Re: [silk] Is Wikipedia reliable ?
On Jan 25, 2008 9:47 AM, bharat shetty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That led me to googling and I came upon this http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page - which promises to be a better Wikipedia, by offering reliable content that can be trusted upon. Any insights, enlightening comments around, o' venerable silk-listers ? While I agree that Wikipedia articles have inaccuracies and many could do with some good copy editing and pruning, I have my own doubts about whether a peer reviewed encyclopedia is any better when it comes to accuracy. I came across the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture[1] a couple of years ago at SciFoo camp. I glanced at a few of the articles in it and it looked promising. I then turned to the articles on Indian cuisine and it full of inaccuracies. For example, an idly is described as deep fried lentil dough balls (clearly a bonda or vada). There were at least a couple of dozen such mistakes. What I found annoying with the mistakes was the fact that (a) I could not quickly correct them and (b) The article was supposedly written by an expert in the field. A frequent snarky remark about open source and content is you get what you pay for. If all I can get for $420 per volume is articles with glaring inaccuracies, I would rather settle for wikipedia, warts and all. Thaths [1] http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Culture-Scribner-Library-Daily/dp/0684805685/ -- Bart: We were just planning the father-son river rafting trip. Homer: Hehe. You don't have a son. Sudhakar ChandraSlacker Without Borders
Re: [silk] Is Wikipedia reliable ?
On Jan 25, 2008 9:47 AM, bharat shetty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: However, it turns out that Wikipedia has some wrong information at places, he also said. That led me to googling and I came upon this http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page - which promises to be a better Wikipedia, by offering reliable content that can be trusted upon. I suppose there are currently three approaches to this. One is the traditional the expert is right Brittanica approach that we have been familiar with for so many years. The second is the The crowd is the expert paradigm of Wikipedia where everybody has edit authority and the truth is a rather dynamically changing equilibrium (articles in wikipedia keep changing and there is a lot of discussion around knowledge) rather than just expert decree. In fact, in a lot of cases, the discussion page provides more insight than the article page. The third is the knol approach (Google - see screenshot herehttp://www.google.com/help/knol_screenshot.html) that seeks to strike a balance between the top down nature of Brittanica and the chaotic bottom-up nature of Wikipedia. In fact, the concept is pretty interesting. Experts can author pages on their topics and invite a group of peers to collaborate. So this part is close to the Brittanica approach. But the twist here is that there can be several knols on a particular topic and the crowd determines, through votes, rating and hits, which knol is the best for a given subject. -- Krish Ashok Blog: krishashok.wordpress.com GTalk: krishashok www.stage.fm/krishashok
