Wikipedia is down

Comments (19)

1. I’m not sure ’cause I feel so stupid. Is there some place I can look it up?

2. It descreases the sum of knowledge, but it increases the quality

3. I’m not sure about that. If you average the quality of information across all the sites on the internet, Wikipedia is definitely way above average.

4. I’m not sure about the quality, if you average the quality of information on all the sites on the internet, Wikipedia is definitely way above average.

   1. But there are no quality controls – quite often some pretty big mistakes get to stay for quite a long time.

      1. Well, yes I’m not saying Wikipedia is always high quality. But compare it to most resources on the internet, and it still comes out on top.

   2. Consider wikipedia as used, rather than just relative to other sites.

      Without wikipedia: people BSing their way through conversations.

      Sometimes with Wikipedia: people make calls on statements of fact.

      Wikipedia is like duct tape. Never the strongest solution, but so fast, cheap, and available, it’s often the best anyway.

   3. “But there are no quality controls – quite often some pretty big mistakes get to stay for quite a long time”.

      Evidence? There have been studies of this. This one:

      http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1413/1331

      found that experts rated wikipedia more reliable in their subject areas than non-experts did.

      Roy Rosenzweig compared wikipedia to more traditional encyclopedias, and found that the former was, on average, more accurate.

      Alex Halavais did a study in which he inserted deliberate errors into wikipedia, some credible seeming. All were gone within three hours.

      1. Most of the time, I find the accuracy ratio of traditional encyclopedias to be undefined, 0/0, because traditional encyclopedias rarely seem to have what I’m looking for.

         1. My favourite encyclopaedia is Baldwin’s Dictionary from the late 19th century. But then, I seem to be that sort of guy…

      2. The comparison to traditional encyclopedias by Roy Rosenzweig was pretty flawed. He only looked at quantitativ accuracy, but ignored the very big differences in quality. Yes, Encyclopedia Brittanica might have more errors than wikipedia (something I am not convinced of, given the small sample size), but the errors in Wikipedia were much greater.

         This was pointed out by many back when Roy Rosenzweig published his results

      3. And from your own link:

         “These results may be some cause for cheer by advocates of Wikipedia, but they should be taken with caution. The sample size was small and the difference between the means of the articles’ credibility was only significant at the 10 percent level, not at 5 percent. Further work should be done to verify this finding. In any case, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to data collected during this project, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes”

         In other words, there are many errors in wikipedia.

         I’ll give wikipedia one thing though, they have become better at handling controversial issues, where science is solely on one side of the debae (e.g. global warming and vaccinations). A couple of years ago, those articles were absolutely horrible, with false balance and all. Now they are often still bad, but much better than they used to be.

      4. Thanks – useful corrective. But you seem to be holding W. to an unreasonably high standard if your main criticism is that it contains mistakes (unless you know of some reference source that passes that test).

      5. Really interesting discussion here. I’ve heard about similar surveys before, but there was some new information here.

         I think one big difference between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias should be pointed out though. Wikipedia contains articles on subjects that are too obscure and people that are too unknown to be considered for a traditional encyclopedia, something which should affect the tendency for errors to slip through.

         A good comparison would only compare the amount of errors between articles on a particular subject that is covered by both Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias instead of looking at the overall frequency of errors. Then again, maybe that was what was done in the aforementioned surveys, I haven’t read any of them.

5. I thought, for a moment, the End Times must be nigh with Wikipedia being down as well as the Panda’s Thumb Forum. But I find that, Epicurus be praised, I can still get into Wikipedia, although PT Forum is still out.

6. Wiki is back. So is Panda.

7. Panda still out here.

   1. Try clearing your cache and cookies. It’s working fine for me.

      1. Okay, thanks, Panda’s back

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