[WikiEN-l] RE: partisan wrangling on wikipedia

Sat Feb 1 22:32:10 UTC 2003

On Saturday 01 February 2003 01:37 pm, Geoff Burling wrote:
> That is a pessimistic view of Wikipedia in its current state. Accurate,
> from what I've observed of certain articles, but still pessimistic.
>
> Unfortunately, the evaluation of mankind's accumulated knowledge frequently
> results in the same kind of dust-ups we're seeing in Wikipedia. For
> example, Eric Thompson, while undoubtedly the most learned & influential
> scholar of Mayan history & culture in recent times, nonetheless delayed
> the successful translation of Mayan inscriptions for a generation
> because of his own biasses and a tenacious insistence on his own POV.
> For an example outside of the humanities, I am reminded of an attempt by
> one of the leading US medical journals -- I forget if it was the New
> England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the AMA -- to review the
> lauded discoveries that journal had published a few years prior: after
> a few months they discontinued this series, having discovered
> that far too many of these articles turned out to have been bad science![*]

Excellent point! I was thinking about writing just such an email. In short: 
Anybody who believes that is is possible /not/ to have bickering and 
wrangling in Wikipedia hasn't spent much time working with large groups of 
people in an academic setting (or even in an office working on a project for 
that matter). 

Different people have different viewpoints and Wikipedia IMO does a very good 
job of distilling the POV down to their NPOV elements. But this process takes 
a lot of time for highly contentious subjects. It also occasionally requires 
us to expel those people who can't work with others - but the same is true in 
the real world.  

--mav
WikiKarma:
Work on adapting NASA bio information to expand [[Rick D. Husband]]