Experts Rate Wikipedia Higher Than Non-Experts 204
Grooves writes "A new Wikipedia study suggests that when experts and non-experts look to assess Wikipedia for accuracy, the non-experts are harder on the free encyclopedia than the experts. The researcher had 55 graduate students and research assistants examine one Wikipedia article apiece for accuracy, some in fields they were familiar with and some not. Those in the expert group ranked their articles as generally credible, higher than those evaluated by the non-experts. One researcher said 'It may be the case that non-experts are more cynical about information outside of their field and the difference comes from a natural reaction to rate unfamiliar articles as being less credible.'" That's the problem people face when 'everyone who disagrees with you is a moron'.
A Possible Reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Historian A: "The Nazis were horrible awful people who killed and murdered millions of people during World War II. They created nothing but pain and suffering while seeking out total fascist control of the entire world."
Historian B: "Nazism is not a precise, theoretically grounded ideology. It consists of a loose collection of ideas and positions: extreme nationalism, racism, eugenics, totalitarianism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and limits to freedom of religion."
Now the reason I put those two up there is because your average person (I'm American so I may be biased on 'average') would probably favor historian A's perspective as opposed to historian B. Historian B is actually an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]. It's more encyclopedic as it's not opinion oriented. I'm not saying Wikipedia is free of opinions but what I'm proposing is that non-experts have an opinion and often when they read something that doesn't align with that opinion, they consider it to be incorrect.
The (on average high) neutrality of Wikipedia is most likely what causes non-experts to rate it as more erroneous than experts. Since the sample set was so low (as the report notes) then it is perhaps more likely that this happened.
I think that this is what the "Everyone who disagrees with you is a moron" article is getting at. I'm guessing experts are training not to suffer from that disease.
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I think another issue with this is that neither the ArsTechnica NOR the actual write up actually say what pages were viewed. I think that these are VERY important questions that should be asked about this "stu
Re:A Possible Reason (Score:5, Funny)
off-by-one error invokes thread exception (Score:3, Funny)
Being the first comment, an off-by-one exception occurs, resulting in an aborted termination of the thread.
Re:off-by-one error invokes thread exception (Score:4, Funny)
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Specifically it does not say that it is never appropriate to mention or compare to Nazism, and it says nothing about ending the thread. There are some corollaries that state that the thread is over when a comparison to Nazism is made, but even those have logical bounds: obviously valid comparisons exi
Re:A Possible Reason (Score:5, Funny)
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Peer reviewed (Score:5, Interesting)
However, wikipedia is different from such journals because it is a commons which is shared by people with differing viewpoints. It doesn't get the same bias that some journals may get where submitters and readers gravitate towards one of several different publications with slightly different biases (e.g. some journals favor publishing articles related to global warming as a concequence of human activities while others favor articles about it being a more natural phenomonon).
Debate is healthy, as long as it is reasoned. Wikipedia's nature enforces reason on debates about its contents. If a wikipedia entry gets edited by a person with a bias, a person with an opposing bias deals with it directly by editing the _same_ article, instead of proposing an alternate view somewhere else where it may not be seen by readers of the article. This beats the status quo , where oposing sides tend to just keep shouting their message without having any true debate.
Re:Peer reviewed (Score:4, Informative)
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No, science is a methodology based on the faith that the real world exists. It claims no insights into devine truth or spirituality.
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If you argue that evidence of Global Warming only proves a short term warming trend and that it is inconclusive whether it is influence by man or if it represents a long term climate change people will call you delusional even though you are correct
Re:A Possible Reason (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm pretty agnostic on the whole Global Warming debate, but it bothers me that the people who are so opposed to it argue on what they believe to be true, rather than what they think to be true. That is what you have done here. You've offered no substantial evidence to support your conclusions, rather you simply imply that all those opposed to your belief are morons.
So why are you so surprised when you are called delusional? You certainly don't offer anything to counter that impression.
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Like you, I consider myself agnostic on the global warming. But I'm a little confused at your response to the parent post. How does one offer "substantial evidence" when one feels that the evidence is inconclusive? What type of evidence would he offer?
The whole subject of global warming being caused by people would seem to me to fall under the heading of an "inferred best explanation," which suggests a strong probability, but falls short of being proof according to the Scientific Method [wikipedia.org].
The main p
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It's the "only proves" statement. The limited amount of data doesn't prove anything. Whether it is short term climate change or long term climate change is part of the question which we have inconclusive data for. The data we have shows past results, but w
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Indeed, circumspect assessments of such one-track religious issues to so many Slashdotters as Global Warming is baiting flamage.
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It's flamebait, because it's an intentional digression of the discussion off topic. GW has nothing to do with wikipedia, and there is no reason to pick that specific example in this widely divergent case except to excite controversy. The addition of a personal opinion in the statement as an absolute fact without explanation is just asking for a flame war.
There's nothing in GGP that clears it from being a deliberate attempt at disruption, and every indication tha
Rule of Thumb on Using Wikipedia (Score:2, Interesting)
1. You have a small inkling of the subject, and you are using the Wikipedia article to enhance your understanding.
2. You verify all statements in the Wikipedia article by reading all the primary source references. If the article has no references, discard it as a claptrap of lies.
#1 will enable you to spot the obvious (possibly deliberate) inaccuracies. #2 is to ensure the validity of the informati
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That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, you moron
Experts qualify (Score:3, Insightful)
The less competent see fewer nuances and therefore make more straight forward assertions, they qualify their position less, therefore it looks clearer to an uninformed observer.
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Hitler is by far not the only source of Nazi ideology. Other main contributors were Alfred Rosenberg, Gottfried Feder, Carl Schmitt, Karl Haushofer, Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and many others. In general, "National Socialism" was far more complicated and ingrained into (not only) German thinking of the times than seems to be taught in US schools today (which does not make the ideology and its deeds less horrific of course.)
Re:A Possible Reason (Score:4, Interesting)
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: HELL, Yes.
When you read Mein Kampf, you realise a) exactly how out to lunch, sick & twisted Hitler really was, and b) how out to lunch Chamberlain & the other European politicos were to even TRY to negociate with him.
Maybe Experts are just as biased (Score:3, Insightful)
Propoganda? (Score:2, Interesting)
Simple (Score:3, Insightful)
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I didn't realize the study was editable prior to it being released.
Re:Propoganda? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably because wikipedia is a charitable non profit registered 501(c)(3) educational foundation [wikipedia.org] which means that it is legally obligated by both the US government and State of Florida to serve a public purpose, in this case education. While those companies that you speak of are for profit multi billion dollar corporations trying to people their products and sevices and are often lobbying the government to pass laws to make it easier to sell their stuff.
Sure anything that adds to wikipedia's reputation for accuracy will make donors feel more comfortable about donating to wikipedia. But the simple fact is that every page view on wikipedia is an expense for the Foundation, they make no money directly from their content. The best way to judge a non profit is to look at the number of people getting paid by them. And so far, the Wikimedia Foundation still seams pretty lean compared to other foundations and they are keeping their other overhead expenses reasonably low as far as I can tell.
So, yes it is good to question all studies which promote one product over another, but this simply confirms something that we might have thought anyway. That if you know more about something than others, then you are in a better position to judge the accuracy of what was written about that something.
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In short, I'm asserting that an expert requires less accuracy in their documents than nonexperts because their own expertise can fill in the spaces.
Commonly used in IP field for prior art (Score:5, Interesting)
Good to Know (Score:4, Funny)
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Well... (Score:2)
Weirdly, it does (Score:2)
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Ignorance breeds fear? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why hate wikipedia? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is free, a lot of people have put a lot of effort into it, and it is incomparable to any other repository of knowledge known to man.
Why the fuck would anyone want to piss on it? Don't like it? Shut up and go to a library.
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It has to do with why the "people who disagree are morons" article is wrong: if everyone could suddenly identify who the geniuses were, the not-so-geniuses would immediately kill them all out of fear, or jealously, or whatever.
Wikipedia is just a repository for information and who is informed on various subjects (whether the information is right or wrong, agr
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Or get yourself an Encyclopedia Britannica [amazon.com]. Only $1,100.00 new from a reseller.
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While this takes time, it is of course way better than wikipedia, provided that you have the intelligence to do a good job of the above. If you don't h
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Wikipedia is alright for cursory information, but it's not and never will be a legitimate, citable source unless it's methodology changes and it and it's supporters need to stop trying to make it seem like it can be.
To me, this is the strangest thing about the Wikipedia "debate". Critics of WP frequently claim that supporters consider it to be a "legitimate, citable source", yet I've never seen any supporters of WP say that it is, or is ever meant to be.
No encyclopedia is a legitimate, citable source. Not in any publication that matters, anyway. My kids have cited Wikipedia in elementary and junior high school papers, and WP is just fine for that, as are Britannica, World Book, etc. They're probably okay for som
I hope they didn't act on it. (Score:4, Funny)
I just hope that those non-experts didn't feel the urge to "fix" anything.
The problem with this is... (Score:4, Interesting)
BUT, when it comes to policitically charged articles (or other non-academic articles), b/c of people's "MY true is reality no matter what the facts say" mentality nowadays, the acuracy plumits.
Basically, this study is nothing but a false positive in favor of wikipedia.
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Don't ask me why, but I actually skimmed the (quite long!) article about nutrition. I agree that the article could be tightened considerably. E.g, the the whole "Nutrition and longevity" seems to be based on pure speculation. E.g, I remember a recent study that found no links between intake of a
Rawr (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyways I guess in summary people are way too afraid of the wiki model.
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Thus easily allowing you to choose which 'facts' you want to include.
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I don't agree with that. Trustworthiness is more a function of how invested in the "facts" the contributors are. Where stronger emotions exist you lose trustworthiness.
WP is a great resource just so long as you don't count on it being definitive. Having millions of edits is no guarantee of accuracy.
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Still, a lot of the time you see things that if you know a lot about a topic you know are wrong - or at least not as right as it could be... I try to edit it sometimes but it ends up being a lot of effort and then (often) someone changes it to make it worse and an editing war takes place.
Even so, I wouldn't cite WP
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I've got a first grader and I'm almost shocked by how many requests to look up information on the i
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Personally I think Wikipedia is great, and I use it a lot for day-to-day reference when I want to find out about things... and to be h
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Re:Why Teachers Hate Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about medicine for a second. Would you rather have 500 enthusiastic amatuers doing su
Why I Doubt (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why I Doubt (Score:5, Interesting)
But that's why this experiment's results are so interesting. What you're saying reminds me of how people look at mainstream media's coverage of things. It appears somewhat reasonable when they're talking about things you don't really understand, but then once they get onto a topic you know anything about, suddenly you see how full of shit they are. Your ignorance allows you to trust them, and your expertise makes you distrust them.
This study perversely suggests that Wikipedia is having an opposite effect on people, than mainstream media does.
I wonder if it has to do with what happens when people find errors in things they're familiar with. When you find errors in Wikipedia articles, do you do anything about it? With mainstream media, you can't do anything about it, but with Wikipedia, you can. Maybe you don't correct errors, but eventually someone may, and perhaps the motivation to do that, is somehow proportional to expertise.
One idea on why (Score:5, Interesting)
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IMO, 'The expert says "there are some good ideas behind this really shitty writing"' because experts have a body of knowledge which fleshes out all the unexplained basics which a layperson may or may not know.
That background knowledge (or lack thereof) makes a huge difference in their ability to evaluate information.
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We have a winner.
In reading through old sets of the Britannica, (people really do save such things,) the first thing you notice is the quality of the writing: T.E. Lawrence on Guerrilla Warfare, H.L. Mencken on the American language.
it's a question of open-mindness (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the things that one learns while doing his/her PhD is that he/she is NOT an expert in ANY field. It is only a matter of time for some big-headed know-it-all grad student to get crushed in a conference by a more experienced, better informed researcher. Being a grad-student and having research as your job makes you more open to new ideas and other people's opinions.
When you daily come accross many different approaches that try to solve the same problem, you are bound to learn that you must examine them all first before you decide. Otherwise you might miss a good idea that may eventually cost you your PhD. Sure you will have a favourite in the end, but that will be only after giving way to every possible option.
So a grad-student reading a Wikipedia article with an "alternative" (i.e. mistaken) point, would say "Hmm.. why not?", while a non-grad-student could say "WTF is this?" Of course, this would be the case only when the point is more close to being debatable and not obviously wrong.
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I believe that the difference between the groups that this study used was not really the fact that in one group there were "experts" and in the other "non-experts", but that in one group there were "grad-students" and in the other "non-grad-students".
And I believe someone should RTFA before weighing in on it. It wasn't divided into "people who are grad students" and "people who aren't grad students," it was divided into "people who are grad students or researchers in a certain field and are given an article from Wikipedia about that field" and "people who are grad students or researchers in a certain field and are given a random article from Wikipedia's 'Random Article' link in the Navigation Menu on the front page." Or maybe we shall let the study it
Good for initial exposure to ideas. (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I find it to be a very useful resource for information on technical topics outside of my field of specialization. I do lots of modeling and conceptualization for games, so it's reeeeally nice to have an easy resource to explain the basics of say 19th century steel production or aircraft engines from the 30s. It's also really cool just to be able to read about a historical event and click a related topic to trace a thread through time. It's not a complete resource, but what is?
As It Should Be (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, note that these experts aren't necessarily saying that Wikipedia is 100% accurate or reliable. The real issue might be that where a non-expert might mistakenly disregard a large amount accurate information from Wikipedia, an expert might understand that while the majority of the information was accurate, a few important inaccuracies were also present.
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Or you should have the basic critical thinking competence to review whether the claims in the article are sourced, and review the sources (particularly if the use is of any importance.)
An encyclopedia is, after all, a starting point for research, not an ending point.
If you don't understan
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If you know an expert in a field why bother checking Wikipedia at all?
"Caution ... needs to be used..." (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, well, caution--and further research--needs to be used before citing anything learned from the Encyclopaedia Britannica... or the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics... or the World Almanac as a fact.
All of these are secondary sources. All of them are highly useful and are used as actionable sources of information every day, but none of them would be an acceptable citation in a research paper.
Furthermore, Wikipedia has always had policies that all information in Wikipedia must be derived from a published "reliable source" and that the source should be cited. Although these policies have mostly been honored in the breach, in the past year or so there has been an increasing tendency to cite sources explicitly. This is virtually a requirement for an article to become a home-page "featured article," for example. In some cases it is easier to trace the source of a fact in a Wikipedia article than in a traditional encyclopedia.
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Not just virtually, it is a formal requirement [wikipedia.org]. The only FAs that have few/no references were promoted a few years ago when standards were lower, and the removal process is gradually pruning them out.
Apparently Doctors/Med Students Aren't Concerned (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:Apparently Doctors/Med Students Aren't Concerne (Score:2)
I've heard complaints about Wikipedia from many people who are eminently unqualified to make such assertions.
Conversely, the experts in the area seem to like Wikipedia, much as the above story suggests. Along these lines, I was interested to hear a podcast from Australia's Science Show [abc.net.au] talking about this very issue (the podcast is no longer up, but there is a transcript [abc.net.au]).
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's true for large sections of Wikipedia, and that's one of the many reasons why it sucks as a primary reference source. You can be pretty much assured that any "hot button" topic will be a veritable mess of crap created by borderline "expert" well-organized editor cliques aggressively pushing POV agendas. This is an interesting ecosystem to observe, actually, as an example of how online communities
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Can you provide examples of this in action?
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Think it's not the problem with even science? Why do so many people attack Bjorn Lomborg with a fanatical ferocity for daring to raise scientific questions about how, why and if global warming is happening?
I'm not really familiar with this guy, but it looks like he's a political scientist with some background in statistics that's published a book in the popular press critical of global warming. I guess it was my impression that science was done by people trained in the field, not by political scientists th
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It doesn't matter what your credentials are, either your facts and conclusions are right or they are not. You don't agree with Lomborg? show us when and where he rushed to conclusions (in fact, some others have).
Your post is a classic example of why credentials DO matter to the 99.99% of us that aren't climate scientists. I really don't have the time to listen to people that have no training in the field they're talking about. 99% of the time people that have no training in the subject they talking about
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I don't think the problem is not trusting it so much as not being able to critically evaluate it. I don't usually trust the general media for what I think are some very good reasons, but many people I see, mostly outside my circle of friends, seem to be quite happy to simp
Why isn't Wikipedia better? (Score:2)
People can only know about faults in Wikipedia if they saw them for themselves (otherwise it's hearsay, and the complaints are therefore without merit). By looking up Wikipedia, people are acting as a part of the community, most likely with the intent of deriving benef
similar problems with traditional media (Score:2)
Isn't it time Slashdot had a Wiki icon? (Score:5, Interesting)
The MediaWiki sunflower [wikimedia.org] would only be suitable as an icon for Wikis powered by that piece of software. I don't have an idea for an icon to represent all wikis.
Where are the digital signatures/endorsements? (Score:2, Insightful)
In theory, citations should achieve the same goal, but it's clear that people don't want to research Wikipedia articles that have already been written. They want to use them as research. Do we want to work to try to change
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Since Wikipedia is licensed under a fairly permissive license, nothing stops experts (or anyone else) from serving digitally-signed copies of Wikipedia articles if they want to endorse them in that way.
It's not about "expert" but rather "demonstrable" (Score:2)
A few important points (Score:2)
- "Generally credible" is certainly better than "not credible", but note that "Very credible" was an option and Wikipedia didn't hit that mark. So people that say "Use Wikipedia as a starting point, but not as an authoritative source" are probably the ones who should draw the most self-validation from this study IMHO.
- 13% of the articles contain errors - and that was excluding contested content and stubs!
Hardly surprising... (Score:2)
The site's operators have however always suffered from a persistent, gnawing insecurity about credibility...but the question that has never been definitively answered is which particular group they so desperately need credibility with. I suspect said group is, as I said, pseudoscientific atheist
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These articles could have been written by anybody. It only seems appropriate that I would be skeptical about a topic written by a less than credible source about a t0pic I know little about.
The same is true for reference books, articles, television programs, etc. That's what the references are for. I agree you should be skeptical of wikipedia articles, I'm just not sure you should be more skeptical than you are of other sources of info.
Ah, but (Score:2)
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Reference books and articles (in my industry at least) are peer-reviewed, if you are getting them from the major outlets. You know they are credible, or at least validated by several other PhD's in the field.
Or maybe they are corporate funded propaganda. You don't know until you check the references and see who has peer reviewed them. The exact same thing goes for Wikipedia articles. Maybe articles in some given publication are always reviewed by certain parties and you can build up a level of trust, but
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Oh. Sorry. Left my tinfoil hat at home.
You don't know until you check the references and see who has peer reviewed them.
No shit. At least I know when I submit my papers to the AIAA [aiaa.org] they are peer-reviewed by PhD's and that when I pick up a journal from them, those papers have been too. Same goes for ASME, etc. Wikipedia has no such level of validation, because any asshat can go in and change the math/science/engineering, not just the mathematicians/scient
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Oh. Sorry. Left my tinfoil hat at home.
Who needs a tinfoil hat? Have you been living in a cave? It has been standard procedure for many large companies to fund the publication of "scientific" studies for many, many years. If you aren't aware of it, the chances are you have read some unknowingly. Heck, it is not even uncommon for "news" programs to run advertisements made to look like news announcements in the middle of the news with no disclaimers.
t least I know when I submit my papers to the AIAA they
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All people in the study are presumable smart and well educated.
Read more carefully... (Score:3, Informative)
They're not saying that, and that's not the "stunt" they "[tried] to pull". They're saying that the biology Ph.D candidate is an expert in biology, and he, as an expert in biology, rated biology articles rather high as far as accuracy goes. He then rated astronomy articles (a field in which he isn't an expert) lower. Now, move on to the g
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