‘You Could Look It Up’: The World Before and Since Wikipedia
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I will often try to find concepts I don't know. Simple things like "Why do we say 'deceased'? Aren't they 'ceased'? If they are 'de-ceased', that leaves US as 'ceased'". I'm moderately curious, but mostly I enjoy finding the little perversities. Maintaining a sense of wonder, if you will.
Amongst my younger (I'm mid-to-late 30s, they are mid-to-late 20s) friends and co-workers, though, I typically get the response of "I don't know, what does google say?". Then they look it up, and stop wondering. (Sometimes the answer is pretty good, often it boils down to 'no one knows')
On the one hand, I'm glad to see people moving past the "I wonder..." stage towards GETTING answers. On the other, even when the answer is inadequate, they then stop wondering.
I'm curious if this anecdote is generally true, and if so, if it's a temporary fad in our relationship to information, or if this represents one step in a path of "permanent" change in our relationship to information.
I suppose I could google that...
This allows for the type of fatuous speculation that makes for decent conversation.
Occasionally I even give in to the need to know.
Well put. Brings to mind "Modern Jackass" magazine from one of my favorite This American Life episodes:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a...
(also, I misclicked the upvote button and downvoted you instead, sorry!)
Or, people who played Oregon Trail on Macs and Commodore 64s in grade school.
Really, just thinking of it as "members of Generation X with an early and lifelong interest in technology" would probably work better than trying to carve it out as a narrower subset of Gen X by age.
Meanwhile, the first really popular version of Oregon Trail came out in 1985[2].
Ultimately I just meant it as a jaunty shorthand for the intergenerational window in which I was born. If you were also born then and this does not jive with your experience, it's going to be okay, eventually.
[1] http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2015/04/oregon-trail-generat... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(video_game...
Trying to control what other people can do... great joke!
> fatuous speculation that makes for decent conversation
Misinformed conversation... sounds awesome.
There's a deeply sarcastic culture of fake rules at my company, in which groove this fake rule fits precisely. Lunch time is generally understood as a time of bullshitting, conviviality and foosball. Every time we have to wait 30 seconds to find out, e.g., how many apple seeds you can eat without killing yourself, we are all richer for it.
> e.g., how many apple seeds you can eat without killing
> yourself, we are all richer for it.
Either way, we should be safe, and it just goes to show how much more fun wondering is than an extremely inconclusive answer.
I've seen people move from speculating to assuming too often, but I don't see speculation as inherently wrong.
The thing is, the topic under question is usually pretty pointless (see "deceased" example above, or my musing about how the first time bread "raised" must have been freaky, or any such thing).
While learning a piece of trivia is _nice_, it's rarely as interesting as the act of speculation. Because I'm not really (all that) interested in the question at hand, I'm teaching myself (and regularly exercising the ability) to NOT KNOW, to DESIRE KNOWLEDGE, and to ACCEPT THAT SOME THINGS ARE BEYOND MY GRASP. It's good to find that somethings ARE in my grasp (answer someone gave about about "deceased" was the first time I've had that question answered!), but I get that lesson a lot in life.
When I wrestle with the "big" questions (What should I do with my life? Am I happy right now? Why did this terrible thing happen to me? Does existence care about me? Why do I care if it does?) some comfort with the unknowable is good. When I'm dealing lesser "big" questions (Am I actually good at this, or am I just faking it and haven't be caught yet? Am I an insensitive ass to people around me? Can I really buckle down and get this project completed? Why the heck do people vote for <INSERT POLITICIAN HERE>?) I likewise want to have experience with both being able get answer as well as NOT being able to get answers.
Learning is awesome. I love it. But I also need to be good at dealing with wanting to know, or dealing with being unable to know. Around me I see too many people of many ages that aren't interested in things they can't easily learn.
I'd much rather have real conversation about politics, whether "The 100" is good TV, social issues, or just about anything really, than an argument about facts that could just be googled.
This is well documented.
I'd rather talk about literally nothing than have another political conversation where I am either preaching to the converted or shouting at a stone wall.
Yeah, I'm seeing that mentioning "talking politics" on a mostly American forum immediately labels you as a "debbie downer".
You should read this - http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html
excerpt:
"But our engineering strength is also our social weakness. Countless times as engineers you will find yourself interrupting someone telling a story, an anecdote or a joke to correct a false assumption, provide an extra fact that the narrator overlooked, give a bigger perspective on the problem or point out that the joke premise is actually flawed.
You can identify this behavior because the person interrupting usually starts with the phrase "Well, actually...".
As a kid, I thought this was my strength. I knew a little bit more than my sister. So whenever she would say something, I would quickly interject something like "Well, actually, the origin of the word Shih Tzu means Lion Dog and has nothing to do with the dog's digestive patterns".
Yes, I was really fun to hang out with.
Whoever pulls a "well, actually" almost always shifts the conversation to himself. And now we are no longer following along with your friend's joke, we get to learn how much more you know about the limitations of the Sun Protection Factor scale in sunblock products.
Even the most rudimentary of the well-actuallistas is able to spoil even the best Ricky Gervais material.
But instead of rolling with the punches and participating in a brainstorm of ideas and exploding humor, they contribute interruptions, facts and details that merely produce stop energy on an ongoing discussion. They turn the center of attention towards them."
-----
Similar with "talking politics."
When people want to "talk politics" they usually really mean "Let me show you how right I am and how wrong you are if you disagree. Let me show you how smart I am."
Nothing to do with being a "debbie downer."
Now, where is that traffic?
But, what does ANY of this have to do with me? I learned to avoid (well, mostly avoid :-) the "well actually" trap almost two decades ago and have spent the intervening twenty years mentoring younger engineers out of that habit.
What I was actually responding to was the idea it was better to "speculate" about who played Snape, or why is the sky blue, or is vim BSD or GPL licensed rather than look it up.
I'd rather have conversations about Alan Rickman portrayal of Snape or what impact the sky being blue has on our emotional reactions to blue or why vim is clearly better than emacs.
Also, Canadians, in general, don't tend to discuss politics in that manner, at least not in mixed company. We have more political parties and our views are more fluid. I have, for example, voted for 4 different political parties in my life time at the federal level alone.
No arguments.
I'd rather do almost anything else than "talk politics." Especially with people who like "talking politics." Playing in traffic seems much more appealing.
I think there's a big benefit in finding out that you're often wrong. It's easy to look something up and go "yeah I knew that" when really it was just one of the things you thought might be true. Regularly seeing that what you were really, really sure about is actually completely wrong after having to try and justify what you're saying is wrong (e.g. that X was in film Y, etc). Similarly, realising you don't understand something too well when trying to explain it to someone else.
Also, mistakes and weird misconceptions form bits of jokes that grow and change over time.
There seems to be a lot of reaction to "talking politics". Maybe my perspective is coloured by being Canadian and living where the politics aren't so polarized and gamed?
Also, the tangents that are spawned based both on some.of the specific answers people propose and elements of the arguments for those answers.
Now we can simply look it up and be done with it.
First, someone would tell you "to look it up". So, travel to library, hit card catalog, find a few titles.
Go to shelves. Somehow, 50% of the books from the card catalog wouldn't be on the shelves, but there also tended to be other books here that you hadn't found in the card catalog.
Read books. While some topics were interesting, often you dealt with authors that did a terrible job of compensating for their biases, or did poor science. I have the same reaction to most news stories (which is why I hang out here :) ) It'd be like watching a 30 min youtube video while trying to find a single fact.
End result: Still don't know your answer, learned some trivia, and have more disdain for the state of knowledge.
I've found the accessibility of knowledge to be much improved these days, and have a better opinion of our collective knowledge as a result. I also still read a lot and gain a lot of trivia, but I'm generally reading material I'm more interested in. So I don't feel the internet-age has really hurt those areas.
The grass is always greener, etc.
It is, however, a bit of a generational experience. If you grew up using card catalogs and learning to spell from a dictionary (?!), your relationship with knowing/not knowing will be different than someone who grew up with the Web always around and accessible. I think it was Agatha Christie who said of her childhood "I couldn't imagine being so rich as to have a car nor so poor as to not have servants".
Irony: I just googled that to confirm, and was mostly right but not quite accurate, assuming the links are themselves accurate:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/01/agatha-christie-i-nev...
What you describe seems like a lack of curiosity, and I don't think easy access to information is a cause of incuriosity, though it could be a contributing factor.
Curiosity, and by extension a general sense of play about the world, are sucked out of most people by adulthood.
It's just that they deal with their curiosity differently: They seek an answer, and are content with whatever level is currently available, and move on to other matters, while I revel in the uncertainty.
Can't say one is better, though I'm obviously more comfortable with my version. Will say they feel very different, and I end up feeling alone in the crowd.
Related: One coworker at my previous job noted that we enjoyed our high school interns more than than college interns because the high schoolers hadn't had their sense of wonder and curiosity beaten out of them. I'm still evaluating if I think that's true.
Its a but more invested though.
To take a simple example, where was such-and-such an author born? If you had grown up in the same village as the author or read one of his/her books then you could answer the question. But, if you had no such head start, a trip to the library or asking a well educated friend would be the only way.
Nowadays, with Wikipedia, the answer is provided by 'OK Google' in the first paragraph of the first result. This effectively makes it impossible to run competitions on TV/Radio/print that require high levels of 'general knowledge'. In fact, even the phrase 'general knowledge' is not used as often as it used to be!!!
Although it is great to be able to look up everything and anything instantly, I liked it in the days when there was some rewards and respect for knowing stuff that nowadays is deemed to be 'trivia'.
I have a similar mindset to you, and am of the same age as you, therefore I can clearly remember a time when I was interested in things like this and I needed to look it up in an actual book, or even in the early days of the web, use quite complex skills to find the answer.
To a rough approximation, no-one else in my cohort or older gave a damn about stuff like this. So are you remembering a different time when everyone was like this, maybe in a different country or area from me. Do your colleagues and friends of the same age or older all exhibit this thirst for (let's face it) mostly pointless knowledge? Or is this just a "young people today" cliche?
* Space-Time by Albert Einstein
* Radium by Marie Curie
* Mass Production by Henry Ford
* Wireless Telephony by Guglielmo Marconi
* Wilbur Wright by Orville Wright
* Leon Trotsky by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
* Guerrila Warfare by T.E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia')
* Yosemite Park by John Muir
* Life, Terrestrial and Otherwise by Carl Sagan
* The Philosophical Consequences of Relativity by Bertrand Russell
There are many, many more. Do I want to learn from those people or from the 'wisdom' of the crowds?
I think it's out of print, but I highly recommend it. (ISBN 0-670-83368-4)
>As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from.
And who is the arbiter of factual correctness? Or conceptual correctness.
I've noticed that lots of Wikipedia articles are completely inaccessible to people without lots of domain knowledge. I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate.
Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary. People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because they seriously expected to learn anything from it.
My family couldn't afford Britannica, so I had to walk to a local library to read it. I remember it being fascinating from an "I didn't know that was even a thing" angle, but close to useless for learning about specific topics - mostly because the learning needed an entire book, not a short article.
Wikipedia is great for factual gazeteer-type information about people and places, but it has the same problem with math and science - i.e. you literally can't teach the content in that format.
I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad.
Online courses do this already, and some of them are very good at it. But it would be useful to have everything collected on a single site instead of scattered all over the web.
There is a wikibooks, though I think it falls short of your ideal. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
I'm not sure what basis you could have to say that. Have you seen a survey?
Britannica was and I assume still is respected by academia as a serious, accurate reference tool.
I've wanted something similar, but going the other way. That is, you start at post-grad level and can expand things to lower level as needed.
For instance, an article in this format on the prime number theorem would start out stating the theorem and presenting a proof at a level that you'd see if this was a proof from a mathematics journal. At any step in the proof you could expand the article in two ways.
1. Horizontal expansion. This fills in omitted steps, but stays at the same level.
2. Vertical expansion. This explains the step in terms of less advanced material.
Expanded material could further be expanded, both horizontally and vertically. So for instance suppose that in the top level proof of the prime number theorem an integral appeared and was evaluated. Expanding horizontally would fill in the details of how you evaluate that integral.
But suppose you have not studied calculus. You could expand that integral vertically, and keep expanding, until you get down to an explanation of calculus. That would give you essentially a course in calculus--but just the calculus needed to support the prime number theorem proof.
This could be the basis of an alternative way to teach math and physics (and other sciences). Pick a set of interesting, advanced results, chosen so that when you expand all of them the bottom level will have covered the complete undergraduate math and physics curriculum. I think this could be a good approach because it provides more motivation. Everything you learn at the bottom level is motivated because it is needed for that specific advanced result you are trying to learn. Contrast that to the current approach where you have long stretches of material that might not seem interesting but that you are learning because you are told you'll need in 3 or 4 years when you are finally getting to look at interesting stuff.
John Muir lived in the 19th century. Yosemite Park has a bit more done to it and learned about it since then. Marconi straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, but claiming that his writings would inform you about wireless telephony as we currently know it is beyond foolish. They were experts in their time, but much has changed since then.
> I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate.
Irony that you wouldn't use simpler English terms in this criticism :)
Haha, you got me there.
I think you'd enjoy Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language". https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Fundamentally compiling an encyclopedia is an act of summarising - declaring certain information to be more important, interesting or relevant - and it is impossible to eradicate subjectivity from that.
One of the strangest criticisms I see about WP is that it's subjective about things like politics or biographies. These are subjective topics, and as such it's impossible to be wholly objective about them, even from the most well-intentioned, educated, neutral point of view. It's a strange criticism, because usually the critic will have no problems in ignoring the subjectivity of their suggested alternative, or sometimes conveniently neglect to provide an alternative at all.
Bob hit John in the face.
Based on that information alone it seems like an unprovoked attack in which Bob is an aggressive attacker. Yet the statement is still factual.
Bob hit John in the face because he was choking Mary to death.
In this statement we see Bob as the defender and not the aggressor. With more information we could see why the situation unfolded in the first place, but many times it won't be available and things get left to interpretation.
To agree with what you are saying above, large parts of human life are subjective, not because reality is subjective, but because information loss leaves us to interpret events via our biases.
Their robots.txt file doesn't scream crawlers go away.
Their first article is about 100th Anniversary of the Battle of Verdun so I search "Battle of Verdun" and their page, in the UK, is #15.
Looking at site overall I think this is a fair result?
Maybe demonstrates that results on page 2 are generally overlooked/rarely seen?
Unless it's about something I already know, I can't always tell when a Wikipedia article is totally off base, either through omission or commission, about facts or context. I trust Britannica and experts more.
IMHO, often the difference between experts and amateurs is that the amateurs have huge blind spots, gaps in their knowledge that they are unaware of, and a lack of context. A doctor and a patient can read the same online research but there's a big difference in how they might interpret it.
I'm not saying that "balance" always achieves improved results -- see the Baathist Guard of Kochinistas standing jealous watch over any article concerning the Koch brothers, Koch Industries, or the various political influencing organisations. But what Wikipedia has that Brittanica did not is a "show history" page revealing who's made what changes to a page. That is often far more revealing than the page itself.
Now: if Wikipedia would grow a pair of balls/ovaries and actually do something about rampantly partisan editors, that'd be peachy.
That's a good point about those examples; they are flawed in that respect. My point was that I'd rather read an article written by an expert and held to high editorial standards than one written by a crowd of people with various levels of knowledge.
I'd also expect to learn much more uniquely valuable insight about an issue from the authors listed above, but that's a different issue.
A philosphical question I heard on Car Talk: Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what their talking about?
Recruiting and vetting experts, and not falling into the trap of mindlessly accepting received wisdom, is tricky. So is false equivalence / false balance, and wisdom-of-crowds stuff.
Though ... some of the wisdom-of-crowds bits suggest that if you can harness the sensibilities of the many, you may end up with better results than of a single individual. I'm not entirely sold. Area of active investigation.
"snide comment that my thing is better than your thing, then comment that my thing is not achievable"
By the way, you're going to learn a shitload more about wireless telephony from modern sources than you are from Marconi. Likewise a few others in that list. And being a famous name doesn't mean that your writings are digestible to those not already in your industry.
My mother sold encyclopaedia door-to-door briefly when I was a kid, and I read our set voraciously, every volume cover-to-cover. I really don't understand this dick-swinging competition where one encyclopaedia is considered to be some sort of godhead, and the next is considered to be a cesspit.
I mean hell, Wikipedia has already won the 'source of truth' argument against Britannica, with independent studies showing that the former had a lower error rate than the latter. That doesn't mean that Britannica is useless, but it does point out that a lot of misconceptions about Wikipedia are unfounded.
Having a collection of great articles on a dozen random topics is not really helpful, since the probability that I'll want to learn about those specific topics is low.
This is the Internet age. I'm not interested in having a poor man's library taking space on my shelf, when I can access the world's.
You are correct! And I even double-checked. I wish I could still edit my original comment.
> Available in Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/treasuryofencyc00fadi_vmk
Wow, that's great! How does it work? Can I just get a logon and read any book there online? Download a PDF or ebook?
I think for much serious research you could start with Wikipedia and then read the linked sources. Wikipedia itself is only an informal summary.
(I just read their summary of TE Lawrance's article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_and_tactics_of_guerri... . Shame the original is paywalled)
Wow, I'm amazed to see it cited. I assumed it was a long-forgotten treasure (and it is a treasure; it revolutionized my understanding of irregular and asymmetric warfare, plus he writes exceptionally well).
To be clear, I don't know that the original is available anywhere online, paywalled or not. I think britannica.com (which has enough free articles that I rarely worry about the paywall) only has current articles, but I could be wrong.
EDIT: It is online, apparently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11147725
"Guerrilla warfare Written by: T.E. Lawrence"
on Britannica's site, followed by
"To continue reading activate your free trail"
https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2005/12/16
And in Jaron Lanier's article:
http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-t...
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/WikiCon-Konfliktfeld-...
I'm not sure whether there's English articles on the (apparently rather German-centric) problem. (For one, it's easy to find the German ones, because of course Germans have a distinct word for it: Löschnazi-Debatte.)
(Edit: Sorry, accidentally misclicked and downvoted you.)
Really? No. It's a well known wide spread systematic problem. The root cause should be fixed by the international Wikimedia Foundation.
Read about the issues on English Wikipedia:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi...
The notability guidelines are very off in the German Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi...
English Wikipedia is really good. Though sometimes even there I wished some articles were on Wikipedia rather than some obscure Wikia-subwiki with tons of advertisement. It's not like HDD space costs much money these days. And all these article have sources anyway. Wikipedia had this nice "triva" sections that I love on IMDB.com up to 2006 (or so), sad some decided to delete them as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Triv...
This guideline does not suggest removing trivia sections,
or moving them to the talk page. If information is
otherwise suitable, it is better that it be poorly
presented than not presented at all.I have a different gripe with Wikipedia that has nothing to do with whether articles within it are factual or not: poor writing style.
Wikipedia editor guidelines encourage cooperation and consensus, but this regularly results in edit wars, where editors aggressively delete each other's edits. To resolve this, editors will usually resort to an unspoken system in which one editor will write one fragment of a sentence and cite sources for that fragment, the other editor writes the next fragment and cites it and so on. The result is a horrible mess that, although most likely entirely factual, is perfectly unreadable.
Worse yet, it is very difficult to simply copy such a paragraph from Wikipedia and paste it to your friend's chat box - the inline citation marks remain as full blown numbers and have to be removed by hand.
That page focuses on articles with simpler grammar, easily understandable for children or people who learn English as second language.
"Worse is better."