7 ms·

It's not as easy as you say. When the article contains mathematical errors, sourcing your correction is not easy. Wikipedia does not allow personal research. Wh

by wbhart 15y ago

It's not as easy as you say. When the article contains mathematical errors, sourcing your correction is not easy. Wikipedia does not allow personal research. When the article contains "facts" which are in error, which you only know because you can understand the maths yourself, you don't have a source, other than your own research. Finding one, to correct what is to you a blatant error, can be a massive job. You shouldn't need a source to correct an error. The person who wrote the original piece of incorrect information should have to source their claim. Also, when I edit wikipedia articles without consultation with the community first, it invariably gets shouted at and reverted. Consult the community, and you have to expect that people there actually understand why the article is in error. Mathematics is sometimes very subtle. Errors can be subtle. Trying to explain them to people who didn't understand what they were writing in the first place is impossible. Yes, there are very many extremely qualified academics adding stuff to Wikipedia. But there are also very many amateur mathematicians who write many almost-but-not-quite-true things, not understanding the subtleties involved. I already spend a lot of my time teaching people how to do mathematics. Doing so on Wikipedia is a poor venue. By the way, since when did people start using the down voting feature on HN for posts they didn't personally agree with?

redthrowaway 15y ago
>By the way, since when did people start using the down voting feature on HN for posts they didn't personally agree with? I think it was more the implied laziness of thinking Wikipedia is a great resource but not being willing to fix it. As for your issue, if you know something's wrong from your own research, have you published it? There's a secondary source right there. Wikipedia, by necessity, aims to be verifiable, not true. People will argue till the cows come home about truth, and do so much less civilly than when arguing about verifiability. So yes, there are plenty of errors on Wikipedia that exist because the source is wrong. The only consistent way to deal with this is to leave it in until other secondary sources emerge that allow you to fix it. Still, you can just run the math, as that isn't OR. If you'd prefer, you can tell me the page and the error and I'll take care of it. Being an established editor can be handy sometimes.
- wbhart 15y ago
  "I think it was more the implied laziness of thinking Wikipedia is a great resource but not being willing to fix it." If you spend your life teaching and doing research, laziness is not something you like to be accused of. Some of my papers and computing projects have been referenced on wikipedia. I feel my time is far better spent writing such things than entering edit wars with people who don't understand the subtleties of the subject they are writing about. "As for your issue, if you know something's wrong from your own research, have you published it?" I suspect you aren't an academic and I can see why you might think this would be a good course of action. You cannot publish corrections to blatant errors in Wikipedia and get academic credit for it. We are under continual pressure to publish new and interesting things. That we have found an error in Wikipedia is unfortunately not one of them. "If you'd prefer, you can tell me the page and the error and I'll take care of it. Being an established editor can be handy sometimes." I suspect you'd add a note to the page asking for a citation to support the existing incorrect statement because you won't be able to check it yourself. It will remain there for months, and by then everyone will have lost interest and moved on. Or perhaps the statement has a citation, but for subtle reasons the statement is correct, but nothing to do with the subject of the article. Without understanding the mathematics, you have no way of checking that. So even "verifiability" doesn't help. You need to understand just how very difficult this is. Go to the page on "Group action". Look at the section "Types of actions". Now look at the bullet point "irreducible". Do you see anything wrong there? Do you see a citation? (Please do not remove it -- I am not stating there is or isn't an error there.) How would you, an experienced editor, check whether this was correct and relevant information? Edit: I edited the above for tone after someone pointed out that I sounded like I was yelling. Not my intention.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Friendly advice: you'd be more persuasive if you yelled less. As someone who jumped into WP with the primary intent of improving technical software security coverage, I know where you're coming from. WP can seem hostile to experts, because it is --- unlike the real world --- structured to prevent experts from carrying higher status. Whole WP forks have been created to allow acknowledged experts to contribute without arguing with laypeople. Having said that, all those projects failed, and WP is perhaps the most impressive resource on one of the top 5† most impressive information technology projects in human history. I don't love WP's attitude towards expertise, but I also don't love tilting at windmills. WP will continue to be successful without your mathematical expertise. That's just a fact. Knowing that, maybe you can understand how people on HN would feel it's unproductive to loudly complain about your experiences on WP. † Prepared to concede the human genome project as more impressive than the Internet.
scott_s 15y ago
When I find errors in Wikipedia articles, I add a section to the Talk page explaining my reasoning, citing sources if I can. Then more "established" people can make the edit. As far as sourcing errors goes, think about it from the perspective of a generalist. For any given "correction," I think it's fair to assume that the change is more likely to be wrong than correct. The generalist who curates many pages is probably not qualified to determine either way, so the safest thing to do is revert back to the old version. Hence, sourcing corrections can give them confidence that the change is more likely to be correct than the original. Yes, this is difficult. But I think that's it's inherently difficult. That is, providing a vast source of knowledge covering many topics digestible by non-experts is inherently a difficult endeavor.

by wbhart 15y ago

redthrowaway 15y ago

>By the way, since when did people start using the down voting feature on HN for posts they didn't personally agree with? I think it was more the implied laziness of thinking Wikipedia is a great resource but not being willing to fix it. As for your issue, if you know something's wrong from your own research, have you published it? There's a secondary source right there. Wikipedia, by necessity, aims to be verifiable, not true. People will argue till the cows come home about truth, and do so much less civilly than when arguing about verifiability. So yes, there are plenty of errors on Wikipedia that exist because the source is wrong. The only consistent way to deal with this is to leave it in until other secondary sources emerge that allow you to fix it. Still, you can just run the math, as that isn't OR. If you'd prefer, you can tell me the page and the error and I'll take care of it. Being an established editor can be handy sometimes.

wbhart 15y ago
"I think it was more the implied laziness of thinking Wikipedia is a great resource but not being willing to fix it." If you spend your life teaching and doing research, laziness is not something you like to be accused of. Some of my papers and computing projects have been referenced on wikipedia. I feel my time is far better spent writing such things than entering edit wars with people who don't understand the subtleties of the subject they are writing about. "As for your issue, if you know something's wrong from your own research, have you published it?" I suspect you aren't an academic and I can see why you might think this would be a good course of action. You cannot publish corrections to blatant errors in Wikipedia and get academic credit for it. We are under continual pressure to publish new and interesting things. That we have found an error in Wikipedia is unfortunately not one of them. "If you'd prefer, you can tell me the page and the error and I'll take care of it. Being an established editor can be handy sometimes." I suspect you'd add a note to the page asking for a citation to support the existing incorrect statement because you won't be able to check it yourself. It will remain there for months, and by then everyone will have lost interest and moved on. Or perhaps the statement has a citation, but for subtle reasons the statement is correct, but nothing to do with the subject of the article. Without understanding the mathematics, you have no way of checking that. So even "verifiability" doesn't help. You need to understand just how very difficult this is. Go to the page on "Group action". Look at the section "Types of actions". Now look at the bullet point "irreducible". Do you see anything wrong there? Do you see a citation? (Please do not remove it -- I am not stating there is or isn't an error there.) How would you, an experienced editor, check whether this was correct and relevant information? Edit: I edited the above for tone after someone pointed out that I sounded like I was yelling. Not my intention.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Friendly advice: you'd be more persuasive if you yelled less. As someone who jumped into WP with the primary intent of improving technical software security coverage, I know where you're coming from. WP can seem hostile to experts, because it is --- unlike the real world --- structured to prevent experts from carrying higher status. Whole WP forks have been created to allow acknowledged experts to contribute without arguing with laypeople. Having said that, all those projects failed, and WP is perhaps the most impressive resource on one of the top 5† most impressive information technology projects in human history. I don't love WP's attitude towards expertise, but I also don't love tilting at windmills. WP will continue to be successful without your mathematical expertise. That's just a fact. Knowing that, maybe you can understand how people on HN would feel it's unproductive to loudly complain about your experiences on WP. † Prepared to concede the human genome project as more impressive than the Internet.

scott_s 15y ago

When I find errors in Wikipedia articles, I add a section to the Talk page explaining my reasoning, citing sources if I can. Then more "established" people can make the edit. As far as sourcing errors goes, think about it from the perspective of a generalist. For any given "correction," I think it's fair to assume that the change is more likely to be wrong than correct. The generalist who curates many pages is probably not qualified to determine either way, so the safest thing to do is revert back to the old version. Hence, sourcing corrections can give them confidence that the change is more likely to be correct than the original. Yes, this is difficult. But I think that's it's inherently difficult. That is, providing a vast source of knowledge covering many topics digestible by non-experts is inherently a difficult endeavor.