Growing pains for Wikipedia

Cnet ^ | 12/05/2005 | Daniel Terdiman

[frankenMonkey]

...mentally triangulate the truth...

damn, thats good.

[antiRepublicrat]

Wikipedia is what happens without tightly controlled peer review.

As has been mentioned, this guy could have been part of the peer review instead of complaining.

[antiRepublicrat]

I think Wikipedia is about as trustworthy as the average NYT news story or the average comment on Freerepublic. Which simply means that you understand when you read it that you are reading an introduction or one take

The average Wiki entry has several authors, several takes. If you don't like that POV, make your own edits.

In that, I find it a lot more reliable than the NYT. I can always read the editorial discussions if something looks fishy, and see how that POV was arrived at.

[cloud8]

> Wikipedia, for the articles I've needed it for, has been absolutely un-biased and extremely informative.

You can't beat Wiki for quick common knowledge--bio info, movies, geography, etc., but if you're looking for expertise or interpretation, be sure that the author cites his references.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Exactly.

Those trying to change entries are a bit like those who vote over and over in a poll in order to change the outcome.

One thing that might help (maybe they do this) is to keep track of changes and who made them.

[Lancey Howard]

Wikipedia is like "the information age" meets "The Satanic Verses". In the Salman Rushdie book, "satanic verses" were extra verses that were maliciously added to the existing text of the Koran over the course of hundreds of years by people who translated/copied it by hand.

With Wikipedia anybody can twist, distort, embellish and/or completely fabricate whatever they wish. And once made, that entry will, in some form or another, bounce around cyberspace forever. "History" in the "information age" is becoming more and more meaningless.

I don't know if, a hundred years from now, "history" will have any credibility at all.

[sam_paine]

Which simply means that you understand when you read it that you are reading an introduction or one take on the issue and the writer is a human being with a viewpoint.

I don't understand the whole point of communication, then. When I discuss anything with anyone, I don't define anything in that human conversation as "the truth."

I don't give Dan Rather, Rush Limbaugh or GW credit for speaking "truth." Every writer is biased, and from several sources you can get a confidence factor in some overlapping agreement.

If I have not read the changelog or been involved in the "conversation" that made the article, then on the face, Wikipedia is just one source just like a peer edited NYT article is just one source.

[sam_paine]

I don't know if, a hundred years from now, "history" will have any credibility at all.

Or maybe it will be completely credible.

[Lancey Howard]

Thanks for that link.

Having been a member of the Science Fiction Book Club in the '60s, and having grown up on Tom Swift and then Robert Heinlein, I love that stuff. By the way, it has always occurred to me that if you had a giant (and very sophisticated) mirror properly positioned on a distant star (or even a series of mirrors here and there) then you could, using an equally sophisticated telescope, pick up the reflections of light that eminated at any time during the past and "see" any historic event that happened on earth's surface (as long as there wasn't too much of a cloud cover).

It's like when we look up at the sky and see a distant galaxy - - we are actually seeing that distant galaxy as it was hundreds or thousands (or millions) of years ago. Well, a distant mirror could reflect back to us images of our earth as it was hundreds or thousands (or millions) of years ago.

At least, that's what I figured when I was a kid.

[sam_paine]

if you had a giant mirror

Hell, if you had a time machine!

[Taliesan]

With Wikipedia anybody can twist, distort, embellish and/or completely fabricate whatever they wish. And once made, that entry will, in some form or another, bounce around cyberspace forever. "History" in the "information age" is becoming more and more meaningless.

I don't know if, a hundred years from now, "history" will have any credibility at all.

Nonsense. Whatever credibility history ever had it retains. You think biased data somehow got edited out of the process in 4th cent BC Athens, or 10th cent AD Constantinople, or 19th cent Paris? A hundred years from now it will be MUCH EASIER to write the history of our era than ever before. Why? It's all being preserved.

The historian has always had to cope with multiple sources of info with multiple biases. In fact, that is a historian's dream! The only bad thing for history is when the data is DESTROYED.

It really is only the liberal mind that frets that people can't sort out data on their own. An "editor" is nothing more than a middleman, like an insurance agent or a stock broker. A middleman is only needed because of a technological deficiency, and the middleman always goes away when the technology arrives to eliminate the gap between the consumer of the data and the producer. The "editor" does not help the historian. The "editor" just lays one more layer of bias on top of primary sources.

Absolutely nothing has changed in the information age except the volume of the info being produced, and its endurability. The digital revolution will produce much more accurate history, just like, in the long run, the blogosphere will purify, not foul, the information available to the public. The only difference between the old editorial process and the new is that the new takes place in public.

Let not your heart be troubled.

[Lancey Howard]

Thanks for the response!

[Arkinsaw]

If you don't like that POV, make your own edits.

And then have them reverted within minutes.