Comments on: The Charms and Troubles of Wikipeda

By: Victor

Victor — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:00:01 +0000

This is the main reason I read brfootnote.theclawmagazine.com. Insightful post.

By: joshua cohen

joshua cohen — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:59:05 +0000

By: Nicole Demby

Nicole Demby — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:15:22 +0000

Thanks so much for your reply Evgeny. While I understand your point, what I was trying to say (which perhaps I should have said more clearly) is that perhaps the site achieves something more interesting and relevant than their own stated mission by manifesting the epistemological relativity and reflexivity of internet knowledge. If Wikipedia wants to attract more tenured university professors and fewer uncredentialed common folk as editors, they should make systemic changes to the site as you suggest. Yet we must consider that something of the “wisdom of the crowds” approach might be lost in the process (I’d hedge a bet that your “subject experts” tend to be no less male and white than the current editor pool).

By: Evgeny

Evgeny — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:14:15 +0000

Ni Nicole – thanks for your review. I think you are being a little bit unfair to what I had to say: 1) I didn’t really touch upon the question of accuracy in that review at all 2) I never suggested that Wikipedia should be subject to the same “restrictive methodologies as more traditional encyclopedias” 3) If Wikipedia defined its mission as being the greatest repository of people’s diverse and obscure interests, I would not be offering any criticism at all. However, they want to be taken seriously as the world’s most reputable source of knowledge. I am fine with extensive entries on the Transformers as the next guy, but in order to fulfill their mission they may need to, well, make a few changes. Please note that it doesn’t necessarily mean purging the site of trivia – it means finding new ways of producing knowledge in areas that are not yet well-covered on the site – or redefining their mission if this fails.

Finally, to say that I “lament” the advent of Wikipedia is misleading – I actually call it one of the greatest social experiments in that essay. The reason why I criticize Andrew Lih’s book is precisely for not telling us WHAT makes it work so well so that its lessons can be applied elsewhere (and no, it doesn’t mean that it’s perfect – hence my criticism of its current approach to knowledge creation).