What is a South American turquoise swarklebug?
(When you're ready to reveal the secret answer, click "Show")
If you answered that the South American turquoise swarklebug is a swarklebug with a turquoise shell whose home region is South America, you won!
A Wikipedia article whose lede doesn't begin with that degree of simplicity, obviousness, and
hyperlinking is usually ripe for improvement.
How many examples can you find and fix today?
Ontology in general is complex, and we aren't going to "
reach the end of it" on Wikipedia; but
applied or practical ontology is a big part of the difference between (1) being ignorant, or being only narrowly educated in certain areas, and (2) being broadly and deeply educated. And most applied or practical ontology is oddly simple, once you've figured it out, despite seeming mysterious before that. Often it is only a matter of recognizing, for example, that there are wikilinks that should be in this lede, but aren't yet. And it's not that hard to realize that in the article on (say)
iron oxides, the words
iron and
oxygen, with links to those elements' articles, should be in its lede—indeed, in the opening sentence of that lede. It's not even hard. In fact, if you have solid 101-level
scientific literacy, some
critical thinking, and some basic
composition skills, you can usually find ways to improve Wikipedia literally as fast as you can read it, in articles below
GA status. (The same is true of Wiktionary.) And yet Wikipedia to date is still full of ontological gaps. Which (if you think about it) reflects on us humans, the default ways we tend to think, and what low-hanging fruit is available in improving upon them, even while acknowledging and accepting their humanity. And most practical ontology could be greatly elucidated at Wikipedia and Wiktionary (the two working together) if enough
critical thinkers worked earnestly on those projects. Imagine a world in which 99% of the practical ontology that most people ever need was fed seamlessly to them, instantly, for free, and on demand, by Wikimedia projects. It would mean that when they land on the article about the South American turquoise swarklebug, they are going to understand within seconds (not by doing a bunch of further research) that it is a
swarklebug with a
turquoise shell whose home region is
South America. And within only a few
degrees of separation that can be jumped at the speed of a
hyperlink, they will be able to tell, if it occurs to them to ask, what other kinds of swarklebug exist, what other things exist that are turquiose, where South America is, what an insect is, what other insects live in South America, why
turquoise is called
turquoise, and so on. Wikimedia can facilitate that, if people will simply bother to build these projects. We are not there yet—not nearly. You may find portions of Wikipedia that feel like they have arrived at that juncture—for example, the
iron oxide articles of the Wikipedian world mostly already say "
iron" and "
oxygen" in their ledes—but I can guarantee you, from being one of the volunteers working away, out in the weeds, that in some of the areas that matter most to human health and economics, we are not yet even close.
Not yet close; in fact, there is so much low-hanging fruit around that sometimes, while I am picking it, I am troubled by the thought that out of something like half a billion to a billion native and ESL English speakers in the world, so very many of whom could be working on the English Wikipedia for free at any time they were willing to be and had a device and internet connection available to do it, I am the only one within the past decade who both thought of the fact, and bothered to take care of it, that the article on molecular biology, for example, should link to the article on molecules in its opening sentence. The funny thing is, it doesn't take much. A mere high school education, some curiosity, some thought, some reading of books and googling of connections, is all that's required for most of the improvements I make to Wikipedia. I myself went to university, too, although I'm now making up for the deficiencies of my experience there, slowly and on my own. Anyway, the point being, anyone with half a head can do this, and it's kind of sad that so few are, considering how much nearly everyone benefits from the existence of Wikipedia, both directly and (even more importantly) indirectly. It troubles me that we have such a fat, wonderful opportunity in front of all of us, waiting for nothing but for smart people to bother, and it's lying here so largely unrealized—quarter-realized or tenth-realized, compared with what it obviously could be if more than 0.1% of capable people were bothering. And yes, people who don't bother could point out that I'm spending my own time doing this, and at what opportunity cost, and Wikipedia has errors in it, and on and on, but let's get real here—what the hell are countless other people doing at this very moment with their allegedly precious time? Posting shitty political image macros on Facebook? Watching action flicks and playing active-shooter video games?
If you think that that sounds like a whole lot of bullshit and you'd instead like to do something useful and educational and positive and peaceful and self-improving and altruistic with your life, grab a hoe and come help, out here in the weeds. It's fucking free, and there's fresh air and sunlight.
PS: Speaking of the theme of "shouldn't this already have happened by now?", see also "Shit I cannot believe we had to fucking write this month" by Emily Temple-Wood ( "This month in systemic bias, we had to write a whole bunch of shit that should have been written forever ago and generally made the world a better place.")
25 April 2024 |
This question is both epistemic and socioeconomic. My best version of my answer will continue to evolve, but I wanted to capture an evolving draft here.
I perceive that some instantiation, or group of instantiations, of the concepts of Wikipedia and Wiktionary is, both epistemically and socioeconomically, both (1) inevitable in a free society and (2) preferable to the absence thereof. Unlike techno-utopians, though, I do not believe that such instantiations can be a replacement for either intellectual property or scholarly publishing; rather, instead, I perceive them to be necessary adjuncts thereof: corollary complements. Regarding this distinction, I feel that the vision statement of the Wikimedia projects ("imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge") contains a lamentable polysemic ambiguity that causes a communicative flaw: when it speaks of "the sum of all knowledge", does it mean the sum total, or a summary? The word sum has senses referring to (denoting or connoting) both. The summary sense is the appropriate sense in which to understand the vision of the Wikimedia projects; it is the sense in which the vision is epistemically and socioeconomically sound. (Compare also WP:PRIME.) In contrast, the sum total sense is the sense in which techno-utopians have often tended to take it, but this notion is a misapprehension, because it encourages pathologic variants or corollaries implying that there cannot be any intellectual property that is not theft and that the gatekeeping (threshold-setting) role of editorial boards, editorial offices, and peer reviewers in scholarly publishing is worthless or even harmful. Both of those flaws in thinking are wrong, and we are paying the price for their recent binge of stalking abroad (a drunken binge that began with the panglossianism of the early web era but just bears yet more diseased idiocratic consequences every year), and we will pay still more to come if we do not learn to curb and domesticate the monsters that have been loosed.
And yet—I perceive that the general public, by which I mean all of us in our day-to-day lives, of all education levels and occupations, benefits from having, and should somehow be provided, a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and a free dictionary that anyone can edit, as epistemic and socioeconomic complements to (not replacements of) whatever other information resources exist (including those that require some intellectual property and/or scholarly publishing). And I perceive that if ones are not provided, ones will be bootstrapped in the wild to fill that vacuum. This is the inevitability factor, but it is not any techno-utopian variant of inevitability but rather a real-world version. It is not inevitable that the instantiations that exist will be good ones, or adequate ones. What is inevitable is that shitty ones will exist if good ones do not.
Speaking of which, I am not asserting that the current ones themselves are not shitty. In fact I perceive a certain latent shittiness about them that is even larger than their superficially apparent shittiness. I am asserting, though, that wherever they currently are on the gradient of shittiness, it is worth improving them, because (1) if they go away then others at even lower points on the shittiness gradient will inevitably replace them, and (2) every day, as millions of people use them, it would be better if they sucked less than they do; that would be a net gain, a net benefit. In other words, we are boned, so then working within that framework, tack appropriately, and do the work (to do so).
A problem with the current ones is that they are too threadbare and sketchy in important areas of worthwhile information (notwithstanding that they contain a massive surfeit of various types of unimportant or less useful information, which reflects not so much the law of triviality as the laws of which aspects of life most humans tend to find most mentally engaging). The best way to lessen this problem is for capable (competent) people to bother to do the work of incrementally improving them.
This essay draft on rationales will continue to be iterated.
An important exploration on this topic:
|
“ | Knowledgeable people should be warned, but I hope that isn't completely discouraging, just a hint to go slowly and not expect unbounded success. | ” |
— User:Sminthopsis84, conveniently combining modus vivendi with vis vivendi |
“ | War brings sharply to men's minds the fact that wasting our substance means more than a loss to the individual; it is an act of sabotage against society, even though it is unconscious and unintentional. | ” |
— Gove Hambidge (1890-1970), also touching on modi vivendi and vis vivendi |
“ | All this does is get me to normal. | ” |
— Krusty the Clown, also touching on modi vivendi |
“ | Life is a journey of pursuing improvement, not a destination of reaching perfection. | ” |
— some asshole holding degreaser and grounding straps, on truisms as parameter resets |
“ | → | ” |
— ⸺, — |
“ | Fuck around and find out. | ” |
— some asshole in Peoria, on the alignment problem, as prompted and goaded by some asshole in Palo Alto |
“ | Every other authour may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few. | ” |
— Dr Johnson, touching on negative reinforcement |
Various, lately; some notes are jotted below. These notes are mostly in chronological order with the newest first (older last), except for the limited extent to which the analysis must sometimes loop back or cross-reference. Corollary: To follow along/retrace, read each parent-level bullet and its dependent/child bullets (if any) as a unit, in chronological order; thus, overall, in ascending (not descending) order.
2024-Q2
2024-Q1
2023-Q3
2022-Q3
2022-Q2 and Q1
°