About a year ago, I started seriously using Wikipedia as a professional resource, not as replacement for scholarly articles in my research area but as a fast way to get some basic facts in nearby areas (differentiable manifolds, permutations of finite sets, and, especially, model theory, if you must know). Frankly, I was stunned by the quality of the articles. Not only was there a lot of information (all of it accurate), but in many cases there were the sort of concise explanatory overviews that you just can’t find in books and papers.
I used it so much that I decided to give the Wiki foundation $100 at the end of the year.
When I mentioned all of this to a reader here who works at Wiki, he kindly offered to give me a tour of the offices in San Francisco (when I was out there last January). The thing that surprised me right off was how much they talked about being accused of having a liberal bias along with the fact that, unlike mainstream media, which cowers in fear and alters their coverage when attacked in this way, their attitude was to shrug and say “maybe reality has a liberal bias”. They weren’t about to go in and give someone at the Heritage Foundation a special page to spout nonsensical global warming denialism just because conservatives were whining.
Obviously, it’s the highly decentralized structure of Wiki that allows them to get away with this. If enough sufficiently determined hacks and nuts wanted to, they could stick a lot of anti-evolution supply side nonsense into various Wiki articles (for all I know, they have already). But the Wiki model strikes me as potentially robust in a way that commercial media is not. There are no editors to pressure per se, no advertising dollars to pull, and of course, the thing isn’t owned by General Electric or Disney.
Not everyone likes Wiki as well as I do. I know that there are errors in some articles and it isn’t clear that the wealthy and the whacko won’t eventually find a way to control it, the way they have with commercial media (and NPR and PBS, let’s face it). But I’m encouraged by the possibility of having information controlled by people who don’t have summer homes in Nantucket.
robertdsc
I have a Wiki reader on my iPhone. I love bouncing around the pages and looking up things. Just right now I looked up the reconciliation process to gain some info on how things should shake down.
clone12
It’s kind of hard to make stuff up when you actually have to source your claims.
Jay C
I concur with your assessments of the Wikipedia: as a first-resource for basic information on a vast variety of subjects, it’s top-notch: my only surprise is that there hasn’t been more biased BS inserted in: especially in some of the articles on sensitive political and/or cultural subjects.
Do they survey their entries at all? I mean, I have “edited” articles myself: always for minor grammar stuff, but what would have stopped me (or anyone else) for popping in an editorial opinion (or wingnut meme)?
In any case, whatever they are doing, it’s a good job.
licensed to kill time
Your first sentence sounds like a line from The Big Bang Theory or Numb3rs (to this mathematically illiterate ugly bag of water).
I absolutely agree with your last sentence though ;-)
The Grand Panjandrum
I would agree and the Further Reading section normally has very good suggestions.
Menzies
Up until now I’ve never donated to Wikipedia – I’m a poor college student and all – but I’ve been thinking about contributing $5 or $10 the next time a donation drive rolls around, or perhaps before that. This article sort of steeled my nerves to help out. I use Wiki all the time to do basic research into various topics, and losing it would be a huge blow.
I’m a little more pessimistic than you might be, though. I think Wiki’s days have always been numbered. We’re getting into an age where state and corporate power is re-injecting itself into the technological process, now that there are people in both those areas who are trained from scratch in new developments or even grow up with the present situation as concerns technology, and I think the Internet has a huge target painted on its back.
That said, instead of just giving up and letting whoever eventually purchases Wiki control the flow of information from it, that just makes me think we should keep it the way it is for as long as possible.
dr. luba
I’ve written a couple of articles for Wikipedia, and used to have to police them regularly for vandalism (usually schoolboys sticking in dirty words). But lately I see almost automatic reversions of vandalism. wikipedia does a really good job of monitoring articles and preventing vandalism, although I can’t say I know how.
MoeLarryAndJesus
My username – MoeLarryAndJesus – was banned by Wikipedia after a long and Kafkaesque series of insane inquisitions. The initial objections to it came from Reagan-loving SuperChristians. Most of them were adolescents.
The idea of Wikipedia is fascinating. The execution is often ridiculous. I won’t even go into my long battle there with Seth Swirsky, the dumbest HuffPo blogger who polices his Wikipedia site very seriously.
After the MoeLarryAndJesus name was banned I tried to go with TortureIsWrong. They didn’t like that one, either. Fools.
Bits and pieces of these battles can still be found in the Wiki catacombs, which are vaster than empires.
Linkmeister
I find Wiki remarkably good for finding pointers to specifics in the References and External Links sections. I find it just fine for my needs when looking for pop culture references I missed by virtue of being either out of the country or oblivious when they first appeared.
There are lots of accounts of Wiki wars when you get into the weeds, though.
MikeJ
Some articles are good, some not so good. There’s been a war going on for years about Guantanamo detainees having pages under their own names. Every time one gets created it’s nuked right away, even after a fight on the deletion page.
MoeLarryAndJesus
But for REAL laughs, check out Conservapedia, which is made from the craziest stuff on Earth.
wmd
Vandalism happens to wiki. I was reading the article on hominids recently. Someone had changed the “Order” entry in the Scientific Description (taxonomy) to “p;eople” from “Primates”.
I saw the vandalism and fixed it anonymously. I’ve also made anonymous changes on pages where my expertise makes it clear that content is incorrect (eg Beowulf clusters – I fixed the material on MPI libraries as I’ve worked developing MPI libraries).
As for putting in editorial content – certainly that can happen. Typically another editor will remove the slanted material fairly quickly. Look at “talk” pages on subjects such as global warming to see how this plays out in practice.
Active wiki editors have a facility to watch page changes. There’s a link to show how many watchers a page has under the “history” tab, and controversial or frequently changed pages will have a larger number of watchers.
DBrown
The Wiki is great. Information is power and this is as close as a univerial information source as we have ever had. The US public library system is a solid first in this country for information but hardly available 24/7. The Wiki, while having a great cross-section of good (but hardly deep) information still can’t compare to the resources of the library but for a easy first read and getting a good start, it can’t be beat.
kid bitzer
1) i love wikipedia, and agree that it is a phenomenal resource.
2) as an avid generalist, i think the math entries are *uncharacteristically*good. what i mean is, not all subject areas are up to that standard.
it’s not surprising: the wiki is as good as its frequent, obsessive users are. math users adopted it early, and have kept it up to high standards. experts in some other, humanistic areas are more computer-averse. so the experts don’t patrol the entries on which they are expert. so the quality is mediocre.
3) i wish i knew how to protect its independence. once, long ago, universities were safe-houses for intellectual independence. that changed.
Toast
Read: “Look at me! I’m wicked smart!” ;-)
MattF
Wikipedia articles can be excellent, but you have to be careful. One thing to watch out for are technical areas that traditionally have large numbers of amateur participants– you can find things in that sort of area that are just flat wrong, and the powers that be in Wikipedia-land are (I guess, understandably) reluctant to just toss it all out and thereby tell the enthusiastic-but-wrong amateurs that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Menzies
@MoeLarryAndJesus:
Conservapedia – the trusworthy encyclopedia!
Martin
I agree on Wikipedia. I’ve found the occasional error, but to be honest, it’s no more common than what I find in the print literature. A quick pass through the talk pages is usually worthwhile if you’re unsure of the content – I can’t recall a time that the mistake in the page wasn’t at least being discussed in talk.
The solution to vandalism is traffic. The more people see the page, the faster the vandalism gets reverted. I think the vandals forget that unlike other forms of vandalism where each component needs to be time-intensively addressed (often taking as long or longer than the vandalism), all Wikipedia needs is a fast revert to a previous version and it’s taken care of. The vandals need to invest far more resources than the maintainers do, which is the opposite of most forms of vandalism.
RSA
There are some very good articles in Wikipedia, but I think that it depends to some extent on the topic. In my experience, the best articles are written on topics where (a) it’s easy to distinguish experts from non-experts and (b) people don’t have strong opinions about the “right” way to think about something. I think the math articles (the ones I can understand, at least) are probably the best.
DougJ
@kid bitzer:
as an avid generalist, i think the math entries are uncharacteristically good. what i mean is, not all subject areas are up to that standard.
I suspect that is true.
Martin
@Toast: Truthfully, if an 8th grader itemized all of the math topics they were studying, they’d sound like PhD candidates to most Americans.
Look at us, we’re proud of our ignorance!
KeithW
Please stop calling it Wiki, though. Wiki is the type of user-editable site, and Wikipedia is a specific example of a wiki.
licensed to kill time
@KeithW: That got me interested in where the term is derived from:
slag
I’m definitely a big Wikimedia fan. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, you name it. I think I’ve only donated to them once in my life, but this post inspires me to want to do it again. Thanks for that!
Also, just wanted to clarify some terms (as I understand them):
wiki-the software on which Wikimedia sites are based. Anyone with access to a server can create a wiki.
Wikimedia-the foundation that started Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, etc.
Wikipedia-a most excellent source of general information on a vast array of subjects. Often just as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica no matter what Jon Stewart says.
(Just in case not all of us get the differences here.)
Update: And I see Keith W beat me to it. Sorry for the redundancy.
WereBear
I love Wikipedia, and we are donating, simply because we use it so often.
I’ve used up many an evening just wandering from link to link. I keep meaning to expand certain stubs I know something about, but so far have only expanded one cat related article. But they liked it :)
jayackroyd
and NPR and PBS, let’s face it
I was putting together a short bio for Karen Tumulty’s most recent visit to Virtually Speaking and wanted to make sure I got the right name for the Sunday morning show she appears on sometimes. Looking up Washington Week, I happened to scroll down to the PBS show’s sponsors list.
Boeing was top of the list.
ET
As a librarian I generally use it for myself and others as a way to get a general picture but not as an end source. However, for the well researched and well developed entries with lots of citations, sources, and external links it is a good jumping off point. Caveats abound of course, though I would say some entries are more prone to this than others. Bias abounds in all sources depending on the authors perspective and ultimate point to prove so this is not exclusive to Wikipedia.
I remember a number of years ago there was an entry that was about someone – a member of Congress or something similar – where there was a “fight” over the entry. The creator (a PR person for the subject I think) was writing it one way with their slant and then someone would come in an change it to their slant. This went back and forth a number of times and I want to say the Wikipedia people got involved but I can’t really remember.
drew42
I find Wikipedia to be the most valuable source of information on the planet. And apparently, so does Google — most searches I run end up with a Wikipedia entry as the top result.
Which is why it annoys me to no end that it constantly gets bashed in the media (and annoys me triple when liberal icon Jon Stewart bashes it).
Until very recently, my wife thought it was just a collection of conspiracy theories and flame wars. Because that’s how TV newspeople portray it.
Quiddity
I read Wikipedia all of the time. Occasionally, while looking at an entry, a totally new topic will come to my mind. Being too lazy to type the word into the search box, I sometimes try to link-click to get to the new topic.
Example: I was reading something about North Dakota while the television was on and Letterman made a joke about how short Tom Cruise was. How to get to Cruise from Dakota? I forget all the steps**, but I got to the Oscars and from there to recent Awards (Hoffman for Rain Man) and then to Cruise. Wikipedia didn’t have his height, but there was an external link to IMDB where under biography he’s listed as 5’7″. All without touching the keyboard.
Yes, it’s kind of stupid, but it also challenges you to think of the best link on a particular page to help you get to your destination.
** I think it was from S. Dakota / USA / California / Los Angeles County / economy of / Warner Bros / Jazz Singer / Academy Awards / Best Actor list
John
As far as any liberal bias to wikipedia, it’s worth noting that Jimmy Wales, the founder, is a big fan of Ayn Rand.
jayackroyd
Quiddity
xkcd illustrates.
jayackroyd
@Quiddity
xkcd illustrates.
Darksyde
Good post.
James Gary
Wikipedia is great for what it is. In my opinion, the only real problem is that people will ignore its mile-wide-and-inch-deep quality and use it as a substitute for other, more carefully thought-out and reseached, sources.
Wiki McQuicky
@kid bitzer: I second this — the math bits are top notch. It’s much easier to look up stuff in the Wiki than to grab a reference book off my desk. Which is crazy.
Anyway, maybe another reason the math articles are so well done is because it’s so difficult to insert biased POV into one.
jayackroyd
@Quiddity
http://xkcd.com/214/
Cerberus
@James Gary:
Well yeah, it’s the best version bar none of what it is. And what it is is an encyclopedia, a source of shallow information to give you a basic grasp of a concept, refresh your memory or provide sources for more in-depth information and where to find it.
It’s not meant to substitute a class or the thorough understanding of an expert.
The only problems come in stupid people’s natural draw towards Literalism and Websterism by which they can seem smart by assuming their shallow understanding of a topic from cursory glances at primary sources like wikipedia or more often, the dictionary, actually trump decades of genuine research and nuance.
The problem is like always, the dumbasses, not the resources. As I said, I’ve had way more problems with people turning to the dictionary as if it was an argument winner, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using it as a way to check my spelling (though I mostly use google autofill for that these days).
Idiots will always misuse tools.
Existenz
It would be extremely expensive to try and “control” Wikipedia. You’d basically have to hire full time employees who are assigned certain topics, and their job would be to constantly reintroduce the conservative/corporate slant every time a regular Joe fixes it. It would exhausting, mind-numbing work.
Now, could a corporation or right wing group hire 10,000 Indians to slant facts and history in a certain area? They could try, but it would be very expensive, Wikipedia would probably block their IPs as they figure them out, and the aforementioned regular Joes would keep fixing the articles almost as fast as they are modified.
Cerberus
Addendum to myself, I really love wikipedia and its movie trivia cousin TV Tropes. They are far better than they have any means to be, far more thorough than they have any reason to be, and far more accurate than one would inherently suspect being an openly editable public encyclopedia.
In general, it’s far less biased and contains less outright lies or oversimplifications than most encyclopedias I’ve used and most of the textbooks I had back in school.
In general, it’s part of what I love about the internet, which is that in so many ways, it presents idealized notions of anarchy and communism and they work on the web in a way that is quite likely impossible in real life.
Where else has a donation system been an actually viable economic method of sustaining art or allowed the crazed type of freedom to find or create the type of content you want and find one’s audience and that audience to find you?
Sure it means most of the internet gets blanketed by all the crap we like to pretend we don’t do in “polite society” and the petty hatreds that often get pretended away, but what it gives us is so much more in so many ways that I don’t think we really appreciate how singularly unique the current iteration of the internet is by a human society standpoint.
Woodrowfan
I used to edit and write for Wikipedia, but got tired of the battles over some subjects. A particular RW author used to always stick his crap into articles.
Xav
Jimmy Wales does very little for Wikipedia now. It’s generally unpopular when he makes decisions. Almost everything is left to the community. WP has largely calcified, and it’s hard to change direction: there are too many people invested in it running their way. So, interestingly, the content may have a liberal bias, but institutionally it’s quite conservative.
Contentious articles (Israel/Palestine, notably) are usually the best sourced, because everyone is keeping an eye on each other.
Demographically, most editors are white, male, middle-class and college-educated. That said, it also has a fairly US-and-euro-centric bias.
Quiddity
@jayackroyd
That was a good one. But it was undirected!!
RSA
In most areas, I think this is true; there’s this odd tendency, though, for some articles to go into way more detail than they need to. For example, some of my work involves the analysis of user interfaces, and I recently discovered that Wikipedia has two 2,000 word articles on what are called tabbed dialog interfaces and multiple document interfaces. That’s maybe five times as much information as would be in a college textbook covering user interfaces. Geeky enthusiasm, I guess.
Don SinFalta
I use Wikipedia quite often and I find the technical articles to be pretty consistently good in the same ways DougJ described. I also agree with kid bitzer that overall the technical articles seem somewhat better than the general stuff, although that varies by area. One reason for this quality is because, at least in technical areas that I know well, the articles are frequently written in large part by people who are actually experts in the area. And then there’s the fact that most technical fields are not areas of political controversy, combined with the fact that the people who are most likely to want to muddy the waters editing the articles are so illiterate about the subject that they don’t even know where to start.
Wikipedia has become, for me, the most visited site on the Internet by far. It is a resource I often use in preparing notes for classes, and I also use it as to augment background material for things that people need to know in my classes but that I’m not teaching directly. At its best, for mathematical subjects, it is one of those priceless resources where the essence of a topic is presented not only concisely, but in an intuitive form that makes it accessible to technically competent non-specialists.
Quiddity
Wikipedia should include more external links. On some pages there often only one or two (or even none). And some of them are broken.
PeakVT
That said, it also has a fairly US-and-euro-centric bias.
At least the English language version does. I suspect each language version has its own bias.
tesslibrarian
I also tend to use it for quick overviews of subjects, especially if our databases aren’t moving quickly and someone is just looking for the order an author published her books or what aliases they use. At the very least, Wikipedia provides links to where to find the information on the author, or other subjects, that are either part of our own reference collection or a reliable site for the information sought.
My manager *hated* it when The Office mentioned Wikipedia interview tips and the page went nuts (not that long after Colbert suggested people change info about elephants). “Why? WHY do they have to do that???” She was angry about that for a week. Kinda funny.
GeeYourHairSmellsTerrific
It’s Wikipedia Doug, Wiki is generic name for the software that powers Wikipedia.
Anarch
Speaking as an ex-logician: what in the name of God are you doing that involves differentiable manifolds, permutation groups and model theory? The only thing I can think of that might be relevant would be that you’re a number theorist trying to understand Hrushovski’s proof of Mordell-Lang, but I don’t know how the manifold theory gets in there…
DougJ
@Anarch:
Bingo. Certain possible generalizations require a little understanding of maps of tangent spaces of manifolds.
Yutsano
@DougJ: :: looks up at sky ::
Yep. Right over my head.
Nylund
I’m in economics and I use a lot of math and statistics, much of which I was not formally trained in or have forgotten over the years. If I forget something like some aspect of the Kalman Filter or Ito’s Lemma, Wikipedia will be my first stop.
Sentient Puddle
I had the good fortune of being in college right around the time Wikipedia was coming into form. It was an interesting thing to see.
As far as citation policy went, it was exactly like you’d expect. Professors would say “No. No. NO. A THOUSAND TIMES NO. Don’t ever speak of this again.”
More interestingly though, there were some professors who had assignments that went along the lines of do a drive-by vandalism of some page and keep an eye on it. Point obviously was that this stuff would go unchecked, and the article would remain inaccurate for at least a good while.
In this case, “a good while” ended up meaning a few minutes max. Now that bloody well impressed me.
Ron
As if there wasn’t enough reason to read Balloon Juice, I now get to see differentiable manifolds mentioned. Not my field either but certainly something I saw in grad school.
The Raven
Wikipedia is a great place to start research, and fine in blog comments. I find the mathematics content is pretty good, though it is outdated in places. But it’s no place to finish, nothing to cite in anything finished, and you have to be careful of it.
In other areas, Wiki tends to reflect popular consensus rather than deep knowledge. Never trust it in a controversial area. Sometimes a cult will infest an odd corner of it, with bizarre results. Its licensing rules make it near-to useless on art and architecture of the past century. Most relevant graphical material is copyrighted and these are subjects where graphical content is of great value. The most that can be written are pages of citations and commentary. Which have some scholarly value, but are not of much use to working designers and design students.
The Raven
“…they talked about being accused of having a liberal bias…”
The US public consensus, generally, is liberal, see. Probably the world consensus is liberal. So this is not surprising; if Wikipedia realistically reflected the public consensus, it would be liberal.
This is a modern version of a socialist argument for anarchist collectives. Founded by an Objectivist. Hunh.
Joel
My only issue with Wikipedia is the fanaticism of the British and their colonials in using their preferred spelling for scientific articles. Yes, I know Nature uses the “behaviour” spelling and other such nonsense, but most other people (US, Canada, continental Europe, China, Japan, etc) do not.
Andrew J. Lazarus
DougJ, that’s a really diverse set of specialties. I mean, number theory was almost it for me. Care to explain?
Gregory Kohs
Here are all the things that donors to the Wikimedia Foundation put out of their minds when they write that check or plug in those credit card numbers to help further bloat the $10.4 million budget.
http://tinyurl.com/WMF-myths
If you like supporting an organization that most recently reported that only 31.5 cents of every revenue dollar actually go toward the program services outlined by the non-profit’s mission statement, then the Wikimedia Foundation is for you… fools.