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"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

by 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
      At the risk of carrying on a conversation... I would like to reply to that. I certainly agree with that and appreciate your clarification. However, what is happening is that Wikipedia is attempting to deal with very technical topics. As such there is a great divide between the techniques that are empirically observed to successfully collate general knowledge and the tried and tested techniques, developed over hundreds and even thousands of years for collating technical knowledge. Precisely because academics have so little time to communicate their knowledge to nontechnical audiences there is a dire need for an approach that can successfully deal with this very difficult problem. My claim is that the wikipedia approach is so far not as successful in this area. On forums where ignorance is king, I frequently advocate the use of Wikipedia to inform. Both aspects need to be understood. There are many people for whom Wikipedia should be a tremendously important tool. In forums like this, I emphasise the other side of things. The Wikipedia approach has its limitations as a means of disseminating precise and technical information.
wbhart 15y ago
Here is a better example than the "Group action" one, and it's a real clanger. Look at the page on "Group representation". There it defines a notion of "irreducible representation" in the section "Reducibility". Now, notice the phrase "A subspace W of V that is invariant under the group action is called a subrepresentation." Which group action is it talking about? This is completely orphaned. You might think to click through to the page on "Group action" and see if you can get a clue what might have been meant before an edit orphaned this phrase. In fact, a module can be thought of as a generalisation of a vector space. So in the case of an irreducible group action as defined on the "Group action" page, if R is a field, the module there is a vector space. That G acts R-linearly means precisely that there is a group homomorphism from G into GL(X), i.e. that you have a group representation into the vector space X. So, now the definition of an irreducible group action is that there is no non-trivial, proper vector subspace of X which is invariant under the group action. The definition of an irreducible group representation on the other hand states that there is no non-trivial, proper vector subspace of V that is invariant under the associated group action. But how in a million years is anyone supposed to work that out from looking at either page? And if either page changes, the connection is totally lost. A substantial part of the "Group representation" article would have to be rewritten to fix this. And similarly for the "Group action" article. Then the two would have to be connected so that a revert in one doesn't mess up all the hard work in the other. Naturally people have pointed out in 2004 that there are problems here. But in seven years it has never been fixed.
redthrowaway 15y ago
Of course I can't point out the error. I'm asking you to, and provide a source to back it up. I'm no expert on math, but I've been editing for years and I know how to get corrected information included. I'm not suggesting that I, as a layman, could replace your knowledge as an expert. I'm suggesting that I, as an experienced editor, could help you fix a problem in a way that's likely to stick.

by wbhart 15y ago

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
    At the risk of carrying on a conversation... I would like to reply to that. I certainly agree with that and appreciate your clarification. However, what is happening is that Wikipedia is attempting to deal with very technical topics. As such there is a great divide between the techniques that are empirically observed to successfully collate general knowledge and the tried and tested techniques, developed over hundreds and even thousands of years for collating technical knowledge. Precisely because academics have so little time to communicate their knowledge to nontechnical audiences there is a dire need for an approach that can successfully deal with this very difficult problem. My claim is that the wikipedia approach is so far not as successful in this area. On forums where ignorance is king, I frequently advocate the use of Wikipedia to inform. Both aspects need to be understood. There are many people for whom Wikipedia should be a tremendously important tool. In forums like this, I emphasise the other side of things. The Wikipedia approach has its limitations as a means of disseminating precise and technical information.

wbhart 15y ago

Here is a better example than the "Group action" one, and it's a real clanger. Look at the page on "Group representation". There it defines a notion of "irreducible representation" in the section "Reducibility". Now, notice the phrase "A subspace W of V that is invariant under the group action is called a subrepresentation." Which group action is it talking about? This is completely orphaned. You might think to click through to the page on "Group action" and see if you can get a clue what might have been meant before an edit orphaned this phrase. In fact, a module can be thought of as a generalisation of a vector space. So in the case of an irreducible group action as defined on the "Group action" page, if R is a field, the module there is a vector space. That G acts R-linearly means precisely that there is a group homomorphism from G into GL(X), i.e. that you have a group representation into the vector space X. So, now the definition of an irreducible group action is that there is no non-trivial, proper vector subspace of X which is invariant under the group action. The definition of an irreducible group representation on the other hand states that there is no non-trivial, proper vector subspace of V that is invariant under the associated group action. But how in a million years is anyone supposed to work that out from looking at either page? And if either page changes, the connection is totally lost. A substantial part of the "Group representation" article would have to be rewritten to fix this. And similarly for the "Group action" article. Then the two would have to be connected so that a revert in one doesn't mess up all the hard work in the other. Naturally people have pointed out in 2004 that there are problems here. But in seven years it has never been fixed.

redthrowaway 15y ago

Of course I can't point out the error. I'm asking you to, and provide a source to back it up. I'm no expert on math, but I've been editing for years and I know how to get corrected information included. I'm not suggesting that I, as a layman, could replace your knowledge as an expert. I'm suggesting that I, as an experienced editor, could help you fix a problem in a way that's likely to stick.