Dumbshit Dept.

Thoughts on Digital Universe

Larry Sanger and nut-job Joe Firmage have decided that the chaotic Wikipedia is no good and that an encyclopedia created by subject-area experts from various academic institutions around the world would give better results. Their thesis is that the contents in Wikipedia have not been verified by experts and thus the whole work is suspect. ZD Net writes about Digital Universe:

A frequently raised criticism of the constantly growing repository of information has been that the millions of articles created by a worldwide community of contributors are not verified by experts.

Of course, that has always been Wikipedia's modus operandi--that its articles are written and vetted by its community, not by an elite corps of Ph.D.s. Yet there are some who feel that while the site has a satisfying populist appeal, and may be on par with the Encyclopedia Britannica when it comes to accuracy, it still suffers from a lack of true accountability.

This may very well be true for you if you come from an academic institution where rigorous (and slow) methods are used to verify and back up every piece of research. But even then, there are lots of cases where research turns out to be bunk -- so the traditional academic system isn't flawless either.

I think that instead of fitting wikipedia to the existing model of accountability, wikipedia will bring about a new model of accountability. We cannot fully see this model yet -- I think it will take a few more years for this model to emerge and become clear how it works. Given the bottom-up nature of Wikipedia, this new model of accountability cannot be designed into the system. It will emerge from the vast chaos and smack us right in the face and our response will be: "Duh, why didn't we see that from the start, it's so obvious!"

The failure of Nupedia shows that a top-down approach with rigorous expert reviews of articles doesn't work. Not enough articles ever make it out of the gate and there are not that many "experts" that want to work for free. I don't think that the Digital Universe approach is sufficiently different from Nupedia that it really has a chance to survive. And with Joe Firmage lending a hand in this effort it's already not off to a good start -- most of his writings haven't been vetted by experts and have been subject to a fair amount of ridicule.

As I see it, its a top-down vs bottom-up approach and the net is all about bottom-up. Bolting top-down approaches onto the net, never works right -- chaotic systems that are at the edges of the network are what makes the net and Wikipedia tick.

I'll say it again -- Wikipedia is not perfect. But wikipedia is evolving and the community is learning how to deal with the difficulties it faces. In the end, Wikipedia could be one of the greatest and most successful social experiments ever -- it will just take some time.

Dear wikipedian's: Don't listen to the idiots and keep on writing!

Technorati Tags: bottom up, wikipedia

Posted by Mayhem at December 23, 2005 08:43 PM