User:WayneC

Hi. I'm a guy in Maryland who'll be a physics major at UMBC starting fall 2005.

I have rather varied interests, including:
 * science fiction (especially the Stargate universe)
 * military history
 * archaeology
 * ancient civilizations
 * history
 * linguistics and languages; I know some Latin and want to learn Ancient Greek and Sanskrit
 * classical music
 * natural history

Problems I see with Wikipedia
The fact that I'm a Wikipedian and edit articles often doesn't mean I think Wikipedia's run particularly well. I recently came across Wikipedia's introduction page, and was amazed at some of the stuff I read there about Wikipedia's goals and policies. Below, I've written up my thoughts on this article's content and what can be done to improve Wikipedia.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

"Wales intends that Wikipedia should achieve a 'Britannica or better' quality and be published in print."

Ha ha ha. Good luck. Actually, I think that Wikipedia should be published. The reason a free-enterprise system works so well is that people can review products and avoid the ones of low quality. Sink or swim. If Wikipedia were published, people would immediately take note of all its errors, misrepresentations, and other flaws and reject it, forcing Wikipedia to get actual credentials for its content.

"Wikipedia is built on the belief that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops."

The difference there is that open-source programmers know what they're doing; they have to, to make their software work. Wikipedians needn't have any qualifications in the subject they edit. In addition, an open-source programmer has a vested interest in making a program work well, if he intends to use it. With Wikipedia, if you edit something, it's right there, regardless of whether or not it "works" (i.e., communicates its information well). This is the basis of vandalism and edit wars.

"Its authors need not have any expertise or formal qualifications in the subjects which they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be 'edited mercilessly and redistributed at will' by anyone who so wishes."

You've got to be kidding me. Editors don't have to have credentials on what they edit? And Wikipedia wants to rival Britannica? Call me old-fashioned, but I think articles should be written by those people who know their subject matter best. This mainly applies to articles that deal with complex issues that defy easy analysis.

"Its articles are not controlled by any particular user or editorial group, and decision-making on the content and editorial policies of Wikipedia is instead done by consensus and occasionally vote, though Jimmy Wales retains final judgment."

Hence edit wars. Without any central authority in control of articles, it becomes impossible to settle disputes. If an encyclopedia can't make up its mind on a topic, what makes anyone think it's reputable?

The "rule by consensus" is also a rather disturbing policy. Consensus is really little more than mob rule. What's needed is a qualified authority to decide on the content that it knows best. People with no qualifications on a topic shouldn't be in control of its content; leave that to the people who actually know the stuff.

"Wikipedia requires that contributors observe a 'neutral point of view' when writing, and not include original research. Neutral point of view, itself a 'non-negotiable' policy, articulates the encyclopedia's goal as 'representing disputes, characterizing them, rather than engaging in them.' If achieved, Wikipedia would not be written from a single 'objective' point-of-view, but would fairly present all views on an issue, attributed to their adherents in a neutral way. The policy states that views should be given weight equal to their popularity."

Huh? What? Excuse me? What about correct point of view? Sometimes I think that many people here forget that there are such things as verifiable, true facts. If a view is wrong, it shouldn't be in there. Period.

Views should be given weight equal to their correctness. An encyclopedia presents facts, not disputes. If one view if wrong, it isn't included, regardless of how many people hold it.

"Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority."

With good reason. It has no reliability, because anyone can edit it, as opposed to the people who are qualified to edit certain articles. It also has no authority, depending on consensus and not correctness to resolve disputes.

"It is considered to have no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians, academics, and the editors of more formally written encyclopedias."

Actual encyclopedias, you mean.

"Critics argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work. In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in the articles, e.g., see Wikipedia:Provenance. However, these proposals are quite controversial."

This is certainly a step in the right direction. I honestly have trouble imaging anyone who'd have trouble with an enyclopedia being required to contain real facts.

"Wikipedia contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and the editors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about."

Okay then, that settles it. Wikipedia is not, and never will be, an encyclopedia as long as this policy is in effect. An encyclopedia contains facts, and facts need to be proven true or discarded. Without that, they're useless.

"Wikipedia's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in accuracy. Referencing Linus's law of open-source development, Sanger stated earlier: 'Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow.'"

As I said before, the comparison with open-source software isn't really valid, because software requires a certain level of expertise to make it work. If I read over programming code and decide to edit something I know nothing about, I'm pretty likely to mess up the program somewhere. If I read over a Wiki article and decide to edit something I know nothing about, it's still there. A program will stop working if it isn't coded right, so it automatically weeds out bad code (to an extent). That weeding out of bad text would normally occur in a peer-review process, but Wikipedia isn't peer-reviewed.

"Conversely, in an informal test of Wikipedia's ability to detect misinformation, its author remarked that its process 'isn't really a fact-checking mechanism so much as a voting mechanism', and that material which did not appear 'blatantly false' may be accepted as true."

There you go. Mob rule, simply said. Detecting misinformation should be a process of determining what actually is wrong, not voting on what people think (without needing any qualifications) is wrong.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view

"The policy is easily misunderstood. It doesn't assume that writing an article from a single, unbiased, objective point of view is possible. Instead it says to fairly represent all sides of a dispute by not making articles state, imply, or insinuate that only one side is correct."

Again with the ambivalence toward correctness. But what if one side is correct? Verifiably, truly correct? I often think that Wikipedia's founders often forget (or don't know) that there are such things as true facts, things that are true whether one believes them to be true or not. As I've said before, an encyclopedia is the place for facts, not controversies. Factually documenting controversies is possible, but the issues that are controversial often have one correct position.

Resources

 * Perseus Digital Library
 * The Pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian
 * The Sound of Ancient Greek
 * Omniglot
 * Clickable IPA chart
 * Warships1
 * Stargate SG-1 Transcripts
 * Stargate Atlantis transcripts