A brief contrarian point of view. If Wikipedia is to succeed in any measure to move beyond its tabloid status then transparency is essential.
That is, every admin must necessarily have their identity exposed and it surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here - and I find it hard to justify.
Authority (in the sense of an encyclopedia) comes because the individuals involved are transparent and respected in some conventional sense. Hidden identity provides no basis for authority since the landscape of individuals is unknown and the changes to that landscape impossible to track. Such that, even if a group of anonymous admins is able to command respect for a period, there is no guarantee, no way to judge, that a group of admins have the same capacity in the future. Indeed, if the current group of admins do manage to establish public confidence then the public is immediately at risk since that group can be opaquely usurped.
The short end is that for the long term welfare of Wikipedia admins - all contributors - need to be transparent - otherwise Wikipedia is simply a propaganda engine.
That the journal Nature should give any support to the scientific articles in Wikipedia is a cause of great concern - since Wikipedia is not a specialist encyclopedia they have by inference given unfounded credence to the whole.
With respect, Steven -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stevenzenith
Steven Ericsson Zenith wrote:
A brief contrarian point of view. If Wikipedia is to succeed in any measure to move beyond its tabloid status then transparency is essential. That is, every admin must necessarily have their identity exposed and it surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here - and I find it hard to justify.
Ah, but admins don't control the content, do they? In just a quick glance at several of the encyclopedias I have lying around, none of them mention who wrote each article, most don't source their facts and many don't have editors listed by name anywhere in the set. What makes Wikipedia so special?
G'day Michelle,
Steven Ericsson Zenith wrote:
A brief contrarian point of view. If Wikipedia is to succeed in any measure to move beyond its tabloid status then transparency is essential. That is, every admin must necessarily have their identity exposed and it surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here - and I find it hard to justify.
Ah, but admins don't control the content, do they? In just a quick glance at several of the encyclopedias I have lying around, none of them mention who wrote each article, most don't source their facts and many don't have editors listed by name anywhere in the set. What makes Wikipedia so special?
While I agree with you *in general*, on the specific point of named contributors ... uh ... not in my experience.
I've got two encyclopaedia-like thingies sitting about; /The World Book Encyclopedia/ (1966) and /A Woman's Body/ (199X).
The World Book includes a list of its contributors, and where an article was contributed by someone not on the list (for instance, their entry for association football) it includes direct credit over the article ("this was contributed by Mr $NAME, president of the USSSF" or whatever it was at the time).
/A Woman's Body/ lists its contributors, with qualifications and area of interest. So, that exceedingly interesting article about the workings of the nervous system, while not *directly* credited, can easily be traced to Dr Josephine Bloggs, PhD and author of numerous textbooks on brain surgery. Meanwhile, that piece of new-age claptrap about the aquatic ape causing women to stick their pinkies out while drinking tea and subverting the dominant paradigm of male superiority as a gesture of independence --- or whatever it was --- is presumably the fault of Ms Karma Roe, astrology expert extraordinaire.
Of course, real names don't necessarily confer authority (/A Woman's Body/ is a remarkable combination of excellent information and utter tosh), but as I read somewhere, "Britannica have Oxford's greatest expert on Shakespeare to write their article. Wikipedia has User:ShakespeareFan00", or words to that effect.
What makes admins so special? A lot of them are mostly janitors. Non-admins do the majority of content edits, which is what Wikipedia's credibility is based on. Why not require a real name, address, email, and phone number to register? That would do more for accountability for contributions.
I don't find it hard to believe at all that admins are showing "resistance" to having their identity revealed. There are a lot of wack jobs on the Internet that could use that information for nefarious purposes. Frankly, when revealing one's real name becomes a requirement for adminship, I'll ask to be desysopped.
-Hermione1980
--- Steven Ericsson Zenith steven@semeiosis.com wrote:
A brief contrarian point of view. If Wikipedia is to succeed in any measure to move beyond its tabloid status then transparency is essential.
That is, every admin must necessarily have their identity exposed and it surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here - and I find it hard to justify.
Authority (in the sense of an encyclopedia) comes because the individuals involved are transparent and respected in some conventional sense. Hidden identity provides no basis for authority since the landscape of individuals is unknown and the changes to that landscape impossible to track. Such that, even if a group of anonymous admins is able to command respect for a period, there is no guarantee, no way to judge, that a group of admins have the same capacity in the future. Indeed, if the current group of admins do manage to establish public confidence then the public is immediately at risk since that group can be opaquely usurped.
The short end is that for the long term welfare of Wikipedia admins - all contributors - need to be transparent - otherwise Wikipedia is simply a propaganda engine.
That the journal Nature should give any support to the scientific articles in Wikipedia is a cause of great concern - since Wikipedia is not a specialist encyclopedia they have by inference given unfounded credence to the whole.
With respect, Steven -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stevenzenith _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
__________________________________________ Yahoo! DSL Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com
"Steven Ericsson Zenith" wrote
That is, every admin must necessarily have their identity exposed and it surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here - and I find it hard to justify.
I'm surprised that you're surprised. I use my real name, but I respect the reasons others do not.
Authority (in the sense of an encyclopedia) comes because the individuals involved are transparent and respected in some conventional sense. Hidden identity provides no basis for authority since the landscape of individuals is unknown and the changes to that landscape impossible to track. Such that, even if a group of anonymous admins is able to command respect for a period, there is no guarantee, no way to judge, that a group of admins have the same capacity in the future. Indeed, if the current group of admins do manage to establish public confidence then the public is immediately at risk since that group can be opaquely usurped.
The short end is that for the long term welfare of Wikipedia admins - all contributors - need to be transparent - otherwise Wikipedia is simply a propaganda engine.
I don't follow you at all. We should put certain things in the disclaimer, against giving WP undue authority. But if we had all real-name contributions, we should have to put almost exactly those things in, anyway.
That the journal Nature should give any support to the scientific articles in Wikipedia is a cause of great concern - since Wikipedia is not a specialist encyclopedia they have by inference given unfounded credence to the whole.
Concern to whom? What kind of support? They found a number of _mistakes_. The fact is that Britannica has similar mistakes, just no so numerous.
Caveat emptor still applies. People shouldn't believe everything in the newspapers, nor on Wikipedia. That doesn't make newspapers or Wikipedia useless.
Charles
--- charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Caveat emptor still applies. People shouldn't
believe everything in the
newspapers, nor on Wikipedia. That doesn't make
newspapers or Wikipedia
useless.
True, but until the recent Nature comparison study, Wikipedia had been plagued both by an external anecdotal criticism fad and by an equally baseless internal inferiority complex disguised as 'establishing stability.' (Wherefore art thou, Wikifaith?)
For those who still think Wikipedia's overall quality is lacking, setting sights on Britannica was (in 20/20 hindsight) setting the sights too low.
stevertigo
__________________________________________ Yahoo! DSL Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com
On 12/27/05, Steven Ericsson Zenith steven@semeiosis.com wrote:
That is, every admin must necessarily have their identity exposed and it surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here - and I find it hard to justify.
If that were the case, I would not be an admin. I value my online privacy and as someone who is not yet secure in an academic career I would loathe if people could Google my real name and come up with results of me bickering with cranks online about any of the various subjects I end up bickering with cranks over. Adminship is supposed to be "no big deal" -- a broom and mop -- and there's no reason for good editors to give up their anonymous status, if they should desire to keep it, in order to take on a few more janitorial abilities.
Authority (in the sense of an encyclopedia) comes because the individuals involved are transparent and respected in some conventional sense.
That isn't how Wikipedia has ever established its authority. That is in part why it is such a unique and wonderfully problematic entity. We don't rely on the reputations of our experts, we don't even require a full name. The authority stems from the belief that with enough eyes, any factual error is shallow. In practice it doesn't work out perfectly, as we all well know, but that's all part of the game. I don't think throwing around normalizing statements about how encyclopedias in general establish authority is going to be very applicable to a project whose entire modus operandi is subvert the traditional information model of an encyclopedia.
Hidden identity provides no basis for authority since the landscape of individuals is unknown and the changes to that landscape impossible to track.
Again, Wikipedia's authority has never and should never be laid in individuals. The entire point was to make it so that anyone, no matter how uncredentialed or autodidactic or even generally ignorant, can take a stab at increasing the world's knowledge. And be reverted by people of greater or even lesser knowledge. With the hope that it will all work out well in the end.
Our authority, in an ideal system, comes from our ability to cite our sources, to fact check, and to trust one another on the basis of long and continued contributions.
Such that, even if a group of anonymous admins is able to command respect for a period, there is no guarantee, no way to judge, that a group of admins have the same capacity in the future.
That's a problem? Perhaps it would be a more ideal world if people who formerly had trust and respect were occasionally audited.
Indeed, if the current group of admins do manage to establish public confidence then the public is immediately at risk since that group can be opaquely usurped.
"Public confidence"? What public? What confidence?
The short end is that for the long term welfare of Wikipedia admins - all contributors - need to be transparent - otherwise Wikipedia is simply a propaganda engine.
Joseph Goebbels happily gave his full name whenever he delivered nonsense. What you are talking about is identification, not transparency. Wikipedia is one of the most transparent enterprises on the entire internet -- it is easy to see in an instant everything a contributor has done, everything they have ever squabbled about, every time they change their mind and any place they might have been discussing a change before it was actually made. It is an easy task to show ever omission, every purposefully false addition, every bit of slander, as it went down, who did it, at what time, at what place.
Encyclopedia Brittanica, by contrast, is a system with no transparency whatsoever. Oh, you can match names to articles. But that doesn't get you very much, in the end. And when EB's errors were pointed out by Nature, did they blame those individual authors? No. They blamed the encyclopedia as a whole. The same as they did with us. In the end, knowing the authors didn't change a thing.
That the journal Nature should give any support to the scientific articles in Wikipedia is a cause of great concern - since Wikipedia is not a specialist encyclopedia they have by inference given unfounded credence to the whole.
I don't think anybody made the mistake to think that Nature's review gave a completely clean bill of health to the entire encyclopedia, and the articles they covered were not strictly scientific, but included historical and biographical entries as well reviewed by academic historians, not scientists. (The difference between a historian's and a scientist's approach is quite apparent if you look at the error checklist for the Mendeleev article, done by a well-respected biographer of Mendeleev who currently teaches history at Princeton.)
FF
On 12/27/05, Steven Ericsson Zenith steven@semeiosis.com wrote:
A brief contrarian point of view. If Wikipedia is to succeed in any measure to move beyond its tabloid status then transparency is essential.
That is, every admin must necessarily have their identity exposed and it surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here - and I find it hard to justify.
I am geni. That is my identity.
-- geni