One of the big advantages of Firefox over IE is a search tool that lets me plug a search-phrase into "Wiki+Google" and get the best of both worlds.

But, yeah, sometimes it's like drinking from the fire hose.

What a cynical attitude. That's like saying the NYC library has three times as much useless info as a small library for you to sift through.

The problem with Wikipedia is that there is no REAL authority over the information on it. They have changed this so that some topics cannot be edited and are starting to come up with a editorial review board.

Good heavens! Of course I thought of the library counter-example -- that's where the publishing discussion came from. The point is that much of the material catalogued by engines like Google is, well, crap.

A good example is that if I want to learn about Kevin Trudeau's snake-oil empire, a satire that I wrote and posted here is in the top 30 hits for his name! It's just absurd -- my unedited crap is that high on the list!

And I'm not saying that Wiki is the end-all be-all solution here -- it's just amusing to me that it's about the best that we've got on the 'net, yet it represents a return to a tried-and-true structure rather than an advance in form.

The move, as I see it, is a glimmer of recognition that authority matters on many weighty topics. That's a healthy reality check, not cynicism.

Brian.

This is a lovely, elegant essay, just the sort that its author suggests I shouldn't be able to find on the Internet. But find it I did -- at blogcritics.

"On the other hand, if I wanted to write an Internet article about sandpaper, I'd write it, format it as a web page, and upload it to a server on which I purchase space.

"It could be that my Internet article about sandpaper was the most intriguing sandpaper exposé ever written. But who would know? Even if it was well written, no one would have cross-checked my facts or evaluated the structure of my arguments. There would be no consensus about the quality and accuracy of my Internet article."

You are romanticizing the pre-Net world. Had you written the same article for a daily newspaper, it would not have been fact-checked. Had you written it for a slick magazine, it might have. But what if you were a brilliant scholar of sandpaper in the pre-Net world, but had no editorial connections? Who would know? Your work might never be published. Or you might have pitched it to a "respectable" media organization or publisher, only to have it stolen, and published under someone else's name. Thus did H.G. Wells steal Florence Deeks' History of the World ms. via his publisher, Macmillan & Co., and although the cases are hardly equal, the New York Times once stole an article idea from me, assigned it to one of its top writers, and published his version as a Magazine cover story. With the Internet, I don't waste my time pitching to organizations like the Times. I just post my finished article.

You also speak of consensus, but consensus is irrelevant; it's truth that's important. Liars can arrive at a consensus; they do it all the time.

Speaking of liars, let's take the argument yet another step, to academia. You talk about peer review. Peer review is only as good as the peers doing the reviewing. In the natural sciences, academic peer review may be of value, but in the humanities, social sciences, and hate sciences, it's a joke. The fact that a tenured professor gets an article or book published, is no reason not to take her/his/its research with a grain of salt. Academic hoaxes are today produced assembly-line style.

"That's just about where we stand with the 16 million pages that mention dinosaurs. Very little edit / review /oversight. Maybe incomplete sentences. Or speling mistook."

"It's not an Earth-shattering case that I'm proposing here: there's little question that the Internet sacrifices quantity for quality, and leaves us, hungry knowledge consumers, with little capacity to sift through the rubble to find the edible crumbs."

The Internet has nothing to do with our "capacity to sift through the rubble ..." The more time you devote to a subject, the quicker you will be able to sift through the rubble. And until you've devoted a good deal of time to a subject, you'll have no idea whether the information you're being given is true.

Kids attending universities today are no better off. Professors are supposed to have gone through a process that will weed out lazy, dishonest scholars, but today, things tend to go in the opposite direction -- the tenure process weeds out anyone who isn't a liar.

How does one weed out google entries? I don't know how one does it for sandpaper, but when I needed to know whom it was that H.G. Wells plagiarized, I googled under "H.G. Wells" and then under "plagiarism." Voila!

How does one determine the quality of entries? I'm glad you asked. With time, one figures out that certain sites or individuals are more reliable than others. And with the Internet, one can often make that determination more rapidly than one could with scholars. For instance, if I am doing research on crime, I expect an author publishing on the Web to provide links to such resources as the FBI's uniform crime reports. If he doesn't, immediately loses credibility. By contrast, when Sandra Stotsky wrote Losing Our Language, she was confronted by hundreds of articles by tenured education "scholars" such as Carl Grant that claimed to be based on years of "research." Stotsky had to spend years in libraries digging through education journals, in order to determine that the "research" didn't exist. Had the journals been on line, she could have done her research in a fraction as much time.

As for encyclopedias, the only one I own is the Encyclopedia of New York City. It looks great. It was edited by Columbia University's Kenneth Jackson. It is based on consensus. And yet, many of the articles it contains are dishonest, and there are crucial elements of NYC history that are simply not told (e.g., the rise of institutionalized black racism). Jackson hired people who shared his politics.

Ultimately, there are no authorities. One must figure things out for oneself.

"there's little question that the Internet sacrifices quantity for quality"

You have that reversed, I believe...

Just as Google's extensive indexing can give you three times more useless information, it can also gives you three times more *useful* information.

I use Google as a one of many research tools in my job, and the kind of information I'm looking for simply cannot be found in Wikipedia nor is it ever likely to be found there.

Instead I have trawl through company annual reports, local news, country gazzeteers, industry papers, academic papers, press releases and the millions of public domain listings out there on the web.

As an analyst, I have to be careful when taking any 'facts' at face value. A company statement could often be treated with just as much scepticism as a blog post!

I find myself wading through Google listings on a daily basis, but I go back to Google because the other search engines consistently fail to deliver the same amount of *useful* information.

A user who knows the key words they're looking for and has a rudimentary knowledge of how the search engine works, can always filter out most of the extraneous pages when presented with 16 million returns.

> How does one determine the quality of entries? I'm glad you asked. With time, one figures out that certain sites or individuals are more reliable than others.

Or blog entries for that matter.

Well, I do like Google so I went there and entered Nicholas Stix, no quotes or other qualifiers.

I didn't have to look far. Google's most relevant popped up several that are sure to be the Nicholas Stix that's posting here.

I noticed a pattern that would fit Mr. Stix's criterion of "figure[ing] out that certain sites or individuals are more reliable than others." It has less to do with objective reality than who's doing the 'figuring'.

Mr. Stix's essays appeal to those with a certain preconceived notion of the world. Those that have these notions will have them reinforced. They are full of wild allegations that like other people of his ilk never make an objective verifiable reference.

So it still boils down to the majority of info on the net is just crap. One can find thing one agrees with, it might make them more armed to argue such. It may make the crap smell a bit sweeter.

One still has to test one's knowledge, wherever they might get it from, against objective criterion.

There is no easy road.

Rather than shed worthwhile hours of the day on point-by-point responses:

"Ultimately, there are no authorities. One must figure things out for oneself."

This must be meant as a joke, or its author does not recognize that it is self-defeating. If there are NO authorities, then "oneself" cannot be an authority. If it is a serious statement, then it represents a relativistic position that has slipped into solipsism. There's no fighting a committed solipsist.

Brian.

Rather than shed worthwhile hours of the day on point-by-point responses:

"Ultimately, there are no authorities. One must figure things out for oneself."

This must be meant as a joke, or its author does not recognize that it is self-defeating. If there are NO authorities, then "oneself" cannot be an authority. If it is a serious statement, then it represents a relativistic position that has slipped into solipsism. There's no fighting a committed solipsist.

Brian.

The statement is not self-defeating, relativistic or solipsisitic. The has traditional meaning of authority always referred to a powerr or knowledge outside of oneself.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=authority

You also misused the term "solipsist." A common error these days. During the mid or late 1990s, the misuse of "solipsist" instead of "subjectivist" or "narcissist" was popularized by some semi-literate journalists.

Comment 8 posted by Les Slater on October 4, 2005 10:13 AM:

> How does one determine the quality of entries? I'm glad you asked. With time, one figures out that certain sites or individuals are more reliable than others.

Or blog entries for that matter.


Well, I do like Google so I went there and entered Nicholas Stix, no quotes or other qualifiers.

I didn't have to look far. Google's most relevant popped up several that are sure to be the Nicholas Stix that's posting here.

Why, if you "like" google, would you enter a name without quotation marks? Had you simply entered my name the standard way, with quotes, you would have found 38,000 entries, all but perhaps two of which would refer to me.

I noticed a pattern that would fit Mr. Stix's criterion of "figure[ing] out that certain sites or individuals are more reliable than others." It has less to do with objective reality than who's doing the 'figuring'.

Mr. Stix's essays appeal to those with a certain preconceived notion of the world. Those that have these notions will have them reinforced. They are full of wild allegations that like other people of his ilk never make an objective verifiable reference.

You're a liar. Either you never read any of my essays, or you did and lied about their content. That would explain the vague character of your smear. Few if any journalists whose work is posted on the Internet make as many references that may be objectively corroborated, or link to as many external sources, which may in turn be objectively corroborated, as I do. However, the corroborating requires a work ethic and intellectual integrity, neither of which you have. And you are the last person to be complaining about "those with a certain preconceived notion of the world." Don't tell me: You're open-minded and tolerant, but those who disagree with you are close-minded and intolerant.

P.S. I wrote the above response before I read your cowardly, dishonest race-baiting of William Bennett. And that is yet another ground for annoyance -- you put me in the position of having to defend Bennett.

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/01/145336.php

>> Mr. Stix's essays appeal to those with a certain preconceived notion of the world. Those that have these notions will have them reinforced. They are full of wild allegations that like other people of his ilk never make an objective verifiable reference.

> You're a liar. Either you never read any of my essays, or you did and lied about their content.

Below is excerpted from '911 - Four Years Later'

WEBCommentary Contributor
Author: Nicholas Stix
Date: September 11, 2005
www.webcommentary.com/asp/ShowArticle.asp?id=stixn&date=050911

In New York, briefly after the London bombings, police were checking the bags of every fifth subway rider seeking to board trains in Manhattan. (I went to Manhattan about two weeks ago, and the practice was no longer in effect.) I'm not sure they were checking the bags of young Arab men, even when they were the fifth person. All an Arab homicide bomber would have to have done to kill everyone on a subway train would be to ... look like an Arab homicide bomber. As in bearded, with a swarthy, Arabian complexion, wearing a heavy coat on a summer's day, with lots of objects creating lumps around his middle and upper body, and maybe for good measure, muttering "jihad" and "Sheik bin Laden" to himself in Arabic. The NYPD officers, trained for years in "diversity seminars" to look away from individuals who fit criminal profiles and fight off their own judgment and experience, wouldn't dare pull over someone who looked like a terrorist. That would be "racist." In such a situation, after letting the terrorist pass onto the train unmolested, an officer might search the line for the most All-American, masculine-looking white guy he could find, and mercilessly hassle him, until the explosion knocked the cop onto the ground.

Re: Comment 12 posted by Les Slater on October 5, 2005 09:09 AM

And your point would be ... exactly what? That it is intolerant to report the truth? Do you deny that since 911, law enforcement and security opersonnel hav egone out of their way to avoid searching people who meet the profile of suicide bombers, while going out of their way to harass octogenarian, non-Muslim grandmothers and Medal of Honor winners, in one case attempting to confiscate the Medal of Honor itself?

Oh, I forgot. You don't deal in facts or arguments, just innuendos, smears, and lies.

I just hope you don't present yourself to anyone anywhere as a knowledgeable, honest source of cultural information. At least when people see your posts here, they can see what you're about.

I use solipsist in the philosophical sense, not a journalistic sense. I am a philosopher after all. In philosophy, we speak of solipsism as a position that holds that only the self can be verified (that's a rough definition). The comment that the self is the only source of authority is, thus, solipsistic. Subjectivist and narcissist are quite different.

And I suspect from your comments that you did not read my original post particularly closely. I suggest that you re-read it, keeping in mind what we, in philosophy, call the "principle of charity". Really, read it slowly and you might pick up on the point.

And you might want to refrain from admonishing the use of words that you do not actually know. Bear in mind also that dictionary.com is not a particularly good source for explanations of complicated philosophical positions.

For a fascinating disucssion on solipsism (one of my favorite topics by the way), I suggest Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" and to some extent, the later remarks in his "Tractatus". It's relevant to the points that I'm making in the article.

Brian.

> That it is intolerant to report the truth? Do you deny that since 911, law enforcement and security opersonnel hav egone out of their way to avoid searching people who meet the profile of suicide bombers, while going out of their way to harass octogenarian, non-Muslim grandmothers and Medal of Honor winners, in one case attempting to confiscate the Medal of Honor itself?

Listen to yourself, you're nuts. You might be prone to hyperbole, but in this case it exposes more of you than what you're writing about.

Do you really believe the shit you're writing? Going out of their way to search out octogenarian, non-Muslim grandmothers and Medal of Honor winners? Finding a couple examples does not in any way justify such a sweeping generalization.

You know nothing, you project the sick shit you believe.