Episode 42: The Question of Muhammad, the Wiki,and Everything
The panel returns, with Andrew Lih (Fuzheado), Andrew Phillips (Tawker), Liam Wyatt (WittyLama), and Nico Montes (The Placebo Effect).
Topics include Muhammad pictures on Wikipedia, Foundation audit and new hires, State of mailing lists, Citizendium’s license, Steward election results, and Print Encyclopedias.
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I have to disagree with Andrew’s statement that “most of the sum of human knowledge” is already on Wikipedia. As stated, it’s nonsensical, though you probably meant most of the *important* or *encyclopedic* human knowledge. Even then, I think it’s pretty far off the mark. Wikipedia suffers from a lot of recentism (exponentially more information on people and events as they get closer to the current time), and the English-language Wikipedia has a lot more information on subjects important to the English-speaking world than on others. When Wikipedia has as much information on the popular entertainers of 1407 as it does on those of 2007, then you might be able to make that claim; but at the moment there are literally millenia of human history that are covered by a few sentences or paragraphs instead of hundreds and hundreds of articles. Of course, that type of information is much less interesting to people, it’s only found in libraries if at all, and good luck finding an online reference for it. You could argue that the current Wikipedia already holds much of the information that it will hold in the future – I’d disagree with that too, but it’s a more defensible statement.
Comment by Yaron — March 6, 2008 @ 5:50 pm
Oh yeah, but otherwise, great podcast. I bet a lot of people are wondering whether you’re going to address a certain issue in the next one…
Comment by Yaron — March 6, 2008 @ 5:53 pm
Thanks, I also enjoyed the podcast.
I have to agree with Yaron here, Fuzheado. Perhaps I misunderstood you but I was really dumbfounded by your suggestion Wikipedia already has a majority of the relevant content covered. I come across what I consider to be important gaps all the time. For example, the coverage of philosophy, politics, the social sciences, and especially history is really skimpy. There’s a very large amount of important material in these disciplines with no articles at all, let alone articles approaching acceptable quality or completeness. And this has a bearing on other areas of WP as well. So for example contemporary science is well covered while the history of science is not so well covered. And as a historian Roy Rosenzweig has pointed out, the history which does exist on WP is very factualist in its orientation, whereas a majority of history as a discipline is based on not simply catalogueing discrete events but evaluation their significance in relation to one another.
Fuzheado, you make the comment that we’re approaching a point where most new content will be oriented towards keeping up with current events as time goes on. Well in some sense the same thing has to be done with the past, and that’s a huge undertaking.
Comment by Nonplusplus — March 18, 2008 @ 12:53 am