Understanding is the Essence of Intelligence

Jean Vincent

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August 07, 2008

Health coverage in Wikipedia and Knol

I just commented on knol: content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation, here are my thoughts regarding health issues in both Wikipedia and Knol.

I believe that health knowledge is too important to be left under the sole control of the pharmaceutical industry and their so-called experts. Mainstream medicine has a long history of ignorance, failures, lies, and financially-driven interests.

Most oncologists continue to deny the role of the immune system in fighting cancer thirty years after the discovery of Natural Killer (NK) cells in the 1970s. This denial prevents most oncologists from recommending better nutrition and other environmental improvements after chemotherapy that could prevent the mutation of low-stage cancers into hopelessly deadly metastatic cancers.

There are a large number of diseases uncured, some of which are frighteningly increasing in rate such as allergies and cancers. Current medical practices are failing to not only cure these but also to prevent their progression.

After all, health is still a work in progress with more open questions than definitive answers. People need to have access to all available knowledge and opinions, because health is also a matter of opinion when facing a deadly disease for which conventional medicine offers you no hope (Metastatic cancers, Alzheimer, ...).

Wikipedia Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) policy requires that all opinions be expressed as opinions and no bias towards a subset of opinions. This is going in the right direction and enables more knowledge about any subject to be represented in a single location. I don't see how Knol will ever be able to address this issue.

That said Wikipedia is far from perfect and still biased indirectly due to the pressure of notability guidelines. These guidelines require that any knowledge provided comes from so-called reliable sources, which means mainstream media, which is in turn controlled by financial interests which means advertising and in the end the pharmaceutical industry as far as health is concerned. This prevents the inclusion of knowledge and opinions coming from other cultures and experiences that are not red-stamped by the FDA or other well-founded research lobbied by the pharmaceutical industry and other financial concerns (including the billion dollars supplements industry which have been proven to have no effect in many cases). I don't understand why Wikipedia, which is a pure product of the Internet has such disregard for internet-borne content. Unless this is the result of a kind father-son complex.

I believe that all opinions need to be represented especially in the cases where definitive cures to deadly diseases do not exist. These opinions need to be clearly represented as such to enable readers to understand quickly the origin of such research, yet enabling the centralization of such knowledge and research. This could easily be stated under a specific section untitled 'Controversial Opinions'.

What also needs to be acknowledged is that new generation, internet-age, readers know that knowledge cannot be 100% trusted and that skepticism is the rule rather than the exception. They know this thanks to the widespread dissemination internet scams, spam, viruses, and other lunatic opinions now available. They also have been able to learn that so-called mainstream media is nothing more than opinions.

What is changing with the Internet is not just what is available as units of knowledge but the trust that people now put in all past, present and future knowledge. The result is higher scrutiny and better ability to make personal choices. Both Knol and Wikipedia need to understand this or the void will be filled by new venue.

Other Wikipedia-related posts:
Who are the customers of Wikipedia?
Where do people find the time to contribute to Wikipedia and Open-Source?

Comments [0]


July 26, 2008

Where do people find the time to contribute to Wikipedia and Open-Source?

"No one who works in TV gets to ask this question", says Clay Shirky in his brilliant speech at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo.

According to Clay, the time comes from the Cognitive Surplus TV has been masking for 50 years and Wikipedia would represent about a 100 million hours of thought while TV watching is 200 billion hours in the US alone every year, or 2,000 wikipedia projects wasted every year watching television, or one Wikipedia project wasted every weekend just watching adds. Clay also teaches us that 4-year-olds now knows that a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.

The Internet revolution is just beginning and the amount of cognitive surplus put to work is growing every day world-wide. People now want to use their cognitive power to empower themselves and give new meaning to their lives rather than giving it away to adds, sitcoms or gin. This shift is redefining everything we know in unpredictable ways.

Comments [3]


July 25, 2008

Who are the customers of Wikipedia?

The Story.

I have been a big fan of Wikipedia for years, considering one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century. But over the last few years I have seen numerous contributors becoming frustrated with increasing bureaucracy and a "shoot first, ask questions later"  (quoting Rific on my talk page) attitude from overzealous administrators or should I say cops.

This morning, after I created the article about the Open Web Foundation, I was surprised that seven (yes 7) minutes later the article was already nominated for speedy deletion for an alleged, unverified, copyright violation. This despite a clear guideline in the criteria for speedy deletion stating that "Before nominating an article for speedy deletion, consider whether it could be improved, ...". No attempt was made by the administrator to check if the article could be improved as he acted mechanically over a bot indication that their MAY contain a copyright violation.

I then had to engage in a race to avoid the speedy deletion by tagging the article with a "hangon" tag, editing the article and providing proper explanation in the talk page.

Two hours later, another administrator changed the speedy deletion tag for another one, still calling for speedy deletion but for another reason. This time because the article did not "indicate the importance or significance of the subject". If this second administrator had spent less than a minute checking the relevance of the subject, they would have found lots of reliable sources. Therefore this second nomination was also violating Wikipedia guidelines.

Finally after other edits from myself and another generous contributor who added some references, a third administrator accepted to remove the speedy deletion tag entirely.

My point here is that at no time did the first two administrators consider they were violating their own guidelines of considering whether the article could be improved before nominating it for speedy deletion.

During this process we have exchanged a lot of messages on the discussion page of the article instead of improving the content of the article. A big waste of time for nothing because the cops@wikipedia won't consider they could have been violating their own guidelines and nobody will blame them for that.

There are 48, and growing, different tags and policies allowing administrators to nominate an article for speedy deletion today. Chances are that if this trend continues, nobody except administrators, will be able to make an edit without risking at automatic reverse or nomination for speedy deletion.

In the end, Wikipedia administrators are both legislators, cops and judges! But they seldom are contributors to the content of Wikipedia.

 

So, Who are Wikipedia's customers?

Obviously, the readers are but without the valuable content provided by millions of generous contributors, occasional and not, there would be nothing to feed readers.
As contributors are not paid and indeed provide food for wikipedia they should also be considered customers of Wikipedia.
Therefore Wikipedia, the company here, should consider how to treat its customers properly and stop policing with over-zealous legislators, alias cops, alias judges, alias administrators.

 

What will happen if Wikipedia fails to keep encouraging contributors?

Well this will encourage contributors to consider alternative places to contribute, and possibly go check for Knol  in Google-land. This could be the beginning of the end of Wikipedia.
In the end Wikipedia could be left only with a few thousand administrators, or bot-geeks, and very few real contributors. I do not believe that administrators will contribute anything other than bots and more rules to further close Wikipedia to the average contributor.

 

Can we still consider Wikipedia 'Open'?

A few years ago Wikipedia was definitely more open, but over the years the administrators are closing it in many ways:

  • by the explosion of the number of rules, making it impossible for the average contributor that I am to not violate half a dozen rules per edit

  • using bots to automatically an inhumanly flame contributors and prevent further edits by scaring contributors out of Wikipedia

  • by not separating powers properly and creating a closed administrator club where being politically correct (read over-zealous and over-protective) is encouraged

  • by excluding administrators who would like Wikipedia to stay Open

What could Wikipedia do?

Definitely review the direction where Wikipedia is headed and find innovative ways to keep the bad guys outs while rewarding contributors and stop scaring them off.
A few guidelines:

  1.  Administrators should always consider if an article can be improved before any sort of retaliation. This requires human intelligence and excludes the use of bots to automatically tag articles, reverse changes or delete articles.

  2. Bots could still be used to help administrators make a review of an article

  3. Separate powers. There are thousands of administrators of Wikipedia, split them in exclusive groups and monitor abuses proactively. 

These are just a few suggestions and I am sure that some or all of these have already been considered but it is time to implement something to give some  freedom back to contributors.

Long live Wikipedia!

Related Posts:

Where do people find the time to contribute to Wikipedia and Open-Source?

Health coverage in Wikipedia and Knol

Comments [11]