On Danish there actually are two major Wiki-based encyclopaedias:
One is Den Store Danske (lit.: The Big Danish) (DSD) and the other is – of course – The Danish Wikipedia (DaWiki).
After a discussion on intelligence last night, we – as so many times before – ended up with the DaWiki article on the matter. Unfortunately – being slightly drunk and all – we didn’t find our answer there and moved on to DSD where the answer was clear and useful – and ultimately solved our debate (or at least, changed the direction of our debate).
Now here the first paragraph from DSD (my translation) on the subject of intelligence:
intelligence, (from lat. intelligent ‘insight’; the ability to perceive, comprehend, understand), expression of potential of or competence to ie solving problems, thinking and acquire new knowledge.
And here’s the first paragraph from DaWiki (again – my translation) on the subject of intelligence:
The world intelligence derives from the latin verb intelligere, which means “to comprehend”. There isn’t an agreement on, what the term intelligence implies. The common meanings are the ability to learn or the ability to solve new tasks, without any previous knowledge regarding the procedure. Intelligence is tied to the processes in the cerebral cortex. It might have something to do with the capacity of the brains neocortex, ie. how many neural process it is able to handle simultaneously while solving a task. In recent years it have become common to use the term, to describe the total sums of characters and skills; as a result of this, the term are watered down to a level, where it doesn’t relate much to the intellect.
Now for the DSD translation I had to do two dictionary lookups. For the DaWiki I had to do 12 – and I had to use the English Wikipedia to translate some Danish technical terms to their English counterparts.
Now. One of my accomplices in drinking yesterday is a teacher. Teaches 10-15 years old and they uses the internet. And they use the Wikipedia, because my friend is one of the younger and more rebellious teachers. Now while his older collegus don’t use Wikipedia their main argument is, that it isn’t a realiable source. The MediaWiki system (which runs all the wikipedias) has a function called Flagged Revisions, which is used to mark the content as releable. DSD already uses this function, and on DaWiki the discussion about introducing this function is already ongoing. But for my rebeloius teacher friend relaiablity isn’t the issue with DaWiki. It just makes DaWiki another platform which helps the pupils of the basic concept of source evaluation, which is to be developed as a basic skill in a modern world with a gazillion of sources.
His problem with DaWiki is that it is to correct for his young pupils. It’s a lack of ‘unassumingness’. The articles are mainly written by dedicated knowledgeable people, which of course tries to write it for an unassuming people. On DaWiki we actually have a template to be put on articles which contains expert-written texts, but that only takes us that far, because we’ll always value correctness above anything else. And at large that’s at a cost of unassumingness. And to be fair – this isn’t only relevant to the Danish Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia is also struck by this, though at a lesser degree, because of it’s more outspread base of editors.
At one point we – at least on the Danish Wikipedia – might have to begin reasserting at what direction the Danish Wikipedia is to take. A Wikipedia where unassumingness is allowed for or where every single sentence, has to be 100% correct, verifiable and unambiguous….
