The Society for Neuroscience says now is the time for all good members to come to the aid of the Wikipedia.

Heaven help them.

Aren't all the good members banned?

No, it will be educational for them.

All the doctors and professional types encouraging their colleages to go to work on Wikipedia, have likely never spent serious time there themselves. It's kind of like never-married people urging their single friends to tie the knot. "Oooo, you'd be so riight for each other!!"

Great! Sit back and watch, as these educated professionals are reverted and banned by 12-year olds! I smell a disaster!

That would be my worry as well.

It's really strange that it doesn't appear to be obvious to everyone that when the inevitable news of a prominent professor of whatever being blocked by some hormonally over-active adolescent for "incivility", or some other imaginary wikicrime, hits the news stands then the whole mess of wikipedia's chaotic and unaccountable governance will be blown wide open. I suggest a "night of the long knives", to purge the kiddie administrators before it's too late. As a start, at least.

Yes. So?

Someone suggests we have a night of the long knives to purge WP of all these ignorant and young powertrippers before the world discovers that the site is run by them.

Um, first, if you did that, there'd hardly be anybody left.

Second, if you did that, it woudn't be Wikipedia as we know it, anymore. The whole idea brings to mind some bizarre fantasy where Genghis Khan telling his wife (Sylvia Khan, I think her name was): "Quick, quick, clean up this yurt a little-- do you want these people to think we're barbarians...?"

These neurologists need their heads examining!

Elonka tried something similar via the IGDA wiki - that page went 403 but fortunately is preserved. Possibly after User:IGDA tried it all a bit too crudely and got herself blocked for her pains.

Although I'm biased, I think academics usually make pretty good editors, since they tend to contribute in their area of expertise and know that referencing is essential.

Moreover, the core concept of science is that "authority" is meaningless - we are perhaps not happy than when one of our pet theories are killed with some new data, but this happens so often that you get used to it quite quickly. Scientists do not expect to be deferred to based on whatever our academic positions are - if our opinions conflict with the literature, our opinions just have to change.

Tim, you may be familiar with some of my "work"... oh, call it "art", if you will.

One of my favorite experimental edits to Wikipedia was on a scientific article that was observed by at least 150 people that day, because the article had just been mentioned in the scientific trade press as the first of a planned program to require Wikipedia publication before peer-reviewed journal publication.

The article was about an obscure nematode protein, and I deliberately messed with its content, in much the same way a Fox News-watching conservative might mess with the article about Al Gore.

For more than a day and a half, nobody detected the deliberate scientific fiction, because I used big words like "introns" and "copurified". The breaching experiment was then uncloaked after I revealed my identity elsewhere online, the account was put through a "CheckUser" test, the account was blocked, and the experiment was ended by noted mathematician, Axel Boldt. (Who, by the way, holds the same view as me: "I think that Wikipedia would be much improved if only people who have provided their real name were allowed to edit the encyclopedia.")

I must agree with Jon Awbrey, that the only reason scientific articles are able to get so "good" is that they simply haven't been found (yet) to be a desirable target for mischief and deceit.

You see graffiti all the time, but that isn't an argument against building bus shelters.

You can also treat the bus shelters with a graffiti-resistant polyurethane coating, if "the community" will only allow you to flip that switch. Thing is, the Foundation that owns Wikipedia's servers thinks that polyurethane coatings will somehow kill "free culture".

Sorry if I've spoken too elusively with metaphors, but I'm sure you get my point.

I support flagged revisions as well, but I'm glad you seem to agree with my point.

I'm glad (?) you seem to lack the level of self-worth that might otherwise halt your contribution to a system that pisses on your support of flagged revisions. Each to his own, Tim. There's another cool site out there that you might want to check out. It uses a similar "always editable" dynamic that Wikipedia cherishes.

Cool, I'm sure I'll find that useful. Thanks.

As to flagged revisions, I'm not the kind of person who sees reasonable and argued disagreements between people who I respect as people pissing on me, but maybe that's due to my overly-cheerful personality.

That's true in some areas of the sciences, but in others, higher amounts of established knowledge make it easier to theorize with greater confidence. And a great deal depends on whether you've actually published your "pet theory" already - most scientists are more cautious than that. IOW, they usually only publish a poorly-supported theories when there's a genuine threat of being beaten to the punch.

I realize that I'm generalizing... possibly even theorizing...


That depends on the nature of the literature in question, doesn't it? Or are you defining "literature" to mean "proven facts"...?

Your opinions can survive one or two papers weighing on them, but they have to break under the weight of data eventually. Scientific disputes get really exciting when you have two competing models, each consistent with some, but not all of the data. That can make for some "intense" and "interesting" discussions at meetings!

(Or possibly due to a diminished sense of self-worth.)

It seems to me that there are two types of people who encounter the editing experience at Wikipedia:

(1) Those who feel that the attempt to contribute quality content to the legacy of mankind is more valuable (or offsets) the possibility that one's contribution will be ruined at some point in the near future; ruin aided, by the way, by an easily-remedied flaw in the architecture upon which one contributes.

(2) Those who feel (even if after a long, painful path toward their "realization moment", all while being distracted by the public relations puffery and in-wiki camaraderie of how noble is the cause) that the contribution of quality content to the legacy of mankind is more ethically accomplished somewhere where the architecture is not deliberately left in a more-flawed state than it has to be.

I can certainly see how those in the latter stages of Category 2 come off as mean-spirited and lacking in optimism by those in Category 1.

As one human to another, I wish you all the best of luck and success in your endeavors, Tim. Your cat looks like my church pastor's cat.

Thanks, but nothing is forever, if you see every reader of an accurate and informative article as a "success", then whatever might happen to content in the future is immaterial. I always make the comparison between the number of people who have read my thesis (5, including me) and the number of people who have read my featured articles. Based on these articles' utility and prominence, I think creating them was a useful way for me to spend some of my spare time. They may well become less accurate or less comprehensible in the future, but they will still have been helpful in the meantime.

As to Loki, he is both too well and too inappropriately-named to be a well-behaved church cat!

Tim's words well-summarize a big part of my reasoning for contributing to Wikipedia also. I think Tim recognizes some of the serious issues with Wikipedia's model. For one, he has had some run-ins with some POV-pushing editors/admins. In contrast to my generally angry reaction to such instances, however, he reacted with amazing patience and forebearance.

I've had some serious run-ins with journal editors and reviewers as well, Wikipedia isn't that much different from real life in that regard. Indeed, if you can't deal well with rejection and criticism you don't get on very well in science. One of the most important things my old boss taught me is that you mustn't take robust, frank and and detailed critiques of either your data or your writing drafts personally. Harder to do sometimes than others, but you have to separate your ego from the process of other people helping you by pointing out your mistakes.

I'm afraid I will have to qualify your claim that "the core concept of science is that "authority" is meaningless" It SHOULD be - but in reality (and I'm fully aware that I might be dismissed by some as a follower of the 'strong' programme in making this comment, while I'm nothing of the sort) many people do both claim authority as scientists (and I have seen this happen in many places on Wikipedia, for example) in order to appeal to authority in order to push a Point of view (in Wikipedia and unfortunately in academic journals also), and, on wikipedia in particular, play a game of 'trumps' as to what 'weight' should be given to evidence depending on what journal it is and whether it is 'better', something which is subject to value judgements and also - yes - appeals to authority.

As you will be aware, my own concerns about Wikipedia came about after behaviour by others on the pages there related to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Lyme Disease. I should also say immediately that the ways in which I was treated on Wikipedia (ad hominem, defamation) were certainly not in a collegial or 'scientific' fashion. Here on Wikipedia Review at least, I cannot be banned for defending myself with legitimate and rational argument, or for pointing out when something is defamatory and deliberately designed to 'poison the well' against my own academic contributions to the above issues (I am an academic, a sociologist).

I also agree with Somey about the idea that "if our opinions conflict with the literature, our opinions just have to change." This is quite clearly untenable, otherwise science would never progress, and paradigms could never shift. "The literature" does not = "fact" or "truth" per se and without question.

I must say I think many people claiming expertise as scientists appear unaware of when they are acting unscientifically, in fora such as Wikipedia but not exclusively, and I think this is because they are not aware of how and when knowledge (including scientific knowledge) is being socially constructed, and this may be to do with a naivete about the importance of social scientific knowledge (e.g. sociology) when considering how to proceed in careful scientific methodology. The situation is even worse when disciplines claiming 'hard' scientific authority but in reality owing much of their 'knowledge' base to social sciences or even the literary humanities (disciplines such as psychiatry, for example) refuse to acknowledge or consider how that knowledge may have been socially constructed (and often unsafe).

I agree with Angela Kennedy - up to a point. The point is that scientific authority rests not with scientists, but in the results of experiments designed to falsify a particular proposition and so far failing to do so.

Thus science does not derive authority from its proponents per se but from its descriptive and predictive power in experiments.

Going back earlier into this thread, Greg Kohs made a point made that Wikipedia would be made a lot better by having named (non-anonymous) editors. I find myself mostly disagreeing with that point - most of the editors of note are already known even if they don't sign their name.

The problem is those known people should not be writing encyclopedia articles at all, unless they can demonstrate genuine scholarship in those very areas of knowledge that they are contributing to. Most of them (all of them?) do not. Instead, they play petty political power games in order to enforce their ignorance over everybody else's and woe betide a real bona fide expert in the subject because then the preposterous NOR and COI policies come into play. The ignoramus with the most friends and the most free time generally wins these contests.

That's another reason I don't edit Wikipedia - I'm not an expert in any subject other than "things John A has done in his life, 1960s to date", which no-one would want to read. Wikipedia actively promotes and conflates the ability to do scholarly research with the ability to use Google and work a browser. Thus it gives genuinely mentally unbalanced people the opportunity to rewrite history in an instant. Linda Mack/Sarah McEwan/Slimvirgin shouldn't be let near any encyclopedia article - she's simply unbalanced as well as an incorrigible liar.

The key difference between Wikipedia and Britannica is that the former is simply hosted while the latter is published, and only after undergoing extensive editorial quality control checks.

And Encyclopedia Britannica stands by its scholarship. If Britannica offered to allow me to write an article, I would refuse - I simply don't know enough except on subjects so mundane that they would never be allowed in an encyclopedia.

Wikipedia has always promoted itself as an encyclopaedia that "anyone can edit". So that would include mentally ill people. I like the idea of verifiable real names being introduced - that would cut out some if not most of the vandals and socks. I can't see wikipedia implementing anything like that anytime soon though. What needs to happen is wholesale changes in administration starting at the top down with Wales retiring, and someone with unsullied credentials replacing him.