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Fundamentally though, the article fails to engage with whether these phenomenon are really a problem. As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia prog

Fundamentally though, the article fails to engage with whether these phenomenon are really a problem. As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall. Additionally, with the increase of the "great unwashed" online for lack of a better term, yes, the density of intellectual and worthwhile thought online goes down. But does that matter, or more accurately, is that cause for concern over and above the general phenomenon of an "appearance" focused culture? Does social media cause, or merely reflect the values of our underlying culture? What I do know is that I have been born into a time where I have the most access to knowledge of any human civilization ever. I can download Wikipedia. I have e readers. I don't even need to pay the university any more because I have so much access to libraries, knowledge and communication and computation. While I am of course concerned about our societies values and their consequences, it is hard for me to take seriously the concern on the face of it that social media is destroying knowledge, when it is available in amount, redundancy and accessibility in greater amounts than it ever has been before. Period. Perhaps there is also some anxiety on the separation of knowledge from the "appearance of knowledge" industry as well :p

white-flame 9y ago
What social media is destroying is the curation of accessed knowledge. I agree that that's not an assault on knowledge itself.
- narag 9y ago
  In practice it could be the same. I believe that, at some point, more common knowledge about knowledge will reach the masses, making them less like "masses".
bloaf 9y ago
>As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall. This is true, but I also believe Wikipedia is beset by the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Over time, the meaning of "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" has shifted from "you can just go and contribute what you know!" to "write what you want, but it'll just get removed unless you spend lots of time learning our rules."
cirgue 9y ago
>What I do know is that I have been born into a time where I have the most access to knowledge of any human civilization ever. You have more access to text, not necessarily knowledge. Knowledge requires active construction through application, debate, and participation. The internet is the perfect medium for constructing software knowledge for obvious reasons, but what about something like economics? On the internet, there are endless supplies of really terrible misunderstandings of core economics principles floating around that, for someone starting out, look and sound no different than the real thing. What about the construction of new knowledge? Social media's mechanism seems to be based exclusively on hot takes. How enlightening or instructive do you think that is?
intended 9y ago
I’ll disagree with your statement because there’s a hidden variable/assumption that has now changed. There is a great amount of information available today compared to before - all else held constant. All else is not constant. Assumptions on signal vs noise have been upended and getting to good information to an average person is now perhaps more of a task than before. Given an average joe, none of them will be on the level of informational awareness as a member of HN. They will not know or try to check the links on a Wikipedia page, be aware of various turf wars, or the credibility of a page. This is if they approach a page directly, as opposed to being diverted or distracted from information. In short- by measures both malicious, intentional and accidental, signal is now swamped with more noise than ever before. So I disagree with that statement as it is true only in a general, unspecific and intractable sense. (The rule of thumb is that all noise is signal to someone, and a lot of this is signal for our hindbrains which are better customers than our rational, non-impulsive minds.)
- csydas 9y ago
  Quite frankly, I think you give even the average HN user too much credit. We are awash in information and there just is no good method for properly vetting it in a timely manner unless you are prepared to devote a not-insignificant amount of time to doing so, and even reading the material presented past the headline is often asking too much of many readers; how many discussions here have gone on for hundreds of posts for hours as people who just want to get into an argument banter back and forth? We live in a wonderful age full of lots of information, but we're all pretty poor at sorting it, and the informatoin we do receive tends to be less about informing and more about persuading. I occasionally see the discussion threads from our Marketing/Sales guys and I see the "fightcards" they pass back and forth with highlights for winning out over competing products; while I see the value in a sales situation, I can't help but see many similarities in think pieces and the fightcards, in that they don't aim to provide deep and indepth information on any particular subject, they're meant to be highly persuasive towards a specific idea while diminishing another. I understand this in a competitive sales situation, I suppose - you're more or less fighting memes and myths from someone else, so you fight back with the same since the audience doesn't understand the raw data anyways, or the raw data is incredibly subjective. But for Thinktanks or other such outlets, I think this is an incredibly dishonest way of discussing and presenting information, regardless of the source behind it. Infographics, ByTheNumbers, AtAGlance, all such methods are just coy tricks to avoid actual data and instead present an opinion as fact. We see it with various news media too where the authors conflate the number of references with validity, and you end up with news blogs where every other word is referenced or a link to a reference, and the references often contain so much information there's no reasonable way you could validate even one of them in time before the article has taken off as viral. We are drowning in information and poor information sharing in general - even when you have the cognizance to know to check things like the history behind how a piece of information was assembled, there often is just too much data for any one person to sort effectively, and tracing such data to a reliable source is darn near impossible. Our major media outlets failed us the moment they decided to try competing with clickbait headlines and rapid, poorly researched stories, and we failed them when we started falling for it hook, line, and sinker. Media outlets should be on the ball with cameras and people and concise reporting, but the actual information should be the result of slow, intentional, cumbersome, and concretrated effort. We luckily still see this a lot from magazines, luckily enough, but the rest is pretty dire.
Silhouette 9y ago
While I appreciate the positive vision you describe, I think it is also important to acknowledge that just because there is a page of information about a subject on Wikipedia, that is absolutely no guarantee that the information provided is correct or complete. Wikipedia content is not necessarily reviewed by experts, and even when it is, there is no guarantee that a real-life expert will be given credit as such by the Wikipedia community. For example, there are technical subjects where a very long page has been maintained and evolved for years despite presenting a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject and despite various comments in the corresponding talk page by people who apparently did understand the problem. Trendy topics on technology seem to be particularly bad for this, as you can easily get a page dominated by young, inexperienced contributors who only learned a buzzword in a particular narrow context, with no idea of the history, original motivation, or more general application of the underlying idea.
bane 9y ago
> As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall. True, but it's an absurdly strong statement to say that WP has anywhere near "most information" recorded. I find at least 2 or 3 times a week a need to find out more about some topic where WP has no entry on it.

white-flame 9y ago

What social media is destroying is the curation of accessed knowledge. I agree that that's not an assault on knowledge itself.

narag 9y ago
In practice it could be the same. I believe that, at some point, more common knowledge about knowledge will reach the masses, making them less like "masses".

bloaf 9y ago

>As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall. This is true, but I also believe Wikipedia is beset by the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Over time, the meaning of "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" has shifted from "you can just go and contribute what you know!" to "write what you want, but it'll just get removed unless you spend lots of time learning our rules."

cirgue 9y ago

>What I do know is that I have been born into a time where I have the most access to knowledge of any human civilization ever. You have more access to text, not necessarily knowledge. Knowledge requires active construction through application, debate, and participation. The internet is the perfect medium for constructing software knowledge for obvious reasons, but what about something like economics? On the internet, there are endless supplies of really terrible misunderstandings of core economics principles floating around that, for someone starting out, look and sound no different than the real thing. What about the construction of new knowledge? Social media's mechanism seems to be based exclusively on hot takes. How enlightening or instructive do you think that is?

intended 9y ago

I’ll disagree with your statement because there’s a hidden variable/assumption that has now changed. There is a great amount of information available today compared to before - all else held constant. All else is not constant. Assumptions on signal vs noise have been upended and getting to good information to an average person is now perhaps more of a task than before. Given an average joe, none of them will be on the level of informational awareness as a member of HN. They will not know or try to check the links on a Wikipedia page, be aware of various turf wars, or the credibility of a page. This is if they approach a page directly, as opposed to being diverted or distracted from information. In short- by measures both malicious, intentional and accidental, signal is now swamped with more noise than ever before. So I disagree with that statement as it is true only in a general, unspecific and intractable sense. (The rule of thumb is that all noise is signal to someone, and a lot of this is signal for our hindbrains which are better customers than our rational, non-impulsive minds.)

csydas 9y ago
Quite frankly, I think you give even the average HN user too much credit. We are awash in information and there just is no good method for properly vetting it in a timely manner unless you are prepared to devote a not-insignificant amount of time to doing so, and even reading the material presented past the headline is often asking too much of many readers; how many discussions here have gone on for hundreds of posts for hours as people who just want to get into an argument banter back and forth? We live in a wonderful age full of lots of information, but we're all pretty poor at sorting it, and the informatoin we do receive tends to be less about informing and more about persuading. I occasionally see the discussion threads from our Marketing/Sales guys and I see the "fightcards" they pass back and forth with highlights for winning out over competing products; while I see the value in a sales situation, I can't help but see many similarities in think pieces and the fightcards, in that they don't aim to provide deep and indepth information on any particular subject, they're meant to be highly persuasive towards a specific idea while diminishing another. I understand this in a competitive sales situation, I suppose - you're more or less fighting memes and myths from someone else, so you fight back with the same since the audience doesn't understand the raw data anyways, or the raw data is incredibly subjective. But for Thinktanks or other such outlets, I think this is an incredibly dishonest way of discussing and presenting information, regardless of the source behind it. Infographics, ByTheNumbers, AtAGlance, all such methods are just coy tricks to avoid actual data and instead present an opinion as fact. We see it with various news media too where the authors conflate the number of references with validity, and you end up with news blogs where every other word is referenced or a link to a reference, and the references often contain so much information there's no reasonable way you could validate even one of them in time before the article has taken off as viral. We are drowning in information and poor information sharing in general - even when you have the cognizance to know to check things like the history behind how a piece of information was assembled, there often is just too much data for any one person to sort effectively, and tracing such data to a reliable source is darn near impossible. Our major media outlets failed us the moment they decided to try competing with clickbait headlines and rapid, poorly researched stories, and we failed them when we started falling for it hook, line, and sinker. Media outlets should be on the ball with cameras and people and concise reporting, but the actual information should be the result of slow, intentional, cumbersome, and concretrated effort. We luckily still see this a lot from magazines, luckily enough, but the rest is pretty dire.

Silhouette 9y ago

While I appreciate the positive vision you describe, I think it is also important to acknowledge that just because there is a page of information about a subject on Wikipedia, that is absolutely no guarantee that the information provided is correct or complete. Wikipedia content is not necessarily reviewed by experts, and even when it is, there is no guarantee that a real-life expert will be given credit as such by the Wikipedia community. For example, there are technical subjects where a very long page has been maintained and evolved for years despite presenting a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject and despite various comments in the corresponding talk page by people who apparently did understand the problem. Trendy topics on technology seem to be particularly bad for this, as you can easily get a page dominated by young, inexperienced contributors who only learned a buzzword in a particular narrow context, with no idea of the history, original motivation, or more general application of the underlying idea.

bane 9y ago

> As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall. True, but it's an absurdly strong statement to say that WP has anywhere near "most information" recorded. I find at least 2 or 3 times a week a need to find out more about some topic where WP has no entry on it.