7 ms·

Wikipedia fails as an encyclopedia, to science’s detriment

67 points by nikbackm 11y ago

tokenadult 11y ago
The author of the editorial comments, "Disturbingly, all of the worst entries I have ever read have been in the sciences. Wander off the big ideas in the sciences, and you're likely to run into entries that are excessively technical and provide almost no context, making them effectively incomprehensible." I am a Wikipedian. I have been editing various articles since 2010. I have won the Million Award[1] twice for major improvements to high-traffic articles. In the sciences I follow most closely in my own research, the Wikipedia articles are even worse than "excessively technical and provide almost no context," and are often simply wrong. The worst part is that many Wikipedia articles about science are wrong more because of omission of things that every working scientist in each field knows than because of miscopying of correct statements about science. Most Wikipedia articles are still very thinly sourced, and most are based only on sources that appear online, and many of those sources are not from professionally edited publications. I think it would be a good idea for a rich philanthropist to fund a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize to see what combination of organizational, technological, and other factors could build a team of encyclopedia-compilers that could put together a better free, online encyclopedia than Wikipedia. Right now, Wikipedia gets a lot of external funding, but it has a surprisingly tiny number of active editors,[2] and the Wikimedia Foundation strategic plan still calls for more improvement of content.[3] I think Wikipedia has exceeded everyone's expectations, and I see people who have access to better scholarly resources use it almost every time I'm with other scholars, but I also think Wikipedia today is like Excite or Lycos in 1998: the best available service in its category, but rather easily displaced by something as good as, say, AltaVista. There is still a lot of space to make a much better free, online encyclopedia, and some friendly competition might make Wikipedia a whole lot better too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Million_Award https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Million_Award [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Number_of_editors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Number_o... [3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Stra...
- jessriedel 11y ago
  > could build a team of encyclopedia-compilers OK, but if we want better science articles, we need to find a way to get practicing scientists to contribute. You can't improve the article on quantum memory without them. > ...that could put together a better free, online encyclopedia than Wikipedia What's the advantage of making it separate from Wikipedia? The only one I can think of is that you can put domain experts in charge who are allowed to appeal to their expertise rather than verifiability. But in this case, you want domain-specific encyclopedias rather than general purpose ones, like the celebrated Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Arguably, you want better science writers to contribute who may or may not be practicing scientists. After all, the goal probably shouldn't be to replicate physics journal depth in Wikipedia but, rather, to provide a mainstream source of information for those who may have some background but are not specialists on a given topic.
    - jessriedel 11y ago
      > ...you want better science writers to contribute who may or may not be practicing scientists. The practicing scientists don't necessarily need to be controlling the whole process, but if they aren't playing an integral roll then the encyclopedia will be bad. Even in the mainstream news, reporters know that they can't just read a few journal articles and then start writing up a popular piece. They have to interview scientists. In practice, I think the only way to do this for a reasonable price is to use non-monetary incentives (e.g., fame) to get the scientists to do at least some of the writing themselves. But maybe someone can figure out how to start a foundation that hires professional writers to interview scientists. (As an aside, this does make me wonder why, when there is a collaboration between skilled writers and skilled scientists, the writers are always in charge and use the scientists as a resource. You'd think there'd be room for a model where the scientist outlines all the bullet points and uses the writer as a resource.) > ...the goal probably shouldn't be to replicate physics journal depth in Wikipedia... The question of whether to purge all physics topics from Wikipedia that have no hope of being useful to laymen (of which there are many thousands) is more-or-less the inclusionist/deletionist debate. Personally, I don't see why you'd want to get rid of them.
m3mnoch 11y ago
/shrug i guess. i mean, what's the layman's description of a rabi cycle? anyone? if someone can lay on me a description my very smart, but non-techy wife would understand, i'll be happy to update the wikipedia entry. seems like all you have to do is explain quantum physics to a layman first. then (apparently) how a two-state quantum system interacts with an oscillatory driving field and what that has to do with that original layman's explanation of quantum physics. piece of cake.
- brownbat 11y ago
  > i mean, what's the layman's description of a rabi cycle? Ars technica tackled that without blinking in this article from 2010: http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/10/riding-a-rabi-cycle-past-the-limit-of-moores-law/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/10/riding-a-rabi-cycle-p... It's tempting to dismiss lay explanations as impossible when you're assuming the laymen needs a full and complete understanding of every implication. But in lay explanations, you're not graded on completeness, you're just offering a foothold so people know generally what you're talking about and one or two implications. What are we talking about? Quantum mechanics. What's that? When things are really tiny they seem to obey unexpected rules (of physics). So quantum mechanics describes the behavior of really tiny things. What's a rabi cycle? So you have some of these really tiny things, and they're flipping between two states, like a light switch. Maybe you shine a light on them to get them excited, and when they're excited in a certain way, they flip back and forth between these two states. What does that get us? Maybe it helps us make lasers that have effects that are more focused than we would expect given diffraction limits--that's the limit of how focused light can get based on the properties of the lens you're using.
  - m3mnoch 11y ago
    dude! you should update that page! i actually understood what you said!
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    There's nothing in that article that the layman can use to predict anything, i.e., the reader will not be able to answer any questions afterwards that aren't directly addressed in the original article. That's a sign that those sorts of explanations give the feeling of understanding, but don't actually impart knowledge. If someone writes "there's a war in Syria", then the reader can accurately predict that there will be an above-average number of bombed out buildings, and probably lots of refugees on the border. But if someone writes "Rabi oscillations are when very tiny things flip back and forth", there are no non-trivial questions the reader can answer. The reason is that the reader knows roughly what "war" is and what a country is and that "Syria" is a country. But when you tell them tiny things are flipping...all they know is that tiny things are flipping. (Ask "do you think you can catch the tiny thing on it's edge part way through it's flip?" Or "Do the tiny things flip faster or slower than sound waves?" The reader will have no idea.) In other words, "Energy makes it go!": http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
ozy123 11y ago
I think betterexplained.com demonstrated that there is an alternative way of detailing information that a lot of people found helpful. Perhaps multiple versions of a page each with a different take on explaining it, perhaps rated versions... etc
RadioactiveMan 11y ago
"And it's not all physics and math; the entry for the Ka/s ratio, a useful measure in evolutionary biology, assumes you already know a lot about evolutionary biology and the genetic code." It seems to me that any information - in an encyclopedia or anywhere else - on a subtopic must assume knowledge of the parent topic. Other gripes by the author seemed to be nitpicks about article quality, which are fair but extremely minor.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  Yea, I'm all for adding as much layman-intelligible context as possible, but you can always make there sorts of gripes if you expect arbitrarily niche science topics to self-contained. The fact is that there's just not that much to say about quantum memory if you don't have the background to know what a Rabbi oscillation is. I wonder to what extent this is just a humanities/sciences divide. I'd bet that scientists reading wikipedia far outside their specialty are less surprised and frustrated by the level of accessibility than are non-scientists. With important exceptions, topics in the humanities generally just have fewer levels of dependency.
  - isolate 11y ago
    What are the exceptions?
    - jessriedel 11y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism (Needless to say, I don't think these levels of dependency imply true intellectual depth...)
    - brownbat 11y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Dogmas_of_Empiricism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Dogmas_of_Empiricism
- ghaff 11y ago
  A well-written encyclopedia article should still be able to instruct a generally educated lay reader about what a thing is and why it's notable even if the more detailed explanation heads into depths that someone without appropriate background may not be able to follow. I had a very similar discussion with someone involved with the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this year and he highlighted math/science as having exactly this issue. Way too many articles seem to be written by people who are far more comfortable and interested in using the equation editor than in providing an intelligible explanation. The problem isn't universal to be sure. But it is widespread, especially in less popular topics.
Nadya 11y ago
Well if the author wants layman terms... Wiki has that: simple.wikipedia.org example: simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Theory As for quality: then try and improve it. Much information gets hidden or lost in the Talk pages because of internal politics and other such pettiness. And subtopics will always require knowledge of the parent topic. This goes for science, mathematics, linguistics, and hell - even video games.
Avshalom 11y ago
Isn't the whole selling point of the hypertext format that we can follow as many links as we need for context and foundational information?
andrewmcwatters 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
Sideloader 11y ago
Wikipedia will always be in flux. I don't use it much for looking up science based stuff but I do check it to see what's being said about the conflict in Syria, the Israel/Palestine conflict and other contentious geopolitical topics. Edit warring and vandalism/inserting bias are the norm for these pages. (I do edit entries when I have the time.) Arguably there is no "right" answer that can settle arguments about political topicsand no matter what is written somebody will come along and claim bias and change the wording or delete sections they find objectionable. Pages about less publicized event (e.g Russian-Georgian war of 2008, the Mahar Arar affair) are blatantly slanted to one side or another and stay that way for months or even years. The science articles I have read are sometimes overly technical or needlessly verbose but others know more about that than I do so I can't provide examples. If every person who posts a long rant or complaint on an entry's Talk page took the time to edit(in good faith)the parts they think need improvement the public would benefit by having access to better quality information. As it stands people put a lot of energy in pointing out, often valid, flaws but very few actually do anything about it. Wikipedia is only as good or as accurate as its editors make it and humans, being the strange creatures we are, have a difficult time agreeing on even relatively basic things so it will always be a work in progress. That it exists is a positive thing overall and to really get a sense of how accurate an entry about a topic you know little about is reading the Talk page is a must. And if you do know have knowledge that you think is missing from an entry or think you can improve the wording...be bold and go for it!
zatkin 11y ago
There's always simple.wikipedia.org for Simple English explanations of complicated topics, though it's lacking in nearly the same size as the regular English Wikipedia.
- dingaling 11y ago
  "Simple" shouldn't mean "limited vocabulary". The problem isn't the words used, it's the way the writer expresses the subject using words. It should mean gradually revealing a complicated subject by building one simple concept upon another. An example is explaining a rainbow; avoiding the word "refraction" would actually make the explanation more difficult, so instead start by explaining what refraction is.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    That's why hyperlinks exist.
a-nikolaev 11y ago
Yep, wiki tries hard to be impenetrably technical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_position http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GeneralPosition.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GeneralPosition.html
swiley 11y ago
Maybe if universities offered incentives to undergraduates who cleaned up some of the articles? It would help them get recognition too.
DefaultUserHN 11y ago
Layman's Explanation of Gravity: Gravity is a force that pulls objects together, the more mass an object has, the stronger the pull. The closer an object is, the stronger the pull. On Earth, gravity pulls at 9.8 meter per second squared. Bla bla bla. Wiki's Explanation of Gravity: Gravity is a 3 dimensional vector that transform another vector along the 4th dimension. On Earth, this transform can be integrated over the 4th dimensional to bla bla bla. Given a topological surface, this gravity vector, if the magnitude is big enough, can transform and bend the geometric space into a hole. Bla bla bla. Layman's Thought: What the f*ck that all that even mean?

67 points by nikbackm 11y ago

The author of the editorial comments, "Disturbingly, all of the worst entries I have ever read have been in the sciences. Wander off the big ideas in the sciences, and you're likely to run into entries that are excessively technical and provide almost no context, making them effectively incomprehensible." I am a Wikipedian. I have been editing various articles since 2010. I have won the Million Award[1] twice for major improvements to high-traffic articles. In the sciences I follow most closely in my own research, the Wikipedia articles are even worse than "excessively technical and provide almost no context," and are often simply wrong. The worst part is that many Wikipedia articles about science are wrong more because of omission of things that every working scientist in each field knows than because of miscopying of correct statements about science. Most Wikipedia articles are still very thinly sourced, and most are based only on sources that appear online, and many of those sources are not from professionally edited publications. I think it would be a good idea for a rich philanthropist to fund a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize to see what combination of organizational, technological, and other factors could build a team of encyclopedia-compilers that could put together a better free, online encyclopedia than Wikipedia. Right now, Wikipedia gets a lot of external funding, but it has a surprisingly tiny number of active editors,[2] and the Wikimedia Foundation strategic plan still calls for more improvement of content.[3] I think Wikipedia has exceeded everyone's expectations, and I see people who have access to better scholarly resources use it almost every time I'm with other scholars, but I also think Wikipedia today is like Excite or Lycos in 1998: the best available service in its category, but rather easily displaced by something as good as, say, AltaVista. There is still a lot of space to make a much better free, online encyclopedia, and some friendly competition might make Wikipedia a whole lot better too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Million_Award https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Million_Award [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Number_of_editors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Number_o... [3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Stra...

jessriedel 11y ago
> could build a team of encyclopedia-compilers OK, but if we want better science articles, we need to find a way to get practicing scientists to contribute. You can't improve the article on quantum memory without them. > ...that could put together a better free, online encyclopedia than Wikipedia What's the advantage of making it separate from Wikipedia? The only one I can think of is that you can put domain experts in charge who are allowed to appeal to their expertise rather than verifiability. But in this case, you want domain-specific encyclopedias rather than general purpose ones, like the celebrated Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Arguably, you want better science writers to contribute who may or may not be practicing scientists. After all, the goal probably shouldn't be to replicate physics journal depth in Wikipedia but, rather, to provide a mainstream source of information for those who may have some background but are not specialists on a given topic.
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    > ...you want better science writers to contribute who may or may not be practicing scientists. The practicing scientists don't necessarily need to be controlling the whole process, but if they aren't playing an integral roll then the encyclopedia will be bad. Even in the mainstream news, reporters know that they can't just read a few journal articles and then start writing up a popular piece. They have to interview scientists. In practice, I think the only way to do this for a reasonable price is to use non-monetary incentives (e.g., fame) to get the scientists to do at least some of the writing themselves. But maybe someone can figure out how to start a foundation that hires professional writers to interview scientists. (As an aside, this does make me wonder why, when there is a collaboration between skilled writers and skilled scientists, the writers are always in charge and use the scientists as a resource. You'd think there'd be room for a model where the scientist outlines all the bullet points and uses the writer as a resource.) > ...the goal probably shouldn't be to replicate physics journal depth in Wikipedia... The question of whether to purge all physics topics from Wikipedia that have no hope of being useful to laymen (of which there are many thousands) is more-or-less the inclusionist/deletionist debate. Personally, I don't see why you'd want to get rid of them.

m3mnoch 11y ago

/shrug i guess. i mean, what's the layman's description of a rabi cycle? anyone? if someone can lay on me a description my very smart, but non-techy wife would understand, i'll be happy to update the wikipedia entry. seems like all you have to do is explain quantum physics to a layman first. then (apparently) how a two-state quantum system interacts with an oscillatory driving field and what that has to do with that original layman's explanation of quantum physics. piece of cake.

brownbat 11y ago
> i mean, what's the layman's description of a rabi cycle? Ars technica tackled that without blinking in this article from 2010: http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/10/riding-a-rabi-cycle-past-the-limit-of-moores-law/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/10/riding-a-rabi-cycle-p... It's tempting to dismiss lay explanations as impossible when you're assuming the laymen needs a full and complete understanding of every implication. But in lay explanations, you're not graded on completeness, you're just offering a foothold so people know generally what you're talking about and one or two implications. What are we talking about? Quantum mechanics. What's that? When things are really tiny they seem to obey unexpected rules (of physics). So quantum mechanics describes the behavior of really tiny things. What's a rabi cycle? So you have some of these really tiny things, and they're flipping between two states, like a light switch. Maybe you shine a light on them to get them excited, and when they're excited in a certain way, they flip back and forth between these two states. What does that get us? Maybe it helps us make lasers that have effects that are more focused than we would expect given diffraction limits--that's the limit of how focused light can get based on the properties of the lens you're using.
- m3mnoch 11y ago
  dude! you should update that page! i actually understood what you said!
- jessriedel 11y ago
  There's nothing in that article that the layman can use to predict anything, i.e., the reader will not be able to answer any questions afterwards that aren't directly addressed in the original article. That's a sign that those sorts of explanations give the feeling of understanding, but don't actually impart knowledge. If someone writes "there's a war in Syria", then the reader can accurately predict that there will be an above-average number of bombed out buildings, and probably lots of refugees on the border. But if someone writes "Rabi oscillations are when very tiny things flip back and forth", there are no non-trivial questions the reader can answer. The reason is that the reader knows roughly what "war" is and what a country is and that "Syria" is a country. But when you tell them tiny things are flipping...all they know is that tiny things are flipping. (Ask "do you think you can catch the tiny thing on it's edge part way through it's flip?" Or "Do the tiny things flip faster or slower than sound waves?" The reader will have no idea.) In other words, "Energy makes it go!": http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

ozy123 11y ago

I think betterexplained.com demonstrated that there is an alternative way of detailing information that a lot of people found helpful. Perhaps multiple versions of a page each with a different take on explaining it, perhaps rated versions... etc

RadioactiveMan 11y ago

"And it's not all physics and math; the entry for the Ka/s ratio, a useful measure in evolutionary biology, assumes you already know a lot about evolutionary biology and the genetic code." It seems to me that any information - in an encyclopedia or anywhere else - on a subtopic must assume knowledge of the parent topic. Other gripes by the author seemed to be nitpicks about article quality, which are fair but extremely minor.

jessriedel 11y ago
Yea, I'm all for adding as much layman-intelligible context as possible, but you can always make there sorts of gripes if you expect arbitrarily niche science topics to self-contained. The fact is that there's just not that much to say about quantum memory if you don't have the background to know what a Rabbi oscillation is. I wonder to what extent this is just a humanities/sciences divide. I'd bet that scientists reading wikipedia far outside their specialty are less surprised and frustrated by the level of accessibility than are non-scientists. With important exceptions, topics in the humanities generally just have fewer levels of dependency.
- isolate 11y ago
  What are the exceptions?
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism (Needless to say, I don't think these levels of dependency imply true intellectual depth...)
  - brownbat 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Dogmas_of_Empiricism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Dogmas_of_Empiricism
ghaff 11y ago
A well-written encyclopedia article should still be able to instruct a generally educated lay reader about what a thing is and why it's notable even if the more detailed explanation heads into depths that someone without appropriate background may not be able to follow. I had a very similar discussion with someone involved with the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this year and he highlighted math/science as having exactly this issue. Way too many articles seem to be written by people who are far more comfortable and interested in using the equation editor than in providing an intelligible explanation. The problem isn't universal to be sure. But it is widespread, especially in less popular topics.

Nadya 11y ago

Well if the author wants layman terms... Wiki has that: simple.wikipedia.org example: simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Theory As for quality: then try and improve it. Much information gets hidden or lost in the Talk pages because of internal politics and other such pettiness. And subtopics will always require knowledge of the parent topic. This goes for science, mathematics, linguistics, and hell - even video games.

Avshalom 11y ago

Isn't the whole selling point of the hypertext format that we can follow as many links as we need for context and foundational information?

andrewmcwatters 11y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Sideloader 11y ago

Wikipedia will always be in flux. I don't use it much for looking up science based stuff but I do check it to see what's being said about the conflict in Syria, the Israel/Palestine conflict and other contentious geopolitical topics. Edit warring and vandalism/inserting bias are the norm for these pages. (I do edit entries when I have the time.) Arguably there is no "right" answer that can settle arguments about political topicsand no matter what is written somebody will come along and claim bias and change the wording or delete sections they find objectionable. Pages about less publicized event (e.g Russian-Georgian war of 2008, the Mahar Arar affair) are blatantly slanted to one side or another and stay that way for months or even years. The science articles I have read are sometimes overly technical or needlessly verbose but others know more about that than I do so I can't provide examples. If every person who posts a long rant or complaint on an entry's Talk page took the time to edit(in good faith)the parts they think need improvement the public would benefit by having access to better quality information. As it stands people put a lot of energy in pointing out, often valid, flaws but very few actually do anything about it. Wikipedia is only as good or as accurate as its editors make it and humans, being the strange creatures we are, have a difficult time agreeing on even relatively basic things so it will always be a work in progress. That it exists is a positive thing overall and to really get a sense of how accurate an entry about a topic you know little about is reading the Talk page is a must. And if you do know have knowledge that you think is missing from an entry or think you can improve the wording...be bold and go for it!

zatkin 11y ago

There's always simple.wikipedia.org for Simple English explanations of complicated topics, though it's lacking in nearly the same size as the regular English Wikipedia.

dingaling 11y ago
"Simple" shouldn't mean "limited vocabulary". The problem isn't the words used, it's the way the writer expresses the subject using words. It should mean gradually revealing a complicated subject by building one simple concept upon another. An example is explaining a rainbow; avoiding the word "refraction" would actually make the explanation more difficult, so instead start by explaining what refraction is.
- gohrt 11y ago
  That's why hyperlinks exist.

a-nikolaev 11y ago

Yep, wiki tries hard to be impenetrably technical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_position http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GeneralPosition.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GeneralPosition.html

swiley 11y ago

Maybe if universities offered incentives to undergraduates who cleaned up some of the articles? It would help them get recognition too.

DefaultUserHN 11y ago

Layman's Explanation of Gravity: Gravity is a force that pulls objects together, the more mass an object has, the stronger the pull. The closer an object is, the stronger the pull. On Earth, gravity pulls at 9.8 meter per second squared. Bla bla bla. Wiki's Explanation of Gravity: Gravity is a 3 dimensional vector that transform another vector along the 4th dimension. On Earth, this transform can be integrated over the 4th dimensional to bla bla bla. Given a topological surface, this gravity vector, if the magnitude is big enough, can transform and bend the geometric space into a hole. Bla bla bla. Layman's Thought: What the f*ck that all that even mean?