Wikipedia is bound to catch up

January 16, 2006 at 7:45 pm | In technology, links |

I love the idea of human-create and freely-exchanged knowledge, not relying on a stamp of approval from an “expert.” Wikipedia works this way. From RecentChanges.info ⇒ all things .wiki:

NY Times writer George Johnson weighs in on the debate over Wikipedia’s accuracy with a balanced article which actually does some numerical analysis of the accuracy of Wikipedia vs. Britannica. He reports that “A study last month in Nature showed that the decision is far from clear-cut. Calling on experts to compare 42 competing entries, the journal counted an average of four errors per article in Wikipedia - and three in Britannica.” That is not terribly different, but how did they even compute such a number? The article goes on to describe some of the inaccuracies found in both resources and from that description I can only conclude that it’s pretty hard to really measure accuracy, but suffice to say that this should dispell the notion that the Britannica is way more accurate than Wikipedia.
The best part of the article comes at the end, where Johnson talks about the benefits of having many people of less expertise eventually create a better product than a smaller number of experts. He makes a masterful comparison of Darwin and Marx in making this point. His overall take — “Wikipedia is bound to catch up“.

5 Comments

  1. Ted,

    you have failed to provide a link — in my book, this is a violation closely related to plagiarism. :(

    BTW: why do you care whether the person who made the ALLEGED statement(s) has ever written for the New York Times?

    You seem to walking along a slippery slope of hypocrisy….

    nmw

    Comment by new media works — February 16, 2006 #

  2. Hey NMW,
    I’m confused. I linked to Wikipedia and also to recentchanges.info, where I got the bulk fof this post. I don’t see anything about alleged statements. What am I missing?

    Comment by ted — February 16, 2006 #

  3. Well, “citation” is a tricky business on the net (I am doing research on this). So you are partially pardoned for “innocence”, as there are hardly any standards on this yet. Note, however, that until I hopped over to recentchanges.info there was also no link to the original article there either. Citing references is a very basic element of information storage/retrieval, and the failure to do so is considered unprofessional at least (and perhaps even something like a cardinal sin).

    Speaking of professional, let me get back to my other point: Why do you cite a professional journalist to substantiate the claim that expert opinions might be superfluous?

    Comment by new media works — February 16, 2006 #

  4. I didn’t cite anyone. I linked to a story I found interesting. The story I linked to quoted an article in the New York Times about an article in Nature. I didn’t read the Nature article, so this is the best information I have. If you’d written about the nature article in your blog, I could’ve linked to you. I have no interest in doing extra work to find a non-professional when I have a professional story right here.

    Some blogs probably do that work. Maybe yours does. Where is your blog, anyway? ;-)

    Comment by ted — February 16, 2006 #

  5. If you wish to discover my secret hiding place for clues about how new media works, then check out the “liner notes” in http://www.amarokprog.net/photos/1996_8437.jpg (if you can find them) — that text is rather straightforward, I think.

    :D nmw

    Comment by new media works — February 17, 2006 #

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