[WikiEN-l] partisan wrangling on wikipedia

Sat Feb 1 08:10:16 UTC 2003

On Fri, 31 Jan 2003 koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

> When I think of wikipedia, somehow I'm reminded of the [[Milgram
> experiment]]--except the seats are really wired.  Currently I would
> not recommend anyone join wikipedia, unless the person knows of some
> obscure Russian filmmaker to write about or some photographic
> technique which calls for dry unemotional writing.  Something about
> the culture here is just *wrong*; it calls to people who itch to have
> a buzzer in hand, and those of us lucky enough not to be on the
> receiving end are still uncomfortable watching the spectacle.

That is a pessimistic view of Wikipedia in its current state. Accurate,
from what I've observed of certain articles, but still pessimistic.

Unfortunately, the evaluation of mankind's accumulated knowledge frequently
results in the same kind of dust-ups we're seeing in Wikipedia. For
example, Eric Thompson, while undoubtedly the most learned & influential
scholar of Mayan history & culture in recent times, nonetheless delayed
the successful translation of Mayan inscriptions for a generation
because of his own biasses and a tenacious insistence on his own POV.
For an example outside of the humanities, I am reminded of an attempt by
one of the leading US medical journals -- I forget if it was the New
England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the AMA -- to review the
lauded discoveries that journal had published a few years prior: after
a few months they discontinued this series, having discovered
that far too many of these articles turned out to have been bad science![*]

[*] I mention this story not to impeach science or the scientific
method, but to show that the scientific method is not always rigorously
applied -- nor always consistently.
>
> Why are you here?  Are any of you trying to change another person's
> opinion?  If you are, you belong on Usenet, and best of luck.
>
Speaking for myself, I'd say that I'm attempting to argue the following
thesis: "Here is some valuable information you should know. Read it." And
if someone believes that her/his information is either just as valuable
or more valuable, then as Jimbo is running Wikipedia at this time, they
are welcome to add it to what I'm providing.

At one time I thought I could very craftily tilt the content of Wikipedia
towards my own POV, but as it accumulates more articles, this becomes less
possible. Let me offer an analogy to explain my point. Suppose that I
want a landscape to be nothing but forest, instead of a yucky grassland,
& so I spend my time & efforts digging up the grasslands & planting trees.
After some time at this, I realize just how hard it is to plant even as
much as a few acres of trees, & accept the fact that there will be
grasslands in this landscape.

Of course, the conflicts seem to focus on the prime bits of real estate
that everyone wants to garden their own way. But I cannot help but wonder
that when a Wikipedian has won the battle & one article reflects her/his
own "N"POV, if that Wikipedian follows the hyperlinks to see whether
the other articles subvert the thesis proven after so much labor.

Geoff