Gary R., Clark, list,
Yes, the grad student in 2005. I don't know whether s/he was a student
at all, but I had reached the point of exasperation in silly but polite
arguments with the person, so I starting saying things like "I don't
know what your teachers are telling you, but..." and saying that s/he
had maybe a "misplaced loyalty to MIT" (the publisher of the book that
s/he treated as gospel). I wasn't editing any Wikipedia article at that
time, I was just arguing on the Truth article's talk page for a change
to a paragraph about Peirce that wrongly claimed that he held a theory
of truth as consensus. I got impatient because I supplied my
interlocutor with numerous quotes from Peirce plainly stating his own
opinion on it across the years, and my interlocutor seemed incapable of
taking that into account and was saying some silly, shoot-from-the-hip
things. I abandoned the discussion and, some years later, registered at
Wikipedia and began editing the Peirce article (I think somebody else
finally repaired the Truth article). Jon Awbrey had already done a lot
of editing of the Peirce article, but there were many edit wars back
then. I added many footnotes with links to texts via Arisbe, peirce.org,
Google Books and the Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms. That was fun.
The edit wars pretty much went away. For me the biggest struggle became
against people's efforts to lop off parts of the article because they
thought it was too long. I worked many, many hours to write economically
and to re-write more briefly that which was already there. Nowadays the
article is not so unusually long for a Wikipedia article. I haven't
edited it in years. Looking over it, I see few changes except an added
section on "Slavery, the Civil War and Racism." Anyway, eventually I dug
back through the Truth article's talk-page history to see whether my
interlocutor had continued the argument. My interlocutor had replied
with a long aggrieved comment about how scholars shouldn't talk like
that, it was just so wrong, etc. Meanwhile, still no grasp of what
Peirce said in plain English about truth over and over again.
My biggest complaint about Wikipedia was that too many technical
articles were written as if by students for professors, rather than as
if by professors for the general public (like me). I don't have an
opinion on whether that's improved. Back when Scientific American was a
top science journal, the first 2/3 of the typical article was for the
educated public and the last 1/3 was for experts. I don't mean that the
ratios should be emulated, I mean that the idea of differently aimed
sections is not a bad one.
I agree that Wikipedia and other encyclopedias are good starting points,
not end points.
Best, Ben
On 12/14/2016 4:59 PM, Clark Goble wrote:
On Dec 14, 2016, at 2:17 PM, Gary Richmond <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:
In the past, Ben Udell has had some revealing things to say about his
experience of writing and editing Wikipedia articles--the good, the
bad, and the ugly--and I'd be interested to hear his views regarding
Wikipedia 2016.
I just remember the part where he had some grad student who kept
correcting his edits based upon some textbook (that was wrong). The
discussion then (which was longer ago than I’d recalled now that I
check — 2005) was quite a bit more negative than this one. Which
really does demonstrate the structural changes the organization made
leading to much better entries.
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