Wikipedia vs. Encyclopaedia: a question of trust?
TechRadar.com, UK -23 minutes ago
The sale of traditional encyclopaedias moved away from door-to-door sales to the ‘added value’ that came along with CD or DVD versions in the mid-’90s. ...

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I didn't bother to read the article in full, but something early on triggered a thought:


This made me think of another area where this has happened: home education.
A little bit of personal info: we home educated one of our kids for around a year after a big fall out with a school over bullying. (Backstory: kid being bullied due to having a false eye, daughter refuses to take part and is ostracised for it. Complain to school, they say they cannot resolve the problem. We say: we will have to take her out of school; they say: we'd do the same). At the time we had friends who were home schooling.

Now, we are educated people. I was not overly happy about the situation, but happy to be supportive (I was working in a real job as opposed to working from home(!)). What we found has strong parallels to this environment:

1) A substantial body of people were "believers" in home education.
2) A "philosophy" emerged that tests of success, such as exam results were irrelevant.
3) Alternative educative methods were preferred over traditional methods (most of which seemed to rely on kids magically learning things without actually needing any formal education process).
4) Any attempt to criticise led to a defensive closing of ranks. There were a few messiahs of the home education system whose words were law and required no critical thinking.
5) The success of home education relied on pointing out a few high profile exceptions (Richard Branson was held up as a role model at times).
6) Going back to the dark side was likely to lead to social exclusion.
7) Many people in home education had genuine reasons for struggling with the normal system: behavioural or dyslexia being notable issues, along with bullying, but this meant that the home education environment had a strange skew in its environment.
8) No real interest in traditional subjects. Basket weaving hippy lifestyle alternative energy compost heaps being a vital ingredient of the curriculum. No respect for educational success.
9) System fell outside the scrutiny of governmental authorities. Support groups were well versed in techniques to avoid scrutiny.

It was the realisation that we were not coping with providing a rounded education made us bale out, and in the new school we paid for (being advantaged over many others in that community) was able to cater for our needs. Not long after, a person in that community went to prison for child abuse, praying on the open environment and lack of scrutiny of the environment. (We had confidentially reported a family for intervention as they had an 11 year old child who was entirely illiterate - they evaded inspection by telling the authority that they were moving the following week. They stayed put for a couple of years after).

So that is the background. It struck me that this is where Wikipedia is heading to: a mystic belief in the power of the amateur that so undermines professionals, that people will not value teaching, because that in turn is provided by specialist professionals who cannot compete with the power of the Internet-nerd who must know better. Do you support teaching (even though we have probably all had our run is with bad teachers) or should we give in to the tube?

Wikipedia in its own right may or may not be important, but it is part of the Internet corroding worthy institutions of society.

Urggh.. Can a mod discard that useless <img> tag in the initial post, so that we can make this thread readable.

Done.

Thanks, Guy.

The Cult of the Amateur has its lure, but it also has its downside.

Our society still hasn't discovered how to optimize the learning process for children, adolescents, young adults, adults, and seniors.

...my point being, that those without learning might choose to discard an imperfect system in preference for an even worse one. Typically, these worse systems are justified with "You can't say it is wrong until you've tried it." With home education, the point of testing success or failure is set by the participants as sometime in the future when the subject of the experiment realises their life potential. This is never before 18, and the value judgements to assess success avoid things like career and academic measures.

I think the Wikipedian point is that the excuse for Wikipedia is that it is a big untried experiment, and until it is finished we cannot judge whether it is a failure. Yet as it goes along, we can see oft-repeated errors of mankind being replayed.

The most dishonest is the suggestion that the product is designed to be a panacea for world education, the sum of all knowledge, but the design premise is that it is built out of the unknown so we cannot make any judgment on whether the system is likely to produce something useful - they believe the exceptions are the rule. If knowledge is of no use in determining how to build an encyclopaedia, then why should we value the other given knowledge within it? If an encyclopaedia does not require knowledge and experience, why should building a car, a bridge or whatever?

That last one reminds me of the Millennium Bridge in London. When it was built, it suffered vibration problems was highly unstable due to resonance and had to be re-engineered at great expense. The top engineers said that it was not their fault as nothing like that had been built before. My mate, a PhD Civil Engineer pointed out that civil engineering is a discipline built on the knowledge that they work with unknowns and therefore they design to allow for that. Building in a tunable dampening system into the original design was an obvious and standard engineering approach.

Peer review, editorial oversight as two examples, are the Wikipedian dampening system to tune out instability. The solutions are well known and obvious and no competent institution should ignore them unless they have solid evidence that an alternative solution will work.