Not really - Wikipedia still makes you say, "That can't possibly work." Think about it - the first and most definitive, accessible source on any subject you don't know anything about, is something strangers on the Internet can collaboratively edit, troll, or subtlely subvert. This just can't work - except that it does!
It goes counter to everything on the Internet. You would expect it to read like the comments section of a news article - instead, it's more definitive and factual than news articles themselves. Amazing!
In a more general sense this can be applied to any form of crowdsourcing. How can open source software work with a bunch of strangers adding code? How can citizen scientists provide accurate data? How can airbnb provide a good hospitality service? How can uber be safe and on time?
It's all just our natural prejudice towards people who aren't "qualified" or experienced. Humans are pretty terrible at judging qualification. Either they'll use some irrational subconscious criteria like the person dressing appropriately or appearing confident, or they'll rely on faulty measurements like scores on some test or having some sort of certification. Sure these are all useful to some extent but we have to start realizing that design has a limit, especially when you enter fields governed by things other than hard science.
> Think about it - the first and most definitive, accessible source on any subject you don't know anything about, is something strangers on the Internet can collaboratively edit, troll, or subtlely subvert.
Still the point is valid - the wildcard "anybody can edit" is not at all true, for many of the most 'followed' pages. Which are the one that are most interesting to change.
I've had old company listings disappear because they had no links. The company is gone! History! Nothing to link to. So that meant some busybody made it their job to delete that piece.
I disagree, though we may be living in different Internets :). At least for me, Wikipedia was an obvious continuation of everything I saw on-line when I was growing up.
Wikipedia works like every reasonable Internet community - read: just fine as long as someone is not trying to make money on it, and as long as those attempts are actively and ruthlessly punished. For some the default picture of Internet is comments under a news article on some big portal. For me, the default picture of the Internet is Hacker News.
When the SOPA/PIPA protests happened in 2012, I was really surprised to learn that students were upset since all they used as a resource was Wikipedia.
I mean for the most part I agree with the quoted articles in that Wikipedia is hard to "verify" other than what you believe sounds true. And sometimes this happens.
1) Someone write something on Wikipedia
2) Person changes it
3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia.
5) Repeat
It is a bit scary how much our source of information is just this one site source without decent "fact" checking other than turf war related reasons.
Here is one: I am pretty certain that Alicia Keys was born in 1980 and not 1981 as her Wikipedia article says. I have no way to prove this based on Wikipedia standards and if you look on "the Internet" you sometimes see 1980 and sometimes see 1981. The editors who turfed her page at the time sided with the 1981 timeline.
And how did they "prove" it was 1981? They showed links to some music related websites with articles about her saying she was born in that year. Completely ignoring alternative sources that said she was born in 1981.
I mean there are certain explanations on why this happened:
1) A major publication cited her DOB as 1981, others followed suit.
2) Alicia keys' handlers want her to be a year younger than she is, so she told her PR people to make sure everyone says she was born a year younger.
3) Someone misheard she was born in 1981, wrote that down on Wikipedia, then everyone else just used Wikipedia as a reference.
The problem I'm trying to get at is, Wikipedia is so popular its hard to figure out if people are just lazy and using it as a source, which perpetuates this cycle of "Fact F on Article A is true because of source S, Source S it turns out, used article A to look up Fact F and reprinted it without really fact checking F.
So yeah, popular, but hard to determine how accurate. /rant.
> 1) Someone write something on Wikipedia 2) Person changes it 3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia. 5) Repeat
If you are talking about the "news"-articles, you are right. With the same arguments I could argue that >almost every< historical fact/source is somehow modified, according to political/moral/memory problems.
Just to mention the total media collapse these days, where Russia & "The West" have so different facts put out in the wild, that you actually can't find what happened, by only reading and selecting a source. What's interesting is that both media don't provide any evidence of what actually happened, they just spread out opinions by other people, which are in most cases subjective.
What Wikipedia did ( and is doing very good ), though is that it gathered multiple knowledge bases under one roof - very general, sometimes, but accurate enough. For example, I've graduated law and could claim that what I can find as articles on that topic is very basic, but true. Also I'm professionally working as a web-dev and still can claim that most articles I find are precisely moderated and reflect the science-books.
It's so funny I always like to "Let's check wikipedia" and people usually reply "That's not an accurate source of information", which IMHO is wrong. Wikipedia is still the most accurate (general) knowledge base to me.
I remember that when Wikipedia was new, people were more willing to trust something that a random guy said on his website or in some book rather than what was written on Wikipedia. I never understood that. Wikipedia at least has more eyeballs.
I feel somewhat the opposite. The problem, as I see it, is the more people involved the more difficult it is to refute. It's the idea that the more people say it the more true it becomes. Never mind the blatant disregard for hard facts with articles based on subjective opinions in certain topics, Wikipedia is not an objective source of information to me. Sure, I use it occasionally for generic stuff but I also pay attention to the listed sources. I read them for myself not trusting the people that created the article on Wikipedia.
I agree that you have to be very critical of Wikipedia articles. Often they are of poor quality and contain mistakes. But that is true for most sources.
My point is that I don't see how Wikipedia is worse than some random website or book.
Now try to follow the same thought process for other sources of information. Ever see a citation in a newspaper? How do you check the facts on the evening news? What is the sequence of events leading to something being reported (and believed by the vast majority of people reading it)?
1) Reporter discovers something (how???) 2) Reporter submits it 3) Some editor approves/rejects it (how/why???) 4) A very good looking person presents it to you on TV along with audio and visual designed to make it look plausible.
If it turns out to be untrue, is it reported? What if you discover that it is untrue yourself? How do you correct it?
So yeah, even more popular that wikipedia, but hard to determine how accurate.
It's really hard to argue against consensus reality. If enough people are all convinced that Alicia Keys is born in 1981, they will all keep repeating it until it's true.
My own pet battle in this war for truth is that "open source" was coined as a synonym for "free software" in 1998 and nobody called free software "open source" before then. There are so many people who argue so vehemently that "open source" was a term that people used naturally for software before 1998, and this gets repeated so often as to become consensus reality.
It's worse that that: telling people the facts doesn't necessarily change their minds, often it just hardens their existing beliefs. See, for example, The Backfire Effect
In cases where people have very strong beliefs, they would rather abandon reality than change them.
It's quite common in tech, but is it worth worrying about? US society survives despite all the birthers, con-trail conspiracists, creationists, anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers, people who think the moon landings were staged in Arizona, and so on.
In that context, I think Wikipedia is doing pretty well....
It's so scary when I think about myself and how often do I do that. I want my beliefs to reflect reality, but how well can I do it? How is anyone aware of this bias not afraid that they believe nothing but lies?
Do most people care that much about particular beliefs? Most of us recognize that the world changes, and more information becomes available, and we update our brains on an hourly basis.
It's only really a problem for "single-issue fanatics" or extremists or whatever: those people who stake so much of their intellectual, emotional and sometimes financial capital on a particular point of view that they have to defend it regardless of the facts. Creationists, for example.
The more interesting one was Paloma Faith, whose incorrect age had been widely reported by some reputable U.K. national newspapers. In 2012 Wikipedia editors turned up early and local news coverage that gave her correct age, two years before the U.K. national news eventually reported that she had been lying about her age. They haggled over whether the national newspapers outweighed the local/early news and the information put out by the school that she had attended, for the better part of a year, getting sidetracked several times along the way.
I documented another case that wasn't biographical:
Well, Wikipedia is pretty famous for its fairly vicious politics, infighting and general difficulty of getting incorrect articles fixed if someone has decided to camp on them. Whenever I read it I'm constantly amazed that it works as well as it does, given that whenever I peer behind the curtain what's going on there is fairly appalling.
I remember some years ago the wiki page for Bitcoin insisted it was a ponzi scheme. Wikipedia has a page that defines the essential elements of a ponzi scheme and Bitcoin didn't meet them, but no matter - edits to remove this statement were immediately reverted and diverted to an endless discussion page in which the camper in question couldn't be persuaded by any means, not logic, not evidence, not weight of people disagreeing. I see that these days the issue has been "resolved" by having an entire section called "ponzi scheme dispute" that consists merely of different pundits contradicting each other.
> these days the issue has been "resolved" by having an entire section called "ponzi scheme dispute" that consists merely of different pundits contradicting each other.
IMHO that is a good thing more often that not. It means that someone who has heard the rumour will check Wikipedia and find a couple paragraphs about the subject, with links to the most trusted agreed-upon references about who said what.
The alternative is not having the section and requiring those same readers to search their own way through the internet, without having any idea of what sources to trust, and likely getting only one side of the controversy.
It's definitely a better situation than it was, insomuch as at least people can make up their mind about it.
That said, call me a pedant, but the term has a clear definition. The statement is either right or wrong. Being able to cite people who merely assert an opinion doesn't make them automatically worth having on an encyclopedia page.
As examples, the wiki page for Barack Obama doesn't mention the claim that he's a Muslim or that his birth certificate was faked anywhere .... because it's factually incorrect nonsense that shouldn't be on a wiki page. Ditto for the page on climate change.
But this sort of thing seems very hit or miss. Whether pages can be kept factual or not seems to depend just as much on whether someone reverts every change to the page, as the facts themselves.
Mostly it's about recentism. Wikipedia, as all encyclopedias, is usually very good for stuff that doesn't change frequently or in large amounts.
But there is a continuing problem with recent and current events. You get a lot of people trying to produce a single article, and disputes occur.
One example: the Amanda Knox article spent literally years in a slow-moving and entrenched edit war (which nearly gave me a hernia trying to unpick) over whether she was guilty or not - all of which was up in the air due to pending court cases.
As soon as the case died down and tied up, the article instantly became a dead zone and is mostly OK.
My recollections from Wikipedia back in 2005 were quite impressive given the massive scale and open contribution barriers of the project.
In fact, the reception is just as split today as it was back then. Especially in light of increased grievances regarding how Wikipedia's bureaucracy operates.
Indeed. There's studies in how to bias an article whilst maintaining the illusion of NPOV (simple example: if you support X, always add an adjective when describing its detractors, but leave supporters unqualified). There's also pretty well documented cases of people with an axe to grind on specific subjects locking an article in their favour.
Sorry, I don't. I recall reading something very intelligent about the edit war between Israeli and Palestinian sympathisers, but google didn't yield it up. (In general terms, it's quite hard to google stuff /about/ wikipedia.)
One special kind of bias I'm aware of is something obviously done by religious fanatics who invest significant amount of energy adding "a religion section" to every famous person's biography and formulating and selecting his/hers statements as the support for the belief even when the statement was obviously made as the opposite.
As the most prominent example, the religious people take a deep care not to have this quote of Einstein on his main Wikipedia page: "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends."
The goal is obvious: to present "the smartest people" as believers, "one of them."
Ha ha. I've noticed there's a particularly active British contingent as well who make sure to add a media section that cites primarily British media sources or usually in article about inventions and stuff will add a section to show that the actual origin was some obscure British inventor who had invented it before everybody else. Judging from the slant of many articles I've noticed, that country seems to be a little overrepresented among contributors on English language wikipedia (relative to other English speaking countries)
You might be surprised. Population of US: 300m,
South Africa 50m, Canada 35m (but not all of those are English-speaking), Australia 20, New Zealand <5, Ireland <5, UK: 65m. You can cut this multiple ways.
So, the UK is the second largest English-speaking country by population. Also, you could say that around 1 in 7 of the English speaking world is from the UK (and that's a lot).
And that's before we consider the ridiculous amount of power and wealth the British Empire had, and just plain history. It's not entirely surprising to see the UK cropping up almost everywhere.
From what I've seen it's usually even less sophisticated than that: simply add a long list of "criticisms", "objections" or "controversy" related to the subject matter and provided they have links to notionally reliable sources they'll make the subject matter look more contentious than it is, and tend to survive attempts to remove per UNDUE WEIGHT because who's to argue with a whole list of reliable sources? For bonus points, delete universally understood facts for not having a citation or for merely paraphrasing the source.
The sourcing policy of course is most skewed towards the cranks when the subject matter is simply too esoteric or plain ridiculous for any reliable source to have ever bothered attempting a detailed critique.
I think the community is waking up to this issue; there have been recent bans for people exhibiting this behaviour. It's hard though because you have to unpick a pattern of behaviour and show it's malicious.
It has a huge advantage of brand recognition, which means it's often the first result people click on and the first page someone links to if they think their readers might want a term defined. You know it's probably not the best description of the topic, but it will tend to give a text-based answer that tend to strike a reasonable balance between length and detail, be easy to navigate, have input from both sides of the debate if there is a prominent debate, and definitely won't try to install malware on your computer or play video in your face.
For reasons related to the above, afaik Google has never tried to nerf its prominence in search results, unlike profit-seeking content farms. That's probably an underestimated reason for its SEO success as well.
Well, you are saying (correctly, IMHO) that for users doing a search, without previous knowledge of what are the best sources of information on a particular subject, will choose Wikipedia in a list of possible links for the reasons you mention.
On these assumptions I don't see any reason why Google should "nerf" its results, since they effectively present what the user is most likely to be looking for :)
That was what I meant by "for related reasons". The flip side of that is many of the commercial content farms that Google intentionally nerfed usually gave people exactly what they were looking for too.
And on a related note, "what the user is most likely to be looking for" is path dependent. Unlike other content sites, I rarely bother using Wikipedia search, because I can invariably find the page by Googling from my browser. If the relevant Wikipedia result wasn't consistently on the first page of Google, I'd tend to go direct to WP when actively looking for Wikipedia articles like I do with other less search-optimised but often superior websites. And if that was the case, Wikipedia would almost never be the result I wanted when Googling subject matter, much like although I'm often interested in BBC News, finding the Beeb's take on a subject is never the reason for me using Google News.
Who wants to scroll all over a new site to find information when you already know how Wikipedia is laid out and functions? If I'm looking for sources, scroll to the bottom. If I'm looking for history, check after the index.
With other sites, you often have to wade through ads and read the whole thing just to answer a simple question. And most of the time, I'm just looking for details on things I already know.
Isn't it an indicator of success that it is the first result in almost every Google query? The articles don't write themselves and Google tries to show the most relevant information, hence the articles must have some standing before they percolate up the results.
It's not as simple as that. Does Google show the most relevant information, or does it show a non-profit link that suppresses its competitors, and that it can scrape without any legal issues? Does it promote Wikipedia to give its search results authority, even when other sites may have better and more accurate information? I explore some of these issues here: http://newslines.org/blog/google-and-wikipedia-best-friends-...
I imagine their ranking metrics show that Wikipedia pages are very popular with their users, which is why they've steadily moved up in the rankings. It makes sense too - Wikipedia gives a general rundown of a topic in a standard format, so for a initial search to learn the basics of something it's a great destination. Can't see much of a conspiracy here.
"It’s hard to believe today, but 10 years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment run by utopian radicals."
I have absolutely no recollection of this. Wikipedia has had some trouble, just like any other successful project, but has in my view been widely regarded as a pretty successful project that everyone wants to have around (unless you sold encyclopedias).
I also have no recollection of this. 10 years ago I was in college and Wikipedia was ubiquitous enough that every professor had a policy about its use. It never seemed doomed, maybe it seemed to be finding its place, but to me not doomed.
In my experience, 10 years ago the policy was "Don't use it". It was treated as untrustworthy, despite other encylopedias being acceptable. I haven't been in school in a while so I can't say if attitudes have changed. But I'd hope that modern instructors would consider any encyclopedias to be too generic for citing in research, but acceptable for understanding the basics of a topic.
2 years ago it was banned in my sixth form still, but the sources at the bottom were allowed. The principle was "anyone can edit it, therefore only trust things with multiple sources". A reasonable policy really.
> 2 years ago it was banned in my sixth form still, but the sources at the bottom were allowed.
That's a really good lesson about sources in general. One can't even trust a primary source, except as an indicator about what someone at close hand thought to write down; it and everything which references it will have biases, slant and perspective.
There is such a thing as truth, but it can only be approximated.
Technically, that's always been the case for encyclopedias for any college serious about academics. You should cite the source, not the editorialized version of it.
I think it's important to point out the huge generational gap that formed around that opinion. It was really only the Baby Boomers who looked down on Wikipedia during that time. We all had a sense of their growing lack of relevance back then, but it hasn't been until today that we generally all agree the Boomers won't regain relevance.
At least for my fields of interest, encyclopediae are never considered appropriate references for college student papers—Wikipedia is not exceptional in that regard.
That said, Wikipedia is untrustworthy. It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors. It's important to treat it with a healthy dose of skepticism and base research work on original sources instead. Regardless, though, it's an amazing resource that I'm sure has accelerated research productivity at all levels.
It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors.
The policy pretty much everywhere that I have encountered, since I was in elementary school in the 1980s, has been that tertiary sources like encyclopedias should never be cited for the information they contain (except when you are citing it because the point of interest isn't the information that is in the encyclopedia but the fact that it is in the encyclopedia, such as if you are writing about how certain events are presented in various venues.) I think the first elementary school research paper I did was an exception and permitted citing one encyclopedia among the three sources required.
Tertiary sources have always been, in most venues, "acceptable" only as research tools to find primary and secondary sources,
(Oddly, though, its become common in the last few years for even reputable news media sources to cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source. I don't see that really as progress in Wikipedia's acceptance so much as a sign of the increasing laxity of standards in journalism.)
WRT your parenthetical, it's historically normal for journalists to have lax standards. The web didn't invent pressure to publish. I think you're actually seeing increased transparency.
Honestly, I feel like High School teachers don't like Wikipedia because it's overpowered. What's the point of making a research assignment when Wikipedia already contains all the research a student could want?
> In my experience, 10 years ago the policy was "Don't use it"
IIRC from back then it was more like "never us is as a main source" and "for [deity]'s sake don't cite it", which I think is still pretty much the case.
It was often a useful way to find other useful sources though, either through explicit links in the articles or by introducing the reader to useful search terms they'd not thought of or otherwise been introduced to, and people were encouraged to use it for that purpose (but that purpose only).
Not sure if this is a universal change, but at least in my experience with professors the past few years I've been told it's ok to use code examples on Wikipedia for stuff or that I can cite articles.
But on the other hand, I've had other professors still say we aren't allowed.
This is my recollection as well. I and everyone I knew thought it was the bees knees. I'm sure they had trouble with getting money and scaling and bad-faith editors, but the basic idea of the project was and is thought of as awesome.
Don't remember this either. I distinctly remember using it on recommendation of my older cousins for elementary school essays and the teachers loved everything I wrote.
Besides the articles about how a select few editors actually maintain the bulk of Wikipedia, I too have no recollection of Wikipedia being considered a "doomed experiment". I've been working in the industry since before 2000, so I'm not sure what happened in 2005 to warrant this.
I remember this. I was out of school a couple of years by that time.
If you read the history of ubiquitous technologies that we take for granted, you'll see the same attitude repeated. The car, plane, radio, television, light bulb, the UN, etc. you'd have to look at the really early form of these things.
I started editing wikipedia in 2002, when there were just a few hundred editors, and you could still measure the zeitgeist by trolling Recent Changes. I used to get very annoyed at how much time people wasted editing 'List of songs whose title is not in the lyrics'. The early years were rocky.
Ha, that page. I haven't looked at it for years and years but it used to be one of my favorite examples of Wikipedia nonsense -- the page was created in order to have "Bohemian Rhapsody" on it: that was the entire purpose of its existence. But eventually a few editors decided "Bohemian Rhapsody" didn't count and started edit wars whenever someone tried to add it back in. Good times.
>"It’s hard to believe today, but 10 years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment run by utopian radicals."
I can't believe nobody has responded to this with [citation needed] yet! ;)
OK seriously now, I kind of remember some rumbling about the challenges facing the project: crowd-sourcing a general purpose encyclopedia, generating enough money to keep things running without showing ads - who would write the content, the quality would be terrible, etc.
I'm not sure it was "widely" considered as doomed, but I'm also sure the breadth and depth of topics and overall result ranges from outright shock to pleasant surprise of the naysayers.
Wikipedia has flaws but overall it is a great reference on a massive variety of topics. Here's an anecdotal example: I'm a hiker and a friend and I ran across a weird looking fruit on the trail. After taking pics and asking around we were told it was an "Osage orange". Never heard of it, so I went to Wikipedia and found a lot of info and yes, that was definitely it. I can't imagine Encyclopedia Brittanica, World Book, any of those I remember from my youth, would have had as much info on the Osage orange!
A neat exercise for anyone who thinks Wikipedia isn't a useful reference is to pick ten random subjects from Encyclopedia Britannica and see how many of them have an article in Wikipedia. (Answer is most likely "all of them".) Then do the opposite:
Space Flight Operations Center (in wiki but not E.B.)
Hypertrocta (in wiki but not E.B.)
Sokół motorcycles (in wiki but not E.B.)
Paradeudorix petersi (in wiki but not E.B.)
Bella Voce (in wiki but not E.B.)
...and so on...
Now there is a certain amount of vandalism, rumor, political skew, etc. so you should take what you read in Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but at least it's there. Most of the time it will point you to a more authoritative source in case you think someone's being deceptive about Osage oranges.
I remember people talking about how it would be inaccurate and full of nonsense because people would just put in whatever they wanted. Britannica would be the source of wisdom, and Wikipedia would be from the masses, full of errors. This was in 2002 or so.
I can confirm I heard this sentiment echoed back then and I'm pretty sure that this is what the article title is referring to. That nobody here remembers this point of view surprises me, frankly.
For me Wikipedia and Stackoverflow are now only reference material; - I rarely even consider contributing. I still pay a bit once in a while for the fundraisers but my feeling is that will decrease as well.
Wikipedia is what convinced everyone that you could "crowd-source" everything. That inevitably spawned all sorts of doomed experiments. But the only ones who considered Wikipedia a "doomed experiment" were those who had a vested interest in that being true.
> There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it provides accurate, comprehensive information to billions of people every day.
Some random Internet stat says there are about 3 billion users on the Internet. It's reasonable to assume that Wikipedia gets used by at 1-2 billion at minimum.
https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ indicates 453M unique visitors in the month of April 2015, so most certainly the claim of "billions of people every day" is wrong by at least one order of magnitude.
The current example of similar style "claim chowder" is probably Bob Lutz' commentary on Tesla. And I would do the same thing I did back then re: Wikipedia: acknowledge but discount.
Upper management sent out an email my workforce telling us "to beware the Wikis". Their stance was that since anyone can edit it, it can not be trusted and that it could potentially host malicious content.
Today it's just widely considered a very popular but doomed experiment. Wikipedia is corrupt as hell and the power of editing important pages lies in the hands of a few elites.
It would seem there's a conflict of interest between Wikipedia and those that report on it, since there's some overlap there. Reminds me of the old Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
The talk was that it was doomed, but from inside it was blindingly obvious that, "if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia." I said so at the time: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/277688.html
This article is essentially an approximation of a Jay-Z song, celebrating the triumph over adversity and haters. If Wikipedia started out selling crack the similarities would be overwhelming.
Personal anecdote: I was in a location where Jimmy Wales introduced himself in 2007 with a simple, "My name is Jimmy Wales, I started Wikipedia". Some 50 very senior people from many industries and professions all said "thank you!" enthusiastically in response.
It wasn't considered a failure or doomed in any circle I frequented 10 years ago, and I did a lot (academia, business, entrepreneurship, makers, more) -- and it wasn't so with anyone of the "general population" that I associated with. The only less-than-positive remarks I've heard about Wikipedia where from people who snarked "but anyone anywhere can change a value any time, how can you ever trust that?" Which is, of course, true -- but a variation of which applies to e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica just as well.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadIt goes counter to everything on the Internet. You would expect it to read like the comments section of a news article - instead, it's more definitive and factual than news articles themselves. Amazing!
It's all just our natural prejudice towards people who aren't "qualified" or experienced. Humans are pretty terrible at judging qualification. Either they'll use some irrational subconscious criteria like the person dressing appropriately or appearing confident, or they'll rely on faulty measurements like scores on some test or having some sort of certification. Sure these are all useful to some extent but we have to start realizing that design has a limit, especially when you enter fields governed by things other than hard science.
That's not true. Go to this page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_celebrities
pick a list and add yourself into it. Within an hour your change will have been reverted.
This claim that anybody can edit wikipedia is bullshit and rather annoying.
I've had old company listings disappear because they had no links. The company is gone! History! Nothing to link to. So that meant some busybody made it their job to delete that piece.
Wikipedia works like every reasonable Internet community - read: just fine as long as someone is not trying to make money on it, and as long as those attempts are actively and ruthlessly punished. For some the default picture of Internet is comments under a news article on some big portal. For me, the default picture of the Internet is Hacker News.
I mean for the most part I agree with the quoted articles in that Wikipedia is hard to "verify" other than what you believe sounds true. And sometimes this happens.
1) Someone write something on Wikipedia 2) Person changes it 3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia. 5) Repeat
It is a bit scary how much our source of information is just this one site source without decent "fact" checking other than turf war related reasons.
Here is one: I am pretty certain that Alicia Keys was born in 1980 and not 1981 as her Wikipedia article says. I have no way to prove this based on Wikipedia standards and if you look on "the Internet" you sometimes see 1980 and sometimes see 1981. The editors who turfed her page at the time sided with the 1981 timeline.
And how did they "prove" it was 1981? They showed links to some music related websites with articles about her saying she was born in that year. Completely ignoring alternative sources that said she was born in 1981.
I mean there are certain explanations on why this happened: 1) A major publication cited her DOB as 1981, others followed suit. 2) Alicia keys' handlers want her to be a year younger than she is, so she told her PR people to make sure everyone says she was born a year younger. 3) Someone misheard she was born in 1981, wrote that down on Wikipedia, then everyone else just used Wikipedia as a reference.
The problem I'm trying to get at is, Wikipedia is so popular its hard to figure out if people are just lazy and using it as a source, which perpetuates this cycle of "Fact F on Article A is true because of source S, Source S it turns out, used article A to look up Fact F and reprinted it without really fact checking F.
So yeah, popular, but hard to determine how accurate. /rant.
As illustrated in this useful infographic: https://xkcd.com/978/
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting
Just to mention the total media collapse these days, where Russia & "The West" have so different facts put out in the wild, that you actually can't find what happened, by only reading and selecting a source. What's interesting is that both media don't provide any evidence of what actually happened, they just spread out opinions by other people, which are in most cases subjective.
What Wikipedia did ( and is doing very good ), though is that it gathered multiple knowledge bases under one roof - very general, sometimes, but accurate enough. For example, I've graduated law and could claim that what I can find as articles on that topic is very basic, but true. Also I'm professionally working as a web-dev and still can claim that most articles I find are precisely moderated and reflect the science-books.
It's so funny I always like to "Let's check wikipedia" and people usually reply "That's not an accurate source of information", which IMHO is wrong. Wikipedia is still the most accurate (general) knowledge base to me.
My point is that I don't see how Wikipedia is worse than some random website or book.
1) Reporter discovers something (how???) 2) Reporter submits it 3) Some editor approves/rejects it (how/why???) 4) A very good looking person presents it to you on TV along with audio and visual designed to make it look plausible.
If it turns out to be untrue, is it reported? What if you discover that it is untrue yourself? How do you correct it?
So yeah, even more popular that wikipedia, but hard to determine how accurate.
But who cares?
Can you? These things aren't exactly public record, are they?
Genealogy is a perfectly good answer.
My own pet battle in this war for truth is that "open source" was coined as a synonym for "free software" in 1998 and nobody called free software "open source" before then. There are so many people who argue so vehemently that "open source" was a term that people used naturally for software before 1998, and this gets repeated so often as to become consensus reality.
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
In cases where people have very strong beliefs, they would rather abandon reality than change them.
It's quite common in tech, but is it worth worrying about? US society survives despite all the birthers, con-trail conspiracists, creationists, anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers, people who think the moon landings were staged in Arizona, and so on.
In that context, I think Wikipedia is doing pretty well....
It's only really a problem for "single-issue fanatics" or extremists or whatever: those people who stake so much of their intellectual, emotional and sometimes financial capital on a particular point of view that they have to defend it regardless of the facts. Creationists, for example.
I documented another case that wasn't biographical:
* http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/le...
I remember some years ago the wiki page for Bitcoin insisted it was a ponzi scheme. Wikipedia has a page that defines the essential elements of a ponzi scheme and Bitcoin didn't meet them, but no matter - edits to remove this statement were immediately reverted and diverted to an endless discussion page in which the camper in question couldn't be persuaded by any means, not logic, not evidence, not weight of people disagreeing. I see that these days the issue has been "resolved" by having an entire section called "ponzi scheme dispute" that consists merely of different pundits contradicting each other.
Still, this is better than it used to be.
IMHO that is a good thing more often that not. It means that someone who has heard the rumour will check Wikipedia and find a couple paragraphs about the subject, with links to the most trusted agreed-upon references about who said what.
The alternative is not having the section and requiring those same readers to search their own way through the internet, without having any idea of what sources to trust, and likely getting only one side of the controversy.
That said, call me a pedant, but the term has a clear definition. The statement is either right or wrong. Being able to cite people who merely assert an opinion doesn't make them automatically worth having on an encyclopedia page.
As examples, the wiki page for Barack Obama doesn't mention the claim that he's a Muslim or that his birth certificate was faked anywhere .... because it's factually incorrect nonsense that shouldn't be on a wiki page. Ditto for the page on climate change.
But this sort of thing seems very hit or miss. Whether pages can be kept factual or not seems to depend just as much on whether someone reverts every change to the page, as the facts themselves.
But there is a continuing problem with recent and current events. You get a lot of people trying to produce a single article, and disputes occur.
One example: the Amanda Knox article spent literally years in a slow-moving and entrenched edit war (which nearly gave me a hernia trying to unpick) over whether she was guilty or not - all of which was up in the air due to pending court cases.
As soon as the case died down and tied up, the article instantly became a dead zone and is mostly OK.
In fact, the reception is just as split today as it was back then. Especially in light of increased grievances regarding how Wikipedia's bureaucracy operates.
As the most prominent example, the religious people take a deep care not to have this quote of Einstein on his main Wikipedia page: "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends."
The goal is obvious: to present "the smartest people" as believers, "one of them."
So, the UK is the second largest English-speaking country by population. Also, you could say that around 1 in 7 of the English speaking world is from the UK (and that's a lot).
And that's before we consider the ridiculous amount of power and wealth the British Empire had, and just plain history. It's not entirely surprising to see the UK cropping up almost everywhere.
The sourcing policy of course is most skewed towards the cranks when the subject matter is simply too esoteric or plain ridiculous for any reliable source to have ever bothered attempting a detailed critique.
I think the community is waking up to this issue; there have been recent bans for people exhibiting this behaviour. It's hard though because you have to unpick a pattern of behaviour and show it's malicious.
For reasons related to the above, afaik Google has never tried to nerf its prominence in search results, unlike profit-seeking content farms. That's probably an underestimated reason for its SEO success as well.
On these assumptions I don't see any reason why Google should "nerf" its results, since they effectively present what the user is most likely to be looking for :)
And on a related note, "what the user is most likely to be looking for" is path dependent. Unlike other content sites, I rarely bother using Wikipedia search, because I can invariably find the page by Googling from my browser. If the relevant Wikipedia result wasn't consistently on the first page of Google, I'd tend to go direct to WP when actively looking for Wikipedia articles like I do with other less search-optimised but often superior websites. And if that was the case, Wikipedia would almost never be the result I wanted when Googling subject matter, much like although I'm often interested in BBC News, finding the Beeb's take on a subject is never the reason for me using Google News.
With other sites, you often have to wade through ads and read the whole thing just to answer a simple question. And most of the time, I'm just looking for details on things I already know.
I have absolutely no recollection of this. Wikipedia has had some trouble, just like any other successful project, but has in my view been widely regarded as a pretty successful project that everyone wants to have around (unless you sold encyclopedias).
That's a really good lesson about sources in general. One can't even trust a primary source, except as an indicator about what someone at close hand thought to write down; it and everything which references it will have biases, slant and perspective.
There is such a thing as truth, but it can only be approximated.
That said, Wikipedia is untrustworthy. It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors. It's important to treat it with a healthy dose of skepticism and base research work on original sources instead. Regardless, though, it's an amazing resource that I'm sure has accelerated research productivity at all levels.
Tertiary sources have always been, in most venues, "acceptable" only as research tools to find primary and secondary sources,
(Oddly, though, its become common in the last few years for even reputable news media sources to cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source. I don't see that really as progress in Wikipedia's acceptance so much as a sign of the increasing laxity of standards in journalism.)
Well, for academic purposes, it still is.
But then again, as then, it's still used for those purposes now, despite the policy.
IIRC from back then it was more like "never us is as a main source" and "for [deity]'s sake don't cite it", which I think is still pretty much the case.
It was often a useful way to find other useful sources though, either through explicit links in the articles or by introducing the reader to useful search terms they'd not thought of or otherwise been introduced to, and people were encouraged to use it for that purpose (but that purpose only).
But on the other hand, I've had other professors still say we aren't allowed.
Maybe they're warming to the idea now.
If you read the history of ubiquitous technologies that we take for granted, you'll see the same attitude repeated. The car, plane, radio, television, light bulb, the UN, etc. you'd have to look at the really early form of these things.
I can't believe nobody has responded to this with [citation needed] yet! ;)
OK seriously now, I kind of remember some rumbling about the challenges facing the project: crowd-sourcing a general purpose encyclopedia, generating enough money to keep things running without showing ads - who would write the content, the quality would be terrible, etc.
I'm not sure it was "widely" considered as doomed, but I'm also sure the breadth and depth of topics and overall result ranges from outright shock to pleasant surprise of the naysayers.
Wikipedia has flaws but overall it is a great reference on a massive variety of topics. Here's an anecdotal example: I'm a hiker and a friend and I ran across a weird looking fruit on the trail. After taking pics and asking around we were told it was an "Osage orange". Never heard of it, so I went to Wikipedia and found a lot of info and yes, that was definitely it. I can't imagine Encyclopedia Brittanica, World Book, any of those I remember from my youth, would have had as much info on the Osage orange!
Space Flight Operations Center (in wiki but not E.B.) Hypertrocta (in wiki but not E.B.) Sokół motorcycles (in wiki but not E.B.) Paradeudorix petersi (in wiki but not E.B.) Bella Voce (in wiki but not E.B.) ...and so on...
Now there is a certain amount of vandalism, rumor, political skew, etc. so you should take what you read in Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but at least it's there. Most of the time it will point you to a more authoritative source in case you think someone's being deceptive about Osage oranges.
It's a fair question. Here's what I could find from 2005 ...
"The One for All model has delivered solid results in a remarkably short time" http://www.wired.com/2005/03/wiki/
Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems Yes it's garbage, but it's delivered so much faster! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_pr...
For me Wikipedia and Stackoverflow are now only reference material; - I rarely even consider contributing. I still pay a bit once in a while for the fundraisers but my feeling is that will decrease as well.
Comprehensive? What?
https://reportcard.wmflabs.org
Are other medias better in that respect?
Good on ya, Wikipedia! You've come a long way up.
It wasn't considered a failure or doomed in any circle I frequented 10 years ago, and I did a lot (academia, business, entrepreneurship, makers, more) -- and it wasn't so with anyone of the "general population" that I associated with. The only less-than-positive remarks I've heard about Wikipedia where from people who snarked "but anyone anywhere can change a value any time, how can you ever trust that?" Which is, of course, true -- but a variation of which applies to e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica just as well.