I absolutely would go back to Britannica. A stable reference is essential if one wants to coherently understand the world.
It's a thing, yes, to faff on, as undergrads and weak grad student TAs do, about there being "information in the way that narratives about an event/person/place/etc change over time" but the fact is, those changes happen out of sight and are not accessible to almost anyone for analysis, and besides: that's a sleight of hand that switches the focus from "what happened" to "what are people shouting loudest about what happened". It's a twitterfied degradation of our collective cognitive grasp of reality and it's not an acceptable way to proceed into the future.
Besides, Wikipedia is corrupted by individual political interests at the topic level and cannot be trusted to even eschew rank polemic let alone to be complete. The battle for control over pages is an interesting topic for political media analysis, sure, but that's an advanced specialist topic, not an excuse for using the platform as a place to learn. It is not even suitable as a place to learn about the general scope of the problem, certainly not for apprentice and journeyman thinkers, anyway. It takes years of assiduous self-study of critical textual analysis before one's able to use unstable sources as sites of information.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "stable." Could you explain?
Wikipedia decentralizes control and bias. Britannica centralizes control and bias: in its heyday it was literally owned by the same university that gave us Milton Friedman. Alas, if you really want access to content you'll never own with Britannica, you can still buy a subscription. You're living in the right time for this mentality too. Privately owned government sponsored kids programs is the only option now. I'm not happy with it. But if that's what you want, you got it.
I'll try to return later--I have some tasks preventing an effortpost. Here's a book title which encapsulates the concept in itself--if the reader possesses basic knowledge of poems and their publication and audience reception. https://archive.org/details/coleridgetextual0000stil Coleridge and textual instability : the multiple versions of the major poems
Version changes as tracked in Wikipedia's history are not sufficient to address the problem of constant incremental change to any chunk of content, and cannot even begin to address the problem inherent in readers at different times reading different information and understanding their individual experiences of that content as authoritative. The folklore of the "Tower of Babel" story identified this problem in its basic form millennia ago and humanity has not solved that problem by throwing text into the constant-update and silent-rewrite blender of contemporary technology.
Marshall McLuhan wrote very well, and presciently, about the problems of digital technology. His book dealing with Gutenberg discusses stable text--paper printed media--as a critical precondition for analytical thought and effective communication beyond the level of the micro-village. His analysis of all A/V media as a return to oral communication, with all its practical impossibility of useful reference and its emotional and irrational cognitive location in the mind, is absolutely correct.
The question of centralization of bias is an advanced topic that cannot and does not solve the basic problems introduced by unstable texts as objects and as conduits and shapers of communication. It is irrelevant that Britannica had bias. It compounds the problem that Wikipedia's bias is at the page level and is not consistent throughout. The inconsistency functions to erase the bias from view, because the biased standpoint of one page doesn't match the biased standpoint of a page on a different topic with different political operatives editing it. Comparison of like things in bulk is a primary method by which neophyte readers or readers unfamiliar with a topic learn to identify subtexts and the pattern signatures of bias. It is **better** to use stable texts with one coherent editorial bias, so that readers can learn to identify the political "voice" that is speaking, than it is to use a multitudinous text which allows bias to pass undetected.
I won't read a 280 page book to understand your point. So we may have to drop this one. ;) But I don't understand this "Version changes as tracked in Wikipedia's history are not sufficient." Why not? What's the practical difference? If I published Wikipedia in its state on Jan 1 of every year, how would that not get the effect you want? It's very easy to do.
I don't see your argument being different from the argument of centralization. You argue Wikipedia is "corrupted by individual political interests at the topic level." Sure. And Britannica, what of it? Is the assumption that it's not corrupt or that it's corruption is more desirable because it's authored with _less_ democracy?
They aren't sufficient because they, for example, require every reader of a paper written using wikipedia as a source to reconstruct the page history in order to use the reference. This demands that all readers thoroughly investigate every footnote. Most readers will not do that. As well, in order to reduce the time and effort burden of recreating the reference in order to use it, any putative reader must privilege that paper above all others, and read it as close in time to the author's **collection** of the reference, not even the publication date of the paper. This set of additional tasks is insupportable. Humans are time and energy bound creatures, not theoretical entities facing only one choice in a model: to archaeologically reconstruct the references, or not.
The reason that skilled (domain knowledgeable) readers have heretofore "gotten away" with not manically reading all the references and reconstructing them immediately--creating their own library of stable references in other words, or creating an "offline copy"-- is simply because of the stable and durable, ie paper, nature of the references. Digital references simply are not that.
Look at your own method here. Rather than read the references I gave you as a footnote to my thesis, you simply inveighed on me, the academic, to spend more time telling you about it. That's not a supportable model. It's also an oral model that does not hit your cognitive or memory circuits the same way that physical printed matter does.
I do recommend reading the book at some point. Developing opinions about a domain without investigating the domain is just a confabulation.
That's just the nature of citations. How is that different from Britannica? It also has citations. You either trust what you're reading or you must check the citations. And then you either trust the citation, or you must check their citation. That's just the process.
I'm not angry at you, but you're also not _owed_ my time. You came here to engage, and I'm willing to engage you. I'm not willing to read 280 pages because you pasted a link. We're going down a rabbit hole here.
I don't understand how corruption is _worse_ on decentralized Wikipedia than centralized Britannica.
I don't understand how citations are _worse_ on decentralized Wikipedia than centralized Britannica.
I don't understand how the "version changes" are _worse_ on Wikipedia which is iteratively developed by versioned than Britannica which is iteratively developed (internally) and periodically released.
You're not making these points. I'm not angry at you, but you're not winning me over making absurd statements like "I do recommend reading the book at some point. Developing opinions about a domain without investigating the domain is just a confabulation." If you need 280 pages to make your point, we're not going to go anywhere. You're just wasting my time.
I'm sorry, I can't take someone who'd rather make demands on an academic to digest a domain of knowledge and deliver it up, rather than use the references given, seriously when that person complains the academic isn't getting across to them. Certainly not when the topic is that Wikipedia is worse than useless unless it is reconstructed as the reference it was at the time of its reading, and then all other interlocutors take the time out of their lives to load that ephemeral version into working memory, re-assess whatever different versions they'd been using, and check for parity with all other interlocutors before proceeding.
It is a living example of the problem I pointed out.
I absolutely would go back to Britannica. A stable reference is essential if one wants to coherently understand the world.
It's a thing, yes, to faff on, as undergrads and weak grad student TAs do, about there being "information in the way that narratives about an event/person/place/etc change over time" but the fact is, those changes happen out of sight and are not accessible to almost anyone for analysis, and besides: that's a sleight of hand that switches the focus from "what happened" to "what are people shouting loudest about what happened". It's a twitterfied degradation of our collective cognitive grasp of reality and it's not an acceptable way to proceed into the future.
Besides, Wikipedia is corrupted by individual political interests at the topic level and cannot be trusted to even eschew rank polemic let alone to be complete. The battle for control over pages is an interesting topic for political media analysis, sure, but that's an advanced specialist topic, not an excuse for using the platform as a place to learn. It is not even suitable as a place to learn about the general scope of the problem, certainly not for apprentice and journeyman thinkers, anyway. It takes years of assiduous self-study of critical textual analysis before one's able to use unstable sources as sites of information.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "stable." Could you explain?
Wikipedia decentralizes control and bias. Britannica centralizes control and bias: in its heyday it was literally owned by the same university that gave us Milton Friedman. Alas, if you really want access to content you'll never own with Britannica, you can still buy a subscription. You're living in the right time for this mentality too. Privately owned government sponsored kids programs is the only option now. I'm not happy with it. But if that's what you want, you got it.
I'll try to return later--I have some tasks preventing an effortpost. Here's a book title which encapsulates the concept in itself--if the reader possesses basic knowledge of poems and their publication and audience reception. https://archive.org/details/coleridgetextual0000stil Coleridge and textual instability : the multiple versions of the major poems
Version changes as tracked in Wikipedia's history are not sufficient to address the problem of constant incremental change to any chunk of content, and cannot even begin to address the problem inherent in readers at different times reading different information and understanding their individual experiences of that content as authoritative. The folklore of the "Tower of Babel" story identified this problem in its basic form millennia ago and humanity has not solved that problem by throwing text into the constant-update and silent-rewrite blender of contemporary technology.
Marshall McLuhan wrote very well, and presciently, about the problems of digital technology. His book dealing with Gutenberg discusses stable text--paper printed media--as a critical precondition for analytical thought and effective communication beyond the level of the micro-village. His analysis of all A/V media as a return to oral communication, with all its practical impossibility of useful reference and its emotional and irrational cognitive location in the mind, is absolutely correct.
The question of centralization of bias is an advanced topic that cannot and does not solve the basic problems introduced by unstable texts as objects and as conduits and shapers of communication. It is irrelevant that Britannica had bias. It compounds the problem that Wikipedia's bias is at the page level and is not consistent throughout. The inconsistency functions to erase the bias from view, because the biased standpoint of one page doesn't match the biased standpoint of a page on a different topic with different political operatives editing it. Comparison of like things in bulk is a primary method by which neophyte readers or readers unfamiliar with a topic learn to identify subtexts and the pattern signatures of bias. It is **better** to use stable texts with one coherent editorial bias, so that readers can learn to identify the political "voice" that is speaking, than it is to use a multitudinous text which allows bias to pass undetected.
I won't read a 280 page book to understand your point. So we may have to drop this one. ;) But I don't understand this "Version changes as tracked in Wikipedia's history are not sufficient." Why not? What's the practical difference? If I published Wikipedia in its state on Jan 1 of every year, how would that not get the effect you want? It's very easy to do.
I don't see your argument being different from the argument of centralization. You argue Wikipedia is "corrupted by individual political interests at the topic level." Sure. And Britannica, what of it? Is the assumption that it's not corrupt or that it's corruption is more desirable because it's authored with _less_ democracy?
They aren't sufficient because they, for example, require every reader of a paper written using wikipedia as a source to reconstruct the page history in order to use the reference. This demands that all readers thoroughly investigate every footnote. Most readers will not do that. As well, in order to reduce the time and effort burden of recreating the reference in order to use it, any putative reader must privilege that paper above all others, and read it as close in time to the author's **collection** of the reference, not even the publication date of the paper. This set of additional tasks is insupportable. Humans are time and energy bound creatures, not theoretical entities facing only one choice in a model: to archaeologically reconstruct the references, or not.
The reason that skilled (domain knowledgeable) readers have heretofore "gotten away" with not manically reading all the references and reconstructing them immediately--creating their own library of stable references in other words, or creating an "offline copy"-- is simply because of the stable and durable, ie paper, nature of the references. Digital references simply are not that.
Look at your own method here. Rather than read the references I gave you as a footnote to my thesis, you simply inveighed on me, the academic, to spend more time telling you about it. That's not a supportable model. It's also an oral model that does not hit your cognitive or memory circuits the same way that physical printed matter does.
I do recommend reading the book at some point. Developing opinions about a domain without investigating the domain is just a confabulation.
That's just the nature of citations. How is that different from Britannica? It also has citations. You either trust what you're reading or you must check the citations. And then you either trust the citation, or you must check their citation. That's just the process.
I'm not angry at you, but you're also not _owed_ my time. You came here to engage, and I'm willing to engage you. I'm not willing to read 280 pages because you pasted a link. We're going down a rabbit hole here.
I don't understand how corruption is _worse_ on decentralized Wikipedia than centralized Britannica.
I don't understand how citations are _worse_ on decentralized Wikipedia than centralized Britannica.
I don't understand how the "version changes" are _worse_ on Wikipedia which is iteratively developed by versioned than Britannica which is iteratively developed (internally) and periodically released.
You're not making these points. I'm not angry at you, but you're not winning me over making absurd statements like "I do recommend reading the book at some point. Developing opinions about a domain without investigating the domain is just a confabulation." If you need 280 pages to make your point, we're not going to go anywhere. You're just wasting my time.
I'm sorry, I can't take someone who'd rather make demands on an academic to digest a domain of knowledge and deliver it up, rather than use the references given, seriously when that person complains the academic isn't getting across to them. Certainly not when the topic is that Wikipedia is worse than useless unless it is reconstructed as the reference it was at the time of its reading, and then all other interlocutors take the time out of their lives to load that ephemeral version into working memory, re-assess whatever different versions they'd been using, and check for parity with all other interlocutors before proceeding.
It is a living example of the problem I pointed out.
Also aren't the new episodes out only on HBO first now?
For now, yes. HBO dropped the show which is now moving to Netflix.
Just as bad. Worse.