From: Peter Lofting lofting@apple.com
At 12:41 PM -0800 10/31/02, Larry Sanger wrote:
...It doesn't take an epistemologist to see that accuracy cannot be vouchsafed by a vote--10, or 100, or 1000 approving Wikipedians certainly *can* be wrong!
Sure its not fireproof, but it gives a measure of the degree of consensus behind the article, which has some interpretable value:
- Firstly it indicates that the article hasn't been vandalized and is
not contentious - at least as far as the generalist editorial midwives are concerned.
- Secondly it shows that it has passed at least first levels of
evolution - perhaps only of structure and linking. Interrelationships to other info is itself valuable even if the body of the article isn't top notch.
Hi Peter,
This is all perfectly true. I didn't mean to say that an "everybody has a vote" certification proposal would be simply useless.
But is there a *solid reason* for the "everybody has a vote" certification proposal? I'm still not sure I understand what it is. The above are advantages, but they don't clearly indicate what the reason, or purpose of the proposal is.
To suggest that a votes flag would highlight collective wikipedian ignorance on a subject implys the fearful belief that members are obliged to know everything. Isn't this belief opposite to the whole idea of a Wikipedia?
Well, I'm not aware that *I* suggested any such thing...
It sounds like the project is overshadowed by the old social expectation of the high standards expected of an encyclopedia publisher. The project is bound to lose credibiity if it fails to unload this expectation from immature pages. Clear labelling would dispell this and reflect that pages are a living, evolving work, as well as invite improved contributions.
Maybe! It *might* also suggest to readers familiar with Everything2 and Kuro5hin and other projects that are self-evaluating, that the project is essentially a self-contained community, interested in impressing itself and not really interested in meeting independent standards.
We all know that *accuracy* is only very poorly vouchsafed by a vote of the general public. That's as obvious a philosophical platitude as any. And while we rightly regard the typical Wikipedia participant as much more intelligent and well-informed than the average citizen of the Internet, the *reader*, who wants to rely on an encyclopedia for accurate information, has no particular reason to believe this. Much less does the reader have any reason to believe that our being "above average" indicates that articles we approve are necessarily reliable.
All that would be necessary to gain credibility with students and librarians and experts is to accurately label the status of an article.
That's quite a bold claim to make, if you think about it. Most librarians and experts, at any rate, are very careful about what resources they want to label as reliable. They are, you might say, hired to be information snobs. They will only recommend the best. And quite right, that's what they should do. So, no. A mere label will not suffice. The label has to be, in addition, *credible to the people who might recommend the resource to their students, colleagues, etc.*.
Votes is only part of it. Another label could helpfully be added indicating whether the article has been reviewed by subject area experts or not.
...and if the label is right alongside a label indicating the general publicly-voted status of the article, the "peer review" label will lose some credibility, it seems. Suppose Britannica were to put at the bottom of an article, "Reviewed by John Doe, Ph.D., famous Xologist. The general public has rated this article a 7.2 (out of 10)."
An endorsement list would be the ultimate way to go, showing names/URLs of individuals or bodies who have accepted the page as OK/useful, along with a rating value. Amazon.com book ratings could be a first model - open to all with a star rating. Note that such a list could also reflect variation in evaluation and people could then follow links to those endorsers who diverged in their rating to find out why.
But how on earth can we attract the "knowers" of the world to so much as think about Wikipedia for one hot second, without giving them some guarantee that they won't be wasting their time? And how *do* we give them that guarantee?
Another benefit if this is it could divert the energies of those with strongly diverging POVs from "vandalizing" the page. They could instead channel their energies into expressing their difference via the rating and creating a linked counter-page...always room for one more page.
Do you mean that we could create competing pages on the same topic? Well, notwithstanding the few pages where there are a few different competing articles on the page (this is viewed as a temporary expedient), this is one of the original ur-proposals for creating an encyclopedia, and on both Nupedia and Wikipedia we've always come out against it. Cf. [[neutral point of view]].
I disagree also that there's always room for one more page; there isn't always room for one more page. The fact is that Wikipedia has succeeded by being selective, in a certain sense. If we had not constantly insisted, "This is an encyclopedia, dammit!", and egged each other on to uphold certain standards, then we might have ended up like just another Everything2. You might be shocked (or not :-) ) to hear me say that Wikipedia is *selective*. It makes it sound like Wikipedia is an *elitist* project. But you know what--to a certain extent, it *is* an elitist project, and that is *partly* what's responsible for its success. The fact that it's elitist is what certain people, who are probably more jealous than anything, occasionally try to take us to task for, usually fallaciously appealing to our sense of democracy, freedom, and openness. How *dare* we think we can enforce a nonbias policy? How *dare* we draw a distinction between encyclopedia and dictionary? How *dare* we ban people who simply want to ruin the very thing we're working on? Who do we think we are, anyway?
People who ask those sorts of questions just fundamentally disagree about Wikipedia is about--but that's putting it too nicely. In fact, they fundamentally lack the wisdom to understand what has really made it possible in the first place.
Descending soapbox...
--Larry
At 8:03 AM -0800 11/1/02, Larry Sanger wrote:
Another benefit if this is it could divert the energies of those with strongly diverging POVs from "vandalizing" the page. They could instead channel their energies into expressing their difference via the rating and creating a linked counter-page...always room for one more page.
Do you mean that we could create competing pages on the same topic? Well, notwithstanding the few pages where there are a few different competing articles on the page (this is viewed as a temporary expedient), this is one of the original ur-proposals for creating an encyclopedia, and on both Nupedia and Wikipedia we've always come out against it. Cf. [[neutral point of view]].
Just the observation that if there are multiple POVs and one slot you will always have a power struggle between the POVs to own the slot; wheras if you have a place - someplace, anyplace to put each POV you can say to each of "them" - "You belong here... stop fighting with each other... there's room for both of you".
This could take the form of sub-pages or sub-paragraphs or whatever. This is much like the lemma of a dictionary and the multiple senses of the term that accumulate under the entry.
Of course it doesn't solve the extreme cases where one POV is in denial of another, but it does give them somewhere else to "live" in the document.
Just an attempt to convert some of the heat into light.
Peter.
Peter Lofting wrote:
Just the observation that if there are multiple POVs and one slot you will always have a power struggle between the POVs to own the slot; wheras if you have a place - someplace, anyplace to put each POV you can say to each of "them" - "You belong here... stop fighting with each other... there's room for both of you".
The way that we're supposed to do this is to have a paragraph, section, or page (depending on size) that says <A thinks B about C>. But even this should be NPOV; B should accurately reflect what A really thinks about C, and it shouldn't imply that A is right about C or that B is correct.
-- Toby
On 11/2/02 7:38 PM, "Toby Bartels" toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu wrote:
Peter Lofting wrote:
Just the observation that if there are multiple POVs and one slot you will always have a power struggle between the POVs to own the slot; wheras if you have a place - someplace, anyplace to put each POV you can say to each of "them" - "You belong here... stop fighting with each other... there's room for both of you".
The way that we're supposed to do this is to have a paragraph, section, or page (depending on size) that says <A thinks B about C>. But even this should be NPOV; B should accurately reflect what A really thinks about C, and it shouldn't imply that A is right about C or that B is correct.
Rather, that's *one* way to do this. There are many, many ways of presenting information and knowledge that do equivalent jobs of achieving balance.
At 8:03 AM -0800 11/1/02, Larry Sanger wrote:
An endorsement list would be the ultimate way to go, showing names/URLs of individuals or bodies who have accepted the page as OK/useful, along with a rating value. Amazon.com book ratings could be a first model - open to all with a star rating. Note that such a list could also reflect variation in evaluation and people could then follow links to those endorsers who diverged in their rating to find out why.
But how on earth can we attract the "knowers" of the world to so much as think about Wikipedia for one hot second, without giving them some guarantee that they won't be wasting their time? And how *do* we give them that guarantee?
Your comment contains both the assumption that I see as constraining your POV and also the key criteria that IMHO will encourage "knowers" to pass by:
(1) Your assumption appears to me to be that knowers won't come to the site unless it already contains the highest quality knowledge and you cannot guarentee that so you are in a catch 22 view of the problem. It sounds like you're living through the night before a big examination and are terrified of failure!
I would point out that people's motivations are many and varied - including 'knowers', and imagining a wider variety of reasons other than just wanting ready-perfected look-ups can ease this catch 22 view of things. e.g.
- joy of knowledge - people love anything on their chosen subject - joy of sharing - people love sharing with others - joy of teaching - people love being able to give of themselves - joy of refinement - people love being able to perfect (ie. correct a page) - joy of recognition - people love being seen and acknowledged - joy of absorbtion - people love being absorbed in their subject - joy of learning - people love finding out new views and facets of knowledge - joy of children - people love helping the next generation
etc... All these can be strong motivations that do not require perfect knowledge to be already present on the site.
(2) The key criteria for 'knowers' to engage in your site is not that things are perfect , but that they don't have their time wasted.
That means that there needs to be honest and accurate advertising of the status of information and the process by which it is edited. Then people can choose whether to invest their time - for whatever reason. You will lose people rapidly if their contributions are wasted in some way - ignored, bounced, defaced, etc.
Cheers
P
At 8:03 AM -0800 11/1/02, Larry Sanger wrote:
Maybe! It *might* also suggest to readers familiar with Everything2 and Kuro5hin and other projects that are self-evaluating, that the project is essentially a self-contained community, interested in impressing itself and not really interested in meeting independent standards.
I'm not familiar with those other sites. I'm not interested in self-contained communities. I am a stranger who has stumbled across the wiki site and is interested in the idea of it. It appears to be a idea with rich potential and noble ideals... abstract attractions perhaps.
As an "outsider" I now have the nerve/conceit/guile to express my POV and interact on the list.
What am I now that I interact? An insider or an outsider?
What If I continue to interact? Do I become more of an insider or more of an outsider?
By the nature of the technology and the setup, there is no boundary or container and anyone can interact - both positively and negatively.
Yet there is a community, so what binds it and how is it joined and left?
On the one hand you despair of vandalism and yet on the other you despair of getting informed input.
How do you attract the "right" people and dissuade the "wrong" people from interacting?
Who should manage/own/weild that distinction of right and wrong?
The words "community" and "consensus" come to mind, but how to articulate them in a living interaction?
Because it is boundary-less, you as a community don't have powers of exclusion, so the only way I can think of attracting the right kind of people is by "resonance": Resonance is the phenomenon of inducing similar activity in others (e.g. other tuning forks). Whatever you do will attract people who resonate with that activity.
The implication here is you get where you want to be by embodying the activities and principles you hold and not feeding (i.e. reacting to) those of different POVs.
If this is done consistently the result is a collection of like-minded people all in resonance and aligned to a shared purpose, while the "others" have lost interest and taken themselves elsewhere to find their own resonances.
If you're attracting riff-raff and having editorial battles the implication is that the riff-raff are in resonance with some people in the community who like creating drama.
If this is the case the most productive thing to do is examine the motives and goals of each "member" and try to align them better.... that or accept that the present state is what "members" choose - consciously or unconsciously.
Why are you involved in the Wiki project?
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