Wikipedia editing

[RedWorker]

Does anyone else on RevLeft edit Wikipedia?

I do. Mostly to work on making it politically neutral and add information related to the left.

I think it's a great project. Free knowledge, written by the people instead of the bourgeoisie. Except it's currently being written by people who are under the influence of the bourgeoisie. And this fact has seemingly led some people on here to dislike Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is a great thing, and instead of shunning it we should work within it to make it better.

We have to work to remove the right-wing influence in Wikipedia and keep articles free from any of that crap. Unfortunately there's a big amount of editors who will work as hard as possible to block any progress, and introduce bias.

[M-L-C-F]

I do as well. Not as much as I used to. But I wanna start doing it more again. I also wanna start contributing pictures too. Since my smartphone has gotta good camera on it (it's a Samsung Galaxy Note 3). Wikipedia has got a lotta bullshit that needs filtering and fixing. So we may as well do it, to counter the bullshit from elitist and reactionary pieces of shit.

That being said, Jimmy Wales can fuck off. He's a libertarian twat, and a complete asshole. But that doesn't mean Wikipedia is bad, or should be viewed as bad. It's independent of those facts.

[The Intransigent Faction]

I find the academic attitude toward Wikipedia, which is ingrained into all new or aspiring academics here, to be very condescending. "The encyclopedia that anyone can edit? My goodness, but everyone knows that knowledge is a privilege of the elite!"

That said, there are certain topics on which Wikipedia might be reliable, i.e. chemistry. In general, though, I'm not so sure some Wikipedia articles deserve their place at the top of a Google search list. At best, they're redundant echoes of other, better material sourced in the Wikipedia articles.

"Neutral point of view" is also pretty much nonsense when it comes to articles on historical events, for instance. Whose point of view is the "neutral" one? Usually their striving for "neutrality" in this regard demonstrates latent biases.

[DigitalBluster]

The problem isn't that anyone can edit it, but that it's written competitively, not cooperatively as claimed.

Someone writes a stub; if they have a decent source, the stub isn't speedy-deleted. Someone else doesn't like what the stub says, but they can't just delete sourced material that they don't like, so they search Google for a counterpoint and add that. And so it goes, back and forth, until the article is far longer than necessary to educate the reader on the major points of relevance. Compare any Wikipedia article to its Britannica counterpart: the latter will cover the same ground, but won't descend into obvious point/counterpoint, on-the-other-hand-ism. A few self-selected (and thus inherently biased) editors with an interest in the subject tend to dominate the article, with occasional contributions by uninvolved readers (who may actually know more about the subject than those treating the article like an ideological turf war).

If Wikipedia were a cooperative effort, the process would look nothing like this.

[synthesis]

I find the academic attitude toward Wikipedia, which is ingrained into all new or aspiring academics here, to be very condescending. "The encyclopedia that anyone can edit? My goodness, but everyone knows that knowledge is a privilege of the elite!"

Actually...


Wikipedia pops up in bibliographies, and even college curricula

All through high school, Ani Schug was told to steer clear of Wikipedia (http://www.orlandosentinel.com/topic/arts-culture/wikimedia-foundation-inc.-ORNPR00066.topic). Her teachers talked about the popular online encyclopedia "as if it wasn't serious or trustworthy" and suggested it only be used as a tip sheet.

Imagine her surprise this spring when her American politics professor at Pomona College assigned the class to write detailed entries for Wikipedia instead of traditional term papers.

Turns out it was a lot harder than the students anticipated. Their projects had to be researched, composed and coded to match Wikipedia's strict protocols. Schug and her classmates wound up citing 218 scholarly legal and newspaper sources for their entry on a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing corporate donations for ballot initiative campaigns.

Then came the really scary step: All their work was posted publicly on Wikipedia for reading and editing by a potentially immense audience.

"It felt more real that other people will be reading us besides just our group and the teacher," said Schug, 19, who just completed her freshman year at Pomona. "It makes us feel more obligated to do a good job and present the facts in an unbiased way."

***

Once the bane of teachers, Wikipedia and entry-writing exercises are becoming more common on college campuses as academia and the online site drop mutual suspicions and seek to cooperate. In at least 150 courses at colleges in the U.S. and Canada, including UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco's medical school, Boston College (http://www.orlandosentinel.com/topic/education/colleges-universities/boston-college-OREDU0000539.topic) and Carnegie Mellon University, students were assigned to create or expand Wikipedia entries this year.

The result, supporters say, has been better researched articles about, for example, the causes of paralyzing strokes and the history of the American West. And, they say, students are becoming better prepared for a future of digital information.

"Even the best research papers get buried in a drawer somewhere," said Amanda Hollis-Brusky, the Pomona politics professor who assigned the Wikipedia projects. "These make a real contribution to the public discourse."

When the not-for-profit Wikipedia was started in 2001, the idea was that antiestablishment volunteers — in fact, anyone who could access the Internet — would write and edit its mainly anonymous entries. An unbiased truth was supposed to emerge if enough contributors took part. By contrast, traditional encyclopedias hired expert authors.

But even as its popularity soared among the public, Wikipedia earned a reputation among academics as amateurish, peppered with errors and too open to nasty online spats over content. Wikipedia has tried to repair all that with better safeguards and a wider range of topics.

As part of that effort, Wikipedia has established a San Francisco educational arm that helps colleges tailor class assignments to the site's technical demands. It trains "Wikipedia Ambassadors" like Char Booth, the Claremont Colleges librarian who aided the Pomona class.

Wikipedia "gets well-written articles from [college] students who are studying the topics and have access to the best literature on the subject and the expertise of professors who can guide them as well," said LiAnna Davis, a spokeswoman for the Wiki Education Foundation.

Pomona professor Hollis-Brusky and Booth taught students to meet the requirements of tight writing, neutral tone and abundant citations for their projects on such topics as the Federalist Papers , diamond importing laws and the electoral reform group FairVote. The student groups presented their research to the class and displayed their Wikipedia pages on a large screen in a Hahn Hall classroom. The Supreme Court case entry showed that it had attracted about 2,000 viewers in a month.

Even with complaints of mistakes and incompleteness, Wikipedia has a powerful reach. Often the first site suggested by Google searches, it has about 4.5 million English-language entries and 496 million visitors a month worldwide.

Wikipedia "has essentially become too large to ignore," said Berkeley's Kevin Gorman, a former student who is the nation's first "Wikipedian in Residence" at an undergraduate institution.

"It is certainly an initial source of information for a huge number of people," he said. "For many people, it may be their primary source of information."

Gorman guides students who are composing Wiki entries as assignments in UC Berkeley's American Cultures program — requiring classes that deal with ethnic and economic diversity.

Gorman said it is important to expand the ranks of Wikipedia authors and editors beyond its early base of "basically techno, libertarian, white dudes."

Further symbolizing peace with academia, professional scholarly organizations in sociology, psychological science and communications in recent years have urged members to write Wikipedia articles and to assign students to do so. Other efforts include Wikipedia-writing marathons, such as one sponsored by CalArts' online magazine, East of Borneo, that focused on topics about the Southern California art world.

Gorman also works with UC San Francisco's medical school, where professor Amin Azzam runs a month-long elective class for students to improve Wikipedia's medical information. In the first such class at an American medical school, students have started or revised pages about hepatitis, dementia and alcohol withdrawal syndrome, among others, Azzam said.

The assignments, he explained, are part of young doctors' "social contract to do good in the world and help patients" learn about health.

In revising and broadening the entry on strokes, medical student Andrew Callen experienced Wikipedia's argumentative nature. A Wikipedia medical editor, apparently a physician, challenged some of Callen's technical terminology.

Callen said his language was more precise but conceded after some back and forth that the distinction was not important for lay readers.

"I didn't take offense at it," he said. "In a way I appreciated it."

Writing for Wikipedia, Callen said, is a good way to improve the explanation of complicated science to patients."The more people we can get to edit it, the more accurate the information will be," he added.

***

Some skepticism remains.

Doug Hesse, vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English, said Wikipedia's understandable insistence on neutrality doesn't allow students to make reasoned arguments and analysis in term papers.

And its reliance on published sources eliminates students' independent interviews, experiments and research, said Hesse, who heads the University of Denver's writing program.

At Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, professor of human-computer interaction Robert Kraut has assigned classes to compose Wikipedia chapters in psychology. Students have benefited, he said, but he, too, doesn't think such assignments will become commonplace.

Compared to regular term papers, Wiki entries require a lot more faculty time to ensure they are ready for online viewing. Some colleges may be put off by the public editing, which Kraut said led to some of his students' writings getting excised for not following what he considered to be very complicated footnoting rules.

In Pomona College's politics class, there was no nasty flaming on any class projects, which counted for 35% of the students' grades, according to Hollis-Brusky. (Most Wikipedia authors use pseudonyms and the Pomona students were urged to do the same to avoid possible privacy violations.)

Freshman Lane Miles, who worked on the FairVote research, said it was doubly satisfying to help build the online encyclopedia. "We are educating ourselves and educating others," he said.

[RedAnarchist]

I sometimes edit things if I see an error or something outdated and I've even translated smaller articles in English even though I'm a monoglot, but I don't actively participate on the site.

[M-L-C-F]

Encyclopedia Britannica might not have the "my dick is bigger than yours" fighting of Wikipedia. But it's still a highly bias source, full of bullshit viewpoints. I was reading some of them that were from the late 60s. That are in my Grandma's basement. I was just laughing at the nonsense in it. Just like the ones that were then current at my high school, when I was younger. :lol:

[The Intransigent Faction]

Actually...

Interesting. In pretty much every class I ever took at university, it was made abundantly clear "Don't use Wikipedia as a source", and I know courses at other universities have had a similar attitude.

If that's changing, okay, great, but that was certainly the attitude I encountered, and it was made pretty clear in most if not all course syllabi.

So "actually", yeah, the attitude toward Wikipedia has, perhaps up until recently, been skeptical or downright negative, as the article suggests ("Once the bane of teachers").

[The Intransigent Faction]

Encyclopedia Britannica might not have the "my dick is bigger than yours" fighting of Wikipedia. But it's still a highly bias source, full of bullshit viewpoints.

Yeah, that's not necessarily uncommon. It says a lot about encyclopedic claims of "neutrality".

[RedWorker]

Interesting. In pretty much every class I ever took at university, it was made abundantly clear "Don't use Wikipedia as a source", and I know courses at other universities have had a similar attitude.

Which means that you should not cite it directly (obviously), but you can still use it, and use its references in your work...

[The Intransigent Faction]

Which means that you should not cite it directly (obviously), but you can still use it, and use its references in your work...

Of course, that was never discouraged, provided the sources cited were themselves reliable by academic standards.

[DigitalBluster]

Encyclopedia Britannica might not have the "my dick is bigger than yours" fighting of Wikipedia. But it's still a highly bias source, full of bullshit viewpoints. I was reading some of them that were from the late 60s. That are in my Grandma's basement. I was just laughing at the nonsense in it. Just like the ones that were then current at my high school, when I was younger. :lol:

Britannica is certainly biased, but that's beside the point about Wikipedia articles being polluted by superfluous, ideological, back-and-forth struggles to convince readers by burying them under a litany of alleged proofs, a result which is to be expected from the structure of the wiki format combined with Wikipedia's policies. And, obviously, this verbosity doesn't achieve a neutral point of view any more than the corporate media does when it presents "both sides."

[M-L-C-F]

Yeah, I agree. I just was merely stating my dislike of Encyclopedia Britannica. I hate how it's also viewed as a legitimate source according to Wikipedia too.

[Red Commissar]

I used to edit wikipedia on a constant basis in a period of about 5 to 6 years ago. Since then though I haven't really bothered. Every once in awhile I log in and correct a grammar or spelling issue but beyond that nothing much anymore.

Finding sources is a difficult one. For more well-known and researched events, then you can find many and work from there (though of course, there is still the back-and-forth over NPOV). This is tougher for lesser-known ones that don't get as much academic attention or serious media coverage, but regardless of some historical significance- sources are less easier to find in those and you are more prone to NPOV flagging there, if not notability requirements. A lot of things can go wrong at that point- a persistent anti-what ever you are looking at, an unsympathetic mod, w/e.

[Red Commissar]

I used to edit wikipedia on a constant basis in a period of about 5 to 6 years ago. Since then though I haven't really bothered. Every once in awhile I log in and correct a grammar or spelling issue but beyond that nothing much anymore.

Finding sources is a difficult one. For more well-known and researched events, then you can find many and work from there (though of course, there is still the back-and-forth over NPOV). This is tougher for lesser-known ones that don't get as much academic attention or serious media coverage, but regardless of some historical significance- sources are less easier to find in those and you are more prone to NPOV flagging there, if not notability requirements. A lot of things can go wrong at that point- a persistent anti-what ever you are looking at, an unsympathetic mod, w/e that can lead to the death of an article.

Some subjects don't really get much attention as others. Wikipedia has a lot more (detailed) articles on history, politics, and culture, but a lot of its articles on the sciences for example don't really go into much detail outside of major topics. I suppose a lot of that has to do with the inaccessibility of reliable science literature (journals are behind pretty expensive paywalls only in range of universities) and trying to word it down for general reference.

For better or worse though, wikipedia is at least among the first, if not the first, resource people use when they are unfamiliar with something.

[Comrade #138672]

Why do people think it is strange that teachers say that you should not use Wikipedia as a source? It *is* unreliable as a source, since it is generally incomplete, error prone and biased, despite that Wikipedia can be very useful for insight and learning. This has nothing to do with elitism.

[Rugged Collectivist]

Neutrality is a lie. I kind of like the back and forth format of wikipedia because it gives me several viewpoints on an issue.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Neutrality is a lie. I kind of like the back and forth format of wikipedia because it gives me several viewpoints on an issue.

That might be useful for some subjects, but when it comes to, for example physics, there are articles where the author spends most of his time discussing some crackpot theory that seven people and their dog believe in. And in my experience it's not just the fault of the psychoceramicists - overzealous debunkers often end up giving their "targets" more space than they deserve on account of the number of people that know about them.

[The Intransigent Faction]

Why do people think it is strange that teachers say that you should not use Wikipedia as a source? It *is* unreliable as a source, since it is generally incomplete, error prone and biased, despite that Wikipedia can be very useful for insight and learning. This has nothing to do with elitism.

Those aspects of it don't. Any a-priori assumption that because "anyone can edit" it (meaning not just academics but workers), it must be inherently inadequate, certainly has a lot to do with elitism.

[The Intransigent Faction]

Neutrality is a lie.

This. Isn't the concept of a "neutral point of view" paradoxical?

[RedWorker]

This. Isn't the concept of a "neutral point of view" paradoxical?

Well, maybe the inclusion of "point of view" in that phrase technically makes it an oxymoron. But not really. You can stick to just telling the facts. There's a difference between an opinion and an encyclopedia article.

[The Intransigent Faction]

You can stick to just telling the facts.

Which facts? Even that has an implied "point of view".

[RedWorker]

Which facts? Even that has an implied "point of view".

Yeah, nothing can be 100% absolutely fully neutral. In fact, nothing in life is perfect. Don't be ridiculous.

[The Intransigent Faction]

Yeah, nothing can be 100% absolutely fully neutral. In fact, nothing in life is perfect. Don't be ridiculous.

I'm not being ridiculous. I'm making the point that claiming "neutrality" as a measure of validity is ridiculous because of the inherent paradox, so the idea that a source is more or less authoritative because of proclaimed "neutrality" is flawed.

Either "neutrality" means taking the "middle of the road" approach which for obvious reasons isn't "neutral" (see: "centrist" politics), or it means presenting all sides as equally valid or relevant, which has the same problem as the "middle of the road". It certainly doesn't mean "give greater weight to commonly accepted views", whether they are right or not.

[GodOfEvil]

Wikipedia looks hard the edit:confused: