Wikipedia talk:Response to the Guardian

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[edit] Guardian article

Youch. Wikipedia gets reamed in this Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1599116,00.html Babajobu 08:28, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I think you mean [1] Martin 08:47, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Oops, yes, as far as I know Wikipedia is not mentioned in the Hariri article. :) Link corrected. Babajobu 08:52, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

That guardain article is crap. I like the guardian but some of it is stupid, on TS Eliot it gives it 6/10, without giving any reason other than "It's purely factual and not in any way analytical" (which is a good thing) and "It doesn't list my book in the bibliography" which is not a bad thing. The critique of Encyclopedia was from the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1992 to 1997, thats not exactly NPOV is it. Martin 09:02, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

On the countrary: that could perhaps be a valid criticism of an article. As I always say, you don't explain to someone what a radio is, what it's significance is, and just what it's all about, by simply listing every dial, diode, crystal, and LED that goes into making it. Dxco 01:10, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Not so bad really, they love to make it look bad, but other that the haute couture article there are no big errors found. I wonder why media loves to run these every so often? - cohesion | talk 09:07, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

The Guardian has been fairly pro-wiki in the past, so I don't think it's any sort of a conspiracy. Some of the complaints were reasonable and fairly constructive (for example, all of the articles mentioned were culture and humanities subjects, which we really lack knowledgeable editors for), whilst some where just silly. (The fact that the Encyclopedia article is 2000 words long and not 26,000 (!!!) words long is definitely not a bad thing.) The Guardian has a 'Right of Reply' thing as part of its editorial policy, however, so if we write a reasoned and well-argued response, it is guaranteed to be printed. How about we draft a rebuttal somewhere here, to give our side of the story? --137.205.18.129 18:21, 24 October 2005 (UTC) (User:Fangz)

I agree. We should send them a copy of {{sofixit}}. -Splash^talk 18:25, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Most of the criticisms seem to be spot on, though the haute couture bit seemed odd (hopefully we aren't making ANY value judgments!). I can't imagine what rebuttal we would make, other than to fix the articles. Christopher Parham (talk) 18:37, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I love the idea of a communal rebuttal produced in the same manner as was employed for the Vanity Fair piece. Jimbo would need to organize it. Jimbo, where are you?? Babajobu 19:54, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I think we may be able to do well on a rebuttal too. I think I've found an innacuracy with the Guardian's Basque criticism, as I outline at Talk:Basque_people#Review_of_this_article_in_the_Guardian_newspaper but I would really need someone to look at that and check I'm not missing something. A chap on Encyclopedia seems to make some good points here Talk:Encyclopedia#Guardian_criticism. Do we have anything else we can say? I totally disagree that we got reamed. 6 out of 8 score us 6/10 or above. The second lowest score comes from an ex-Britannica employee. Given the frankly ludicrous way we've all made this thing, we've done incredibly well. --bodnotbod 22:11, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Other points I would add: what would have constituted a score of 10? The article would have made more sense if we'd been rated v Britannica and Encarta with their articles on those subjects getting a score out of 10 too. Without that you have to wonder whether it's something as nebulous as "the author's book on the subject" or "10 then -1 point for every innacuracy" (which would unduly punish a long article). So the scores are rather nebulous. --bodnotbod 22:18, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I think in any rebuttal, we also need to be broadly tackling the issue of value judgements - explain NPOV fully, I mean, and justify basing articles on facts over subjective impression from a moral perspective. We also have to discuss the issue of unevenness - i.e. the impression that we have too much information on X instead of Y - having more information on something, so long as it is relevant and well organised, is always a good thing. Also, we could always ponder at the motives of including "The largest general encyclopaedia in English is the Encyclopædia Britannica", a blatant factual error, in the second paragraph of [2]...--Fangz 22:36, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

what I want to know is why didn't they help fix the mistakes! Arniep 00:39, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Two reasons: it isn't their job to fix Wikipedia's errors, and they don't consider Wikipedia a serious reference work. ‣ᓛᖁᑐ 13:01, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

it isn't anyones job to do anything in Wikipedia. The more knowledgable people help with it the more it will improve. Arniep 20:36, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Journalistic codes of ethics generally say you observe and report without interfering unless it is a matter of life and death. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:58, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Of the people being interviewed, none were the journalist(s) working on the story. (The Vogue editor was quoted, but was not the article's author or the interviewer.) By the reasoning you cite, any journalist ever quoted by another journalist in an article about Wikipedia could never edit a Wikipedia article without violating a journalistic code of ethics, and would make this post journalistically unethical. 207.191.23.56 06:13, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

 :) :) That actually would have been a much more interesting and funny article!! If they'd gone in and edited the articles. Maybe then the Britannica guy would start to get wikipedia. (Of course, we'd have to go back and fix some of his errors!) flux.books 15:54, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Matthew Buckland posted an item to The Poynter Institute's "E-Media Tidbits" blog on Oct. 27 linking to the Guardian critique. The blog, and Poynter, are aimed at journalists. 207.191.23.56 06:13, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

What emerges is a somewhat lukewarm impression of Wikipedia's entries from the panel of experts. The scores by the judges range from 0 out of 10 to 8 out of 10 for the various wiki entries, with critiques varying from "inaccurate and unclear" to "reasonably comprehensive."

It would have been even more interesting if Guardian Unlimited had gone a step further with its judges, giving scores and critiques to the same entries in a traditional encyclopedia, and then comparing the scores.

Yes, comparison to Britannica etc. would be interesting; so would comparison to web sites that are generally considered to be maintained by experts in their respective fields. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:17, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Let's work on a common response to the Guardian lots of issues | leave me a message 09:19, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

For the high ratings like Bob Dylan, we should leave positive replies discussing things that are good about Wikipedia, rather than worrying about getting a 10/10, in my opinion. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-28 07:46

Important factors to take into account:

• Accessibility via article length. Wikipedia deliberately sets limits on article length since it is accessed across the internet, a medium that (due to network connectivity and computer speed issues) does not always handle large pages well for all people. This is important in particular when ensuring adequate accessibility to developing countries.
• Wikipedia is also not commercially funded, nor does it sell its products.
• WP's development model is perforce "many articles which over time become more complete and of higher standard". Traditional encyclopedias model is "fewer articles to a high standard and add more articles over time"
• It is not clear how effective Brittanica's system of maintaining all thousands of its articles to cutting edge information is, but it is unlikely to be a fraction of the capability of the Wikipedia community's.
• WP is in early development still, and is creating its own policies and editorial methods appropriate to a system having a million articles edited by half a million people of varied understanding. The model works however it would be naive to expect no learning curve. WP has only been in existence a few years.
• A strength of WP's system is similar to comparing Linux to Microsoft (sorry for any flames this causes!) in this sense: proprietary and corporate funded and managed, versus lay-enthusiasts. The advantages on the one hand are slickness, completeness and corporate style overview of the product (at least to the average non-technical user). The advantages on the other are that WP will identify information (by user contribution) that Brittanica will not, cannot be subject to "behind the doors" manipulation or slanting of fact, users are not dependent upon trust in a proprietary fact finding and selection process, cannot be denied access in future due to local government censorship or publishers pricing policy, and over time, when WP has been going another few years, will probably outdo many other sources of information on many scales: completeness, neutrality and immediate ongoing updating of latest information (WP articles as a source of news and analysis during the election or Jackson trial) being main ones.

FT2 04:09, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Actually, this article should make us proud

... but obviously, we need to work even harder ;-) No, seriously, we didn't get that many bad marks, and consider just what we were - not just implicitly, but once explicitly - compared to: At the very least, the Britannica. And people, as much as I love WP and know its advantages over traditional encyclopedias and yadda yadda, that is one mighty big thing to be compared to. And they also had the articles being checked by people who a) where experts in their fields and b) unfamiliar with WP, at least most of them. Now, as everybody who ever worked in academic fields knows, many "experts" tend to be, shall we say, a bit subjective: Only chance to get a 10/10 is if you very much agree with them, which is quite obviously the case with some of the reviews. Which leads to b) as well, since NPOV would in many cases rather prevent that, and NPOV also leads to the "lack" of criticism and analysis some mentioned, although traditional encyclopedias tend to have it. WP, on the other hand, leads to anything like this having to come in the form of attributed criticism and analysis, a difference we need to point out in our response. (This need for NPOV I guess also stops many of the not-too-many editors in the humanities field to add anything like this at all.)

So, IMO, our reply should contain the following points:

1. NPOV, and the fact that this leads to "criticism and analysis" being allowed only in an "attributed" way, and hence, usually the last thing added to articles.
2. The advantages WP has over traditional ones; links are mentioned in the articles, there are others.
3. The fact that they picked articles from fields where we are, on the average, rather weak.
4. And tell them to link not just to the current articles next time, but also to the versions reviewed - and mention that they forgot to mention that their experts could have corrected all the stuff they found with a click of a button, too! ;-)

On a side note, I think this article and its many "I have never been there before" shows that we still have not yet attracted many "experts" in their fields, which still is a damned shame. We need to get working on that -- although WP style editing and experts (see above) are of course a somewhat explosive mixture ... still, we should make an efford there to get at least some "big names" in here. -- AlexR 09:28, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

• Well, the fact that the Guardian has introduced a few experts to Wikipedia can only be good for Wikipedia. Maybe they'll talk to their fellow expert friends about it. Experts tend to want to correct mistakes, and Wikipedia lets them do that. We should thank the Guardian for introducing some experts to Wikipedia, and encourage them to find more critics. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-28 09:55

Thing is, the wiki NPOV policy is an explanation of what their experts felt was lacking, but does not answer the criticism. They are saying that the articles need to be more POV, and that this is a failing of WIKI. I have to agree, they are right. Wiki is afraid to allow opinions because it has limited control over extreme views. This policy (perhaps I mean also the requirement to cite sources) is designed to arbitrate disagreements, rather than improve articles. It is stated as a means of improving articles, very laudable and few would disagree. However the main point of application is when people disagree about content. The result is that by failing to allow editors to express their educated (but unsupported) views, wiki becomes open to exactly this criticism. I think, I would support less severe application of this policy. Making it so strict tends to subvert its aims of improving quality, because it becomes a tool of war. Sandpiper 14:30, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

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[edit] Does Guardian's Premise Miss the Point?

I first began using wikipedia to get an overview of certain topics. There is simply too much information available on the web and the search results on a search engine too unreliable as far as prioritizing the results in a way that is useful for me. For example, if you do a search for a piece of classical music you are likely to get a lot of consumer advice for products namely CDs related to that music, and not necessarily information about the piece itself. Wikipedia can serve as a kind of human filtering device (by this I mean not simply based on web search hits, that organizes information). It seems to organize topics into digestible form. The skill of orgainzation has been critiscized by some, but then I do not see those critics necessarily willing to lend a hand, nor see them providing any viable alternatives other than going back to old models that really don't solve the problem. Others who have commented above seem to subscribe to the idea that Wikipedia is in some kind of direct competition with traditional encyclopaedias, as a kind of definitive source of information in digest form. I would submit, that while this may indeed be one of the long-term goals in some secondary way, that people may be missing out on some of the bigger implications. Namely, that our hunger form information and the availability of that information has grown to such an extent it has simply outstripped traditional ways of filtering, organizing and providing ready access to it. To have access to more information through Wikipedia, the wise user I think accepts a certain risk that indeed some of the information may not be as reliable other sources (which you simply do not have the time to go to--otherwise you would not have gone to Wikipedia in the first place). So Wikipedia is like a starting point. If he needs to confirm the information then one has to go to the traditional sources. But that starting point to start our interest and that overview that Wikipedia provides plus the cluster of useful links (even the Eliot scholar acknowledged this part--but marked Wikipedia down because his frame of thinking was to limit the uses of Wikipedia to the traditional uses of an encyclopaedia) gives it some extremely important distinctions. One example I would give are the synopsis of every episode of some TV series. You will never find that in the traditional encyclopaedias, I think. The cost of printing all that text prohibits it and the model they use is a rather academic one which precludes certain kinds of entries and topics. WC 05 June 2006.