Comments on: Nature and Britannica: Round 2 http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/ by Steve McIntyre Sun, 19 May 2013 22:53:06 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Jim Erlandson http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/#comment-47181 Fri, 28 Apr 2006 14:34:03 +0000 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=603#comment-47181 Late post. Some interesting thoughts from Nicholas Carr roughly in agreement with what J. Sperry says above.

The quality of any entry in Wikipedia, for instance, is ultimately determined not by how many people work on it but by how many talented people work on it. An entry written by a single expert will be better than an entry written by a hundred fools. When you look deeply into Wikipedia, beyond the shiny surface of “community,” you see that the encyclopedia is actually as much, or more, a product of conflict than of collaboration: It’s an endless struggle by a few talented contributors to clean up the mess left by the numbskull horde.

He includes some numbers to support his claims.

]]> By: J. Sperry http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/#comment-47180 Wed, 29 Mar 2006 20:59:36 +0000 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=603#comment-47180 I’m one of those Wiki editors, because if I see something that’s wrong, I try to fix it (if I can) rather than complain about it. What you will find about Wikipedia is that the serious editors stick around while the vandals and “monkeys” are fleeting, so the “roses” tends to outweigh the “garbage.” (I’m speaking here about the content of the meaningful pages. Wikipedia is full of useless pages that you would only find if you specifically look for them.)

The serious editors have “watchlists” so that they can easily see what happens on the pages with which they are most familiar or interested. Reverting harmful changes is easy. There’s a permanent history of *everything* that goes on so you can find exactly where an article gets flawed.

Regarding the perceived bias in Wikipedia, while W. Connolley does get opinionated on the discussion pages (which is the intent, of course), I find him to be mostly reasonable when editing the main articles (in Wiki terms, using neutral point of view), with my main gripe being the use of blogs as references. Just today, he restored a comment somewhat critical of the Kyoto Protocol.

]]> By: TCO http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/#comment-47179 Mon, 27 Mar 2006 19:46:40 +0000 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=603#comment-47179 Comparison?

]]> By: frank borger http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/#comment-47178 Mon, 27 Mar 2006 19:27:23 +0000 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=603#comment-47178 As a test, I looked up something I’d previously been very involved with and could be considered an expert on, the Therac25 radiation therapy accelerator accidents that smoked a couple of patients.

The article in wikipedia was so filled with butchered physics, wrong references, etc that an annotated listing of the problems would have been three times as long as the article itself. I’ve never seen a “scientific” article with so many errors in 40 odd years.

Until wiki gets some editors, it’s a room full of monkeys and typewriters.

]]> By: Jim Erlandson http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/#comment-47177 Mon, 27 Mar 2006 19:09:47 +0000 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=603#comment-47177 Wikipedia is like hitchhiking — its free, relies on strangers and usually you get where you’re going without a problem. Other times … well … you just never know.

I wonder if Nature will permit Wikipedia citations.

]]> By: John A http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/#comment-47176 Mon, 27 Mar 2006 18:24:21 +0000 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=603#comment-47176 I’m very surprised that Luboà…⟠is taken in by Wikipedia since Wikipedia represents the very opposite of scholarship and the scientific method. Instead of history being written by people known and written about, we have what amounts to a wholesale assault on the past by whoever is the most persistent crank or political propagandist.

I think it goes without saying that wikipedia actually presents us with a model of knowledge rooted in anarchism and mob rule. Truth on wikipedia is decided by the mob, science by fashion and popularity and history rewritten by revisionists without a scintilla of demonstrated scholarship nor any oversight.

What Wikipedia represents to the sum of human knowledge is what the Czech regime after the “Prague Spring” was to political freedom.

]]> By: Chris Chittleborough http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/#comment-47175 Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:50:44 +0000 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=603#comment-47175 I’m a little less optimistic than Prof Motl; see my my comment (and the following one) on the earlier thread.

]]> By: Steve McIntyre http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/#comment-47174 Mon, 27 Mar 2006 03:56:13 +0000 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=603#comment-47174 There’s a certain irony in Nature’s position here. Enc Brit has formal peer review, just like Nature. If Nature is right, then peer review as practiced by Enc Brit contributes little to the merit of the article relative to a Wiki procedure. But what if the same were true of peer review as practiced by Nature?

]]> By: Luboš Motl http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/#comment-47173 Mon, 27 Mar 2006 03:46:44 +0000 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=603#comment-47173 Wikipedia is extraordinarily and surprisingly effective. Encyclopedia Britannica is a representative of the old school that has had many advantages – but if you can make thousands of people to work on an encyclopedia for free and if you find the right balanced rules, Encyclopedia Britannica just can’t compete with you. I find it obvious that the large collaboration projects based on state-of-the-art technology, such as Wikipedia, will be increasingly taking a lead. Even if Britannica’s statement that they’re more solid and balanced than Wikipedia were true today, it is all but guaranteed that it won’t be the case in a couple of months or years.

]]> By: kim http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/25/nature-and-britannica-round-2/#comment-47172 Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:21:01 +0000 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=603#comment-47172 On another blog I used to joke about the Nursing Home Sewing Circle, a dozen octogeneriennes parallel processing a millenium of experience.
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