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Wayne Osborne
Byrne Robotics Member
Manhunter
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 3817
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| Posted: 14 September 2005 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | 1
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And so the torch of knowledge is once again passed. From the
kindling hands of Herodotus down through the ages to the electronic
grasp of.............Jimbo?
I weep for the future.
WO
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Ed Deans.
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 28 November 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 857
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| Posted: 14 September 2005 at 11:07pm | IP Logged | 2
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I use Wikipedia from time to time. It's useful on some subjects but the Byrne
article has been pretty poor.
I have a feeling that has to do with the subject being controversial among an
obsessive and juvenile contingent. It's like a horde of Michael Moore writing
the G.W. Bush's biographical entry.
I hope for both Wikipedia users and JB, an evenhanded and accurate article
can be created.
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Carl Dompok
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
Location: Malaysia
Posts: 69
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| Posted: 15 September 2005 at 1:11am | IP Logged | 3
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No doubt that it's interesting to read Wikipedia but readers should keep an open mind upon the accuracy of the entries. I don't know how long wikipedia can last since there are many debatable 'articles' that causes a lot of confusion.
Its like reading The Enquirer to me now...entertaining to everybody except the person being written about.
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Mike Tishman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 25 July 2005
Posts: 229
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| Posted: 15 September 2005 at 1:57am | IP Logged | 4
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Jon Juzan wrote:
| As long as they are stating that anyone can edit it
(hence, open to inaccuracies), they are doing all they need to
do. |
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Exactly. It's also worth noting that edited media are also subject to
errors, inaccuracies, biases, etc. The difference is that they don't
wear that fact on their sleeve, which has a tendency to lull people
into a false sense of security. You should always treat
everything you read with a grain of salt, Wikipedia no more or
less than other sources.
Matt Hawes wrote:
| I wasn't going to weigh in on this matter until I
read the above. ALWAYS write to the top in serious matters. |
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The whole point of a wiki is that it doesn't have a top. It's
decentralized and user-driven with distributed authority, like open
source software. Jim Wales doesn't "run" the place, he just facilitates
it. We (the broad community of the internet) "run" Wikipedia as a sort
of ad hocracy. Trying to go to "the top" strikes me as the single least
effective way to deal with this issue.
Personally, I feel that this is often a more sound way of organizing
something, because it applies evolutionary principles to the
development of the enterprise. Correct information is almost always
more useful than incorrect information. The people who use Wikipedia
also run it, and they want it to be as useful as possible. Overall, on
the large scale, millions of pairs of eyes poring over the encyclopedia
daily looking for useful information are going to be more effective in
the long-term at keeping out errors than a more limited number of
official experts.
Again, the most useful parallel is with the open-source software
movement. Linux has far fewer security holes than Windows, because
anyone can look over the source code and fix mistakes, instead of only
the chosen priesthood in Redmond, WA. Fresh people looking at the code
spot things that one closed circle of people are never likely to see.
Overall, I think any attempt to try to force Gamaliel Snapdragon or
Jimbo Wales or anyone else to make the changes you want is just futile
and counterproductive. If you want the entry to look different, edit
it. If you're concerned about people coming in and changing it, monitor
it periodically - it's like the Adopt a Highway program. If people
insist on trolling in the JB entry, that will rapidly become obvious if
we're diligent about monitoring the entry and correcting it when errors
are introduced.
The whole point of Wikipedia is that it's participatory. It's never
going to reflect your views unless you participate in it actively.
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Ian Evans
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 September 2004
Posts: 2433
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| Posted: 15 September 2005 at 2:55am | IP Logged | 5
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Mike wrote:
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It's also worth noting that edited media are also subject to errors, inaccuracies, biases, etc. The difference is that they don't wear that fact on their sleeve, which has a tendency to lull people into a false sense of security. You should always treat everything you read with a grain of salt, Wikipedia no more or less than other sources.
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Well I would disagree. I think one must consider the source. 'No more or less than other sources' suggests that one give the same credence to a report found in the National Enquirer that one gives to the Washington Post. It is a fallacy that all sources have the same capacity for abuse, since editorial process involves a (admittedly fallible) system of checks that are carried out before the material is published - and, crucially, publishers of print media have the threat of litigation hanging over them that, for one reason or another, internet sites do not. So the 'grain of salt' needed for Wikipedia would be more like a large barrel.
And I am not an unsophisticated reader - I teach English - but without this discussion might well have taken what I read on the Wikipedia site at face value, since experience has led me to believe that official, authoritative looking-and-sounding documents ARE generally subject to the kind of quality control that makes gross errors unlikely...that this is not true in this case has come as a surprise
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Mike Tishman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 25 July 2005
Posts: 229
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| Posted: 15 September 2005 at 3:07am | IP Logged | 6
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In my experience, inaccurate information on Wikipedia has been the
exception rather than the rule. It's had a far greater success rate for
me than almost any other source, "legitimate media" or otherwise. It
does more harm than good, overall, and I think the approach most
posters on this thread have towards the whole thing is totally
counterproductive.
I mean, look at what's actually happened here. The errors in question
are not currently up on the site. This board noticed errors, and they
were edited out. Simple as that.
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Ian Evans
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 September 2004
Posts: 2433
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| Posted: 15 September 2005 at 3:28am | IP Logged | 7
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I appreciate that Mike, but how many times does one come back to re-read articles to make sure they were accurate? In the minds of anyone who has read this information before the damage is already done. Having no system of checks in place BEFORE the material is disseminated is a dangerous way of going about things. Imho.
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Mike Tishman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 25 July 2005
Posts: 229
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| Posted: 15 September 2005 at 3:47am | IP Logged | 8
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I don't know anyone who uses Wikipedia who doesn't get how it works,
and doesn't read it with the appropriate attitude. I'm kind of shocked
to see how little people know about it in this forum, frankly, but in
my experience that lack of knowledge is unusual. On top of that, I
think the actual error rate is low. I really think people in this forum
are drastically overstating the actual problems here.
That said, yes, of course, there are dangers with open source,
collaborative, amateur media, but there are dangers with the
traditional media, also. And, well, this is where media is going in the
future. The internet is a massive cooperation amplifier, and audience
fragmentation and niche marketing are stripping away market share from
major traditional media outlets to the point where it's getting
difficult to visualize a future where the modern media and publishing
conglomerates as we know them are sustainable.
Simply put, the potential profits in running a big centralized
publishing or broadcasting outfit are shrinking, and organizing
large-scale amateur collaborative enterprises like Wikipedia are
getting easier and easier. There really aren't a lot of ways that a
scenario like that can play out except for the decline of traditional
media and the rise of things like Wikipedia (and file-sharing networks
and such).
When I was in college, I did a self-designed concentration in European
intellectual and cultural history, and followed up with some grad work
in the history and sociology of science. If there's one thing I
learned, it's that there's no stopping waves of interlocking
technological and cultural change like this. Whenever they happen, a
bunch of people rail against the changes and another bunch embrace
them. The former inevitably drown, and the latter inevitably prosper.
It's fruitless to shake one's fist at Wikipedia. We need to learn to
work with it. If we want it to work better, we have to participate
actively, because that's how the whole thing works. If that means
someone on this board checks on the JB entry weekly and edits it as
necessary, than that's what it means.
Wikipedia, like the broader internet, is an ecology of information.
Parasites and the like will always pop up. We need to function as an
immune system.
Edited by Mike Tishman on 15 September 2005 at 3:48am
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Ian Evans
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 September 2004
Posts: 2433
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| Posted: 15 September 2005 at 4:12am | IP Logged | 9
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Mike Tshman wrote:
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I don't know anyone who uses Wikipedia who doesn't get how it works, and doesn't read it with the appropriate attitude. I'm kind of shocked to see how little people know about it in this forum, frankly, but in my experience that lack of knowledge is unusual.
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We run into trouble right from the off there, Mike; that you 'don't know anyone' surely has very little bearing on the numbers of said people, no? I don't want to appear snarky, but how can anyone make judgements based on their own social circle? I am saying that it is more than reasonable to suggest that many, many people - who come to the internet as a source of reference and not entertainment, and who therefore do not take part in onljine communities where their manner of use of a site would come up - would be blind to any problem in reading the information as authorotative. That is the problem.
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David Teller
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 05 June 2004
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 213
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| Posted: 15 September 2005 at 4:56am | IP Logged | 10
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Wikipedia is a brilliant concept - and works very well.
All these problems can be solved via discussion in the relevant talk pages. If JB (or anyone) goes in there and states what bits are actually incorrect and back it up with facts - everyone will be fine with the changes.
It's a collaborative process - take part!
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Mike Tishman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 25 July 2005
Posts: 229
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| Posted: 15 September 2005 at 5:06am | IP Logged | 11
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Ian Evans wrote:
| I don't want to appear snarky, but how can anyone make judgements based on their own social circle? |
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I'm not only talking about my real life social circle here, Ian. I'm
talking about other web communities related to a variety of other
interests. I lurk and/or post regularly in about a dozen message boards
with largely unrelated topical focuses. I read from an RSS aggregator
that collects items from about 50 communal and personal blogs and news
sites (including mainstream news sites). People involved in those
communities and blogs talks about other communities and blogs they
read. I've got a pretty broad sampling of, for lack of a better term,
"internet culture," and I have to tell you honestly, people in this
thread really seem to know less about Wikipedia than anywhere else on
the net where people post regularly. Not surprisingly, they're also by far the most hostile to it.
And, yes, the loosely-defined community of people who spend a lot of
time on the internet is a pretty small segment of the overall
population, but they're also the primary group of people using
Wikipedia as a reference.
I'm not saying that you're not a sophisticated reader, Ian, at all, but
the norms of this forum are really, really different from those of just
about anywhere else online, and generalizing about the broader internet
from the knowledge base and social norms of the regulars of this forum
would lead to a lot of inaccurate conclusions. I've never seen another
forum where people are forced to use their birth names, for one example
that has come up in this thread, and the type of things people talked
about in the thread on Rich Johnston (libel suits, etc) would be
regarded as completely insane and out-of-touch with reality almost
anywhere else. Similarly, I've never seen a bunch of people who spend
this much time online who seem to know as little about Wikipedia.
The people who come here, in my experience, don't like most other
forums on the internet, and often for good reason, and it seems like a
conscious group decision was made when this board was formed to carve
out a little isolated corner of like-minded individuals.
I'm not saying these things are bad. That decision (arguably) improved
the quality of discussion here, but it comes at a price. People here
seem to know less than average about how most other internet sites
function, they don't seem to be talking about the same things everyone
else is talking about, and there seems to be a lot of hostility towards
a lot of things which are normal fixtures of life in the "outside
world," like rumor blogs and Wikipedia. I don't think any of the people
who are actually using Wikipedia would take anything written
there as anything like gospel truth, or doesn't understand the basics
of what it is and how it works.
And, to go back to what I've said earlier in this thread and in other
threads, trying to "go to the top" and ask Wikipedia to change the way
it works to accomodate you, rather than going through the
commonly accepted editing process and committing long-term to
participation in the process of maintaining the accuracy of the entries
you care about, is not going to work. Moreover, it's just going to
provoke a more hostile counter-reaction.
Think about it from the perspective of any of the millions of people
who use Wikipedia, who contribute their time and effort to creating and
maintaining it. This resource works for a lot of people, and
they're really excited about it and about the potential of peer-to-peer
media. They like Wikipedia, they work on improving Wikipedia, and they
don't know you from a can of paint. How would you expect them to react
if a relatively small handful of people, who have themselves
contributed nothing to the Wikipedia project, come in demanding
extraordinary accomodations and special attention from Wikipedia
staffers over a single entry they don't like? Especially if they're
threatening lawsuits, for Christ's sake?
A lot of people have put a lot of work into Wikipedia. You're coming
into their house and demanding they do things the way you want
them done, and offering nothing in return except the threat of
lawsuits. That's gonna look very, very bad.
I can guarantee you they will ask "Why don't they just edit and
maintain the entry themselves?" I can guarantee you that no matter what
your intentions, and no matter what the justification for your demands,
you're going to come across like ignorant bullies, and there will be no
way to spin it so that it doesn't get turned into another widely-circulated "Bad Byrne"
story.
We know John Byrne's bad reputation on the internet is unfair, but it
exists, and we have to deal with it as such, and avoiding doing things
like this which will be construed as "Bad Byrne" behavior is
probably wise. If people think you beat your wife, whether or not it's
true, you don't want her to appear in public with any black eyes,
because no one's going to believe you didn't do it. If Michael Jackson
really wasn't a child molester, it would have been smart for him to
stop having weird sleepovers with children once people started to think
that he was. It's important to avoid the appearance of impropriety when
you have a PR problem to begin with.
The best thing that anyone can do in this situation is to just edit and
commit to maintaining the entry in question just like everyone else
does for the entries they care about. You might think that that's
excessive, or unnecessary, but plenty of other people manage to do it
every day, and they're not going to be sympathetic to you saying that
you can't or, worse, that you shouldn't have to. Frankly, I can see
their point in this respect. Everyone else who uses Wikipedia pitches
in to maintain Wikipedia, and that's how the whole thing stays afloat.
If we don't pitch in and do our share, we really shouldn't expect
anyone else to go out of their way to accomodate us, either. We should
more realistically expect other to expect us to play by the same rules
that they play by.
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Dave Pruitt
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 6150
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| Posted: 15 September 2005 at 6:33am | IP Logged | 12
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Let me address one thing here, the use of real names. That was something JB insisted on since later in the AOL days, IIRC, and I think it's good. I like feeling like I'm communicating with real people, and don't have to say things like, "That's a good point, Gamaliel," to use a recent example. I don't however, have the illusion that everyone here is using their birthname, and not using a "real sounding" name, their middle name, an alternate spelling of their last name, etc, etc. It's not a problem, unless it turns out to be someone who was banned, pretending to be someone else, or they're using a fake name for some other sinister purpose, and it's discovered. NO ONE is forced to use their birthname, we simply ask that they use a "real name" when registering here, that's all. We're not conducting background investigations. I know that many people who use the internet like to maintain a measure of privacy, and that's fine. We just don't like talking to total cyphers. Isn't that a crazy concept?
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