Hi, Gillianren. My biggest objection is what Hillman called 'edit creep'. I find a Wiki article I really like, cite it, then refer back to it, and discover it has changed. Reminds me of Tolkien's "before the world was made round" comment. I know I'm going to keep citing Wiki anyhow, but I hope it gets better. Like you say, it's a good starting place.

Even when you use the toolbox (left page) "Cite this page" -- which includes the version ID (oldid=) -- so that you can go back to what you cited, regardless of subesquent edits?

See Wikipedia: Citing Wikipedia (2008 April 6 version).

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John M and Captain K: thanks to you both for taking the time to read the excellent essays which I cited, plus the excerpts from my old user pages!

And tadvance, if you haven't read all this stuff, I hope you will do so! I know it's alot (and the essays I cited only take the story up to about mid 2006), but it's well worth your time, particularly if you ever use Wikipedia as an informational resource.

I feel that the essays I cited and my own essays actually represent the voice of moderation! I should perhaps have mentioned that many experienced Wikipedians have expressed agreement with many of the points I made within Wikipedia itself; see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_retention
(There are many other pages expressing dissent; look around).

If you want to see examples of former Wikipedians with "axes to grind", try http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/ (a site devoted among other things to ferreting out the IRL identities of Wikipedia "admins" who operate under "handles" rather than their real names, a project which raises troubling privacy issues), http://wikipediareview.com/ (to mention just one of many sites which frequently feature fairly rabid critism of the existing "power structure" at Wikipedia), or read Cade Metz's hilarious (and slightly scary) account of the bizzare saga of sometime Wikipedian Judd Bagley http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12...and_overstock/
I must warn you: this stuff will probably make your eyes spin around in their sockets, but I trust it will blunt the unfortunate impression that I am too embittered to be able to offer sound advice on whether to use Wikipedia, and if so how.

01101001, good point, if I do say so myself--- yeah, I already made the same point, somewhere buried up above, but it bears repeating: if you feel you simply must cite Wikipedia, instead of linking to (for example) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein, you should always take a moment to click on "permanent link" under toolbox (look at the left hand sidebar) and link to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...ldid=205948697 which happens to be the current version as I write. Even better, click on "history" to try to ensure that you aren't linking to versions in the middle of an "edit war" with an anon vandal, which happens to be pretty common with this article, which happens to be the most read science-related page on Wikipedia (and I can prove that claim, if anyone is curious, since WP logs more than most people realize and makes almost all of the logs public, if you know how to access the information). Indeed, if you check you'll find that the version immediately previous to the version I just cited was a version with a typical "silly vandalism" (silly but annoying). Even better, click on "discussion" and look at the archives to get some sense of recurrent problems this article has experienced over the years. (A particularly abhorrent example is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Al...tein/Archive_6). Somewhere in those archives you'll find the results of a small statistical study I carried out documenting one months worth of vandalism at this one article.

I cannot--- and do not--- expect that everyone will agree with all or any of the points I have tried to make above, but I think I can ask that anyone interested recognize that I have thought about this, that I have extensive experience at Wikipedia, and that if you know where to look, there is much thoughtful criticism of Wikipedia to be found.

Overall I encouraged by feedback so far, since I think we seem to mostly agree on my overall goal, which is not to get everyone to stop visiting Wikipedia at all, but rather to get BAUTians to try harder to say, whenever they link to a Wikipedia article, "BTW, if are not already aware of this, you should know that there are many complicated, subtle, and endemic quality control issues at Wikipedia, so you should always be very careful to read critically and keep a sharp eye out for suspect claims or possible slanting".

This is currently up to individual teachers, and their practices seem to vary widely. Some say they explicitly forbid Wikipedia (and in a tiny minority of schools that is even official policy); others say they think Wikipedia can and should replace printed textbooks. (I seem to have mislaid the link the printed transcript of a PBS program which examined how Wikipedia and other internet resources are changing the face of American education, but they interviewed some teachers who expressed this view--- which I find utterly shocking, as you can imagine.)

dgruss is a Chemistry teacher, and no doubt there are other teachers at BAUT--- I hope they will join the discussion!

In common with several commentors who responded, I tend to feel that the best response to Wikipedia is neither to ignore it, nor to forbit its use, but rather to reinstate the high school civics course as a mandatory element of universal public education, with a curriculum updated to focus on issues of technology and society. Wikipedia can then be used to provide innumerical examples of disinformation, clandestine agenda pushing, and so on. Taught well, such courses could and should produce a generation wise to the ways of spin. That would be good for many reasons beyond controlling the spread of woo. It would also make it much easier to casually cite some version of some Wikipedia article which appears at a glance to in fairly decent shape, secure in the expectation that most citizens will appreciate why readers of Wikipedia are either skeptical and critical readers, or else they are at risk of being manipulated and misled.

Uh, nowhere. Poor choice of words on my part (I just edited the post to which you were responding). Sorry!

To avoid possible misunderstanding: despite my brief attempt to place this discussion in a much broader pedagogical context (when I realized I was about to hijack my own thread, I deleted my outline of a possible curriculum for a modern civics course), throughout this discussion I am speaking about science and math articles. Yes, to repeat: it is a very common misunderstanding (VCM) to assume that "math articles in WP are almost entirely good" or that "mathcranks don't exist" or that "no-one would take the time to slant a math article to promote a hidden sociopolitical agenda". The world would be a better place, I suppose, if any of those assumptions were true but unfortunately, they are completely incorrect.

I sure hope you don't work at NASA or anywhere else where it is important that only correct mathematics be employed!

No doubt everyone here has heard of Citizendium, and probably knows that progress at this alternative has been very slow (I think they have perhaps a hundred articles a year after it was founded by Larry Sanger). Citizendium attempts to compete with Wikipedia head to head, but uses a system in which proposed edits to articles are moderated by "curators", which is intended to ensure fact checking, balance, and so on. One difficulty here lies in attracting expert authors (untainted by bitter controversies which could cloud judgement) and in attracting persons competent to administer what would be a vast enterprise, if Citizendium every really gets rolling.

One key element in my own response is that the wiki model (moderated or not) works better when the pool of authors/editors is fairly small and share common and well-defined goals. My feeling is that this is easiest to ensure if for example the mathematical professional organizations encourage ad hoc committees to set up small specialized wikis (with edits by invitation only, and only by tenured faculty at accredited universities) in, for example, "PDEs of mathematical physics", "Dynamical Systems", and so on.

Take a look at this specialized encyclopedia in the area of my formal academic training, dynamical systems:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/...amical_systems
It would be impossible to imagine a more stellar roster of authors! (No, I have nothing to do with this initiative, but I wish it well!)

My hope is that academics will generate many more specialized encyclopedias of quality comparable to the "Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems", which will then be "autoaggregated" (perhaps at the level of individual surfers using Greasemonkey, or perhaps at "one stop information" websites similar to Wikipedia) into a coherent whole by adding links from one vetted article to dozens of others. Even this would fall far short of Britannica style editorial oversight, but it would be infinitely preferable to the chaos of Wikipedia.

Another possibility might be government subsidies for Brittanica so that this becomes a free on-line encyclopedia while retaining its experienced staff of highly trained editors (genuine editors, not the Wikipedia caricature of that role). This would almost certainly be found to be politically unacceptable in the U.S., but it just might fly in Britain, after the model of the BBC.

These suggestions are not mutually incompatible; the first might lead to free on-line encyclopedias comparable to the printed version of the venerable Encyclopedia of Mathematics, while the second would make one of the most venerable traditional encyclopedias available on-line free to all.

Actually, a wikipedia reference with an edit-war controversy that's even closer that the Edison reference you mentioned comes if you check their cite for Universe Today, one of the parent sites for this board, which has repeatedly been modified by a former member of this forum to include links to his own site.

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.

I'm familiar with that particular incident, but yes, I am all too familiar with this kind of problem.

Everyone, I regret to say I gotta go now, but I thank you all for your patience with me as I tried to outline some complicated issues in this thread. I apologize for any misunderstandings which might yet have to come to light had I stayed, which no doubt would have been due to overhasty "refactoring" of my old essays, poor choice of words, or others sins of commission on my part. I'd just like to say that in this thread I've received a much more civil response to my attempt to make some pointed but (I hope) fair and well-informed criticisms of Wikipedia. Good luck in all your expository endeavors and also to your efforts to counter the worst of the woo.

Everyone in this thread has been patient and helpful, and I really appreciate it!

Do you mean... "Sins of omission?"


I'm truly a terror

I'm pretty sure he meant "comission" but he might not've.

I'm pretty sure he did.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Yeah, ya know... there's a mild attempt at humor somewhere in that post... Hmmm.. I wonder if Chris Hillman will get it

I meant to make a longer post, but I had to break off, and just hit Submit. I was going to come back to it, but never did.

I too intended to wade through the readings but I got stuck on the very first one, so I was surprised that no one has mentioned it. Has the link suffered from the infamous drift, perhaps?

Thanks, I hope it works ok.

"I sure hope you don't work at NASA or anywhere else where it is important that only correct mathematics be employed!"

not there--but correct mathematics is important, and with the stuff I do, it's actually pretty obvious if it's wrong (i.e. the software puts out gibberish instead of something recognizable--an analogy might be a first-person shooter game program that does ray-tracing computations wrong, so you have random triangles popping up all over the place). Actually, mistakes I've made are far more often typos (missed brace in a program, forgot to allocate right amount of space in a data structure) than wrong math or incorrect algorithm! There are mathematical cranks around, particularly in the more well-know topics as Fermat's Last Theorem--but I've lots of use for Wikipedia's math and computer science algorithm articles. On the other hand, I have not written any general relativity simulators, so I can't vouch for accuracy there. It could be the errors are only in certain types of mathematical articles.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

And if you find that Wikipedia is wrong - FIX IT!

Though I would second the "fix it" philosophy, it can be frustrating to fix an article only to later come back and find that somebody who thought he knew better than you, but actually didn't, has "corrected" it back.

I will add, though, that the mathematical articles I've looked at did not suffer from this problem, in general. There are occasionl exceptions with "hot button" articles, like the one on the equality 1=0.999..., which every now and then falls prey to:

• idiots who think they know better than standard mathematics;
• mathematical purists who confuse the issue by getting all stringent and pædantic with the oh-so-important issue of "what really constitutes a true proof".

That said, this particular article is fairly good and accurate, on a good day. Even on a bad day, it's only a small fraction of the article that usually turns into gibberish or agenda-pushing, and most of the time that's easy to spot (for the informed eye).

Recently, Wikipedia has been tightening its standards of verifiability, which has been a mixed blessing. On one hand, it encourages more throrough referencing. On the other hand, sometimes whole paragraphs that were correct but happened to not be referenced are deleted and replaced with less accurate material, just because some editor found one inferior source that supports the latter version. (This refers to articles of non-mathematical content, though).

I do think, though, that for some, really, really controversial and complicated topics, Wikipedia is only good for the links to other sites. I'm thinking of stuff like the article on human races, which is currently an unintelligible and often misleading mess, because in the effort to be "balanced" the editors end up allowing the article to become a patchwork of opposed claims, with no effort to weight them against each other.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Now, I would say that 1=0.9999.... is essentially a definition issue.

If you define a decimal .a,₁a₂... to be the sum
a₁/10 + a₂/10² + ...

and take the usual convention that an infinite sum means the limit of the sequence of partial sums, then yeah, 1=0.9999.... And these are the usual definitions.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Those are the keywords. When people ask a question about a mathematical relation, typically they're interested in standard definitions. Alternative constructions can provide an interesting footnote, but the basic answer should focus on what is standard.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Yes, this is an argument that's often put forward against those of us who find Wikipedia less than compelling as a reference source. It's been suggested to me that saying I find Wikipedia unsatisfactory while refusing to fix the things I find wrong is the social equivalent of complaining about the government while not voting.
But a glance at the discussion pages leads me to believe that I do not have the time and energy to deal with the Wikipedia environment. That observation is borne out by the experience of Wikipedians I know, and some who post here, who seem to have to devote a very large amount of time and energy to just maintain the status quo ante: BigDon's term "Bickerpedia" seems very apposite.
So to compare non-participation in Wikipedia to "not voting" is to suggest that the democratic process involves turning up at the polls at least once a week in order to get into an argument with several voters who disagree with your politics and who attempt to destroy your ballot papers.

Grant Hutchison