{"id":39,"date":"2005-12-06T06:47:00","date_gmt":"2005-12-06T10:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=26"},"modified":"2005-12-06T06:47:00","modified_gmt":"2005-12-06T10:47:00","slug":"wikipedia-and-operations-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2005\/12\/06\/wikipedia-and-operations-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia and Operations Research"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wikipedia.org\">Wikipedia <\/a>is in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2005\/TECH\/internet\/12\/05\/wikipedia.rules.ap\/index.html\">news<\/a>, due to some inaccurate\/obnoxious\/insulting entries regarding a journalist and alleged involvement in the Kennedy assassinations.<\/p>\n<p>Wikipedia is an interesting effort to harness the knowledge and energy of hundreds of thousands of people to form a new type of encyclopedia.  The key aspect is the ability to freely enter information (or misinformation) and edit what is there.<\/p>\n<p>The entry for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Operations_Research\">operations research<\/a> is pretty good, covering both the general (what is OR) and the specific (some military and other examples).  The pointers are well selected.  The &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/w\/index.php?title=Operations_research&#038;action=history\">history<\/a>&#8221; gives all the past edits, and it is striking how many edits went into this entry alone.  That is one advantage of multiple people working on it:  100 edits don&#8217;t seem bad if 50 people are doing them.<\/p>\n<p>But what is to stop someone from putting &#8220;Operations Research is an upsidedown cake with cherries&#8221; into the entry?  As this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wired\/archive\/13.03\/wiki.html?pg=2&#038;topic=(none)&#038;topic_set=(none)\">Wired<\/a> article describes, with enough interested volunteers, such vandalism can get corrected within minutes.  Of course, that assumes the entry is in an area with knowledgeable and active volunteers.  I wonder how much misinformation is stored in the backwaters of wiki.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the doubts, I think a wiki based Encyclopedia of OR would be a tremendous asset for the field.  While some expert-based encyclopedias are fine (Gass and Harris have a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0792395905\/qid=1133870326\/sr=8-1\/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14\/103-1288126-1973416?n=507846&#038;s=books&#038;v=glance\">good one<\/a>, at an astounding $620 new), a community based wiki would be more up-to-date and be able to cover far more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wikipedia is in the news, due to some inaccurate\/obnoxious\/insulting entries regarding a journalist and alleged involvement in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia is an interesting effort to harness the knowledge and energy of hundreds of thousands of people to form a new type of encyclopedia. The key aspect is the ability to freely enter information (or &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2005\/12\/06\/wikipedia-and-operations-research\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Wikipedia and Operations Research&#8221;<\/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":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs-and-web"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}