2008/10/7 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/2400/
(our direct personal and individual responsibility for the global financial crisis notwithstanding)
Really interesting article - thanks! A couple of quites that leapt out, for those who don't want to read 40pp of epistemiology over lunch:
"In other words, rather than simply determining exactly how reliable an information source is, we should really determine how reliable it is compared to the available alternatives ... if the reliability of Wikipedia is comparable to the reliability of traditional encyclopedias, then the reliability of Wikipedia presumably compares even more favorably to the reliability of randomly chosen websites."
"That is, we are also concerned with how much knowledge can be acquired from an information source, how fast that knowledge can be acquired, and how many people can acquire that knowledge ... Wikipedia, thus, provides a nice example of how epistemic values can come into conflict. In particular, while Wikipedia may be slightly less reliable than Encyclopedia Britannica, it is arguably much more powerful, speedy, and fecund ... Hence, despite legitimate concerns about its reliability, it probably is epistemically better (i.e., in terms of all of our epistemic values) that people have access to this information source."
In other words, we're a net good thing even if we're not perfect. Which is, you know, pleasant to hear :-)
I note that both Citizendium and Veropedia get a mention, which is cheering - two different solutions to the same overall problem - and that there's a very sensible suggestion right at the end on how to improve -
"People can be misled by incomplete information as well as inaccurate information (cf. Frické and Fallis 2004, 240). Even if Wikipedia includes only accurate information, if its omissions tend to mislead people, it may not be a reliable information source ... Hence, important omissions should be flagged as well as inaccuracies."
Do we have an easy way of doing that just now? A few articles have a plethora of empty framework headers, but this isn't all that common (or all that effective) - the problem is it really needs a competent and informed overview to know what important part is missing in the first place.