I’m not sure I even know how to parse “wikipedia blog on rationality”.
The link to Less Wrong in Eliezer’s fanfiction.net profile takes you to the wiki page for the sequences. So they were in a wiki, which I guess they figured was part of Wikipedia.
So they were in a wiki, which I guess they figured was part of Wikipedia.
A lot of people think that every wiki is a part of Wikipedia or the same thing as Wikipedia, or that “Wikipedia” is a common noun meaning “wiki”, or that every Wiki has to be a ’Pedia of some sort. And most people don’t know that the first wiki predated Wikipedia by six years, so they assume Wikipedia invented the concept.
A lot of people think that every wiki is a part of Wikipedia or the same thing as Wikipedia, or that “Wikipedia” is a common noun meaning “wiki”, or that every Wiki has to be a ’Pedia of some sort.
I’m not sure what that third hypothesis means, but the first two seem very different to me and seems worth knowing how popular those two beliefs are.
By “every Wiki has to be a ’Pedia of some sort”, I was referring to this observation:
Over the first six years of wikis, most were informally-organized, and mixed discussion in with factual content. They gathered information, but focused on (or at least allowed) discussion and socializing; they did not resemble encyclopedias. (The original wiki, Ward’s Wiki AKA WikiWikiWeb AKA the Portland Pattern Repository, is a good surviving example of this format, as is CocoaDev, the first wiki I encountered, plus the SL4 Wiki.)
But people often assume Wikipedia-like rules, norms, and structure apply to every wiki. I own and (now only occasionally) edit a wiki about a little-known band, documenting its albums, songs, concerts, etc., and its fan culture. Early on, a few people mistakenly assumed that rules like NPOV, notability, and encyclopedicness applied there. I’ve seen this elsewhere too, but it’s admittedly getting harder to find incorrect examples of such assumptions, because most wikis these days (at least the big ones) are modeled after Wikipedia, just within fictional universes or within more specific domains than “all human knowledge”.
(Also, to ”...or that ‘Wikipedia’ is a common noun meaning ‘wiki’”, let me add “or that ‘wiki’ is an abbreviation for ‘Wikipedia’”. I’m not the sort who will cling to old definitions as the True Essence of normally evolving words, but given the wide historical and current use of “wiki” for sites unrelated to Wikipedia, I reserve the right to get mildly annoyed at people who say “wiki” as shorthand for “Wikipedia”.)
For what it is worth, the Wikimedia foundation doesn’t like people using “wiki” for Wikipedia. Most Wikipedians don’t like it either. And neither does Wikipe-tan as she makes clear here
Edit: Apparently the software interprets a closing parenthesis in a URL as the end of the URL string. This is an unfun bug. Using a short url to avoid the problematic parsing.
Although it doesn’t apply in this case, do you think the common use of WikiMedia (which defaults to the same dignified blue and gray look that Wikipedia has) contributes to the problem?
It probably contributes to it. It’s pretty easy to assume a site is identical or similar to Wikipedia when they look almost identical. (Nitpick: Wikimedia is the foundation that owns Wikipedia and its related sites. The wiki software that they develop and run is called MediaWiki.)
TvTropes probably doesn’t suffer from this problem too much because 1) it doesn’t have “wiki” in its name; 2) it doesn’t run MediaWiki or look like it; and 3) the home page has a paragraph that starts “We are not Wikipedia. We’re a buttload more informal. . . .”
I wonder if that sort of thing should be added to the list of biases—it’s being so influenced by the most prominent example that one no longer perceives the range of possibility. It seems something like framing, but not exactly it.
I don’t know if that’s quite what’s happening here. It’s probably more that Wikipedia (and maybe a few other heavily Wikipedia-inspired, MediaWiki-based sites) is the only exposure most people will have to the wiki concept. The range of possibility didn’t exist in their minds in the first place.
I’m not sure if the effect whereby it skews people’s expectations of other later-discovered wikis is something like a qualitative rather than numeric version of anchoring (is there any research on that? Does it have a name?), or if it’s just an unsurprising and possibly rational result of people originally seeing “wiki” associated with a single site and not a larger category. If a person is casually familiar with Wikipedia, and they hear their friends call it “wiki”, and they’ve never heard of the general wiki concept… and then they happen upon CocoaDev, see that it describes itself as a wiki (which, to them, was previously not even a one-element category but just a single website; it would seem analogous to Bing calling itself “a google”), and import their expectations about “wiki”… then is that really a bias if they find many aspects of CocoaDev’s structure very surprising?
Maybe it’s a bias specifically if they fail to update their understanding of the concept “wiki” and instead assume that CocoaDev is doing something wrong.
I don’t know if that’s quite what’s happening here. It’s probably more that Wikipedia (and maybe a few other heavily Wikipedia-inspired, MediaWiki-based sites) is the only exposure most people will have to the wiki concept. The range of possibility didn’t exist in their minds in the first place.
Fair enough.
It could be described as a sort of group bias. People would have been capable of seeing a range of possibility except that a strong example channels their minds.
The first one is not at all uncommon. Although I don’t have any citations off the top of my head, as a (not very active) admin for Wikinews I can say that very often news sources credit us as “Wikipedia.”
With all the nonsensical “cool” prefixes (see iPod, XBox), “cool” etymologically-challenged names (Skype, Google), and “cool” weird-spelling-that-kind-of-suggests something (Syfy) going on, I don’t blame people for thinking any new name they encounter is simply made up for no reason.
I’m not sure I even know how to parse “wikipedia blog on rationality”. But at least in some sense, we apparently are Wikipedia. Congrats.
The link to Less Wrong in Eliezer’s fanfiction.net profile takes you to the wiki page for the sequences. So they were in a wiki, which I guess they figured was part of Wikipedia.
A lot of people think that every wiki is a part of Wikipedia or the same thing as Wikipedia, or that “Wikipedia” is a common noun meaning “wiki”, or that every Wiki has to be a ’Pedia of some sort. And most people don’t know that the first wiki predated Wikipedia by six years, so they assume Wikipedia invented the concept.
I’m not sure what that third hypothesis means, but the first two seem very different to me and seems worth knowing how popular those two beliefs are.
By “every Wiki has to be a ’Pedia of some sort”, I was referring to this observation:
Over the first six years of wikis, most were informally-organized, and mixed discussion in with factual content. They gathered information, but focused on (or at least allowed) discussion and socializing; they did not resemble encyclopedias. (The original wiki, Ward’s Wiki AKA WikiWikiWeb AKA the Portland Pattern Repository, is a good surviving example of this format, as is CocoaDev, the first wiki I encountered, plus the SL4 Wiki.)
But people often assume Wikipedia-like rules, norms, and structure apply to every wiki. I own and (now only occasionally) edit a wiki about a little-known band, documenting its albums, songs, concerts, etc., and its fan culture. Early on, a few people mistakenly assumed that rules like NPOV, notability, and encyclopedicness applied there. I’ve seen this elsewhere too, but it’s admittedly getting harder to find incorrect examples of such assumptions, because most wikis these days (at least the big ones) are modeled after Wikipedia, just within fictional universes or within more specific domains than “all human knowledge”.
(Also, to ”...or that ‘Wikipedia’ is a common noun meaning ‘wiki’”, let me add “or that ‘wiki’ is an abbreviation for ‘Wikipedia’”. I’m not the sort who will cling to old definitions as the True Essence of normally evolving words, but given the wide historical and current use of “wiki” for sites unrelated to Wikipedia, I reserve the right to get mildly annoyed at people who say “wiki” as shorthand for “Wikipedia”.)
For what it is worth, the Wikimedia foundation doesn’t like people using “wiki” for Wikipedia. Most Wikipedians don’t like it either. And neither does Wikipe-tan as she makes clear here
Edit: Apparently the software interprets a closing parenthesis in a URL as the end of the URL string. This is an unfun bug. Using a short url to avoid the problematic parsing.
I think you can backslash-escape parentheses in URLs to avoid that bug (or that unexpected-but-correct-according-to-the-spec behaviour, rather).
Testing it: blah.png)
Although it doesn’t apply in this case, do you think the common use of WikiMedia (which defaults to the same dignified blue and gray look that Wikipedia has) contributes to the problem?
Do people expect TvTropes to be like Wikipedia?
It probably contributes to it. It’s pretty easy to assume a site is identical or similar to Wikipedia when they look almost identical. (Nitpick: Wikimedia is the foundation that owns Wikipedia and its related sites. The wiki software that they develop and run is called MediaWiki.)
TvTropes probably doesn’t suffer from this problem too much because 1) it doesn’t have “wiki” in its name; 2) it doesn’t run MediaWiki or look like it; and 3) the home page has a paragraph that starts “We are not Wikipedia. We’re a buttload more informal. . . .”
I wonder if that sort of thing should be added to the list of biases—it’s being so influenced by the most prominent example that one no longer perceives the range of possibility. It seems something like framing, but not exactly it.
I don’t know if that’s quite what’s happening here. It’s probably more that Wikipedia (and maybe a few other heavily Wikipedia-inspired, MediaWiki-based sites) is the only exposure most people will have to the wiki concept. The range of possibility didn’t exist in their minds in the first place.
I’m not sure if the effect whereby it skews people’s expectations of other later-discovered wikis is something like a qualitative rather than numeric version of anchoring (is there any research on that? Does it have a name?), or if it’s just an unsurprising and possibly rational result of people originally seeing “wiki” associated with a single site and not a larger category. If a person is casually familiar with Wikipedia, and they hear their friends call it “wiki”, and they’ve never heard of the general wiki concept… and then they happen upon CocoaDev, see that it describes itself as a wiki (which, to them, was previously not even a one-element category but just a single website; it would seem analogous to Bing calling itself “a google”), and import their expectations about “wiki”… then is that really a bias if they find many aspects of CocoaDev’s structure very surprising?
Maybe it’s a bias specifically if they fail to update their understanding of the concept “wiki” and instead assume that CocoaDev is doing something wrong.
Fair enough.
It could be described as a sort of group bias. People would have been capable of seeing a range of possibility except that a strong example channels their minds.
The first one is not at all uncommon. Although I don’t have any citations off the top of my head, as a (not very active) admin for Wikinews I can say that very often news sources credit us as “Wikipedia.”
I have to wonder where they think Wikipedia got its name from...
With all the nonsensical “cool” prefixes (see iPod, XBox), “cool” etymologically-challenged names (Skype, Google), and “cool” weird-spelling-that-kind-of-suggests something (Syfy) going on, I don’t blame people for thinking any new name they encounter is simply made up for no reason.