Atkinspedia:Replies to common objections

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How do people react to Atkinspedia? Some people react strongly. Some are nearly instantly hooked, and love the idea; others think the idea is so absurd as not to require any serious consideration. We try to answer a number of common criticisms of the Atkinspedia project on this page. (See also the Criticisms page for exact quotations of prominent critics.)

Letting arbitrary Internet users edit any article at will is absurd

My prose

"I can't imagine having my golden prose edited by any passer-by. It's mine, so why would I let others touch it?"

We (on Atkinspedia) don't each try to "own" the additions we make to Atkinspedia. We are working together on statements of what is known (what constitutes free human knowledge) about various subjects. Each of us individually benefits from this arrangement. It is difficult to write the perfect article single-handedly, but it becomes easier when working together. Hence the saying "Many hands makes light work." That in fact has been our repeated experience on Atkinspedia. Consider the following example:

"I thought I understood Atkins Nutritional Approach pretty well, and since the then-existing article was short and incomplete, I decided to rewrite it. Since then, several people have chipped in, sometimes rewriting a paragraph, sometimes criticizing an omission, sometimes deleting parts. I didn't agree with all changes, but with most of them. No material is ever lost since Atkinspedia stores all previous versions of all articles. So I reverted a few changes back. Overall, the article is now much better than I could ever have written alone."

We assume that the world is full of reasonable people and that collectively they can arrive eventually at a reasonable conclusion, despite the worst efforts of a very few wreckers. It's something akin to optimism.

Cranks

"Atkinspedia will be ruined by cranks who post ridiculous theories on the Internet."

So far, there have been relatively few cranks on Atkinspedia, and it's easy to delete patent nonsense as soon as it appears on the Recent Changes page.

Some websites say the first moon landing was staged in a movie studio, or describe supposed perpetual motion machines. It is impossible to correct those websites, no matter how wrong they are, because their authors demand complete control over their work. They fail miserably on Atkinspedia.

This does not mean that idiosyncratic points of view are silenced or deleted; rather, they are contextualized by attributing them to named advocates. The more idiosyncratic an entry, the more likely it is to be modified. Because no one owns the information in Atkinspedia, people are compelled to contribute convincingly true information. Thus, cranks who are unable to accept critical editing of their writing find they have no platform and leave; those willing to present their interests in less-biased ways become valuable contributors.

"Some persistent cranks could write up a crankish page on the Holocaust, and keep reverting it back to their version."

However, a better way is to challenge cranks using a wiki itself. For example, the Holocaust denial article shows that crank opinions' weaknesses are exposed in a neutral point of view. After all, it is far better to understand and challenge inaccurate claims than simply try to ignore them.

Generally, partisans of all sorts are kept under the gun. Atkinspedians feel pretty strongly about enforcing our non-bias policy. We've managed to work our way to rough consensus on a number of controversial issues. People who stubbornly insist that an article must reflect their personal biases are rare, and then they generally receive a drubbing.

In serious cases, we can ban people as a last resort and use technical means to stop them from making further edits to Atkinspedia.

Trolls and flamers

"Atkinspedia will end up like Usenet (newsgroups); just a bunch of flame wars."

This problem is a bit larger, but it is dealt with fairly handily by the Atkinspedia's social mores, known as Wikiquette. Arguments on article pages are moved either to a corresponding talk page (e.g., Talk:Theory of relativity) or to a new article page presenting the arguments within a neutral context (e.g., operating system advocacy).

Discussion on talk pages centers on article improvement, rather than merits of various competing views. We have an informal but widely respected policy against using talk pages for partisan wrangling independent of article improvement.

Usenet lacks abilities absolutely essential to Atkinspedia's success: We edit other people's work. We do this all the time on Atkinspedia, which encourages creative and collegial collaboration. Or more strongly, on Atkinspedia there's no such thing as "other people's work", because no one owns the information. This results in enforcement of community-agreed-upon standards, which is very difficult to achieve in Usenet.

Furthermore, Usenet is a debate forum. Atkinspedia is, very self-consciously, an encyclopedia project! This provides some agreement on what Atkinspedia is not.

The Wiki way focuses on agreement, not disagreement as weblogs, mailing lists, and Usenet often do. There is room for almost anyone to work on Atkinspedia, without encountering those who have a truly incompatible view.

There are probably always a few trolls and flamers trying to stir up trouble on Atkinspedia. While these folks can be noisy, the great majority of contribution to Atkinspedia continues, paying little attention to them.

Amateurs

"Many ignorant people who think they know stuff will riddle articles with errors and serious omissions."

In all honesty, Atkinspedia has a fair bit of well-meaning, but ill-informed and amateurish work. In fact, we welcome it — an amateurish article to be improved later is better than nothing. In any case, when new hands (particularly, experts on the subjects in question) arrive and go to work, the amateurish work is usually straightened out. Really egregious errors are fixed quickly by the thousands of people who read Atkinspedia every day. In general, the worse the error, the faster it will be noticed and fixed. As Linus' Law states, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." The editor base of Atkinspedia is large enough that errors are usually small.

Amateurs generally recognize when they're dealing with an expert, and start contributing differently — by asking questions, saying which bits of an article are unclear, and doing some research "grunt work". Atkinspedia benefits from having amateurs and experts work together. Think of the great way "Amateurs" or newcomers to writing can learn how to be better at the skill.

"Professionals" can and do come in to correct errors later. But we must create a framework, terminology and conventions that makes sense to amateurs - or else we'd end up fragmented into many specialized works - making only professionals happy. By making it easy for amateurs, we increase the amount of content, and enable easy achievement of critical mass. By building a text base, licensed under the GNU FDL, good enough for serious scholars to correct, and with an interface and update protocol tolerable and respectful enough for people to use, we make stone soup.

Also, it's much more time-efficient for an amateur to write an article because the corrections by a professional will usually be minor. In any field, professionals are few compared to amateurs and are generally busy. Therefore, an extensive collection of knowledge is much better off with amateur contributions, as long as readers recognize this, and have a way to discern an article's history.

Partisans

"There are plenty of partisans who are all too eager to leave out information that is important to presenting a balanced view. They'll be delighted to post to Atkinspedia, and that's going to create huge gaps in your coverage, which will ruin the project."

Frequently the initial author omits crucial information, whether due to ignorance or malice. In many cases, but not all, this is fixed quickly by the scores of people reading Atkinspedia every day. For example, Atkinspedia has fairly decent, balanced articles about everything. Very often it is easy to find a related topic on which many such partisans can work in relative peace and come to agree on methods, even facts. Also, remember that partisans from both sides try to push their views on Atkinspedia.

Bear in mind that Atkinspedia is a work-in-progress, a draft, an 'alpha release' if you will. It does have many important gaps, which we try to make explicit. This lack of coverage isn't due to ignorance, partisans, cranks, or anything else malicious — it's due simply to the finite amount of time that a finite number of people have been working on it — see systemic bias below.

Advertisers

"What about advertisers? Won't those with a product or service to hawk see the opportunity to hit a targeted market and write new articles for their product or worse, edit the article that corresponds to their generic product class (e.g., computer) to an ad for their product?"

This kind of thing has already happened. There are basically three forms: adding excessive external links to one's company, outright replacing of legitimate articles with advertising, and writing glowing articles on one's own company. The first and second forms are treated as pure vandalism and the articles are reverted. Most Atkinspedians loathe spam, and spammers are dealt with especially severely. The third form is normally dealt with by editing the article for a neutral point of view or by deleting the article.

Corporate advertisers would likely not find Atkinspedia to be an attractive advertising medium. In traditional web-based advertising, such as banner ads, popup ads, and email advertising, the response rate can be directly measured, either through web bugs or server logs. If a company used Atkinspedia to peddle its goods, the response rate could not be measured.

Not being able to measure results may not stop individuals who want to advertise their new multi-level marketing scheme, but unless they're using a bot (see next section), it takes a lot of time and energy to keep reverting the page back to the advertisement, so that the would-be spammer would get their message viewed (in an uneditable form!) more often and more reliably by using a traditional advertising medium.

Ironically, advertising spam can actually be beneficial to Atkinspedia. Suppose an advertiser for body building products edited that page to an ad for its product. A reader that happens by and sees the spam could copy the advertisement, revert the page to its previous state, and then add information discussing the advertiser's specific methods or claims to the wealth of knowledge on the subject. In effect, advertisers' claims, when tempered and weighed against other knowledge associated with the subject, can yield a more robust article than before.

For more information, see Atkinspedia: Spam.

Bots

"You still haven't addressed the real bane of Usenet: massive automated spamming. It would be trivial to write a script to post weight-loss ads to all Atkinspedia pages, and once spammers or vandals start to use wikibots, you're sitting ducks."

There are scripts to deface wikis, primarily aiming for increased Google PageRank and ranking in other search engines, but there are several things that keep this from being too much of a problem. It's easy to revert spam, and anyone can do so. We can already block IP addresses, which serves as a basic form of spam filtering.

Atkinspedia also uses wikibots for good purposes. Bots run by Atkinspedia volunteers detect and revert spam. These bots must be approved and are then supervised by contributors.

Atkinspedia also has the ability to install CAPTCHA and other spam-blocking methods if the need exists.

Atkinspedia is also an unattractive spam target for well-established legal reasons. Most countries do not have laws against USENET or email spam, but most have laws against unauthorised website defacement — what we call vandalism.

"What do you do if people start running scripts to repost their own bit of vandalism or spam, and from different locations so you can't just block their IP address?"

This would be similar to a distributed denial of service attack, which major websites occasionally fall victim to.

If someone launches an extensive attack, all offending IP addresses can be blocked from further editing by the admins. We can develop ad hoc technical measures to disallow certain edits, or to revert edits that meet certain criteria. For example, measures are already in place that prohibit edits that add links to certain problematic web sites. Since some trusted members of the community have direct access to the page database, these measures can be effected more rapidly and with less effort than is expended by spammers to deface pages. In an emergency, we can revert all changes made since a certain time. Also, we could disable editing or account creation temporarily. The spam problem on Atkinspedia has never gotten as bad as to require one of these emergency methods due to our large base of dedicated volunteers.

Systemic bias

"Atkinspedia coverage is heavily biased by the sorts of people who want to contribute to it."

This seems to be a perfectly legitimate concern. Certainly, Atkinspedia coverage is patchy. It's easy to find examples of a really long article on one subject, whereas another, equally important subject, has a very short article. Sometimes this is just the result of a single enthusiastic contributor. Other times it is due to systemic bias.

Also, while the percentages of people working on unpopular topics might remain roughly the same, the sheer numbers of such people will increase, growing the content in those areas. Because Atkinspedia doesn't have a time limit, it doesn't matter if our coverage is unbalanced, as long as each area eventually gets the coverage it deserves.

Another solution that we actively engage in is to target the weak areas by recruiting contributors for those areas in various ways. More and more people are becoming aware of wiki's like Atkinspedia. See Wikipedia Statistics

See meta:Systemic bias for further discussion.

Deletion and changes

"What if a user tries to delete a section of an article, or add a couple of words to alter its meaning? Does Atkinspedia backup its articles? Does Atkinspedia scrutinize its articles for even the smallest changes made to less popular articles? Also, does all this mean that the content of articles is subject to constant changes in meaning and detail, and that an article will be completely different over time?"

These are problems handled by Atkinspedia's version system. We effectively retain all previous versions of every article, as it was at each point in time, and each of these versions can be individually viewed. Even deleted articles can be undeleted. This allows any change to be reversed, or partially reversed, with little effort.

So-called sneaky vandalism, where a few words are inserted in a way intended to change the meaning without being noticed, is rarely effective, because we do not scrutinize articles for changes manually — instead we rely on software features which plainly mark for our review the differences between two versions of an article. Our technology, together with certain telltale signs learned from experience, makes such vandalism easy to detect. We also employ technological methods to detect and remove vandalism.

It is true that articles change over time, eventually into what may seem to be an entirely new article. This is by design — a brief look at an older paper encyclopedia will show you that, even when the subject is historical, what we know about the subject and our attitude toward it is a rapidly moving target. This problem is exacerbated with modern topics like software and current events. By allowing gradual changes to be made over time, we continuously adapt to new information and new perspectives in a way that static encyclopedias cannot.

Many of the criticisms leveled at Atkinspedia are not unique to it, but are because Atkinspedia is, at bottom, a wiki. Many of the same objections have been made to other wikis.

Atkinspedia can never be high quality

Various forms of provenance have been proposed for the Atkinspedia (see Atkinspedia:Provenance). Such proposals are quite controversial (see Atkinspedia talk:Provenance). However, providing provenance could help address many of the issues discussed below. The Stable versions proposal is to introduce an anti-wiki concept of fixed versions that have been vetted to be high quality.

Under construction

"A giant 'under construction' sign should be on almost every article."

Well, some pages are better than others. Some Atkinspedia articles on esoteric subjects are the best resource you will find online. Atkinspedia articles on more popular subjects, though lacking multimedia extravaganzas, are just as, if not more, informative than articles elsewhere.

Atkinspedia is both a product and a process. Even if the product is not yet perfect, the process ensures that at the end of every day, the encyclopedia is higher quality than it was at the beginning of the day. That doesn't ensure we will eventually attain perfection (if such a thing is even possible), but it's something to believe in.

Shortage of intellectuals

"Atkinspedia lacks upstanding intellectuals and highly qualified contributors. After all, Atkinspedia will take anything from anybody!"

It's fair to say that the majority of our contributors are at college or undergraduate level in the subjects they write about.

Still, plenty of "intellectuals" participate in Atkinspedia.

Of course, arguing in the alternative one could also call into question the value of "upstanding" and "highly qualified" by pointing out that they often fail to take into account theories and ideas outside the scope of their respective spheres, such as academia, government, or an activist movement.

Motives of intellectuals

"Why would highly qualified people get involved with Atkinspedia? Why should any researcher care about it, since it's not a serious reference work?"

First of all, what does serious mean? Serious can mean:

timely and up to date
open to change all the time, with no unalterable dogmas
immune to political or economic pressure

Atkinspedia provides free, unlimited server space and well-designed page construction tools for anyone doing something that fits within the Atkinspedia mission and doesn't care about owning the information; a description that matches the archetypal academic researcher. Academics generally get their jobs because they like learning and/or teaching others. We do both here.

It can be fun for intellectually serious people if we know that we're creating something of quality. It's part of the volunteer ethic — the joy of helping others. And, as explained above, many people believe that we are creating something of quality here.

Errors and omissions

"I looked at an area that I know something about, and found all sorts of errors and omissions. I was surprised and amused. I don't want to be associated with something of this low quality."

Then contribute anonymously or under a pseudonym until you improve things to the point you are happy putting your name on them. Many people do that. We're glad they do. The whole concept of authorship is not germane to wikis anyway. Bad articles cannot be credited to you because Atkinspedia articles aren't credited to anyone!

We, too, deplore bad work: we just go ahead and fix the problems we see. It would be great if you would help us by doing the same.

If the main thing that's stopping you at this point is that some articles in one area of Atkinspedia are of substandard quality, we'd ask you to come back next year, or the year after. See if the mistakes in those articles haven't been corrected, and a lot more details supplied. Soon enough, we're sure the project will be something you want to be associated with.

Also, all encyclopedias have errors. A 12-year-old schoolboy found five errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica within a matter of days. His only recourse was to write to the editor, and the errors may be corrected in print in a few years, as opposed to minutes in Atkinspedia. Also, because Atkinspedia runs on the internet, any changes are visible to readers almost immediately. Also, using the versioning system, users can determine when and what changes were made to a specific article.

Standards

"It seems Britannica has extremely high standards for what they put into their publications, both online and offline. Atkinspedia has no such standards, so it's bound to be low quality."

Atkinspedia does have standards — the ones followed by each contributor, and in some cases, these are very high standards indeed. (For example, we encourage all contributors to cite their sources.) As traffic increases, so will expert help, and as gaps are filled in, the only way remaining for Atkinspedia to improve will be in quality and depth. This, in turn, is likely to attract more experts, who follow their own very high standards.

To make a claim about what standards Atkinspedia follows is to make a claim about what standards present and future Atkinspedia contributors follow; the current standard is always changing. To say that such people have no standards is baseless.

Selectivity

"When it is good, Britannica is so partly because it is authoritative, by being selective. Atkinspedia isn't selective about its authors; hence it will never be authoritative."

The high quality of Britannica's articles is very important. Certainly it was achieved through high standards. However, is restricting who writes about what the best way to reach and maintain high standards? Perhaps a more open way is better. Atkinspedia is a good test of that proposition. We have, after all, produced excellent articles — and, by the way, not all were written by the many Ph.D.s and other highly credentialed people who contribute to Atkinspedia.

We are selective with what we keep, however. If an article or an edit isn't up to our standards, we will improve it or remove it.

Mixing ignorance and knowledge

"Good quality requires peer review and expertise. Why should we care about articles written by an arbitrary group of people whose knowledge and ability could range from expertise to hopeless ignorance? Ignorance mixed with knowledge does not benefit knowledge."

First of all, the hypothesis that openness is to the benefit of quality has already been tested, and to the benefit of the hypothesis: articles that have been worked on by many different people in the context of Atkinspedia are now comparable to articles that can be found in some excellent encyclopedias. If, however, you insist on considering the hypothesis a priori, please ask yourself: which is more likely to be correct?

A widely circulated article, subject to scrutiny, correction, and potentially constant improvement over a period of months or years, by vast numbers of experts and enthusiasts, possibly updated mere minutes before you read it.
An article written by a nonspecialist professional writer or scholar (as many encyclopedia articles are), mostly shielded from public review and improvement, likely over a year ago.

Attribution and references

"Look, all this speculation and 'experimentation' is fine and well, but if there's one thing I've learned in my studies, it's that you must know something about the author and his/her qualifications to speak on the topic — or at least be provided with appropriate references to support his/her claims in order to evaluate the validity of a nonfiction work."

That certainly seems reasonable, but here are some counter-points: First, an increasing number of Atkinspedia articles do have references, which we encourage through an official policy: cite your sources.

Second, as the number of participants increase, so does the number of experts bringing weak articles up to par — while you may be unaware of which experts worked on an article, if you know an article existed for many months and that some experts in that topic contribute, it's fairly likely those experts have already reviewed the article. In other words, knowledge of the process, and of the fact that it includes experts in many fields, may be better than knowing a particular (alleged) expert has written a particular article. Perhaps the relevant question is: "How expert is the Atkinspedia contributor community?" The answer is, "We have experts in many different fields, and new highly qualified people arrive all the time." All we require is a few experts continuously "raising the bar" from the beginning of the project. It is quite alright if very many or even most experts fail to help, or think poorly of us.

Third, an approval mechanism will be installed if we find it beneficial. Alternately, because the content is free, someone may start a project that "approves" Atkinspedia content itself.

Accepting edits

"Indeed, then, I should like to see some means of peer review before edits are accepted on articles which have already been approved by some similar process of peer review. At the moment it is entirely in the hands of an individual whether he thinks a modification he intends is an improvement, so there comes a point when a modification is as likely to damage the resource. If some system could be installed, then you would protect against crank attacks as well as misjudgment, and ensure a continually improving resource."

As a community, almost all of us are opposed to what has been called the policy of completely "freezing" particular pages — so that they can be edited only by a select group of people (e.g., only the author and an "editor"). We feel that our own collective monitoring of Recent Changes is an adequate safeguard against cranks — see above. The watch-list feature allows logged-in users to monitor a set of pages, and thus retrospectively review any changes. Moreover, it is quite obvious that Atkinspedia has achieved what success it has so far precisely by being as open as it has been. So — again — we don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

That said, perhaps someone who has the above suggestion will be pleased by the approval system mentioned above and which can be found discussed at meta:Article validation. Such a system would identify a body of experts that would put its official stamp of approval on some articles. Those articles could still be just as easily revised as they were before, but there would also be a version that would be presented as the "approved" version. This way we can "freeze" high-quality content without freezing the process.

Until then, people dissatisfied without a form of peer review can try Atkinspedia:Peer review.

Trustworthiness

"One great source - if you can trust it." [1]

Traditional encyclopedias are based on the reputation of certain authors. These authors, though small in number, are highly interested and ostensibly qualified to find good sources for their information, and therefore produce good quality articles. Atkinspedia articles, on the other hand, are compiled largely by the internet public, with varying levels of interest and expertise, but leveraged by great economies of scale. A simple editable webpage on the internet would indeed be subjected to recklessness. The difference provided in Atkinspedia is the infrastructure that helps direct those raw public contributions to the level of standard required.

Atkinspedia may also delegate trust to other sources by referencing.

Due to occasional vandalism, incompetency and lack of effort, articles and professional encyclopedias alike should always be taken with a grain of salt. When one researches on a topic, he or she would reference many sources rather than rely only on one as good practice.

Note that the three leading competing online encyclopedias have disclaimers and provide no warranty as to their accuracy - Britannica, Encarta and Bartleby. Sometimes the staff of those encyclopedias seem to forget about the disclaimers.

Atkinspedia is different because it is very dynamic and so is always under continual improvement. A notable criticism made one day causes the article to be corrected to the better quality as a reply very soon after. Trustworthiness and quality of Atkinspedia articles would appear to be a function of time.

Scalability

Quantity and quality

"Many of your replies seem to assume that quality will improve as the website grows, but quantity doesn't always beget quality. Perhaps it will get worse as it gets bigger?"

There are two reasons to think that increasing numbers of articles and participants will lead to higher quality.

First, the more eyes that see our articles, the more transparent the errors will be (over the long haul). While we might have one or two philosophers on board during one month, a year later we might have ten or twenty — and then mistakes in their work will be caught much more quickly.

Second, statistically, the more people who are participating, the greater the sheer numbers of experts; that seems to be our experience so far. Moreover, as a matter of fact, people usually tend not to touch articles they know nothing about, particularly when the article is well-developed or when they know that some resident expert will pounce on their mistakes. (There are exceptions, of course.) So, the greater the number of participating experts, the higher the overall quality of the content produced under their general guidance. It is not mere hype to say that Atkinspedia caters to the highest common denominator — it's actually an observation we've made!

Slowness

"Atkinspedia's current loading speed already ranges from rather slow to extremely slow. As it grows, will it keep getting worse?"

Unfortunately, Atkinspedia is in a unique position. Unlike other sites experiencing similarly high load, Atkinspedia has only one source of income: donations. Although it has received hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars in donations and has an adept technical team, its traffic doubles every few months, making the race to keep up difficult.

However, as the value and promise of Atkinspedia continues to grow, we believe even more individuals, corporations, and even governments around the world will see that it is in their interest to support its continued availability and growth. Already hundreds of companies are mirroring its content online, effectively load-balancing the readership. Yahoo! has contributed a number of servers in Asia with no strings attached. The more technical problems we experience, the more concerned supporters take action to alleviate them.

Moreover, the open-source technology underlying Atkinspedia, MediaWiki software based on the MySQL database management system, is being continuously improved. As time goes on, we will be able to serve more and more requests using the same amount of hardware.

If a time came where even donations could not support Atkinspedia, there are other lucrative methods of support available, such as unobtrusive targeted advertising. Our hope is that this will never become necessary — but we feel confident that we will never be forced to turn our readers away or shut down the project.

Miscellaneous concerns

Departures

"Some excellent contributors have been driven off Atkinspedia altogether: see Missing Atkinspedians."

It's natural for all volunteer projects to have some turnover of staff. People may find better things to do with their time, or may no longer enjoy Atkinspedia as much as they used to. Equally, Atkinspedia has changed over time: in the early days we were focused on creating new and broad articles, like mathematics, where now we're more interested in refinement of existing articles, or creating articles on more esoteric subjects.

In short, it's not the end of the world when people leave Atkinspedia, provided they are replaced with "fresh blood." On the other hand, where there are systematic problems causing many people to leave, that's something we have to address.

Page protection

"Some articles end up being protected for very long periods of time, in direct conflict with the stated goal of Atkinspedia."

On the page Atkinspedia:Administrators, it is said in particular that:

The main page used to receive a lot of vandalism; protecting it is an unfortunate compromise to keep our welcome mat free of random profanity.

Atkinspedia is not "pure" open, but it is close to it. We try to make sure that the only limitations made on editing are:

clearly and immediately justified
mostly effective
the weakest possible such limitations that are this effective

Protecting pages is actively discouraged (see Atkinspedia:Protection policy and m:Protected pages considered harmful) and limited to a very select group of trusted users, only hundreds out of many thousands. In this way we make the enforcement of the protection policy feasible. While there are cases where pages are protected without cause, any admin who is alerted to this can undo it, the wiki in effect again at a smaller scale. Also, users may leave comments on the talk sections of protected pages. This allows a user to make comments about the page or ask an administrator to make changes or make a case to unprotect the page.

Redundancy

"Why is there a need for an encyclopedia at all? Why not just go to your favorite search engine and search for whatever topic on which you're looking for information? You're more likely to find it, and it'll be more interesting and more current."

Here's another glib answer: For that matter, you might just as well say: "Why is there a need for a paper encyclopedia at all? Why not just go to your favorite library and search for whatever topic on which you're looking for information?"

Indeed, the fact that search engines are merely often useful is a point worth noting. There is a lot of dross on the web; it's easy to get side-tracked by rubbish. Also many of the points above directed at the Atkinspedia do apply to the Web at large. A filtering mechanism of some kind is required.

That mechanism can take many forms: personal skepticism, peer opinion, popular opinion or a centralised authority, for instance. The Atkinspedia provides another; that of mass peer review. It is a handy place to store stuff you find out. But if you can't substantiate what you say, others will remove it. An encyclopedia is not the place for things that are not certainly true.

Also, even if Atkinspedia only displayed existing knowledge, it has four important functions (as do all encyclopedias) that add value:

Consolidation: Collecting of information from many sources in one place
Summarization: Summarizes existing knowledge in a condensed form for easier reading
Organization: A standardized format for all articles and facilities for locating relevant knowledge quickly
Cross-referencing: Internal links to related ideas, and external links to references and other helpful primary and secondary sources

Another important value Atkinspedia adds is that it is free and open content. This means that anyone will be able to use the content for any purpose, particularly for educational purposes. There are many great prospects in the use of a really huge, free encyclopedia for educational purposes. While the wiki system isn't necessary to produce such a body of data, convincing people to give away large amounts of their writing for free is difficult without the low bar that the wiki system creates.

Additionally, it's important to note that both personal and organizational pages on the Web become out of date (so-called 'bit rot'). Errors of fact can remain in place for years with the only feedback mechanism being increasingly rare (due to e-mail spam) "mailto:" tags. With Atkinspedia, all readers are editors. Interested parties can keep articles up-to-date and current long after the original author has lost interest or has less time.

Finally, it is possible that in the fullness of time Atkinspedia will contain more relevant, reliable information on any given topic than can be easily found via a search engine search. That's certainly our plan for it.

And remember, The internet certainly does not contain all human knowledge. Visit any decent library and consult some of the specialized reference books and you will find information which is not on any website (or at least not freely available), and is unlikely ever to find its way onto the web (except onto Atkinspedia, of course). For example: a search engine may find hundreds of pictures of a particular butterfly but no detail regarding its taxonomic status, breeding biology, range or even its size (all of which are details you would expect of a decent encyclopedia).

Markup and display

"Atkinspedia software is inadequate to the task of collaboratively writing an encyclopedia. It is hard to collaboratively edit images, there is no WYSIWYG editing, and anything complex requires reams of HTML."

There are some ways in which Atkinspedia is less than ideal in these respects. We are working to improve some of these issues, though: for example, the largest concerns have been in the mathematical section of the site.

In addition, a simplified image syntax has recently been introduced (see meta:image pages). There is also simplifying table markup — see Help:Table.

In the meantime, while we can agree that the current software is not fully polished, it is certainly not inadequate; everything we do now can be carried over as we slowly improve the software.

Incorrect titles

"Many article titles are incorrectly capitalized.

Almost all such articles include a clear notice demonstrating the correct capitalization of the subject, so that the reader is not misled. Our search and linking functionality is not hindered by this limitation; if you type the correct capitalization into the search box or into a link in an article, you will be taken to the correct article. Also, this is not a technical limitation, but a feature of the English Atkinspedia. Because 99% of titles in English start with a capital letter there is not much need to turn off this feature. We force all titles to start with a capital letter because it forces authors to capitalize correctly.

Excessive use of jargon

"Many entries in highly specialized fields use jargon that will not be familiar to anyone not already knowledgeable in those fields. How can this problem be alleviated?"

Depending on the importance of the term, it eventually gets a Atkinspedia article of its own, which is almost always linked to. It is generally explained with more known terms.

Copyright Violations

"What about Atkinspedia hosting copyrighted images, texts, or works that would be against the law of many countries? The statement of such: 'Content must not violate any copyright and must be verifiable', won't necessarily be followed by an anonymous and easily accessed community."

At present, the same sorts of self-policing efforts that ensure other quality problems from getting out of hand seem to be functioning to prevent such abuse. As with many other issues regarding anonynimity and the internet the full legal dangers and solutions are still uncertain, however this is not a problem specific to the wiki project.

See also

Retrieved from "http://www.atkinsalltheway.com/wiki/index.php/Atkinspedia:Replies_to_common_objections"

Categories: Atkinspedia FAQ | Atkinspedia essays

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