asinann said:
Sayvara said:
Decisions to block Wikipedia is usually based on ignorance what Wikipedia actually is and how it is supposed to be used.
The main argument of its detractors is "Anyone can edit it, therefore it is not reliable" is nonsense at best. While it is true that anyone may edit it, this in itself says nothing about the quality of the articles. The obvious counter-question is: "what makes single-editor articles any more reliable?". Answer: nothing. A high number of editors does not lessen the quality.
Most of those single editor articles are written and reviewed by credible people within their industries
So what? Credible people make mistakes too. Credible people have agendas too. Credible people have opinions too. Credible people will do wrong too.
In academics, titles are nothing. Your professorate is worth nothing if you make claims that you cannot back up. The veracity of what you publish is not based on your title. The important part is the
peer review, the process where other people read your work, and make up their own minds whether you know what you are talking about or not.
The perhaps most famous example of all: Albert Einstein. In the year 1905, when he published his most important work, he was an office clerk at the patent office in Berne, Switzerland. Not a professor. Not a doctorate. He was essentially an academic nobody. Yet he revolutionized physics as we know it.
Another famous example of this was the scientist Jacques Benveniste. Benveniste was a respected researcher and scientist. He was also a very charming man and had very easy to gain sympathy.
Benveniste came to a rather startling conclusion: that water seemed to "remember" a substance it had once contained even though it was no longer present in the water. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMDV-4KGWi8] He wrote an article to Nature, one of the most respected scientific journals in the world where he announced his research. Sir John Maddox was the editor of Nature. He became faced with a problem: he knew that Benveniste was wrong; that what he was saying was a physical impossibility. But the researched seemed legitimate, and Benveniste truly believed what he wrote.
So Maddox did it the scientific skeptic way: he took a team of people with him and went to the lab and asked Benveniste's team to repeat the experiments. They did so, and they seemed to be getting the same results again. But Maddox's team noticed that Benveniste and his assistants were not adhering to the gold standard of scientific research: they were not double-blinding their tests. Maddox asked Benveniste to do it all again, this time with double-blinding. They did so.
The results were devastating. The claimed effect simply wasn't there. Benveniste had been completely wrong [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SMegB9-QUk].
One would think that this was a wake-up call for Benveniste and that as a good scientist he should have admitted that he had not worked as rigorous as could have been expected. But Benveniste persisted and claimed that the effect was there. He went even further and claimed that this effect which he had observed could be transmitted over the telehone, or even emailed accross the world. When he died in 2004, he had been utterly discredited and made ridiculed by winning two IgNobel-prizes, so far the only person to do so.
Hence: you cannot trust anyone to be right. Not even "experts". And one doesn't have to be an "expert" to be right.
This goes to show that your argument that paper encyclopedia are better that Wikipedia because they have single-editor articles is weak at best.
Further more: how do you know for sure that the articles in paper encyclopedias really
were written by experts in the field and that a particular article was not compiled by some office temp?
asinann said:
I could right now go edit the wiki on astrophysics to say that the sun has a yummy marshmallow center.
Do that. Go right ahead and do that. Edit into the english Wikipedia article about the Sun [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&action=edit] that the star Sol has a yummy marshmallow center. Then sit back and watch. Within a few minutes, this edit will be gone and your user will have gotten a notice saying that you shouldn't vandalize Wikipedia.
Granted non-english Wikipedias are slower at this. But vandalism still does not go unnoticed. The advantage of Wikipedia is that errors can be easilly seen and removed. The transparency is complete. How do you achieve that with a paper encyclopedia?
Perhaps you are claiming that paper encyclopedias do not contain errors. Nature's comparison of errors between Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review#Nature] shows with devastating clarity that EB is not much better than Wikipedia. EB went ballistic, of course, but the comparison still reverberates: paper encyclopedias are not perfect either, and the order of magnitude of errors is the same for Wikipedia as with other encyclopedias.
Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_that_have_been_corrected_in_Wikipedia].
asinann said:
Try using that reasoning on a college instructor, They'll tell you that wikipaedia can be used ONLY if you have another source to back it.
Which is exactly how it should be with
any encyclopedia! If you are using an encylopedia as a one-stop shop for information, then you are doing it wrong. If your college instructor allows you to use an encyclopedia as your only source, then he/she's
wrong! If you relying on encyclopedias to be accurate and definitive, then you are wrong wrong wrong wrong... wrong wrong wrong wrong... you're wrong... you're wrong... you're wrong [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrjwaqZfjIY]!
Wikipedia does not hold truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Wikipedia specifically says that it doesn't. Anyone that assumes that Wikipedia holds
Truth? does so in direct contradiction of how Wikipedia states how to use it.
The difference is that Wikipedia admits this and is open about its weaknesses. How many other encyclopedias do that?
/S