Mathias Schindler a écrit:
Robert McHenry is Former Editor in Chief, the Encyclopædia Britannica, and author of How to Know (Booklocker.com, 2004).
...and besides his former job, he has written an 'interesting' piece of paper about wikipedia
"The Faith-Based Encyclopedia"
http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html
"The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."
Now... This is a strange comparison... :-(
How strange. To apply "faith based" to anything that I have something to do with clearly betrays a lack of understanding.
Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:
- Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those
writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.
This is a very common misunderstanding of our project, but it is inexcusable and irresponsible for a former editor of Britannica to make such a claim without even doing (apparently) the most cursory of research into how our work is actually conducted. The process of review is neither "unspecified" nor "quasi-Darwinian" but is in fact carried out in great public detail on talk and policy pages.
There's nothing "faith based" about it -- it's good old fashioned *rational* hard work, undertaken by people of good will in a spirit of love and kindness.
--Jimbo
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
There's nothing "faith based" about it -- it's good old fashioned *rational* hard work, undertaken by people of good will in a spirit of love and kindness.
There is some truth in the rest of the article, though. The example on Alexander Hamilton is indeed striking. I use Wikipedia for information a lot. But in the back of my head, I always keep thinking: "it is a wiki, it may not be true, it may not be NPOV, it may be very incomplete, even if it doesn'n say so". If I would need information and it would be important that I was sure about it, I probably wouldn't trust Wikipedia as a single source. I probably would look first into Wikipedia, and then check the facts with sources like Encyclopædia Brittanica or the Dutch Winkler Prins. In the end, the authority of Wikipedia will always remain below that of estabished, commercial encyclopedia's. It does not mean Wikipedia isn't very very great, but it is a unpreventable consequence of the whole Wiki concept.
We will soon have 'validation'. I don't know the details, but it would be good if a knowledgeable user's validation would weigh more than a non-knowledgeable user's validation. Somewhat like /.'s karma: if my edits/articles get good ratings, my karma goes 'up', and the validations I do on other articles weigh more. Or: if I write a lot of articles in [[Category:Physics]], validations I do for other articles in this category weigh more than I do for [[Category:Music]], and vica versa.
There is a problem with the Alexander Hamilton story. The problem cannot be solved 100% in a wiki. We can lessen the problem with validation and other techniques, though.
I will always love Wikipedia.
yours truly, Gerrit Holl.
P.S. It is very cool to see that his complaints are dated by now. Was the Encyclopædia Brittanica editor responsible for the edit? I guess not...
What, you don't question other sources of information? The Britannica isn't exactly the most NPOV source itself you know...
TBSDY
Gerrit wrote:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
There's nothing "faith based" about it -- it's good old fashioned *rational* hard work, undertaken by people of good will in a spirit of love and kindness.
There is some truth in the rest of the article, though. The example on Alexander Hamilton is indeed striking. I use Wikipedia for information a lot. But in the back of my head, I always keep thinking: "it is a wiki, it may not be true, it may not be NPOV, it may be very incomplete, even if it doesn'n say so". If I would need information and it would be important that I was sure about it, I probably wouldn't trust Wikipedia as a single source. I probably would look first into Wikipedia, and then check the facts with sources like Encyclopædia Brittanica or the Dutch Winkler Prins. In the end, the authority of Wikipedia will always remain below that of estabished, commercial encyclopedia's. It does not mean Wikipedia isn't very very great, but it is a unpreventable consequence of the whole Wiki concept.
We will soon have 'validation'. I don't know the details, but it would be good if a knowledgeable user's validation would weigh more than a non-knowledgeable user's validation. Somewhat like /.'s karma: if my edits/articles get good ratings, my karma goes 'up', and the validations I do on other articles weigh more. Or: if I write a lot of articles in [[Category:Physics]], validations I do for other articles in this category weigh more than I do for [[Category:Music]], and vica versa.
There is a problem with the Alexander Hamilton story. The problem cannot be solved 100% in a wiki. We can lessen the problem with validation and other techniques, though.
I will always love Wikipedia.
yours truly, Gerrit Holl.
P.S. It is very cool to see that his complaints are dated by now. Was the Encyclopædia Brittanica editor responsible for the edit? I guess not...
csherlock@ljh.com.au wrote:
What, you don't question other sources of information? The Britannica isn't exactly the most NPOV source itself you know...
I don't say I don't question other sources, it's just that I question Wikipedia more often than more authorative sources like Brittanica.
Gerrit.
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
How strange. To apply "faith based" to anything that I have something to do with clearly betrays a lack of understanding.
Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:
- Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those
writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.
This is a very common misunderstanding of our project, but it is inexcusable and irresponsible for a former editor of Britannica to make such a claim without even doing (apparently) the most cursory of research into how our work is actually conducted. The process of review is neither "unspecified" nor "quasi-Darwinian" but is in fact carried out in great public detail on talk and policy pages.
There's nothing "faith based" about it -- it's good old fashioned *rational* hard work, undertaken by people of good will in a spirit of love and kindness.
It's sort of telling that he used the word "Darwinian" - for many years even educated people dismissed Darwin's evidence for evolution, but when the underlying mechanisms (genetics and DNA) were uncovered, Darwin was pretty thoroughly vindicated. He sounds like a Microsoft guy announcing that Linux is a failure because he found a security hole.
Amusingly, the effect of the "public restroom" analogy depends on where one lives; in Switzerland at least, the public restrooms are more sanitary than those in US males' apartments. :-) Also, the analogy is essentially an admission of defeat; public restrooms are popular and heavily used - people want more of them, not fewer.
Stan
On 16 Nov 2004, at 18:12, Stan Shebs wrote:
public restrooms are popular and heavily used - people want more of them, not fewer.
Stan
Yes. From http://www.worldtoilet.org/ : "'Gracious Living for a Model City' is the theme of the 1st World Toilet Expo & Public Toilet Forum 2005, to be held in Shanghai, China from 11-13 May 2005. (...)" (Also cf. http://www.worldtoiletexpo.com/ .)
;-)
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com