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]]