28 ms·

>"I'm much more worried about what happens when an unethical outfit manages to start getting major clients and start controlling articles that our average reade

>"I'm much more worried about what happens when an unethical outfit manages to start getting major clients and start controlling articles that our average reader assumes are not written by corporate flaks." Or worse, if Wikipedia's trustworthiness is tarnished beyond repair. I remember when I was in high school 5 or 6 years back Wikipedia was kind of seen as a joke by my peers. Now it's taken as near fact. Although I think skepticism of anything read on the Internet or elsewhere is healthy, I would hate to see it revert to the first state because of greedy "PR" firms.

mjn 13y ago
A hope that's admittedly probably wildly optimistic is that Wikipedia could help people get better at critically evaluating sources, since everyone knows you are not "supposed" to take it completely uncritically on the basis of the publisher's authority. If you get some familiarity with it gets reasonably easy to spot which articles have something strange about them. Sometimes it's the writing style, sometimes the tone that clearly sounds like advocacy or PR copy rather than encyclopedia copy, sometimes the absence of or particular choice of references, etc. I tend to also start with strong prior skepticism depending on the area, e.g. articles on present-day companies, but not ones big enough to attract a lot of real editors (unlike Google, Microsoft, etc., which do) are inherently suspect for paid editing, while articles on mathematics, whatever other problems they might have, typically don't ring my "might be a PR shill" warning bell. Can be useful even outside of Wikipedia! Distinguishing between trade-nonfiction books honestly trying to cover a subject, versus trade-nonfiction books that are thinly veiled ads for a piece of technology (or the author's management/diet/etc. consulting gig), has some similarities.
- eru 13y ago
  Articles on math and physics might just be plain wrong, though. (Especially the `entropy' article, since every armchair physicist wants to contribute.)
makomk 13y ago
That might not be such a bad thing. Wikipedia isn't exactly trustworthy even without paid editing by PR folks; the Wikipedia pages of journalists who criticise them tend to turn into hatchet jobs for instance.

mjn 13y ago

A hope that's admittedly probably wildly optimistic is that Wikipedia could help people get better at critically evaluating sources, since everyone knows you are not "supposed" to take it completely uncritically on the basis of the publisher's authority. If you get some familiarity with it gets reasonably easy to spot which articles have something strange about them. Sometimes it's the writing style, sometimes the tone that clearly sounds like advocacy or PR copy rather than encyclopedia copy, sometimes the absence of or particular choice of references, etc. I tend to also start with strong prior skepticism depending on the area, e.g. articles on present-day companies, but not ones big enough to attract a lot of real editors (unlike Google, Microsoft, etc., which do) are inherently suspect for paid editing, while articles on mathematics, whatever other problems they might have, typically don't ring my "might be a PR shill" warning bell. Can be useful even outside of Wikipedia! Distinguishing between trade-nonfiction books honestly trying to cover a subject, versus trade-nonfiction books that are thinly veiled ads for a piece of technology (or the author's management/diet/etc. consulting gig), has some similarities.

eru 13y ago
Articles on math and physics might just be plain wrong, though. (Especially the `entropy' article, since every armchair physicist wants to contribute.)

makomk 13y ago

That might not be such a bad thing. Wikipedia isn't exactly trustworthy even without paid editing by PR folks; the Wikipedia pages of journalists who criticise them tend to turn into hatchet jobs for instance.