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Re: [Bug-gne]How Nupedia solves this


From: Bob Dodd
Subject: Re: [Bug-gne]How Nupedia solves this
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 13:31:58 -0800 (PST)

--- Tom Chance <address@hidden> wrote:
> And bias, censorship, freedom. They're all pep words
> really, I don't think anybody can qualify them; nobody
> could define freedom as being able to read x% of
> articles published worldwide. The three terms are very
> subjective, so anybody trying to define them is
> missing the point. 

Well, they are definable, they're just not very measurable :-))
Which is the point I was making when I poked some gentle fun at peer
review. It's pointless to say something is unbiased, or that it's
definitively more accurate, as the terms are at best misleading. Peer
review is about obtaining a limited form of consensus in order to make
a point, collections like GNE are about influencing that consensus
(after all, unsolicited material is usually from some-one wanting to
make a point about the subject, or possibly about themselves). Whether
you reach for GNE or Nupedia will depend on the task at hand.

> Its all about the degree of bias/
> censorship/ freedom. Even GNE will encounter a lot of
> bias, certainly to begin with (all our authors will be
> from affluent countries for starters).

I would argue that it will be _all_ bias in some form or other. And
much worse than that, there will be many subjects with only 1 or 2
non-reviewed submissions (I don't think we will get 100 entries on the
manufacture of acryllic paint. There's a certain irony that the
contentious subjects are the least problem in this respect) which
leaves the reader with limited scope for comparison, though you can
argue that this is no worse than buying a single book on the subject.
There is also the problem of what in politics would be called
"entryism", which is a more subtle version of the promotion of ideas.
In this case, you and your friends get together to ensure a particular
view/philosophy is prominent across the whole of the collection,
forming an unrepresentatively large percentage of the whole collection.

 
> I should think the greatest two aims of Nupedia and
> GNE will be to make as large an accessible a resource
> as possible, and then to make it as free as possible
> without having detrimental affects on its quality (in
> Nupedia's case).
> 
> Tom Chance

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