Walter Block linked to this article earlier on LRC, in which the writer links to this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_hacking_incident
That has to be one of the most blatant pieces of disinformation I have yet seen on Wikipedia. Even the name of the article suggests as much. A couple more examples here and here.
So, what are we to think of Wikipedia? A work-in-progress, or just another glorification of mob rule?
It just needs competition. I like failure, because it’s the only way we get innovation and progress. If everything worked well, we would be in a very static experience.
Also, the Hacking thing is something Tokyo Tom uses in his language as well. It’s funny to see people, when confronted by the blatant dishonesty of their movement, pretend that it is someone else’s fault.
D. Friedman gave a talk at Google, and he mentions how even if global warming is real, the cost to deal with it might outweigh the negatives, and that of all the threats we face, it is one of the least significant ones to worry about.
And yet I find these folks are so passionate about it, as though war, bio-warfare, eugenics, nukes etc are no longer issues. I think it is a kind of mass hysteria.
I recall Jonathan Catalan, who is a prolific contributer to certain sections of Wiki, commented on a previous Wikipedia thread about a similar contention. He’d be in the best position to respond.
Who is that guy? [;)]
Forgive me, the third “a” needs a feather above it… Catalán [8-|]
Oh! Catalán! Yea I know that guy. Love his economic theory. Killed a guy with a trident though, can’t say I like that.
It would be like saying that the internet itself is mob rule since anyone can post whatever he likes. Precisely because free entry is a reality, both Wikipedia and the internet, Anarchy itself for that matter, ensure that gross errors are few and far between, considering the current degree of information of course. So I often trust Wikipedia much more than “authorable” sources. A single propaganda-article won’t change my mind, else I’d need to stop being an anarchist.
Wikipedia is just one example of private enterprise. The fact that it fails in many way doesn’t detract from the anarchistic and voluntary nature of Wikipedia. (Although it sometime resembles politics which we all hate with a passion)
Wikipedia’s policy failure are what created fork of wikipedia or alternative specialist encyclopedia like mine.
I think critisizing Wikipedia for disinformation is like critisizing a club for making bad drinks (I admit, not a perfect analogy): it comes with the territory. In Wikipedia anybody can edit any article at any time. It is literally impossible to revise every edit for factual accuracy, and this is especially true when there is a bias towards or against something. I have always held that Wikipedia is a poor source when it comes to finding information on controversial topics (I mean, just look at their economics articles—sure, they give the other side, but that is hardly “NPOV” (Neutral Point of View) if the rest of the article is written as if one theory is more correct than the other).
As aforementioned in the thread, I used to write for Wikipedia—fourteen featured articles gave me a lot of experience with factual accuracy. But, at first I thought that if an article was featured then that was that—it had reached perfect harmony. I was wrong, and this is one of the factors which turned me away (although, I still want to write an article on Richard Cantillon). There is a constant battle to fight against revisions and factual inaccuracy. A few days ago I received an email from a Marine who had apparently partaken in the Battle of Khafji, which I had originally written and taken through the featured article process. He told me that the official history was wrong, and that he intended on changing the article. I emailed him back with that I would not actively resist his changes, but I implored him to find repudiatable source material to back his claims, otherwise it would jeoperdize the article’s claim to accuracy. I’m not sure if he listened, but it goes to show that it’s a constant battle to keep facts in line.
The best thing Wikipedia is for is to use as a bibliography. I would read the piece, and then read the source material, and then look for more source material. Even if the information is accurate, Wikipedia is still not a good source. I wrote on Spanish tanks, covering almost every major Spanish tank ever produced (except for a few civil war tanks, which I didn’t have sufficient source material). My Wikipedia magnum opus, Tanks in the Spanish Army, is probably the single best English source for tanks in the Spanish Army in existence. Would I use it as a source for a paper? No. It’s simply not in depth enough, and I would never use one source and claim partiality or accuracy.
I think that Wikipedia is a work in progress. The current aim, which may or may not be achieved, is to pick everybody’s mind to build an encyclopedia which covers every imaginable topic. I am willing to guess that at some point in the future hard copies of articles will be archived in some way. This “some way” will be “hardback” versions of the encyclopedia, distributed in DVDs. Will these DVDs be completely accurate? Probably not. But, these hardback versions of Wikipedia always drive towards partiality and accuracy, and so are to some degree better than the Wiki version of the encyclopedia.
Now, on the tangent of whether or not Wikipedia should be allowed as a source in universities and other schools: yes! I see nothing wrong with using Wikipedia. What I see wrong is using Wikipedia as the only source. Any paper that uses one source, or does poor research, should be failed, whether the source is Wikipedia or whether the source is Human Action. Of course, I am making the assumption that this paper is a research paper.
Always wanted to ask somebody: why the hell do modern armies opt for manually reloadable tanks (Leo 2) when cheaper, more effective, lighter autoloaders (LeClerc) are out there?
Right, and for many non-controversial pieces, it is most certainly IS possible to put together an accurate and well written article. But my ‘mob rule’ comment applies more to the ‘consensus’ that is used for decision making. The majority (the ‘mob’) isnt always (or even usually) right.
Tanks such as the Leopard 2 and M1 Abrams are relatively older, as they are effectively from the mid-1970s. At the time, autoloaders were bulkier and there was a distrust in whether or not the autoloader could outpreform an experienced and trained human loader (the average American loader can reload between five to six seconds, I believe; it’s been a while since I’ve looked at the figure). By the late 1970s, autoloaders were becoming popular for future tanks. In other words, writers were predicting their use. In the early 1990s there was a planned Block III upgrade for the M1 Abrams, which was eventually canceled, but which included an autoloader. The problem is that the autoloader in an existing tank turret makes very little sense, since the turret is already designed around the human loader. The decrease in weight comes from a decrease in necessary armored volume, but an existing turret already has its armored volume designed around a human loader. There were new turrets proposed for Block III, but nothing ever came of it.
The Leclerc finally entered production in 1996, I believe, and so had two decades of advancements over the M1 Abrams and Leopard 2. This explains why it’s more or less modular, as well (although, the Leclerc suffers from problems of being a tank build in limited series, and so is very expensive and so are spare parts; for a while, the French were having issues replacing the expensive and powerful diesel engine, which is unique). Future tanks will have autoloaders, I think: this includes the future combat system.
When it comes to arbitration majority rule is hardly used. Arbitration ends when all parties agree to that version of the article (which is why it’s tragic when some random new editor joins the scene after arbitration, and the process starts all over again). If an agreement canno be reached then the arbitration committee is called in, and that person acts as a negotiator. They are miracle workers, trust me.
The difference between democracy on Wikipedia and democracy in the United States, in any case, is that on Wikipedia it is voluntary. You don’t like it, you can leave. This can be bad for Wikipedia, surely, but so far nobody has been able to compete with them on the same level (there are alternative Wikipedias of the same nature, too).