I came across the article on Syntagmatic analysis the other day, and was amazed to find it was a stub. Syntagmatic analysis is an important method that for one thing has long played a central role in Media and Film Theory. There's acres of academic material to draw from to build an informative article. Yet it remains a stub.

Looking round the whole Semiotics field, it is a ghost town of stubs and poorly written articles. That means that there must be very few editors who have any background in textual analysis. It's especially ironic when one considers that having a knowledge of the methods of textual analysis seems essential in compiling an important information source like Wikipedia. Yet the discipline appears to be a marginal backwater on the site itself!

I know Jon Awbrey wrote some material related to Semiotics, though that has probably been deleted by JzG during one of his revenge blitzes, but surely there must be some other editors on that site capable of providing decent overviews. That there isn't speaks volumes about the ghettoized preoccupations of Wikipedia editors and the ignorance of major academic disciplines -- especially Humanities related theories and methods.

In other News:

When I arrived in Wikiputia in late 2005 the article on Semiotics was such a horrendous mess of pop culture misconception that it would have required a major effort in tyro re-education to carry out all the re-org needed to fix it. Nobody I know who knows anything about the subject could work up the quanta to tackle what they could tell from a few trial attempts would be a thankless and most likely futile task. So we tinkered around the edges and tried to fix things in places where none of the tyros were paying attention. It doesn't pay for me to say where, as any topic they discover is soon beset with meat-&-sock-puppet consensual sects of know-it-all ignoramuses.

If anyone is serious about working on these topics, then I recommend that they try getting together at Wikipedia Review, and quite wasting their lives at Wikipedia.

Jonny

Agreed. Any serious expert in semiotics (or any other academic field that gets ignored by the Wiki anime fans) would be wise to support a better-run online encyclopedia.

The one about descriptive linguistics is sad. In fact, the topics listed under Linguistics are generally a mess. Some are really well-written and well-referenced, and some are useless.

I feel sorry for humanities students who think Wikipedia can let them be lazy about research.

(Meanwhile, film students can gorge themselves with micro-trivia about Buffy The Vampire Slayer.)

As has been noted, this is all because

1) Wikipedia reflects the interests of its editors

2) Academic types have better to do than work hard on Wikis (like publish under their own names or else perish)

3) Even when academics are drawn in by a 90% correct article to make a few fixes, they tend to run into people who would otherwise be their students or dropouts, and find to their shock that those people get as much say about the article as the academics do. Sometimes (by reason of Wikipower structure, with its rewards for wanking-time and brownnosing-history), even more power.

4) None of the above can be fixed without fixing WP's deeply-conflicted attitude toward expertise. On one hand, WP wants verifiability, not truth. On the other hand, it wants the verifiable sources to be "reliable" which means, er, that they should likely be "true" by any sense of that word we can agree on. Does not compute.

5) This latter conundrum is in no small part due to wikipedia's refusal to give up anonymity, which is the figleaf which allows its ignorant Eloi to continue to do the work, under the evil eyes of the underground Morlocks which actually run the damned thing.

And there we are. People like Sanger have proposed solutions, but there are other less drastic ones I can think of.

One would be to allow the "unwashed publick" (anon IPs and name-editors with only a short and non-vetted edit history) only to edit only an "temp edit version" of any article. All edits only show up 24 hours later, after somebody in trust has vetted them, all in one bunch. Meanwhile the mainspace article that shows up when people search a topic, only shows the last "stable" version, which has passed a pre-vet process. The job of doing the 24 hour (or whatever) vandal free "update" of stable versions, can be done by either old and trusted editors, or admins, or both, without special subject-knowledge, since this level is only to get rid of the vandals and jokers who want to see their work "up" like a spraypaint-tag, for however few minutes it now takes for some editor or bot to revert it (and sometimes, as we all know, it can be longer). But this fixes 90% of the acruracy problems, right there. Yes, it removes immediate gratification, but perhaps by doing so, it will ALSO remove the work of people who can't wait 24 hours for gratification. Not an entirely bad thing. Of course, you can get gratification by watching the "temp" version change in realtime, just as now. But that lags what people "see" when they use the encyclopedia in search mode, by just a bit. It's all like moderated edited discussion boards-- I'm not re-inventing the wheel, here.

(Later edit-- well, there is ONE new thing proposed above, and that is the idea that after you edit, you can still see the new version and so can everybody else, even under my system. That's not true on message boards. This is a two-tier system where only the mildly-moderated article is "up" as "encyclopedic" or the "real" encyclopedia, but if you want, you can view the underneith "under-edit" version, and change it at any time, and so can anybody else. So there you see the quantum-foam and the vandalism in real-time. So, if you REALLY want to see the grossness of what Bismark called "sausages or laws being made" (many have used the metaphor for the present WP), then you can DO that. But under my proposal, THAT "under construction version" is not what's immediately presented to the public when they use the encyclopedia in "lookup" mode. So it's the difference between going to a funeral and actually going back to the mortuary prep room. Gosh, I'm big on death metaphors, lately. Probably part of disillusion.)

At the second level, we must have some people with true academic subject-matter-expertise, who volunteer to have their creds checked (this can be done) and to "promote" a stable version that passes their expert muster for subject-matter-error, every so often at longer intervals (times can be decided-- this depends on volunteer commitment). We don't demand that these people add content unless they want (that's asking too much). All we want is for them to remove stuff that is academically wrong. That still leaves the "stub" problem due to lack of academic time commitment to write, but at least the little peer reviewed stubs will be "academically" acurate, and vandalism-free.

--Milt

Sensible people have said sensible things on this thread. Sensible people have said sensible things before. It has been ignored by the Sanger-Wales Crowd and it will be ignored forevermore. Sensible people may be surprised at this, but it's probably because even many sensible people have yet to tumble to what Sanger and Wales are really selling. If you don't know that you don't know why the suckers are so hell bent to buy it.

Jonny

Er, could you explain a bit? It might well actually BE that what JIMBO is really offering that is so addictive, is the chance to vandalize an encyclopedia in real-time for those who want THAT, vs. the chance to whack-a-mole such vandalism in real-time, for those who "get off" on THAT. Sort of like "fight club," indeed, if true. (And there are bigger wars to fight at higher levels too....). And would mean my proposal would fail, for purely sociological reasons.

And that would also explain why the Sanger version is failing. No fights available.

But I fail to see that each is offering the same product. They surely aren't.

-- Milt

It will be tomorrow before I can respond more fully, but there are many old threads on all of these issues that can probably be sampled under the search heads of Citizendium and Confidence Games.

If you know the history of Wikipedia you know that most of the pilings and shorings of ideology are really due to Larry Sanger. He tried to plug the cracks of anonymity in the Wikipedian dike but the robots considered that sabotage and booted him out for his troubles. Nevertheless, he steadfastly insisted on preserving all of the other flies in the oinkment when he booted up Citizendium, and that shows a real lack of ability to learn the lessons of Wikipedia's many other disabling flaws.

Jonny

I dozed off in the middle of Dead Zone last night and had this vision of the Con∑ate Con Man standing before Saint Peter, explaining how he really gave all those suckers a Fair Value Bang For Their Bucks, no matter how exorbitant the price might seem to the superficial observer. He proceeds to (mis?)quote Sigismund Frodo to the effect that Every Moment Of True Happiness Is The Fulfillment Of An Infantile Wish (EMOTHITFOAIW) and says that he always gave his marks exactly that — momentary being the operative cacheword, but, really, how much true happiness do you think a mere mortal could really take? SF, hisownself, who mirabile dictu made it past the Perlsy Gates, interrupted with some scholium on the word "sucker" that I didn't exactly cache, but that was the gist of it, so far as I can tell …

Jonny