Let's you and him fight.

[reddragdiva]

Wikipedia a force for good? Nonsense, says a co-founder: "The founder of the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia criticised the Education Secretary yesterday for suggesting that the website could be a good educational tool for children."

(Larry Sanger says on his blog that this was the media going "let's you and him fight" with an out of context quote. He meant our governance is broken ... which a fair few Wikipedians agree on.)

I got calls from the BBC and the Press Association. I didn't play up to the "let's you and him fight," but did note that:

• Citizendium is more free content and therefore a good thing (per the WMF's mission, no less) as it helps validate the model and open content in general.
• They've got a good community and seem to have started well.
• There's certainly got to be more than one way to do this.
• Wikipedia is not "reliable", and the best way to use Wikipedia in schools is for the teacher to teach the kids critical reading. Wikipedia is good if you think. Same for Citizendium, Britannica, autobiographies, blogs and newspapers.

The BBC wanted a telly piece, so I went to the Borders in Oxford Circus, and Borders kindly let the BBC film there. The interviewer, Rory Cellan-Jones, asked me the same question about reliability three or four times until I got it down to a nice soundbite.

They filmed a few walking-around bits in the reference section. Oddly enough, Borders don't sell printed encyclopedias any more. We decided the Oxford dictionaries would be suitable (I mentioned how the OED used a model like ours starting 150 years ago — volunteer contributions).

This should be on BBC1 six o'clock news this evening. Probably a seven- to ten-second clip of me. That took an hour to make. Maybe I might actually not end up cut this time.

Edit: And a call just now from Andrea from Computeractive. I've got it down to two minutes now, each sentence repeated twice.

Edit 2: 15 seconds of fame! About 6:22pm. RealVideo stream. My head is way too shiny.

Comments

[seahorsemystic.livejournal.com]

ooooh I wish I could see it here.

We just had that conversation here, in the university, about Wikipedia and critical reading. I like the idea of it, and I use it from time to time, but I also know that not all the information is factual. You have to be able to read between the lines, for sure.

[ksta.livejournal.com]

hurrah! I shall defo be watching that, at work, clearly.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

You might be able to view it on the BBC website (http://news.bbc.co.uk) - the main news programs, including the 6pm news, get streamed online. You can view it using RealPlayer or QuickTime.

[reddragdiva]

These may or may not say "you are not British you pirate scum you."

[poggs.livejournal.com]

ssh's to home, port-forwards local port 8080 to TiVo
*records*

[reddragdiva]

If it is used, I'd love a clip of the segment please kthx mate.

[seahorsemystic.livejournal.com]

fantastic! Thank you.

[reddragdiva]

The thing about Wikipedia is you have a 24/7 view inside the sausage factory. It should bring you to an awareness that most other stuff is written about as well. It's like the unsupported Firefox versus the Microsoft-backed IE.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Ooh, you're 'im off the telly.

[reddragdiva]

We shall see!

[reddragdiva]

I SO IS.

[reddragdiva]

The segment was about 6:21pm-6:23pm. An MPEG would be most welcome please!

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Video is up on the BBC now - here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/player/nol/newsid_6540000/newsid_6546600?redirect=6546613.stm&news=1&bbwm=1&nbwm=1&bbram=1&nbram=1).

[seahorsemystic.livejournal.com]

Watching it now. Thank you for sending the link.

[kittylyst.livejournal.com]

I didn't realise you had a co-founder.

[reddragdiva]

Neither did Jimbo until Larry started touting himself as one, and more so in all Citizendium promotion.

[hiddenpaw.livejournal.com]

I really liked your quote about teaching students to check thier sources. As a fundimentalist agnostic I think it's an aproach that shoud be applied to just about any single source of infomation the Encyclopedia britanica included (I've never read the britanica, does it give it's sources?). After all I am sure they are not right about everything they print and there are conflicting theories about so many things these days.

It would make a good lesson for children to be set a Wikipedia articl by thier teachers to read and research and report back on it's credibility.

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

Citizendium has actually launched now? Wow.

Grats on your 15 secs of fame. The radical in me thinks that if I'm being praised by blairite ministers I must be doing something wrong..

"Concerned about the website’s integrity, Mr Sanger left Wikipedia" - err - so unconnected to him not being paid?

"Nick Gibb, the Tory schools spokesman, said: “A huge amount of the current curriculum, particularly in history, is devoted to teaching children to be discerning when it comes to information on the internet."

“It appears the Secretary of State is not quite as modern as he needs to be in this information age.”

We, of course, agree with teaching people critical thinking. Why politicians do may be another issue entirely..

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

He's a former employee. There was no money to keep paying him - rather than work for free (like everyone else) he left.

[ruthi.livejournal.com]

I saw you on television on the internet.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Not a bad piece, but I can't shake the suspicion that the Beeb had decided the agenda and, at best, the actual news sources had some choice over the wording.

Which is exactly what you expect from the archetypal 'top-down' media channel. Broadcast media really isn't interactive, participatory, or peer-reviewed - the antithesis of a wiki, and I think the only reason they are covering Wikipedia at all is that the journalists themselves use it constantly..

Meanwhile, I am intrigued by the notion that schoolchildren are being taught critical reading and cross-checking earlier and earlier. I was taught on the 'Textbook-as-God' model without the slightest latitude until way, way into sixth form.

Even then, I recall that only one subject encouraged critical reading: a little over two decades ago, so much of basic biology was still debatable that even a high-school curriculum encountered areas that had to be taught by presenting differing views of conflicting evidence. That's probably no longer true in any subject at the level of enquiry required for a general education before university - not in terms of settled and accepted scientific theory - but it is far more necessary in these times of 'spun' news and the systematic distortion of scientific evidence by lobby groups.

Which makes it all the more intriguing when you think that a government who are presented as being control-freaks are doing something so dangerously democratic.

[pfctdayelise.livejournal.com]

noice one!

[brindabelladawn.livejournal.com]

Sanger can hardly talk; Citizendum is a far *less* reliable resource than Wikipedia. Not only does it hardly have any content, but the content they have is crap - it's on about the same level as Conservapedia, despite the latter being a joke and having existed for only a third of the time.

[kittylyst.livejournal.com]

So remind me.

Of course, both of you were there.

Personally, I wasn't.

I have no idea what the story was.

I'm coming to this story late in the game.

Apparently it seems that there are any number of Verifiable documents which support either position.

I wasn't there. I don't know which were correct or not.

But it just seems a bit suspicious that you guys all tend to cluster around the ones Jimbo has endorsed.

Kind of without critical thought.

[reddragdiva]

I cannot tell a lie. Xenu's mind control rays make me say so.

Larry Sanger was highly involved in it, taking pretty much a senior editor role (except without the power to say "that's not going in.") "Co-founder" is pushing it really hard and appears mostly to be for publicising Citizendium. Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.

[kittylyst.livejournal.com]

But Jimbo seems to be actively trying to influence what Wikipedia says about this entire subject - on no good Verifiable basis other than his say-so.

Given that I know people (and if you think about it, so do you) who are eye-witnesses to the summary deletion of entire pages + history + idea that they ever existed - based upon what we can only assume was the request of the UK Govt, this is hardly a basis for a decent free 'pedia, is it?

[reddragdiva]

I have literally no idea what you're on about, particularly the UK Government getting pages deleted. Please email me directly if you feel you can't speak other than obliquely in a comment.