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Wikipedia - "I made it up"

tsg said:
Or perhaps they think too many people trust it too much. People constantly believe things they should be skeptical of simply because they read it on the internet, read it in a newspaper or saw it on television. This isn't new and it isn't any different simply because it's Wikipedia.
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Actually, it is new and different in the case of Wikipedia. The claims of the founders, as well as it's ardent supporters like Geni, is that it is every bit as reliable and useful as traditional encyclopedias, such as Brittanica, if not actually superior to them (Geni's claim), because of the open user-editable format, not in spite of it. The fact that one of the co-founders is now one of it's strongest critics, and has admitted that it's not reliable, although he attempts to shift criticism by claiming the same thing of all encyclopedias, without support of course.

Here's an interesting debate between one of Wikipedia's founders, and the Editor in Chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, as published by the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/public/articl...1xZOC9Y9PFhJZV16jFlLM_20070911.html?mod=blogs
 
luchog said:
:dl:

Typical woo true-believer response. You were proven wrong, so you resort to dismissal and ad hominem.
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You've proven nothing. That a few mistakes go uncorrected doesn't disprove that Wikipedia is, in general, self correcting.

The fact is, the articles are significant. I'll give you a hint, one of them is an important part of Japanese history. The other concerns an important part of one of the major peoples of the Ukraine. Obviously things no one cares about, unlike collectible card games.
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Significant is not the point. They can be entirely significant and important and still go uncorrected if nobody else reads them.

If Wikipedia is so easily vandalized, and carries such errors for so long in articles that are scholarly, as opposed to pop culture and other meaningless fluff, that pretty much proves that point that Wikipedia is nowhere near as self-correcting and reliable a source for anything serious as you've been preaching for so long.
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No, it doesn't. It only proves that the few articles you think should be reliable are not. Mostly because you made them so.

The long-running political feuds and the consistency of vandalism and unsupported claims in so many articles, political and otherwise, should have been enough proof of that, but you can't get a true believer to re-evaluate his beliefs I guess.

My experiment has proven my point. The Wikipedia experiment has failed miserably. Useful for fluff, not nearly reliable enough for serious scholarship.
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"Serious scholarship" is your requirement, not Wikipedia's. That doesn't make it a failure. It means it doesn't meet your needs. So use something else. Many other people find it useful despite not meeting your requirements. Deal with it.
 
luchog said:
Actually, it is new and different in the case of Wikipedia. The claims of the founders, as well as it's ardent supporters like Geni, is that it is every bit as reliable and useful as traditional encyclopedias, such as Brittanica, if not actually superior to them (Geni's claim), because of the open user-editable format, not in spite of it.
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Whether or not it is more or less reliable than a standard encyclopedia isn't the argument. The argument made is that Wikipedia can't be trusted at all because of the format and I don't see that supported either here or by your experiment.
 
luchog said:
I'll give you a hint, one of them is an important part of Japanese history. The other concerns an important part of one of the major peoples of the Ukraine.
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Why don't you just tell us which articles they are and what errors you have introduced into them? Is it so important to you to prove to yourself and a few dozen JREF forum members that "Wikipedia can't be trusted" that you want to risk thousands of people around the world to be misinformed?
 
luchog said:
:dl:

Typical woo true-believer response. You were proven wrong, so you resort to dismissal and ad hominem.
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Um irony much?

The fact is, the articles are significant. I'll give you a hint, one of them is an important part of Japanese history. The other concerns an important part of one of the major peoples of the Ukraine. Obviously things no one cares about, unlike collectible card games.
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Prove it.

If Wikipedia is so easily vandalized, and carries such errors for so long in articles that are scholarly, as opposed to pop culture and other meaningless fluff, that pretty much proves that point that Wikipedia is nowhere near as self-correcting and reliable a source for anything serious as you've been preaching for so long.
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Depends on the area. Now I would count this as a "scholarly area"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_nitrate

The long-running political feuds and the consistency of vandalism and unsupported claims in so many articles, political and otherwise, should have been enough proof of that, but you can't get a true believer to re-evaluate his beliefs I guess.

My experiment has proven my point. The Wikipedia experiment has failed miserably. Useful for fluff, not nearly reliable enough for serious scholarship.
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You have failed to release your data (you also have failed to try the same test with more traditional sources although after what happened with the Bogdanov brothers I'd rather you didn't).

Encyclopedias are never reliable enough for serious scholarship (ok in a few cases the author of the article means that the article may be of interest in a study of that person). No one disputes this.
 
geni said:
There is a reason you would have a hard time getting such a test past an ethics comittee

No they is why they have not been corrected. Errors in say [[Pokémon]] tend to get picked up faster.

Given that such "tests" make a a noticable percentage of sneaky vandalism as tests they are not very good.
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So what you are saying is that errors don't necessarily get fixed promptly?

Well, fine, we know that.

The thing is, you cannot rely on people to be trustworthy. Certainly not on the internet. There are many groups and individuals who have reason to spread information that is either not factually accurate, or biased. And they will - and do - take advantage of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a great resource, but its defences against this sort of thing are simply inadequate.

Not that I have a solution to the problem as a whole. I am working towards a partial solution - using trust metrics - in an application I'm developing, but I don't know if it would be feasible to implement this for Wikipedia.
 
PixyMisa said:
So what you are saying is that errors don't necessarily get fixed promptly?

Well, fine, we know that.

The thing is, you cannot rely on people to be trustworthy. Certainly not on the internet. There are many groups and individuals who have reason to spread information that is either not factually accurate, or biased. And they will - and do - take advantage of Wikipedia.
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Tell me about. I thought the US elections were over a year away. Why am I already dealing with candidates? I supose on the upside they are no longer blameing it on interns.

Wikipedia is a great resource, but its defences against this sort of thing are simply inadequate.
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There are various plans being worked on

Not that I have a solution to the problem as a whole. I am working towards a partial solution - using trust metrics - in an application I'm developing, but I don't know if it would be feasible to implement this for Wikipedia.
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Problem is most content is added by new users. The users your system will tend to really trust mostly do maintince.

Current attack lines involve makeing the bots smarter and article rateing.
 
Morrigan said:
...Wow.
Luchog demonstrated that the claims about Wikipedia articles being corrected rapidly and having a self-correcting mechanism are false. He only "lied" in the sense that he experimented with the process to test the flaws in the system, the same way hoaxers who make crop circles "lie" to test public incredulity, or that James Randi and Carlos "lied" to the Australian public.

Your counter-argument is what... that it doesn't matter because nobody cares about the articles he edited (and you have no evidence of that either)? So allowing misinformation is okay if the articles are not especially popular subjects?

You amaze me.
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Every encyclopedia will contain false or misleading information. The question is how much damage this misinformation does. If an article is not frequently read, then logically, its errors will not do much damage. If an article is frequently read, it will also be frequently edited, and therefore not do much damage. If a tree falls in an empty forest, it won't crush anyone.

Wikipedia has problems that need to be fixed, but this particular problem is overstated.
 
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MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - Neil Waters had never seen anything quite like it.

“I was looking at a stack of final examinations,” said Waters, a professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, “and I found several instances of misinformation that [were] identical from one student to another.”

All of those students in Waters’ Japanese history class late last year had been steered wrong by the same source — Wikipedia, the sprawling online encyclopedia that has revolutionized how ordinary people find information....
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17740041/
 
robinson said:
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - Neil Waters had never seen anything quite like it.

“I was looking at a stack of final examinations,” said Waters, a professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, “and I found several instances of misinformation that [were] identical from one student to another.”

All of those students in Waters’ Japanese history class late last year had been steered wrong by the same source — Wikipedia, the sprawling online encyclopedia that has revolutionized how ordinary people find information....
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17740041/
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It sounds like more than just the foolishness of relying on wiki- this sounds like plagiarism.
 
All of those students in Waters’ Japanese history class late last year had been steered wrong by the same source — Wikipedia
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This may mean that luchog's vandalism-to-prove-a-point may already be doing its damage...

luchog said:
I'll give you a hint, one of them is an important part of Japanese history.
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Are you happy now, luchog? :mad:
 
JJM said:
It sounds like more than just the foolishness of relying on wiki- this sounds like plagiarism.
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I'd have to agree. This is more evidence of the students poor research skills than it is the unusability of Wikipedia.
 
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