Wikipedia at 2 million

Two million crap articles perpetually “in need of cleanup to meet WikiPedia’s quality standards” except when they’re about lists of movies ordered by uses of the word “fuck”? Of course there’s no alternative… because there’s no pressing need. Just use regular boring old encyclopaedias in conjunction with the boring old rest of the Internet. Simple.

I find Wikipedia very useful when I am trying to figure out how to explain something that I already roughly know (eg the pros and cons of AC transmission compared to DC transmission), but can’t remember in enough detail to write it.

Incidentally, has anyone noticed a few media articles on Wikipedia about companies and political groups editing their own entries that imply that editing your own entry is a bad thing? It’s Wikipedia – it says on the English homepage that it is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Does anyone know why people are starting to think that’s unethical to edit your own entry, or that of some organisation you’re involved in?

It’s Wikipedia policy that you don’t edit the article about you

I disagree that improving articles is now more important than adding articles; Wikipedia is still deficient in many areas I have some knowledge about (e.g. military history, comics, science fiction) and even in relatively well covered areas the depth of coverage is not that great.

One of the things I dislike about current Wikipedia practises, which plays a role in why coverage is still weak despite so many entries is that there are groups of editors who put as much stock in trying to eliminate entires as in adding entries.This in an encyclopedia which is supposed to catalogue everything of interest.

Thanks Stuart. What’s puzzling me is the concern in the media seems not to merely be about dishonesty, but simply to state that so-and-so has edited their own organisation’s wikipedia page. Perhaps this is a result of editing by someone trying to squeeze articles into a corner of the newspaper.

Plus I understood that Wikipedia originally defended itself against the charge that it would be biased due to people’s editing by the defence that it had millions of fact-checking, and any damage caused by people deliberately inserting errors would be rapidly corrected. If this error-correction process does not apply to people who introduce errors by editing their own or their own company’s or client’s pages, then we have a general problem with Wikipedia as there are plenty of people biased about matters in which they have no financial interest.

“Sometime around next Sunday, Wikipedia will reach 2 million articles”

And? In all seriousness, why can’t I summon the will to care? The whole thing strikes me as so 2001. I know, I know, the techno-millenarians will cry, “but it changed everything.” Yea, sure, but – umm – could you remind me again what it changed? Yea, I’ll grant that a certain number of geeks probably spend less time masturbating to internet porn whilst editing entries and labeling Jeremy Freese “not worth knowing about,” but, really, Wiki-talk puts me to sleep. Leave it to the folks in the “communication” departments…

Thanks, John. (Teaches me to ask snarky rhetorical questions…)

That should be “Karakitai”. Thre are many spellings.

> (eg the pros and cons of AC transmission
> compared to DC transmission),

That’s bizarre: I was just going to post asking doctor slack at #1 above to read the Wikipedia article on high-voltage DC power transmission (HVDC) and find me an equivalent in any general-purpose reference text outside the utility industry. Then your comment popped up…

Cranky

Just use regular boring old encyclopaedias

Oh please. Encyclopaedias cost a fortune, go out of date immediately and don’t travel wherever you do. That’s a snarky, elitist comment, if you don’t mind me saying so. Wikipedia may not be perfect, but it’s a great for quick looks at things, and despite what someone said above, it’s not particularly unreliable, compared to the sources of information that many people use like, say, print media.

On a more serious note, is anyone else put off by the decision to require cites? My feeling was always that the point was that the self-editing function minimized the need for cites. Now, once you get dueling edits, cites can be valuable arbiters (altho, often as not, you just get dueling cites), but it really bugs me to read a page on the Laestrygonians in the Odyssey, and someone has tagged it as needing a cite. To what end?

I guess I feel like it’s pointless devil’s advocacy – it’s very easy to make work for someone else by demanding a cite for a perfectly noncontroversial, easily verifiable statement, but it doesn’t benefit anyone. There doesn’t seem to be any rigor in how citation demands are attached to articles and statements within, and so it doesn’t mean much. It’s also a flawed concept, since not all authorities are online, but IME online sources are the de facto standard.

I had the experience, twice, of looking up something and not finding it. Both instances dealt with some 19th Century social philosophers. Both of them have web sites dedicated to them, with a good biographical summary.

Since I assume that the material on these sites is copyright, I can’t just pick it up and stick it into Wikipedia (although that seems to happen frequently). So if I wanted to create an entry how would I go about it? Steal from a printed encyclopedia instead?

Getting material into the site requires that it be based upon something else, this difficulty seems to be given only token acknowledgment (and that’s mostly for images).

Jordan: …articles, which, at least in an uncontroversial field like mathematics, are usually thorough and correct—certainly more so than any other easily searchable Web resource.

Mathworld?

It’s also a flawed concept, since not all authorities are online, but IME online sources are the de facto standard.

I don’t think that’s true. Maybe it depends on the kind of articles you look at, but in my experience printed sources are given as often as online sources.

The problem, of course, is publicity. If I’m an uninformed non-math-oriented person (actually, scratch the “if”), I won’t know about MathWiki or other specialized resources.

Ever heard of Google?

By the way, the implications of Wikipedia winning the Google-lottery via a quirk in Google’s algorithm (links to anywhere boost everything on the site) are under-discussed. There’s plenty of HIGHER-QUALITY specialized sites (e.g. Mathworld mentioned above), but they don’t get found, because Wikipedia won the Google-prize. Hence it turns into a vicious circle, of people getting lower-quality work from Wikipedia, never seeing the better work, and then praising Wikipedia for good-enough work when in fact it’s worse than the other resources.

I share Seth’s irritation with the Google rankings. The analogy I like is the one provided by Wikiwatch with McDonalds: Wikipedia is a convenient, high-recognition, low-cost, low-quality provider which succeeds in driving out its higher quality competitors. It may be true, as John says, that There Is No Alternative (at least not right now) but noone has to be happy about this state of affairs.

engels:

The quest for accurate, well-researched write-ups is only for pedantic academicos, as we all know.

I do not in fact believe a kitten dies every time someone finds WikiPedia useful. I just don’t think it’s all that hot as a basic encyclopedia, never mind being a whizbang universal human library, that’s all. The exceptions are all very well. I’d even like to read that article about the Qaraqitai.

I was a lot more vehement in the days when WP content was replicated across a dozen copycat encyclopedia sites, so that crap WikiPedia articles would crowd the first four pages of a Google search. That seems to have eased up, at least; noawadays it’s just the starry-eyed rhetoric about WP that’s a minor annoyance, and worth the occasional tilt.

No, Engels, and please don’t speak to me that way. I’m lazy? You piece of shit.

It’s because I work from home and on most topics I’m interested in, Wiki is better and quicker than the edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica I own. I can look up a date, a place, or a name instantly without leaving my seat. Often I can find bibliography instantly. Sometimes there are even usable links.

Wiki is not an alternative to Google, to a library, or to buying books. It’s a single, very useful tool.

As far as I know, the resource to which Wiki is far inferior does not exist yet. As I said, we’d be a lot closer to that superior resource if universities let down their paywalls.

I believe there’s a lot of hype which swirls about Wikipedia, not just in the popular press, but also in more academic-type discussions where too much Kool-Aid has been drunk. It think it’s worth “harshing the buzz”. There’s a very exploitative aspect to Wikipedia which bothers me, where a few people at the top of an organization do well, and everyone else does badly. Plus the hype marketing is then used to distract attention from other problems.

I think it’s great for comics plotline descriptions and character biographies though, I’ll admit that.

Did I (or anyone) say that McDonalds or Wikipedia is a “cheap substitute of something” or that Wikipedia isn’t “useful tool”? What I am saying is that many people, including myself, use it on many occasions when it would be better to use other resources, such as Google, another online reference source, or a library, and the reason for doing this (certainly in my own case) is often laziness.

I’ll grant you that as a possibility engels, but don’t confuse laziness with convenience. If I’m using wikipedia to look up something at work, keep in mind that part of my job is to get things done sooner rather than later. Searching for info myself can take quite a while. If there is a relevant wikipedia page it is likely to provide most of the information I need very quickly. If I knew of specific sources that had better material, obviously I would use them. The fact that I do not, we can attribute to a problem other people have noted: wikipedia winning the google prize and other factors associated with being the most popular ‘pedia out there. And this is not laziness on my part. Just the consequence of certain patterns, some predetermined, some of which could have or still could go a different direction.

abb1:

“But much more often all I need is some idea about […]”

Which is OK if you don’t mind the possibility that the “information” you get may simply be totally wrong, and was merely written down in Wikipedia because someone heard someone else say that someone else say that the percentage of rubber is such and such.

Don’t matter, if we both agree to settle the bet by what’s in wikipedia. I don’t really care what the percentage of rubber is.

As far as the exploitation thing goes, Wiki offers people who have been squeezed out of the university racket a chance to continue doing something. I’m pretty sure that’s where the good Karakitai article came from — lots of very sharp Central Asianists (and lots of very sharp astronomers) never get academic positions.

This strikes me as a very good thing, I should go on to say. But then, I would think that.

Perhaps the wiki skeptics should set themselves a task: to compile a link page of pen-access resources on various topics which are superior to Wiki.

Mpowell – I’m not confusing those things. Using wikipedia is always convenient; in some cases, however, it is also lazy, eg. if you are not under intense time pressure and you could find a better source (ie. more accurate, more interesting, more intelligent and better written) through googling for five minutes, logging into Encyclopaedia Britannica or getting a book off your shelf. Perhaps you and John are under such intense time pressure that you really have no alternative, but for the average student or researcher I don’t think this is the case.

I think Maggie would be a baroness (friherrinna).

49: It probably would be: Swensson, Johnsson, Andersson, Larsson, Olsson, Petersson, Ericsson, and so on.

The Scandinavians who came to the US almost never had noble names (Palmqvist is the only one on the list up to 300 that I’ve ever seen here) and the whole point of being ennobled seems to have been to quit being Yon Yonson from Wisconsin and really be somebody.

I’ve been told that the Swedes, though economically relatively egalitarian, are acutely class-conscious. One guy told a story of trying to buy cognac, which he could afford, and being told by a clerk that he should get brandy (apparently he was visibly non-elite).

For a non-mathematician, the “lattice” wiki was more useful than the Mathworld “lattice”.

Sounds to me like the helpful clerk at Systembolaget was simply suggesting something less expensive but better-tasting.

“Perhaps the wiki skeptics should set themselves a task: to compile a link page of open-access resources on various topics which are superior to Wiki[pedia].”

See the site:

http://www.resourceshelf.com/

Not that they’re wiki skeptics, but their whole mission is pointing to good open-access resources. Ever heard of it? No? I rest my case.

Actually, I should have gone further: both those libraries have excellent collections of online resources, which are better than those listed above. But I wouldn’t be surprised if other public libraries in America could offer a package of a similar level to the above.

But across the board Wikipedia is far more comprehensive than Brittanica

Agggh! What on Earth is it with these obsessive comparisons to Britannica?

Eh, wasn’t the _Nature_ comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica cooked in Wikipedia’s favour?

(The last four paragraphs of the above comment should be indented.)

#69/bi – Yes, I’d say the comparison was arguably “cooked” to favor Wikipedia – The methodology used was almost guaranteed to generate a headline of “Wikipedia almost as accurate as Britannica” (the trick was every quibble was counted as an error for both – and any article can have quibbles).

I certainly agree with point about wikipedia’s stylistic imperfections, that’s a problem; irritates the hell out of me sometimes.

In short, the results are just magic pixie dust.

I don’t have free access to anything which is not free for everyone whatsoever.

Stanford does not have an entry for Stephen Toulmin, and Wiki does. In all but one of the six Stanford articles called up by a “Stephen Toulmin” seacrh, Toulmin is just a name on a list. He gets one sentence in one piece.

The more eclectic nature of Wikipedia, and its refusal to perform the gatekeeper / censor function, is a big plus for me, though I’m sure that for philosophy professionals it’s not. Presumably an an article on Toulmin would lead to the corruption of youth.

Resource Shelf is pretty impressive, and I’ll be looking through it. By its organization, however, it is absolutely useless for a quick search on a miscellaneous topic.

People mention the Brittanica so much because it serves the same quick-search function that Wiki does. If it weren’t behind the pay wall I’d use brittanica more. I just looked at the teaser for their Toulmin article, though, and it’s shorter than 200 words and can’t be much good. It would not be worth $70 a year to be able to access that kind of thing.

Seth, Slack, usually I agree with you guys, but I’m starting to wonder whether Jimmy Wales has been screwing your wives or something.

To John Q at 68, okay, sorry for that outburst. Actually the online encyclopaedia I use is Columbia but I can see why Britannica came to mind in that context. I guess I just have a bit of a reaction to the genre of the Britannica comparison, as cf. the posts about the Nature “study.”

To Emerson: Jimmy Wales ran over my cat. Now you know, you hearless bastard.

To Katherine: I sniff at you plebs! Sniff, sniff! And you can’t stop me, mwahaha!

That’s the problem with so many discussions about Wikipedia, the never ending debate about whether it’s cool or not, whether it lives up to the hype, how awful or awesome it is, etc.

Wikipedia is a tool with advantages and disadvantages, but I wish the discussion would start about how to best use it and make it more useful, rather than leaving it stuck in hot or not.

What people miss who point out that there are better sources than Wikipedia online is that there is no other place where you can get everything: Wikipedia’s math coverage may be second best to PlanetMath, but at Wikipedia you can also look up history, or literature or pop culture. It’s supposed to be the encyclopedia which covers everything and that’s what makes it useful as a starting point for researching any subject. I always have a Wikipedia tab (two actually, one Dutch and one English) open in Opera so I can quickly look up something mentioned elsenet I’m not familiar with. Nine out of ten times Wikipedia gives me, not the full story, but at least a good impression of what the subject is about.

” wish the discussion would start about how to best use it and make it more useful,”

You see, this is what bothers me – if I see something that I think is notably flawed and disturbingly exploitative, why am I constrained not to talk about those flaws, and somehow obligated to try to solve them? (especially if they’re pretty standard social issues that nobody has solved much). And that’s even more an issue where there’s so much hype, where I might think a little deflating of the hype is warranted.

I’m not saying you mean the following, but I’m very leery of “make it more useful” because that has a strong tendency to turn into: YOU should work for free to fix the problems caused by the flaws in the first place, and then we’ll claim it’s magic and use that magic to enrich ourself elsewhere.

And I think: Umm, why should I do that? It seems like a really bad deal for anyone except the few people trying to get rich off it.

Wikipedia is fundamentally a popularity-mining site. That shouldn’t be ignored in critiquing it.

Dr Slack @86 – who are these hordes of people you seem terribly concerned about? Has anyone actually experienced actual harm, professionally or financially? I am well prepared to be proved wrong on this point if you can provide evidence. But I would venture to suggest that even Mr Seigenthaler hasn’t suffered in the long term.

There have been a few high profile politicians and one or two others who have complained about edit wars, and if anything this has highlighted the fact theat Wikipedia, being what it is, should not be treated as the fount of all knowledge. Weighing that up against the enormous usefulness it has for an enormous number of people, and I’m still thinking it comes out ahead.

john/ #90, I think there’s a set of standard arguments that Wikipedia has evolved to deflect criticism.

Point: It’s often not very good

Deflection: No single source sould be taken as gospel.

[This *deflects* the point, because it turns into a prescription to the reader, away from Wikipedia’s quality]

Deflection: Newspapers / magazines are not very good

[This shifts the basis of comparison – it’s supposed to be an encyclopedia, not popular press]

Point: It exploits people to work for free

Deflection: People are exploited in many ways to work for free

[But that doesn’t justify Wikipedia doing it – a small-time cult leader isn’t justified because there are bigger cult leaders]

And so on.

Here’s my argument, Seth.

It’s better than anything else available to me today. I gave instances above: Britannica and the Stanford Encyclopedia on Toulmin. I also explained why “Resource Shelf” is worse for my purposes than Wiki is.

It’s much better than anything available to me 10 years ago. Combined with Google, I’m in paradise now. I use Google very extensively, but I often start with Wiki. And Wiki often guides me to better sources.

Every non-profit depends on volunteers. I’m in favor of volunteerism and I’m also in favor of extra-academic intellectualism.

I agree that something should be done about the slander and disinformation. If someone were to set up a more reliable, more carefully controlled resource that does everything that Wiki does, that might be a good thing, except that they’d probably do the kind of gatekeepering that the Stanford Encyclopedia does.

What if we just drop the term “encyclopedia” and say that Wiki is a very good thing: a free, easy-to-use, information resource of variable but often very high quality, comparable to the free press. but not an authority.

I don’t take Wiki as an authority, but I don’t take the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as an authority either. The SEP’s claim of authority is, for me, obnoxious. Toulmin has directly challenged the Anglo-American philosophy of which he once was part, and their response has been to unperson him.

But there I go again.

Engels, Toulmin was a respected, well-connected analytic philosopher who came to believe that Anglo-American philosophy was on the wrong track, and he said so quite intelligibly. To me someone like that should be covered. Do you believe that he shouldn’t be? Do you believe that Wikipedia also should have left him out.

Your little outburst of sarcasm was really not effective at any level, not even the snark level. In particular, it had no intellectual content whatsoever. Curb your affect, please.

Seth, where’s a better one-stop all-purpose search? I already explained why Resource shelf isn’t that.

For Toulmin, Brittanica is worse, and the Stanford Encyclopedia is worse.

All sarcasm aside, John, it’s becoming quite clear that your objection to the SEP is that it reflects the scholarly consensus within the field of philosophy. There’s no need for me to comment on that view here, or your opinions about academic philosophy, just to note that it is not one which will be shared by the vast majority of researchers, students and interested amateurs wanting to learn about the subject.

Seth, what I use Wiki for is a one-stop all-purpose search. I find it very useful that way. That’s what encyclopedias are for.

I can easily imagine a better such resource, but as far as I know it doesn’t exist at this point in time.

Seth, Wiki has a specific use, and I use it for that. For my areas of central interest, I go to books. For areas of secondary interest, Wiki is a godsend. (Same for any other encyclopedia, but Wiki is better). I don’t understand your objection, and this is starting to sound like a personal vendetta.

I’m going to go to the Resource Shelf and check it out, and I may well find valuable specific-topic sites there. But I’m pretty sure I’ll still use Wiki a lot.

Nobody said it was your duty, bi. Other people are doing it, though. rest easy.

So Bi, is Wiki wrong for covering Toulmin more thoroughly than Stanford or Britannica? Should they be censured in some way?

Block that affect, bi! Sarcastic, angry rationalists (et al) tend to be morons.

“Vast Conspiracy” sarcasm is stupid, bi. You don’t learn, do you?

Excluding Toulmin from philosophy on the basis of a jurisdictional dispute of that sort strikes me as wrong. In any case, anyone wanting to learn about Toulmin would be far better off going to Wiki, rather than trying to figure out which professional, legit site accepts him as kosher. Same for Cicero.

John Emerson:

“‘Vast Conspiracy’ sarcasm is stupid, bi.”

Here are your own words: “Toulmin has directly challenged the Anglo-American philosophy […] and their response has been to unperson him.”

“You don’t learn, do you?”

Oh please, not this “I’m wrong, but I’m still right!” schtick again. Then again, I don’t understand why people keep defending Wikipedia like it’s their firstborn. It’s just a web site, for goodness sake. (And not a particularly high-quality one at that.)

Sure, it’s nice to get access to paid-only databases through your local library. But you have to live in a place with a tax base that supports the wildly expensive (thousands of dollars per year) subscription prices for those fancy electronic databases. So Green City may be able to afford a biographical dictionary, while Blue City cannot. In my small suburban town of 4000 residents, people may live in one of three townships depending. Each municipality has different resources available.

Not only do you have to show proof of residence to get a library card — which is tough for college students, au pairs and others who don’t have a utility bill or lease in their own name — but children have to have their parents come to the library and sign a form.

There are a lot of barriers to getting information. Wikipedia is one tool that can help people get information they would not otherwise have access to easily, or at all.

I am in complete accordance with emerson’s 95.

JE: Well, we can joust with anecdotes about good and bad WikiPedia articles if you really want to. I generally find that for anything I’m looking for, there’s a) a rare chance of pulling up an article that’s strong, well-written and interesintg; b) a good chance of pulling up an article that’s decent, but clumsily written and presented and does in 2000 words what other resources I use do better in 700; c) a fair chance of pulling up an article that’s partially decent, but partially incoherent or riddled with inaccuracies or the suspicious debris of editing wars; and d) a non-infrequent chance of pulling up something completely useless except for entertainment value. Trying to filter which is which is exhausting, and not what I look for in a reference work, so I don’t bother anymore. If you do, more power to you.

To make a positive, non-hostile suggestion: if the Resourceshelf people had a consolidated search so that you didn’t have to poke around deciding which site had what you wanted, it probably would be a superior alternative to wiki.

A problem touched on above which is very relevant to me is that a lot of sites deliberately exclude unqualified people such as myself. I’d like to see a study of that. My guess is that the pay sites earn very little revenue for the content-producers.

The links to further resources thing is nice, mind you, but not consistently “wow” enough to win me over.

Holy crap, there are actually people taking the “worst. episode. ever” approach to something as mundane as Wikipedia?

It’s good for a lot of stuff. It’s not perfect. What the hell’s to argue with?

Some of you need to get out more.

I’m afraid you (and Sage Ross, who knows little about the project) are mistaken about the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/). It is definitely and gratifyingly growing; we have nearly tripled our number of articles since our spring launch, and doubled our number of registered accounts. Perhaps you were thinking that, if it had a chance, it would instantly start growing within an order of magnitude of Wikipedia’s growth? Of course not. It took Wikipedia itself time to grow, you know–and we have about the same word count, I think, that Wikipedia had after this amount of time. CZ will take some years before it can seriously rival Wikipedia in any way other than quality. But as long as we are on a steady growth vector, and as long as we can expect to accelerate our growth–as I think we can–there’s no reason to think we won’t be a dominant force by, say, 2010.

I hope Citizendium never grows as fast as Wikipedia. Because in order to grow that fast, they would have to allow editing under anonymous screen names, and they’d someday end up with 1,300 administrators like Wikipedia has, most of whom are anonymous and many of whom are teenagers.

It took me 20 months of anti-Wikipedia activism and 14 attempts to get my Wikipedia bio deleted. It was started by SlimVirgin, an anonymous admin whose real name is Linda Mack. She started this bio on me because she had a political agenda. Ms. Mack once worked for Pierre Salinger when Salinger was ABC bureau chief in London in 1989-1991. Salinger locked her out of her office when he came to believe that she had been working for MI5 all along. I think she’s still someone’s agent-of-influence on Wikipedia.

Ms. Mack’s early edits on Wikipedia, which provided clues to her real-life identity, were “oversighted” by Jayjg, one of her secret admin buddies with super-admin powers. “Oversighted” means that the history was wiped out. Unless you happened to have a complete dump of Wikipedia from more than two years ago, you couldn’t trace her early edits.

There is more going on within the Wikipedia cabal than meets the eye. It helps to see this if you’ve been their victim for 20 long months, and been banned several times over, and punished with more extraneous, unwanted details in your biography, the more you complained about these details.

Wikipedia should either disallow anonymous editing, or get entirely out of the business of hosting biographies of living persons. At a minimum, they should offer a no-questions-asked opt-out for the subjects of such biographies.

Wikipedia’s general counsels — last year it was Brad Patrick and now it’s Mike Godwin — claim that the Wikimedia Foundation is immune to all defamation claims and all invasion of privacy claims by subjects of biographies, because they are a mere “service provider” under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That means you have to launch what might turn into an expensive federal case and win there, just so that you can get the opportunity to petition for damages in state court. Suing administrators is not practical, because they’re often difficult to identify, and they’re from all over the world, and they will tag-team behind your back to undermine you.

Wikipedia is a huge video game, with role-players behind the curtain, pretending that they’re editing an encyclopedia. For articles on popular culture and other harmless trivia, it doesn’t matter. But when something matters to somebody, it quickly becomes a disaster zone.

Google shares at least half of the blame for this situation. It sends Wikipedia about half of Wikipedia’s total traffic.

I’m sort of sympathetic to Citizendium in that it tries to address at least one systemic flaw of Wikipedia, it’s de-emphasis of expertise. However, I doubt it will actually ever take over from Wikipedia as the dominant online encyclopedia, as Wikipidia has 1) a huge first mover advantage and 2) is easier to participate in, easier to join and create new content for and 3) for most of its content it’s good enough, even if Citizendium’s policies ensure its articles are of a higher quality.

One important aspect of Wikipedia that is not being discussed here is the overwhelming evidence that the work of many thousands of volunteers is being used to financially enhance the pockets of a handful of lucky Wikimedia Foundation board members and advisers who happen to be lucky enough to also serve on the board of the for-profit Wikia, Inc. or Amazon.com. The whole racket is detailed here:

The tight-knit web of Wikimedia and Wikia

(And if it’s any consolation to Daniel Brandt, which it probably isn’t, WikiPedia has by now sufficiently “jumped the shark” in public consciousness to an extent that now limits the damage the Linda Macks of the world can do.)

Full disclosure: I am a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation and have been a Wikipedian since 2001. I spend an alarming amount of time on Foundation matters purely as a volunteer.

In my own comparisons with other general reference works, Wikipedia tends to reflect the kind of broadened coverage one would expect from a 600 million word encyclopedia (WP) vs. a 55 million word one (Britannica Online). Mind you, Britannica has some excellent reference texts, especially in the Macropaedia. But Wikipedia does have an enormous wealth of information about subjects I consider important which simply aren’t mentioned at all in other sources.

For example, Wikipedia has some great (some not so great) overview articles about darker and lesser known aspects of US history: covert programs like MKULTRA (drug tests on US citizens), COINTELPRO (subverting “dissidents”), Project FUBELT (coup against Allende), and so forth. These are critical aspects of US history that other sources consider to be barely worthy of a footnote. Beyond conspiracy theory, here we have conspiracy fact, well-referenced and documented by quite a few reputable historians, but still not a part of most curricula.

Or look at the recent “articles of the day”: Renewable energy in Scotland,
Jersey Shore attacks of 1916, and the olm (a blind salamader). The first topics do not seem to appear in Britannica at all, while the olm only has a brief paragraph compared with Wikipedia’s well-referenced, richly illustrated multi-page treatise.

Granted, articles about overarching topics and themes are sometimes (not always) quite terrible. Wikipedians often do a fantastic job when it comes to collecting the tiniest little details about a subject that is very narrow to begin with. You may scoff at this when the subject happens to be pop culture; personally, I find it immensely important that there exists a medium where we attempt to neutrally describe and summarize mass-produced “cultureware” that is consumed by (and, in the process, influences) millions of people.

Reading Wikipedia’s articles about video games has also given me a newfound respect for the genre; some recent games at least have rich, compelling stories that are as much deserving to be recorded and re-told as any movie. I prefer to reach my own judgment about such matters to being subjected to someone else’s sense of importance.

True: Wikipedians can be exclusionist, too. They delete webcomics that haven’t been mentioned in enough external sources. They condemn blogs as unreliable while writing in a medium that seems to be the very opposite of reliability. They struggle, internally and always, with the tension of writing on an encyclopedia that is also a wiki (or vice versa).

I personally hope that policy development will move away from the idea of “relevance” as established by some authority and purely towards whether articles can be verified and maintained. When in doubt, I’d rather have too many articles than too few. But even in this blog discussion, I recognize the same two camps that we have inside Wikipedia: those who condemn us for having articles about “crap”, and those who condemn us for deleting articles about subjects important to them. There won’t be easy solutions, but so far I think we’re striking a reasonable (if not perfect) balance between the desires for quality & quantity.

An endeavor so gigantic as Wikipedia will make friends as much as enemies. Some may dislike us for valid reasons. People like Seth Finkelstein and Daniel Brandt, who post here, have campaigned relentlessly to get their biographies deleted (and both eventually succeeded). Many individuals simply do not wish information about them to exist in a space that conveys encyclopedic authority, while being seemingly completely open to the insertion of random claims.

I respect those concerns. I think it is awful that, right now, Wikipedia puts all of its articles under the same “letterhead” of an encyclopedia, not distinguishing clearly between those that have just been created or edited by random strangers, and those that reflect the best work we can do.

We are, of course, adding a lot of metadata, which sometimes can even get in the way: that we believe an article lacks citations, that it is not neutral, too Western-centric, or any other of hundreds of “maintenance templates”, as they are called.

But this is still a very page-centric view of an article, rather than a history-centric one. After all, we do store every change ever made to any article. So we’ve been trying to figure out ways to make the history of the articles more transparent to readers. Who has worked on an article, who has looked at it? How reliable do we believe it to be?

One effort that we are driving internally for this is the “stable version” extension, AKA FlaggedRevs, which will allow designated user groups to assign quality tags to a revision. Most importantly, we want to clearly identify those revisions which we know to be free from vandalism. One could argue that, once this mechanism works well, everything else will false into place — all it really takes for wiki quality assurance to work, is for the group of “good faith contributors” to be clearly separated from bad faith attackers.

FlaggedRevs will go into a public beta on a dummy site in the next few weeks, and if all goes well, will be deployed on production sites later this year.

A concern about this particular strategy is whether it will in fact scale to the massive number of edits that we are seeing on Wikipedia every hour, every minute, every second. An alternative to human review is the use of algorithms to at least derive some information from the revision history. Luca de Alfaro’s work on trust computation is very interesting in this regard, taking into account the “survival rate” of different blocks of text by different editors for the computation of trust values that can then be assigned to them. We are working with Luca and providing him with the resources he needs for his research.

So, a combination of human quality annotation and certain heuristics will hopefully allow us to make it clearer to the reader what exactly they are looking at (has it been reviewed? are the authors members of the core community?), even allowing us to set reasonable “default views” (always showing a recently reviewed version, for example).

In other words, Wikipedia is not “done” yet. We are fully aware that in order to increase our usefulness, we need to constantly reinvent ourselves. We are always open to ideas and constructive criticism (and in fact, we tend to be our own harshest critics). I’ve met some of the smartest people I know through the Wikimedia community, and I hope and believe that we can provide a useful resource to all of humanity.

When we say, “you can improve Wikipedia”, we don’t just mean that you can edit articles on our website. Contrary to some claims, nobody is getting rich off Wikipedia, which is run by a non-profit organization. All our software is open source, and all of our content is free forever, including the freedom to run your own copy according to your own rules. (This is a freedom, for example, used by Citizendium to make and modify copies of Wikipedia articles. Sadly, CZ does not yet grant others the same freedom for its own articles, though they vaguely promise to do so at some point in the future.) We have countless open forums and are generally a fairly welcoming bunch. We don’t much like cyberstalking, trolling, bizarre conspiracy theories, edit warring, and similar types of obnoxious behavior. But that should go without saying.

I’d be happy to read your list of “5 things Wikipedia should do”, and then I’ll be equally happy to point out how the different lists are in complete opposition to each other. ;-) I also would appreciate, in the interests of full disclosure, if all participants would shed some light on their past involvement with Wikipedia in such debates. Having an axe to grind doesn’t necessarily make you wrong — but it certainly could shape or alter your perceptions. :-)

Jesus fuck, Seth. You’re a nutso grievance-collector.

There are legit issues about Wiki, but no one will ever know about them from you.

I completely agree that the slander-and-disinformation question should be addressed.

Let’s not confuse popularism with scholarship. There’s plenty of people writing about CIA mind-control. The madness is in thinking that a process which favors the loudest and most obsessive produces good reading on the topic. I don’t doubt the end product would be well-footnoted, but that’s doesn’t necessarily have any connection to reality.

One of the deepest, non-cult (:-)) dislikes I have about Wikipedia is how, as you outline, it tries to escape intellectual responsibility by cost-shifting onto the reader. It’s a general web-2.0 formula where the organization gets a bunch of people to sound-off and have an argument, portrays the result as some sort of great civic achievement, and then in response to intellectual criticism says it’s up to the readers to figure out who was spouting nonsense, and if you don’t like that, you’re against democracy. I don’t think academics and people who value being accurate over being popular should promote that sort of thing.

[Note it’s consistent that Wikipedia works great for comics and TV because on those topics the most obsessive person is in fact very likely to be the most objectively correct!]

I’m a big supporter of Wikipedia for a couple of reasons. First, most of the world has essentially *no* access to the kind of information elite Euro-American academics take for granted.

Additionally, in my own field (oceanography) Wikipedia at least makes an effort to explain complex processes at a basic level. One of the advantages of Wikipedia’s open editing policy is that it keeps scientists like myself from hiding behind jargon. And if some teenager wants to help me increase scientific literacy by pointing out where I’m unclear or mistaken- that’s okay with me!

An interesting sidelight. My wife recently finished a book on the history of the written word. It is amusing how many of the reactions to Wikipedia parallel elite reactions to the introductions of such technologies as the printing press, or the Korean phonetic script. “It makes (fill in the blank) too easy! Anyone can do it!” Academic elites like myself need to be careful that our focus on the truth isn’t just another power play.

Seth, I’m not in any sense a member of a Wiki cult (I never have posted there). I’ve tried half a dozen times to explain that I’ve found Wiki to be an extremely useful resource, superior to the actually-available alternatives. I’ve made that point in several different ways. To the Wiki-haters, this all seems irrelevant (“anecdotal” in Dr.Slack’s words).

I waited until #137 to get personal. Your monomaniac persistence is what turned me. I usually get personal much quicker than that, as we all know. And I didn’t call you a motherfucker, which I do whenever appropriate.

If Wales is secretly profiting from others’ work, I would see a problem in that. Frankly, though, if I were doing Wikis I wouldn’t care. Wiki would be a gratifying outlet for me I don’t presently have.

I also agree about the slander aspect. Thou I wish that Seth had been quicker to disclose his personal grudge.

But a lot of energy has been put into badmouthing Wiki as a resource, and it’s all wrong. There’s been this tendentious comparison to a nonexistent ideal resource, and I find that annoying.

It’s not a winning argument. It does make it easier to understand why you’re saying what you’re saying. I had already asked whether Wales had screwed your wife or peed on your cornflakes before that information came out, and the information helped things fall into place.

My whole argument has been this: Wikipedia has been very useful to me, and while I know that there are certain problems (which I have acknowledged several times), we should at least recognize that Wikipedia is a valuable resource. You refuse to do this, and I now think I understand why.

Let it drop. Or at least narrow your attack to one which is defensible.

And you might consider not asserting without evidence that people who disagree with you are cultists.

Doesn’t surprise me that John Quiggen would pretty much miss my points quite entirely, as he found them not to be provocative. Just as an example, my concern is not about Jimmy Wales speaking about Wikipedia on paid engagements — it’s his speaking about WIKIA, INC. on those engagements. Also, note that Quiggen makes no mention of the very important concern that the exact same person who is responsible for the financial books at the Wikimedia Foundation is the exact same person who is responsible for the financial books at Wikia, Inc. And this same person has been found by an Illinois judge to have inappropriately scattered over $800,000 that he owes a plaintiff. I grow weary of trying to enlighten the minds of people who can so phenomenally miss such important points.