User:12.103.251.203

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I am not a free name! I am a number!

Wait, that's not right.

I am not a free name! I am an free-floating unintegrated 8087 numerical co-processor!

I occasionally kibitz on Wikipedia, because it's a great way to pick up chicks.

I have a rather odd "name" because I refuse to create Yet Another Web Login Account. At last count I have 378 of them, and that's at least 377 too many. So I've decided to only create them when I absolutely have to, and since Wikipedia will let me sign articles with my IP address, I shall.

Thank you for your kind attention.

[edit] Thoughts on the wikipedia process

Not that anyone cares about what I think (except myself), but I feel obligated to write this anyway.

I like the idea of a user-contributed encyclopedia. But I think the web-at-large is the same thing, mostly, and I find it hard to see the advantage of Wikipedia over individual web pages.

I've serously thought about making contributions here; I suspect there are a number of subject areas I could write meaningful articles on, particularly in the computer science, typography, AI areas. I write voluminous amounts of content for my personal website, and it would make sense to add/kibitz here on more academic issues.

But I have a few serious problems with the Wikipedia process as it stands as of Dec 15, 2005, and I don't feel my time spent playing politics here would be worth it. For the articles on my own website I have full control over their content, and I don't have to worry about some twit with a chip on his shoulder coming in and mucking it all up in the unholy name of "their NPOV".

I see many controversial Wikipedia articles which have had their final slant decided not by who is most qualified, but who is loudest and most adept at manipulating the Wikipedia community. I've seen horrible arguments go on over relatively trivial things (capitalization of words?) eventually resulting in people leaving Wikipedia. I see factual inaccuracies, but I refuse to fix them out of the certain knowledge I will end up in a flame war or that my changes will be reverted by someone with a particular bias on the subject.

I also firmly disagree with Wikipedia's general approach to a neutral point of view. In theory there is a neutral point of view. In practice, few articles can ever achieve it unless written entirely by someone with a truly neutral point of view on the subject. Minor factual omissions, slight slantings, vague choices of wording, and it's easy to end up with a slanted article; I see this happen frequently.

But the biggest deficiency with Wikipedia is what I'll term malicious inaccuracy. Most encyclopedias strive for accuracy and completeness out of a healthy economic interest. Wikipedia has no such motivation; in fact, the claim is that no one is legally or financially responsible for accuracy.

While that indeed makes sense for something which is contributed for free, it also means any numbskull can come along and muck with any article, inserting whatever gibberish she wants. Sometimes the gibberish is caught and removed, especially for very active articles; but all too obviously there are cases when it hasn't been caught.

Any information source should be fact-checked against other sources. I'm a diehard skeptic who supports this fully, and in a way, Wikipedia's lack of authority makes this more blatantly obvious. But at the same time I should also be able to place some minimum level of trust in the encyclopedia!

Only rarely would I need to check trivial data such as birthdates or name spellings in a commercial encyclopedia, as I can assume the editors have made a best-faith effort to ensure these sorts of things are accurate. With Wikipedia I cannot make any assumptions whatsoever. Yet as I have to verify every piece of information against some other source, I might as well have consulted those other sources in the first place.

It isn't the big controversial articles which interest me. I can look up those subjects on the Web easily enough, probably with more current and complete information than is available in Wikipedia. It's the specialist minutiae which I find useful, and yet that is exactly the sort of article which is most likely to have minor errors of fact and large amounts of bias--because very few people will be familiar with the subject matter and fewer still will want to take the time to fix it.

I was amused to see news stories about the Nature "peer-review" of various Wikipedia articles. They apparently peer-reviewed some set of scientific Wikipedia articles at some date. Those articles have probably changed since then, and will change again. For all I (or anyone else) knows, as of today those articles may contain horrible inaccuracies. I don't know what the point was.

I never want to imply "Imminent death of Wikipedia, film at 11". But these problems aren't obvious to most users. I do believe Wikipedia will eventually hit a sort of "usefulness wall" where it will be unable to become any more authoritative/usable without some basic changes.

First on my list would be the basic concept of article ownership. It has problems; if yoy choose the wrong editor(s) you can easily end up with a stagnant article, or one with horrible bias. But it's the only way to prevent malicious inaacuracies, and editors should not have to constantly revert factually-incorrect edits.

The bias problem already exists. Most major arguments are resolved by "mob rule" or, more accurately, whoever is most politically adept or has the most time on their hands. (I should provide specific examples for this, but I'm too lazy right now to go dig them up; I suspect most longtime Wikipedia contributors have run across this at least once.)

Article subjects should be approved before publication, rather than the current approach of "anyone can write an article and anyone can propose deleting an article". I'm utterly amazed more people haven't wasted the community's energy by suggesting frivolous deletions (maybe it's just a matter of time...) Wouldn't you feel like a fool having spent many hours working on an article only to have it deleted because someone didn't think it was relevant, and got several other people to agree with him?

The communication tools need to be vastly improved. It's almost impossible to find any real discussions going on in "the Wikipedia community"; lots of isolated pages, few animated discussions. I see many times where drawn-out discussions over article content take place on talk pages, but they take forever because it's such a lousy mechanism for communicating (many of these issues would be resolved in 5 minutes if the people involved had a more interactive way to talk).

Enough.

[edit] One other thing

It bugs the shit out of me that Wikipedia keeps asking for money instead of something far more valuable: people's time. They aren't the same thing.