{"id":103,"date":"2008-06-17T21:26:30","date_gmt":"2008-06-18T01:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2008\/06\/17\/wikipedia-accuracy-and-democracy-at-work\/"},"modified":"2008-06-17T21:26:30","modified_gmt":"2008-06-18T01:26:30","slug":"wikipedia-accuracy-and-democracy-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wikipedia-accuracy-and-democracy-at-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia Accuracy and Democracy at Work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I find\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Main_Page\">Wikipedia<\/a>\u00a0fascinating. \u00a0Anyone can edit &#8212; how could that <span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-style: italic\">possibly<\/span> work?<\/p>\n<p>Of course, there&#8217;s been a lot of discussion and debate about the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=wikipedia%20accuracy&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8\">accuracy of Wikipedia<\/a>\u00a0articles. \u00a0I think Wikipedia is pretty accurate, <span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-weight: bold\">if<\/span> you look a sort of <span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-weight: bold\">content<\/span>\u00a0<span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-weight: bold\">average over the long term<\/span>. \u00a0Inaccuracies in any given article will get corrected by the crowd over time (but with new inaccuracies added). \u00a0In other words, any given article has &#8220;inaccuracy noise&#8221; over time, around a mean (or accurate) &#8220;value&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I think democracies work like Wikipedia articles. \u00a0At any given instant, something&#8217;s &#8220;inaccurate&#8221; (e.g. broken, dysfunctional, etc.), but the system works pretty well if you consider the average results over time. \u00a0It&#8217;s the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds\">wisdom of crowds<\/a>\u00a0at work.<\/p>\n<p>So the question is: \u00a0how much of a content cleanup will the 2008 elections be? \u00a0(And that&#8217;s as political as I&#8217;m going to get in this blog).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I find\u00a0Wikipedia\u00a0fascinating. \u00a0Anyone can edit &#8212; how could that possibly work? Of course, there&#8217;s been a lot of discussion and debate about the\u00a0accuracy of Wikipedia\u00a0articles. \u00a0I think Wikipedia is pretty accurate, if you look a sort of content\u00a0average over the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wikipedia-accuracy-and-democracy-at-work\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}