I can honestly say that every article in Wikipedia that I would have had expertise to write in has a well-thought, well-proofed entry already. I like Wiki because, of the things I can verify, I can verify that it’s been written by an expert and edited for clarity.
I’m pretty sure that Wikipedia’s strength does not lie in objective reporting of current events. I don’t think that anyone should be looking at Wikipedia for news. It’s a reference tool, and I (for one) use it as such. I wouldn’t ever look up details on Alito’s confirmation hearing, or even details about Hurricane Katrina, but I might use it to find the significance of Madison v. Marbury if it were mentionned or to learn the difference between a hurricane and a tornado. I’ll get my news from other sources, and look up the background on Wikipedia.
Well that is exactly the problem, though, isn’t it? Youknow the topic and can infer the expertise of the contributors. However, the main use of an encyclopedia is to learn about topics you don’t know about and you are dependent that the article is accurate, meaning that someone else has vetted the credentials of the contributors.
BTW, I love Wiki, contribute all the time. Sometimes when I am bored I intentionally mis-spell a word in the search (e.g. Calfornia) so I can correct the spelling error in articles. And I am quite proud of some of my contributions, although none of them are particularly grand.
Actually, Wikipedia has a good reputation for reporting news; if I recall correctly we even won an award for our coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and our coverage of Hurricane Katrina was also excellent. That said, we totally suck at reporting issues with political significance.
There’s also WikiNews, which is dedicated to reporting news. I don’t have much to do with WikiNews (I have an account there, but have barely used it), and can’t vouch for its effectiveness.
on the very old show the Honeymooner’s Jackie Gleason’s character use to threaten Alice that " One of the days, One of these days Alice, Wump, straight to the moon"
This was as in he would hit hard so hard she would fly to the moon.
I love Wiki for the not just for the knowledge it contains, good and bad. But more for the fact that it represents what I always thought the internet should be (besides Porn!) about. A world of people comming together to share information, it is an amazing thing they have done.
Well there’s a lot more context to the Honeymooner’s gag than that. To start with, it isn’t a “joke”. It’s a repeated gag, like Homer strangling Bart on the Simpson’s. Looked at out of context, it’s horrible. In the Honeymooner’s, Ralph was a blustering fool, while his wife was the one who really controlled how things worked. He never hit her, the threat was empty and everyone knew it.
However, it wasn’t used wisely or effectively in this thread.
It was used as the springboard for a Futurama joke, reflecting the modern-day unease with the subject matter. Phillip Fry, the suspended-animation survivor from 1999, wakes up in 3000 and ends up going with co-worker Leela to an lunar amusement park riddled with historical inaccuracies. These include animatronic versions of Ralph and Alice Kramden, which the park’s museum-narration claims represent the then-prevailing theory of the beginning of the 20th-century space program:
Ralph robot: One of these days, Alice! Bang! Zoom! Right… to the moon!
Leela: Wow, I had no idea the early astronauts were so fat.
Fry: He’s not an astronaut! He’s a comedian! He was using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife!
And that’s the point, no one is going to deny that a huge percentage of the Wiki articles (especially on mainstream “classic” encyclopedia topics) are pretty accurate. But it’s the fact that we don’t actually have any real proof that it’s been put up by an expert nor do we necessarily know that it’s been sufficiently vetted that make Wikipedia, as a whole, less reliable than EB. I think Wiki is a great tool, but it is clearly inferior to a published encyclopedia when it comes to reliability.
And with EB you don’t have to look at an article’s history or the discussion behind the article to see if anyone’s actually vetted it, it’s an assumption the second you see that it’s within an EB volume.
Wikipedia is actually somewhat useful at giving out the generalized information of current events. I bet there’s lots of people that haven’t followed Plamegate all that closely. If you check it’s entry over on Wiki then you will find a generally unbiased and useful overview. At least as unbiased as your average news agency, anyways (because the news is pretty biased it seems.) Sure, if you’re doing a research paper on the Plame affair, I wouldn’t consider Wiki a source to use, nor would I consider an AP report or a John Leo article all that appropriate either.
Anyways, to be honest I wasn’t necessarily talking about strictly current event issues. One example is Bob Hope. Prior to the day Bob Hope died his wiki entry was a tame, ordinary biographical outline of who he was, why he’s famous, what he’d done. The day he died the post was defaced quite childishly, primarily because Bob Hope was in the news, so that gave someone the idea to go in an deface his Wiki entry. It didn’t stay up long, but is the sort of thing you have to watch for when you have a project like Wikipedia.
At one time it used to be said it was a pretty big accomplishment to get yourself an entry in the encyclopedia. That meant you were a pretty important person over a pretty long period of time. EB isn’t writing for today, it’s writing for the ages, that’s why minor celebrities that pop up and then fade away won’t get an entry in an EB.
Wiki on the other hand, basically anyone that’s ever in the public eye will get an entry. Does that make Wiki better or worse? Neither, I think EB and Wiki have different goals. EB both out of desire and necessity limits itself to topics of more importance or more “weight.”
After all, this forum has it’s own Wiki entry and I don’t think any of us really think the SDMB is important enough to have an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
And in response to your other question, I tend to get a new volume of encyclopedia’s roughly every 8-10 years. The edition I have right now is 2004 and I believe it set me back around $1200-1300 all said and done. On top of just the generalized reference books I also got a set of “Macropedias” which have in depth (multi-page) articles on major topics. Some of these are written by famous academics and nobel laureates.
Here’s the way I look at the comparison between Wikipedia and Encycoperdia Britannica.
Breadth - Wiki has over 800,000 articles. EB has under 80,000 articles. So on 90% of the articles Wiki covers, EB’s equivalent information is zero.
Currency - Wiki is constantly updated. EB is static. If you looked up the Pope in EB it would tell you it’s John Paul II. Obviously you know that’s not true. But suppose you were trying to find out if George McGovern or Ray Bradbury or Peter Ustinov was alive? EB could only tell you they were alive two years ago. If you’re looking for information on Samuel Alito or avian flu or Lost, which would you choose; Wiki or EB?
Accuracy - In head to head comparisons on the subjects they both cover, EB probably does beat Wiki. But it’s a matter of degree not kind. EB has been found to have factual errors that were incorrect at the time they were printed. So both sources are accurate about most information and both have been found to be wrong in some obscure details.
Style - Arguably EB’s strongest advantage. EB is written by professional writers; Wiki by amateurs.
Connections - Wiki is hyperlinked. EB is not.
Cost - Wiki is free. EB costs hundreds of dollars.
Convenience - Depends obviously on what your online access is. Personally, I find Wiki more convenient that a large set of books.
Alas, it doesn’t say “Don’t Panic!” in big friendly letters on the cover.
Oh yeah, it doesn’t have a cover. But still.
HHG comparisons aside, I use Wikipedia a LOT, and I’ve found it to be quite useful as a reference on everything from habeas corpus to Badger Badger Badger.
I don’t use their search engine - I use the dropdown “Wikipedia & Google” add-on in the Firefox browser. It probably does what Derleth described, only without having to type “en.wikipedia.org” every time. It works fast and well, Google doesn’t seem to mind, and it eases the load on Wikipedia’s servers.
I won’t necessarily disagree with anything you’ve posted here. But the factual errors found in an EB are valmost nonexistant while if I wanted to I could link a wiki article right now that has factual errors in it (all I’d have to do in order to do this would simply be to head over to wiki and PUT a factual error in an article if I was so inclined… that’s sort of the point.)
But I’ll again reiterated that while 90% of Wiki’s articles don’t have an EB equivalent I’d say about 85% of those are articles that wouldn’t be appropriate to put into a traditional encyclopedia anyways.
EB’s are also cool in that they’re stylish, and are something a family can keep for ages. It’s cool looking through some of the very old editions of my grandfather’s encyclopedias, it’s like looking back in time and it’s something you would never get with an online encyclopedia.
Has anybody looked at the Encyclopaesia Britaqnnica enty at Wikipedia. Read some of the Discussion page, it is pretty interesting the amount of animosity some folks seem to have for EB. I think the whole EB vs. Wiki debate is kinda silly, and both sides seem to be guitly of getting involved in it.
I love the ubiquity of Wiki - it is accessible anywhere there is an internet connection. Also, it doesn’t have a barrier to entry, like an expensive encyclopedia (some of you have noted paying $1000-1300 for an EB). For those of us in a developed community, with libraries and universities nearby, a free, online, potentially-suspect reference source isn’t a neccessity. But imagine a community with no access to a library - a phone line to the internet is enough to get Wikipedia. I like knowing that the same quality of starter information on a topic (which is what Wikipedia articles should be viewed as) is available to anyone that can get on the 'net. Sure, if one wants to know A LOT about a topic, then Wiki is just a starting point, but so would the EB and it doesn’t come with useful hyperlinks.
So, my thanks to those of you involved in the Wikipedia project.
