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mik3capBig subject, but I'm feeling thoughtful this morning. I posted this comment in a ZDNet blog article about "Making Wikipedia Better":
http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2005/12/the_probabilist.html
"True objectivity" is unachievable. And if you believe that the authoritative editors of Scientific American or Nature or any other lettered academic journal do not have emotional investment in what they edit, you are mistaken. No process will ever completely eliminate bias or create total "objective" accuracy, but the problem of precision is what is best addressed by the Wikipedia model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy
In other words - if 95% of the world really believes that the world is flat, that bias is going to be reflected in the Flat World Wikipedia article. But it's what 95% of the world believes anyway, so it's essentially the consensual reality that everyone agrees upon, right or wrong (objectively).
However, the observations of 700,000 editors and authors who are vested in the Flat World article will create an emergent system that portrays a precise statistical normalization of those 700,000 views and gets continuously edited until either observations change or consensual reality shifts.
What Wikipedia is, is a conversation. It's not a book - it's a continuous cycle of information improvement through constant communication.
In expanding on this further - why wouldn't it be possible for us to start measuring bias and observation itself if we start tracking such things in Wikipedia articles? Why can't we take the mean of all edits on a group of articles and produce an actual graph of belief and bias? For example, imagine all articles on evolution, creationism, ID, and what have you were compared, and the 100,000 authors that worked on those were mapped; as the population of authors and editors increases, doesn't that mean that the actual state of the world's view of evolution gets more and more accurately represented?
Imagine what we could do if everyone in the world participated in the conversation - because articles aren't articles, they're thoughts and beliefs. They're atomic snapshots of the state of a mind; when someone edits, that means they're keeping what they agree with and changing what they don't agree with, so their edit is their state of mind on a particular topic.
http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2005/12/the_probabilist.html
"True objectivity" is unachievable. And if you believe that the authoritative editors of Scientific American or Nature or any other lettered academic journal do not have emotional investment in what they edit, you are mistaken. No process will ever completely eliminate bias or create total "objective" accuracy, but the problem of precision is what is best addressed by the Wikipedia model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy
In other words - if 95% of the world really believes that the world is flat, that bias is going to be reflected in the Flat World Wikipedia article. But it's what 95% of the world believes anyway, so it's essentially the consensual reality that everyone agrees upon, right or wrong (objectively).
However, the observations of 700,000 editors and authors who are vested in the Flat World article will create an emergent system that portrays a precise statistical normalization of those 700,000 views and gets continuously edited until either observations change or consensual reality shifts.
What Wikipedia is, is a conversation. It's not a book - it's a continuous cycle of information improvement through constant communication.
In expanding on this further - why wouldn't it be possible for us to start measuring bias and observation itself if we start tracking such things in Wikipedia articles? Why can't we take the mean of all edits on a group of articles and produce an actual graph of belief and bias? For example, imagine all articles on evolution, creationism, ID, and what have you were compared, and the 100,000 authors that worked on those were mapped; as the population of authors and editors increases, doesn't that mean that the actual state of the world's view of evolution gets more and more accurately represented?
Imagine what we could do if everyone in the world participated in the conversation - because articles aren't articles, they're thoughts and beliefs. They're atomic snapshots of the state of a mind; when someone edits, that means they're keeping what they agree with and changing what they don't agree with, so their edit is their state of mind on a particular topic.