Wikipedia, how good is it, what are it's biases

thorin_bane wrote:

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devonshire_Mall]Amazingly, Devonshire Mall closes at 6:00 p.m. on the busiest shopping day of the week (Saturday), while other cities' malls are open until 9:00p.m. or 10:00p.m. This may be due to the fact that Windsorites have a "Union Mentality". Otherwise, it makes no sense to close earlier.[/url]

 

Wow interesting take. Assholes. We are a bar town and people like to enjoy their weekends. Hell they are open on sunday it isn't like a few places out east. Or that we don't shop enough to justify late hours. Many of our fast food joints close at midnight.

I won't mention the numerous spelling and gramitcal errors on the page...even though it is suppose to be checked and verified.

In Montreal, all suburban malls that I know of (except those with movie theatres) close at 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The ones downtown also close at 5 p.m., except for the eatery areas.

Yeah, they do!  It's interesting - some of them don't open until 11 or noon on Sundays either.

Anyhow, yeah, Wikipedia is really a good resource when it comes to pop culture trivia, but when it comes to explaining philosophical or academic concepts, it's not the greatest.  Although even then I still find it useful if I have absolutely NO clue what a term means, or what an author espoused, as a starting point.  You have to kind of take it for what it is - it's not the world's foremost scholars and experts on topics - it's collective knowledge of the thousands of people who contribute to it.  So you can look to it for the basics on any given subject, but to go more in depth, you have to go beyond Wikipedia.

Thanks for that genstrike!

Rabble's in cahoots  has a link to an article about a blatantly biased Wikipedia piece. The story is by the Council of Canadians.

torontoprofessor wrote:

(1) I don't think that Wikipedia itself has any biases. There are too many writers and editors.

But the ways in which this body of writers and editors that is labeled under the name "Wikipedia" comes to be constituted, along with the norms of social discourse within wikipedia administration, has the effect of producing systemic biases, regardless of the multiplicity of writers and editors. Indeed, a project within wikipedia recognizes the very problem, and work at countering it (although the extent of their success in doing so is arguable).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias

Wikipedia is full of biased entries, too numerous to count. All that is necessary is for the proponents of one point of view to outnumber, or tire out, those of a contrary view.  It happens all the time. Futhermore, the sometimes cumbersome structure of Wiki is such that certain facts can't be structured into an entry. Things just get excluded because they don't fit into the category, or sub-category, and unless you have the time that professional editors have (unlikely) then you view will be silenced. Especially left wing views.

It's an education in propaganda. All the tricks of MSM propaganda are put to use: straight out deletions, clever edits that dismember a coherent argument, chopping entries up into a jumbled and incoherent mess that is later criticized for being incoherent, etc.,  the editing of single words to exclude certain concepts and ideas from being clearly put forward, etc., etc., etc.

Here's a fun, if exhausting exercise. Find a left wing argument on a subject about which you have a good understanding that is missing from a Wiki entry. Draft your own supplement., bearing in mind that adding new categories or sub-categories can be very complicated. Now add your Wiki submission and follow the entry for the next month.Your submission doesn't have to be lengthy, ... just truthful, well-researched, etc.

You will be surprised by the "edits" that are done on your work. Follow all the twists and turns of the various "editors". My experience is that the more "controversial" my submission is (translation: the more right wing Wiki editors object to it) the more effort will be put into deleting, modifying, or silencing the contribution. Warning: you can really wear yourself out here. But it will show you just how "democratic" and "free" wikipedia really is.

Paid PR scandal erupts at Wikipedia

Concerned Wikipedians raised the alarm Monday that two trusted men -- one a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK, the other a respected Wikipedian In Residence -- are allegedly editing Wikipedia pages and facilitating front-page placement for their pay-for-play, publicity-seeking clients.

Jimmy Wales is not pleased.

It began this week when an interesting discussion started on the DYK ("Did You Know") discussion page.

Roger Bamkin, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK, whose LinkedIn page describes him as a high-return-earning PR consultant, appeared to be using Wikipedia's main page "Did You Know" feature and the resources of Wikipedia's GLAM WikiProject (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) initiative to pimp his client's project.

Bamkin's current client is the country of Gibraltar.

In August, Gibraltar was featured as a Wikipedia DYK front page feature an astonishing seventeen times - that's an unusual frequency of every 2-3 days.

Other than the Olympics, it is the only repeated topic throughout the month.

The "Did You Know" section on Wikipedia's Main Page publicizes new or expanded articles - the publicity viewership on Wikipedia's front page is estimated in the hundreds of millions per month.

Public opinion in Canada on the war in Afghanistan (wikipedia.org)

http://web.archive.org/web/20101128103336/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_in_Canada_on_the_war_in_Afghanistan

Is Wikipedia the number one resource used on the 'net'?

Have posters here ever contributed to it, apart from financially, such as editing, etc.?

Was it a rewarding experience? And if not, why not?

NorthReport wrote:

Is Wikipedia the number one resource used on the 'net'?

Have posters here ever contributed to it, apart from financially, such as editing, etc.?

Was it a rewarding experience? And if not, why not?

I use it frequently, but have found lately that it seems drier and less interesting than it used to be. There are a group of editors who are on a mission to make it more rigorous, and do so by deleting articles that are not sufficiently "notable" and by erasing statements that are not properly referenced.

For medical information and certain other things, I would have to say it is no longer my number one resource (or even near the top). Some of those articles are almost unreadable, and there are several alternative sites that are much clearer and more useful.

Funnily enough, I just added two paragraphs to an entry on a Canadian fingerstyle musician yesterday. It had been flagged as a candidate for deletion because the artist is not sufficiently notable (which is bullshit), and the article had been stripped of a lot of interesting information because it wasn't properly referenced (probably true, even though the information was in fact quite sound, but "original" research is not permitted). I was not the author of the original entry and am only slightly acquainted with the musician in question.

I added some info on his successes on YouTube and iTunes, and hope that that might help demonstrate that he is in fact notable. His style is really quite distinctive and he's a brilliant player, but finding independent third-party credible sources that state that clearly is not easy. He's still fairly young.

I checked the edit history of someone who had cut out good information about him, and this person had flagged numerous articles for deletion. One was about an actor with a large fan base, but who had only ever appeared in one major TV series. Apparently, that's not good enough to be considered notable. Jeesh. I often turn to wikipedia for information on somewhat obscure entertainers (generally wondering whatever happened to that guy?), but it is becoming less useful for that sort of thing.

So to answer whether it was rewarding, I'd have to say not particularly. The two paragraphs I just contributed will go poof if the whole article is nuked (and getting all the references straight was pretty tedious). A couple of years ago, I created an entry for a relative who had been the auditor general of a small European country, but it was back in the sixties when auditors general rarely made the news. There was a debate amongst editors as to whether he was sufficiently notable, and fortunately they decided he was, but the entry is very slim because he only made the news twice as far as I can tell. I couldn't add anything interesting about him because there were no published sources to back it up. The name he was known by (Frank) was even edited out because the two sources referred to him only by his formal name, Francis. So, irritating and unrewarding. None of the other relatives or anybody else came up with anything useful to add (that could be documented).

Wikipedia may be editing itself into boring oblivion. I liked it better when it was a little wild and crazy.