On 17/01/2011 15:30, Tony Sidaway wrote:
I suppose my problem here is understanding how the
discussion goes
from<the useful part of the web is expanding faster than we can keep
up> to<there is a problem with this>.
I believe the "mission statement" approach to WP would necessarily find
troubles with this phenomenon. Of course we can take the "sum of all
knowledge" (online and offline) with a pinch of salt; that's what
mission statements are for. But notice that the built-in inclusionism of
addressing the issue that way has the practical effect of forcing us to
build up expertise and criteria. CSD and notability guidelines are there
to solve (for example) the issue of "garage bands with a MySpace page
aren't necessarily encyclopedic", but not that issue alone. Across broad
areas some sifting goes on.
On deep and semantic web, these are useful concepts
that will help us
to develop more capable data mining tools, but not essential for our
task at hand, which is to present a particular subset of structured,
organized human knowledge.
We must look both at the "blue sky research"
approach, and the pragmatic
business of presenting a properly edited and categorised piece of
hypertext to the world, in real time. If we treat the mining options as
essentially irrelevant, we are planning our own obsolescence.
Knowledge is social. We evaluate data as part of a
collaboration
(Wikipedia merely provides a framework for exploiting this universal
human activity). It is unavoidable and irreducible. There is nowhere
online a hidden trove of knowledge that we can use without first
exposing it to evaluation. And we already have far more potentially
useful data than we can ever evaluate so it's a bit pointless worrying
about the invisible net in general. Better to use top down methods to
identify likely sources (some of which are currently invisible).
Well, I agree with
the last part, since it fits in with my approach as
of today. WP can still usefully gobble down existing old reference
material, and if that is done by making it visible on Wikisource on the
way, so much the better. Given the reactions of others to this concept,
I think you'd be wise to admit that "evaluation" is pluralistic in nature.
Charles