect, some of the features of this design paradigm have been ruling the day, perhaps every other day, for only the last 60 years, the last 20 years, or the last 5 years, again, it all depends on what you are looking at.

Another hair that needs splitting is the one I mentioned in regard to Usenet — there is the autonomous dynamics of the system in its own reich and then there is the impact that it has on our everyday lives and greater enterprises. Gestalt dynamics is such that some part of the minimally attended Ground can always go Figure again — sometimes suddenly and sometimes unpleasantly, so we have to watch out for that — but time after time some things we once cared a whole lot about just fade away and never trouble our whirried mind again.

My question is — How does our grasp of dynamic systems need to evolve in order for us to take these contextual, hermeneutic, interpretive, or pragmatic factors into account in decidedly more sensible ways than we have in the past?

Comment by Jon Awbrey — February 26, 2009 @ 2:45 pm

[Kato]

Good work Jon.

[Milton Roe]

Some pretty lively discussion going on there — here's my latest 2¢ —

The purpose of a critical review enterprise, then, is not to pour cold water on the shipwreck victims, but merely to provide them with lifeboats, encouragement, and directions to shore.

Hmmm. I could've sworn I'd seen Jon pouring saltwater into the wounds of many a shipwreck victim, as well as providing survivors staggering from the desert of WP, with a covered silver serving platter, hiding a peanut butter sandwich and a message of .

So what's all this, then?

"Lifeboats, encouragement, and directions to shore," is now the new code for

"Just stop editing the Φucking thing, you noOb! Ja, Ja, " ?

[Jon Awbrey]

Okay, yeah, sometimes you have to slap the more hysterical ones around a bit. But I’m sure you’ve seen all the movies.

Comment by Jon Awbrey — February 25, 2009 @ 4:30 pm

[vipulnaik]

I'm the author of the original post. I apologize for getting some facts about the Wikipedia Review wrong in my original post (i.e., making the false claim that it was started by Daniel Brandt). I made the correction to the post after Jon Awbrey pointed this out in a comment.

I'd like to thank people from the Wikipedia Review for selecting to highlight the article, and offering their comments and perspective.

Vipul

[Jon Awbrey]

I'm the author of the original post. I apologize for getting some facts about the Wikipedia Review wrong in my original post (i.e., making the false claim that it was started by Daniel Brandt). I made the correction to the post after Jon Awbrey pointed this out in a comment.

I'd like to thank people from the Wikipedia Review for selecting to highlight the article, and offering their comments and perspective.

Vipul

Welcome to the Φray, Vipul —

As I noted in one of my comments above, you have actually gone out and done one of the things that several of us here have been suggesting might be the next step in the e-volution of Wikipedia, namely, the pieces of its content that are both salvageable and significant will be forked or mirrored into the care of communities who both care about them and have the competence to continue their development in a positive direction. This appears to one of the trends that you have anticipated and begun to implement in your Math Subject Wikis.

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

Speaning of Webers, here's an Invitation to the Dance …

Vipul,

It may be time, as it recurrently is, to reflect more critically on the features of the regnant design paradigm that I mentioned above. In order to pursue that discussion in a more leisurely way than we might be able to achieve here, I have opened a topic in the Meta Discussion Forum of The Wikipedia Review entitled “Fallacies Of Dyadicism, Connectionism, Behaviorism”.

Comment by Jon Awbrey — March 1, 2009 @ 3:04 pm