Wikipedia and FUD
If you click on some of my links, you will find that I really like the online encyclopedia:
Wikipedia
The premise is interesting, anyone can edit an entry, anyone can change it and there is a tracking database so if someone hijacks an entry and makes it invalid, this entry can be rolled back to a previous form. This may seem to invite chaos but the quality of the information is excellent and if there is an interesting tid-bit that you know about the subject, you can add it.
Mr. Robert McHenry is the Former Editor in Chief of the
Encyclopedia Britannica and he wrote a scathing article at
Tech Central Station (link to TCS home page:
here) called
The Faith-Based Encyclopedia
In January (just found out about it),
Free Software Magazine published a rebuttal:
The FUD-based Encyclopedia
Dismantling fear, uncertainty, and doubt, aimed at Wikipedia and other free knowledge resources
In this article, I respond to Robert McHenry’s anti-Wikipedia piece entitled “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia.” I argue that McHenry’s points are contradictory and incoherent and that his rhetoric is selective, dishonest and misleading. I also consider McHenry’s points in the context of all Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP), showing how they are part of a Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaign against CBPP. Further, I introduce some principles, which will help to explain why and how CBPP projects can succeed, and I discuss alternative ways they may be organized, which will address certain concerns.
The author (Aaron Krowne) sets up his thesis, lets people know what Wikipedia is about and then starts delivering a well-placed Clue-Bat to Mr. McHenry's cranial regions:
McHenry’s central thesis is that, quite contrary to general observation, Wikipedia is a poor-quality resource, that it is in a constant state of chaos, and that these problems will tend to get worse over time. Of course, he doesn’t explain how one is to reconcile this claim with the increasing popularity of Wikipedia, other than a veiled suggestion that people are simply stupid.
McHenry begins his article with a proof-by-denigration. He takes the entire proposition, that a commons-based collaborative encyclopedia could even be successful, as ridiculously out-of-hand. He recounts Wikipedia’s failed first start as “Interpedia,” which I presume is done to poke fun at the concept, the people, and the community process behind Wikipedia. Then, in heavily loaded terms, he characterizes the claim of increasing quality as (emphasis added):
Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.
He then goes on to say:
Does someone actually believe this? Evidently so. Why? It’s very hard to say.
Actually, I don’t believe it is so hard to say, and will go into detail on the matter shortly.
McHenry then goes on to theorize that the currently-vogue educational technique of “journaling” is responsible for corrupting the thinking of today’s youth, consequently leading them to believe in something as ridiculous as the success of collaborative commons-based projects. I can only surmise that this bizarre tangent is due to a pet peeve of his, and believe it can be safely discarded.
Our friendly author then takes a stab at empirics. His method is to sample a number of Wikipedia entries, inspecting their previous versions and revision history to ascertain whether the quality has increased or decreased. The size of McHenry’s sample set is: 1.
At this point, it is worth noting that Wikipedia recently reached the 1 million article mark.
The article is a bit on the longish side but there is a lot of territory to cover. Needless to say, Aaron -- as someone with their feet on the ground and working with open source and Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP), knows his stuff and delivers the goods to Mr. McHenry who obviously comes from the MSM equivalent of publishing. (MSP anyone?)
On a personal note, my Dad wrote a great series of Physics books (Halliday and Resnick). I remember him struggling through the typesetting problems (the galley proofs coming back with the formulae wrong, graphs not done properly, etc...). At that time I was using TeX for desktop publishing and design on a PC. I showed him a bit of what I could do and he talked with his publisher and they didn't have a clue what this was. They were still locked into the old photo-mechanical machines from 20 years previous...
Posted by DaveH at February 28, 2005 10:04 PM