16 ms·

I think the overall problem is that wikipedia attempts to substitute policy for expertise. As other have pointed out, wikipedia has to deal with lots of bad ed

by autarch 15y ago

I think the overall problem is that wikipedia attempts to substitute policy for expertise. As other have pointed out, wikipedia has to deal with lots of bad edits from people who are not motivated by a pursuit of facts or truth. To deal with this, they've come up with a set of policies that the editors seem to enforce fairly rigidly. This does an okay job of preventing the wackos from taking over. Unfortunately, since the editors often lack the subject expertise to distinguish cranks from experts, these policies end up making it harder for experts to contribute in some cases.

starwed 15y ago
I used to try to work a bit on physics articles. That actually wasn't the problem there -- the problem is that there are so many cranks, and they (being cranks) are so insistent on their incorrect views that it becomes a constant, tiring battle preventing any real work from being done. The only rational course is, once it has been established that you're dealing with a crank, to completely disengage and smack them down with the official policy. (They never have any reliable sources/citations to support their edits.) It's tempting (since they are usually provably, mathematically wrong) to try to convince them of their errors, but experience shows that never works. I saw a lot of people just burn themselves out doing that -- in this case, expertise was being driven away by reluctance to rely on policy.
tptacek 15y ago
It is indeed very annoying for experts to contribute to Wikipedia. They probably shouldn't. Instead, they should do what experts do best, and Wikipedia should do what encyclopedias do best: to wit, experts should conduct research to generate new primary sources or write books to generate new secondary sources, and Wikipedia should continue finding secondary sources to summarize.
- phren0logy 15y ago
  That seems like a real shame, and an unnecessary repetition of work. Surely there's some way to verify expertise and provide expert commentary with supporting links to primary sources, even if it doesn't mean editing the entry directly? Perhaps a side-bar? I'm sure this would lead to arguments about how to verify expertise, but even if it only started with unimpeachable credentials that would seem like a start. Tell me very clearly who is providing the commentary, and I can decide myself if it's credible. I feel like I'm rambling a bit, but really this seems like a wasted opportunity. Why recreate Wikipedia from whole cloth when it already has so much? I suppose that given the way it's licensed, you could always fork it...
  - ErrantX 15y ago
    The reason for doing it that way is that the bar to "facts" entering the mainstream is significantly higher (i.e. peer review, editorial review, etc.) as opposed to "what some WP editor let through". This is important because people do cite Wikipedia and there is more than one instance of a "fact" appearing in an article and later being cited to a secondary source that cites... you guessed it Wikipedia. :) The important step that publishing material adds is peer review. An editor might have excellent credentials but other editors are not equipped to peer review their material. FWIW I don't agree it is an unnecessary repetition of work; the published material is likely to be much more than a summary, with reasoning, and so is adding significantly to the body of work on the topic - which WP can then summarise :)
    - DanBC 15y ago
      > This is important because people do cite Wikipedia Well, yes, but even Wikipedia tells people not to use it as a source, but to follow the links in the article to the sources. That's one of the reasons why sources are supposed to be important.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    An encyclopedia is a survey of existing secondary sources. It's not a research venue. The true waste would be taking valuable research and synthesize and hiding it in an encyclopedia. Pokemon aside, most new knowledge that merits inclusion in Wikipedia deserves its own independent source. It goes research -> authorship of secondary source (journal article, book, magazine article, whatever) -> citation in encyclopedia. And that's really all that happened here: someone tried to skip the middle step (notably: they tried to skip it while authoring the secondary source --- the author of this article published an authoritative text on the Haymarket Riot later on), and Wikipedia called that out.
    - angersock 15y ago
      The true waste would be taking valuable research and synthesize and hiding it in an encyclopedia. It's not like it wouldn't be available elsewhere, right? It goes research -> authorship of secondary source (journal article, book, magazine article, whatever) -> citation in encyclopedia. Conventionally, sure, but Wikipedia would seem to offer an opportunity to fix the shortcomings with that system. Why do you care so much about secondary sources? Because they're vetted. Why is that important? Because primary sources can be taken out of context, because people can't parse them out correctly, etc. I would submit that both of those things are no longer safe assumptions. Secondary sources can be fabricated whole-cloth and appear legitimate (entire industries, such as some branches of SEO, do exactly this) when they are not, and can even cite Wikipedia themselves. So, secondary sources aren't these bastions of truth that they seem to be. The idea that primary sources aren't usable to the populace is also old. It's trivial these days for a user (who cares even the tiniest amount) to run a search and contextualize a source. If Crazy Eddie's Account of the Haymarket Riot is, after a fast search, the only one that has Xenu interfering then maybe it's not a credible account, yeah? Moreover, having so many eyes seeing the same citations and clicking through them increases the likelihood that somebody who actually does have expertise in the matter can comment usefully. If you can't trust the great unwashed masses to search out the truth of things given primary sources, why do you think giving them prechewed knowledge is any better?
- angersock 15y ago
  It is indeed very annoying for experts to contribute to Wikipedia. They probably shouldn't. Er, you realize how poorly this reads to the uninitiated, right?
  - tptacek 15y ago
    No? Experts shouldn't want to write encyclopedias. There's a reason you can't cite them --- not Wikipedia, not Britannica --- in real work: they're encyclopedias. They're not just tertiary sources; they're among the least prestigious of the tertiary sources. I had exactly this problem back in 2007 when I spent some time on Wikipedia. It frustrated the hell out of me, but when I calmed down, I realized that even if WP worked exactly the way I had wished it did, contributing new research to WP is a waste of my time, and the alternative, contributing citations to published sources, is dreary work indeed. The best advice I can offer a subject matter expert uninitiated in Wikipedia that wants to contribute to Wikipedia: write a book.
    - angersock 15y ago
      Experts shouldn't want to write encyclopedias. That's presuming a great deal, don't you think? Besides, the format of Wikipedia isn't so much that an expert would need to write an entire encyclopedia as it is that they can contribute their knowledge of a tiny slice of the domain to an article. Don't get so bogged down in the definition of encyclopedia--hell, almost all of those are printed on paper or optical media, so I guess Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia either, and so we shouldn't limit ourselves.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        Who is this "we" you're talking about? How much of Wikipedia did "we" build? A bunch of people got together and used the Internet to replace Britannica. While doing it, they also said, "here's all of our work product, if you want to go do something else with it". Now here comes 'angersock, for whom that's not good enough. "No, it's not enough that I have the whole Internet to build a new site on, and the whole Wikipedia database to seed it with; no, I want the people working on Wikipedia to build the thing I want, and stop concerning themselves so much with that whole encyclopedia thing". I'm caricaturing, I know, but really, I don't get where you're coming from here.
- boredguy8 15y ago
  The Encarta and (I believe) World Book entries on "Fractal" were written by Benoit Mandelbrot. It's actually quite common for experts to write entries for an encyclopedia.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Benoit Mandelbrot is famous because he published in venues like _Science_, not because an encyclopedia commissioned him to write an article or two. I'm not saying experts can't write encyclopedia articles; I'm saying, credible experts don't use them as venues for research.
    - kevinpet 15y ago
      You are missing the point. Identifying an expert and asking them to write the article is exactly what traditional encyclopedia's do, while wikipedia actively discourages this.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        That's not true. Wikipedia does not have a policy of discouraging experts from writing there. I've personally said (a couple times here) that experts shouldn't write Wikipedia articles, because it is a waste of their time. But they are clearly welcome to do so. The only thing they're not welcome to do is to cite their own expertise instead of actual sources.
        snowwrestler 15y ago
        But in this story, the author did cite actual sources but was still reverted by page-watchers.
- JumpCrisscross 15y ago
  After the expert creates a new primary or credible secondary resource, it shouldn't matter if it's the experts themselves or others who add it to Wikipedia.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  It is indeed very annoying for experts to contribute to Wikipedia. Contrary to some of the replies your comment has received, I agree that Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and it is not a place of first publication for new research findings. That's what Wikipedia is, because that's what Wikipedia says it is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not This is consistent with everyone's understanding of what an encyclopedia (ANY encyclopedia) is, as you point out in your further replies to comments. Indeed an expert in some subject should spend time building up primary and secondary sources, and leave compiling useful reference works like encyclopedias to people with editorial experience who are familiar with the good secondary sources on various subjects. But of course one problem with Wikipedia today is that volunteer editors of Wikipedia ("Wikipedians") are not selected, and by the way the project is mob-managed basically CANNOT be selected, for their editorial experience and familiarity with secondary sources. My first attempt to contribute to the Wikipedia project was to post some source lists (what a librarian might call "pathfinders") in user space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol... and post links to those in article talk space so that editors could refer to good-quality secondary sources as they revised articles on controversial subjects. I can't say that those source lists haven't been used at all, but I can view the page access statistics for those source lists, and they are certainly underused by other Wikipedians. Meanwhile, there are whole broad topics on Wikipedia that are frequently subject to edit wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/... with sockpuppets and meat puppets continually reappearing to push fringe points of view. There is no sustained management response to this, despite the desire of the Wikimedia Foundation to improve content quality. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary/Improve_Quality http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate... After edit: I had earlier posted the same article that was submitted to open this Hacker News thread on my Facebook wall, and one commenter there recalled his experiences trying to correct blatant factual errors on Wikipedia, which eventually led him to the Lamest Edit Wars page in Wikipedia project space, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LAME http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LAME where one has to laugh to avoid crying.
- bh42222 15y ago
  Wikipedia recreates all the limitations of a physical set of encyclopedias. This includes doing a sort of OK job of summarizing relevant facts. This is a limitation for physical encyclopedias because paper, and even more so shelf space, are expensive so some facts have to be prioritized over others. And you can't easily make corrections to a book after it is printed and sold, and since research never stops a paper encyclopedia will frequently be out of date, thus it can never be that accurate - so why expend a ton effort to make it more accurate in the first place? Electronic encyclopedias, like Wikipedia, don't have the same inherent limitations. Wikipedia just happens to have re-created them for the same reason electronic calendars by default show you one month at a time, even on the 30th and 31st, rather than a chunk of next and last months. The reason so many people are so motivated to complain about Wikipedia and all it's limitation is because everyone intuitively can sense there ought to be a better way. 1. Notability of facts is a red herring. Text is easy to compress and storage space is cheap. 2. The need to summarize topics is a red herring. Having a summary "front page", or "top", or "above the fold" etc, combined with more in depth, detailed sections, is a standard way of organizing information on the web. An electronic encyclopedia really ought to use that kind of presentation strategy. 3. Primary sources, new research and minority opinions would naturally be part of the lengthy, detailed version of a topic. And if you want to go completely crazy you could do things like allow voting. Allow people to sort what the default view is by general popularity. Even crazier, sort by popularity based on experts opinion, work out a way for experts to electronically sign or approve articles, and allow people to choose a set of "experts". Go totally bonkers and verify the experts so that someone could choose to see the top evolution articles as rated by Richard Dawkins. Or alternatively re-crate all the limitations of a physical set of encyclopedias.
  - scott_s 15y ago
    I have a different conclusion. Wikipedia shows that the physical limitations of encyclopedias were not the real limitations of their size and scope. Rather, it was the time and effort required to maintain them.
    - r00fus 15y ago
      Physical limitations of dead-tree encyclopedias (as opposed to Wikipedia) is distribution and availability - these, in turn, produce the spam/defacement issues that Wikipedia has evolved process to control.
- aidenn0 15y ago
  It does seem to me though that the way wikipedia is going to end up dated in minor areas. Obviously if we have another copernicus, enough people will generate sources about heliocentricity that wikipedia will catch up quickly. However, how many people are going to write about the subject in the OP? Textbooks (another tertiary source) continue to repeat things that have been known (and even rigorously proven and published) to be false by experts 30 years later. Maybe it's just an inherent flaw in tertiary sources, but I'd like to see people at least try to come up with a way to fix it.
username3 15y ago
New to editing Wikipedia? Read this thread first. Click parent above.
stfu 15y ago
people who are not motivated by a pursuit of facts or truth I am not quite sure about this. In my view Wikipedia tries to negotiate a middle ground between all the different people who think they have a claim on the "facts" or "truth". Just imagine Charles Murray presenting his research that the economic problems of America's working class are largely its own fault, stemming from factors like the presence of a lot of lazy men as a fact on Wikipedia. (Quote from: http://chronicle.com/article/Charles-Murray-Author-of-The/130722/ http://chronicle.com/article/Charles-Murray-Author-of-The/13... - currently most popular Cronicle article). I truly believe that people have most of the time good intentions with their edits, but there are a lot of different versions of "truth" around - especially in Social Sciences.

by autarch 15y ago

starwed 15y ago

I used to try to work a bit on physics articles. That actually wasn't the problem there -- the problem is that there are so many cranks, and they (being cranks) are so insistent on their incorrect views that it becomes a constant, tiring battle preventing any real work from being done. The only rational course is, once it has been established that you're dealing with a crank, to completely disengage and smack them down with the official policy. (They never have any reliable sources/citations to support their edits.) It's tempting (since they are usually provably, mathematically wrong) to try to convince them of their errors, but experience shows that never works. I saw a lot of people just burn themselves out doing that -- in this case, expertise was being driven away by reluctance to rely on policy.

tptacek 15y ago

It is indeed very annoying for experts to contribute to Wikipedia. They probably shouldn't. Instead, they should do what experts do best, and Wikipedia should do what encyclopedias do best: to wit, experts should conduct research to generate new primary sources or write books to generate new secondary sources, and Wikipedia should continue finding secondary sources to summarize.

phren0logy 15y ago
That seems like a real shame, and an unnecessary repetition of work. Surely there's some way to verify expertise and provide expert commentary with supporting links to primary sources, even if it doesn't mean editing the entry directly? Perhaps a side-bar? I'm sure this would lead to arguments about how to verify expertise, but even if it only started with unimpeachable credentials that would seem like a start. Tell me very clearly who is providing the commentary, and I can decide myself if it's credible. I feel like I'm rambling a bit, but really this seems like a wasted opportunity. Why recreate Wikipedia from whole cloth when it already has so much? I suppose that given the way it's licensed, you could always fork it...
- ErrantX 15y ago
  The reason for doing it that way is that the bar to "facts" entering the mainstream is significantly higher (i.e. peer review, editorial review, etc.) as opposed to "what some WP editor let through". This is important because people do cite Wikipedia and there is more than one instance of a "fact" appearing in an article and later being cited to a secondary source that cites... you guessed it Wikipedia. :) The important step that publishing material adds is peer review. An editor might have excellent credentials but other editors are not equipped to peer review their material. FWIW I don't agree it is an unnecessary repetition of work; the published material is likely to be much more than a summary, with reasoning, and so is adding significantly to the body of work on the topic - which WP can then summarise :)
  - DanBC 15y ago
    > This is important because people do cite Wikipedia Well, yes, but even Wikipedia tells people not to use it as a source, but to follow the links in the article to the sources. That's one of the reasons why sources are supposed to be important.
- tptacek 15y ago
  An encyclopedia is a survey of existing secondary sources. It's not a research venue. The true waste would be taking valuable research and synthesize and hiding it in an encyclopedia. Pokemon aside, most new knowledge that merits inclusion in Wikipedia deserves its own independent source. It goes research -> authorship of secondary source (journal article, book, magazine article, whatever) -> citation in encyclopedia. And that's really all that happened here: someone tried to skip the middle step (notably: they tried to skip it while authoring the secondary source --- the author of this article published an authoritative text on the Haymarket Riot later on), and Wikipedia called that out.
  - angersock 15y ago
    The true waste would be taking valuable research and synthesize and hiding it in an encyclopedia. It's not like it wouldn't be available elsewhere, right? It goes research -> authorship of secondary source (journal article, book, magazine article, whatever) -> citation in encyclopedia. Conventionally, sure, but Wikipedia would seem to offer an opportunity to fix the shortcomings with that system. Why do you care so much about secondary sources? Because they're vetted. Why is that important? Because primary sources can be taken out of context, because people can't parse them out correctly, etc. I would submit that both of those things are no longer safe assumptions. Secondary sources can be fabricated whole-cloth and appear legitimate (entire industries, such as some branches of SEO, do exactly this) when they are not, and can even cite Wikipedia themselves. So, secondary sources aren't these bastions of truth that they seem to be. The idea that primary sources aren't usable to the populace is also old. It's trivial these days for a user (who cares even the tiniest amount) to run a search and contextualize a source. If Crazy Eddie's Account of the Haymarket Riot is, after a fast search, the only one that has Xenu interfering then maybe it's not a credible account, yeah? Moreover, having so many eyes seeing the same citations and clicking through them increases the likelihood that somebody who actually does have expertise in the matter can comment usefully. If you can't trust the great unwashed masses to search out the truth of things given primary sources, why do you think giving them prechewed knowledge is any better?
angersock 15y ago
It is indeed very annoying for experts to contribute to Wikipedia. They probably shouldn't. Er, you realize how poorly this reads to the uninitiated, right?
- tptacek 15y ago
  No? Experts shouldn't want to write encyclopedias. There's a reason you can't cite them --- not Wikipedia, not Britannica --- in real work: they're encyclopedias. They're not just tertiary sources; they're among the least prestigious of the tertiary sources. I had exactly this problem back in 2007 when I spent some time on Wikipedia. It frustrated the hell out of me, but when I calmed down, I realized that even if WP worked exactly the way I had wished it did, contributing new research to WP is a waste of my time, and the alternative, contributing citations to published sources, is dreary work indeed. The best advice I can offer a subject matter expert uninitiated in Wikipedia that wants to contribute to Wikipedia: write a book.
  - angersock 15y ago
    Experts shouldn't want to write encyclopedias. That's presuming a great deal, don't you think? Besides, the format of Wikipedia isn't so much that an expert would need to write an entire encyclopedia as it is that they can contribute their knowledge of a tiny slice of the domain to an article. Don't get so bogged down in the definition of encyclopedia--hell, almost all of those are printed on paper or optical media, so I guess Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia either, and so we shouldn't limit ourselves.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      Who is this "we" you're talking about? How much of Wikipedia did "we" build? A bunch of people got together and used the Internet to replace Britannica. While doing it, they also said, "here's all of our work product, if you want to go do something else with it". Now here comes 'angersock, for whom that's not good enough. "No, it's not enough that I have the whole Internet to build a new site on, and the whole Wikipedia database to seed it with; no, I want the people working on Wikipedia to build the thing I want, and stop concerning themselves so much with that whole encyclopedia thing". I'm caricaturing, I know, but really, I don't get where you're coming from here.
boredguy8 15y ago
The Encarta and (I believe) World Book entries on "Fractal" were written by Benoit Mandelbrot. It's actually quite common for experts to write entries for an encyclopedia.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Benoit Mandelbrot is famous because he published in venues like _Science_, not because an encyclopedia commissioned him to write an article or two. I'm not saying experts can't write encyclopedia articles; I'm saying, credible experts don't use them as venues for research.
  - kevinpet 15y ago
    You are missing the point. Identifying an expert and asking them to write the article is exactly what traditional encyclopedia's do, while wikipedia actively discourages this.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      That's not true. Wikipedia does not have a policy of discouraging experts from writing there. I've personally said (a couple times here) that experts shouldn't write Wikipedia articles, because it is a waste of their time. But they are clearly welcome to do so. The only thing they're not welcome to do is to cite their own expertise instead of actual sources.
      - snowwrestler 15y ago
        But in this story, the author did cite actual sources but was still reverted by page-watchers.
JumpCrisscross 15y ago
After the expert creates a new primary or credible secondary resource, it shouldn't matter if it's the experts themselves or others who add it to Wikipedia.
tokenadult 15y ago
It is indeed very annoying for experts to contribute to Wikipedia. Contrary to some of the replies your comment has received, I agree that Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and it is not a place of first publication for new research findings. That's what Wikipedia is, because that's what Wikipedia says it is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not This is consistent with everyone's understanding of what an encyclopedia (ANY encyclopedia) is, as you point out in your further replies to comments. Indeed an expert in some subject should spend time building up primary and secondary sources, and leave compiling useful reference works like encyclopedias to people with editorial experience who are familiar with the good secondary sources on various subjects. But of course one problem with Wikipedia today is that volunteer editors of Wikipedia ("Wikipedians") are not selected, and by the way the project is mob-managed basically CANNOT be selected, for their editorial experience and familiarity with secondary sources. My first attempt to contribute to the Wikipedia project was to post some source lists (what a librarian might call "pathfinders") in user space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol... and post links to those in article talk space so that editors could refer to good-quality secondary sources as they revised articles on controversial subjects. I can't say that those source lists haven't been used at all, but I can view the page access statistics for those source lists, and they are certainly underused by other Wikipedians. Meanwhile, there are whole broad topics on Wikipedia that are frequently subject to edit wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/... with sockpuppets and meat puppets continually reappearing to push fringe points of view. There is no sustained management response to this, despite the desire of the Wikimedia Foundation to improve content quality. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary/Improve_Quality http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate... After edit: I had earlier posted the same article that was submitted to open this Hacker News thread on my Facebook wall, and one commenter there recalled his experiences trying to correct blatant factual errors on Wikipedia, which eventually led him to the Lamest Edit Wars page in Wikipedia project space, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LAME http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LAME where one has to laugh to avoid crying.
bh42222 15y ago
Wikipedia recreates all the limitations of a physical set of encyclopedias. This includes doing a sort of OK job of summarizing relevant facts. This is a limitation for physical encyclopedias because paper, and even more so shelf space, are expensive so some facts have to be prioritized over others. And you can't easily make corrections to a book after it is printed and sold, and since research never stops a paper encyclopedia will frequently be out of date, thus it can never be that accurate - so why expend a ton effort to make it more accurate in the first place? Electronic encyclopedias, like Wikipedia, don't have the same inherent limitations. Wikipedia just happens to have re-created them for the same reason electronic calendars by default show you one month at a time, even on the 30th and 31st, rather than a chunk of next and last months. The reason so many people are so motivated to complain about Wikipedia and all it's limitation is because everyone intuitively can sense there ought to be a better way. 1. Notability of facts is a red herring. Text is easy to compress and storage space is cheap. 2. The need to summarize topics is a red herring. Having a summary "front page", or "top", or "above the fold" etc, combined with more in depth, detailed sections, is a standard way of organizing information on the web. An electronic encyclopedia really ought to use that kind of presentation strategy. 3. Primary sources, new research and minority opinions would naturally be part of the lengthy, detailed version of a topic. And if you want to go completely crazy you could do things like allow voting. Allow people to sort what the default view is by general popularity. Even crazier, sort by popularity based on experts opinion, work out a way for experts to electronically sign or approve articles, and allow people to choose a set of "experts". Go totally bonkers and verify the experts so that someone could choose to see the top evolution articles as rated by Richard Dawkins. Or alternatively re-crate all the limitations of a physical set of encyclopedias.
- scott_s 15y ago
  I have a different conclusion. Wikipedia shows that the physical limitations of encyclopedias were not the real limitations of their size and scope. Rather, it was the time and effort required to maintain them.
  - r00fus 15y ago
    Physical limitations of dead-tree encyclopedias (as opposed to Wikipedia) is distribution and availability - these, in turn, produce the spam/defacement issues that Wikipedia has evolved process to control.
aidenn0 15y ago
It does seem to me though that the way wikipedia is going to end up dated in minor areas. Obviously if we have another copernicus, enough people will generate sources about heliocentricity that wikipedia will catch up quickly. However, how many people are going to write about the subject in the OP? Textbooks (another tertiary source) continue to repeat things that have been known (and even rigorously proven and published) to be false by experts 30 years later. Maybe it's just an inherent flaw in tertiary sources, but I'd like to see people at least try to come up with a way to fix it.

username3 15y ago

New to editing Wikipedia? Read this thread first. Click parent above.

stfu 15y ago

people who are not motivated by a pursuit of facts or truth I am not quite sure about this. In my view Wikipedia tries to negotiate a middle ground between all the different people who think they have a claim on the "facts" or "truth". Just imagine Charles Murray presenting his research that the economic problems of America's working class are largely its own fault, stemming from factors like the presence of a lot of lazy men as a fact on Wikipedia. (Quote from: http://chronicle.com/article/Charles-Murray-Author-of-The/130722/ http://chronicle.com/article/Charles-Murray-Author-of-The/13... - currently most popular Cronicle article). I truly believe that people have most of the time good intentions with their edits, but there are a lot of different versions of "truth" around - especially in Social Sciences.