Improving Wikipedia Coverage of Computer Science 186
Pickens writes "MIT computer scientist Scott Aaronson has an interesting post on how to improve Wikipedia's coverage of theoretical computer science. Aaronson writes what while Wikpedia will never be an ideal venue for academics because 'we're used to (1) putting our names on our stuff, (2) editorializing pretty freely, (3) using "original research" as a compliment and not an accusation, and (4) not having our prose rewritten or deleted by people calling themselves Duduyat, Raul654, and Prokonsul Piotrus,' he identifies twenty basic research areas and terms in theoretical computer science that are not defined on Wikipedia, and invites readers to write some articles about them. Article suggestions include property testing, algorithmic game theory, derandomization, sketching algorithms, propositional proof complexity, arithmetic circuit complexity, discrete harmonic analysis, streaming algorithms, and hardness of approximation. One commenter suggests that professors should encourage students to improve the Wikipedia articles about topics they are studying. 'This will help them understand the topic and at the same time improve Wikipedia.'"
Original Research (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially all that you have to do (or should have to do) to avoid the "original research" claims is to cite sources. It's not intended to be treated like some sort of scientific journal, it's intended to be an encyclopedia; everything put in the Wikipedia should have been published elsewhere first. Seems reasonable.
Beware of posting your own research... (Score:5, Insightful)
A problem to watch out for is that if you add your own research to Wikipedia (even with all the proper citations), you'll get slapped by some self-important wikipedian because it is apparently wrong and evil to have the person directly responsible for the research itself to be included in the creation of encyclopedia content about said research.
Removal... (Score:4, Insightful)
A while back, about a year ago, I spent my time correcting wikipedia - the corrections I made were accurate, meaningful, and relevant to the topic. However, my additions and changes were mostly removed within two hours of my posting. Perhaps those who run wikipedia do not like my educated improvements. One incident that sticks was when a friend and I added a section dedicated to the problems with genetic algorithms; by the next day it was removed. I had sources, a good and well written arguement, and it was fairly long and not biased (at least my professor thought so).
As for adding new topics, one may try, but seeing as additions are not appreciated, than what would become of new articles (even stubs)?
Re:Removal... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Beware of posting your own research... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not "wrong and evil" per se, but you should be extremely careful about this sort of thing. Ethics are important; someone with an obvious conflict of interest should be open about it and circumspect about his edits.
CS coverage relatively better (Score:5, Insightful)
Most academic issues are handled worse than computer science.
Most of the CS coverage addressed on wikipedia is the kind of stuff that working computer programmers would be interested. There are a few theory articles, but you can't expect much from them. Writing in CS theory or other areas in mathematics is difficult, and requires more than citations. It requires strong writing and editing skills, and strong understanding of the subject at hand. I wouldn't expect to get more than a rough overview of a field from its wikipedia entry.
Academics should think of "literature reviews." (Score:3, Insightful)
If they and their students write a Wikipedia article in exactly the same way as they write an academic "literature review," they will have no problems at all.
Literature reviews presents no original research; provide some interpretation and context but no personal opinion; and cite sources for every fact. Just like a good Wikipedia article.
Re:wrong list (Score:3, Insightful)
About your claim that articles get worse over time, I haven't seen many real cases of that. Some articles on important topics seem to stay in bad state indefinitely, but that's an other matter.
Re:Prokonsul Piotrus (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Removal... (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet I could do the same. Not to say perlhacker's arguments weren't well-thought-out and well-researched, just that there may very well have been a good reason for it -- to play devil's advocate.
Re:So show us. (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope people do this, to make you realize how skewed and insular your view is. It's certainly not baseless. You will be inundated if they do. It's not as bad as everyone says it is, it's actually worse. But bearing in mind the many corrupt admins, this just seems like wasting more time. It would be like Canute trying to hold back the tide. There's really no point in fighting for truth on Wikipedia.
It's happened to me many times with minor edits. However, I have simply long since avoided using Wikipedia altogether, it just not worth wasting the time, or getting the neo-nazi orange "you have a message" forced to your IP address, when an admin doesn't like your changes, no matter how factual they are. (and sending messages this way to dynamic addresses is a really retarded thing to do anyway -- at best all you do is make new enemies. Every. Single. Time.)
Wikipedia has the bad press and comments it deserves. Unfortunately, it has a Google page rank is really does not deserve.
Wikipedia is only as good as it's source... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:wrong list (Score:3, Insightful)
Academics aren't going to write about these articles because they prefer to spend time doing original research, so he's challenging those of us who do like to research other peoples work to summarise it for Wikipedia.
Re:So show us. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you're right, but thus far you've acted exactly as the parent post described: Complaining about how bad Wikipedia is without providing any links as evidence. So why not show us these "minor edits" that were reverted by corrupt admins so we can judge for ourselves?
Re:Prokonsul Piotrus (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you joking? Guidelines for inclusion are incredibly lax.
If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article.
Are you reading that? Any subject that's been mentioned in a magazine/book/journal/newspaper/website with some amount of editorial control is acceptable.
That's every video game, every book, every television show and every episode of each, every politician, every rock band, rapper, and hit song that's ever been on the radio, every school, and every city, in the entire world, forever and ever,
and that's without even starting an argument! The number of fictional characters and abstract concepts on Wikipedia is absolutely staggering.
You really want it to be laxer than that? Here's where you can find that stuff: THE REST OF THE INTERNET.
Deletionists are following the Golden Rule that summarizes the purpose of Wikipedia and all of the debates that have ever occurred on it, the one part that no one seems to get, no matter what:
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that summarizes research from reliable secondary sources.
That's what it is and that's all it's ever going to be. If someone's doing something you don't like, either a) you're wrong or b) they're a troll and you shouldn't give up so easily. How is that any different from the rest of the Internet? How is that any different from real life? How could Wikipedia possibly pursue its goal better than it does without restricting people more?
What Could Possibly Go Right? (Score:4, Insightful)
One commenter suggests that professors should encourage students to improve the Wikipedia articles about topics they are studying. 'This will help them understand the topic and at the same time improve Wikipedia.'"
How is bringing thousands of people into the mix who don't know what they're talking about (many of whom think they know everything) supposed to improve anything?
Encouraging your students to go "improve" Wikipedia articles isn't encouraging them to speak up, seek knowledge, or debate.
Re:So show us. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's just another example of the problem, really. Articles have to battle vandalism so much of the time that self-appointed editors just revert first and ask questions later, with the unfortunate consequence of ensuring that the article will never be better than mediocre.
Re:tagged !encyclopedia (Score:2, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with "a lack of space". All information on Wikipedia must be backed up by reliable, independent, secondary sources. This is fundamental.
An article is deleted if and only if there are no reliable, independent, secondary sources that discuss it.
So if you want an article on a Simpsons episode [wikipedia.org], find the sources that discuss it -- IGN, EW, TV Guide, all reliable sources not directly owned by Fox Television -- and it's good. Even though not every sentence in the article is properly cited, the topic as a whole is suitable for inclusion because it has the potential to be expanded.
If an article [dbatley.com] has never been addressed in any reliable secondary sources, it gets deleted, because not one sentence can ever be properly verifiable. There is no potential to ever meet Wikipedia guidelines. So for the sake of Wikipedia's quality, not quantity, it is removed.
It's not about space, it's not about geekiness. It's about sources and nothing else.
Re:Original Research (Score:3, Insightful)
You'll get modded down for that anti-wiki heresy! I'd say it's a good summary of Wikipedia, though a reference book should be hearsay - it's not their job to prove things, merely to collate other peoples reports.
Re:Donald Knuth agrees (Score:5, Insightful)
just think of Wikipedia as a reflection of the social intelligence and cultural health (or is it social health and cultural intelligence?) of a society.
if a society is healthy, and its population consists of relatively intelligent, mature, unselfish individuals, then a Wikipedia-type knowledge repository would be a great success and a very useful cultural tool. on the other hand, if a society is plagued by social issues resulting in a large population of emotionally-dysfunctional sociopaths, then the signal-to-noise ratio might be very low due to there being more trolls than legitimate users.
a Wikipedia-type site probably wouldn't work very well in a society dominated by greed and the selfish pursuit of personal financial interests either, as you'd probably have more spam ads than legitimate edits. likewise, a society dominated by a culture of anti-intellectualism might result in a collaborative knowledgebase full of misinformation.
all things considered, Wikipedia has been a relatively big success. sure, there's the odd troll, misinformation or spam edit, but one doesn't have to "remain forever on guard after making technically complex contributions." there are enough relatively intelligent and well-intentioned users to drown out the noise from idiots/assholes. most users try to keep an eye open for bad edits, whether intentional or unintentional, and make corrections when appropriate. and as long as everyone does that, the burden of "guarding" the integrity of the information on Wikipedia gets distributed between millions of users, meaning each user has to do very little to maintain the quality of the site.
Replacing Wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
Citizendium looked like a great idea until they decided to dump the Wikipedia content and start from scratch. So now, according to their front pages, Citizendium has 8,700 articles and English Wikipedia has 2.6 million. If you want to look something up, chances are it won't be in Citizendium. So you go to Wikipedia instead. And we all know everybody else goes to Wikipedia as well.
If you have a contribution to make, why bother with Citizendium? Chances are nobody'll read it. Academics like their names on things but they also like those things to be read. If you contribute to Wikipedia, the worst thing that can happen is that it gets reverted, and nobody reads that either.
When a new project forks Wikipedia while fixing its organizational problems, then it might attract the best academic contributors. It has to fulfil the following criteria:
Then, smart people can contribute in the hope that the whole project won't get dumped in favor of Wikipedia's established content. The new project can benefit from enhancements to Wikipedia. And contributors to the new project can hope that even if it does die, their changes will have as much chance of surviving in Wikipedia as if they'd made them directly. All of this won't be easy to get right, but they're similar problems to distributed development, and computer scientists are the best placed to solve them.
For now, Wikipedia may be inefficient in all kinds of ways, but it's also an extremely successful project. It has a lot of good content, a lot of contributors, a lot of readers, and a lot of momentum. A rival can't ignore all that.
Re:So show us. (Score:3, Insightful)
What's very poor, here, is your ability to read. The OP said "every episode, save that one". In other words, "every episode, except that one".
Egg on my face. But let me try again, because this still doesn't make sense to me:
Some guy nominates Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) [wikipedia.org] for deletion and fails in his attempt. So what does he do? Merges every episode, save that one, into List of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes [wikipedia.org]. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he engages in backroom deals to gain support.
So, he failed to do something, whereupon he did some other things that don't affect the first thing. What's your point? What "backroom deals" are we talking about? He gave the administrators money? Cocaine? Blowjobs? Political influence?
Oh, he got rid of the articles that weren't properly sourced. What a bastard.
Have you been reading the comments in this article? Most people, here, think that is the problem. Asinine notability requirements. You're given an example of what people don't like about wikipedia and your response is, essentially, "good"?
I have. What I keep seeing over and over are comments like:
...which all betray a complete misunderstanding of what the notability and verifiability requirements are and why articles get deleted. I've never read anyone on Slashdot say "I disagree with Wikipedia's verifiability policy. Fan sites should be considered reliable sources." All I see is miseducated crap like the above.
That said, I don't know how anyone could disagree. I could start a Pokemon fan site right now that says Torchic is based on a mythical Korean bird guardian creature whose baby chicks could spit fire from their stomachs, which Satoshi Tajiri had a wooden statue of in his room that was carved by his dying grandfather, and this complete bullshit would be eligible under your encyclopedia and not eligible under Wikipedia. How do you defend against that? Can I make a fan site saying I invented Torchic? Am I notable then? Isn't it completely subjective, then, to say that I'm not eligible for inclusion, but any fact I make up about Torchic is eligible for inclusion? How would disputes be settled, a majority vote? How do you defend the one expert against the 100 idiots?
I mean, there's a reason Wikipedia is the first search result for the majority of Google searches. Wikipedia is good. It's not great, but it's good. Why radically undermine it to make it more like the rest of the Internet? There are enough Pokemon fan sites. This is one site that doesn't want to parrot those sites, it wants to take the best of the Internet and the best of the old world of publishing. That's how it got to where it is today.
Using wikipedia policy to justify wikipedia is just circular reasoning.
Absolutely. But using Wikipedia policy to justify the decisions of editors who are following Wikipedia policy, which people on Slashdot constantly misrepresent as inconsistent or subjective or mob-rule or political or they're-picking-on-me or whatever-they-want-to-call-it-ism, is reasonable.
Re:HHGTTG vs Encyclopedia (Score:3, Insightful)
What we need is a real-life implementation of the Hitchhiker's Guide. It should be far less careful than Wikipedia (and likely should be a superset of Wikipedia with all of those fun lists like "Things Gregory House has written on his whiteboard on House M.D.")
Isn't that exactly what the web is? All kinds of information about anything with no limit on the content; making a single site to hold all that information seems kind of redundant. :-)
Re:Prokonsul Piotrus (Score:3, Insightful)
So? If you believe the philosophy for Wikipedia works for 100,000 articles, what makes you think it won't work for 10,000,000 articles?
Hell, what if you actually (for example) add tons and tons of Star Wars articles to Wikipedia, and those Star Wars fans you just attracted actually started following links and looking at and editing other Wikipedia sections, and you've actually gained "editors."
In any case, Wikipedia isn't effective at stopping vandalism now, so it could hardly make things worse. Idiotic vandalism like "OMG THIS ARTICLE SUX!!!" sure, but subtle vandalism Wikipedia just doesn't catch on the vast majority of articles.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Disagree (Score:2, Insightful)