| ▲ | consumer451 a day ago |
| Of course it has faults, but so did the Library of Alexandria. However, can anyone argue that Wikipedia is not our best attempt at collective facts? Of course agreeing on collective facts is extremely messy. Show me a better attempt, please. |
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| ▲ | alcuin a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Fair to assume that the library of Alexandria contained books written by the most erudite scholars and philosophers of their day, not Joe and Jane and their cohort of terminally online gatekeepers. |
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| ▲ | consumer451 a day ago | parent [-] | | Why is that fair to assume? "Books" were extremely rare then. Some random librarian had to include those books, and likely leaned towards taking all written works due to scarcity. Likely some other librarian disagreed with some inclusions and certainly many readers disagreed with the content. They must have had a system for all of this. It was far less open than Wikipedia. IIRC, they seized all scrolls from all ships in the port, in many languages. They likely had many "errors" according to other librarians and many readers. |
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| ▲ | betterunix2 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What are "collective facts?" How do you distinguish "collective facts" from "alternative facts?" It is hard to imagine a worse attempt at establishing a collection of commonly accepted truths than Wikipedia. Scientific journals are overwhelmingly better at weeding out falsehoods and hoaxes, despite the history of successful efforts to dupe reviewers. University libraries are also better at collecting knowledge, and in fact the entire industry of journal publishing began at university libraries. That knowledge is not locked away from the masses, it is just less convenient to access than Wikipedia. Even Wikipedia has had to accept that a certain amount of oversight and review is necessary. There are some topics that attract bad actors, paid shills, state-sponsored propagandists, etc., and Wikipedia had to introduce "protected pages" to deal with such things. Add a structured review process and more rigorous citation requirements and those "protected pages" would be a lightweight version of academic publishing. |
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| ▲ | nxm a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As long as we acknowledge its limitations and biases |
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| ▲ | mmooss a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > can anyone argue that Wikipedia is not our best attempt at collective facts? Maybe at free collective facts. If you want to pay: JSTOR and Google Scholar, for example; textbooks; or any of the endless scholarly encylopedias, guides, and review papers, especially on specific topics. And if you don't want to pay: shadow libraries, or the reference room of an academic library. |
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| ▲ | consumer451 a day ago | parent [-] | | Well, that's a fair argument! I am not deeply familiar with the process of peer review, but is it open? As far as I know, it is confidential on purpose, correct? Doing all of this with an open moderation trail is what makes Wikipedia truly ambitious, isn't it? I have spoken with a few Reddit mods, and Chad, creator of automod and reddit's 12th hire about this topic. Everyone agreed that truly open moderation would be the biggest shit show ever. Yet, that is ambition of Wikipedia. Can you imagine what Dang and Tom would have to deal with if all of their moderation was open? I might have some disagreements with HN moderation, but open moderation is not something I would wish upon them. | | |
| ▲ | betterunix2 a day ago | parent [-] | | It depends on what you mean by "open." Yes, the reviewers' comments and the authors' rebuttals are generally confidential, and there are good reasons for doing it that way. One significant reason is to allow the reviewers to make their comments freely, without worrying about how those comments might be perceived by the public or how the authors' reputations might be impacted; likewise with the authors' rebuttals. Another reason is to avoid tainting the review process in situations where a paper is rejected from one journal and re-submitted to another -- the second set of reviewers should not know that it was previously rejected, nor should they know why it was previously rejected. On the other hand, the peer review process is "open" in the sense that there is no explicit credential required to be a reviewer, only expertise in the field (typically determined by publishing papers -- in principle someone with no formal education could publish enough papers to start getting invitations to be a reviewer). It is also "open" in the sense that anyone can submit a paper for review as long as it adheres to formatting (page layout, font size, etc.) and length requirements. |
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