Re: [WikiEN-l] The WP Challenge: Healthy Collaboration
on 1/18/11 2:10 PM, Fred Bauder at fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: The importance to the individual of collaborating within a group. And the importance to the group in recognizing, and nurturing, the individual. From: Amy Chua Is a Wimp By DAVID BROOKS Published: January 17, 2011 NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18brooks.html?nl=todaysheadlinese mc=tha212 Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events). Moreover, the performance of a group does not correlate well with the average I.Q. of the group or even with the I.Q.'s of the smartest members. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others' emotions when they take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others' inclinations and strengths. Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together. This also presents to how home schooling can produce the socially-challenged. Be healthy, Marc Riddell Heh, All backwards, her children, hungry for safe opportunities for social interaction, will be sitting at home editing Wikipedia most evenings. Nightclubbing and ski weekends is just not going to work for them. We can look forward to substantial contributions to math and music. Fred And you consider Wikipedia, right now, to be a safe opportunity for social interaction!? Please take a closer, more-objective look, Fred. Marc Everything is relative, compared to a Rainbow Gathering Wikipedia is a piece of cake. We have more than our share of people without social skills, at least when they start editing. That is part of what the internet is about. Not that there are not people who will NOT be socialized; some notable Wikipedians fall into that category. 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] Long-term searchability of the internet
On 18 January 2011 10:56, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: On 17/01/2011 15:30, Tony Sidaway wrote: I suppose my problem here is understanding how the discussion goes fromthe useful part of the web is expanding faster than we can keep up tothere is a problem with this. I believe the mission statement approach to WP would necessarily find troubles with this phenomenon. Of course we can take the sum of all knowledge (online and offline) with a pinch of salt; that's what mission statements are for. But notice that the built-in inclusionism of addressing the issue that way has the practical effect of forcing us to build up expertise and criteria. CSD and notability guidelines are there to solve (for example) the issue of garage bands with a MySpace page aren't necessarily encyclopedic, but not that issue alone. Across broad areas some sifting goes on. Well, I think you answered the implicit question: naive mission statements involving terms like sum of all knowledge aren't of much practical use. On deep and semantic web, these are useful concepts that will help us to develop more capable data mining tools, but not essential for our task at hand, which is to present a particular subset of structured, organized human knowledge. We must look both at the blue sky research approach, and the pragmatic business of presenting a properly edited and categorised piece of hypertext to the world, in real time. If we treat the mining options as essentially irrelevant, we are planning our own obsolescence. No complaints there. We can continue writing an old fashioned encyclopedia or (one day) become more semantically oriented, or whatever else comes along. My issue with the semantic option as it stands at present is that it's incompatible with our current goal. It would be fine to write a search engine to wander off and aggregate all cricket statistics to produce the ultimate cricket encyclopedia, but we can't do that without a reliable free source. The free semantic infrastructure doesn't exist, and that's even before we work out how we assess the reliability of the information from various sources. It's neither essential for the task in hand, nor is it clear to me that it will ever be something this project can do. Perhaps in ten years time my qualms will appear laughable but for now the semantic web hasn't yet encountered its equivalent of the Codd revolution that has made modern databases such a doddle, and we're talking about much more ambitious processes than those described by relational calculus. Knowledge is social. We evaluate data as part of a collaboration (Wikipedia merely provides a framework for exploiting this universal human activity). It is unavoidable and irreducible. There is nowhere online a hidden trove of knowledge that we can use without first exposing it to evaluation. And we already have far more potentially useful data than we can ever evaluate so it's a bit pointless worrying about the invisible net in general. Better to use top down methods to identify likely sources (some of which are currently invisible). Well, I agree with the last part, since it fits in with my approach as of today. WP can still usefully gobble down existing old reference material, and if that is done by making it visible on Wikisource on the way, so much the better. Given the reactions of others to this concept, I think you'd be wise to admit that evaluation is pluralistic in nature. Pluralistic as in social, or pluralistic as in multi-faceted? Either way, no argument there. ___ 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] The WP Challenge: Healthy Collaboration
Which is one of the main reasons I (also slightly biased as per my background in education) am a huge advocate in public education. It's not just learning stuff (or having stuff crammed into your head a la Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'), but a critical part is also learning how to interact and socialize with other people who are not necessarily your family. -MuZemike On 1/18/2011 1:27 PM, Fred Bauder wrote: on 1/18/11 2:10 PM, Fred Bauder at fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: The importance to the individual of collaborating within a group. And the importance to the group in recognizing, and nurturing, the individual. From: Amy Chua Is a Wimp By DAVID BROOKS Published: January 17, 2011 NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18brooks.html?nl=todaysheadlinese mc=tha212 Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events). Moreover, the performance of a group does not correlate well with the average I.Q. of the group or even with the I.Q.'s of the smartest members. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others' emotions ‹ when they take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others' inclinations and strengths. Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together. This also presents to how home schooling can produce the socially-challenged. Be healthy, Marc Riddell Heh, All backwards, her children, hungry for safe opportunities for social interaction, will be sitting at home editing Wikipedia most evenings. Nightclubbing and ski weekends is just not going to work for them. We can look forward to substantial contributions to math and music. Fred And you consider Wikipedia, right now, to be a safe opportunity for social interaction!? Please take a closer, more-objective look, Fred. Marc Everything is relative, compared to a Rainbow Gathering Wikipedia is a piece of cake. We have more than our share of people without social skills, at least when they start editing. That is part of what the internet is about. Not that there are not people who will NOT be socialized; some notable Wikipedians fall into that category. 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
