6 Responses to “A Wiki Story”

1. qwerty Says:
   May 24th, 2005 at 11:21 am

   “The blogs and the podcasts and the Wikipedia are not the story; the people we find through them are.”

2. Robin Says:
   May 24th, 2005 at 12:34 pm

   Well, I suppose our moment in the sun couldn’t last forever. But it was a good experiment none the less. My guess is that had the show actually been broadcast it would have been only a matter of minutes before those changes were made anyway.

   for the record, I care what David Miller has to say.

3. mmcpher Says:
   May 25th, 2005 at 2:35 pm

   Wiki is a totally neat, totally unreliable idea. I first came across it helping my daughter do research for a 4th or 5th grade school project. I forget the specific topic, maybe something about the Wonders of the Ancient World. Wikipedia was a source for words, pictures and links, but it was to inaccurate and contradictory to pass muster for a pre-middle school project, at least IMHO. There was no question it suffered by comparison to other web sites. But I remain interested in the project and the theory. A few months ago, I briefly conducted a similar experiment. I burried a small phrase in the “poker” entry, specifically adding the game “Fizben” to the list of derivitave games. It lasted less than it took me to draw a Royal Fizben, less than a day (I was going to remove it myself after a few days, but didn’t have to). My thought then was that the Wikis police this kind of nuisance stuff themselves. Maybe there are bad cops, but then the good cops come in and clean up the corrections. Is it a valid assumption that the good cops will outlast and outwork the good cops? If you think of it in terms of vandals versus truth-seekers, my money would ultimately be on the truth-seeker, but what does Wiki do about misguided truth-seekers?

4. Jackson Says:
   May 25th, 2005 at 5:29 pm

   The curse and blessing of Wikipedia is that it provides such a rich metaphor for the web itself. The comment above from “mmcpher” is right in one sense: you can’t be sure that what you read on the web is factually correct. But if we are to believe in the wisdom of crowds, then eventually, what we read in, say, the Bach entry will be true as the numbers of contributors to the article increase.

   Any thoughts what the magic number is that will tip an entry from conjecture to real live fact?

5. beland Says:
   May 26th, 2005 at 1:04 am

   > But why do we care what “David Miller� says?

   If the question is, “Should a quotation from David Miller be included in the encyclopedia?” the answer is clearly no. We don’t care what David Miller says, in that sense. In fact, Wikipedia specifically prohibits adding original research or personal opinions to articles, even if presented in the third person.

   If the question is, “Should we put information that David Miller supplies in the Wikipedia?” the answer should be obvious. Yes, if he has has something factual, encyclopedic, and relevant to an article. That’s the whole point of the project. Everyone knows something interesting about the universe, and its goal is to get a large number people to contribute small pieces of information until everything worth knowing (for an encyclopedia, at least) is assembled in one place. And after severar years, we can empirically say that this has resulted in the collection of a large amount of information.

   If the question is, “Should we trust what David Miller has to add to Wikipedia?” the answer is, I would say, no. I’m sure some people will, and well, lots of people trust unsubstantiated rumors for no particularly good reason. Who knows who he is or where he’s getting his information? We might, however, put more faith in his claims if they have been peer-reviewed (like scientists and academics do), cites reputable sources, or has been fact-checked or independently verified (as journalists and detectives do).

   So the interesting question here is, “Can we trust the Wikipedia group dynamic to purge falsehoods?” It seems like some erroneous information is removed quickly, depending on how many and what kind of people are monitoring an article, and how easy it is to check a given fact against one’s own personal knowledge. Even this level of fact-checking seems to produce a remarkably informative and accurate collection. But there are a finite number of people working on the project, which has gigabytes of facts to monitor, and so it seems to have some neglected corners. A stated long-term goal is to have articles which have been rigorously fact-checked against the authoritative sources which they cite. Even given how fast the project is currently growing, this will take years to accomplish, because it is a very labor-intensive task. But then, this is not an atypical timeframe for large reference works.

   One of the interesting things about Wikipedia is that if a critic says, “Article X contains a factual error,” or “Article Y doesn’t cite its sources,” or “Article Z is poorly written,” one might always reply, “So why don’t you fix it?” I wonder, then, whether Wikipedia needs more fans, or more critics.

6. JamesFlynn Says:
   September 5th, 2005 at 8:46 pm

   The danger for wikipedia, and related wiki-technologies is the “tragedy of the commons” – its initial success, brought about by a co-operating group of idealistic wikipedians, may in the future be abused by the more mercenary among us. Spam has almost broken E-mail – once the spammers target wikipedia.org, what will stop spam from breaking the wikipedia? To echo mmcpher’s comment – will there be more good cops than bad cops?

   I think that ultimately, good behavior will need to be enforced by a feedback protocol – in a similar way to BitTorrent et al – users will only be allowed to edit a page once they’ve proven their worth via contribution.

   For now, it works wonderfully. My most recent article (on a scientific topic) was edited by a 19 year old sydney native of japanese extraction, and I must admit, his corrections improved the page.

   But also wikipedia reminds me of how far we’ve come from the ancient irish monks of 13 centuries ago, in cold stone rooms and with freezing hands, who with love and care, crafted every word of the bibles – every hebrew name, every letter – in black and color ink. The bible was the encyclopedia of their day, and they often took months to write a single page. In their reverie, did they imagine the global book that is our wikipedia?

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