A couple more thoughts about Wikipedia
03/26/2010 18:48
I’m feeling less pissed off today about Wiki overwriting my content. I think this is a fatal flaw of Wikipedia, which will undermine the quality of their entries and destroy their credibility with the people who make Wiki what it is with their contributions. But I still believe in peer-to-peer information exchange.
Rob Weir of UMass wrote an interesting post that appeared today on Inside Higher Ed. It’s about trying to get students to appreciate the value and limitations of sources like Wiki when they’re doing research. It generated a moderate number of comments, mostly more-or-less in favor of letting students use internet sources, but with an understanding of their limitations. We’re not Luddites after all, seemed to be the general consensus.
What surprised me was that, aside from me, everyone was pretty focused on the demand side of the equation: the consumers of information. No one seemed particularly interested in the supply side, which may be partly because Rob’s post talks mostly about undergraduates writing papers. But presumably some of the commenters also perceive themselves as knowledge creators. I wonder what they think if Wiki from the perspective of info suppliers?
My big objection to Wiki is that it’s shooting itself in the foot by letting people or automated processes trash meaningful, well-documented content without putting something equally useful in its place. I think that’s suicidal, for a site that depends on volunteered content. Disagreements are one thing -- that's what the discussion pages and the revision histories are for. Actually, disagreements are probably a good thing, leading to better posts in the long run. Just trashing someone's work and replacing it with machine-generated text, however, is stupid.
Because let’s face it, there’s nothing magic about Wiki. Google can give you a dozen pages on any topic that are deeper, better researched, and more reliable than Wiki. Most are free of charge, and free of the occasional obscenities and stupid comments that find their way into (especially controversial) Wiki posts. Many are hosted on academic servers.
Maybe Wikipedia is an intermediate step on the way to a free, worldwide basic knowledge base. One whose time has come and gone. Maybe the next step is that people with subject-matter expertise can start posting it themselves. Server space is cheap or free these days. Yeah, a little uniformity of presentation is helpful. But I’ll happily endure a clunky interface (I’m talking about you, Fulton Postcards) or a few web-ads (Spartacus Educational) for useful, reliable content.
So what if people started posting the info they’ve done the most work on to the web? What if university departments asked their faculties and grad students to help populate a “this is what we do here” website that provided more than just marketing info about their most recent publications? What if we talked to our students about their future roles as producers of knowledge, and got them in the habit of contributing to this knowledge base rather than just consuming it?
Rob Weir of UMass wrote an interesting post that appeared today on Inside Higher Ed. It’s about trying to get students to appreciate the value and limitations of sources like Wiki when they’re doing research. It generated a moderate number of comments, mostly more-or-less in favor of letting students use internet sources, but with an understanding of their limitations. We’re not Luddites after all, seemed to be the general consensus.
What surprised me was that, aside from me, everyone was pretty focused on the demand side of the equation: the consumers of information. No one seemed particularly interested in the supply side, which may be partly because Rob’s post talks mostly about undergraduates writing papers. But presumably some of the commenters also perceive themselves as knowledge creators. I wonder what they think if Wiki from the perspective of info suppliers?
My big objection to Wiki is that it’s shooting itself in the foot by letting people or automated processes trash meaningful, well-documented content without putting something equally useful in its place. I think that’s suicidal, for a site that depends on volunteered content. Disagreements are one thing -- that's what the discussion pages and the revision histories are for. Actually, disagreements are probably a good thing, leading to better posts in the long run. Just trashing someone's work and replacing it with machine-generated text, however, is stupid.
Because let’s face it, there’s nothing magic about Wiki. Google can give you a dozen pages on any topic that are deeper, better researched, and more reliable than Wiki. Most are free of charge, and free of the occasional obscenities and stupid comments that find their way into (especially controversial) Wiki posts. Many are hosted on academic servers.
Maybe Wikipedia is an intermediate step on the way to a free, worldwide basic knowledge base. One whose time has come and gone. Maybe the next step is that people with subject-matter expertise can start posting it themselves. Server space is cheap or free these days. Yeah, a little uniformity of presentation is helpful. But I’ll happily endure a clunky interface (I’m talking about you, Fulton Postcards) or a few web-ads (Spartacus Educational) for useful, reliable content.
So what if people started posting the info they’ve done the most work on to the web? What if university departments asked their faculties and grad students to help populate a “this is what we do here” website that provided more than just marketing info about their most recent publications? What if we talked to our students about their future roles as producers of knowledge, and got them in the habit of contributing to this knowledge base rather than just consuming it?
