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dhex
Joined: 17 Jan 2007
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 Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 7:54 pm |
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| the folks at illegal art sometimes snort too much adbusters and forget that a parody is a parody and not really the most powerful weapon earth has ever known. |
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Value Illage
Joined: 07 Dec 2006
Location: Toronto
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| Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 10:17 pm |
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Just another damaged elitist, trying to nanny the proles. His argument is about an ounce of piss into the sea, anyway-- one humpty ex-Brit writing a book isn't enough to get God and King back on the internet.
Someone should show him 4chan. He'd lose his fucking mind. |
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Jeff Garneau
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 5:48 am |
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| 4chan is pretty much proof of his argument |
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Value Illage
Joined: 07 Dec 2006
Location: Toronto
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| Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 4:22 pm |
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Were 4chan the entire internet, it'd be proof of his argument. As it is, a small percentage of total creeps can be found in any society and in any media.
Where goes man, always shall there be 4chan. |
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dhex
Joined: 17 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 12:15 am |
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| it just raises the obvious potential that as millions network, stupidity can be passed as easily as useful information. |
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Jeff Garneau
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 4:07 am |
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| 4chan is really lame and i'm sorry that you don't understand why but maybe you should try hanging out with cooler/funnier/smarter people. |
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 4:09 am |
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| dhex wrote: |
| it just raises the obvious potential that as millions network, stupidity can be passed as easily as useful information. |
As opposed to leaving the masses unenlightened in the first place. How many people would've bothered going out of their way to learn "proper" things that tend to be taught in a linear, impersonal manner? Instead we give them a more self-directed and active form of learning. It is a very unofficial, experiential learning, as opposed to a guided and professional education.
Professional education, of course, takes professionalism, and professionals tend to seek compensation for their efforts. Thus Ye Olde Encyclopaedia Britannica wants your fiat, whereas wikipedia (which is nearly as good, but not quite as professional) is a progressive labor of love which is given for free.
Did you know that the entry for Kingdom Hearts has 69 references as of this writing? The intelligentsia's backlash against the observed lack of professionalism has caused the masses to take their game up a notch. Whether such a comprehensive entry on Kingdom Hearts is really useful to the world in itself is debatable, however, its contributors are now acting with more professionalism than before.
The net effect is that the 'democratization' of the web is making a boiler-room of agitation and evolution for the people who had no voice at all in the past.
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BotageL
pretty anime princess
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: *fidget*
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 4:09 am |
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| Jeff Garneau wrote: |
| 4chan is really lame and i'm sorry that you don't understand why but maybe you should try hanging out with cooler/funnier/smarter people. |
Because obviously "Yeah, but 4chan isn't the entire Internet" means the same thing as "4chan is not lame."
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Jeff Garneau
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 4:12 am |
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| hmm in retrospect it is difficult to tell if this guy is an apologist or not if not i retract my statement then |
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dhex
Joined: 17 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 5:56 am |
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| Quote: |
| The net effect is that the 'democratization' of the web is making a boiler-room of agitation and evolution for the people who had no voice at all in the past. |
and thusly we get 69 references for kingdom hearts.
edit: i hate to use something as predictable as "cargo cult science" but that's what 69 references for kingdom hearts is. have you seen the refs? having lots of references doesn't make a resource useful or particularly professional.
wikipedia is a great resource for entertainment. or if i need to explain terms like "ethnography" it's an encyclopedia anyone can reach. very convenient. but not very trustworthy. |
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 6:31 am |
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If a person is interested in Kingdom Hearts, then the 69 references may be useful. It is relative to the individual's interests.
If the professionals claim that they are better in part because they are well-referenced, then being well-referenced may be considered an act of professionalism. It is relative to the individual's definition of professionalism.
As for trustworthiness? Most institutions that matter will give shitstain grades to anyone who trusts any encyclopedia enough to use it as a reference by itself. At a certain point, then, there is a concession that no encyclopedia is fully trustworthy, that they are merely regurgitations of other people's research. Trusting any encyclopedia would be, indeed, Cargo Cult Science.
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slipstream
hates LOTR films
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 8:45 am |
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| dhex wrote: |
| the folks at illegal art sometimes snort too much adbusters and forget that a parody is a parody and not really the most powerful weapon earth has ever known. |
could you imagine what people shooting up reason.com would produce?
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dhex
Joined: 17 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 5:07 pm |
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| Quote: |
| If the professionals claim that they are better in part because they are well-referenced, then being well-referenced may be considered an act of professionalism. It is relative to the individual's definition of professionalism. |
and the cargo cult part of this jibe is that the kingdom hearts writer(s) seem to think that many references = good referencing. which is fine for wikipedia, but that's not exactly saying a lot.
but i don't think its elitist to say that sometimes there are people who are experts and there are those who are not, and an encyclopedia made up of 50,000 non-experts may indeed be less valuable than one written by 1000 experts in various fields.
this may be crazy talk in the web 2.0 era, but 15 minutes of myspace or livejournal is a cheap, if effective, way of making the same point. (or the unabomber's point for that matter)
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| Trusting any encyclopedia would be, indeed, Cargo Cult Science. |
that's not what the term means.
http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html
and so:
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| I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. |
trust is a continuum, to be sure. that's got fuckall to do with with the original author's (somewhat misguided, somewhat real) fear of passion being a replacement for intelligence and research.
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| could you imagine what people shooting up reason.com would produce? |
that's already been answered:
he did a real good job on bill moyer's pbs joint a few weeks back, actually. and npr loves him to death despite not being able to see the sideburns/jacket combo. (pow pow) |
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v84j3gs2uc7ns4
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 7:50 pm |
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 8:56 pm |
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| dhex wrote: |
| and the cargo cult part of this jibe is that the kingdom hearts writer(s) seem to think that many references = good referencing. which is fine for wikipedia, but that's not exactly saying a lot. |
And does Britannica have any information at all on Kingdom Hearts? When searched, the only relevant results are Google Ads. So "not exactly saying a lot" is the difference between absolutely zero information and lots of referenced information.
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| but i don't think its elitist to say that sometimes there are people who are experts and there are those who are not, and an encyclopedia made up of 50,000 non-experts may indeed be less valuable than one written by 1000 experts in various fields. |
That, uh, point has never been disputed. My point is that the experts (or "professionals" as I've referred to them) want money for their work, while at the same time not covering all of the subjects that a common person might be interested in.
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| this may be crazy talk in the web 2.0 era, but 15 minutes of myspace or livejournal is a cheap, if effective, way of making the same point. (or the unabomber's point for that matter) |
And these are people who likely would never have paid for a Britannica subscription in the first place.
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| Trusting any encyclopedia would be, indeed, Cargo Cult Science. |
that's not what the term means. |
Eh? If I take a few isolated pieces of another civilization -- runways, parachute cloth, rations -- and crudely arrange or emulate those things, it is foolish for me to assume that I will be on the level of that civilization, or that they will have a reason to come back to me. Likewise, if I wrote a research paper which depended solely on research conducted by cracking open a dictionary, I should not expect to be competent in that subject or worthy of earning a degree in it.
That fits my definition of Cargo Cult Science.
I do see your original point, in that the zeal of making 69 references does not necessarily mean that the work is professional. Once again, though, it drills into definitions of professionalism:
If a Kingdom Hearts reference includes lines from the game, how is that different from a Holy Bible reference which includes lines from the book? If a reference to Gamespot says something about the development of Kingdom Hearts which may or may not be correct, then how is that different from a reference to one of the Popes saying something about the mother Mary that may or may not be correct?
(Aside from the elitist perspective of, "WELL THE HOLY BIBLE IS IMPORTANT AND NOBODY SHOULD CARE ABOUT KINGDOM HEARTS.")
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| trust is a continuum, to be sure. that's got fuckall to do with with the original author's (somewhat misguided, somewhat real) fear of passion being a replacement for intelligence and research. |
And that, in the end, goes back to one of my original points in earlier posts: It's a little thing we call 'progress'.
Where the earliest entries for Kingdom Hearts may have been founded on passion with no research at all, the contributors have now been challenged to put that passion into research. And, indeed, 69 references of buckshot research take some passion to put together. Is it as good as Britannica?
No.
It's better.
Britannica doesn't have any information on the game at all.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 9:18 pm |
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I think it's worth noting an oft-inconsidered fact: that Wikipedia and Britannica? Both exist. Yeah.
If one were threatening the existence of the other, then there might be cause for argument. As it is, they are complementary resources which have their own strengths and weaknesses. Use each for its strengths; avoid indulging its weaknesses. Problem solved.
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Let's Play, starring me. |
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 9:28 pm |
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The stuffy elitist academics tend to say that we should all have the sense to support the important and professional endeavors of the likes of Britannica, rather than waste our precious time on this earth with whatever it is that we expend our time and effort on.
If there is only so much time in a day, and the human attention span only lasts for so long, then clearly we should direct people toward things that matter to the intelligentsia, rather than let them decide for themselves.
Which is a special topic unto itself. And again, most of the myspace kids were never going to buy a subscription to Britannica in the first place, whether wiki exists or not.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 10:09 pm |
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I mean, yeah, but the self-described Wikipedians are the same in their crusade against the stuffy elitist establishment, which, even if it is stifling, got to be that way for a reason, that being that it's pretty useful for a lot of things.
Point is, neither kind of absolutism is necessary, or helpful.
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Let's Play, starring me. |
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slipstream
hates LOTR films
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 11:00 pm |
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| CubaLibre wrote: |
I think it's worth noting an oft-inconsidered fact: that Wikipedia and Britannica? Both exist. Yeah.
If one were threatening the existence of the other, then there might be cause for argument. As it is, they are complementary resources which have their own strengths and weaknesses. Use each for its strengths; avoid indulging its weaknesses. Problem solved. |
I wouldn't be so sure Wikipedia isn't threatening the existence of Britannica. Heck, Britannica was already threatened by weak competitors like Encarta. |
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parkbench
Joined: 12 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 1:33 am |
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| If one were threatening the existence of the other, then there might be cause for argument. As it is, they are complementary resources which have their own strengths and weaknesses. Use each for its strengths; avoid indulging its weaknesses. Problem solved. |
No, they don't "both exist." When's the last time you picked up an encyclopedia over going to wikipedia? I'm pretty sure one is gaining almost every day.
I won't deny the flaws in Wikipedia, but it gets such a bad rap for all its theoretical shortcomings. Show me the article that says George Bush is an alien and I'll agree with you. Otherwise, it's pretty solid.
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v84j3gs2uc7ns4
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 2:22 am |
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 2:46 am |
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Simon Belmont, do you edit under:
A) An anonymous IP
B) A user with no userpage (their names appear red so they are identified as newbies)
Wikipedia editors are biased towards reverting anything even slightly suspicious from these, because well, I've patrolled Recent Changes a few times myself and it quickly becomes obvious that edits from them are 75% bad.
So, here is how to become a member of the "elite": create an account with a minimal userpage, learn the wiki markup syntax so you look like you know the ropes, and speak in the bland formal Wikipedia tone. Wikipedia is too big for anybody to know everyone by name, and there are no real factions most of the time; there are just the three main categories of anons, regular users and admins. Factions and edit wars tend to form only on certain limited and predictable controversial topics; avoid them and you'll feel better about Wikipedia.
Generally you can project the impression that you are a regular user and nobody will bother to look at your edit history to see you are a newbie. I guarantee that, on noncontroversial topics, you will almost never be reverted even if you don't bother to source. |
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 3:15 am |
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| parkbench wrote: |
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| If one were threatening the existence of the other, then there might be cause for argument. As it is, they are complementary resources which have their own strengths and weaknesses. Use each for its strengths; avoid indulging its weaknesses. Problem solved. |
No, they don't "both exist." When's the last time you picked up an encyclopedia over going to wikipedia? I'm pretty sure one is gaining almost every day.
I won't deny the flaws in Wikipedia, but it gets such a bad rap for all its theoretical shortcomings. Show me the article that says George Bush is an alien and I'll agree with you. Otherwise, it's pretty solid. |
I mean, yes. Yes, they do both exist. I mean, yeah.
When's the last time I walked over and picked up an encyclopedia? In high school, when I had to do a research paper. When's the next time I will? In law school, when I have to do a research paper. I look at Wikipedia all the time, because my entire professional reputation doesn't depend on whether the information I'm idly looking up on carbuerators or whatever is completely correct.
Like I said, different strengths, different uses.
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Let's Play, starring me. |
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