Wikipedia & Google: Free Schooling?

[raolduke]

Of course.. Just because it’s in a book doesn't automatically make it valid. I know books are generally more credible but it seems that the internet can be almost as reliable as traditional methods of sharing information. The question originally was whether or not things on wikipedia (mainly) can be counted as credible in anyway?

 

[Chris Hillman]

Where is the boundary of the Safe for Ignoramuses Zone?

Convenience is valuable. Accuracy is valuable. People can/will/do trade accuracy for convenience.

Sure, but

it's only really dangerous when you try to extend approximations beyond their boundaries.

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.

You posted a lot of interesting information. I'm still reading it.

Yes, and there's much more I didn't post. I am very glad you are reading the essays Iinked to--- I found them thought-provoking!

 

[Thrice]

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.

Well nothing in principle stops the expert from sharing the information eg by posting in this thread or by banning it in classes.

 

[raolduke]

Would you consider this forum as a valid source of some knowledge?

 

[cristo]

Would you consider this forum as a valid source of some knowledge?

Is that question aimed at anyone in particular?

I think this forum is a good source of knowledge-- after all there are many professors/teachers/professional engineers/grad students/ (etc...) who post here regularly and share their knowledge. Of course, the longer one reads posts here, the more one can tell whether or not to "trust" a certain poster.

 

[Chris Hillman]

Another attempt to summarize the problem

Well nothing in principle stops the expert from sharing the information eg by posting in this thread or by banning it in classes.

I think you misunderstood something.

Would you consider this forum as a valid source of some knowledge?

At the present time (May 2007)? See http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/RelWWW/HTML/more.html . And I agree with what cristo said.

I don't disagree with the principle that most activities (searching for a job, a house, information about "quadi-dyadic chromatic p-functions" ) involve tradeoffs. The special problem with Wikipedia is that the potential benefits of a free on-line encyclopedia with millions of articles, and also of a very different thing, a social club with thousands of highly active members, are obvious to all, while the ways in which information can be, has been, and is being manipulated at WP by devious persons seeking to pursue some hidden agenda, is so far very little appreciated, even by most technical writers.

 

[Chris Hillman]

Scholarly versus Populist ethos

Just came across another essay to add to my list of suggested reading on Wikipedia:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sanger07/sanger07_index.html
WHO SAYS WE KNOW: On the New Politics of Knowledge, by Larry Sanger, The Edge, undated.

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

I'd prefer less emphasis on "truth" versus the concept I think Sanger actually has in mind, "fair and accurate presentation of mainstream expert opinion, plus fair and accurate description of some widely discussed nonmainstream opinion", but otherwise this slogan well summarizes much of what I wrote above.

I largely snipped a lengthy claim that the problem with the Brittanica model is that experts are allowed to define "what we all know". Sanger thinks this is a problem. Nicholas Carr disagrees:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/04/sanger_1.php
Stabbing Polonius, by Nicholas Carr, Rough Type, April 26, 2007

"Maybe that's a little harsh"-- yeah, maybe a little :-/ But he does make an interesting point:

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.

In other words, WP and Citizendium and Web 2.0 seem to be redefining words like "knowledge" in ways which will have profound effects, if Sanger is correct. But Carr is even more dubious about WP than Sanger:

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.

I think that gets back to my fear that WP will prove a Very Bad Thing because in the end it may harm students more than it helps. That's because the most important thing students can learn (in high school, in college) is not a bunch of "facts" (Sanger's "truth") but how to acquire reliable knowledge of (or at least a reliable impression of) mainstream/dissident thought on some topic, to assess evidence, to critique reasoning, and to test one's own understanding, knowledge, and skills--- in short, how to think independently.

The public, including not only the current of students but even many journalists and "opinion shapers", have accepted without protest Wikipedia's redefinition of "good knowledge" as "conveniently accessible knowledge" rather than "reliable knowlege". I believe this is moving in just the wrong direction if our vision of an "educated citizenry" includes the principle that citizens in a democratic society should be capable of independent critical thinking.

 

[Moonbear]

It is sad that NO ONE uses libraries anymore.

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.

On the original question, no, it's not an adequate source for schooling, and neither is reading the encyclopedia in bound form. Wikipedia and other internet sources are more prone to containing misinformation than bound encyclopedias, but you can also find pop science books in the library that will give you just as much misinformation. It's not because it's online that it's not a good source, it's because of who writes it and the level of content in it even when written by someone who knows what they're talking about. It's not going to educate you on a topic, it's just going to give you the tiniest taste of information to decide if it's something you'd want to find out more about.

And, yes, I've even had to deal with the students whose high school teachers were the source of misinformation. I don't care WHAT the source is of misinformation, if it contains misinformation, it is not a good way to be educated. It is REALLY HARD to get misconceptions and misunderstandings out of someone's thinking process once they've been planted there. I dealt with this for many years when teaching freshman biology. So, no, a source that has misinformation is NOT better than no information at all. It's better to start off with a clean slate having no prior knowledge of a subject and learning from someone who knows the subject than to start out confused and trying to unlearn mistakes planted by a bad source.

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.

That said, most of the biology topics I've looked up aren't too bad, but they are the most cursory of information. It's also prone to the same issues as someone independently reading a textbook without an instructor's guidance runs into...terminology is very specific, and definitions can be quickly misunderstood if you don't know that a particular word in the definition must have only a very precise meaning for the definition to be correct (in the classroom, I can find students who have misunderstood these definitions by asking them to paraphrase, and see if they substitute the wrong synonyms or present a wrong concept to catch it quickly, but if you're reading on your own, you don't get the benefit of the teacher/professor to warn you of these issues). For what's available on it, it seems like a waste of server space when every library in the country (probably much of the world even) has multiple textbooks that will answer the same question in a better way, and in better context of the subject as a whole.

 

[Chris Hillman]

I agree!

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.

Exactly! This is precisely why so many former members of WikiProject Physics, including myself, have been driven out of the WP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_retention

Actually, in retrospect, I can hardly believe I was ever so naive to spend time there. When I first heard about WP, I thought it sounded like a bloody silly idea. As it turned out, my first impression was correct

 

[raolduke]

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.

The karma system would be the best in my opinion. There would be a couple problems probably for the first year of its introduction but it would shape up quickly. If you really wanted to restrict non-qualified people from posting you could create some kind of age verification or some sort of qualifying test. Another solution which might be costly but effective? - Creating a network to record information posted by an individual. This system would keep track of the individual's ip address and would also house the karma system.

 

[Chris Hillman]

Flamebait?

Well, raolduke, there are many things you probably haven't thought about:

1. There are profound and deeply troubling ethical issues involved in trying to track edits by individual identity.

2. There are challenging technical issues involved in such tracking which you obviously haven't yet considered, and which I think we neither need nor wish to discuss here.

3. The scary thing is that those who know a little bit about this stuff assume the technical issues can't be overcome, but those who know more know that given sufficient effort and resources (available to, let us say, Google, Choice Point, or maybe even the government), know that to a great extent they can be.

4. These rather inflammatory issues are but a small part of a much larger social issue involving the troubling implications of the very large scale tracking/recording/monitoring the existence of individual citizens by private and governmental agencies. For a non-hysterical non-technical study, see No Place to Hide, by Robert O'Harrow, Free Press, 2005. But I can tell you that the situation is actually rather more grim than he describes.

In my deleted user space edits I argued that the very first step to addressing WP's quality control problem has to be eliminating edits by unregistered users, and officially proscribing socks (so that those who create socks at least know they are breaking rules and can be summarily evicted if caught).

Jimmy Wales appears to be moving ever so slowly in that direction, but there is a profound internal conflict in WP culture between (1) WP as a vast MUD for "anon blogging" (2) WP as a public information resource. I argued for splitting off "wikispeech.org" from "wikipedia.org" as a first step permitting rational discussion of policies including behavioral rules (wikilaws) appropriate for these two very different functions. Obviously, for wikispeech.org, secure anonymity (very hard to achieve, as it turns out!) is of paramount importance. For wikipedia.org, very different considerations take precedence. I argued for a "constitution" specifically designed to avoid the need for "user monitoring" on the vast scale you envision. I actually proposed something not dissimilar to a karma system, but it is clear that this would be tolerated only by users deeply committed to the ideal of volunteer service in working toward a common goal, users willing to sacrifice considerable amounts of their privacy while working on the project.

All of these issues are so inflammatory within the WP community that rational discussion of them has proven perennially impossible. And even if discussion were possible, changes are almost impossible given the fact that, as I already pointed out, the WP procedure for discussing policy changes is hopelessly impractical. I feel this stunning inefficiency is one of the main reasons why, as Stacy Schiff put it, "Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket".

(An irony: Stacy Schiff has written a book about V. and V. Nabokov; many of Vladimir's novels center around the ambiguity of personal identity, so it is no coincidence that her analysis of WP is so perceptive.)

 

[mathwonk]

I am in math, and I have often been able to learn something apparently correct in my field from wikipedia.

In my career as student I have encountered roughly three levels of expertise. In high school teachers it was lowest, they often did not understand what they were teaching and knew very little.

In college there are two simultaneous levels presented, that of the textbook, and that of the professor. The professor at a good school usually knowing more and understanding more than than what is in the average calculus text. But in an honors course at a good school, one often meets a book as good as a good professor.

Wikipedia artciles seem, in comparison to that spectrum, often at or above the level of the average text. I.e. not incomptetent, usually quite knowledgeable, seldom at the level of a good prof at a top school, but sometimes.

Unfortunately sometimes the article on a math topic, say tensors, seems to have been written by someone who uses them and thinks they understand them, but not at the level of a mathematician. so the discussion is about how to manipulate them rather than understand them.

presumably other areas suffer the same incursions from posters who do not realize they are not experts. still their aeticles offer something. Perhaps this is less dangerous in math, where there is a test for correctness of every statement, namely proof.

I.e. since in math we do not take anything on faith, we are insulated from harm by crank opinions, or non expert discussions. I.e. they just don't help much, but they do little harm. so in the flawed tensor discussion alluded to, one can still learn something, just not everything.

 

[raolduke]

I thought I added something about it being costly but I believe it can be done.. I agree with you... Its not practical in the slightest but if there are people who really want to have wikipedia as a credible source of information then what has to be done will be done.

 

[Chris Hillman]

Trying to ward off potential confusion

Hi, mathwonk,

I agree that at present math articles at WP are much less likely to be cranky/incoherent/generally awful that physics articles, and I also enjoy reading them. However, regarding your somewhat delphic comment "in math we do not take anything on faith, we are insulated from harm by crank opinions, or non expert discussions", I must demur.

First of all, I assume you meant "in research mathematics we are insulated". Ideally, that would be true and I dare say this ideal was a crucial aspect which initially attracted us to mathematics, since in other endeavors one can hardly make this claim even as an idealization.

Second, I think this remark, even if it had been less ambiguous, is potentially misleading in the context of this thread, since it distracts attention one of the crucial points I and others made above: while trained mathematicians have mastered many "bull**** detection" skills and are capable of quickly spotting many mathematically invalid claims, most students consulting WP have no reliable way of telling which articles are (in the version they view!) honest and reliable accounts and which are cranky. This is unfortunately just as true for math articles as for articles in other highly technical subjects. Over the years there have been, unfortunately, many cases of putative "math articles" at WP written by cranks/ignoramuses which have been discussed at WikiProject Mathematics. In some of these cases it was clear that students could in fact have been fooled. Unfortunately I did not succeed in getting permission from those I asked to quote from emails from individuals willing to confess in private that they are students who were in fact fooled by ludicrous math-related WP articles. The stunning aspect of these confessions was that they concerned articles which you or I, after a mere glance, would consider to constitute "obvious nonsense". One of the points which is difficult to express but which needs to be made is that I feel that experts can often find it very difficult to appreciate/recall how naive untutored but mentally "normal" youngsters can be.

[Edit: oh, that's nifty. I've been here for quite a long time and I never knew until now that PF autobleeps certain words, or in this case, a suffix.]

Third, while discussing this would get OT (start a new thread?), the assertion that mathematicians take nothing on faith while performing their research duties is questionable, and I think most mathematicians will conclude, after a bit of reflection, that they take quite a bit on faith. (I've had discussions with several mathematicians about this very issue, hence my confidence regarding "most mathematicians".) I'd add that at the very least, the suggestion that mathematicians (or Mathematics?) is magically "insulated from cranks" requires qualification.

 

[Chris Hillman]

I repeat, NOT a good idea!

I thought I added something about it being costly but I believe it can be done.. I agree with you... Its not practical in the slightest but if there are people who really want to have wikipedia as a credible source of information then what has to be done will be done.

Last year, in internal discussions at WP, I attempted to frame my conclusions as a binary choice:

(1) split wikispeech.org off from wikipedia.org and create wikiconstitutions, wikicitienships, wikilaws, wikiexecutives, and wikicourts appropriate to each mission (an appalling propspect indeed, but every highly complex endeavor requires regulation),

(2) implement elaborate monitoring of individuals (correlating sockpuppet accounts and anon ip edits with individual users).

Unfortunately, I and others have found that even attempting to discuss the technical possiblity of (2) at WP itself, even in the course of trying to argue that (1) is the only reasonable choice, terrifies many Wikipedians who post under an "anonymous" handle, including some very prominent Wikipedians, who either hadn't known their vulnerability, or had known but didn't want anyone else to know, sometimes with good reason One of the subtexts which may or may not be apparent from discussion with WP of various internal scandals is that what goes on "behind the scenes" tends to be much more disturbing than the genial public face of WP as represented by the charismatic character of Jimbo Wales. (This might be a good place to recall that Wales himself tolerated my user space essays; so while I have questioned his suitability for the role of God-king of wikipedia.org rather than wikispeech.org, I don't question the sincerity of his tolerant libertarian/populist ideals.)

The sad irony is that WP has always been moving toward (2) and since I left, has moved further in that direction. That's ironic because the monitoring (both internal and external) is not on a scale sufficient to deal effectively with the abuses, but is sufficiently capable and intrusive to raise many of the grave ethical concerns I alluded to above. IOW, WP is suffering most of the social costs of user monitoring but receiving little of the desired benefit for the (allegedly) encyclopedic goals of the project.

 

[mathwonk]

you are quite right that not only do we mathematicians take some things on faith, but that our students often have not developed the ability to test statements by proof. so i was indeed over optimistic as to the paradise we supposedly live in. so it is rather an ideal we strive for but often, or even usually, miss.

still it makes a good talking point, until someone perceptive punctures it. and indeed in puncturing it illustrates the power of logic and cogent argument.

 

[Chris Hillman]

Thanks!

The (virtual) pen is still mightier than the stilletto

 

[mathwonk]

well i just had an interesting experience. I started to edit the very minimally useful, and arguably inaccurate Wikipedia article on the Johns Hopkins days of Oscar Zariski, a man and a mathematician whom I knew as a teacher, and whose field is my own specialty, and whose collected works I received as a wedding present.

Moreover almost anyone could improve on the description there of the Zariski topology, which contains essentially no information on that topology and a very questionable negative assertion as to its usefulness.

Indeed none of the assertions there satisfy a mathematicians desire for a logically defensible, fact based presentation.

In spite of this, and in spite of the fact the page is already flagged as marginal in quality, I could not bring myself to set up as an anonymous expert and alter even one word.

At least here my statements and opinions are labeled as my own.

 

[Chris Hillman]

Zariski topology "not very useful"?

Hi, mathwonk,

almost anyone could improve on the description there of the Zariski topology, which contains essentially no information on that topology and a very questionable negative assertion as to its usefulness.

Hmm... I ran right over and grabbed this permalink to the version which you must have examined: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zariski_topology&oldid=128708007

Hmm... I'm not seeing the "very questionable negative assertion as to its usefulness", but neither is the first paragraph suitable for beginning graduate students, much less undergraduates, much less the janitor.

[EDIT: That was because, as mathwonk points out in post #81 below, he was in fact looking at a different WP article.]

I noticed that one of the major recent editors says he's a second year grad student at Harvard and adds that he's particularly proud of this article(!): http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ryan_Reich&oldid=127458158 My guess is that he's a deeply involved in learning about Grothendieck and got carried away. A moment with Google gave www.math.harvard.edu/~ryanr/ so there is some reason to think this user is not making up his academic credentials out of whole cloth, but this is a possibility that WP readers should always bear in mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Essjay_controversy&oldid=128378085

 

[mathwonk]

the assertion that the zariski topology is only useful for regular maps is absurd. the statement about the necessity of considering valuations as a method of studying blowups is very dated in my opinion.

grothendieck's etale topology is merely a variation and refinement of the zariski topology, as would be clear if the poster explained anything about either of them.

 

[mathwonk]

you examined the wrong article. the one i referred to was the biography of zariski, in the section on his hopkins years.

 

[mathwonk]

the article you refer to on the zariski topology, although very detailed and lengthy, is still a bit tedious to my taste and makes a big deal out of a trivial concept.

namely an algebraic set is one defined as the zeroes of polynomials. in the zariski topoogy, the closed sets are simply the algebraic sets. that's it. so on a curve, the proper closed sets are finite sets. on a surface the proper algebraic sets are unions of finte sets and finite sets of curves.

grothendieck's etale topology is merely the refinement where one uses the same open sets but considers them as maps from open sets into the space which need not be inclusions. then there is no need for the maps to be injective, and one allows coverings of zariski open sets to be called open "sets".
but it is obviously still based on the zariski topology.
thats all.

wikipedia belabors this for two pages or more.

 

[matt grime]

[Edit: oh, that's nifty. I've been here for quite a long time and I never knew until now that PF autobleeps certain words, or in this case, a suffix.]

Yep. Not just suffices either. In my hasty typing I have frequently misspelled function by reordering the letters and had it asterisked out (think about it).

Anyway. I've found Wiki quite useful as a tool when I don't want to write out an explanation here of something well known, though I usually scan the article first to make sure it contains some relevant information. This seems reliable on well known topics, e.g. if some asks 'what does lagrange's theorem state?'

But that is just for maths, where opinion matters less, and we're not talking the latest fashionable material as I imagine physics students might read.

However, I try to use planetmath or wolfram as the first line of reference on the web rather than wiki since they tend to be more wide reaching and more reliable respectively.

 

[mathwonk]

Ok I read the page on the zariski topology in wiki, and it is essentially correct, but it reads as if it were written as a school project by a student. It has the officiousness of an article by an older authority, but it is tedious, overlong, and not as insightful as one by a knowledgeable person would be.

It has a bit the tone of, I am telling you something arcane and wonderful, but I would rather ballyhoo how cool it is than just tell it to you. I.e. it tries to make it look fancy rather than simple. The account in any textbook seems preferable.

And it also seems to me to be filled with pejorative implications about the importance of the zariski topology that i find inaccurate. I mean who cares if it is hausdorff or not? as shown in any beginning book, the key point of hausdorffness of Y is that 2 maps into Y should agree on a closed subset of their domain.

This also holds for the zariski topology of affine and projective space. there is nothing wrong with the zariski topology. what is wrong is our outdated habits of focusing on the form of definitions, instead of on the esential mapping properties that come out of them.

Indeed grothendieck emphasized this, but this emphasis only reveals the fact that the zariski topology does have most of the good properties one wants for varieties. the key point is that although the zariski topology of a variety seems weak, the zariski topology of a product is in fact much richer than the usual product topology would be.

this is made very clear in mumford's famous redbook on varieties, but not even mentioned in wiki.

 

[mathwonk]

i am going to conjecture that these articles read as they do because they were mostly written by the founders of wiki, in an attempt to get the project off the ground. I.e. suppose I want to start an encyclopedia without plagiarizing, so i do a little research on a lot of topics and write articles on them based on what I have been able to learn quickly.

Then I invite more knowledgeable people out there to come in and edit and improve them, hoping this will take care of necessary shortcomings of their origin. so theoretically the project will only work if the open editing process works.

This way you start an encyclopedia founded not on the expertise of the authors of the project, but of that of the audience. so those of us criticizing it are actually the ones expected to do the work of improving it.

 

[Chris Hillman]

the assertion that the zariski topology is only useful for regular maps is absurd. the statement about the necessity of considering valuations as a method of studying blowups is very dated in my opinion.

grothendieck's etale topology is merely a variation and refinement of the zariski topology, as would be clear if the poster explained anything about either of them.

I hope everyone realizes that mathwonk have provided here several excellent examples of the phenomenon I was talking about: in many cases only an expert can spot nonsense.

I think I'm converting mathwonk to my view that it is important that faculty speak out on the dangers of using Wikipedia naively. I am probably much more dubious than he that WP has much use for the average citizen seeking reliable information, but I think we all agree it ought to be good for something.

One thing Wikipedia is good for is a fishbowl for sociologists, psychologists, ethologists, and anthropologists (not to mention network engineers, systems theorists, and so on) who wish to study humans interacting "in the wild". This is because edits from user accounts and IPs are fully logged and timestamped, and this data (and much more) is publically available to anyone interested. More and more academic papers on WP (the arXiv so far mostly offers CS papers, but search history, sociology and psychology elsewhere) in fact study various sociological phenomena using WP as a rich source of data, as indeed it is. Of course, this reflects that fact that WP is not simply a website offering a putative information resource; at least nominally, it is also a utopian social experiment which provides a technosocial environment for a large scale collaboration. In practice, this seems to mean that Wikipedia functions as a large scale role-playing MUD.

Another thing WP is being used for is market research. Private information brokers like ChoicePoint keep vast amounts of data on individuals. Allegedly, currently about half of all persons now living, including virtually everyone in "the first world", are the subject of individual dossiers which document biographical data, medical records, financial/banking/insurance data, phone records, travel data, lifestyle choices, etc.---dossiers maintained by ChoicePoint and other information brokers, for purposes of selling this information to essentially anyone willing to pay. WP offers a treasure trove of data on the interests of said individuals--- often including interests they might not wish their family/boss/government to know about, but which information brokers think they have a right to know-- and to sell, e.g. to companies with marketing or personnel departments, or to politically/religiously repressive governments (see BBC for specific examples). The U.S. government has more or less acknowledged that the resources of such information brokers, Google, etc., outclass its own computational resources (which are often fragmented, outdated, etc.), and has persistently tried to gain complete access to these databases, on the grounds such access is (they claim) needed for national security, mostly meeting (it is said) with little resistance.

One of the points I tried to make in my deleted user space essays at WP--- unfortunately I was shouted down there--- was that WP and other MUDs have a responsibility to make it clear that "anonymity" is mostly a myth, that companies like ChoicePoint have the resources to track individuals across different user accounts. Currently information brokers are effectively unregulated in terms of what information they can collect and how they can use it. Anyone who assumes that their social security number or medical records are confidential should definitely read the book I cited, which is actually the least hysterical account I've yet seen. (Before someone asks--- yes, ChoicePoint has sold dossiers to people who turned out to be identity thieves. Information brokers not surprisingly insist it is not their job to vet their clients, and it may be plausible to assume that most thieves prefer to buy the data they need to steal money from other thieves rather than from a "legitimate company".) And all netizens should know about "cyberSLAPP lawsuits" http://www.cyberslapp.org/about/page.cfm?PageID=7

There is also much good information available from organizations like the ACLU http://www.aclu.org/privacy/index.html
the EFF
http://www.eff.org/
and EPIC
http://www.epic.org/
Also, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
frequently runs stories on major compromises of private and governmental databases (e.g. someone looses a laptop containing millions of records containing sensitive personal information--- this happens all the time, and typically no-one affected is told what happened). See "Breach Report 2007" at http://www.idtheftcenter.org/artman2/publish/lib_survey/Press_Release_-_2007_Breach_List.shtml
for some examples (largely independent from the incidents described in BBC news items, which you can search for using their search tool or using Google).

Returning to possible academic responses to the rise of the Wikipedia: I've been mulling arguing that the leaders of American mathematics consider suggesting to the AMS that the Society suggest to department chairs that they consider requiring their graduate students to write mathematical content for the WP for a two credit course in "mathematical exposition" or something like that. But now I am reconsidering the wisdom of that, even if I could persuade said leaders. (Happily, quite a few of them are already interested in mathematical exposition and mathematical education at all levels generally.)

Two-credit course: at one point the UW Math Department experimented with such a course. I don't know if they still offer such a thing, but quite apart from possible WP assignments, I think such courses are an excellent idea. In fact I think writing expository articles is something of a professional duty, which--- again Halmos himself stressed this point--- is sadly undervalued by the academic rewards system.

it reads as if it were written as a school project by a student.

Well, maybe someone at Harvard had the same idea I had. As I pointed out above, the version of the article on "Zariski topology" we are looking at was mostly written by a current Harvard graduate student. It sounds like we are all agreed it "isn't encyclopedic", as Wikipedians put it.

I am going to conjecture that these articles read as they do because they were mostly written by the founders of wiki, in an attempt to get the project off the ground.

Not sure if you are serious, but the "history" tab shows who has contributed to a given article, and sometimes user pages offer information which can be verified. I haven't looked at the wikibio of Zariski, but the distinct article in the specific version I glanced at appears to have been mostly written by the graduate student I mentioned.

 

[mathwonk]

Thanks Chris for the tip about the hostory link. I am obviously a beginner at WP.

The zariski topology article has evloved from a few sentences that to me were almost more useful, into a lengthy but naive student level article, mostly definitions, with little insight.

Just the sort of thing a beginning student would write indeed.

How do you tell where the student is from? Becasue he mentions Joe Harris by first name?the article is not so bad, once you know the source of it, its just obvious it was not written by say a fields medalist.

Is it typical that grad students write these articles?, as they usually do not write books.

 

[mathwonk]

ok a brief browse on wiki reveals that apparently one guy, named charles matthews, with a phd on gauss sums 10 or more years ago, and no other math experience since then, has taken it upon himself to write, begin, or edit, hundreds of articles on math, including the ones i object to as inexpert on zariski and his topology.

fortunately this information is of public record, but makes it quite curious anyone would take these articles as seriously authoritative. he may not be a wiki founder but he does fit exactly the model i conjectured of one person, assuming the job of trying to learn and write up large numbers of articles.

this guy is apparently not an expert in virtually any of these topics.

 

[Chris Hillman]

Ferreting out authorship information

How do you tell where the student is from? Becasue he mentions Joe Harris by first name?

In this case, the student in question stated these facts at his Wikipedia user page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ryan_Reich&oldid=127458158 and Google's first hit on the obvious search was www.math.harvard.edu/~ryanr/ which makes it likely, in my experience, that User:Ryan_Reich is indeed the Harvard Math grad student he says he is. As I pointed out, one should never assume that WP users are telling anything remotely close to the truth about themselves on their user pages without making some attempt to verify the information provided there.

More generally, in my experience, honest WP users generally provide some factual information about themselves, and avoid registering sockpuppet accounts (unfortunately, many Wikipedians believe sockpuppetry is legitimate for various purposes, but again these rationales arise from conflating the "wikispeech.org" function with the "wikipedia.org" function). But as is the case at PF, I know of worker bees valued in the community who jealously guard their anonymity for reasons which they are generally reluctant to share. As at PF, WP users with few contributions who appear to know WP well are almost certainly sockpuppets, but I don't think we want to get into more sophisticated approaches to authorship identification (although the mathematics is quite interesting).

Everyone should be aware that authorship identification is an extremely inflammatory issue in the WP community (which overlaps with the PF community)
because so many use this website as an "anonblog"; see http://www.aclu.org/privacy/anon/index.html
http://www.cyberslapp.org/about/page.cfm?PageID=7
for some legitimate concerns about the growing suppression of free speech in the U.S. (where it is nominally protected, but increasingly, in practice discouraged because the personal consequences for speaking out can be so damaging).

But I stress that while these concerns are legitimate, they arise from the "anonblog" function of WP, which as I said above I have long felt should be split off into "wikispeech.org", and they directly conflict with equally legitimate concerns arising from the scholarly nature of an encyclopedia project. See http://www.aclu.org/privacy/science/index.html for some scholarly concerns arising from contemporary assaults on privacy, incidently (I know of at least one case in which a cranky company tried to force an editor to divulge the names of its referees, with the stated purpose of suing them--- see again the cyberSLAPP link.)

As I said above, a huge benefit of splitting up wikipedia.org and wikispeech.org would be that the consistent and declared author e-identity desirable in any project seeking to produce a reliable information resource (because professional identity coupled with personal accountability is such an important part of the scholarly discourse) would become much less controversial.

the article is not so bad, once you know the source of it, its just obvious it was not written by say a fields medalist.

OK, let's not beat up on a second year grad student :-/ I don't know this particular student but my default assumption about Harvard Math grad students is that they can learn to write :-/

Is it typical that grad students write these articles?, as they usually do not write books.

That's a good question. My own sense is that many of the active editors of math-related articles over the years have been math grad students. However, an amazing proportion of the work is due to a handful of extremely dedicated Ph.D. mathematicians who somehow find the time to produce a vast output, such as Charles Matthews http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Charles_Matthews/About_me
Indeed, CM contributed to an earlier version of the article you read, as did Axel Boldt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AxelBoldt
and my former colleage Walt Pohl (who is now studying economics or something in Dallas, but who remains interested in pure math)
http://www.arsmathematica.net/
WikiProject Mathematics asks its members to provide some information about their academic credentials:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/ParticipantsI
I don't know anyone who suspects that any members have told any lies on that page, but no-one tries to systematically check. To be sure, neither does the Mathematics Geneology Project http://www.genealogy.ams.org/

There are many "edit counters" available, some which run at WP itself and some which run at external sites, and some of the more sophisticated ones make some attempt to provide quick visual clues showing how much of the text of a given version was written by a particular editor. (As I said, WP is a treasure trove of data on all kinds of things, including how a single author writes, since many articles are only edited by a single user for a long period. This data can be fed back into author ID tools, which can in principle use almost any characteristics of user behavior to unmask socks, etc., to track an individual across the web.)

ok a brief browse on wiki reveals that apparently one guy, named charles matthews, with a phd on gauss sums 10 or more years ago, and no other math experience since then, has taken it upon himself to write, begin, or edit, hundreds of articles on math, including the ones i object to as inexpert on zariski and his topology.

fortunately this information is of public record, but makes it quite curious anyone would take these articles as seriously authoritative. he may not be a wiki founder but he does fit exactly the model i conjectured of one person, assuming the job of trying to learn and write up large numbers of articles.

this guy is apparently not an expert in virtually any of these topics.

Well, no, he never said he is an expert on all the stuff he has written about "in the scholarly sense". Other Wikipedians would characterize him as an expert on those subjects "in the WP sense". Everyone who consults WP, or teaches students who might consult WP, should be aware that Wikipedians use the term "expert" to mean "someone who has studied standard textbooks" (and hopefully mastered the material therein), whereas scholars use that term to mean someone who has written a standard textbook, a much stronger criterion. More generally--- sorry to be the bearer of bad news--- WP has become so important that it is incumbent upon educators at all levels to familiarize themselves with the specialized vocabulary used at WP, not to mention extensive wikiskills.

Anyway, about CM: he has clearly continued to (try to?) learn after earning a Ph.D., which I think is laudable.

Hmm... actually, aren't you going to the opposite extreme now regarding math-related articles at Wikipedia, or at least Wikipedians? Running a Cauchy sequence in reverse?

I think you are being a bit harsh on CM; if nothing else you certainly have to grant his volunteer service at WP has been an impressive labor of love. I confess I tend to think many of his articles suffer from failure to implement the Halmos/Baez model (one paragraph for the janitor, followed by...), but given the vast scope of his output, I expect that many members of WikiProject Mathematics would counter: "let's see you try to write about a similar array of topics!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Charles_Matthews/New_-_mathematics
It might help you assess his contribs to use the Way Back machine to sample Wikipedia math pages circa 2002---when CM joined the project, WP was a pretty poor thing. Quite a few Wikipedians think CM has been one of the key figures in the astounding growth of WP, since his efforts appear to have played a role in recruiting hundreds more math "experts" (in WP sense) over the years, with the result that many mathematicians find the coverage of contemporary math in the WP quite impressive. (As you know, I am less sanguine, and I think you are coming to agree with my doubts.)

Many members of WikiProject Mathematics are also adherents of the "open information movement", which believes that scholarly books and scientific research papers (maybe even scientific data) should be freely available to anyone. I tend to feel that way myself, although it is clear that the success of this movement (which appears not unlikely) will create new social problems; for example, just imagine a legal requirement that NASA provide a "professional conspiracy theorist" like Richard Hoagland http://skepdic.com/faceonmars.html with all their Martian data. Bamboozlers will benefit, initially, as much as serious students. The perversion of Wikipedia by guerilla marketeers, wikishills, cranks, political "dirty tricks" operatives, and other individuals who manipulate information presented at WP in order to pursue some hidden agenda, also illustrates that seemingly beneficial innovations are inevitably quickly exploited by persons seeking personal gain at the expense of the wider community.

 

[mathwonk]

i am indeed impressed that CM has been able to learn and write about so many topics in math. i myself could never do that. on the other hand i prefer to confine myself mostly to commenting on things i actually think i understand, not just things i can parrot the definitions of from a text.

I am just beginning to learn how low the standards are for a WP author. If anyone with a phd in an unrelated math field is considered particularly well qualified to comment on hundreds of other math topics, then wikipedia is, as you have suggested, nowhere i want to go for information, at least not about math.

i do not mean to beat up on these people for what they are contributing, but i do want to make it clear i agree that no one should consider these contributions anywhere near the quality of the content of essentially any standard textbook on the subject.

on the topic of zariski topologies, we all have the option of reading mumford or hartshorne, or indeed zariski himself, and artin or grothendieck on etale topologies, so what does a graduate student have to offer of value on this subject?

in the case of CM, he has apparently not at all understood what he has read about Zariski, his topology and the theory if algebraic surfaces, and some[possibly his] contributions to that biographical article are not only useless but partially false.

it might be of help if authors used the time honored practice by scholars of describing their intended audience. e.g. my notes on the RRT, begin with the statement that i am novice, i wrote the notes for myself and for anyone else beginning its study who may find them useful.

the default assumption about an "encyclopedia" author is rather more ambitious.