5 ms·

>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 lazin

>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.
  - wbhart 15y ago
    Whilst my posts on this subject are all over the place here. I'm not arguing that Wikipedia is not useful, nor impressive, nor successful. It is all of these. Nor am I suggesting that having "Dr" in front of your name should give you more power on Wikipedia. What I am alleging is that Wikipedia has a problem with plagiarism, with incorrect information and it has not brought a technological solution to the very difficult problem of verifying information in technical areas (I have also alleged elsewhere that Wikipedia has a problem with deletionism). The general Wikipedia approach works extremely well for general knowledge, but badly, IMHO, with specialised knowledge. For that reason, some academics prefer to devote their time to writing primary peer reviewed articles (the corpus of which is vast compared to Wikipedia, and much more successful if quantity and quality is the metric). As I have already noted, there are many academics who do spend time adding to Wikipedia. They are not wrong to do so. But I personally see limitations to the approach, with no workable solution, technological or otherwise, in sight.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      I understood the point you were making. I was attempting to add to it, saying that these are issues that are going to be especially annoying for academics, who are accustomed to different norms (in particular, respect for expertise earned through study and publication). Academics like yourself are much better off writing primary and secondary sources outside the encyclopedia. It is the goal of the encyclopedia to aggregate and promote primary and secondary sources. It is not the goal of the encyclopedia to itself be the authoritative source for information on any given topic. You will find that having written even a simple survey paper that your ideas and critiques are far more readily incorporated into WP than by bloodying your forehead against the brick wall of other editors following what they know to be well-intentioned and, empirically, effective rules.

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.
- wbhart 15y ago
  Whilst my posts on this subject are all over the place here. I'm not arguing that Wikipedia is not useful, nor impressive, nor successful. It is all of these. Nor am I suggesting that having "Dr" in front of your name should give you more power on Wikipedia. What I am alleging is that Wikipedia has a problem with plagiarism, with incorrect information and it has not brought a technological solution to the very difficult problem of verifying information in technical areas (I have also alleged elsewhere that Wikipedia has a problem with deletionism). The general Wikipedia approach works extremely well for general knowledge, but badly, IMHO, with specialised knowledge. For that reason, some academics prefer to devote their time to writing primary peer reviewed articles (the corpus of which is vast compared to Wikipedia, and much more successful if quantity and quality is the metric). As I have already noted, there are many academics who do spend time adding to Wikipedia. They are not wrong to do so. But I personally see limitations to the approach, with no workable solution, technological or otherwise, in sight.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I understood the point you were making. I was attempting to add to it, saying that these are issues that are going to be especially annoying for academics, who are accustomed to different norms (in particular, respect for expertise earned through study and publication). Academics like yourself are much better off writing primary and secondary sources outside the encyclopedia. It is the goal of the encyclopedia to aggregate and promote primary and secondary sources. It is not the goal of the encyclopedia to itself be the authoritative source for information on any given topic. You will find that having written even a simple survey paper that your ideas and critiques are far more readily incorporated into WP than by bloodying your forehead against the brick wall of other editors following what they know to be well-intentioned and, empirically, effective rules.