Suddenly I have hope for humanity

Yesterday, I wrote about Dr. Sharman Lichtenstein’s rather uninformed criticism of Wikipedia. At the time, I was worried that the general public wouldn’t recognize the flaws in her statements, and that the press would end up repeating it uncritically.

However, I came across two new articles today, each responding to Dr. Lichtenstein: one, a post by Christopher Dawson to ZDNet Education, rebuts Dr. Lichtenstein with the usual points (students shouldn’t be using any encyclopedia, and should be using more than one source), and makes a comment that closely mirrors something I said in the comments of my blog post. He writes:

I’ve become a big fan of the word “discerning” lately. I think it applies to so much of what our students experience online, so here’s my use of the word for the day: Students must become discerning consumers of information. Telling them not to use Wikipedia doesn’t cut it. Teaching them to use a variety of sources of information and to critically examine the information they encounter on the Web is a lifelong skill that we have a responsibility to teach.

This is exactly what I and many other Wikipedians have been saying for a while now. Wikipedia’s unreliability, far from being a hindrance to teaching, ought to be taken as an opportunity to educate students to evaluate all of the information they discover, whether it comes from a supposedly reliable source or not.

Second, a post to Techdirt by Mike Masnick, which makes pretty much the same points. A nice quotation:

Furthermore, in a bit of pure irony, this professor doesn’t seem to realize that by making all of these incorrect statements, she’s showing just how little you can trust supposed “experts” in the first place. After all, she’s going on and on about trusting “experts” over the masses, while showing that she doesn’t even understand how Wikipedia works at all, showing her own wrong, incomplete, biased and misleading positions.

Seeing that people recognize the flaws in Dr. Lichtenstein’s statements is really reassuring. With any luck, this particular sort of misinformation will die out in the not-too-distant future. However, I’m under no illusions that more misinformation won’t replace it. We’ll just have to keep on reading things critically, I suppose. How perfectly awful.

Academics vs. Wikipedia, again

I’ve just come across a fairly annoying little article about the use of Wikipedia by students, written by Rodney Gedda and focusing on criticism of Wikipedia by Sharman Lichtenstein, associate professor of information systems at Deakin University.

If you are faced with the prospect of having brain surgery who would you rather it be performed by – a surgeon trained at medical school or someone who has read Wikipedia?

That’s the view of Deakin University associate professor of information systems Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes the popular free encyclopedia that anyone can edit is fostering a climate of blind trust among people seeking information.

Dr. Lichtenstein has some fairly odd ideas, though, in my opinion. For example, she is said, in the article, to be leading a team of researchers looking at how Wikipedia operates, but she is then quoted:

“People have invested a lot in becoming an expert and they are trying to earn a living and you can’t expect experts to contribute without pay.”

I wonder how she and her team of researchers missed the large number of experts that we do have contributing–without pay, even. Perhaps she blindly trusted some critics of Wikipedia, rather than checking it out for herself.

The article refers to Wikipedia as a “‘web of trust’ network”, which betrays a misunderstanding of either Wikipedia or the meaning of ‘web of trust’. Fortunately, we have an article to help them out.

Too, she seems to believe that Google is going to put articles from Knol at the top of searches:

“Google Knol is supposed to be a competitor to Wikipedia that will involve experts, and because it’s Google, search results will appear above Wikipedia entries which are quite often the first result,” she said.

I do not know in what world she lives that it could be considered a good thing for Google to give preference to its own products in search results, but fortunately it is not the same world that I live in.

She also seems to think that Wikipedia editors are some sort of elite group, and that our notability policy promotes discrimination and elitism. Well, the whole point of the notability policy is to discriminate among possible topics for those which ought to have articles, and as for elitism…

There are quite a few other odd bits in the article, but I’ll leave finding them as an exercise to the reader. It shouldn’t be too difficult.

Wikipedia in Japanese textbooks

On March 25, Shun Fukuzawa, a Japanese Wikipedian, made two posts to foundation-l mentioning that some Japanese textbook (for teaching English) had used an image from Wikipedia showing which countries have the death penalty, and suggesting that it might be this image. That’s great, since it means our production of free content is being noticed and used, but I didn’t think much of it until today, when I came across a news story in The Yomiuri Shimbun which mentions it, too, along with one other bit I found more interesting:

Kairyudo Publishing Co. focuses on Wikipedia, the Internet-based free encyclopedia, in its textbook, discussing how it began and how it is used.

The epic history of Wikipedia is simply so important that it’s used to teach English to Japanese schoolchildren. The article mentioned earlier that the textbook companies were hoping to add material which would arouse the interest of the students, and I do hope that they are successful. Of course, the real question is whether Wikipedia has two founders in Kairyudo Publishing Co.’s version of history…

The end of print

The New York Times has an article titled “Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias” by Noam Cohen. “It has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star,” it says. “Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it.” The article discusses some of the troubles print encyclopedias have had over the last fifteen years or so, and mentions some of the more popular electronic encyclopedias, including the new Encyclopedia of Life, Wikipedia, and the comparably ancient Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

It’s the sort of article we’ve seen before. In February, Brockhaus announced that it would no longer be publishing print editions of its encyclopedia, and earlier this month Gyldendal announced the same thing.

I am somewhat annoyed by the article’s presentation of Wikipedia, though. When it discusses the Encyclopedia of Life, it mentions what a great and ambitious project it is, with a suitably optimistic quotation from Dr. Edward O. Wilson, the project’s chairman. When it discusses the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it mentions that the SEP is written and verified by experts, again with a suitable quotation from Dr. Edward N. Zalta about how quickly the Encyclopedia is updated to account for recent events.

When the article discusses Wikipedia, it does mention that Wikipedia is large–it calls it a behemoth, actually, which doesn’t seem quite the most complimentary word that could be used. Then, rather than mention our quality initiatives, or our very excellent coverage of recent events, it spends a paragraph discussing… wiki-groaning. Honestly, I don’t ask that Wikipedia’s faults be glossed over, but is it really necessary to mention wiki-groaning in every article that is even marginally related to Wikipedia?

But that’s beside the point, I suppose. It is sad to see print encyclopedias go. I’ve got a dozen or more sets of encyclopedias at home, taking up more than one whole bookcase: specialized encyclopedias of science and nature; a collection of handyman’s encyclopedias which describe how things around the house work, and how to repair them; small, six or seven volume sets of more condensed encyclopedias; and then the larger sets of World Book, and Funk & Wagnalls (which became Encarta), and the Encyclopedia Americana. I’ve certainly enjoyed reading them, each set, each article unique and interesting.

My sadness over seeing them go, though, is outweighed by my joy at what is replacing them. Many of these encyclopedias’ online versions are to be freely accessible, and ad-supported. It’s not the same as being freely licensed, but this is still a huge amount of knowledge that anyone with an internet connection will be able to access for free. Even if Wikipedia were to fail tomorrow and the database be lost forever, the fact that these encyclopedias are now available online and for free means that our project has been a success. I look forward to far greater successes in the future.

On sourcing and comments

(Update: After looking around a bit more, I did find a way to contact Scarian, who responded most cordially and enabled comments, and promised to correct the error. Excellent!)

Ben Yates linked to three new blogs by wikipedians, so I decided to check them out. One of them, Wiki-Observations, written by Scarian, had a post about Conservapedia including the a complaint about one of the sources used in the Conservapedia article on homosexuality:

Its source is here. Now, that’s pretty unfair, isn’t it? We can’t check the validity of these claims because you have to register and pay or your school/college/whatever has to have an account. On Wikipedia, the source would be removed and challenged and eventually the statement would be removed.

Now, that’s patently false. The source is a journal article, and the fact that JSTOR includes a copy of that article, and that you have to pay to use JSTOR, doesn’t affect that it is a valid source. You can still get at the source for free if you have access to a library, but even that is beside the point. We use for-pay sources all the time. Older magazine and newspaper articles aren’t available for free online, and books are almost never available for free. You have to buy them or–gasp!–have access to them through a library or such. Just like JSTOR.

Now, ordinarily, a mistake like that wouldn’t warrant a post from me. After all, I could just leave a note on the blog, and the author could fix his error. Even if he didn’t, anyone that read the comments would see my correction. Wiki-Observations, though, has comments turned off. Since there’s no listed way to get in contact with the author, that means that there’s no way to correct this mistake.

Perhaps my horror at being unable to correct this mistake is just an artifact of spending so much time on wikipedia, and of reading blog posts rather than traditional news sources. But, even traditional news sources are contactable, and will issue corrections when necessary. In a way, then, not allowing comments combines some of the worst of traditional news and blogs: like traditional news sources, I cannot correct the error myself, or leave a public comment, and being a blog, there’s not really any editorial control or responsibility.

Some wikipedian blogger, I forget which, recently posted that we ought to follow O’Reilly’s Blogger’s Code of Conduct. I don’t perfectly agree with all of the points of that code of conduct, but I think that if I were making my own, “Allow Comments” would be listed prominently. Comments are perhaps the most effective mechanism for ensuring responsible posting, so I’m hesitant to read blogs that don’t allow them.

Images of Muhammad in Wikipedia

There have been a few threads on WikiEN-l recently discussing the issue of images of Muhammad being present on the relevant article. Some number of Muslims are offended by these images, and have written in to OTRS, on the talk page, and even started a petition requesting their removal.

The discussion on the mailing list has covered a fairly broad range of related topics, including, as I recall: an argument that the images shouldn’t offend Muslims since they were, after all, created by Muslims and that the ban on images of Muhammad was really a recent development; that the petition was likely to be made up mostly of duplicate signatures produced by a bot; that we ought to remove (or hide by default, or provide an option to hide, etc.) any images which offend a significant number of people; that we ought not to hide any images merely because they offend people; that the images are not accurate representations of Muhammad anyway, being created many centuries after his death; that they serve no didactic purpose; quite a few messages were written arguing for or against the idea that the prohibition was against any representations of humans, and therefore it was illogical to be offended by an image of Muhammad in particular. I’m sure there were several other topics discussed which escape me at the moment.

I agree that the images are surely not accurate; I am not so certain that they therefore are not useful. I have not formally studied education, but it has been my understanding that people remember information more readily when they can associate it with an image than when it is merely text. If so, then even an image which makes no attempt to be realistic might be useful. Even disregarding this, it seems to me that a discussion about how Muhammad has been represented by artists is germane to the article, and an image would be appropriate there, if not at the top.

I confess that I support the position that offensiveness of material shouldn’t be a consideration in whether it is included. I think that since our goal is to provide educational material, and therefore to educate, we should try to provide every piece of information we can, presented in the most useful way; I believe that the most useful way to present pictures is inline in articles, so I don’t think that we should be removing them.

It is not that I don’t care that people are offended. I think it’s very unfortunate, since I don’t believe that removing those images is compatible with our goals. I don’t desire to offend anyone, but my desire to educate trumps my desire to be inoffensive.

I may yet be convinced that the images ought to be removed, although I doubt it, since most of the argument for removal seems to be of the ‘we shouldn’t be offending people’ variety.

GDrive

Garett Rogers and Ionut Alex Chitu both have written about the possibility that GDrive–a rumoured file storage service from google–might launch in the coming months, following a WSJ story on the subject.

I wrote something about storing things on Gmail previously when Google increased Gmail’s storage, and the things I said then are pretty much the same things I feel now. This will be massively useful for a lot of people, and for students in particular. We don’t know how much space this GDrive might offer, but even a gigabyte would be enough for most users. Five gigs or so would probably be enough for essentially everyone–I could store all of my code, all of my school work, and probably all of my scanned correspondence in that much space. It wouldn’t be enough forever, since we all continue to generate more electronic documents as time goes on, but an increase of a few megabytes a day, like Gmail, should be plenty.

I can envision a few uses for it beyond just storing my personal documents, if Google were to include the ability to share files with others–piracy issues aside. It would be nice to be able to post scans of journal articles while collaborating on a wikipedia article with others, so that everyone could have access to all of the source material; we can use email for this, but it just isn’t as efficient, and requires re-sending everything if someone new joins in.

Ultimately, I can’t predict just how this could be used without knowing a lot more about it; even that it will launch is uncertain. I do look forward to seeing what the future brings, though.

WikipediaVision

Ben Yates wrote about an incredibly awesome page: WikipediaVision. It shows anonymous edits to Wikipedia on a map, in (not quite) real-time. Four minutes ago, someone from Leesburg, VA, USA, made an edit to Architect (Role Variant), which turns out to be one of the types from a personality-type assessment thing. Someone from Russia edited CP/CMS. Someone from Australia edited Australia Square.

It’s amazing. It’s like watching slideshows of photos people upload to flickr and picasa: mesmerising, although for no reason I can easily discern. In this case, it’s just so cool to see people all over the world contributing to Wikipedia–and seeing a lot of people editing articles about local schools and things.

I think that if this were on some TV channel, I might purchase a television in order to watch it. I love it.

Spider Webs in Space

Ben Yates posted a bare link, titled “Spider webs in space“. It’s a link to the wikipedia article of the same name. This leads me to two thoughts.

First, that’s a really cool idea.

Second, that’s a really bad article name. Somehow it feels like this ought to be a part of the main article on spider webs, since it really only refers to a single experiment, but imagine how that would look:

1. Types of spider web
2. How spiders make webs
3. How spiders use webs
4. Spider webs and drugs
5. SPIDER WEBS IN SPACE
…

Actually, given that the fourth section in the Spider web article is already called ‘Spider webs and drugs’, I guess it would fit in fairly well. It really sounds like some bizarre series of books or something.

Oh well. It’s nice, really. Two million articles on the English Wikipedia; I’ve edited one tenth of one percent of those, and I’ve probably read about a percent. Articles like this make it clear that there is much yet for me to learn from wikipedia. I’m looking forward to Spider Webs on Mars and Spider Webs Meet Frankenstein.

The Man Who Mistook etc.

I completed The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat yesterday, so I can now give my opinions on the work as a whole. I still feel that it was a good book, but some of the sections were less interesting than others (although none were entirely dull), and it did have slow moments; I admit that I skimmed over a paragraph here and there. One thing I want to remember from this: a book by Robert Silverberg called Thorns was referred to in a footnote, and I think that I may read it.

I’m getting further and further behind on Wikipedia–I keep seeing pages and thinking ‘Oh, I need to fix that later,’ and then just adding it to the end of the growing list of things that I may not get to any time soon.

I’m not making much progress mathematically, either. I’ve not read any more of the analysis books I acquired, despite having a deadline since I got them via ILL. Part of the problem is that I cannot realistically finish HAF before I’ve got to return it, so I have trouble gathering the willpower to return to it.

Not only am I behind in my private studies, I’ve got work piling upon me from classes, as well. I’ve a cryptography test to complete, a programming assignment to both start and finish, and a problem set from analysis all to be done by the end of the weekend. It’s probably less than eight hours of work, even if I take my time, but it still irritates me.

To make matters worse, I’ve decided (for no good reason, I’m sure) that it might be neat to be able to submit patches to MediaWiki (which I believe anyone can do). This wouldn’t be a problem except that actually doing it would involve learning PHP, a language of which I know nothing, as well as studying the MediaWiki code. I may not even be capable of it (at present), since I’ve little experience with coding outside of mathematical things which are generally more procedural. Probably I won’t end up doing this, but that just means that I’ll have substituted surrender for defeat, which is an unpleasant choice to make.