Great news.com commentary piece on WP, humorous and serious at the same time:
http://news.com.com/Teens+warning+on+the+gospel+of+Wikipedia/2010-1038_3-610...
From the article:
"Of course, for students, Wikipedia is the miracle cure for procrastination (and there's science to back that up; a recent poll showed that nine out of 10 doctors suggested Wikipedia as a cure to putting homework off. The other 10 percent were too busy uploading spurious entries to participate in the poll)."
On 15/08/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Great news.com commentary piece on WP, humorous and serious at the same time: http://news.com.com/Teens+warning+on+the+gospel+of+Wikipedia/2010-1038_3-610... "Of course, for students, Wikipedia is the miracle cure for procrastination (and there's science to back that up; a recent poll showed that nine out of 10 doctors suggested Wikipedia as a cure to putting homework off. The other 10 percent were too busy uploading spurious entries to participate in the poll)."
Good. I feel like half my talking to the press is getting across that we're fallible and we do our best, but it's a perpetual working draft and this is a feature rather than a problem - and there's no substitute for thinking.
- d.
On 8/15/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/08/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Great news.com commentary piece on WP, humorous and serious at the same
time:
http://news.com.com/Teens+warning+on+the+gospel+of+Wikipedia/2010-1038_3-610...
"Of course, for students, Wikipedia is the miracle cure for procrastination (and there's science to back that up; a recent poll showed that nine out of 10 doctors suggested Wikipedia as a cure to putting homework off. The other 10 percent were too busy uploading spurious entries to participate in the poll)."
Good. I feel like half my talking to the press is getting across that we're fallible and we do our best, but it's a perpetual working draft and this is a feature rather than a problem - and there's no substitute for thinking.
- d.
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Scanning through the "talkback" from that article, I was somewhat amazed at the several, seemingly genuine notes of thanks to the author from high school students who hadn't realized the "limitations" of Wikipedia.
As much as I was irritated by Colbert's stunt, perhaps it had some beneficial results if it has the effect of helping high school students understand why using a single source, especially WIkipedia, is not appropriate for serious research.
-Rich [[W:en:User:Rholton]]
On 16/08/06, Richard Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
Scanning through the "talkback" from that article, I was somewhat amazed at the several, seemingly genuine notes of thanks to the author from high school students who hadn't realized the "limitations" of Wikipedia. As much as I was irritated by Colbert's stunt, perhaps it had some beneficial results if it has the effect of helping high school students understand why using a single source, especially WIkipedia, is not appropriate for serious research.
Yeah. Hell, we're unreliable. But so is EVERYTHING ELSE.
Eegh. Wikipedia is being expected to teach people to think who everything else hasn't.
- d.
On Tue, 2006-08-15 at 11:32 -0700, George Herbert wrote:
Great news.com commentary piece on WP, humorous and serious at the same time:
http://news.com.com/Teens+warning+on+the+gospel+of+Wikipedia/2010-1038_3-610...
This is kind of tangential, but if I see one more person assert that we "banned Stephen Colbert," I'm going to scream.
"The name Wikipedia comes from the Latin root "pedia," meaning "book of arcane facts" and the ancient German root "wiki," meaning "potentially altered by any idiot with Internet access." Actually, Wikipedia combines the words "encyclopedia" and "wiki," a type of software that facilitates online editing."
I have to admit, it made me laugh quite a bit.
It's a great article on the whole, I'm very impressed. Probably the best one I've seen about the site. It manages to be completely balanced and ultimately favorable without ever sounding either evangelistic or scaremongering. And it is also very well written, downright funny at times. Go figure that it would take a college undergrad to write the first entirely reasonable article on Wikipedia.
FF
On 8/15/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Great news.com commentary piece on WP, humorous and serious at the same time:
http://news.com.com/Teens+warning+on+the+gospel+of+Wikipedia/2010-1038_3-610...
From the article:
"Of course, for students, Wikipedia is the miracle cure for procrastination (and there's science to back that up; a recent poll showed that nine out of 10 doctors suggested Wikipedia as a cure to putting homework off. The other 10 percent were too busy uploading spurious entries to participate in the poll)."
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
The author of the article seems to forget that while you should take any source with a grain of salt, online ones in particular. Wikipedia has the advantage that it is subject to quality control (despite of what the author says) althought it's nearly impossible to keep an eye out on all entries. Wikipedia has the advantage of allowing the readers to track down the sources for any given entry. If there aren't any, you can contact the author and ask where they got it.
And no, it's not to propagate your views or that of your peers.
I don't think this is a particularly good article in case you didn't notice...
Mgm
On 21/08/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
The author of the article seems to forget that while you should take any source with a grain of salt, online ones in particular. Wikipedia has the advantage that it is subject to quality control (despite of what the author says) althought it's nearly impossible to keep an eye out on all entries. Wikipedia has the advantage of allowing the readers to track down the sources for any given entry. If there aren't any, you can contact the author and ask where they got it.
Of course in theory it works perfectly like that. However, if a "fact" was included in a version a year ago how easy is it to figure out who put it in to go and ask them for verification? There is no automatic mechanism for "blaming" any one user for any word in an article, which means it is a possible, but totally manual process.
Coming from a non-chalant user point of view though, they do not realise that they can track back through the history of the page to verify things themselves. The quality control you speak of is not perfect, the author of the article was not attempting to say there was no control, just that the control is susceptible to failure due to its passive nature.
Not everyone thinks like a seasoned Wikipedian!
Peter Ansell
On 8/21/06, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
Of course in theory it works perfectly like that. However, if a "fact" was included in a version a year ago how easy is it to figure out who put it in to go and ask them for verification? There is no automatic mechanism for "blaming" any one user for any word in an article, which means it is a possible, but totally manual process.
Unless you have the IBM History Flow app. It's downloadable from IBM: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/historyflow
You can import data from a database dump, if you have access to one, or the program will get the data from the wiki itself. The last I heard, Special:Export was limited to showing 100 revisions, but this seems to have changed now.
On 21/08/06, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/21/06, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
Of course in theory it works perfectly like that. However, if a "fact" was included in a version a year ago how easy is it to figure out who put it in to go and ask them for verification? There is no automatic mechanism for "blaming" any one user for any word in an article, which means it is a possible, but totally manual process.
Unless you have the IBM History Flow app. It's downloadable from IBM: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/historyflow
You can import data from a database dump, if you have access to one, or the program will get the data from the wiki itself. The last I heard, Special:Export was limited to showing 100 revisions, but this seems to have changed now.
Sounds interesting. I should look into that.
Peter Ansell
On 8/21/06, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
Coming from a non-chalant user point of view though, they do not realise that they can track back through the history of the page to verify things themselves. The quality control you speak of is not perfect, the author of the article was not attempting to say there was no control, just that the control is susceptible to failure due to its passive nature.
I seem to remember this person literally writing there was no quality control.
On 21/08/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/21/06, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
Coming from a non-chalant user point of view though, they do not realise that they can track back through the history of the page to verify things themselves. The quality control you speak of is not perfect, the author of the article was not attempting to say there was no control, just that the control is susceptible to failure due to its passive nature.
I seem to remember this person literally writing there was no quality control.
They did say that, however, I read it at least at first as the author pointing out the fact that the software allows anything, regardless of quality. The only quality control in Wikipedia is the community that keeps a track of fellow editors contributions.
I still think you were a bit too extreme in your comments. The majority of the article was quite well done IMO.
Peter Ansell