On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 12:02:25AM -0400, Sj wrote:
On 5/5/05, Viajero viajero@quilombo.nl wrote:
But, like blogging, editing the Net's encyclopedia appeals to a small, enthusiastic demographic.
Showing a little POV here. And a year or so behind the times... I expect this will be proven untrue for [encyclopedia]-editing, and it is already untrue for blogging.
No kidding. I can't get up in the morning without getting random blogs in my eyes and having to go wash them off my face. They've become a veritable plague on the Internet, with great masses of anti-nerds posting the minutiae of their pedestrian lives religiously to the Web. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Like the Guide's lengthy entries on drinking, Wikipedia mirrors the interests of its writers rather than its readers. You'll find more on Slashdot than The New Yorker. The entry for Cory Doctorow is three times as long as the one for E.L. Doctorow. Film buffs have yet to post a page on Through a Glass Darkly; they're too busy tweaking the seven-part entry onTron.
I always ask critics to pick their disparaging comparisons carefully. (We have lots of gaps; better to pick a really good one. for instance, we know almost nothing about the districts of most Russian oblasts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblasts_of_Russia ). It's a little disingenuous to call the seven-section [[Tron]] article a 'seven-part entry'. And, while there was no "Glass Darkly" entry until this article was published, there /were/ entries on 28 of Bergman's other 42 films.
That's a perfect example of how a cursory search for something to support a foregone conclusion about the "problems" with Wikipedia can turn up nothing but chaff, even when there's wheat to be found.
But excessive nerdiness isn't what's keeping Wikipedia from becoming the Net's killer resource. Accuracy is.
Heh heh heh.
Is that a knowing laugh at an oft-heard argument based on false assumptions? I know that's what it would be if it were me laughing.
I really don't see Wikipedia as being any less accurate, on the whole, than Encarta or Britannica. What Wikipedia lacks in rigorous academic review it makes up for in a more effective policy of controlling bias (by way of the NPOV policy). It has taken me a couple decades of learning to do it, but I've gotten to be pretty good at recognizing systemic bias, and when I read a hardcopy encyclopedia like Britannica what I see is a work whose strict editing policies have imbued with such a glossy polish that the systemic bias in its articles are quite obscured from the casual reader. Meanwhile, the less biased but more clumsy errors of Wikipedia are far more recognizable, and provide better hints for when to check your assumptions at the door.
I prefer being more clearly warned about inaccuracies like that. I don't want to be hornswaggled by the sheen of professional academia into buying biases wholesale without fact-checking. The practice of source-checking in producing professional and academic papers was instituted for a reason, and the fact that no reference work is perfect is that reason. If you just accept what's handed to you blindly, you deserve to be wrong, regardless of whether your source is Britannica, Encarta, Wikipedia, fbi.gov, or the Flat Earth Society.
http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm (in case you wanted to see the current state of the Flat Earthers)
I'm just careful not to use it to settle bar bets or as source material for an article. I made that mistake exactly once.
Exciting! Tell us more...
Quite so. I'd like to know what his corroborating sources were or (more likely) whether he simply skipped that part of researching.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]