Comments on: Wikipedia Wars

By: Acleron

Acleron — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 17:23:48 +0000

@makeinu
1) Verifiability is not restricted to the web. Printed references are often used, but verifiable it must be. The advantage in such articles as homeopathy in keeping out unsubstantiated opinion is invaluable.
2) There are many professionals who edit in wikipedia.
3) Wikipedia compares very favourably with Britannica in accuracy and because of verifiability you can usually easily check out any facts. And of course it is totally free.

I’m sure that not even Wales would claim that wikipedia is free from error or contains the best written articles you can find, but taken with reservations it is a good source of information.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 23:28:27 +0000

Wikipedius!

By: Wow

Wow — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:58:46 +0000

Harry doesn’t use a spell checker.

Spellius checkiarum, possibly.

By: Ian Kemmish

Ian Kemmish — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:45:07 +0000

I think you mean spelling checker. Harry Potter uses a spell checker. Though the consensus appears to be against me….

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 12:56:20 +0000

Classic encyclopedias are not automatically more correct than Teh Wiki. I regard them as entirely different phenomena.

Aside from information, The Wikipedia is the world’s absolutely best spell checker. Nothing in it is spelled wrong. It excels as a search engine as well. It is also in some ways the most annoying site on the internet because of this “consensus” thing.

Wikipedia almost couldn’t call the disease “roseola” roseola because somewhere on the internet a possibly credible source used that word for something else, so the term could not be used any more to refer to Fifth’s Disease. For instance. OMG.

By: Wow

Wow — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 12:11:08 +0000

“it’s written and edited by experts and professionals, not children.”

But it gets many of the things it prints wrong.

And it is nowhere near the size of Wikipedia.

By: makeinu

makeinu — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 05:21:21 +0000

I do not personally regard “consensus” as the ideal objective.

Then you clearly do not edit for Wikipedia, where “verifiability” is king. New knowledge is not welcome; unless you can point to it somewhere else on the web, it doesn’t exist.

And there’s the real reason Brittanica kicks Wikipedia to the curb as a reference: it’s written and edited by experts and professionals, not children.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 01:18:39 +0000

Right: Uncommon across the whole universe of articles.

By: Chris Winter

Chris Winter — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 23:59:06 +0000

“Conflict and “editorial wars” are actually fairly uncommon, but those uncommon cases consume a large amount of editorial resource.”

Fairly uncommon across the universe of Wikipedia articles, I would say, but common in the sense that any controversial topic is apt to ignite a “revision war.” You can probably guess whether a given topic is controversial: Climate change is one; vaccines are another; many biographies of celebrities and politicians also qualify.