[Web4lib] Wikipedia vs Britannica

[Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt]

Hello!

I would like to add to Lars Aronsson's excellent remarks that it is
also good to keep away from "popular" controversial topics completely
if you want to participate in Wikipedia and nearly completely avoid
revert wars, cabals, zealots, clueless nuisances and the like.  I've
done this for more than two years now, and on the whole I've managed to
keep sane and get a certain satisfaction from spreading knowledge and
also doing some knowledge organisation and (primitive) metadata
structuring.

However even non-controversial articles can sometimes fall prey to
disheartening (for those who care about what they wrote or corrected or
reorganized)and constant vandalism.  To give but one example: It would
seem (or so the regulars surmise) that the very non-controversial
"Industrial revolution article" has been assigned as a class (or a
multi class) exercise in a school with good Web access, somewhere.  As
a result we have been recently getting swarms of infantile vandalism (
Jason is a -expletive deleted-)(our teacher Miss -name X- is a
-expletive deleted-) on the article, at more or less regular intervals.


In a way though, this is less disheartening than the constant influx of
newbies who are sure that everything they read on the Web is true, more
or less, (when it comes close to their personal view usually) and who
won't bother to go to the library to check what they or others are
writing up or tearing down.  Those clueless nuisances eventually go
away, but still more come up after them.  It wears people down in the
end.

The neatest trick is to write articles which are so encyclopaedic and
obscure (I've done several dozen in this vein) that they will never be
chosen as a "featured article" on the front page of Wikipedia or if
they are very few people will understand them.  When a good but
relatively general non-Science article is featured then clueless
nuisances swarm to it to add their little grain of salt, or
re-structure it.  If a team of editors who hold that subject dear is
not ready to work constantly to shoo them away this relatively good
featured article becomes gradually bloated, disorganized, ill-written. 
I've seen it happen many times over the last two years.

Alain Vaillancourt

--- Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> a écrit :

> 
> One person who is no longer on this list wrote:
> 
> > What the Wikipedia newbie may not understand is that Wikipedia 
> > [...] enforce their guidelines in some rather arbitrary and 
> > roughshod ways. Thus, if you know something about a 
> > topic--indeed, if you are publishing a book on that subject--you 
> > will find your edits "reverted" and labeled as vandalism.
> 
> I tried to read up on what his own Wikipedia controversy was 
> about, and I cannot say I understood everything.  And I don't 
> share the view that these conflicts are entirely Wikipedia's 
> problem.  I tend to see things from Wikipedia's angle and then 
> it's the vandals' problem that they get blocked, while Wikipedia's 
> problems would continue if they weren't blocked.
> 
> But I do share the analysis that many Wikipedia newbies may not 
> understand how Wikipedia works.  And this is a problem when 
> outside entities, such as Nature, encourage people to contribute.  
> 
> In August this year a Norwegian librarian suggested on the mailing 
> list Biblioteknorge to collect funny literary blunders (such as 
> Shakespeare's mentioning of the "coast of Bohemia") on a page of 
> the Norwegian Wikipedia, only to see the new page immediately 
> suggested for deletion because it wasn't encyclopedic in 
> character.  Perhaps it was a good lesson that this surprise 
> happened in front of so many eyes.
> 
> What if a teacher suggests to students that they should contribute 
> to Wikipedia, and the students make mistakes and are perceived as 
> vandals?  If teachers want to take the class to a library or a 
> museum, they can make an appointment first, but at Wikipedia there 
> is nobody with whom you can make this kind of appointment in 
> advance.  There is no schedule for what should happen tomorrow.  
> Everything is now.  It doesn't have to stay that way for ever, but 
> right now I don't know of any way to deal with newbies who come in 
> through referral.
> 
> I know librarians can give advice on how to use (or not to use) 
> Wikipedia, as a reader.  But what do you tell people who want to 
> contribute?  Does that ever happen?  How should it work?
> 
> If you enter Wikipedia as a writer, your toes will be stepped on.  
> If they are already sore, you need to be extremely careful.  A 
> good rule might be to *avoid* editing topics where you have strong 
> feelings, such as the entry about yourself (if there is one).  
> Write about stuff you know, but where you can afford to admit that 
> you were wrong.
> 
> 
> -- 
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
> 



	

	
		
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