Oxford University Press launches the Anti-Google

[General Zod]

aka Fuck you, Wikipedia.

Crowdsourced knowledge repositories like Wikipedia are great for finding the answer to questions that aren't particularly urgent or critical, but their problems are legion, well-documented, and oft-lamented if you're trying to use them for serious work—especially scholarly work. Search engines aren't any better for scholars, because Google searches not only produce way too much information for even the most obscure topics, but they also don't tell you which sources experts would consider really important.

It turns out that for certain topics, the crowds just aren't very wise, and algorithms even less so—in these situations there's no substitute for old-fashioned expertise, but that expertise can be hard to come by if your professor's office hours are booked solid.

Oxford University Press thinks it has the answer, or at least a first shot at the answer, for these problems with the launch of what could fairly be called the Anti-Google: Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO).

The OBO tool is essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines. Users can drill down to a specific bibliographic entry, which contains some descriptive text and a list of references that link to either Google Books or to a subscribing library's own catalog entries, by either browsing or searching. Each entry is written by a scholar working in the relevant field and vetted by a peer review process. The idea is to alleviate the twin problems of Google-induced data overload, on the one hand, and Wikipedia-driven GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), on the other.

"We did about 18 months of pretty intensive research with scholars and students and librarians to explore how their research practices were changing with the proliferation of online sources," Damon Zucca, OUP’s Executive Editor, Reference, told Ars. "The one thing we heard over and over again is that people were drowning in scholarly information, and drowning in information in general. So it takes twice as much time for people to begin their research."

OBO grew out of that research, with the goal of helping scholars and students deal with information overload, possibly by skipping Google entirely. The resulting bibliography is fairly simple and lean, which is exactly the point. The messy and often politicized work of sorting and sifting the information has already been done for users, so that they can drill down directly to a list of the main publications in their target area.

"You can't come up with a search filter that solves the problem of information overload," Zucca told Ars. OUP is betting that the solution to the problem lies in content, which is its area of expertise, and not in technology, which is Google's and Microsoft's.

To trust OBO's content, you have to trust its selection and vetting process. To that end, OUP is making the list of contributing scholars and editors freely available. Each subject area has an Editor in Chief who's a top scholar in the field, and an editorial board of around 15 to 20 scholars. The EIC and editorial board either write the bibliographic entries themselves, or they select other scholars to do the work.

The launch version of OBO covers only four subject areas: Classics, Islamic Studies, Social Work and Criminology. But OUP has plans to add 10-12 new subject areas (known as modules) within the next year. Each subject area contains between 50 and 100 individual entries, and that number should grow at the rate of about 50 to 75 entries per year.

To get an idea of what a section's editorial board looks like, check out the "About" page for the Classics topic. The EIC is Dee L. Clayman of CUNY, and the board consists of 17 of the top classics scholars in the field. The topic has a total of 51 entries written by 38 different scholars.

Evaluations of each scholar's work and worth will differ, but at least users can see exactly how the sausage is made. Contrast this to Google or Bing, where the search algorithm that produces results is a closely guarded secret.

The word that Zucca used a number of times in our chat was "authority," and OUP is betting that individual and institutional users will value the authority enough that they'll be willing to pay for access to the service.

As of today's launch, OBO is either $29.95 a month or $295.00 a year. This pricing will be too steep to fit in most student budgets, so OUP is probably counting on generating most of its revenues from institutional subscribers.

This paywall is the only feature of OBO that seems truly unfortunate, given that the competition (search and Wikipedia) is free. High school kids and motivated amateurs will be left slumming it with whatever they can get from the public Internet, and OBO's potential reach and impact will be severely limited. But even if a paywall is the only model that works for funding this kind of specialized content, at least it's an improvement over what came before.

Quite honestly I'm amazed that nobody's done something like this sooner, though the costs to access might be a downside.

[Morilore]

So the difference between this and SciFinder, essentially, is that the pages are put together by persons, rather than algorithms.

Interesting.

[Dark Hellion]

Am I the only one who finds delightful irony in the fact that by making this collection of hypertext links Oxford will probably cause the top links of a Google search for the generic subject to sync up. By putting in this intensive effort to one-up Google they are probably simply improving Google's searches for those subjects. Especially ironic since many will use Google books as well.

Of course I have often felt that the animosity between scholars and sites like Wikipedia and Google is somewhat artificially maintained and they are more capable of useful compromise than they acknowledge. It seems that it benefits both sides to keep it up which unfortunately means the middle men suffer.

[Dark Hellion]

Ghetto edit: I don't mean the second paragraph as an assignment of blame. Scholars have very good reasons for their reluctance. The refusal of many wikis to accept even the vaguest semblance of authority leaves them bearing a large amount of the responsibility. I primarily meant artificial in that the general disagreement between both sides is overstated for their own purposes. The wikis use it as a pretense of personal freedom against overbearing elitists and scholarly supporters (generally proponents and not the scholars themselves) imply a level of inaccuracy that doesn't necessarily exist. A quick browsing of many wikis can easily convince one of the necessity for authoritative peer review but they do have a definite place as quick reference as long as one is willing to double check with a better source later.

[Kaiser Caesar]

If they really think that students will be willing to pay $29.95 dollars a month and $295 a year for this service, when they can keep using Google and Wikipedia for $0 a month and $0 a year like they have always done, than they are hopelessly optimistic and naive. Of course, I'm sure some universities will buy into this (not as many as they are hoping, though, as why would universities pay for a research tool when professors on campus can provide research lists for the students in their class), but I doubt that a large enough number of students will use it to justify paying for it when many will just continue on using the same tools they have always used, namely, free internet sites such as Wikipedia and Google and their local library.

And, yes, I do know that most universities discourage the use of Wikipedia as a research tool among the students. But does anyone really believe that stops the students from using it to help them?

Of course, I'm still too young to go to college so I could be completely wrong.

[General Zod]

If they really think that students will be willing to pay $29.95 dollars a month and $295 a year for this service, when they can keep using Google and Wikipedia for $0 a month and $0 a year like they have always done, than they are hopelessly optimistic and naive.

Erm.

This pricing will be too steep to fit in most student budgets, so OUP is probably counting on generating most of its revenues from institutional subscribers.

[eion]

I do know that most universities discourage the use of Wikipedia as a research tool among the students. But does anyone really believe that stops the students from using it to help them?

I don't know of a single one (not even the community college I attend) that allows you to cite Wikipedia. They'd take a similarly dim view of you citing any encyclopedia because all encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, merely reference other sources of more in depth information.

As for the OP: very expensive, but I'm sure colleges will snap it up. I'm not convinced its reliability is any better than wikis though, more sets of eyes and all.

[General Zod]

As for the OP: very expensive, but I'm sure colleges will snap it up. I'm not convinced its reliability is any better than wikis though, more sets of eyes and all.

Considering you have vetted professionals assembling it and not just any dildo with an internet connection? Yeah, I'd be willing to trust it more than wikis.

[eion]

As for the OP: very expensive, but I'm sure colleges will snap it up. I'm not convinced its reliability is any better than wikis though, more sets of eyes and all.

Considering you have vetted professionals assembling it and not just any dildo with an internet connection? Yeah, I'd be willing to trust it more than wikis.

There have been a few cases where errors in peer-edited encyclopedias have remained there for years, so just because the guy looking at the article has a degree doesn't mean he's infallible, and because the only people who edit the work are professionals everyone assumes the work is trustworthy and the work is reviewed far less often for errors.

[General Zod]

As for the OP: very expensive, but I'm sure colleges will snap it up. I'm not convinced its reliability is any better than wikis though, more sets of eyes and all.

Considering you have vetted professionals assembling it and not just any dildo with an internet connection? Yeah, I'd be willing to trust it more than wikis.

There have been a few cases where errors in peer-edited encyclopedias have remained there for years, so just because the guy looking at the article has a degree doesn't mean he's infallible, and because the only people who edit the work are professionals everyone assumes the work is trustworthy and the work is reviewed far less often for errors.

If you're saying you'd rather trust a site whose pages have been known to be completely fraudulent or nothing more than heavily whitewashed propaganda instead, you're a moron. Because quite frankly I never said they'd be infallible, I said they'd be more reliable.

[eion]

If you're saying you'd rather trust a site whose pages have been known to be completely fraudulent or nothing more than heavily whitewashed propaganda instead, you're a moron. Because quite frankly I never said they'd be infallible, I said they'd be more reliable.

I don't trust Wikipedia at all, nor should there be any assumption of trust with any information you yourself have not verified. The problem is people assume because something is in an encyclopedia it must be correct. If people assumed the same automatic distrust of any non-verified information as they did with wikis there wouldn't be a problem at all, but more often than not they just say, "Well it's in the encyclopedia, it must be true!"

Not to throw one source against another, but that is demonstratably false. Errors occur no matter what the medium, but the advantage of a wiki is it is self-regulating and a faster responding medium. If there is vandalism (and there certainly sometimes is) it is more often than not quickly discovered and corrected before anyone actually notices it.

So no, I'm not convinced that a traditional encyclopedia is any more reliable in the modern age than a wiki.

[General Zod]

>snip<
So no, I'm not convinced that a traditional encyclopedia is any more reliable in the modern age than a wiki.

Frankly you sound like every single Wikipedia apologist I've ever met; your whole argument basically boils down to mindless middle bullshit. Tell me, are you capable of verifying every single news story you read, or do you believe them because you trust some sources more than others? In any case, what they're creating in the article I posted isn't an encyclopedia.

[eion]

>snip<
So no, I'm not convinced that a traditional encyclopedia is any more reliable in the modern age than a wiki.

Frankly you sound like every single Wikipedia apologist I've ever met; your whole argument basically boils down to mindless middle bullshit. Tell me, are you capable of verifying every single news story you read, or do you believe them because you trust some sources more than others? In any case, what they're creating in the article I posted isn't an encyclopedia.

No, but I rarely rely on just one telling of the facts for my news. I try to get as many different perspectives as possible; this is difficult because for a lot of stories that interest me different sources will just use the AP boilerplate without verifying the information for themselves, so you end up reading the same perspective spun into different forms. Even the sources I might trust more than others have proven their bias and incompetence on more than one occasion.

You're right, this is not an encyclopedia. It looks more like a version of Yahoo's directory system but created by academics instead of the commons. I have no problem with that, but to say this is a "Fuck you" to Wikipedia is a bit of mischaracterization.

[Stark]

Except it isn't, because it was created to make it easier to cite actual sources instead of wiki.

Frankly I'm not sure what the point is, I've never had any trouble doing research and citing valid sources. But then, I don't use wiki, so I'm not part of the problem.

[General Zod]

No, but I rarely rely on just one telling of the facts for my news. I try to get as many different perspectives as possible; this is difficult because for a lot of stories that interest me different sources will just use the AP boilerplate without verifying the information for themselves, so you end up reading the same perspective spun into different forms. Even the sources I might trust more than others have proven their bias and incompetence on more than one occasion.

Fortunately I never claimed you should rely on one source and nothing else. But I guess you prefer attacking arguments that don't exist.

You're right, this is not an encyclopedia. It looks more like a version of Yahoo's directory system but created by academics instead of the commons. I have no problem with that, but to say this is a "Fuck you" to Wikipedia is a bit of mischaracterization.

It's called hyperbole. You may have heard of it.

[Dark Hellion]

Eion, Zod, thank you for being so kind as to prove me exactly right with what I said in the third post of this thread. It brings a special joy to my heart. Too bad we can't figure out a way to charge people to watch two grown men beat up straw men or we would make a killing.

I'll respond in alphabetical order. Eion, one of the most important facets of peer-reviewed journals is not a quest for infallibility, as you seem to be implying. No human endeavor will achieve that. The fact that mistakes exist in such publications is not inherently damning for exactly that reason. And the fact that Wikipedia can be accurate does not assuage its problems. The real thing that separates the peer-reviewed publications from civilian-reviewed ones is the rigor with which they are checked and verified. No quantity of people checking can achieve what a single well-qualified reviewer can simply because at some point there is an initial necessity for one person to be educated and knowledgeable enough about a subject to check another's work. The civilian model does work very well for subjects that are long established, well settled and widely published. There is no shortage of calculus-based freshman physics books and a reference for the material covered within is both easy to create and fact check. There are hundreds of editions by dozens of authors spanning centuries and the primary challenge is not in actually verifying the work but in proper transcription and choosing the most accurate, easily understood and enlightening portions to use. But as you can see the civilian process only becomes useful once a preponderance of peer-reviewed work already exists.

Now to Zod. The composition fallacy is not rock to mindless middle's scissors. The fact that there exist many subjective articles and topics on Wikipedia (or similar sites) does not invalidate the entirety of the site even though some of the topics are willfully inaccurate. It is fallacious to assume that all of the topics are worthless, simply because some of them are. To examine the worth of the site we have to first set some objective of what we realistically expect the site to achieve. Again, we cannot assume that the final goal is infallibility although it would satisfy the delusions of the fanboys and makes a great straw man to beat up. And we don't want to simply collect information without some concern for content because such a task is time consuming but of trivial importance. If we wish for a powerful criticism of Wikipedia this lack of an easily defined goal is a far better place to start than attempting to cherry pick articles. While you could cite incorrect articles all day long the simple breadth of content means that another person could counter every one with an article of impeccable accuracy and technical detail. At the same time, not being sure what Wikipedia is supposed to do does not mean we cannot find purposes to use it for.

The wiki model seems to work well for any subject that is both purely objective and well institutionalized as reasoned in my rebuttal to Eion. Additionally, while we would never want to cite Wikipedia for scholarly work we could use it quickly find a trig. identity or an integration table for doing homework, to get a quick overview of various topics to spark interest for future personal research in chemistry/physics/math/etc. or look up the date of some historical event for idle conversation. Nothing remarkable or of any high intellectual endeavor but it isn't the worthless circle jerk that it is often decried as. Just the simple and practical concession that we needn't refer to the Principia to get F=ma. It is a resource of a somewhat mundane and middling value.

And before you mindlessly cry Golden Mean Fallacy, remember that it is only fallacious if we are simply assuming that the middle ground is correct. If we arrive at the conclusion through a reasonable argument there is no fallacy. We see that there are a number of good and bad points to the wiki format which weigh against each other, as well as some points that are simply mediocre.

I do wish that Wikipedia was better. With the growth of the internet and sites like Wikipedia and Google the scope of human information has become illustrated in a new and fascinating way. In some ways they have set up a framework through which we can visualize (but never achieve) what some type of imaginary "omnipedia" could be. The idea of a fully interacting, exhaustive, objective and accurate online encyclopedia covering not only the sciences, humanities, and arts but also able to cover the cultures and customs of the world. It would be the ultimate egalitarian tool for anyone with access to the internet and would revolutionize a great deal of how we interact with knowledge. I think the greatest shame and crime of Wikipedia is that it has become a monstrosity that works against the creation of a better version of Wikipedia. The mediocrity of its user base excludes exhaustiveness as the majority would be drivel, the freedom of editing hinders the objectivity and accuracy and the necessity to be accessible by lay persons restricts the formatting. It is the great irony that a massive reservoir of human knowledge so accurately reflects us as a species: short-sighted, biased, lazy, brilliant, obsessive and vicious.

[General Zod]

Now to Zod. The composition fallacy is not rock to mindless middle's scissors. The fact that there exist many subjective articles and topics on Wikipedia (or similar sites) does not invalidate the entirety of the site even though some of the topics are willfully inaccurate. It is fallacious to assume that all of the topics are worthless, simply because some of them are.

You know what else is fallacious? Attacking arguments that people aren't making.

[Dark Hellion]

If you're saying you'd rather trust a site whose pages have been known to be completely fraudulent or nothing more than heavily whitewashed propaganda instead, you're a moron.

Hi, if you look closely I am the fallacy of composition. If I take Einsteins General Theory of Relativity and randomly insert a page that is filled with "Ronald Reagan was the greatest U.S. President ever" it does not destroy the authority of the paper.

The fact that there are clearly fraudulent pages does not make the sum total of Wikipedia invalid and even if the sum total of Wikipedia was invalid we could not assume that individual topics within are not actually factually accurate. To make an assumption we need to have some rational scheme by which we can judge it and many of the schemes that seem implied in the criticisms and apologia should just wear a name sticker that says fallacy on it. Again this is another critique of Wikipedia that is often glossed over by its opponents; that the shear size of Wikipedia and its ever changing content render large scale evaluations extremely difficult. There is a ready rebuttal in admitting that we need to cut it into smaller, categorical pieces but this critique is absolutely damning to the "I trust Wikipedia over some stuffy journal" crowd.

This is not to say that your grand conclusion was incorrect. Eion is apparently a moron on this subject. My brain refused to let me actually absorb what he said when I read his initial post so that it could prepare itself for damage control. And though mocking stupidity with hyperbole is an honor bound duty of board members this type of topic seems only to generate it despite being a topic with good possibilities for intellectual discourse.

There are serious and readily identifiable problems with the wiki model. They just never seem to actually be discussed as it is much more rhetorically effective to resort to punditry and hyperbole. And this rhetoric is highly distracting to any actual evaluation or remedy.

I think this is because most well maintained wikis are, in the end, mediocre shit. Its depressingly what we would expect from a vast pool of information written primarily by people of about average intelligence. Its the sad old cliche about jacks and trades. But this easily gets lost in the swirl of the rhetoric and since both sides have entrenched partisans you naturally see a lot of dumb schmucks cling to their golden mean security blanket and obfuscating by association this very real criticism.

This seems to be the terrible cycle of the mediocre, be it wikis or movies or video games. For the ignorant the mediocre is sublime compared to what they are used to and to the intelligent or cultured it is tripe. And on an emotional level the mediocre often seems far worse than the truly bad. There is a perverse enjoyment from seeing something like Chicktracts or Timecube or watching Plan 9 from Outer Space which one cannot get from the middle range of the spectrum. From here we get the ever widening gap between fanboys and haters until it gets big enough for the mindless middle to jump in and forever ruin any chance of intelligent criticism with megatons of nuclear stupid.

But this is just digression on a family of internet arguments that generally make me cringe. Back to the OP. I have to echo Stark a bit, it feels like they have put a lot of effort into compiling something that anyone doing work on would have their own scholarly reasons for compiling themselves. I also have to ask myself how they will even begin to hope avoiding information overload when/if they get to the well established hard sciences. Even maintaining a balance between generality and specificity seems daunting and ultimately somewhat pointless as someone doing a serious research assignment should have no problem spending a couple of hours churning through their universities journal archive search. It seems like they are creating a competitor simply for the sake of it. I don't doubt that the resource will have its uses but it feels very round-about when the real issue is stressing that peer-reviewed journals and wiki sources are different beasts with vastly different uses which are not interchangeable.

[General Zod]

The fact that there are clearly fraudulent pages does not make the sum total of Wikipedia invalid and even if the sum total of Wikipedia was invalid we could not assume that individual topics within are not actually factually accurate.

It's a good thing that's not what I'm saying then, but apparently I need to spell it out anyway. A site with several known fraudulent entries with no standard criteria for inclusion should not be trusted more than one whose entries were created by vetted professionals. Better, or should I use crayon?

[Admiral Valdemar]

Except it isn't, because it was created to make it easier to cite actual sources instead of wiki.

Frankly I'm not sure what the point is, I've never had any trouble doing research and citing valid sources. But then, I don't use wiki, so I'm not part of the problem.

I wouldn't even say it's a problem with Wiki (although there are obvious problems), just with the way a lot of students would go using it. It would be stupid to use Wikipedia as a citation, but using a cite from a Wiki article that you can verify is another story. In the sciences, Wikipedia is pretty damn good. I used it as a kind of launchpad for looking into sources I'd not normally find using Google Scholar or Athens. And I did very well in my scientific research and bioinformatics, before anyone says Wikis are utterly useless.

The worst articles on Wikipedia are inevitably the humanities ones, where a LOT of subjectivity means many, many edits and bullshit arguments in the Talk page to the point that the article gets locked and becomes ever more useless. It's also harder to verify sources without going to some big book or dubious essay, whereas a link to a scientific paper in Nature is perfect (as someone else said, a link to Britannica or Encarta is no better than citing Wikipedia).

I welcome OUP's effort here, and hope if anything that it makes easy-of-use, broadness and, most importantly, veracity of online information repositories far better. A lot of this reminds me of the e-learning thing iTunes and others have made, with universities putting up free lecture materials from their courses, unedited.

[Illuminatus Primus]

I'm exactly with Valdemar; especially in the sciences, Wiki is extremely useful and fast for source-mining, and even if some of them are not reputable, I'm only having to screen and double-check a relatively tiny pool than some raw search.

[General Zod]

I'm exactly with Valdemar; especially in the sciences, Wiki is extremely useful and fast for source-mining, and even if some of them are not reputable, I'm only having to screen and double-check a relatively tiny pool than some raw search.

See, source mining is the one use of Wikipedia I can agree with, if you don't know where to start looking on a topic. It's just using it as any kind of primary source that I find retarded.

[Stark]

I wouldn't even say it's a problem with Wiki (although there are obvious problems), just with the way a lot of students would go using it. It would be stupid to use Wikipedia as a citation, but using a cite from a Wiki article that you can verify is another story. In the sciences, Wikipedia is pretty damn good. I used it as a kind of launchpad for looking into sources I'd not normally find using Google Scholar or Athens. And I did very well in my scientific research and bioinformatics, before anyone says Wikis are utterly useless.

The worst articles on Wikipedia are inevitably the humanities ones, where a LOT of subjectivity means many, many edits and bullshit arguments in the Talk page to the point that the article gets locked and becomes ever more useless. It's also harder to verify sources without going to some big book or dubious essay, whereas a link to a scientific paper in Nature is perfect (as someone else said, a link to Britannica or Encarta is no better than citing Wikipedia).

I welcome OUP's effort here, and hope if anything that it makes easy-of-use, broadness and, most importantly, veracity of online information repositories far better. A lot of this reminds me of the e-learning thing iTunes and others have made, with universities putting up free lecture materials from their courses, unedited.

This is all true, but you can do the same thing with an actual scholarly article too. Using wikipedia is just 'I'm too lazy to log into the journal database'. It's just amusing when you follow wiki cites to sources that actually don't say what the article claims it does...

[Admiral Valdemar]

Given the number of people I've seen on forums who link an article and vehemently point out they are right, only for said article to really say the exact opposite, I'd imagine Wiki is full of these same types. That, or someone didn't bother revising an article to meet the requirements of clarity, and just did it with a simple link. Lazy, but less crapola to wade through for that nugget of gold. Self-refuting debaters are fun.

'Sides, I don't get journal access from home now (how I miss perusing random papers I'd normally pay £30 for the privilege of seeing), unless it's the company library. I had hoped to use the site my department uses, CHROMacademy, but I'll be fisted by a gorilla before I pay $1300 for an annual subscription personally.