Re: [WikiEN-l] Why the Internet dooms universities
On 10/12/10 1:16 PM, Ian Woollard wrote: On 12/10/2010, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: His agenda is to cut his wages bill. (Vice-chancellors are not picked for their fluffy goodwill to all humanity.) But this is the guy who runs the business saying holy crap we're fucked. The thing is that free sources of information have been available for practically forever; they're called 'libraries'. These are not universally available or accessible. Rural areas and third world countries have virtually no access. Maintaining a comprehensive collection is frightfully expensive both in terms of acquisition and storage. Funding libraries is not always seen as a government priority. Many libraries need to divest themselves of much older material just to make space. They didn't replace the need for people known as teachers/lecturers/tutors either, nor the need for examinations to prove that people could actually do stuff, both of which are functions provided by universities. Lecturers in particular keep alive the bankrupt notion that you can teach people by talking at them. One of the principles of education is that learning requires the active participation of the learner. The process of examination is a secondary one, and universities would be well served if they could find a way to get rid of it. The master who work with the students soon know which actually do stuff. So I suspect, at the moment, that he's being pessimistic. Still, in theory, a really good automated educational computer based learning system could change all that I suppose, but I've never heard of one that good. I suppose that automated educational computer based learning system form a major part of Geeks' unrealistic dreams. It's unfortunate that universities have been overrun by the rampant philistinism of those who see them solely as an avenue toward a better job. That would make them no better than glorified trade schools with a pompous name. The crucial role of the university is the expansion and preservation of knowledge. This is not just the passing on of knowledge; it is the provision of a forum for the evaluation and criticism of that knowledge. To an extent that can be done among peers in the absence of a recognized master. Masters are still valuable, but not pontificators. Universities need to redefine themselves in response to the threat posed on them by the internet, and that requires a serious review of their economics. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Why the Internet dooms universities
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 9:45 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: [On libraries] These are not universally available or accessible. Rural areas and third world countries have virtually no access. Maintaining a comprehensive collection is frightfully expensive both in terms of acquisition and storage. This book storage facility recently built for a copyright library in the UK makes that point well: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11484494 Funding libraries is not always seen as a government priority. Many libraries need to divest themselves of much older material just to make space. I think the copyright libraries in the UK are government funded, but I see that the concept is one of legal deposit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_Deposit_Libraries_Act_2003 I think I failed to send copies of a university bulletin I edited and published to the British Library (though I did send it to one of the other libraries listed there). The bulletin in question might even have had an ISSN number. Not sure. Oh well. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
Is there anything on this list: http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia which is a legitimate complaint that we can do something about? I was led there by a link from this post: http://www.redstate.com/docquintana/2010/10/11/fighting-liberal-bias-on-wikipedia/ Which complains bitterly. Fred Bauder ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
On 13 October 2010 14:45, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Is there anything on this list: http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia which is a legitimate complaint that we can do something about? Every word. Then, when we've gone through that list, we can fix our articles on the physical sciences: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Conservapedian_relativity - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
Seriously, Fred... He cites WIKIPEDIA:NOT#DEMOCRACY and the use of American football instead of just football as examples of liberal bias. Not much substance to this bitter complaint in my humble opinion. Nathan ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
On 13 October 2010 14:45, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Is there anything on this list: http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia which is a legitimate complaint that we can do something about? Every word. Then, when we've gone through that list, we can fix our articles on the physical sciences: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Conservapedian_relativity - d. Not fair... But is it clear God made the Earth? Seriously, do our articles Creationism, Creation myth, Ex nihilo and Genesis creation narrative adequately and appropriately deal with the matter? I'm a little skeptical about Ex nihilo, too many big words, well not too many or too big, but a bit obscure. Keep your eye on the ball d., the question is the adequacy and appropriateness of our articles and behavior. What they do is another matter. We do not list Consider the source among our logical fallacies, but perhaps we should. Fred Bauder ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
On 13/10/2010 14:45, Fred Bauder wrote: Is there anything on this list: http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia which is a legitimate complaint that we can do something about? I don't know. One of them (#67) may be about you, but it's kind of hard to tell whether it is, and whether we can edit you to improve matters. #167 is the allegation that we fail to understand what the Tea Party guys are all about. AFAIK we don't claim to understand anything much, just to compile articles from sources. What might be worth doing is to sort these into types of complaint, as a preliminary. The link http://www.redstate.com/docquintana/2010/10/11/fighting-liberal-bias-on-wikipedia/ is of course comical rather than anything to take seriously. Where the Conservapedia criticisms are adjacent to the stuff about soccer loving socialists imposing the view of 95% of the world of the default meaning of football, I think we can scoff, and the writer of that piece has clearly not figured out the traditional uses of encyclopedias either. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
So we got Conservapedia and some other conservative website accusing Wikipedia of having a liberal bias. What else is new, or what else are we to expect? -MuZemike On 10/13/2010 8:45 AM, Fred Bauder wrote: Is there anything on this list: http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia which is a legitimate complaint that we can do something about? I was led there by a link from this post: http://www.redstate.com/docquintana/2010/10/11/fighting-liberal-bias-on-wikipedia/ Which complains bitterly. Fred Bauder ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
I had no idea that theories about gravity and relativity were the result of a liberal conspiracy, but quite a few of those Examples of liberal bias discuss Wikipedia's failure to promote criticism of both principles. Nathan ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
So we got Conservapedia and some other conservative website accusing Wikipedia of having a liberal bias. What else is new, or what else are we to expect? -MuZemike Well, is there anything at all to it, or is it just bull? Fred ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
Conservapedia isn't even a reliable guide to what most U.S. conservatives think of Wikipedia; despite the broad name, the site is actually run by Young Earth creationists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism, which is why it's so outlandish. So, put me down for bull. Pardon the apparent self-promotion, but I wrote about this last yearhttp://thewikipedian.net/2009/11/14/examples-of-bias-in-conservapedias-examples-of-bias-in-wikipedia/#commentson my blog (David commented, so that makes it better, maybe) and my chief takeaway was that some complaints were in fact answered over time, although one imagines not due to their influence, as no one there ever bothered to take credit for the changes. What I'd set out to do in the first place was catalogue their complaints, but it was all too much. If they were at all serious, they'd write something more concise. It's just a list of gripes, and not so much with Wikipedia, but with modernity. On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.netwrote: So we got Conservapedia and some other conservative website accusing Wikipedia of having a liberal bias. What else is new, or what else are we to expect? -MuZemike Well, is there anything at all to it, or is it just bull? Fred ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
On 13/10/2010 14:45, Fred Bauder wrote: Is there anything on this list: http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia which is a legitimate complaint that we can do something about? I don't know. One of them (#67) may be about you, but it's kind of hard to tell whether it is, and whether we can edit you to improve matters. Charles Yes, 67 is a more or less accurate treatment of my reaction to Michael Moore's shennanigans, but the question is about problems we can do something about. Policies are like spider webs, they catch flies, but hawks fly through. There is little we can do to control the behavior of people who are wildly popular. Nobody can control Glen Beck either. I didn't actually go down the list, so I didn't see that or want to draw attention to it specifically. Fred ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
On 13/10/2010 16:02, Fred Bauder wrote: So we got Conservapedia and some other conservative website accusing Wikipedia of having a liberal bias. What else is new, or what else are we to expect? -MuZemike Well, is there anything at all to it, or is it just bull? Of course they can point out deficiencies in Wikipedia articles. Those exist. The question is whether they can prove the case for either of (a) conscious slanting or (b) systemic bias, away from neutral treatment. We should not care if anyone dislikes a WP article because it is neutral: we should care if a serious deviation from neutrality can be shown. Naturally Conservapedia is selective in its interests, and probably the list is as revealing about its selectivity as about anything else. By putting the focus on a subset of articles it might be possible to demonstrate selective bias in an area in Wikipedia: I don't suppose anyone seriously thinks we have no systemic bias of any kind. Which is why my response was in terms of sorting. It is more perhaps of looking for signal in a load of noise. We know that criticisms of disproportion in coverage, for example, are always with us. I didn't feel much illuminated. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
On 13 October 2010 15:19, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: On 13 October 2010 14:45, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Is there anything on this list: http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia which is a legitimate complaint that we can do something about? Every word. Then, when we've gone through that list, we can fix our articles on the physical sciences: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Conservapedian_relativity Not fair... Entirely fair. They're gibbering lunatics whose every word subtracts from the sum of human knowledge. If Conservapedia says the sky is blue, look out the window. If docquintana on redstate says Conservapedia's opinion on anything whatsoever is good for *anything* other than horrified laughter, then he's approximately as worth listening to. Remember: Conservapedia considers *claiming the existence of black holes* is evidence of liberal bias. http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Talk:Black_holediff=prevoldid=719675 There's a broader point here. Why the big push for black holes by liberals, and big protests against any objection to them? If it turned out empirically that promoting black holes tends to cause people to read the Bible less, would you still push this so much? Certainly there is no practical justification to pushing black holes; no one will ever be helped by them in any way. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
Even if Conservapedia are raving lunatics (and I agree with David on that), paying careful attention to our critics is a useful exercise. If you're really interested Fred, make a list of smart people and try to pry specific, constructive pieces of criticism out of them. We all know we're not yet meeting our own standards though. There's plenty of work to on the neutrality front without wondering about how fringe groups like Conservapedia view our neutrality. The silent majority of readers already appreciate what we're shooting for with NPOV. /twocents Steven Walling On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 8:29 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: On 13/10/2010 16:02, Fred Bauder wrote: So we got Conservapedia and some other conservative website accusing Wikipedia of having a liberal bias. What else is new, or what else are we to expect? -MuZemike Well, is there anything at all to it, or is it just bull? Of course they can point out deficiencies in Wikipedia articles. Those exist. The question is whether they can prove the case for either of (a) conscious slanting or (b) systemic bias, away from neutral treatment. We should not care if anyone dislikes a WP article because it is neutral: we should care if a serious deviation from neutrality can be shown. Naturally Conservapedia is selective in its interests, and probably the list is as revealing about its selectivity as about anything else. By putting the focus on a subset of articles it might be possible to demonstrate selective bias in an area in Wikipedia: I don't suppose anyone seriously thinks we have no systemic bias of any kind. Which is why my response was in terms of sorting. It is more perhaps of looking for signal in a load of noise. We know that criticisms of disproportion in coverage, for example, are always with us. I didn't feel much illuminated. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Alleged Liberal Bias
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 8:02 AM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: So we got Conservapedia and some other conservative website accusing Wikipedia of having a liberal bias. What else is new, or what else are we to expect? -MuZemike Well, is there anything at all to it, or is it just bull? Fred Responding on some technical points; 10 (relativity/PBR) - no substance 12 (Pioneer Anomaly) - numerically understanding and articulating the various factors and their estimated errors is critical to coherently understanding this phenomena. WP article is decent (in part because an involved scientist is a contributor) - CP seems not to get it. [disclaimer - COI, slightly involved] 14 (engineering - wind turbines) - no substance 16 (relativity contradictions) - no substance 39 (cold fusion) - may have a point here, but we know about this one... 40 (strategic defense initiative) - no substance [disclaimer - COI, but pro-SDI-ish COI] 45 (gun politics in the US) - no substance [disclaimer - pro-gun COI] 76 (wikipedia promoting suicide) - no substance 95 (operation eagle claw / iran hostage / carter election) - editorial choice to put political consequences in main article on hostage crisis, not in the article on the rescue itself; main article has coverage in lede for the issue. 97 (editor liberal bias) - probably true but omits age based statistical trend (younger / more liberal) - WP generally consistent with active internet user community. 107 (edward teller / oppenheimer security clearance testimony) - WP article is consistent with biographies and histories of the event, perhaps more Teller-leaning nuanced than the average historical coverage 119 (elementary proof) - doesn't appear to have been in WP until the mathematics project got going 2007ish, from reviewing its article and the main mathematical proof article. i don't consider this a valid criticism, however; WP's growth and evolution are strength (and future challenge) not flaw. 141 (communism mass killings) - main communism article section Criticisms of communism at the bottom of page has links to Mass killings under communist regimes prominently, so it's there now. 500 edits ago it was mentioned in the criticisms section but not linked directly off the main article. I'm going to stop there, with a general observation - I think they're right on one big picture thing: Wikipedia has an editorial bias - our default neutrality is that of a moderately internationalist, left-of-US-center somewhat more intellectual than average and more young internet user than average position, compared to the US political landscape as a whole. I.e., our userbase (editors) is skewed younger and more liberally, with the Internet early adopters general population statistics. I am concerned not so much with the specifics they are pointing out, but at a general trend that we may include more negatives about conservative positions and people than about liberal positions and people, which would be worth some statistical analysis. Ancedotal examples, especially those cited by someone so far off on the right end of the spectrum as young-earth creationists, aren't particularly useful for identifying the pattern. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
