After reading lots of discussion of Google’s knol initiative, I finally got around to actually looking at the example screenshot, which is about insomnia. Naturally, I was interested to look at the competition provided by the Wikipedia article on the same topic.
The Wikipedia article starts with a cleanup-needed tag (maybe Google’s choice of example topic wasn’t accidental in this respect), but doesn’t look all that bad. What’s startling is that wiki and knol disagree on some fairly basic points.
The knol, written by Rachel Manber states, without citation, that insomnia affects about one in ten US adults, which I would guess to be about 25 million people. Wikipedia says ’60 million Americans suffer from insomnia each year” and supports this with a link to the NIH which says “About 60 million Americans a year have insomnia frequently or for extended periods of time, which leads to even more serious sleep deficits.” . This WebMD article says “In a 1991 survey, 30-35% of adult Americans reported difficulty sleeping in the past year and 10% reported the insomnia to be chronic, severe, or both” again consistent with Wikipedia. It looks as if the knol introductory sentence should have stated “chronic or severe”.
There’s also disagreement over classifications of transient, acute and chronic insomnia. The knol classification is purely on duration, while the Wikipedia article offers a rather confusing mix of duration and causative indicators. A quick search of the web suggests that there’s lots of different definitions out there.
Since this is a blog, and not a wiki or knol, I can safely generalize from samples of one. As regards simple factual statements anyone is likely to care about, I’d rather go with Wikipedia than with an individually written article, even one by an expert. Wikipedia will usually have a citation, and, if there are conflicting claims, report them. With an individual author, it’s much harder to tell if a given statistic is generally agreed to be accurate and representative of the situation.
On the other hand, Wikipedia is still weak on presenting complex subjects in a coherent fashion. With no single author, articles tend to lack a clear central theme, and to put a lot of weight on marginal issues that people happen to feel strongly about. That’s improving at a higher level (the balance between pop culture trivia and serious articles) but not so rapidly within articles.
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Jacob Rus 12.15.07 at 7:25 am
This also goes against Wikipedia’s Manual of Style. Articles should be comprehensive, but not overly-weighted towards any minor aspect of the subject. In my opinion, the reason that this is hard to combat in Wikipedia is that fixing factual inaccuracies takes a small time commitment (just make the edit, provide a source, and move on), whereas overhauling article organization is a much larger effort.
But if you have the time and inclination, please step up and refocus “lost-at-sea†articles. Often this is a matter of moving content from one article to another, merging articles together, splitting them apart (into segments more focused on each minor aspect in question), etc. It happens all the time, and when done properly, the results can be quite astonishingly good.
A. Y. Mous 12.15.07 at 7:46 am
I see no reason for this to be in any way compared to Wikipedia. This is more along the lines of About.com and HowStuffWorkks.com, both of which have been moving along fine Wikipedia.
I personally would prefer such articles from whetever-be-the-criterion-authorities, than the wisdom-of-the-crowd-masses since my use of online references are just a starting point and never anything more. Bulk and fast editing (sometimes even over a period of a mere 24 hours) over at Wikipedia forces me to keep updating my notes tagged “from Wikipedia” which prevents me from consolidating.
A. Y. Mous 12.15.07 at 7:48 am
“moving along fine in parallel with Wikipedia” and “HowStuffWorks.com”
Jono 12.15.07 at 9:08 am
My concern is that the original author of an article gets editorial control over that article. What is to stop a creationist submitting the first version of the evolution article and subsequently blocking any attempt to make it reflect the science.
A. Y. Mous 12.15.07 at 9:30 am
>> My concern is that the original author of an article gets editorial control over that article.
Why shouldn’t an author have editorial control? As long as he stamps his name on it? More importantly, as along as he does not stamp someone else’s name on it?
I am extremely dissapointed with this prevalent attitude of “But the wrong people will have a say in it!”. I have the right to be wrong. You cannot absolve yourself of the responsibility to verify my claims, be it in a scientific journal (recent case of a 100 year old chemistry discovery being re-discovered”, a work on “history” (Dan Brown is proof enough.), or an online resource.
stuart 12.15.07 at 9:37 am
Jono, from earlier posts there will be competing knols on the same subject, where they have got more than one author to contribute on that subject. So you could end up with half a dozen evolution knols, some more popular than others, in the long run.
novakant 12.15.07 at 10:07 am
What is to stop a creationist submitting the first version of the evolution article and subsequently blocking any attempt to make it reflect the science.
Well, Wikipedia is certainly not immune to people pushing an agenda either. I recently checked out the entry on gun control and, apart from it being blatantly US centric, it was less like reading an informative article on the subject, but rather like witnessing a battlefield. Almost every sentence seemed to have been designed to push an angle. When you go to the article about gun control in the US it gets even worse, unsurprisingly. The whole article seems to be controlled by the WikiProject Firearms which is comprised mainly of gun nuts. When you want to find out about the gun laws in, say, Germany, you are faced with an uninformative article that stops at the gun law of 1938 and obviously pushes the “Nazis bad = gun control bad” meme based on two clearly biased sources, while you don’t get any information on current gun law.
Granted, I’ve picked a particularly contentious issue, but it illustrates nicely all the downsides of Wikipedia. If a one or a group of experts could write an objective and informative article representing a global perspective, I’d rather read that than having to wade through the ill-concealed agenda pushing efforts of biased amateurs.
All that said, I love Wikipedia, I’m just not sure the current model is really very helpful when it comes to certain issues.
Stuart 12.15.07 at 11:22 am
Yeah, I regularly use and occasionally update Wikipedia, but there are a few areas I would consider not worth looking at along those same lines – abortion, gun control, us politics, palestine/israel, global warming, etc. There might well be some good stuff in these areas, or good individual articles within the topic areas, but knowing the process behind it and the sort of people that are likely to spend most time updating those articles leads me to prefer other sources in these cases.
Knols would seem unlikely to achieve anywhere near the breadth that wikipedia has and will achieve over time, but it could supplant the need for things like Brittanica online and the like that act as a backup/alternative to wikipedia on some core topics.
Melinda 12.15.07 at 2:25 pm
The other situation in which the process fails in these open, collaborative efforts is that of highly specialized topics which receive very little review. I’ve seen a number of errors in Wikipedia articles on somewhat obscure topics, and this is actually pretty consistent with AWFUL Linux device drivers for gizmos that aren’t in wide use. Relying on community review for quality assumes community review.
An interesting thing about the Wikipedia model is that it degenerates into an obliterative one, where you’re not just adding your text, but you’re also deleting someone else’s. I haven’t read the Kuznetsov paper on motivations for participating in Wikipedia but it would be interesting to see how well it translates to the knols model, where you don’t get to delete what someone else has contributed but on the other hand you might be able to manipulate its (or your article’s) popularity.
abb1 12.15.07 at 4:17 pm
…but knowing the process behind it and the sort of people that are likely to spend most time updating those articles leads me to prefer other sources in these cases.
That’s what you’d expect, but when I read the wiki entry on intact dilation and extraction a while ago it I found it adequate. I also used wikipedia many times to get I/P facts: dates, names, references.
And what’s “other sources”, how are they better? Everyone’s got a point of view.
PS. Yeah, the ‘gun politics’ entry seems to be exceptionally bad.
Melinda 12.15.07 at 5:27 pm
You just pointed out a major problem with Wikipedia, which is this: Some articles are (very) good and some entries are (very) not good. For any given article, lacking domain expertise, how do you know if it’s a good one or if it’s a bad one?
Robin Green 12.15.07 at 6:11 pm
What annoys me about discussions about these kind of topics, is that they tend not to put Wikipedia, Knols etc. into the proper context.
In other words: *sigh* – nothing here is new.
For example, some people say that students should be educated not to trust Wikipedia. Fine. But why only Wikipedia? There are literally millions of websites out there that students should *also* take with a grain of salt. It just so happens that Wikipedia is very popular for research, but … it’s not like the problem of untrustworthy web content was created by Wikipedia. It has been there all along.
Knols, insofar as we can determine what they are so far, are not a new concept, and the “debate” about them is probably a storm in a teacup. There are other companies that will give you a share of ad revenues for writing for them. And Google already has an incentive to return pages running Google ads higher in the search results. So that conflict-of-interest is not new either.
It’s really kind of irritating me, the extent to which writing about technology often ignores historical and even *very recent* precedents. I think it’s a combination of people being simply ill-informed, some people getting in bed with advertisers (in the case of stories about Microsoft) and some people wanting to hype up stories to sell more copies (in the case of stories about Apple and Google).
abb1 12.15.07 at 6:11 pm
Well, right on the top of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics page some wikipedia authority tells you that
1. The neutrality of this article is disputed and
2. The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.
That could serve as a hint.
Robin Green 12.15.07 at 6:17 pm
Let me be more explicit about the level of novelty involved here: from what I’ve read so far, it looks they’ll be a mashup of personal web pages (which have been around since forever), blogs, and social bookmarking/rating. And that’s really about it. Useful, yes, but certainly not earth-shattering, and not even very innovative.
benj 12.15.07 at 7:37 pm
Just reiterating what other posters are saying, the screen cap makes it look like Knoll will be more of an “open peer reviewed article database” than a wikified ‘pedia.
TheDeadlyShoe 12.15.07 at 7:57 pm
The gun politics article on wiki has always been exceptionally bad. It’s true Knol has an advantage in this area, but the same reasons the wiki article is so bad would lead to a similarly biased Knol being top-ranked. And 80-90% of searches probably won’t go beyond the first Knol, anyway.
MNPundit 12.15.07 at 8:02 pm
“The other situation in which the process fails in these open, collaborative efforts is that of highly specialized topics which receive very little review. I’ve seen a number of errors in Wikipedia articles on somewhat obscure topics, and this is actually pretty consistent with AWFUL Linux device drivers for gizmos that aren’t in wide use. Relying on community review for quality assumes community review.”
Did you fix it? If you know there are errors then fix them and source them. That’s the implicit agreement people make for using the wiki. I detest Colbert’s “wikiality” because the people on the site actually have an interest in using correct information.
I edit wikipedia articles because 1) I’m a geek 2) I read an interesting news story that adds something to something I find interesting or even not interesting. I wrote about half of the current Johanna Goldsmith article and the entirety of the “Boys of Summer(comic)” article from a sense of duty and because I knew about these topics and others didn’t.
We’re trying to archive all human knowledge over there, so every little bit has its purpose.
engels 12.15.07 at 11:24 pm
Did you fix it? If you know there are errors then fix them and source them. That’s the implicit agreement people make for using the wiki.
IOW if you can point to an error in wikipedia then you must not have fixed it, ergo you are in breach of your “implicit” user agreement. As gagging clauses go, I don’t think many corporate lawyers could do better than that.
Melinda 12.15.07 at 11:57 pm
Engels said:
As I see it, that’s yet more incentive not to use Wikipedia.
notsneaky 12.16.07 at 12:06 am
My sense – and that’s all it is – is that Wikipedia has actually gotten worse over the past six months or so. To much popularity or whatever.
Walt 12.16.07 at 1:19 am
Interesting, notsneaky. My impression is the opposite. The articles are getting so detailed it’s hard to be a casual contributor in any area in which you are not an expert.
terence 12.16.07 at 1:33 am
Not Sneaky:
Yeah I sense that too. The biggest deterioration often being in the writing style of some of the high interest entries. This appears to stem from endless back and forth edits from the various opposing camps which leads to choppy pieces.
Also, some people just can’t – it seems – accept that their own pet project doesn’t need to be everywhere. The – relatively short considering – entry on Keynes currently, for example, has a section on Kenyes’s vs Hayek. Interesting perhaps, but, included in a relatively brief summary it’s unnecessary and detracts from the flow of the article. It also gives one the sense that someone out there just doesn’t consider any entry on economics complete if there isn’t at least one reference to Austrian economics in it.
Lyndon LaRouche’s name also pops up from time to time in economics entries which, to my admittedly non-expert eyes, seems as likely to be a product of the persistence of his fans rather than any actual contribution to the subject.
notsneaky 12.16.07 at 2:39 am
Walt,
Yeah, but too much detail can be a bad thing. And I agree with terence that the writing style has suffered.
This:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balassa-Samuelson_effect
used to be a fairly simple article on a pretty straight forward subject – why are price levels lower in poor countries. It’s been all kinds of expended and now has all kinds of unnecessary crap and bad faux-academic writing (e.g.If the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) hypothesis is largely responsible for the deviation from purchasing power parity it is asked why the effect’s principal assumption is true; – it is asked? By whom? This isn’t the usual ‘English as a second language’ thing either. It’s just plain ol’ bad writing)
And I’ve been seeing a lot more of this around lately.
abb1 12.16.07 at 9:29 am
I agree that they are getting longer and that it’s unpleasant, but luckily a typical one has the summary and table of content that usually allows you avoid reading a bunch of irrelevant details.
But yeah, that is a problem. They already have ‘discussions’ separated from the main entry; maybe they should break the main entry into two: ‘essentials’ and ‘details’. Or something.
MNPundit 12.16.07 at 5:22 pm
Whats IOW?
I’m a law student not a corporate lawyer so it’s just a gentleman’s agreement as it were.
Can’t have the benefits without doing your part to contribute where you can. If you’re going to complain and not fix the problem if you have the ability to do so, then what good does complaining do?
bemused 12.16.07 at 8:59 pm
I agree with Robin Green. “Trusting” wikipedia is the same problem you are faced with in reading any online (or paper) source of information. The thing about wikipedia is that there is typically a lot more ability to see the back story on why an article is the way it is. Also, anyone reading an article on gun control who hasn’t recently arrived from Syrtis Major ought to begin with an attitude of mistrust when reading any single article, whatever the source.
The scorn for Wikipedia from academics exhibits a strange lack of familiarity with other and older pop sources of information (c.f. World Book).
Timothy J. Carroll 12.17.07 at 2:35 pm
Good dissection of the two entities. I used your article as a link on my website in a similar article.
This is my take.
I hope you approve, as I am a loyal reader of Crooked Timber.
All the best!
tjc
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