Wikipedia and Me and a few other people
This is a follow-up to Wikipedia and Me. I’ve uploaded my archaeoastronomy entry to Wikipedia and corrected a couple of bits. It all went fairly smoothly though I ended up uploading the image of Auglish (above) to illustrate a section, else most of the photos would have been of American sites. The first edit on it followed a few hours later with someone tidying up the formatting. Then Steve McCluskey came along and clarified a section on the Oxford conferences. After a week it’s fairly static and a better article than the original version.
I’m not a complete convert. I don’t understand the NPOV concept yet. I can see how a Neutral Point of View sounds like a good thing, but if one side of is supported by the evidence and another isn’t NPOV is misleading. I think this is a flaw in Wikipedia, but if you have open access editing I’m not sure how you could consistently take another approach. The easiest way round that problem is to not get into arguments about points of view.
I’m not sure how to judge if the entry is successful. Stasis isn’t a very good yardstick as that could just mean it’s being ignored. I could go for peer-review and so on, but that’s a lot of effort.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Alun on 7th of May, 2006 at 11:55 am, and is filed under Digital Academia, Life. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
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about 4 years ago
Yeah. Isee what you mean. I wouldn’t want to get heavily involved in controversial issues. Most of what I’ve done myself is to correct a number of references to ‘amphitheatres’ when the buildings are actually theatres. I have just doen some rewriting of various articles relating to Lucius Artorius Castus. I haven’t deleted the theories put forward there, but nI’ve pointed out that many of them don’t actually have any evidence to back them up. (Of course, now someone will produce the evidence that I haven’t been able to find.)
about 4 years ago
NPOV is why charlatans prosper. It’s hard enough to make the case against it when reporting science, as Mooney does in http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/6/mooney-science.asp. It’s far harder when the standards of evidence, logic, and ethics aren’t so clear cut.
about 4 years ago
NPOV seems like one of the trickiest issues to enforce. They obviously want people who are knowledgable about a subject to contribute, but anyone who’s really knowledgable about something will probably have some level of passion about the issue based on their experience that may draw it in some direction other than dryly neutral.
I really hope neutrality doesn’t mean balancing the opinions of nut jobs with facts.