User:Stbalbach/Notes

Random Notes to myself.. ongoing thoughts.

Expert's rate Wikipedia. A recent study found that experts rate Wikipedia articles higher than non-experts. People who know something about an article topic before hand typically give it higher praise than someone who doesn't know anything about the subject. This is true in my experience. What this means is people who know nothing about a topic have to judge how trustworthy it is based on factors other than content - and since the content is written by "anyone", we don't trust it as much. But if we already know something about the subject, we are better prepared to evaluate it. Which makes me wonder, what audience are we writing Wikipedia for, other people who already know about the subject? -- Stbalbach 13:01, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Art and other "soft" topics. Came across this great quote: Wikipedia's weakest areas — art and law, for example — demand contextual analysis and interpretive finesse, areas that are typically the domain of individual scholars. - Indeed. How often I have seen "interpretive finesse" passages later deleted by otherwise well-meaning editors. Stbalbach 03:34, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Appeal to authority. At Wikipedia we are taught not to appeal to authority, so that statements such as "One of the greatest works in world literature" should be phrased instead "according to John Expert, one of the greatest works in world literature (citation)." This makes sense much of the time, but sometimes it achieves just the opposite. Rather than clarifying a statement, it dilutes and muddles it, giving the impression that other experts may have opposing views (kind of like global warming in the press which gives equal weight to the skeptics even though they are a tiny minority and not mainstream). I recently entered into a debate on this very statement in The Divine Comedy .. an editor thought that calling it one of the greatest works of World Literature was POV (specifically an appeal to authority). At first I assumed the editor was just being a stickler for the rules in a game playing kind of way, but eventually after showing him a cited quote from Google Books (it's not that hard to find many experts who hold this view), he backed off and said "I had never even heard of The Divine Comedy before reading this article", and thus inferred, because he had personally never heard of it, it must not be that great! This has not been an isolated case. Many canonical works in Wikipedia contain "greatest" or some such subjective but commonly held descriptor that often get removed by junior editors who don't personally hold those same views (out of ignorance and not experience) and thus assume it must be a POV statement - in this way Wikipedia slowly degenerates as contextual subjective information is silently removed by editors without the age or experience to know better. From this perspective I understand what is meant by the anti-expert cult of Wikipedia. -- Stbalbach 17:32, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Context A recent essay on Wikipedia discussed the contexual problem of Wikipedia, best known as the problem of anonymous authorship and the "public restroom" analogy (you never know who was there last). What Wikipedia lacks in author context, it makes up for in content context. For example reading the biography one of the early modern authors, such as W. B. Yeats, it is possible to find out who his friends and influences were, and by way of the network of links within Wikipedia, quickly come to grasp the entire scope of important authors and any important sub-themes. This kind of quick navigation provides the flexibility that "hard" copy lacks. Stbalbach 02:34, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Drive-by editors The concept doest need much explanation for anyone who has been around Wikipedia long enough. It is essentially traveling a high speed hitting articles all over the map with various stream of conscious edits. Often they are good, other times they are not. Typically one can tell a drive by editor by the lack of integration of the new text in to the overall context of the article narrative (ie. the driver is reading the words but not conceptually understanding the whole narrative theme of the article, bizzare or unusual or non-standard facts and ideas, chopping up a narrative and making the text that much more of a gumbo soup to untangle ensuring the "typical" readers eyes (who is probably a 16 year old working on his high school paper) will gloss over in incomprehension). I suspect stimulants such as coffee may be involved. This brings up a bigger concept and that is Wikipedia is actually I-95 (or whatever congested high-speed major Interstate you love to hate). Essentially we all have to respect the other drivers while also ensuring our own respect is maintained. Everyone has different strategies and for sure there are some fast drivers around but the old saying goes, slow and steady we get there when we get there. It's the journey that counts. --04:43, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is the message. If Wikipedia were printed it would be over 600 encyclopedia size volumes. Luckily, Wikipedia is not a book and there are no physical restrictions. The organization of the article, the organization, is the message of Wikipedia, the organization is the message of the medium. Networks of links, networks of ideas, networks of authors; with Wikipedia it is not the physical book restrictions that creates the message of the article, it is the networking and links inside the article that creates the message. The links are the message of Wikipedia. Stbalbach 18:13, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

A new way of thlinking. Articles can be about very defined topics, and unlike the book versions doesn't need to economize space by covering multiple topics in one article. In this way, every Wiki article can clarify and better define a subject, and be a jumping off point to many others creating relationships and networks that reveal new ways of understanding. It changes in essence how one thinks. Just as oral story tellers have diffrent modes of thinking, Wikipedians have a new way of thinking that trancends the linear single-voice book method. Wikipedia is not a single voice, nor is there authenticity, nor is it static. It is a fundamental change, for both good and bad.Stbalbach 04:27, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The coming tsunami. The Library of Congress contains 26MM books. Imagine when (not if) these books come on-line and are fully searchable. This of course is just the tip as countries around the world do the same. There are allready millions of books online and more coming every day as digital scanning robots bring the costs down to create virtual libraries. How does the square book fit in the round hole of the net when the link is the message? A book on-line is the same as a Wiki article cut and paste from EBritannica 1911, it is an end link without the benefit of links. The digitization costs and copyright issues are just the start, 500 years of printed material awaits some form of Wikification. Also how does one absorb so much information, the challenge becomes classification and recommendation. Organization of the data is the message. Stbalbach 00:43, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Google has announced they plan on digitizeing books from a number of libraries, including 7 million from the University of Michigan. The plan is to put the full-text of expired copyright books online, while only allowing searches of the copyrighted books (similair to the Amazon books database). However, one minor fact buried in all the hub-bub is that Google plans on having full access to footnotes and bibliographies of all the books it scans -- these are the original hyperlinks, and once they are in a database, it is possible to create page rankeings based on the number of cites! It's absolutely brilliant, it will now be possible to determain which works are important in the sea of millions of books. Google will be the only one with access to this database, and it will give them the competitive edge not only in search engines, but in libraries and dare I say the University systems at large. Instead of relying on a professor with 30 years of knowledge to recite the most imporant works on the history of Petrarch, it will be possible to refrence 50 million bibliographies and rank the Petrarch bibliography and footnote cites and list it by the greatest number of citations, in effect turning Google in to a kind of expert librarian and professor on any topic. I can't wait. --Stbalbach 07:04, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The Long Tail. One of the criticisms of Wikipedia is that articles are not up to professional standards. Indeed if one were to compare the Wiki entry on George Washington against any number of professionally done encyclopedia articles it will be true. There have probably been thousands of encyclopedia-like article writen about Washington over the years and the space is very competitive and crowded, there are some truely well done encyclopedia articles writen about the "big topics" and Wikipedia is not up to those standards because of its design by committe methodology. However, Wiki has the The Long Tail. If 400,000 subjects were ordered on a bar chart according to popularity of number of encyclopedias that write about them, with the most common on the left and the least common going to the right, the graph would have a large bubble to the left with a tail tappering off to the right. Once past the first 50,000 or so subjects, the popularity rateing would flat-line to around 1 to 3 and stay that way till the end, and thus this is the "long tail" that Wikipedia covers. The same phenomenon can be used to describe movie rentals at Blockbuster where they only carry the first big bubble but neglect the long tail of millions of other existing movies. Or Libraries that carry the most popular books (1 million or so) but neglect the other 99 million books in existence. This is the long tail. Because Wikipedias strength is with the long tail and not the mainstream, for the less popular subjects there is a proportionally greater value added to Wikipedia. Contrary to common sense, the total volume and interest of the least popular articles far exceeds that of the popular articles. The Long Tail. This is the exact opposite of a commercial encyclopedia which finds strength with the more popular and mainstream articles. Stbalbach 17:22, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The Death of Imagination

As a regular contributor to Wikipedia I often read the "What's New" page which is a chronological list of all the new articles being posted. It really is an amazing second by second spanshot of what topics people are interested in, it would be fertile ground for a socioligical study of popular trends and interests. Once you get past the joke articles-- one liners that say "Rulez D00D!"-- it quickly becomes apparent that, instead of writing about normal encyclopedic topics on things such, well, real life, a vast number of articles are describing fantasy worlds.

For example, there is a video game called "Halo" which, although I have never seen it, it is supposed to be very popular. Judgeing from the Wikipedia articles it is also very detailed and elaborate with articles on the "Munch Cruncher" a 4-ton steel tank (I made this up, but you get the idea), and so on. The authors of the articles write in the standard Wikipedia NPOV style which makes the game and the world seem even more real, as if they are reporting on a real world with real items and real events and Wikipedia was part of the fantasy world and not the other way around.

Of course these are kids, teenagers and young adults, I was one once also spending years fixated on the fantasy worlds created by others just as they are - and if Wikipedia was around at the time, I would have also used the forum to help make what was real in my imagination real in the "real world" of Wikipedia.

Yet, I am left wondering, if fantasy and imagination is the ability to express what "could be", yet that expression never takes form in the real world, what happens? Certainly the imagination of a world as envisioned by Halo is highly seductive and attractive (in particular to teenagers smoothered by boundires and rules). If the purpose of fantasy and imagination is to help create somthing in reality, what happens when dreams never come true? Eventually, dreams, and Imagination, die.

Dreams do die, we all have dreams that never come true. Then we find new dreams and, hopefully, more attainable and real ones that can come true. But some dreams do die, the dreamworld of Halo is nothing but dead imagination. It should be no surprise that is a dream world created around death and destruction.

--Stbalbach 19:13, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)