Welcome, Slashdot Readers!
So I got slashdotted. First, welcome to all of you, and thanks for reading.
I knew opining on Wikipedia would create some attention, but I didn’t quite gauge the scale of things. Anyway, some quick reactions:
1) I do know the difference between ‘mitochondria’ and ‘mitochondrial DNA’ - the NIH quote from that post is from a page entitled “mitochondrial DNA” and the point is to look at the results from a Google search of “mitochonrial DNA” - Wikipedia’s first, and NIH is fifth.
2) When you critique Wikipedia, a few things are gonna happen:
a) …the Wikipedians will come out and say: “Don’t complain - edit!” Sorry, that’s not my job. I do edit when it’s something I know about (I’ve lent a hand to entries on the Replacements, Queen Elizabeth, Petrarch, and metabolic syndrome, among others). But when I look to Wikipedia to learn about something - ie, when I use it as a reference, not as a ‘project’ - I use it to understand a topic, not to help create the resource. You wouldn’t want the ignorant likes of me editing those entries, anyway, right?
b) …mention a few pages that are written poorly, and - brilliantly - they will be improved summarily. The epigenetics page has been nicely cleaned up in the past 24 hours. It doesn’t debunk my argument, but it definitely wouldn’t be exhibit A for me any more - and yes, it does show the power of Wikipedia.
c) …people will accuse you of being ignorant, stupid, and a dumbshit. Whatever.
d) …people will say you’re trying to dumb down Wikipedia. Look, I make my life as a journalist. What we do at Wired is translate difficult topics - topics of urgency and significance but not necessarily ones that our readers would come across otherwise - so that people can understand what they are and why they matter. Whether you individually think we succeed or not, I can’t control - that’s for our readers to decide collectively. So far, they decide we do it pretty well. We’ve got 650,000 readers, two National Magazine Awards in past three years, etc etc. We are useful to many people. Same goes for Wikipedia. It is, like it or not, a filter, a tool that’s for the benefit of readers who want to know about the topics it includes. I am such a reader. I have observed that, often, it defaults to an academic and impenetrable style when, in fact, some clarity and explanation would serve those readers well.
You may be a microbiologist, or a mathemetician, or a geneticist, and you have no problem understanding these entries. Congratulations - you are officially smarter than me and many, many, many other users of Wikipedia. But Wikipedia’s not your little playground. It exists as a resource used by everyone; that is its power. Am I saying “dumb it down!”? No. Am I saying science is hard? Yes. But it’s not impossible to write clearly, nor to help the curious become the informed. With the collective resources Wikipedia has - even, at times, including myself - I think that it would be nifty if the writing could be clearer and better.
3) There are thousands (!) of new readers to this site now. Some of you will never return. But I hope some of you do, because I think what I’m trying to do here is what I’m asking of Wikipedia - trying to make sense of some very important trends in science and health and medicine, and trying to help a broader base of people understand them. It’s great that there are scientists out there working on important things - genetics, biology, on and on. But I believe the true, full potential of these disciplines and their research lies in helping the broadest number of people understand it and appreciate it (indeed, if it’s research funded in part by the government, it’s incumbent on those scientists to help those citizen-patrons understand it).
So check back in. You may not agree with everything here. And it’s not going to be definitive. But at least it may be from time to time- as it already seems to be today - a bit provocative.
May 12th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
[…] …more […]
May 12th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
You need to accept that it is best to start with accuracy and then add ‘ease of use
into a reference, than to start with easy to comprehend inaccuracy…
May 13th, 2007 at 2:54 am
So your little project here is turning out to be a bigger thing than you probably anticipated. I think we should introduce swear words like dumbshit into our writing. It would certainly draw more attention. heheee OK. Now somebody’s going to flame me. RUN!!
May 13th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Fine, but you are wrong when you say that it’s not your job, and when you claim with pride that you only edit the things about which you are knowledgeable… As you explain at length, you are a journalist - so who could be better qualified to help in clarifying those passages that are obscure for the layman? The job of a scientist is to research and write what is correct, and scientists like myself are often not the best communicators - it’s not on that basis that we get hired.
The examples that you cited were not really cases of “too difficult”, but they certainly cases of bad style - the typical WP style that results from overlapping edits. Been there, done that
May 13th, 2007 at 11:48 am
You identified a problem, the topics you mentioned were summarilly solved, and in the end, everything came out better than it was. Brilliantly done, I say.
May 13th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Two comments:
You are partially right: articles should be legible AND corect, and I don’t want to correct things I am looking up. However, the problem with your article is that it is written in a very flammable style often used by Wikipedia detractors. You have a good point, but you can also put it this way: it’s better to start with something and then get it polished, than try to get something perfect the first time;
Second comment is to Sergio, we scientists ARE hired on the basis of our writing, although indirectly. Unless you are an obscure nutty genius that gets hired despite being unable to utter a full sentence to another human being, the impact of your research is strongly tied to your strengths as a communicator. A large (large) part of the job is to convince other people that you are doing interesting stuff (getting funded) and that what you did is relevant for others to follow up (citations). Without those two…well you are nobody. Oh, and don’t forget that being a decent communicator might be useful for those darn teaching duties…
May 14th, 2007 at 2:17 am
really i love your blog
May 15th, 2007 at 11:35 am
A criticism I made earlier, which you did not list above, is that you misquoted wikipedia by leaving out the links, and all mention of its hypertextuality. By just following a few of the links, you could learn a lot about the background. As projects like wikibooks & opencourseware develop, you will have even more background, but I think someone of your level would have few complaints with wikipedia. if you acknowledged its full structure & changed your usage habits.
You have a good point about the epigenetics article being cleaned up `in real time’. Heh - but wikipedia even links to the history of edits! Shame on any of your critics for not doing this research.