On Saturday 01 February 2003 01:37 pm, Geoff Burling wrote:
That is a pessimistic view of Wikipedia in its current state. Accurate, from what I've observed of certain articles, but still pessimistic.
Unfortunately, the evaluation of mankind's accumulated knowledge frequently results in the same kind of dust-ups we're seeing in Wikipedia. For example, Eric Thompson, while undoubtedly the most learned & influential scholar of Mayan history & culture in recent times, nonetheless delayed the successful translation of Mayan inscriptions for a generation because of his own biasses and a tenacious insistence on his own POV. For an example outside of the humanities, I am reminded of an attempt by one of the leading US medical journals -- I forget if it was the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the AMA -- to review the lauded discoveries that journal had published a few years prior: after a few months they discontinued this series, having discovered that far too many of these articles turned out to have been bad science![*]
Excellent point! I was thinking about writing just such an email. In short: Anybody who believes that is is possible /not/ to have bickering and wrangling in Wikipedia hasn't spent much time working with large groups of people in an academic setting (or even in an office working on a project for that matter).
Different people have different viewpoints and Wikipedia IMO does a very good job of distilling the POV down to their NPOV elements. But this process takes a lot of time for highly contentious subjects. It also occasionally requires us to expel those people who can't work with others - but the same is true in the real world.
--mav WikiKarma: Work on adapting NASA bio information to expand [[Rick D. Husband]]