Comments on: Wikipedian Utterances of the Gawping Soul

By: digamma

digamma — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 23:27:38 +0000

I agree with Neil – I like the controversial articles a lot. In any dispute, there is a set of facts that both sides will grudgingly agree to. Beyond that there’s a pile of lame arguments built on those facts. I go to Wikipedia when I want those base facts.

By: soru

soru — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 23:24:02 +0000

The usual conservative answer to such questions is moral fibre.

By: trialsanderrors

trialsanderrors — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:32:10 +0000

Actually, once we’ve all gotten over the yuck factor of McHenry’s analogy, I wonder what his alternative to public lavatories might be. Towing a portapotty around wherever you go? Crapping in the river?

By: abb1

abb1 — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 20:50:55 +0000

No, I don’t mean just switching to get a better idea about the subject, but to actually do sociological reseach on how the same subjects (not necessarily controversial ones) are perceived by, say, francophone wiki-enthusiasts vs. anglophone wiki-enthusiasts. It could be an interesting project, I think.

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 20:09:37 +0000

Abb1: I very often switch langwidges on the ‘Pedia, for all sorts of reasons, but I tend to avoid flame-bait entries because life is short. (And I, for one, would ‘ve anticipated some string-theory vs. loop quantum gravity smackdownage. Was Lubos Motl (sp?) in the thick of it, by any chance?)

By: abb1

abb1 — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:37:45 +0000

I am curious if anyone thought of comparing same entires written in different languages. There might a dissertation in it for someone, no?

By: joel turnipseed

joel turnipseed — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 16:58:09 +0000

To John and Matt’s point: “Objectivity” in a field like history is notoriously difficult (see Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession for a fascinating discussion). Now, that’s not to say that one can’t approach objectivity, or that some accounts aren’t obviously bullshit of one flavor or another (whether from ideological bias or sloppiness or both)—just that, as John says, “In most cases you could probably write “All claims about this issue, including the appropriate terms in which to describe it, are disputed””—and then go on to put your cards/evidence on the table. But then, you can’t very well do that in an encyclopedia (and, without introducing a mind-numbing turgidity/vertiginous recursion to terms/contexts, maybe not even in a book [and here we get to the Godel analogy—imperfect as it is: what would a book look like that guaranteed its own objectivity?]).

Tim: Yes, I’ve always thought that such a thing would be a good idea, if hard to implement well. An especial problem with self-organizing trust networks is the “rich-get-richer” problem of initial seeding & their liability to spoofing by sufficiently large bodies corrupters (Ayn Randians, say, or Larouche quacks or Scientologists or…). So, if Wikipedia could somehow garner the committment of a sufficiently-large body of known experts (already problematic on two levels: “Who says?” and “How many would?”), and could track/reverse outlying trends… then it seems like it could make a lot of progress. But then: wouldn’t that veer from it’s own ideology (not to say that it shouldn’t)?

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 15:38:55 +0000

When you go to a reference work, you don’t want to have to worry about whether it’s right or not; you want to be able to rely on it. A cynic might reply with a snarky comment about “avoiding the real labor of thinking”, but that misses the point of a reference work. Perhaps wikipedia would do well to signal the reliability of their pieces: provide information about number of views and edits (and the ratio), the volatility of the entry, etc.

By: Walt

Walt — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:55:18 +0000

Last time I looked, most of the edit wars happened over the George W. Bush web page. What’s interesting about Wikipedia edit wars is how many of them are hard to guess. For example, the disputes over string theory versus loop quantum gravity were astonishing in their viciousness.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:33:26 +0000

John Q wrote:

What would a trustworthy entry on a nationalist or religious dispute be like? In most cases you could probably write “All claims about this issue, including the appropriate terms in which to describe it, are disputed” and leave it that.

But surely there will be cases where one side of the dispute is right and the neutral POV suppresses facts. I just looked at the “Serbia” page and the description of Serbia’s involvement in the post-Yugoslav wars is awfully bland.

By: DS

DS — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 12:39:40 +0000

If that pickled politics link was a wiki page, Soru, I’d have to tag it {{citeneeded}} because I don’t see any evidence at all for the claim that half of all admin time goes there.

By: soru

soru — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 12:00:26 +0000

http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/395
claims that 50% of all wiki admin time is spent on issues related to Indo-pakistani rivalry.

By: Alex Gregory

Alex Gregory — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 11:22:53 +0000

No 15. “I hate to be so blunt but anyone who thinks that wikipedia is competently written need only read the philosophy articles to see this is not the case.”

I think the philosophy examples are a very poor test case for wikipedia. Philosophy is just not the kind of subject where you can reel out a long paragraph of accepted truths and falsehoods. Thats not to say that it can’t be done, only that its understandable that the philosophy articles are of a poorer quality than much of the rest of the stuff on there.

By: David Moles

David Moles — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 09:50:25 +0000

As one of Clute’s 21st century mutants, I think the next line after the quote you pulled is the important one in getting what he’s getting at: “So mutants tend to publish too much.” That’s the heart of the complaint, not that there’s no place for the buck to stop.

Dora’s book, published by a small press (and one with an established habit of publishing first collections by new writers), looks like a creature from the old, moderated world of publishing: pages, spine, cover, dustjacket. But it comes from a different primordial soup than, say, Werewolves in their Youth or Interpreter of Maladies; it comes from the unmoderated new world of blogs, wikis, and chapbooks.

Good editors encourage a writer to put his or her best foot forward; bad editors (or no editors) make it too easy for the writer to stumble. And while Dora’s a friend of mine and I bow to no one in my appreciation of her genius, I understand Clute’s frustration — which is what it is, frustration — with stories that “should not have been assembled here … because some of them are quite seriously less good than her best work.”

By: trialsanderrors

trialsanderrors — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 08:58:29 +0000

I don’t know. I spent the last couple of days engaged in the editing wars over the Mary McCarthy entry. (For the most part I clean the outer reaches of the Wikipedia lavatory, so this was a new experience for me.) Despite strongly held contrasting viewpoints between editors, a fair amount of drive-by editing and at least one uncooperative hard case I think we quickly assembled a pretty good brief on the leak case, heavily annotated and sourced. This isn’t necessarily the result of a shared NPOV (neutral point of view) but of a watchfulness among editors who try to make sure that their POV gets equal billing and a set of ingenious devices like the 3-reverts rule (which I ran afoul of) that force you to push the entry rather than just kick off other’s contributions. It is nice to see that once an entry is properly phrased and sourced, attempts to remove are usually quickly reverted. I would recommend the critics of Wikipedia immerse themselves in such an editing war before they claim there is no censoring or captaining.