- #36
Quaoar
- 184
- 0
Funny that you have enough time to track all these "glaring" errors, but not enough time to fix them. Of course, that would make Wikipedia more correct, and weaken your argument when you rail against it.
Quaoar said:Funny that you have enough time to track all these "glaring" errors, but not enough time to fix them. Of course, that would make Wikipedia more correct, and weaken your argument when you rail against it.
ZapperZ said:It isn't my job. By it's nature, nothing that I correct will stay.
And no, I didn't go out SEEKING these things. These 3 pages were brought to MY attention one way or the other. The worst part was the Accelerator Physics page. I had high school students visiting our facilities a couple of years ago, and they thought they should "read up" on what they will be seeing by looking it up on Wikipedia. BIG MISTAKE! When they started asking really weird questions that had rather strange "connection", I asked them where they found all of these things. Bingo!
That's when I looked up the page and was horrified how these things get passed down. I could spend A CAREER doing nothing but correcting these pages. I can correct these and there will be TONS more just like it. Still don't believe me? I just did a quick look for the very first time on the tunneling spectroscopy page. Anyone who depends on that page for the definition of "normalized tunneling" deserves everything that's coming.
If people who STILL think Wikipedia is a valid reference, then there's nothing the rest of us can do to save them from themselves!
BTW, rather than making an effort in trying to bad-mouth me, why don't you answer my question if such pages qualify to you as having "proper citations"? But then again, you keep saying you're through with this. Didn't last long just like that last time, did it?
How come you are not doing this as an experiment? I presume you are not an expert in accelerator physics. So look at the particle accelerator page, follow the citations, and tell me if you can find the errors on that page. 2 would be sufficient (there's more than that). If you can do that, then you have proven your point that someone who doesn't know anything about it CAN, in fact, distinguish between which are facts and which are garbage if that person follows through with reading all the necessary citations given on a Wikipedia page. Go on. Take the challenge.
Zz.
Quaoar said:Actually isn't it funny how we fight to have the last word? You're no better than I am. No matter what I say, you have to answer. I guess that's how you have 8500 posts!
mathwonk said:it is not true that all online texts are mediocre. those of james milne are excellent.
kdinser said:If I know absolutely nothing about a topic, I go to wiki to learn the vocabulary. Then, depending on how much I need to know and how important my understanding is, I'll look for other websites using the vocabulary that I was able to get from wiki sites.
Ki Man said:you've "left" this thread 3 times... all he's done is reply
Quaoar said:Actually isn't it funny how we fight to have the last word? You're no better than I am. No matter what I say, you have to answer. I guess that's how you have 8500 posts!
And to answer your question, none of the articles you've provided have proper citations (Namely, they provide some external links and links to other Wikipedia articles, but individual sentences are never cited). All I see is confirmation bias from you, which I hope doesn't extend to your professional life.
And lastly, put up or shutup. You've now incidentally visited 4 Wikipedia articles with errors, most of which sound like they could be corrected with the removal of a sentence, which you could do anonymously and would take 5 seconds of your time. How about you go ahead and improve the articles that bother you?
raolduke said:Doesn't the same rule of interpretation apply to wikipedia similar to how you interpret a book? The nice thing about wikipedia, and the rest of the web but wikipedia especially, they offer references that you can view instantly.. Of course it’s all based on personal interpretation and whether or not you chose to believe in the information in question but online sources of information offer instant citation.
Quaoar said:If a [WP] article is not properly cited, you shouldn't believe what is written there.
mathwonk said:well i just tried an experiment, googling "tensor products". Indeed the first two hits were for wikipedia, so i read the first article.
Manchot said:Mathwonk, you inadvertently brought up another good point. The Wikipedia editors are all writing for different audiences. Some people, for example, might only be interested in the result of a derivation. Others might want to see that derivation in gory detail. Some might want to learn the mathematics behind tensors, while others only want to know how to use them.
Quaoar said:Lets assume that the accuracy rate is terrible: 50%. I would rather kids learn from material that's 50% correct over not learning anything at all.
Quaoar said:Isn't a superficial idea better than no idea at all?
cristo said:Huh? I use wikipedia, but only for things that aren't important. It's got an article about pretty much everything you could possibly want. However, wiki is not where I would go to learn technical subjects, since I know that there's a high probabilty that there will be mistakes. I use books or lecture notes freely available on university websites.
Quaoar said:the consensus seems to be that its pretty accurate for broad low-level topics, which is where I think it is the most useful.
kdinser said:If I know absolutely nothing about a topic, I go to wiki to learn the vocabulary. Then, depending on how much I need to know and how important my understanding is, I'll look for other websites using the vocabulary that I was able to get from wiki sites. As anyone with any web experience will tell you, knowing the vocabulary is the most important thing when it comes to good searching practices.
Bottom line to me is, wiki is useful for a lay person to get the very most basic under standing about a subject, and I wouldn't trust it at all for anything past first year or 1.5 year college. Even then, I would look for other collaboration before I used it as a source.
To put the Wikipedia method in its simplest terms: 1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published. 2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified. Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step: 3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy...The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.
Robert McHenry
Is imbalance in Wikipedia "systemic"? I should rather say that it results inevitably from a lack of system. Given the method by which Wikipedia articles are created, for there to be any semblance of balance in the overall coverage of subject-matter would be miraculous. Balance results from planning.
Robert McHenry
The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself...the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous...The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites...What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments, and major universities have all gotten the bug.
Jaron Lanier
Like Sanger and McHenry, he calls attention to problems arising from the Google/WP feedback loop:It's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality...The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning...The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.
Jaron Lanier
He contrasts the WP "hive mind" with the scientific enterprise:For instance, most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use.
Jaron Lanier
And he too expresses fears for the education of future generations:It's not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual... It's safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the possibility of being wrong. Except when intelligent thought really matters. In that case the average idea can be quite wrong, and only the best ideas have lasting value. Science is like that.
[snip]
Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals. These people focused the collective and in some cases also corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing projects. There's a lot of experience out there to work with. A few of these old ideas provide interesting new ways to approach the question of how to best use the hive mind...Scientific communities...achieve quality through a cooperative process that includes checks and balances, and ultimately rests on a foundation of goodwill and "blind" elitism --- blind in the sense that ideally anyone can gain entry, but only on the basis of a meritocracy. The tenure system and many other aspects of the academy are designed to support the idea that individual scholars matter, not just the process or the collective
Jaron Lanier
Some wikitopians explicitly hope to see education subsumed by wikis. It is at least possible that in the fairly near future enough communication and education will take place through anonymous Internet aggregation that we could become vulnerable to a sudden dangerous empowering of the hive mind. History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind outbursts have been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious, and these are only a small sampling. I don't see why there couldn't be future social disasters that appear suddenly under the cover of technological utopianism.
Jaron Lanier
Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate hierarchy of users and policies about policies...Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site's content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent.
[snip]
Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that "a disaster" is not too strong a word for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is infested with "moonbats".(Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks, Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn't. There is no such test for truth.
Becoming a published author is the only thing that separates an author’s credibility from any other person. The standards that separate published works and any random piece of information may be different but just because something that doesn’t comply with a book publishing company or critic shouldn’t be overlooked as garbage. The nice about the internet is that everyone/anyone knowledgeable about a certain subject can make changes to any document on wikipedia or even start their own site to express their opinion or knowledge. The down side to a book or magazine is that you may have to deal with revisions or slanted view points.you buy a book about, let's say, quantum field theory and it is written by Steven Weinberg, there's a very good chance that you are not reading crackpottery. However, if you buy Deepak Chopra book on quantum field theory, then you're up the creek!
raolduke said:The internet is an overload of information that can be viewed almost instantly unlike going to rent or even buying a book from a library or store.
Becoming a published author is the only thing that separates an author’s credibility from any other person. The standards that separate published works and any random piece of information may be different but just because something that doesn’t comply with a book publishing company or critic shouldn’t be overlooked as garbage. The nice about the internet is that everyone/anyone knowledgeable about a certain subject can make changes to any document on wikipedia or even start their own site to express their opinion or knowledge. The down side to a book or magazine is that you may have to deal with revisions or slanted view points.
Unless, of course, you know that it's 50% inaccurate. :)Chris Hillman said:Lets assume that the accuracy rate is terrible: 50%. I would rather kids learn from material that's 50% correct over not learning anything at all.This precisely expresses the anti-intellectual and anti-scholarly ethos I fear WP is promoting!Isn't a superficial idea better than no idea at all?
Quaoar, unfortunately one needs to be fairly experienced with scimathtech to really appreciate this point, but in highly technical subjects which build upon previous work in a delicate way, building upon a foundation which is 50% inaccurate is a recipe for utter disaster.
Agreed, though I'd say undemocratic rather than elitist. Do you see how this might be resolved?This brings up another point I discussed extensively in some essays which formerly appeared at my Wikipedia user space: the firmly entrenched WP political philosophy is avowedly populist rather than scholarly. While populism has many attractive features (such as the idea that all persons are endowed with the innate ability to comment usefully on all topics, and that the opinions of all persons are equally valid), the populist ethos is profoundly contradictory to the scholarly ethos, which is neccessarily elitist, because of the cumulative nature of mathematical and scientific knowledge, and indeed of scholarly discourse generally: you can't really comment usefully on a technical issue if you are completely unfamiliar with what previous thinkers have said.
Thrice said:Unless, of course, you know that it's 50% inaccurate. :)
Thrice said:I'd say [the scholarly ethos is] undemocratic rather than elitist. Do you see how this might be resolved?
Yeah but I think the successes of WP show that reliability/accuracy might sometimes have to take a back seat to other considerations. Given a choice, someone outside science is probably not going to pay texbook prices to satisfy idle curiosity & I'm not sure they should. Perhaps we can define "accurate enough" for some purpose?Chris Hillman said:Right, but the point being made my myself, ZapperZ, cristo, and others, is that in many cases only an expert will be able to reliably recognize inaccuracies/slants.
Coming from the software side of things, I've noticed people tend to join for the "free beer" and stay for the "free speech." I'm not sure to what extent WP will mirror this, but linux was never this popular. I think other sites are likely to be absorbed into WP.http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/42
As Daniel J. Cohen has argued, resources such as Wikipedia “that are free to use in any way, even if they are imperfect, are more valuable than those that are gated or use-restricted, even if those resources are qualitatively better.” Your freedom both to rewrite Wikipedia entries and to manipulate them for other purposes is thus arguably more profound than your ability to read them “for free.” It is why free-software advocates say that to understand the concept of free software, you should think of “free speech” more than “free beer.”
Thrice said:Yeah but I think the successes of WP show that reliability/accuracy might sometimes have to take a back seat to other considerations. Given a choice, someone outside science is probably not going to pay texbook prices to satisfy idle curiosity & I'm not sure they should. Perhaps we can define "accurate enough" for some purpose?
Thrice said:Coming from the software side of things, I've noticed people tend to join for the "free beer" and stay for the "free speech." I'm not sure to what extent WP will mirror this, but linux was never this popular. I think other sites are likely to be absorbed into WP.
It's not a principle! It's an empirical fact. Convenience is valuable. Accuracy is valuable. People can/will/do trade accuracy for convenience. We do it every day here with layman physics explanations. I still think it's only really dangerous when you try to extend approximations beyond their boundaries.Chris Hillman said:Again, this proposal expresses exactly the increasingly accepted but fallacious principle which I and other scholarly-minded observers fear will prove disastrous: the notion that "good information" is "convenient information".
Thrice said:Convenience is valuable. Accuracy is valuable. People can/will/do trade accuracy for convenience.
Thrice said:it's only really dangerous when you try to extend approximations beyond their boundaries.
Thrice said:You posted a lot of interesting information. I'm still reading it.
Well nothing in principle stops the expert from sharing the information eg by posting in this thread or by banning it in classes.Chris Hillman said:My point is that in scimathtech, for the most part, only an expert will sense when he is about to plunge over the edge of the cliff.
raolduke said:Would you consider this forum as a valid source of some knowledge?
Thrice said:Well nothing in principle stops the expert from sharing the information eg by posting in this thread or by banning it in classes.
raolduke said:Would you consider this forum as a valid source of some knowledge?
We are now confronting a new politics of knowledge, with the rise of the Internet and particularly of the collaborative Web—the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, and in short every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people. It is particularly the aggregation of public opinion that instituted this new politics of knowledge.
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We want our encyclopedias to be as reliable as possible. There's a good reason for this. Ideally, we'd like to be able to read an encyclopedia, believe what it says, and arrive at knowledge, not error...Encyclopedias should represent expert opinion first and foremost, but also minority and popular views...I'll have no truck with the view that simply because something is out of the mainstream—unscientific, irrational, speculative, or politically incorrect—it therefore does not belong in an encyclopedia. Non-mainstream views need a full airing in an encyclopedia, despite the fact that "the best expert opinion" often holds them in contempt, if for no other reason than that we have better grounds on which to reject them. Moreover, as we are responsible for our own beliefs, and as the freedom to believe as we wish is essential to our dignity as human beings, encyclopedias do not have any business making decisions for us that we, who wish to remain as intellectually free as possible, would prefer to make ourselves...
Experts, or specialists, possesses unusual amounts of knowledge about particular topics. Because of their knowledge, they can often sum up what is known on a topic much more efficiently than a non-specialist can. Also, they often know things that virtually no non-specialist knows; and, due to their personal connections and their knowledge of the literature, they often can lay their hands on resources that extend their knowledge even further.
Another thing that experts can do, that few non-experts can, is write about their specializations in a style that is credible and professional-sounding.
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The most massive encyclopedia in history—well, the most massive thing often called an encyclopedia—is Wikipedia. But Wikipedia has no special role for experts in its content production system. So, can it be relied upon to get mainstream expert opinion right?...Wikipedia is deeply egalitarian. One of its guiding principles is epistemic (knowledge) egalitarianism. According to epistemic egalitarianism, we are all fundamentally equal in our authority or rights to articulate what should pass for knowledge; the only grounds on which a claim can compete against other claims are to be found in the content of the claim itself, never in who makes it...Wikipedia's defenders are capable of arguing at great length that expert involvement is not necessary. They are entirely committed to what I call dabblerism, by which I mean the view that no one should have any special role or authority in a content creation system simply on account of their expertise...To be able to work together at all, consensus and compromise are the name of the game. As a result, the Wikipedian "crowd" can often agree upon some pretty ridiculous claims, which are very far from both expert opinion and from anything like an "average" of public opinion on a subject...It's easy to be impressed with the apparent quality of Wikipedia articles. One must admit that some of the articles look very impressive, replete with multiple sections, surprising length, pictures, tables, a dry, authoritative-sounding style, and so forth. These are all good things (except for the style). But these same impressive-looking articles are all too frequently full of errors or half-truths, and—just as bad—poor writing and incoherent organization. (Jaron Lanier was eloquent on the latter points in his interesting Edge essay, "Digital Maoism.") In short, Wikipedia's dabblerism often unsurprisingly leads to amateurish results.
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It is no exaggeration to say that epistemic egalitarianism, as illustrated especially by Wikipedia, places Truth in the service of Equality. Ultimately, at the bottom of the debate, the deep modern commitment to specialization is in an epic struggle with an equally deep modern commitment to egalitarianism. It's Truth versus Equality, and as much as I love Equality, if it comes down to choosing, I'm on the side of Truth.
To be honest, I don't see much difference between Sanger and his arch-nemesis and sometime collaborator Jimmy Wales. They're true believers arguing over a technicality - always the bitterest kind of dispute - and Wales recently sidled toward Sanger's camp when he came out in favor of introducing a more formal credentialism into Wikipedia's already extraordinarily bureaucratic operation. (Wikipedia was once about outsiders; now it's about insiders.) As Wikipedia shifts from pursuing quantity to pursuing "quality," it is already heading in Sanger's direction.
Whatever happens between Wikipedia and Citizendium, here's what Wales and Sanger cannot be forgiven for: They have taken the encyclopedia out of the high school library, where it belongs, and turned it into some kind of totem of "human knowledge." Who the hell goes to an encyclopedia looking for "truth," anyway? You go to an encyclopedia when you can't remember whether it was Cortez or Balboa who killed Montezuma or when you want to find out which countries border Turkey. What normal people want from an encyclopedia is not truth but accuracy. And figuring out whether something is accurate or not does not require thousands of words of epistemological hand-wringing. If it jibes with the facts, it's accurate. If it doesn't, it ain't. One of the reasons Wikipedia so often gets a free pass is that it pretends it's in the truth business rather than the accuracy business. That's bull****, but people seem to buy it.
Yes, Wikipedia is the most extensive work of paraphrasing the world has ever seen - and, I admit, that's a useful accomplishment and something its creators can be genuinely proud of - but, in the end, who really cares? It adds not a jot to the sum total of human knowledge. In fact, by presenting knowledge as a ready made commodity, a Happy Meal for Thinkers in a Hurry, it may well be doing more to retard creative thought than to spur it.
Thank you for pointing this out! As I'm reading through this thread, the silliest of arguments has jumped out yet again, that somehow wikipedia is better than books because it's free. Reputable books are freely available at the public library. Actually, anyone can walk into a university library and browse the stacks for free too. They won't let you check out the books if you're not a member of the university community, but you can sit there and read them, or make photocopies to take with you...this was common practice when I was in high school, to head to the closest university library to look up additional information for reports if the book wasn't available in the public library. And, you don't even have to buy a computer to access the information in a library, and they come complete with knowledgeable librarians who can help you search for what you need, and locate appropriate level textbooks if you need a good starting point.gravenewworld said:It is sad that NO ONE uses libraries anymore.
Moonbear said:There's also no point in anyone who knows a subject to waste their time fixing mistakes on wikipedia when any random kid or crackpot can undo it all the next day. Nobody has time to police their entries 24/7, and I'm afraid the crackpots have much more time to waste than real scientists when it comes to modifying wikipedia entries to their liking and undoing changes repeatedly.
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.