Yeah, but come on, some of us do it for fun too. I got a fairly large watchlist and most of my edits these days just involve reverting some vandalisms of both the trivial and non-trivial kind, while waiting for my stat program to finish running or when I feel like procrastinating. I make more serious contributions to those areas where I feel a bit like an expert but most of that is also in the “intellectual goofing off” category, like blogging about economics, or reading blogs about economics or solving math puzzles or reading up on papers out of my area simply because they look interesting.

You make it sound like these unfortunate experts have somehow been chained to their computers like galley slaves in the glorious Wiki fight against trolls and vandals (and sure, it’d be nice if there was less of that, but hey, that’s the internets) but most of us do it because it’s a better way to procrastinate than Minesweeper. That and the whole “Someone on the internet is WRONG!” thing is a powerful motivator.

That post and especially the comments make it very clear that Seth’s hostility ot Wikipedia is widely shared, even among people who are very attracted to its fundamental model. Which raises the question, how much of the problem is specific design decisions about how Wikipedia operates, as opposed to the broad-brush issues of principle we’re mostly talking about here (and that Seth mostly sticks to in his polemics)? Would it be possible to design a system broadly similar to Wikipedia that would be better able to incorporate genuine expertise, by tweaking the rules by which entires are edited? Or does expert authority necessarily require a formal credentialing process?

There’s also a very nice defense of Wikipedia by Cory Doctorow. And, come on, Cory Doctorow.

http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci507015,00.html

That’s what it would be if the real figure was “most”. But when the real figure is “a very small fraction,” it’s not hyperbole, it’s just wrong.

Anyway, I am sorry if you are bothered by the fact that I comment under a pseudonym or if you have doubts about my ‘reliability’. We’re obviously not going to reach much understanding on this.

Hey, I comment under a pseudonym too!

Anyway, Engels, every single exchange I have with you on CT ends with you saying that we can’t communicate and you’ll never respond to me again. So it’s ok, I’m used to it.

I’ve found those, but most of what I look up on Wikipedia isn’t politically-charged or theoretical, so it’s a valuable tool for me. I think Seth’s on the money with his criticisms, but I figger I disagree with the amount of times those criticisms apply and until we can develop some picture of the grains of salt required per Wikipedia paragraph I’m going to be cavalier about it and Seth’s going to be angry about it. Or maybe that’s a stupid way to put it: the variability of the quality is such that no skepticism metric is possible.

The stuff about the senators I was excited to look at. People who rely on Wikipedia for guidance on political affairs should, I think, be wary.

No. No it doesn’t.

As an experiment, I just looked up the Wikipediia pages of the following people:
Bill Thompson, the NYC Comptroller.
Nelson Algren, my favorite novelist.
Margaret Fox, the 19th century spiritualist.
Robert Crumb, the cartoonist.
Milton Babbitt, the composer.
Raul Prebisch, the Argentine economist.
Tom Golisano, the Rochester businessman and patron of the NY Independence Party.
(I also looked up Mary West-Eberhard, the biologist, but she doesn’t have an entry.)

Not one of them contained any such section, anything that could be construed as “muck”, or any criticism at all. None—despite the fact that two are political figures and several are/were involved in serious controversies.

So Wikipedia looks a bit more reliable than pseudonymous blog commenters, at least.

The boosterism is very real, and appears in serious law/policy academic books.

See my blog post critiquing one instance very specifically:

When I hear the word “Wikipedia”, I reach for my flame-thrower

“So Wikipedia succeeds by getting genuine experts to participate—that’s a good thing, right?”

It’s not a good thing that the way Wikipedia is structured requires experts to waste their valuable time fighting off trolls and ideologues, and then hucksters turn around and try to sell this deliberate design flaw trade-off as a great new social development.

“excellent source on questions for which you only need a quick, superficial answer”

Sigh. Please – I HAVE HEARD THAT ARGUMENT. I know it. You don’t have to tell it to me. Where this all started, is that thinking about that argument for a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s subtle problems with it, and have been trying to come up with ways to make those problems clear. That’s what I was pointing out earlier. You start by saying it’s OK for “who draws Tom Tomorrow” i.e. trivia, and you end up taking away attention and Google-juice from experts on cutting-edge legal issue like reverse-engineering, and feeding the beast.

[Tedious: Does this mean I advocate something silly like never ever look at Wikipedia? No, that would be a straw-man. It means I think there’s deep problems with the common argument about “quick, superficial answer”. Only that. Not absurd solutions.]

“But having a single reliable source for such information is really, really convenient.”

But Wikipedia is NOT a reliable source. Not even close. One problem is that it’s hard to know where it’s reliable versus not, so the net effect tends to be to give an illusion of being more reliable than it actually is (again, not a new issue with journalism).

“But unless you can point to a serious harm done by Wikipedia …”

Any example I give would immediately be dismissed by standard defenses:
1) You Didn’t Prove It.
2) It’s An Anecdote Anyway.
3) Wikipedia Articles Don’t Kill People, People Kill People

This comment is long enough already.