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John Seigenthaler Sr. Criticises Wikipedia
EsonLinji writes "John Seigenthaler Sr, a former assistant to Robert Kennedy, has written a commentary in USA Today expressing outrage at a libelous biography that appeared on Wikipedia that suggested he was involved with the assasination of JFK and spent more than a decade in Russia. His commentary also takes aim at internet providers and the laws that allow them to act as common carriers without liability for the actions of their users."
If you disagree with it, just edit it! No need to get all indignant.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
that everything's connected.
If the ISPs were deemed to not be classed as common carriers, and liable for every action of their users, the restrictions on people signing up to ISPs would be unworkable (if the ISP was to remain viable).
Also, they could then be liable for actions of businesses against businesses.
This would set up being as ISP as a very dangerous business. So much so, that it would likely stifle network activity.
If that's stifled, then businesses don't communicate as effectively.
Nor do people.
Which would seriously limit the participation and movement of his discussion and debate forums mentioned in his proper biography.
So, by getting his own way, he'd eventually end up shooting himself in the foot..
How foresighted.
There's some irony for you.
The ability for idiots to troll on Wikipedia is simply part of its nature, and (unless fundamentally changed) means that it can never be viewed as an objective, neutral, authoritative, comprehensive, or in any way lasting resource. The people to complain about are the users who so readily link to Wikipedia to settle every argument or copy-and-paste to pass every writing assignment. They give it a artificial air of credibility, and they take it into their lives without any sense of context.
There are probably plenty of blogs and tinfoil-lined web sites that do his reputation much worse than the entry in question, but he doesn't really need to worry about those because they are obscure. Wikipedia has become an intellectual crutch for millions of lazy visitors, and thus something of an institution. It smells authoritative and is treated that way by too many people. The only cure is for smart people who know better to cite better, direct information and to let Wikipedia play the role that its entire structure demands that it play: one big idealogical squabble-fest.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This seems like another example of someone who completely doesn't understand the internet. Sure, he had an erroneous (libelous?) biography published on Wikipedia. Fucking change it. That is the entire point of Wikipedia, as others have already pointed out. And Wikipedia IS a wonderful - yes, AND flawed - research tool. Nobody says cite Wikipedia in your dissertation and be done with it. It's a starting point, as any Encyclopedia should be, and it's made pretty clear that anyone CAN edit the damn thing. So you take it with a grain of salt, and corroborate your information elsewhere.
Instead, this guy does the going-over-peoples'-heads thing, pulls strings here and there to get things removed from websites, and considers going after an ISP because that evil intarnet needs to be controlled. It's like wanting to know who scrawled naughty messages about you on the blackboard before you walked into class in 3rd grade, when the fucking eraser is in front of your eyes and you're failing to use it.
I was hoping to see something redemptive about the article, but honestly, all I saw was whining. Unfortunately, whining of the dangerous kind, because it comes from a guy who has lots of strings to pull, and who is completely out of touch with the world he lives in. My $0.02.
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supposedly a reliable encyclopedia
Supposed by whom? Wikipedia is at best a starting point for information on anything of any importance. Fortunately most articles tend to cite their references, so you can go and check on facts relatively easily.
I do also notice that Wikipedia has a lot of entries for stuff that might not otherwise be considered important enough to be in an encyclopedia
Why is that a problem?
While I sympathise with his outrage, you would think that a man who takes such pride in founding the "Freedom Forum First Amendment Center" might be a little slower to try to bring his legal people to bear on this issue. Might the original article have been merely misinformed rather than malicious?
His right to publish a rebuttal in the op-ed section is safe, but then he (apparently) has money.
Freedom is slippery.
Using plain ol' text since 1968
It's true that obvious vandalism, pranks, etc. get reverted quickly. It's also true that controversial material, particularly on reasonably current topics (e.g Post-invasion Iraq get attention by editors who are actually checking facts and looking for sources.
But plausible or accidental misinformation, especially if well-written, can remain in Wikipedia unchallenged for very long periods of time. Spelling errors will be corrected, sentences rewritten, but facts don't get checked in any systematic way. Two that I personally ran across:
Example number 1: From July 2003 until October 2003 the article on Jack London said that he "attended the University of California" (true) where he was the editor of the university's literary journal (not true). When I asked the editor who inserted it for his source, he replied "it was the story that was spread around at Cal when I was going there. I don't know if it's true or not, but I had no reason to doubt it at the time that I wrote the info."
Example number 2: Wikipedia policy is act immediately to remove "copyvios"--any material copied from a source that does not explicit provide a free license or is not demonstrably in the public domain. Nevertheless, from June 2004 until a couple of days ago, most of the material in Wikipedia's article on Khalil Gibran was a direct copy from a Cornell University website. Nobody happened to notice it.
These are examples I happened to catch, so I'm proud of them. But there are also two embarrassing examples. There are at least two examples I know of misinformation I personally inserted into Wikipedia. One was carelessness. The other, far worse, was a case where I inserted casual personal "knowledge" that I believed to be true but didn't check--just like the other editor who thought Jack London had edited the Berkeley literary journal. Both went uncorrected for over a year.
The large number of facts that are corrected blinds Wikipedians to the existence of many that are not. Fact-checking is haphazard and catch-as-catch-can. It all works surprisingly well, but "working surprisingly well" is not the same as "working."
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A wiki runs somewhere. Someone comes along and enters something illegal: how to be a sniper, slander or liber about a certain person, excerpts from a book against copyright, you name it.
Someone else comes along, see this and is outraged. They want to do something. What can they do?
"Change it yourself" is like saying "if skinheads painted Nazi slogans on your house wall, just repaint it". Is that really OK and is all that should be done? Nobody should be pursued for this?
Are we saying that a wiki is somehow above the laws and should be exonerated by default of any consequences, along with its administrators, host and everybody, except perhaps that malicious contributor who can't be tracked down anyway?
Personally, I'm glad the dude raised his voice about this. The terms of use and so called "licenses" that wiki's generally use are simple jokes. You can't put up a system where anybody can enter anything they want, in high exposure, and expect to get away with it when something illegal is inserted. Why? Because a wiki is not a discussion. It's supposed to be reference.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
The ability for idiots to troll on Wikipedia is simply part of its nature, and (unless fundamentally changed) means that it can never be viewed as an objective, neutral, authoritative, comprehensive, or in any way lasting resource.
This is a natural conclusion, but it's simply wrong. This is like arguing that the U.S. Capitol is not a lasting resource because parts of the roof and many of the interior walls have had to be replaced over the past fifty years. Or that the writings of Plato are not a lasting resource because their original media crumbled to dust centuries ago. Or that the Bible is not a lasting resource because it has been reorganized, rewritten, retranslated, and augmented over the course of dozens of centuries.
Knowledge does not last unless you maintain it. Erosion tries to break it; idiots try to deface it, censor it, ridicule it, or drown it out. And, of course, knowledge eventually goes out of date -- some of the attacks on it eventually prove to be legitimate, and the knowledge evolves to suit. Honest scholars must do work, hard work, throughout their lives, in order to preserve the old knowledge and keep it up to date. This has always been true; Wikipedia just makes the process much more evident by speeding it up several hundred times.
Wikipedia is accurate to the extent that people maintain it. The articles that people watch are very accurate indeed. The entries that nobody reads or cares about -- including Siegenthaler's biography -- are not. If Siegenthaler wants an accurate biography of himself to appear on Wikipedia, he should write one and put it up, or have someone else do so. If he wants to be sure that trolls don't deface it, he has to monitor all the changes and revert it to a previous version whenever it gets defaced. (Which will probably be a lot more often, now that he's turned himself into a poster boy for the thin-skinned.)
Does he think that this work should be someone else's responsibility? Too bad. TANSTAAFL. If you care about it, do the work. If you don't care, don't expect me to care, either.
The problem, which you identify, is that people think that the text which appears on Wikipedia at any given moment is authoritative. But that's only a symptom of a bigger problem: there is no authoritative source of information. A "squabble-fest" is all we have. The good thing about Wikipedia is that intellectual squabbles take place online, in front of your eyes, in real time -- instead of being spread out across dozens of books, articles, and isolated websites, published over years or even centuries, each of which is a hodgepodge of accurate and inaccurate information.
This dude isn't Bush, Hitler or God, he's just some old man. I know I never heard of him, maybe he's well known in the USA, but the world is full of old men who used to be famous. Not every article about such men on Wikipedia contains such inflammatory accusations. Somebody had to put them there - the question is, why?
I suspect, given the attitude displayed in the article, that he's annoyed a lot of people in the past. One of them found wikipedia and presumably couldn't help themselves ...
And he is correct to do so. The fact that WikiPedia can be used in such a manner, terribly diminishes the worth of WikiPedia's articles. How do you know an article that is based on fact vs. an article that is based on vindictiveness?
WikiPedia is a great concept, but it needs to grow up before it can earn the place in society that so many ascribe to it now. Part of that growing up process will be accountability of its authors and responsibility to its readers.
...Or any of the math articles, or most of the science articles, or anything people actually looked at, or etc. etc. etc.. Vandalism like this is limited to things that no one cares about, and this guy fits squarely in that category.
Would be interesting to see the page hits for the article; it'd be kind of disheartening to see that more people looked up, say, Lebesgue Integration on any given day than you in 4 months.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Wikipedia has potential and is "entertaining" but I'd never use it for real research.
Uh...that's, like, okay.
Because Wikipedia links directly to original sources.
The reason that it was so crucial for old-media encyclopedias to be so heavily examined is because it was a pain in the ass to check original sources.
Most things that people hear word-of-mouth or in the newspaper are less well-checked than what I read on Wikipedia. And that's what I and 99% of the people out there use Wikipedia for. We aren't trying to use it as an authoritative source for writing a doctoral thesis, where the propagation of even a single error might be significant. We're trying to get real-world usable information. And Wikipedia does a better job than anything else out there of doing this.
A lot of people bash Wikipedia because it doesn't seem like it should work. It clashes mightily with the common computer security approach of accepting absolutely no attacks against something. Wikipedia, however, takes advantage of a completely different mechanism that most people undervalue -- recoverability. *Anyone* can vandalize Wikipedia. Vandalizing Wikipedia en-masse, however, is totally useless, because the bulk of Wikipedia's content *is* useful and *does* keep improving.
If someone thinks that Wikipedia is bad, fine. Let them *branch* Wikipedia into a "stable branch", and they can only allow fully reviewed changes to be added, or whatever. That's absolutely legal. There's at least some argument that maybe Wikipedia only needed to be wild and loose in its early days. I don't really think that it's likely, but instead of bitching about how Wikipedians are doing their volunteer work that they're giving to the world, sit down and fix it, you know?
Personally, I think that the rate of update and the value of more articles outweighs ideological arguments about review, but whatever.
Maybe at some point, there will be some concept of a gradient of article stability, and it will require more work to change an older article. [shrug] I dunno. But I hate all the nay-saying about WP.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The fact that WikiPedia can be used in such a manner, terribly diminishes the worth of WikiPedia's articles.
Wikipedia's worth is simply determined by its usage, no more and no less. And apparently, enough people use it for Mr. Seigenthaler to worry about what is says about him.
How do you know an article that is based on fact vs. an article that is based on vindictiveness?
Whatever gave you the idea that everything you read is based on fact? Do you seriously believe that everything the Bush administration publishes is based on fact? That everything in the EB is based on fact? That everything in your textbooks is based on fact? That everything in the newspaper is based on fact? Do you make a habit out of believing accusations against people without evidence? How naive can you be?
The problem isn't with the Wikipedia. The Wikipedia is completely honest about what it is.
The problem is that people like Seigenthaler and you need to grow up yourself and stop nurturing the illusion that publication is some kind of quality control. Start using your head and start asking for evidence, for whatever claims you hear.
As for Mr. Seigenthaler and his little problem: the Wikipedia provides the means for him to correct those issues he feels inaccurate. If the original author is still around, they can hash it out on the discussion page. Maybe one side or the other will provide some evidence to support the accusation or the defense. That's all there's to it. But, as he told us, he isn't interested in correcting the information, he is interested in dragging the original author in front of a court, and I'm sorry, that kind of powerplay just doesn't work anymore in the 21st century.
The fact that WikiPedia can be used in such a manner, terribly diminishes the worth of WikiPedia's articles.
Ah yes, apply your priceless logic to any system of communication and you will find that the more valuable they are, the more ways they can be abused. Email has spam, phones have obscene calls from the pay phone on the corner, the message board at the corner store can be so disorganized that you'll never see that lost cat notice and be a hero for a day.
These forms of communication are so popular because of their value which far exceeds their inadequacies. You can tinker around the edges, but to put forward greater restrictions on their use and to try to impose too many controls would be to destroy their value not improve it.
How do you know an article that is based on fact vs. an article that is based on vindictiveness?
The same way you do in any other context, cross referencing the stated facts. The same way you know when the New York Time says that US Warplanes bombed a wedding party shooting into the sky in celebration, and the US Department of Defense Spokesman says that US warplanes attacked a terrorist camp in Western Iraq. Or when the Iran government says that it is developing Peaceful nuclear technology and the US government says that Iran is going to build bombs. Or when one guy says that Global Warming is manmade and another says it is not. Referencing one source of information for all your facts may have been okay in 3rd grade, but it doesn't fly in real life.
Wikipedia is great simply because it puts those discrepancies in your face and allows anyone to weigh in. And by keeping a full history of revisions that can be viewed, reverted to or merged, we can dig a little deeper right there on the article to see how it got put together. Wikipedia has bones.
WikiPedia is a great concept, but it needs to grow up before it can earn the place in society that so many ascribe to it now. Part of that growing up process will be accountability of its authors and responsibility to its readers.
No, you need to grow up. Seriously. What exactly constitutes accountability to you? You want to make sure that all the writers are in the Guild? Want everyone who has something to say to buy writers insurance, and relax libel laws so that we can't write anything bad about anyone without getting sued?
You can't say it is a great idea and then attack its premise.
If you don't like wikipedia's lack of a meaningful hierarchy of privilege to edit content, then go out and make your own with your own system of trust. You can even take their content to start and let the market decide which content becomes more valuable to them over time.
Despite what you say, Wikipedia has earned a certain level of respect in society in a remarkably short amount of time and you would be hard pressed to make any truly constructive suggestions which would substantially change the model of openness that they follow.