The Role of Experts In Wikipedia 266
Hugh Pickens writes "Episteme, a magazine about the social dimensions of knowledge, has a special issue on the epistemology of mass collaboration, with many of the articles focusing on Wikipedia. One of the most interesting articles is by Lawrence M. Sanger on the special role of experts in the age of Wikipedia. Sanger says the main reason that Wikipedia's articles are as good as they are is that they are edited by knowledgeable people to whom deference is paid, although voluntarily, but that some articles suffer precisely because there are so many aggressive people who 'guard' articles and drive off others (PDF), including people more expert than they are. 'Without granting experts any authority to overrule such people, there is no reason to think that Wikipedia'a articles are on a vector toward continual improvement,' writes Sanger. Wikipedia's success cannot be explained by its radical egalitarianism or its rejection of expert involvement, but instead by its freedom, openness, and bottom-up management and there is no doubt that many experts would, if left to their own devices, dismantle the openness that drives the success of Wikipedia. 'But the failure to take seriously the suggestion of any role of experts can only be considered a failure of imagination,' writes Sanger. 'One need only ask what an open, bottom-up system with a role for expert decision-making would be like.' The rest of the articles on the epistemology of mass collaboration are available online, free for now." Sanger was one of the founders of Wikipedia, and of its failed predecessor Nupedia, who left the fold because of differences over the question of the proper role of experts. Sanger forked Wikipedia to found Citizendium, which we have discussed on several occasions. After 2-1/2 years, Citizendium has a few tenths of a
percent as many articles as Wikipedia.
Not learning from failure... apparently (Score:4, Interesting)
"Sanger was one of the founders of Wikipedia, and of its failed predecessor Nupedia"
There is a reason why he failed; "Without granting experts any authority to overrule such people, there is no reason to think that Wikipedia'a articles are on a vector toward continual improvement," writes Sanger
And all I have to say is ... so what? Articles at wikipedia frequently link to great off site expert resources. Not only that you have a wealth of choices of where you can get your information from, you're not limited to just wikipedia. If wikipedia was the only encyclopedia on earth his point might make sense. But given the level of alternatives and 'competitors' and number of wikipedia's contributors, there's a point where an article is more then good enough as a starting point.
The difference between experts and amateurs
in many instances is not large and for the most part negligible in many area's of knowledge, in other areas not so much.
Not only that, experts frequently get things wrong, the idea that experts are monolithically better then amateurs and other experts also has serious problems. Given that there has always been contention about certain areas of knowledge, take history for example: How much important stuff is/was and is possibly currently being omitted from history by "experts" for any number of reasons that might bias their testimony?
Wikipedia works because it has information people want. Experts frequently cull information they deem 'unworthy' of documenting, there's a whole host of articles on wikipedia about culture and entertainment stuff that would not normally be in a regular encyclopedia.
Truth be told, Wikipedia is an excellent study in the controversial nature of knowledge. Experts are frequently wrong, the history of mankind is one of the constant error in the expert world.
The Wikipedia is getting better (Score:4, Interesting)
Since then, policies and procedures have been put in place. You can no longer get in to edits wars without [[WP:3RR]] [wikipedia.org] stopping you. You can no longer belittle editors who disagree with you without getting blocked for [[WP:NPA]] [wikipedia.org]. You can no longer edit the article about your small open-source project [wikipedia.org] without getting slapped for [[WP:COI]] [wikipedia.org]
Yes, these policies are not perfect, and yes a lot of articles still have unverified claims, and yes, like any democracy, it sometimes takes time and insanely excessive discussion to get to consensus. But the process on Wiki works and the new policies minimize the problems with articles. Did I mention that it's against Wikipedia policy to control articles on the Wiki, as per [[WP:OWNERSHIP]] [wikipedia.org]
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sanger has been saying stuff like this ever since he started Citizendium, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Citizendium sucks.
I think the problem is evident in his statement quoted in the summary: "Without granting experts any authority to overrule such people, there is no reason to think that Wikipedia'a articles are on a vector toward continual improvement". Well, unless you count the fact that collectively Wikipedia's articles have quite obviously been on a vector toward continual improvement since Wikipedia started. Wikipedia's article quality is not monotonic, but it is increasing. Under what metric is Wikipedia not getting better? Larry, stop speaking in generalities and point us to some actual evidence that Wikipedia articles are not increasing in quality.
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, I have no objection to vandalism being taken down, but the biggest flaw I see in Wikipedia is a lot of content gets deleted for no reason (face it, storage and bandwidth is dirt cheap).
How can Wikipedia be taken seriously... (Score:5, Interesting)
...when articles are tagged with the dreaded "primary sources" tag? In case you're not familiar with this tag, it basically states that the integrity of an article is in question because there are not enough cites from secondary sources (no, not a typo) as opposed to primary sources!
Anyone with an academic background will recognize this acceptance criteria as anathema, as primary sources are usually the only sources that count when it comes to rigorous research. That said, a comment earlier about Wikipedia articles striving for validity through consensus rather than rigorous research now makes it very clear to me what is going on. At the least, Jimmy should be honest and clearly indicate to users that Wikipedia is more a compendium of collective wisdom rather than factual content.
Some hard evidence of Wikipedia's failure (Score:2, Interesting)
First, take a look at this discussion by an expert. [artsjournal.com] (We now pause for the know-nothing kooks to ridicule Kyle Gann, claiming he's not an expert: Gann has of course written scholarly books on the subject of his expertise published by major academic institutions. Finished with the crackpot character assassination yet? Good, let's continue.)
Now take a look at the Wikipedia article on the Chicago School of Economics. Does it contain any hint that the Chicago School's prescriptions were put into practice in Chile and failed so spectacularly that the country went into a major recession?
Now take a look at the article on Alexander Hamilton. What birth date is cited? is there more than one? Do they differ? Does the Wikipedia article contain any discussion of a problem Hamilton's birth date? Do any of the Wikipedia contribution even give an evidence of realizing there's a problem with Hamilton's birth date?
Lastly, ask yourself how knowledge gets amassed in the real world via real scholarship. In real scholarship, there is no one single source of knowledge: instead, many different scholars publish different books and different articles, each providing alternative viewpoints. Eventually these differing viewpoints tend to converge on a single interpretation, as demonstrated by the overwhelming number of citations of scholarly books and articles by one particular group of authors and many fewer by all other authors (the familiar power law distribution observed in the long tail et al).
Exit question: does Wikipedia show any sign of recognizing this basic reality of the way scholarship gets done in the real world? (We now return you to your regularly scheduled insults and personal attacks and shower of acid contempt by people who can't even spell or use punctuation properly.)
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:2, Interesting)
Someone should send the scan to the websites, along with an explanation about the situation.
Mod up. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is absolutely correct.
It doesn't really matter if the people guarding articles are experts or not, or whether the other people who are trying to edit the article are experts or not. What matters is that somebody with enough free time to outlast the others will keep or gain control of the article and everybody else will eventually lose interest or give up in frustration and the article will became essentially the property of the person with nothing better to do than try to own it.
So many Wikipedia articles eventually fall into that particular category of worthlessness.
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:3, Interesting)
The trouble is, lots of things can become controversial. Best example is "The Medieval Warm period". As far as I can tell everyone who looked for evidence of this in things like ice core temperature records found it. Unfortunately the fact that the average temperature of the Earth has been warmer in the past is awkward to people who claim that the current warming is unprecedented and an iminent disaster. So the Medieval Warm period article gets attacked by people trying to claim that the warming back then never happened.
And if you look at the article today, it frankly doesn't make any sense. On the one hand the intro says that the MWP never happened. The if you look the "By Region" section it clearly did. And the talk page is a complete warzone with MWP believers quoting The Telegraph, MWP disbelievers quoting sites like realclimate. Unfortunately the MWP disbelievers have got arbcom to label all the sources that are hostile to them as unreliable sources.
Frankly you're better off ignoring Wikipedia and looking at primary sources, i.e. people that actually looked for evidence.
Re:Citizendium (Score:1, Interesting)
Posted further down, but I figure it's worth posting again.
Wikipedia - Homeopathy [wikipedia.org] vs. Citizendium - Homeopathy [citizendium.org]. What quality?
Re:Experts are few and want to be paid. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not true at all - I know many experts (keep in mind that expert and academic are not synonyms) that would love to edit the Wikipedia. But each and every one has ultimately been driven from Wikipedia by various forms of asshattery.
And that's a problem - how? It reduces the pool available for participation, sure. But the project is still open source and thus forkable by any individual who cares to do so.
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:3, Interesting)
You should have posted the article to your blog, and then told some gaming magazine to link to it in some "no idea what to write today" newsbit. Then you could've cited that as a secondary source and bingo.
Laughable, isn't it?
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:3, Interesting)
Articles are meant to provide all the information the average person would find useful about a subject.
By that argument most articles about physics and math could be deleted, because they are pretty much completly useless for somebody not working in that field.
An encyclopedia is a concept that is based around the limitations of paper, Wikipedia isn't printed on paper and therefore should not follow the same restrictions.
Re:Book references (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds more like a Wikipedia editor who is violating the "WP:OWN" standards in an aggressive manner. It happens far more often than many Wikipedians care to admit, but for some types of articles it can be a real pain to get changes to happen.
Writing on Wikipedia does take a bit of a thick skin and strongly defending your contributions to a certain extent. When you have a POV pusher or somebody who is upset with changes to "their" article, it can be even worse.
Knowing your argumentative style here on Slashdot, it doesn't surprise me that other users on Wikipedia may have found you to be a little rough to work with as well. Still, that by itself isn't a reason to completely revert edits by somebody trying to make meaningful contributions.
The military history guys that I've dealt with seem to be a pretty level headed bunch, with some of them having incredible depth to their experience and knowledge of the topics they have written about. You might be surprised if you came back to see who is involved with these articles right now. Often all it takes is to stand up to the more belligerent editors and calling their bluff.
Wow : WP threads on /. are getting interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hi.
A long while ago, I contributed to WP quite a bit. I stopped being subject to WikiStress [wikipedia.org]. I learned one thing at that time : when WP things gets on your nerves, just get a break. Then, one realise that an article is no one's little pet. And now one can come back to an article and forget about it easily. Many people who claim to be specialist or to be especially rightful, should take a WikiBreak... and come back later. No, later than that. Now, contributions starts being good.
I also observed /. threads about WP : They where rather poor, often being aggregation of blatantly incorrect statements. Reason IMHO was that not so many actually contributed to WP, thus ignoring what I now can read in this thread : WP is not a school yard, there are rules, these rules can indeed be gamed, WP is no one pet's toy : being a so called expert does not yield special status, consensus is indeed the driving thing in WP - not The Truth - and so on...
That's a lot of good comments in one single WP /. thread. Pleasantly surprising. I suppose WP is getting actually known by people. Nice!
Z
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:3, Interesting)
A single source telling something different might not be enough to make a final call on a fact, after all the source could just be honestly wrong, it however should be enough to cast some doubt on the data and thus require further research. Especially when it comes to release dates it shouldn't be that hard to verify, there should after all be a plenty of magazines from back then that printed something about it.
Anyway, the real crux here isn't so much the policy itself, but the reaction to your request on the Talk page, which basically starts with "...Wikipedia's verifiability policy requires...". That might be all correct, but it also kind of misses the point, since the interesting part isn't what Wikipedia requires, but what the actual facts are. Way to much time is wasted in such discussions about policy instead about worrying how one could verify the actual data in better way. Now sure, the reply in the Talk page was a very mild one, one that I normally wouldn't even complain about, but in many cases, especially when it comes to deletions and larger edits, such discussions can get extremely annoying and unproductive, because one party just misses common sense and throws mindlessly some Wikipedia rules around (which aren't really hard rules in the first place, but just guidelines) while the other tries to get some fact figured out. And well, in the end the party that cares about the fact is just pissed of and no further research is done on the topic and that is really a thing that needs to change.
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period [wikipedia.org]
Initial research
The Medieval Warm Period was a time of warm weather around 800-1300 AD during the European Medieval period. Initial research on the MWP and the following Little Ice Age (LIA) was largely done in Europe, where the phenomenon was most obvious and clearly documented. It was initially believed that the temperature changes were global. However, this view has been questioned; the 2001 IPCC report summarises this research, saying "...current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of 'Little Ice Age' and 'Medieval Warm Period' appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries". The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) states that the "idea of a global or hemispheric "Medieval Warm Period" that was warmer than today however, has turned out to be incorrect" and that what those "records that do exist show is that there was no multi-century periods when global or hemispheric temperatures were the same or warmer than in the 20th century". Indeed, global temperature records taken from ice cores, tree rings, and lake deposits, have shown that, taken globally, the Earth actually averaged slightly cooler (by 0.03 degrees Celsius) during the 'Medieval Warm Period' than in the early- and mid-20th century
Of course if you scroll down you to the By World Region bit of the article you find
North Atlantic
The last written records of the Norse Greenlanders are from a 1408 marriage in the church of Hvalsey â" today the best-preserved of the Norse ruins.
A radiocarbon-dated box core in the Sargasso Sea shows that the sea surface temperature was approximately 1 ÂC (1.8 ÂF) cooler than today approximately 400 years ago (the Little Ice Age) and 1700 years ago, and approximately 1 ÂC warmer than today 1000 years ago (the Medieval Warm Period).[6]
During the MWP wine grapes were grown in Europe as far north as southern Britain
i.e. the MWP seems to be quite real in the North Atlantic and Europe.
North America
The Vikings took advantage of ice-free seas to colonize Greenland and other outlying lands of the far north.[11] The MWP was followed by the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling that lasted until the 19th century, and the Viking settlements eventually died out. In the Chesapeake Bay, researchers found large temperature excursions during the Medieval Warm Period (about 800â"1300) and the Little Ice Age (about 1400â"1850), possibly related to changes in the strength of North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.[12] Sediments in Piermont Marsh of the lower Hudson Valley show a dry Medieval Warm period from AD 800â"1300.
So the MWP and LIA seems quite real in North America.
and if you read Other Regions, it seems to be real there in Africa, the Antarctic, Japan and the Pacific Ocean too. All of which disagrees with the IPCC/NOAA quotes in the summary.
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:3, Interesting)
The best is the type of discussion now going on thousands of places. Early on the argument was whether Wikipedia could create a viable encyclopedia, Wikipedia vs. Encarta essentially. A few years ago the argument was about Wikipedia vs. Britannica. Now the question is Wikipedia vs. specialized encyclopedias in their specialty.
That's progress.
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:3, Interesting)
The article does not seem like an amazing piece of writing though and is only rated C-class by Wikipedia itself. Such articles are expected to have problems, until someone takes the time to fix them up....
Democracy vs idiocracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia is more of an experiment in some type of direct Democracy/Demarchy (where the whole world rules) while Citizendium is an experiment in Meritocracy (where only the smart rule)
We see the results after a few years. Wikipedia has a much higher level of quality even though there are a lot of bad things about it. Citizendium might be more factually correct on some issues but the problem is that it doesn't have the vast amount of resources Wikipedia gives. Which one is better is a matter of choice. If you give negative points for anything that is not existing, Wikipedia wins. If you don't care that it's not there but what is there is correct then Citizendium is more correct. In the end Wikipedia will be more correct on current culture, things that are evolving constantly and new items while Citizendium will get things that are more scientific better. I think the two should merge some articles and things that are a matter of fact (history, mathematics, chemistry) should be better locked down on Wikipedia. On the other hand our understanding of matters is continually improving even on history but the fact is that even historians keep on rewriting history. Eventually Bush and Hitler will be good (or not-so-bad) guys to certain generations and within a few hundred years we'll have explored the sub-sub-quantum physics as well. It's all evolving and no knowledge is permanent even if they were a matter of "fact", it's all in the eye of the observer.
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:2, Interesting)
There are some great specialized online reference works that use the "cathedral" approach to good effect. As a mathematician, Planet Math [planetmath.org] comes up frequently, and it has a very well-defined, terse style which is usually much more clear than Wikipedia's mathematical muddles. On the other hand, I am always very happy when the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [stanford.edu] has relevant articles, since it takes a very scholarly approach which details the full history of the subject for millenia. When all three sources, Wikipedia, PlanetMath, and the SEP have info on the subject I want - pure bliss, I have a hope of getting it without having to dig into the original papers.
I would hope that other subject areas have similar quality online references. Maybe it is just too difficult to get specialists from many different fields to work together on one of these encyclopedias, so we will end up these large "chunks" of information available to people who know where to find them. The great thing is the internet makes these available for free.
Simple - an online wikipedia court (Score:3, Interesting)
to which experts can take the contested and faulty articles, and the editions can be decided by input from admins, experts, and people.
you cant fight something that is solidly proven, and anyone still fighting such an edit will probably be extremists/radicals in wikipedia.
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:2, Interesting)
But apparently creating your own website, publishing your letter, and then referencing it as a source would be just fine.
That is the problem with many of the edits of Wikipedia - their definition of a source is murky at best and negligence at its worst. I don't think every post/edit must have a source, but don't reject one because the current article references some random myspace page and the change contradicts it.
If it were up to me, I would only accept textbooks/journal articles as valid sources and relegate everything else to the "See Also" category (I know that textbooks and journal articles can be wrong, but presumably there was some sort of review process that doesn't exist for most other forms of reference).
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:3, Interesting)
During the MWP wine grapes were grown in Europe as far north as southern Britain
And today wine grapes are grown as far north as southern Sweden - more proof that it is warmer today than during the MWP.
Re:Got a better way to do things? (Score:3, Interesting)
And with that you've shown a fundamental misunderstanding of wikipedia. Only in the case of a speedy deletion does 1 person decide to delete something. Even in that case a regular editor first tags it as a concern as meeting a criterion for that and then an administrator reviews that request. The rest of the articles are put to a community discussion for deletion where over 5 days people debate if the article should stay. The only situation in which a single person might decide all by themselves to delete something is in the case of a blatant attack page or nonsense.
Understand what is knowledge (Score:2, Interesting)
Having more then one answer to a problem, or having a set of different view for a single issue is consider the single form of correct knowledge.
Wikipedia simply wrong wanting to provide one single set of answer.