Such a fine choice of words! Oh, how nice it would be to be able to say such deliciously defaming things – about myself, or about my whole class of internet-using peers!
And what makes it even better is that maybe he's right. He was after all the editor of a newspaper.
Poison is an interesting thing (as Paul and Dargelos from "Les Enfants Terrible" could remind you). But my personal experience with poison is fairly limited, specifically, there is Ratpoison, that most excellent window manager. Down with the rodent!
Down with the rodent and down with the Yellow Plague! Down with pencils and down with books! Down with The Tennessean and down with the New York Times!
Up with vandals and hacks! Up with knowledge and truth! Up with new media and intellects of all sorts, poisonous and otherwise!
--jcorneli
Once again a crusty Old Media figure hopes that no one will notice that all knowledge is provisional and that even Old Media makes mistakes. Of course, for Siegenthaler, its more personal than for someone like McHenry?.
The specifics are worth mentioning. What is glossed over in Seigenthaler's complaints of the article sitting for "132 days" with the false information is that it wasn't linked to any other articles. Thus, it probably wasn't being viewed much, and certainly doesn't represent a failure of CBPP vetting effects.
I do, however, think Wikipedia's shrinking "anonymous" capabilities are a good thing. Since they are only requiring accounts, anonymity in the classical sense is still available, but edits without some form of persistant identity (and therefore responsibility are not).
--akrowne Tue Dec 6 05:16:13 UTC 2005
Note that the NYT really might be considered to be "new media" in some ways. It has become fairly high-tech (the website version at least); and you get some collaborative effects like "The 25 most frequently emailed articles in the last 24 hours". (or so I've heard). Many people find the NYT very useful and interesting. So I feel sort of bad knocking it, even in play. --jcorneli
Note: see tragical comedy intermission for some further discussion and relationships to other CBPP issues.
Regarding the current retraction of fraudulent stem cell cloning results, the following quote struck me:
Egads! 30-40 articles?! In Science?! I don't know anything about the relative badness of this quantity, but this sounds much worse to me than tiny insignificant parts of Wikipedia being wrong. If I were to look at this controversy with the same alarmist mindset as Wikipedia's critics, I might think "this whole a priori peer-review publication thing is crap! We need to throw it out and find something guaranteed trustworthy!"
But of course, that'd be dumb. Pre-hoc peer review as in traditional publication is clearly not perfect, but it does have its utility. Similarly, Wikipedia (and PlanetMath) have different, but just as important, utility, with their post hoc form of review.
(The cloning article is here: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05350/623383.stm, not that this is necessarily the best article on this controversy…)
--akrowne Fri Dec 16 06:29:05 UTC 2005
The recent Wikipedia "controversy" is bogus. The Wikipedia naysayers are attempting to apply a standard that is not met by conventional scientific and scholarly publications. Are conventional publications free of errors? No! That is why we have errata and revised editions. Are conventional publications "authoritative". Only up to a point. A measure of debate and controversy is a good thing. Scientific revolutions are all about overturning established concensus. The standard for journalistic and non-academic publication is even lower. People print intentional distortions and diatribes, and its all business as usual. Wikipedia is "vulnerable" because it replaces the conventional authority-based quality mechanism with a mechanism that is based on the participation of a large numbers of peers.
Really, there is a continuum of possibilities. Ideally, a knowledge project benefits from a large number of participants whose qualifications are as high as possible. Practical considerations place these two measures in an inversely proportional relationship. Wikipedia is operating in a different area of parameter space from Britannica. It would be interesting to compare the two modalities and study their differences. That's not the journalists' goal. They just want a juicy story.
--rmilson Sat Dec 17
The Wikipedia naysayers are attempting to apply a standard that is not met by conventional scientific and scholarly publications.
Similarly, I'd also hope that the Wikipedia yea-sayers are trying to set such a standard! ;)
I think that a discussion of what is "good" and "bad" in Wikipedia and in other media is something that should happen. But I also think that it risks missing a very important point. This point is that we should be somewhat detached. I think Robert's comment on the topic of comparing Britannica and Wikipedia in an objective fashion is an example of thinking in this detached way and I commend that.
One thing to remember is that media are consumed as well as produced. This fact can be forgotten by professional journalists, who'll curse Wikipedia to high heaven without changing the fact that lots of people find it useful!
Wikipedia certainly has weaknesses, and I could point out some half-dozen of them on demand. (I doubt whether the journalists will have comments that are half as useful as the comments of users and contributors!) Our mission (should we choose to accept it) is to either build something better than what we have currently or to make the best of what we've got, or maybe even better, try for a blend of both.
The "perceived quality" of resources like Wikipedia certainly matters, but I wouldn't turn to the journalists here either. Rather, perceived quality should be measured by user studies.
The nay-saying may give Wikipedia some bad publicity (and maybe even a bad name in some circles), but on the other hand, a high-quality resource will without doubt speak for itself to some extent. Let's keep that in mind as a potential goal! --jcorneli