h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi folks,

I'd like to address a few criticisms and questions that have been raised here. I'm an active Wikipedia user and developer (user name "Eloquence", real name Erik Möller).

First, credibility. It is often a good idea to check the "Older versions" link of a page to find out how many people have been working on it. Usually, a page that has been much refined tends to be more balanced and better fact-checked than one where there has just been one edit. There are exceptions, such as hotly contended topics like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where articles oscillate back and forth until someone joins the debate and helps to find a compromise. You can also find out who exactly has made which addition to an article and then, for example, visit their user page to find out more about them.

Wikipedia articles need to be read critically because there is no single authority that approves them. This has advantages as well: You will find more information in Wikipedia about secret and questionable government programs, for example, than in any other encyclopedia. Wikipedians check the "Recent changes" page regularly and weed out obvious bias fairly quickly, but less obvious distortions may remain until someone with a sufficient understanding reads and edits the article.

One question is, can we get from this fairly anarchistic system to one which can become reasonably credible without sacrificing its advantages? One approach that has been discussed is a model of "team certification" where Wikipedians can form teams that follow different rules and certify articles according to these rules. There could then, for example, be a "Team History" of professional historians, only allowing people with a sufficient background, which would certify articles in the field of history to be factually accurate. A user would then select teams to trust, and be able to filter articles according to certifications.

There is also the "Sifter" project by Wikipedia's former editor Larry Sanger, which is similar, only that there will be a single body of experts, approved by relatively few people; experts without academic credentials will probably not get in. These experts will "sift" high-quality articles from Wikipedia into a separate project where they are stored statically (uneditable).

So, regarding bias, two things can be noted: First, it is possible to detect bias for a critical reader, and to track it to its origins in a much more sophisticated way than on any other website thanks to the revision history. Second, strategies are being discussed for certifying specific revisions of articles as error- and bias-free. To be fair, most articles are relatively credible and unbiased, and references are often cited for controversial claims.

To reduce the problem of "edit wars" (people trying to get partisan viewpoints into or out of articles by force) and related problems, better decision making processes have been discussed. I favor an open, democratic voting process, but the current process is based on consensus, which, in my opinion, means that decisions are often impossible to make.

Why work on Wikipedia? Is it truly dull and boring? Perhaps - but then, hey, you're hanging out on a mostly text-based community right now, so you're already part of a small and unusual group. If you enjoy researching, learning, exploring, discussing (there are a lot of discussions, but they are very goal-oriented), or just copyediting, if you like to get a daily fix of fresh information, if you love hanging out with fairly smart people, Wikipedia is a great hobby. And I have to end with a critical note on H2G2 here: All the articles for H2G2 are copyrighted unless a researcher explicitly puts them in the public domain. That means that the majority of work here will be only usable in the context of H2G2. If H2G2 goes down, so does the collection of work. If H2G2 chooses to bombard its visitors with mega pop up ads, tough. Want to prepare a CD-ROM with H2G2 materials for a course in a school in South Africa? Gotta ask for permission from hundreds of authors first. And so on ..

With Wikipedia, the content is free and will remain so forever. Want to use it for your homework? Put it on your site? Send it to your mother? Post it to Usenet? Print it and distribute it? You can do all this and more without asking anyone. If the folks at Wikipedia decide to close shop, it will only take a couple of days for someone to take the open source software and database dumps and set up a Wonkopedia. You can't close this project down. We're now nearly at 100,000 articles; we cover subjects that no other encyclopedia covers in tremendous detail (while we, admittedly, ignore some subjects that we should cover, especially in the area of history). And this after only two years! The software just keeps getting better (thanks to open source development) and so do the articles. It's tantalizing to imagine where we will be two more years from now.

I hope you'll take a look at http://www.wikipedia.org , browse around, see if you can improve some articles. And if you're disappointed (which I doubt), just come back a little later.

All best,

Erik

PS: Regarding Google indexing - this is a recent problem. We have a whole page that documents our Google pagerank for various articles:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ATop_10_Google_hits

But, as noted on the discussion ("talk") page:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk%3ATop_10_Google_hits

"At the moment, Google doesn't seem to be returning any wikipedia articles as hits (though it still comes up with the front page if you search for 'wikipedia'). Should we be worried about this? --Camembert 16:22 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)"

The server may have been down during the last Googlebot run, or something else may be causing the problem. We're investigating it.

Thanks for that, Erik! Since the entry has been picked and is on its way to the subeditor, no further changes will be made to it. That's the way it's done here, and how we feel we get the best articles on everything. But what you have said confirms everything I said in the Wikipedia entry, so there should be no need for any more changes.

I'm sure that you'll get a few more visitors to Wikipedia as a result of my entry and your posting, particularly when the entry reaches the Front Page. Most of the visits will be just out of curiosity, but I'm sure some will stay!

Keep up the good work.

Just came here following a link from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:H2G2


In case any Wikipedians follow that link,
The Edited Entry on Wikipedia is now here: A918434

You could just edit the page and change the link, you know...

I think I did, three weeks ago.

Hardly polite, though it is possible, to change the text of the comment of another Wikipedian on a Talk page. (Yes, I am now a registered Wikipedian, but I'm hardly an active one.) Anyway, this was the bit to which I was referring (presented in Wiki markup): For those who are interested, I have posted a reply to the H2G2 article/discussion about Wikipedia [http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/F107573?thread=231790&latest=1 here] --[[User:Eloquence|Eloquence]] 16:48 Jan 6, 2003 (UTC) That's an unstable link. A link to a h2g2 conversation which ends in latest=1 simply shows you the last page of the conversation (with 20 posts to a page). If many more posts get added to that conversation the link will point to somewhere else. (This is, admittedly, unlikely to happen. It's a Peer Review conversation for an article which has now been accepted into the Edited Guide, so there's little more to say about it. But the principle remains.) You're better off to mess about with the skip and show fields, so, try [http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/F107573?thread=231790&skip=60&show=3 this]. TRiG.[[User:87.232.43.104|87.232.43.104]] 16:11, 28 May 2006 (UTC) TRiG.