I don't and I never said I did -- but there are agenda driven people editing wikipedia that immediately change any edits that disagree with their point of view - effectively limiting the entries to one side of the issue. In other words, there are people there trying to set in stone the "acceptable" point of view of controversial issues.

Yes, in my opinion, the brief time I tried contributing to Wiki was a complete waste of my time. When I post something on BAUT - it stands as written - unless I edit it to fix the typos. On Wiki you have dozens of people arguing over not only phrasing, but content. It is a discussion board masquerading as an encyclopedia.

I don't think anybody should be looking for the "final word" on ATM theories. Besides - I don't mean "ATM science" when I say "controversial" - I'm talking about anything - politics, science, whatever that is controversial. You have agenda pushers that singlehandedly control the content because they've apparently got time to sit there and immediately upon someone else editing an entry they follow, they check that entry and then reverse it back to the version they liked.

If you want to contest this behavior there is an arbitration process - but for me, there is little value in getting involved in Wiki editing.

__________________
"The scientist who asks the right question reconnoiters a new patch of the unknown, and may, with luck, bring it within the constricted but expanding boundaries of the known."

~Timothy Ferris (The Red Limit) 1982

Ah, sorry. I thought you meant that the use of wiki was also a waste of time.

OTOH, I am very grateful to the thousands who have spent the time creating the wikipages that I have read. I'd like them to know, somehow, that I think that their effort was not a waste of time.

Yes, definitely a problem on Wiki. Look how they go round and round on the evolution article.

I think Wiki could improve by freezing their entries, and then requiring juried assessments of proposed changes. That would still tap into the entirety of human knowledge, and keep the drivel out.

I like Wiki. It's fast, it's easy to use, it covers most everything. But as a previous poster noted, it's really irritating to have the articles continuously in flux. That makes it poor reference material, you're not sure what you are citing.

"That makes it poor reference material, you're not sure what you are citing."--
that would probably be why

1. Wikipedia encourages citations for all statements of fact.
2. most schools teach that you shouldn't cite encyclopedias in general, but use them to find other closer-to-primary references.

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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

Do schools suggest accessing Wikipedia as a means of finding primary references? It seems to me they'd be better teaching people good search techniques so that they can find their own primary references.
Anyone considering using Wikipedia as a reference certainly needs to take a look at the discussion page for their chosen entry. It's surprising how often even apparently innocuous entries (hhEb09'1's "country statistics", for instance) conceal a group of single-issue loons knocking lumps out of each other behind the scenes. If you encounter such activity, you then also begin to wonder about the selection criteria for the citations currently on display.

Grant Hutchison

Notice that this thread has been more about Wiki than about the OP.

I like Wiki. As I said before, it's fast, it's easy to use, it covers more than any other complilation of knowledge.

But, it's unstable, it's subject to abuse (and overuse), and can be flat out incorrect.

Wiki could use some big caution signs. It's an idea which has expanded beyond anything the originators imagined.

I will note that Wikipedia tends to be fairly accurate in my preferred fields--though, for films, I prefer the greater scope of information at IMDB. Then again, IMDB doesn't really cover historical inaccuracies as much as they think they do.

__________________
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!"

I tend to agree. I like wikipedia as a quick reference. Its a tool, and like any tool, it can be useful if you know its limitations and know how to use it; but you can poke your eye out if you don't.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

mathematics too--someone at work expressed the theory that there isn't enough difference of opinion on mathematics to cause edit wars, and non-mathematics-knowledgeable people rarely even try to contribute to articles as compared to other subjects where everyone thinks they know the subject because they read a chapter in a book on it once--and the language of mathematics is abstruse enough that vandalism is hard to make subtle.

Even within the field of mathematics, most are knowledgeable of a few topics, and not of others--it's getting to be a big and fragmented discipline, a long way from the days of Euclid when one person could know all the mathematics known to humanity.

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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

To repeat: for reasons I have explained elsewhere in great detail, these are common misconceptions, and I believe my knowledge of mathematics, my record as an active Wikipedia contributor in 2006, and my carefully documented and thoughtful essays on the nature of Wikipedia and its failings as an information resource render it difficult to glibly dismiss my arguments as being based upon hostility to the goals of the open information movement, inexperience in the ways of Wikipedia, or hasty judgement.

[EDIT: to prevent possible misunderstanding: no-one at BAUT has suggested any of these things, and I didn't mean to imply anyone had done so here. I was trying to forestall (false) charges which have been leveled on previous occasions when I have tried to explain some of my concerns about Wikipedia.]

[EDIT: this is actually the FIRST post in this thread, but due to the origins of this thread in the parallel thread mentioned in the next paragraph, it seems to have automigrated to its current location.]

In another thread in this subforum (see "Ameliorating miseducation at BAUT and similar public discussion fora"), I stated that I have two concerns, based upon occasional lurking at BAUT over the past year, plus one week of posting here. I explained my first concern in that thread.

My second concern, closely related to the first, is that many posters cite Wikipedia articles and appear to believe that Wikipedia constitutes a reliable source of information. This is simply not true even as a first approximation. The reasons for this are manifold and far too complex to attempt to explain here, but let me point out that I was one of the most active editors in the physics pages at Wikipedia in 2006 (in fact at one point I was ranked as the 444th most active Wikipedian), so I know the Wikipedia physics articles, Wikipedia culture and Wikipedia's technical/software environment very well. Thus, my characterization of Wikipedia as inherently unstable and unreliable and vulnerable to politically motivated "slant" and to unrestricted propogation of misinformation (intentional or otherwise) cannot be glibly dismissed as being based upon inexperience at Wikipedia, or upon lack of sympathy with the goals of the Open Information movement, since as should be clear neither of these are the case.

As I noted in the parallel thread:

Someone mentioned the problem of knowing what you are citing when you cite Wikipedia. One basic step when you visit a page like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice is to click on "Permanent Link" at left under "toolbox" (at least, as the site is designed in April 2008) which gives you the url http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...ldid=205396832 which is the current version as I write this paragraph. FWIW, my own advice on how students can use Wikipedia is to list possible key words which they can then search on at their public or university library, which most likely offers an on-line searchable catalog. I also urge all high school teachers to insist upon designing and teaching a course on the many pitfalls of using the web as an "information resource". It's shocking that apparently the National Academies and similar organizations apparently have not designed possible curricula for such a course, so appearently teachers will need to rely upon their own initiative and experience. My other technology-related advice to pre-college teachers is to urge all your students to learn to touch-type.

No doubt everyone with teaching experience is chuckling knowingly over the war stories related by dgruss23 (yeah, we've been there!), but to judge from some comments above, someone will probably rake you over the coals for expressing frustration that your students aren't paying closer attention to your good advice. After all, their opinion, some will say, is just as good as yours, even when that opinion concerns the nature of your professional expertise, teaching and learning!

Yes, Wikipedia fanatics often cite the math articles, which indeed often appear very impressive, and the best ones really do approach the level of Britannica articles--- at least, until someone munges good work by making ill-considered, ignorant, or malicious changes. Unfortunately (I could provide a hundred examples but feel this is neither the time or place for that level of detail), these fans don't realize that many of these articles are imbalanced, seriously misleading, contain misstatements, and suffer from other problems such as internally inconsistent notation/terminology, inadequate linking to related articles, "edit creep", and so on. In addition, there are more out and out cranky "math-related" WP articles than most people would probably guess. And the state of the "physics-related" articles is even worse.

Yay! You quoted my meme! (From my draft essays on "wikishilling" and other woes of Wikipedia, which were formerly available in my Wikipedia user pages.)

Every week, it seems, some crank creates a new WP article touting his own cranky theory. Many such attempts to misleadingly portray fringe or cranky ideas as mainstream show some cunning, such as embedding discussion of the crank theory within the context of "other theories". It's easy for an expert to spot, but almost impossible for non-experts to recognize, as is seen when bad articles come up for AfD and non-physicists say they don't understand why anyone would object.

Yes, you can cite wiki, just so long as you understand that the general concensus on BAUT seems to be that wikipedia should not be considered an authoritative source for academic discussions, particularly on recent science.

But as a general-purpose encyclopedia, there's nothing wrong with it that a bit of critical thinking (that we should be doing anyway) won't solve, and if you're worried about it, you can always use it to check its sources to quote from and cite those instead.

There's no unspoken rule about quoting or citing wikipedia. So long as it's kosher in terms of copyright, it's probably fair game as a casual source.

__________________

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I suspect there may be widespread agreement that people will want to use Wikipedia in some manner simply because "it is there".

I actually agree with you that the only real cure is to educate young people to avoid common pitfalls on the web, including but not limited to treating Wikipedia as a reliable source (and/or not knowing where to find such reliable sources, such as traditional print encyclopedias).

[EDIT: I deleted a call for discussion of a grassroots movement demanding reinstatement of the high school civics course, in order to address pitfalls of and even dangers posed to young citizens by various novel net phenomena, because I couldn't see how to fit this into BAUT. Sorry for almost hijacking my own thread!]

That is not false, but it's misleading nonethelesss:

1. As Stacy Schiff (writing at the New Yorker) put it, "Wikipedia has evolved into a regulatory thicket". The rules (which include "policies", "guidelines", "user space essays", Arbcom findings, and unwritten traditions) currently comprise a chaotic hodgepodge of mutually contradictory and virtually unenforceable "wikilaws". One "rule" advises the user to "ignore all rules!", which obviously contradicts itself!

2. Many articles fail to provide any citations. Without naming names, one of the most prolific authors of (often otherwise useful) math articles at WP is particularly prone to this, as are several of his slightly less prolific peers.

3. Many woo-promoting articles at WP do cite sources; the trouble is that these "sources" are cranky personal webpages, or sometimes publications widely regarded as "junk journals", or even books published by vanity presses or cranky papers "published" by an e-journal founded by some crank soley in order to "publish" his own work (sadly, this a growing genre). To some extent, only a genuine expert will know which journals generally publish papers which can be taken seriously and which publish almost anything which they recieve.

[Schiff's essay is well worth reading; see http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200.../060731fa_fact . Ironically, it played a role in uncovering one of the more infamous Wikipedia scandals; see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...ldid=204408983 for the current Wikipedia account. As a former Wikipedian who had some contact with Essjay and may also have had some unknowing interactions with his sockpuppets, I may not be able to claim to be entirely unbiased, but I was comparitively unaffected by this event, which broke after I had departed.]

Thanks, and I hope you are right, but...

As I think I recently mentioned somewhere, at one point in 2006 I was listed in the 500 most voluble contributors to the English language Wikipedia, and sadly I concluded by Fall 2006 that my efforts there had indeed been a colossal waste.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hillman/Archive and please note well:

0. I focused my efforts in WikiProject Relativity, a pedagogical initiative which I founded but which never really got off the ground. One aspect of this work (which I shared with two other active members) which would be difficult to document today is the careful attention we paid to trying to carefully categorize old and new articles in this area.

1. I am citing specific versions of articles I created or completely rewrote, namely the last versions to which I contributed and therefore the last ones for which I bear at least partial responsibility,

2. I used various "templates" which are now defunct, so many of these early versions will now appear rather ugly. Nonetheless, you should resist the temptation to read the current version (at time T) instead, at least if you wan to assess the nature and quality of my contributions.

3. In many cases, more recent versions have been edited in ways which change a correct equation to an incorrect one, exhibit "edit creep", have been slanted by a dissident promoting a cranky theory, or suffer from other quality-control problems. Some may have course also been -improved-, at least in some ways. In many cases, articles might have been improved in some ways since my last edit, and also damaged in others.

4. An often quoted item of wikifaith holds that Wikipedia articles "monotonically approach perfection". Not only is this claim inherently implausible, observation clearly shows, IMO, that it is completely false. All but the most fanatic Wikipedians in fact tend to acknowledge this.

Let me try to quickly adapt one of my old user space essays to provide an annotated list of some of the best critical examinations of the Wikipedia which had appeared through the Fall of 2006 (other valuable essays have appeared since then, of course).

My original list ran to 90,000 characters and the BAUT limit is only 15,000 so I'll have to spread this version over multiple posts and even then I'll have to truncate it.

Please note that all quotations are attributed to their original source, with links to the on-line version, and that I can and do claim "fair use" for quotations of modest length from the essays of these authors.

Summary

After some struggle, I believe one can extract from the following links and from my own essays a number of common conclusions:

1. A stunningly naive cornerstone of the Wiki Faith states that "wiki pages will be naturally attracted to a state of perfection"; this conviction has proven to be utterly contrafactual, but continues to be regularly repeated by people who ought to know better,

2. This overlooks not only Wikipedia's absurdly cumbersome procedures for dealing with vandalism, hoaxes, POV-pushing, guerrilla marketing, and other malicious edits, but also an important phenomenon which I call ''edit creep'': over time, an article will tend to degraded by edits by inexperienced or careless writers who are unaccustomed to thinking about considerations of
a. organization,
b. balance (the relative weight given to different subtopics),
c. style,
d. consistentency of paragraph structure, verb tense, spelling, notation and terminology,

3. Wikipedia policies and other "official" statements completely fail to stress some essential points:
a. every encyclopedia exists to serve its readers,
b. the editors serve the readers not by merely compiling information, but by evaluating, screening, sorting, organizing, and summarizing information in a concise and coherent fashion,

4. Wikipedia's notorious instability (an excellent article as of this minute may be vandalized or munged by a well-meaning incompetent in the next few minutes) is distracting, disorienting, and does not serve the reader well,

5. Wikipedia's unstructured collaborative writing process tends to suppress many elements of good writing, such as character, style, wit, and even values,

6. As such, Wikipedia actually tends to promote a global trend toward erasing individual expression; this is highly inimical toward the freedom of expression that many Americans cherish,

7. Wikipedia appears to ignore not only the needs of its own readers but also appears hostile toward its most expert contributors, an attitude which is particularly self-defeating when it comes to highly technical topics in science and mathematics,

8. Wikipedia's encouragement of anonymous editing and tolerance of sockpuppetry discourages contributors from taking intellectual responsibility for their contributions, or even for assuming any individual responsibility whatever for their behavior at this website, with predictable results: rampant
a. vandalism,
b. hoaxery,
c. wikishilling,
d. guerilla marketing,
e. POV-pushing,
f. political dirty-trickery,
g. incivility,

9. Wikipedia and Google are excellent at compiling information but absolutely dreadful at evaluating information; they render the finding of information so easy that the time consuming and intellectually far more demanding task of evaluating what one has found increasingly seems too onerous to be worth the trouble,

10. By failing so badly at the filtering and evaluation of information, Wikipedia is failing miserably in its primary mission as an encyclopedia,

11. Far from getting good information to the people, paradoxically enough, the ultimate effect of Wikipedia may actually be to impede the filtering/evaluation of raw information by students, teachers, reference librarians, journalists, other information brokers, policy makers, and even by academics--- which would be an extremely dangerous development, highly inimical to the best interests of a free society,

12. By failing to state an unambiguous and self-consistent mission for Wikipedia, and to promulgate effective policies which further that mission, the Wikipedia leadership has failed to lead.

Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger was once the father of Wikipedia (a title disputed by Jimmy Wales), but he is remembered at Wikipedia as the apostate who departed to found an alternative on-line encyclopedia project, Citizendium.

As such, he is one of the most knowledgeable critics of Wikipedia from both an internal and an external perspective. As you would guess from some of the terms he uses, he is a philosopher by training.

"The epistemology of Wikipedia", by Larry Sanger, WikiMedia Meta-wiki, c. 2001 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_e...y_of_Wikipedia

In this memorandum, Sanger challenges a core precept of the Wiki Faith: the notion that a wiki article will be naturally attracted to perfection. He asks: ''"Is there anything about the Wikipedia process by itself, unaided by an approval process, that tends to the overall improvement of the reliability of the articles?"''

"Wikipedia and why it matters", by Larry Sanger, WikiMedia Meta-wiki, January 2002 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikip...why_it_matters

This is the text of a talk delivered to the ''Stanford University Computer Systems Laboratory EE380 Colloquium'', on January 16, 2002.

(To judge from his later writings, Sanger seems to have since largely abandoned these high hopes for Wikipedia.)

A particularly interesting passage describes a dangerous feedback loop: