Santasa99

Wikipedia lacks a process of scholarly review !

Wikipedia - a place of opininion and not of knowledge Wikipedia lacks a process of scholarly review ! So, What Would Jimbo Say or Do? Peer review has its own problems with groupthink, and only works when the peers are experts. But Wikipedia fans love the fact that it's a great leveler an expert has the same authority as a spotty teenager on the other side of the world who doesn't know the subject matter in hand. What they don't like to talk about is that on Wikipedia, the truth is determined in the end by a physical contest: whoever has the endurance to stay awake at a keyboard and maintain his version of the edits wins. - Andrew Orlowski Few excerpts with several letters from: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/24/wikipedia_letters/page3.html http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/31/060731fa_fact http://www.aaronsw.com Glad to see the rubbish that is Wikipedia is finally being highlighted. With an encyclopedia you are talking about *absolute* quality. If your encyclopedia is meant to be a serious reference work then nothing should come higher than quality and the accuracy of entries. Wikipedia is fatally flawed because of its "come hither" approach - there is no system of peer review, no system to rate and appraise the quality of entries and no system to determine the fitness someone has for editing or creating entries. - As Carr said "...an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best." - The fact that Wikipedia lets people write rubbish and then legitimises the propagation of said rubbish makes us all poorer. Wikipedia is letting itself stand for insularity, trivia and subjectivity. It seems pretty unlikely to me any serious an encyclopedia needs entries on something as pitiful as "Klingon" - another cultural cul-de-sac which also, quite frankly, demonstrates the hold suburban America has on these reference works. Unfortunately by its nature, Wikipedia under-estimates the effort actually involved in creating an authoratative encyclopedia - a true encyclopedia is an enormous undertaking by any measurement. Single entries may take months to write before they are even sent for review by people with legitimate expertise, either through their experience or qualifications. Just having a keyboard and Internet connection shouldn't grant that kind authority. Perhaps Wikipedia should look to the world of peer-reviewed journals to get an appreciation of how knowledge needs to be filtered and distilled and even argued over before what your writing is fit for consumption. - By Kevin Hall - Horst Prillinger - "...Wikipedia generates noise, not knowledge. Previous encyclopedias were well-researched and contained precise information that could be trusted to be correct. Wikipedia, on the other hand, contains a large amount of errors, omissions..." This coming from someone I have learned to know as a fierce defender of open access to knoledge, the state of Wikipedia must be really bad indeed. In general, I fancy the idea of a public space where you can share your knowledge, and what is more, find interesting information. However, if Wikipedia works this way, it is really a place of opininion and not of knowledge. The basic principles of scientific work *must* apply for a publication which calls itself "encyclopedia". Wikipedia, the free "online encyclopedia" has been hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Anybody can access it free of charge, anyone can add to it, and there's any entry for everything. Right? It turns out that the great advantage of the Wikipedia, the wiki format, which allows everybody to add/edit everything, is also its greatest disadvantage. There are a few topics that I care about, a few of which I actually contributed to the German version of Wikipedia. Watching these entries change over the past few months, I noticed the following tendencies: Most contributions are poorly researched, or not researched at all. Accuracy depends mostly on the one website from which the contributor copied the information. A substantial amount of Wikipedia entries contains information that I know to be incorrect. There is no editorial selection. Some entries just grow and grow because some enthusiast who has no sense for what's important and what's not keeps adding pointless stuff to some entries. Due to extensive linkage within Wikipedia itself, a growing number of badly researched, incorrect Wikipedia articles is pushing down well-researched specialist websites in Google rankings. Text and concepts for Wikipedia entries are often blatantly copied from other websites. To avoid instant recognition, the text is sometimes rewritten, adding inaccuracies, inconsistencies or even errors. Due to the nature of the content and the open format of Wikipedia, no copyright holder can do anything about this. Wikipedia generates noise, not knowledge. Previous encyclopedias were well-researched and contained precise information that could be trusted to be correct. Wikipedia, on the other hand, contains a large amount of errors, omissions and superfluous trivia. Basically, what is happening here is the building of a parallel World Wide Web inside the wikipedia.org domain and calling it an "encyclopedia", which is a total perversity. Just making it searchable and giving it an encyclopedia-like structure doesn't make its content any less fluffy, error-ridden and amateurish than any other website. I hope that in a few years it will be so bloated that it will simply disintegrate, because I can't stand the thought that this thing might someday actually be used as a serious reference source. Because in its current form, it's not to be taken serious at all. Robert McHenry on the Encyclopedia entry Reading the entry on "encyclopedia" leaves one with the impression that it was written by someone who had no previous knowledge of the subject and who, once he got into it, found it did not interest him very much. He browsed here and there in one or more reference works and noted what seemed important, but had no understanding of the cultural and historical contexts involved. In other words, it is a school essay, sketchy and poorly balanced. The article is of modest length at 2,000 words (compare Britannica's corresponding article at about 26,000 words). The longest discussion of a particular work is of Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, hardly an encyclopedia at all. The 120-odd words on Browne contrast oddly with the treatment given what was arguably the most influential encyclopedia in European history: "The French translation of [Chambers] was the inspiration of the Encyclopédie, perhaps the most famous early encyclopedia, edited by Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot and published from 175 [sic] to 1772 in 28 volumes, 71,818 articles, 2,885 illustrations." Was it famous for the number of its illustrations, one is left to wonder? (And by the way, the full first edition had 35 volumes.) A cynic might conclude that the whole article exists chiefly as a context for this paragraph: "Traditional encyclopedias are written by a number of employed text writers, usually people with an academic degree. This is not the case with Wikipedia, a project started in 2001 with the goal to create a free encyclopedia. Anyone can add or improve text, images, and sounds ... By 2004 the project has managed to produce over a million articles in over 80 languages." Overall mark: 5/10 · Robert McHenry was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1992 to 1997 "Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious." "Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." – Oscar Wilde