This is one of those Deja Vu to the N-th Power places for me — just about everything wrong with the Crypto-Randroid-Or-Whoever-The Hell-It-Is Uncritical Unreflective Perspective of the Sanger–Wales E-Pyre of Wikipedia and Citizendium is betrayed in the above few lines. It makes me feel like I'm back in the '50s. It's a POV that seems to predate about 60 years of Dialogue & Research on Methods of Inquiry, Learning How To Learn, Systems Thinking, Values Clarification, Critical Thinking, Reflective Practice, Learning Organizations, Learning Communities — just to mention a few of the themes that I remember since I started paying attention. What sorts of attics, basements, closets, and dungholes have these bee-tles been moldering away in all these years? I have no idea. It's like they have a whole separate Cargo Cult Pidgin that makes it impossible to have an intelligent conversation with them.

At any rate, it makes me too tired to talk about now …

Jon Awbrey

I do not know, either. I have mentioned the Randroid connection and the mad idea that it is in possible in principle to settle in on the SINGLE best theory which fits all the presently-known facts. Presuming that there EXISTS a set of black-and-white things you know as a hard "fact", so that you don't have to wrestle with Bayesian methods — which naturally spit out only probabilities, since probabilities are all that they were fed &hellip.

But the other obvious route to madness is this fresh-faced journalism students' view that one can fairly represent any topic by simply (neutrally) representing all the major viewpoints about it, in proportion to the fraction of people who hold them. They actually teach this as a goal in journalism. And I suppose it's better than nothing, so long as its limitations are recognized. We've talked about these over time at WR. In no particular order:

1. The fraction of people who hold a given view is drastically different depending on which group you poll. In particular, the mass view changes depending on what culture and socioeconomic group you look at. Israel, for example, has 10% of the population of Egypt, but publishes 10 TIMES the number of books each year. Which view of the world and politics do you think might be overrepresented, in a literary effort like Wikipedia? Is a cultural viewpoint less valid because that culture has fewer printing presses? Good culturally sensitive people would say "no" in the cause of Australian aboriginies. But it gets much more complicated in the Middle East, where the view tends to be "If they can't publish in English, fuck em."
   
   Views also change depending on level of education and expertise. As we found out with anthropogenic global warming, and Darwinian evolution. This problem comes up every time they ask the experts what they should teach in public school texts, and the public doesn't like the answer. Wikipedia, a popularly written encyclopedia, is not going to fix this tension. If anything, Wikipedia is lucky if it doesn't come out like a biology textbook written by Texas preachers and their congregations.
   
   
2. The standard journalism problem of what fraction of expert people hold what views, cannot even be approached except by experts on a given subject — if you're not an expert, how would you even guess approximately the answer? But Wikipedia tends to be written in drive-by edits by the general public, who learn some fact about X and then go and add it to Wikipedia if they can't find it there already. Wow, magnesium is used in Mag auto wheels! That tends to give the popular wisdom of people who use the internet, and it has enormous inertia. But it intrinsically lacks expertise, and the experts themselves have no extra traction.
   
   
3. The idea that one can judge what the expert view is, except by talking to lots of experts, is wrong. Even expert review articles tend to be biased toward the research that the expert did for his or her last grant proposal (in fact, this is where most of those articles come from). At least TV journalists know they should to talk to many experts and let them present directly (if edited). Print journalists often talk to experts, but garble the results, and the experts are lucky if they are read the snippets of how they are quoted, but don't get to read the entire article. And the product of this goes into Wikipedia sources.
   
   The idea that one can judge the depth of a view by doing a Google search on it, has the problem that Google is self-amplifying, and interest and advertisement driven, not evidence-driven. As demonstrated by the fact that top Google result for most topics is the Wikipedia article. People keep seeing that without wanting to admit the meaning of it. If that's what Google does to the topic you're looking at, why would you trust it for the #2 entry, either (which is likely to be Answers.com ). Using Google Scholar helps some, but last I checked, WP didn't even encourage using that over regular Google, for scholarly subjects.
   
   
4. The above is why any field of human knowledge is subject to short term manipulation and advertising. There is a "theme" to most science conferences, and that theme may or may not survive as conventional wisdom to the conferences down the road. Often it does not. But meanwhile, journalists who write about the latest exciting results, make the same mistakes as the scientists themselves, but worse. If you read a newspaper science section about some (supposedly) new science result, you'd think it was just discovered, when most of the time it's been known for years, but the scientific paper being covered is one currently getting hype. There are far fewer shocking and genuinely new discoveries than you'd think, from reading the newspapers or science pop journal reporting. But there are a lot of scientists who would be happy for the grant review committees to think that they were actually the ones moving ahead an entire field.
   
   Finally, the Bayes problem mentioned at the beginning, just won't go away. There is lots of evidence, but evaluating the quality of evidence is a full-time job, and takes experts. Knowing who these experts are, and why they believe as they do, takes savvy. People with something to sell, can sometimes generate huge amounts of "science" showing that their viewpoints are correct, and this takes years to sort out. If all that is "known" about treatment of a certain disease was discovered in drug-company funded trials, what are you going to do with that "knowledge"? Does it even count as "knowledge"? And so on.

Yikes, I'm getting weary, too.