The fact that the truth is determined by consensus between experts and unknowledgeable or between people with contrary ideas is a problem.
It is not a process that derives the truth since the truth is defined by the many, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_research#Wikipedia.27s_P...
or the more powerful. That leads to power struggles which many just dont want to fight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Wikipedia#Editorial_process
If wikipedia allowed articles to be forked and defined a trust metric that showed which article is more trustworthy, that would solve both previous problems and would also have contradictory ideas together, thus allowing people to have their own opinion about those different opinions and wikipedia wouldnt need to hide the strugle behind curtains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_research#Web_Researching...
Of course, this trust metric would have to be personalized, ie give different values depending on who the user trusts.
Why do we need trust?
Let me just make a simple example. There is an architect , a doctor and an economist each writing an article on their fields. Each one of them wants to read the others article. They are unable to verify it is correct information because they are only experts on their field. How do they solve this problem? Well they use different skills, they don't judge the article, they try to check the person's credibility. My metric tries to use social relations so as to help people that have no knowledge about a specific subject judge the experts.
The absence of knowledge in all fields makes trust a necessity. Controversial topics also necessitate the existence of different articles.
I do agree though that knowledge is not a property of anyone other than humanity.
2011/6/18 Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net
On 06/17/11 5:01 PM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I am a bit biased since I have a project to add a trust metric on
mediawiki
but I think that content ownership is important. It lets us evaluate the content without reading it which is important to most of us who are only experts on one subject.
Somebody should still have to read the article to apply the trust metric. What are the criteria for the trust metric. Ultimately they are statistical determinations with stated deviations.
In any case, if someone doesnt want other to change their articles, the best thing that could be done is forking the article. That
of
course is against the way Wikimedia works.
Yes, I would encourage more forks, but how is it anti-wiki for them to start their own site?
Ec
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