Wikipedia overtaking major news sites

CNN Money ^ | September 6, 2005 | Staff Writer

[CreviceTool]

Wikipedia overtaking major news sites Traffic to the multilingual network of sites has grown 154 percent over the past year. September 6, 2005: 5:21 PM EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The Wikipedia, which has surged this year to become the most popular reference site on the Web, is fast overtaking several major news sites as the place where people swarm for context on breaking events. Traffic to the multilingual network of sites has grown 154 percent over the past year, according to research firm Hitwise. At current growth rates, it is set to overtake The New York Times on the Web, the Drudge Report and other news sites. But the rising status of the site as the Web's intellectual demilitarized zone, the favored place people look for background on an issue or to settle a polemical dispute, also poses challenges for the volunteer ethic that gave it rise. "We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by," said Jimmy Wales, the founder of the volunteer encyclopedia. "How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?" p>

[bvw]

Bohr is dead.

And in a box.

[bvw]

If an observer has no bias there is no observer. Bohr is dead.

[sourcery]

Yes, I would include both societies as having some founding in absolute truths.

A society either evolves so that it is based on truth ("stuff that works in practice,") or else it dies. Same goes for a species. And I submit that the same is true of Wikipedia--although Wikipedia is still extremely young compared even to the United States, let alone to the Hindus.

Any free society has an "invisible hand" that sometimes engages in "creative destruction." The process is not always pretty, and does not always provide good outcomes for all concerned, and occasionally produces a bad result for almost everyone. Sometimes, societies evolve in bad ways, and abandon the truths they had once discovered and embraced.

[bvw]

Yes. Destruction is an important part of the process. There is a constructive destruction and a destructive destruction. Depends how the absolute truths end up being valenced afterwards.

[PianoMan]

I used Wiki to educate myself on the French and British monarchies. I thought the articles were fantastic. I also did some research on the cingulate cortices there. They were all first rate, I thought.

[Sandy]

I love Wikipedia. I use it regularly. Sometimes I'll go to look up one thing, then a few hours later I have to "go back" dozens of pages to get back to whatever I was looking up in the first place (often having lost interest in the original topic by then). I think it's fascinating and fun to get "lost" there. I haven't noticed a liberal bias. As far as I can tell, subjects of controversy usually have a neutrality warning, and you can click to read discussions of a disputed topic's opposing views if you care to. I give it two thumbs up.

[Arkinsaw]

Do some of us want it to be a flattering fiction before we call it "unbiased?"

I wrote hundreds of articles over there so I have some experience with the community.

My primary example is that the term "Santorum" was put in. It was coined by a homosexual activist DJ in San Francisco and had no national exposure. That definition remains in a truncated, somewhat less vile and obscene way. But it still exists.

Islamosfacism on the other hand has been used by conservative columnists, has been broadcast on national news programs, and gets tons of Google hits. Yet that article was turned into a redirect to the article [Neofascism and religion] which has no reference to the term or really much of anything about Islam in it. The Islamofascism article was derided as being unworthy of an encyclopedia article, racist, and offensive and it now no longer exists. Yeah, but an article that some unknown guy made up that equated Senator Rick Santorum with an aspect of homosexual sex WAS worthy.

Why the difference? Because the people who have the influence on Wikipedia do not like Senator Santorum and do want to be politically correct about Islam. Thats why, and its the only possible reason why the double standard. How the article is debated and what due process it gets depends on its content.

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

From the Wikipedia page on Free Republic:

In August 2004 Jerome Corsi, co-author of the controversial and influential book Unfit for Command, apologized in the national media for racist, homophobic, and anti-Islam comments, as well as slurs made against liberal political figures, that he made on Free Republic under the user name "jrlc." The posts were discovered and made public by Media Matters for America, a liberal website [1].

How was this "outing" possible? I also recall that Buckhead was outed.

[sourcery]

How the article is debated and what due process it gets depends on its content.

Yep. Same goes for DU. And for FR. And for any society.

Betcha there's lots of statements in lots of Wikipedia articles that the DUers find objectionable.

[Yeti]

Bohr is dead.

Dead wrong. "If tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, it is both standing and fallen, and in every allowable state in between, each in proportion to its calculated likelihood." Dada Physics and it's confidently mystified victims! How many more pages of scientific publication, how many more textbook pages, how much more grant money will we waste on charlatans taking polite turns at the game of baffling us and eachother with their bullsh!t?

All that's non-sequiter, anyway. Wikipedia is good.

[bvw]

What Bohr said is that the quantum state of the observer and of the observer are bound as one. Then he died. Now he is dead.

At least that is what I have read.

Well, I guess one could believe in the science fictional "many worlds", or in the Bohm's UFO-like hidden variable theory.

But one thing is for sure that there is no such thing as an unbiased observation. Wikipedia is all bias seeking observers.

Oops. Comma missing in that last.

Wikipedia is all bias, seeking observers.

[Acksiom]

Yes, and one could counterargue that the old media still remains the dominant source of contextualization, vastly overpowering both FR and DU combined, and is clearly biased to the left (*particularly* in terms of omission), and this could arguably create an environment in which both participant contributions to articles, and referee decisions about "NPOV" and "common opinion" and so on regarding them, are likewise subject to long-standing built-in bias.

In which case, it's not actually a "Wikipedia-specific" bias, but simply yet another example of the general case today caused by about two generations of increasingly one-sided mass media contextualization.

In short, not that Wikipedia is particularly biased to the left compared to everybody else, but that it's pretty much as biased to the left as *anything* created by those who grew up under the mass media's slant usually is.

Also, my opinion is based upon my experiences with both forums, and the significant difference I see in sheer blatant nastiness and viciousness and so forth between the two. FR is subject to more than its share of petty schoolyard attacks and gross bigotry, especially where homosexuality is concerned, but DU seems to just *thrive* on the stuff and both produce and consume it gleefully in mass quantities, with a much lower signal-to-noise ratio in terms of sober, reasoned, courteous, and insightful commentary.

[shrug] It seems to be that the older I get, the less impressed I am by people's cleverness in saying nasty, vicious things about other people -- and yes, [points at the recent Kerry/Katrina thread], my own included.

I believe FR has a significantly better record on this than DU does. Yet of their respective Wikipedia FR entries, only the FR one makes a particular point of noting this aspect.

So that's the other part of what I'm talking about when I say "slight bias (of omission) favoring the left."

Systematically, TTBOMK, Wikipedia's critical path failure lies in its process of defining its standards of "general knowledge" and "common understanding" and so forth. This is a well-known problem with reference works, and so far we do not appear to have developed any methods of resolving it that even begin to approach the (relative) success of establishing an authoritative editing board -- which Wikipedia *deliberately* lacks.

See: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25 , and note particularly comment 401, http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2004/12/30/142458/25/401#401

So I am not by any means arguing that there is a inherent bias to every Wikipedia article in existence. Or that Wikipedia is bad and wrong. My basic point is only that the standards of the Wikipedia referees are questionable, and particularly vulnerable when it comes their application in terms of the definition of "common knowledge" about a subject, and that this, fundamentally, is likely to be a large part of why I observe a slight bias of omission favoring the left WRT the comparison of the articles about FR and DU.

In summary: leftists generally tend to get more of a pass for their bad behavior than their opponents do, and the Wikipedia entries for FR and DU reflect this.

[Age of Reason]

Wikipedia is dubious at best on a lot of information. It is frightening that history and facts are now subject to even more revision and altering on a grand scale.

Ultimately, anything that gets written is subject to an author's subjective viewpoint.

Your criticism of Wikipedia would apply to all that is authored by humans.

[sourcery]

I believe we are in very substantial agreement.

[Yeti]

Because the people who have the influence on Wikipedia do not like Senator Santorum and do want to be politically correct about Islam.

Maybe, but, like I said before, Wikipedia is not the place I go for editorial content on current events. I also noticed at the bottom of the FR page there was a link to a site that parodies DU. If you want to tit-for-tat every little thing that paints R's and D's in a bad light, it could get tedious. There may be bias one way in one spot, in another way in another spot.

Also, I note from reading the Santorum entry that this word was selected by the American Dialect Society as the most outrageous new word of 2004, and that extensive Google bombing was done in a coordinated effort to introduce the new definition to the public, these two significant events make it worthy of an entry. But I notice that it doesn't have it's own page, it is a subentry under the entry for the somewhat influential blog of the man who coined the term. His primary claim to fame seems to be coinage of "two sex-related neologisms," one of which was "santorum"(I won't say what it means). Since the word is apparently his greatest accomplishment, it's mention and definition are relevant to an article about his blog.

There might be some bias, but if I were editing a worldwide, mul;tilingual encyclopedia, I would be as hesitant to include "islamofascist" as I would to include "baptofascist" or "christofascist." The only purpose would be propaganda against a religion during a time when(rightly or otherwise) this classic motivational propaganda technique is being used by a major political party in a major nation during a time of war.

In brief: failure to validate propaganda for its own sake does not demonstrate bias to me, it demonstrates responsibility and discretion.

Make it, like the santorum entry, a relevant part of an article about something objective, and it will probably be mentioned in its proper perspective under the appropriate topic, as was the word "santorum."

BTW: thank you for whatever work you did on Wikipedia. For PC bias, read Encarta.

[Yeti]

Comma missing

Hyphen?

"Wikipedia is all bias-seeking observers."

Oh, no, wait -- that's...uh...heh: us.

[Arkinsaw]

Betcha there's lots of statements in lots of Wikipedia articles that the DUers find objectionable.

In my experience, those don't last quite as long as those on the other side. The community tends to give more leeway to articles equating Senator Santorum to details of homosexual sex than conservative terms. I watched the debates on those two and know what went on.

My favorite article is this oneBush Family Conspiracy Theory

[kpp_kpp]

the domain name freeperpedia.org is available...

[Arkinsaw]

The only purpose would be propaganda against a religion during a time when(rightly or otherwise) this classic motivational propaganda technique is being used by a major political party in a major nation during a time of war.

No the purpose would be to point out that the word is in widespread use by certain people and factions. Your definition above is worthy content for such an article, but not a reason for keeping it out. I point out the Santorum article due to the double standard, not necessarily the content. If you want to keep the vile content of Santorum then you must keep Islamofascism. If you want to delete Santorum then you must want to delete Islamofascism. Pick one or the other reasoning and apply it to both. Unfortunately, the process on Wikipedia tends toward keeping Santorum, and deleting Islamosfascism. That was my complaint since that double-standard applied in nearly any controversial debate I saw.

I saw the same people arguing for inclusion of Santorum who were arguing against Islamofascism using the exact opposite arguments. Their justification was based on content, not on overarching principles of inclusivity or standards.

[kpp_kpp]

i don't see the bias but i suspect that people here have drunk as much freeper koolaid as they accuse DUs of drinking (maybe not quite as much).

the 'Jim Robinson' section of the "Free Republic" doesn't have much positive to say and I suspect that is part of why the accusations of bias...

people on both sides don't like it when the rock is lifted and what was in the dark is exposed to light.

it looks like ex-freepers wrote the "Immigration rift" section, not lefty liberals.