10 ms·

‘You Could Look It Up’: The World Before and Since Wikipedia

88 points by benbreen 11y ago

frik 11y ago
The English language Wikipedia is great. Some other language have big problems with certain admins that prevent new articles or any additions at all (e.g. German language). WikiMedia should do something and "fix" those administrative issues.
- heinrich5991 11y ago
  This needs to be a bit more nuanced. I do see new articles popping up in the German Wikipedia.
  - creshal 11y ago
    It's a well-known problem in the German Wikipedia that has been regularly making it into the local newspapers for several years now: http://www.taz.de/!5087443/ http://www.taz.de/!5087443/ http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/WikiCon-Konfliktfeld-Wikipedia-2411752.html http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/WikiCon-Konfliktfeld-... I'm not sure whether there's English articles on the (apparently rather German-centric) problem. (For one, it's easy to find the German ones, because of course Germans have a distinct word for it: Löschnazi-Debatte.) (Edit: Sorry, accidentally misclicked and downvoted you.)
  - frik 11y ago
    > nuanced Really? No. It's a well known wide spread systematic problem. The root cause should be fixed by the international Wikimedia Foundation. Read about the issues on English Wikipedia: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions
    - kuschku 11y ago
      German Wikipedia is not associated with Wikimedia, and Wikimedia has no control over them.
- tokenadult 11y ago
  I am a Wikipedian and have been since 2010. Because I read German, I occasionally refer to and edit German Wikipedia. I'm not so sure that German Wikipedia is really that much worse than English Wikipedia in the topics I follow most closely (psychology and linguistics), and I might rather say that English Wikipedia should be less hasty about adding new articles on every pop-culture topic for which few reliable sources exist.
  - frik 11y ago
    German Wikipedia looses a lot of valuable content, on some days more than new content is added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions The notability guidelines are very off in the German Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi... English Wikipedia is really good. Though sometimes even there I wished some articles were on Wikipedia rather than some obscure Wikia-subwiki with tons of advertisement. It's not like HDD space costs much money these days. And all these article have sources anyway. Wikipedia had this nice "triva" sections that I love on IMDB.com up to 2006 (or so), sad some decided to delete them as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trivia_sections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Triv... This guideline does not suggest removing trivia sections, or moving them to the talk page. If information is otherwise suitable, it is better that it be poorly presented than not presented at all.
- sb057 11y ago
  It's not just non-English language Wikipedias that have have admin issues.
ergothus 11y ago
I vastly love being in a world where you can get answers. That said, I've noticed one trend in my younger co-workers and friends that is a little sad (to me). I will often try to find concepts I don't know. Simple things like "Why do we say 'deceased'? Aren't they 'ceased'? If they are 'de-ceased', that leaves US as 'ceased'". I'm moderately curious, but mostly I enjoy finding the little perversities. Maintaining a sense of wonder, if you will. Amongst my younger (I'm mid-to-late 30s, they are mid-to-late 20s) friends and co-workers, though, I typically get the response of "I don't know, what does google say?". Then they look it up, and stop wondering. (Sometimes the answer is pretty good, often it boils down to 'no one knows') On the one hand, I'm glad to see people moving past the "I wonder..." stage towards GETTING answers. On the other, even when the answer is inadequate, they then stop wondering. I'm curious if this anecdote is generally true, and if so, if it's a temporary fad in our relationship to information, or if this represents one step in a path of "permanent" change in our relationship to information. I suppose I could google that...
- mlangdon 11y ago
  I jokingly enforce a no-googling-at-the-lunch-table rule on my millennial coworkers (I'm gen Oregon Trail). This allows for the type of fatuous speculation that makes for decent conversation. Occasionally I even give in to the need to know.
  - klenwell 11y ago
    This allows for the type of fatuous speculation that makes for decent conversation. Well put. Brings to mind "Modern Jackass" magazine from one of my favorite This American Life episodes: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a-little-bit-of-knowledge http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a...
  - nightpool 11y ago
    I dunno, I find Googling-enabled conversation to be just different, not necessarily better or worse then pre-Google convos. This might have more to do with me growing up with them though (also, I misclicked the upvote button and downvoted you instead, sorry!)
hackuser 11y ago
I have a book called The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. It's probably the best demonstration of the difference between serious research and Wikipedia; here is a small sample of the articles (all excerpted from past editions of the Encyclopaedia): * Space-Time by Albert Einstein * Radium by Marie Curie * Mass Production by Henry Ford * Wireless Telephony by Guglielmo Marconi * Wilbur Wright by Orville Wright * Leon Trotsky by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin * Guerrila Warfare by T.E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia') * Yosemite Park by John Muir * Life, Terrestrial and Otherwise by Carl Sagan * The Philosophical Consequences of Relativity by Bertrand Russell There are many, many more. Do I want to learn from those people or from the 'wisdom' of the crowds? I think it's out of print, but I highly recommend it. (ISBN 0-670-83368-4)
- tdaltonc 11y ago
  This is what scholarpedia is for.
- TheCoreh 11y ago
  Isn't that essentially appeal to authority? As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter. >As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from. And who is the arbiter of factual correctness? Or conceptual correctness. I've noticed that lots of Wikipedia articles are completely inaccessible to people without lots of domain knowledge. I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate.
    - adwf 11y ago
      Yes, a lot of the math/science articles are terribly written. Somewhere in a drawer I have a dusty old Physics degree, but even on subjects I understand very well, the Wikipedia article is frequently badly written and hard to comprehend.
leephillips 11y ago
I think there a a lot of insight into the Wikipedia phenomenon in this rant on Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2005/12/16 https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2005/12/16 And in Jaron Lanier's article: http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new-online-collectivism http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-t...
greendestiny_re 11y ago
Hello world. I have a different gripe with Wikipedia that has nothing to do with whether articles within it are factual or not: poor writing style. Wikipedia editor guidelines encourage cooperation and consensus, but this regularly results in edit wars, where editors aggressively delete each other's edits. To resolve this, editors will usually resort to an unspoken system in which one editor will write one fragment of a sentence and cite sources for that fragment, the other editor writes the next fragment and cites it and so on. The result is a horrible mess that, although most likely entirely factual, is perfectly unreadable. Worse yet, it is very difficult to simply copy such a paragraph from Wikipedia and paste it to your friend's chat box - the inline citation marks remain as full blown numbers and have to be removed by hand.
- vilhelm_s 11y ago
  I don't think the fact that citations occur inside sentences is necessarily because the articles are collaboratively edited. Scientific articles generally do the same thing, even if they are just written by one person, in order to make it clear which part of the sentence the citation refers to.
- soared 11y ago
  Can you point me to a good example of this? I've never noticed wikipedia to be unreadable.
- kuschku 11y ago
  If you don't speak high-school level English (C1), then maybe just use simple.wikipedia.org? That page focuses on articles with simpler grammar, easily understandable for children or people who learn English as second language.
stirner 11y ago
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”— in the words of Douglas Adams — “has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words ‘Don’t Panic’ inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.” "Worse is better."

88 points by benbreen 11y ago

frik 11y ago

The English language Wikipedia is great. Some other language have big problems with certain admins that prevent new articles or any additions at all (e.g. German language). WikiMedia should do something and "fix" those administrative issues.

heinrich5991 11y ago
This needs to be a bit more nuanced. I do see new articles popping up in the German Wikipedia.
- creshal 11y ago
  It's a well-known problem in the German Wikipedia that has been regularly making it into the local newspapers for several years now: http://www.taz.de/!5087443/ http://www.taz.de/!5087443/ http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/WikiCon-Konfliktfeld-Wikipedia-2411752.html http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/WikiCon-Konfliktfeld-... I'm not sure whether there's English articles on the (apparently rather German-centric) problem. (For one, it's easy to find the German ones, because of course Germans have a distinct word for it: Löschnazi-Debatte.) (Edit: Sorry, accidentally misclicked and downvoted you.)
- frik 11y ago
  > nuanced Really? No. It's a well known wide spread systematic problem. The root cause should be fixed by the international Wikimedia Foundation. Read about the issues on English Wikipedia: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions
  - kuschku 11y ago
    German Wikipedia is not associated with Wikimedia, and Wikimedia has no control over them.
tokenadult 11y ago
I am a Wikipedian and have been since 2010. Because I read German, I occasionally refer to and edit German Wikipedia. I'm not so sure that German Wikipedia is really that much worse than English Wikipedia in the topics I follow most closely (psychology and linguistics), and I might rather say that English Wikipedia should be less hasty about adding new articles on every pop-culture topic for which few reliable sources exist.
- frik 11y ago
  German Wikipedia looses a lot of valuable content, on some days more than new content is added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions The notability guidelines are very off in the German Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi... English Wikipedia is really good. Though sometimes even there I wished some articles were on Wikipedia rather than some obscure Wikia-subwiki with tons of advertisement. It's not like HDD space costs much money these days. And all these article have sources anyway. Wikipedia had this nice "triva" sections that I love on IMDB.com up to 2006 (or so), sad some decided to delete them as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trivia_sections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Triv... This guideline does not suggest removing trivia sections, or moving them to the talk page. If information is otherwise suitable, it is better that it be poorly presented than not presented at all.
sb057 11y ago
It's not just non-English language Wikipedias that have have admin issues.

ergothus 11y ago

I vastly love being in a world where you can get answers. That said, I've noticed one trend in my younger co-workers and friends that is a little sad (to me). I will often try to find concepts I don't know. Simple things like "Why do we say 'deceased'? Aren't they 'ceased'? If they are 'de-ceased', that leaves US as 'ceased'". I'm moderately curious, but mostly I enjoy finding the little perversities. Maintaining a sense of wonder, if you will. Amongst my younger (I'm mid-to-late 30s, they are mid-to-late 20s) friends and co-workers, though, I typically get the response of "I don't know, what does google say?". Then they look it up, and stop wondering. (Sometimes the answer is pretty good, often it boils down to 'no one knows') On the one hand, I'm glad to see people moving past the "I wonder..." stage towards GETTING answers. On the other, even when the answer is inadequate, they then stop wondering. I'm curious if this anecdote is generally true, and if so, if it's a temporary fad in our relationship to information, or if this represents one step in a path of "permanent" change in our relationship to information. I suppose I could google that...

mlangdon 11y ago
I jokingly enforce a no-googling-at-the-lunch-table rule on my millennial coworkers (I'm gen Oregon Trail). This allows for the type of fatuous speculation that makes for decent conversation. Occasionally I even give in to the need to know.
- klenwell 11y ago
  This allows for the type of fatuous speculation that makes for decent conversation. Well put. Brings to mind "Modern Jackass" magazine from one of my favorite This American Life episodes: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a-little-bit-of-knowledge http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a...
- nightpool 11y ago
  I dunno, I find Googling-enabled conversation to be just different, not necessarily better or worse then pre-Google convos. This might have more to do with me growing up with them though (also, I misclicked the upvote button and downvoted you instead, sorry!)

hackuser 11y ago

I have a book called The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. It's probably the best demonstration of the difference between serious research and Wikipedia; here is a small sample of the articles (all excerpted from past editions of the Encyclopaedia): * Space-Time by Albert Einstein * Radium by Marie Curie * Mass Production by Henry Ford * Wireless Telephony by Guglielmo Marconi * Wilbur Wright by Orville Wright * Leon Trotsky by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin * Guerrila Warfare by T.E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia') * Yosemite Park by John Muir * Life, Terrestrial and Otherwise by Carl Sagan * The Philosophical Consequences of Relativity by Bertrand Russell There are many, many more. Do I want to learn from those people or from the 'wisdom' of the crowds? I think it's out of print, but I highly recommend it. (ISBN 0-670-83368-4)

tdaltonc 11y ago
This is what scholarpedia is for.
TheCoreh 11y ago
Isn't that essentially appeal to authority? As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from.
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter. >As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from. And who is the arbiter of factual correctness? Or conceptual correctness. I've noticed that lots of Wikipedia articles are completely inaccessible to people without lots of domain knowledge. I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate.
  - adwf 11y ago
    Yes, a lot of the math/science articles are terribly written. Somewhere in a drawer I have a dusty old Physics degree, but even on subjects I understand very well, the Wikipedia article is frequently badly written and hard to comprehend.

leephillips 11y ago

I think there a a lot of insight into the Wikipedia phenomenon in this rant on Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2005/12/16 https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2005/12/16 And in Jaron Lanier's article: http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new-online-collectivism http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-t...

greendestiny_re 11y ago

Hello world. I have a different gripe with Wikipedia that has nothing to do with whether articles within it are factual or not: poor writing style. Wikipedia editor guidelines encourage cooperation and consensus, but this regularly results in edit wars, where editors aggressively delete each other's edits. To resolve this, editors will usually resort to an unspoken system in which one editor will write one fragment of a sentence and cite sources for that fragment, the other editor writes the next fragment and cites it and so on. The result is a horrible mess that, although most likely entirely factual, is perfectly unreadable. Worse yet, it is very difficult to simply copy such a paragraph from Wikipedia and paste it to your friend's chat box - the inline citation marks remain as full blown numbers and have to be removed by hand.

vilhelm_s 11y ago
I don't think the fact that citations occur inside sentences is necessarily because the articles are collaboratively edited. Scientific articles generally do the same thing, even if they are just written by one person, in order to make it clear which part of the sentence the citation refers to.
soared 11y ago
Can you point me to a good example of this? I've never noticed wikipedia to be unreadable.
kuschku 11y ago
If you don't speak high-school level English (C1), then maybe just use simple.wikipedia.org? That page focuses on articles with simpler grammar, easily understandable for children or people who learn English as second language.

stirner 11y ago

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”— in the words of Douglas Adams — “has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words ‘Don’t Panic’ inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.” "Worse is better."