Slashdot Mirror
The Register Takes Aim at Wikipedia Again
Syberghost writes "The Register has fired off another salvo in their long-running war of words with Wikipedia, in the form of an article about the lack of "moral responsibility" from the operators of Wikipedia. Wikipedia users fired back less than an hour later, making the Register headline obsolete."
making the Register headline obsolete.
And then what? Does that make the Register story obsolete too?
While I don't think Wiki should worry about all these whingings (does TheOnion have moral responsibility to warn its readers?), Wiki users might get more out of the whole ordeal by asserting (via an entry) the unnecessity of moral responsibility in Wiki.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
And whose set of morals are we talking about here?
The Register article saying that Wikipedia was filled with errors was itself filled with errors. At one point they actually called MMORPG's "shoot em up games." The real definition is right in the acronym, I mean how hard is it to figure it out.
The very openeness that makes Wikipedia such a dynamic and powerful resource exposes it to abuse. Is it a perfect system? No. Is it an incredibly valuable tool? Yes. Will it continue to improve because of things like this? Of course.
This episode shows a strength of Wikipedia, it is quick to respond to problems when it recognizes them. Tell a company about a bug, wait a month, get a response. Tell Wikipedia about a factual error, wait a hour, and see it fixed.
The reason this went unfound for so long? No one cares about Seigenthaler. Even if he was a Nazi.
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -Mahatma Gandhi
Wikipedia is a very easily accessible free source of information with just as much reliability as any other non-peer-reviewed source. Would we somehow be better off if Wikipedia didn't exist at all? Of course not. I can only assume the bad press is fueled by ulterior motives.
The same process that makes the most popular articles on Wikipedia of better quality than Britannica also makes the least popular articles of lesser quality. Although no one was willing to say it to his face, the real reason the error in Siegenthaler's article persisted for so long is that not many people care enough about him to read his eponymous article. Over the four months it was posted I'm willing to bet less than a thousand people read it. Really it is a tree-falls-in-a-forest issue, if no one is reading incorrect material does it really matter that it's incorrect?
People ask, "Where will Wikipedia be after five years." The real question is, "Where will the world be after five years of Wikipedia?"
From TFA:
Everything you read is suspect! You'd better duck!
Only a paranoiac, or a mad person, can sustain this level of defensiveness for any length of time however, and to hear a putative "encyclopedia" making such a statement is odd, to say the least.
This is just plain bullshit. My grandfather had a saying he taught me(and pardon me for some downhomey common sense), but it was popular among he and his friends, and they were very well adjusted people:
Believe half of what you hear, and nothing that you see.
This isn't paranoia. This is reality. Individuals, corporations, governments, etc... tend to be bullshitters. Half the time, they don't even realize they're spreading bullshit. The reason is too many mistake their opinion for fact, because most people don't go deep enough to care what the difference is.
The INSTANT you identify a source as something you can believe is honest and accurate without you having to verify facts or take with a grain of salt, is the instant you've set yourself up to be misled and enter a state of dogmatism.
You question everything. You question what you see, you question what you hear, you question it all. Not out of some hysterical paranoia, but out of rational observation of the reality that we live in a bullshitters paradise.
This article should get -1, Ministry of Truth publication. Believe half of what you hear, nothing that you see, and be happy and secure doing it.
If there's a problem - well, the user must be stupid!
I'll probably be modded down for saying so, but that one sentence nicely sums up Wikipedia's philosophy.
One is that Seigenthaler should have corrected the entry himself...
See, they even blamed Seigenthaler for the libel against him!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
If you had checked the article in the Register you would notice that the wikipedia article is "firing back" by its existence, not by its content. The content was meant to be honest and helpful, not an argument with the Register. That allows wikipedia to look better without sinking to the Register's tactics.
Now, Wikipedia has its faults.. but to be honest, I find it a hugely relevant, usually accurate and very enjoyable resource, sometimes marred by personal agendas and bias.
Seriously. Wikipedia is a tool, similar to almost all sites presenting information on the internet: good for a quick reference, but not authoritative. And I think most people realize that.
A few weeks ago I was writing a paper on Thelonious Monk. Wikipedia says he started playing piano at age six, but, for example, this site says age nine. So Wikipedia has a 50% chance of being wrong on that point. But really I don't mind, and I'm not going to stop using it, because Wikipedia is more of a springboard and a starting place in exploring a subject, rather than an etched-in-stone authority. And I think most people "get" that. The Register, apparently, does not.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
I don't see any reason to change anything about Wikipedia or how it is created. I understand how it is created, how much I can trust it, and what I need to do to verify the information on it. Anybody who doesn't understand this about Wikipedia at this point must be from Mars.
I think people who criticize Wikipedia for the way its entries are created are living in a world where they assume that just because an information resource is well known or popular, it must be accurate. That wasn't true when companies like the New York Times and ABC had a near monopoly on information dissemination, and it sure isn't any more accurate today.
What needs to change is not Wikipedia, it's people's naive notions about epistemology. Or, to put it more bluntly: don't trust any information unless it either doesn't matter, or you can verify it from multiple independent sources yourself. Popularity, trust, and reputation of a source are very unreliable guides to the validity of information.
This kind of conflict is excellent. It keeps everybody honest, or at least brings flaws out in the open, so as to lead to potential resolutions to such problems.
Of course, the world will never see NBC Dateline truly questioning what is said on FOX News, nor will the New York Times truly question the reporting of the Washington Post.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Wikipedia is the prefect format for any type of information on the Internet. Sadly The Register has failed to observe one significant point; Unlike the Register itself Wikipedia is subject to a thousand year old form of analysis: Peer Review. If peer review is good enough for the scientific community (they put a man on the moon, the register has yet to accomplish that) and the medical community (they have done heart transplants, the Register has not) and the Linux Kernel, as any open source project, is subject to peer review (they have a very good perating system, the Register has yet to boot a machine) why would we not subject our historical data to such a process? Why not subject our media to such processes. Sadly it seems that the Register has the disease many younger Internet-generation kids have, a lack of patience. Peer review is slower, but as history moves on, faster. I personally think that colleges could help improve the content by assigning classmates, in the study of their respective fields to contribute to Wikipedia's need for editors. The broad variety of instructors, and college cultures could accelerate Wiki's accuracy and improve credibility. It would also be an excellent place for students and colleges to like student thesis and papers as additional linked sites. I.e.
The American Revolution
Student Works
Browse Purdue's Student Archives
Browse Stanfords' Student Archives
and so forth.
If peer review is good enough for science, medicine, and open source it is certainly good enough for history as well.
My 2cents
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Stop accepting every stupid story submission about Wikipedia.
It's BORING.
Seriously, its like opening up Popular Science to see an article about how Scientific American discovered there were some factual discrepancies in Encyclopedia Britannica Vol 24 45th Edition entry on Underwater Basketweaving.
Yeah, I'm not sure either. They're obviously hugely pro opensource, so why they've decided to make disparaging Wikipedia their mission I have no idea. Of course, much of the negative press about Wikipedia is true-- there are thousands of crappy articles there. But where the register horribly misses the point is that Wikipedia is a work in progress and nowhere claims to be authoritative and correct. The value in Wikipedia is in the process and the open license. If this current model fails, the information can still be freely used. That's what's so powerful.
Besides that I think people taking potshots at Wikipedia has just become the think to do. Wikipedia is more important than the Register and traffic stats prove it. I suppose that's not easy to take if you're a site with your income depending on drawing traffic. Wikipedia's traffic is rising at an enormous rate, and has actually made a leap since all this bad press has come out. http://noc.wikimedia.org/stats.php?period=monthly (and yes that M is million). But what everyone should reallize is that it's a work in progress, it's certainly not ready for brick and mortar publication, and as a whole, it's contributors are just fine with that for now. But trolls like the register will keep claiming as this article does that Wikipedia supporters think it is perfect in order to get people riled up.
Wikipedia must have abused Andrew Orlowski as a child, because I can't think of any good reason for him to keep harping on it. Check out the Register's archives. All of the Wikipedia bashing is from Orlowski. Wow, Andrew, great reporting. I totally didn't know that some things on the internet are false. Way to go on the investigative reporting! Could we maybe get a twenty part series entitled, "Shock! Falsehoods found on internet!"
Some Wikipedia fans are little overenthusiastic. Wikipedia's lack of review is a weakness. But just because it's a weakness doesn't make it useless. Indeed, most of the internet is full of unreviewed crap, yet we all still use it. While Wikipedia would like to think of itself as challenging traditional encyclopedias, I don't see it happening. But compared to doing research on the internet as whole (say, via Google), it's a definate win. Wikipedia is, compared to the general internet, better organized, more neutral, and better reviewed. For a quick overview of a topic I find it an extremely valuable resource. I accept its weaknesses, help flesh stuff out as I can, and get on with my life. If Orlowski thinks Wikipedia is unredeemable crap, so be it. He's reported that. Now move the fuck on. Reposting "Wikipedia has some errors and is therefore completely useless" every week is hardly a good use his time or The Register's money.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Reliability and quality come from accountability, be it an encyclopedia or a complex engineering project.
An engineer who makes one mistake, even if it is not fatal, will lose his license. Why is that? Because said mistakes cannot be tolerated.
The same goes for an encyclopedia. If a high degree of quality is wanted, then people will have to pay severely when they make a mistake. Of course, that's very difficult to accomplish in an online setting, especially one like Wikipedia.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Straw man.
Seriously. Wikipedia is a tool, similar to almost all sites presenting information on the internet: good for a quick reference, but not authoritative. And I think most people realize that.
That's something that often gets lost in Wikipedia debates. In that respect, it is very much like the Internet as a whole: The best thing about it is that anyone can publish. The worst thing about it is that anyone can publish.
The problem is that while Andrew Orlowski highlights the problems with Wikipedia he does so in such a consistently inflammatory way (wiki-fiddler, anyone) to make the word 'troll' appear to be fair enough. Many of his reports look like pure flamebait, or rather click-bait designed to increase El Reg's advertising revenue.
Wikipedia has its problems, indeed and it is good to see someone willing to go against the flow and point out the system's short-comings. Sadly Orlowski's invective (for me at least) got old rather quickly, with more than a hint of spittle-flecked vehemence in his writing.
In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory messages on the internet, such as on online discussion forums, to disrupt discussion or to upset its participants./wiki
I could only read halfway through page two of TFA because the article was so trollish.
Self appointed experts do not like knowledgeable peasants treading on their turf.
Andrew Orlowski is a troll.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
To be slightly pedantic, no. Accountability can only help ensure quality once you have it. If you have a room full of kindergarteners and ask them to write a Calculus textbook, they will produce a textbook of dubious quality even if you kill every kid who makes a mistake. Quality can only come from people who know what they're doing. Accountability is merely one way to seperate the competent ones out from the incompetent.
Personally, I suspect that Wikipedia's method is a somewhat viable way to shuffle out the stupids, as true statements will be less likely to be edited than untrue statements, so gradually over time Wikipedia will tend to be more and more likely to contain true statements. But eh, you might be right.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
I actually can't really disagree with you, but it is more of an "inciteful" remark than an insightful remark.
I've been trying to figure out why this issue is getting people so worked up (myself included), because it's all about some random website claiming to be a sort of encyclopedia. People claim to be experts all the time, and they lie or misinform out of ignorance; it's not a new phenomenon. Why then, do we have articles written like the one at the register, urging a call to arms over "moral responsibility?
It's all over one word: Encyclopedia. If wikipedia called itself the "Unreliable Encyclopedia", would this article have been written? I suppose the author would have had a hernia over what he considered the contradiction in terms. And yet, there do exist unreliable encyclopedias I suspect: those published in the 1950s do not contain up-to-date political and scientific information. They are unreliable, although I would not like to try and guess if they are more or less reliable than wikipedia.
I think that responsibility is the heart of this issue, and is why so many people get worked up about it. It's about who is to be assigned blame if wikipedia is inaccurate.
The author of the register article obviously wants the administrators of wikipedia to be held responsible, as if it was a top-down heirarchy. But it's not: it's more of a sort of p2p encyclopedia. It's not useful to blame wikipedia for being irresponsible any more than it is to blame gnutella for having illegal media on its network.
And the problem with attacking wikipedia and saying its not only useless, but it is harmful, is that it is not only attacking those people who spread disinformation. It is also attacking smart people who have a lot of worthwhile knowledge, and have carefully attempted to transfer this knowledge to an online medium that they knew people would use.
Now, maybe those people who write good articles for wikipedia shouldn't do so, because it'll only confuse people into thinking that wikipedia is more than a mountain of lies.
But I think that the answer lies in finding a way to hold individual wikipedia authors more accountable for their actions.
Hopefully as the internet grows up, people will go from thinking "I have to be careful in believing what I read on the internet" to "I have to be careful in what I say on the internet, because it represents me". We should start believing that it is a serious offense to spread disinformation on the internet, so that people will hold themselves to higher standards.
I say we need secure, historied, online personae.
-------
Incite and flee.
In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory messages on the internet, such as on online discussion forums, to disrupt discussion or to upset its participants./wiki
I could only read halfway through page two of TFA because the article was so trollish.
Self appointed experts do not like knowledgeable peasants treading on their turf.
Congratulations. You have won today's WHOOSH! Award.
It seems to me that we have two separate issues to deal with. One is the theoretical limits of epistemology that Wikipedians must cite when defending errors in the Wikipedia. The other is the difference between an honest mistake and deliberately misleading content. The Register, I think, is correct to say that the former is no excuse for the latter.
So the real problem is not that the Wikipedia cannot achieve a higher level of factual rectitude. The real problem is that the Wikipedia has no facility to help novices establish the authority of an article of the Wikipedia. The best science can offer us [laypeople] is a bunch of journals that practice a complicated protocol of anonymous referees from a select bunch of supposed "experts" in the journal's field. If you want to don the scientist hat, you can always try to replicate the results of someone's journal article. I leave it as an exercise for the reader, but plenty of crap, for various reasons, has slipped through the journals' sacred peer reviews.
The real problem here is that the Wikipedia puports to be peer-reviewed, but each article has its subscribers, and it isn't clear whether an article has been tacitly approved by innumerable readers, or quietly corrupted out of salutary neglect. This ambiguity is the real failing of the Wikipedia, but it should be easily corrected by applying something similar to Slashdot Karma--just to show whether any editorial attention has affected any given article or not.
The real problem with the Register's scathing polemic is that it is just scathing polemic. The Wikipedia and the Register are apples and oranges. The authority of the Register's criticism cannot really be levelled with the Wikipedia, though its argument has a resounding us and them posture. It conveniently ignores the wealth of good content in math and science and that traditional encyclopedias get historical biography just as wrong (Christopher Columbus is a good candidate for this angle). So the punk teenager straw man at the conclusion of the Register article could just as well have been a fat, lazy armchair anthropologist to characterize the racist crap in the encyclopedias I grew up using.
In the end, I think the Wikipedians are right. "The price of liberty is vigilance." The Register is also right. This is one thing that will happen if we're asleep at the wheel. However fiery the iconoclasty makes you feel, do we throw the baby out with the bathwater? No. We take what we have and make it better.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Okay, it's an online source of collective knowledge. That's a Good Thing (tm).
Whether it's accurate or not is completely up in the air. Many articles are read by many people, so hopefully errors are weeded out. Some articles are rarely read, and errors in those will stay for a long time before being noticed.
And then there are topical articles, which may just end up reflecting popular points of view rather than definitive information. That's also worthwhile, but it seems that Wikipedia can be used to 'shout down' dissent by editing articles you disagree with.
Who is responsible when an article is incorrect? The users apparently, but who are they? Just people on the Internet. You, me, that guy over there, people like us. So who is responsible for ensuring accuracy and quality? No-one, really. It's so distributed that there's no real focus, and the end result is the cry of "do it yourself!"
Well, I have a job, a fiancee, hobbies and many things I prefer doing rather than watch Wikipedia articles for changes. That answer screams out "broken process!" to me.
What happens if I make a change to an article and someone maliciously alters it again? Am I really supposed to continually edit an article, and if not, who do I apply to for a final version to be locked?
So what is Wikipedia? Well, it's not correct enough to be a solid source of information. It's not stable enough to be reliable. It's not actually a good source, because nothing you read may actually be correct!
It may be, but the prevalent feel around here is to take everything with a grain of salt. That's all well and good, but if you have a child researching something, how can they do that? Even as an adult, I recognise that while we add filters of perception to events, there is one thing that actually happened, and many accounts of it. Can't we at least find the objective case in the subjective perceptions?
Lastly, people say that Wikipedia is the starting point for research. Well, if it doesn't point you in the wrong direction it may be, but if I have to go to other more authoratative sources, then why bother with Wikipedia at all?
I won't use it, for those reasons. If I need an encyclopedia, I'll buy Encyclopedia Britannica which is a much more reliable source and actually has a solid process for reviewing information. It's a shame, because I like the idea, but I can't see where any value comes from with Wikipedia.
And yet this one of the most commonly accepted beliefs regarding Wikipedia. Some people on Slashdot alone have gone so far as to claim that Wikipedia is public domain and have gotten modded up for it.
Its no longer about whether or not the government can control the information, its now a matter of whos controlling the spread of disinformation. If 'anyone can edit' entries, who's monitoring the monitors? At least with the government its this big huge target we can all see and gang up against. With Wikipedia, we're staring at a bunch of easily masked IP addresses, false user ID info and the complete anonymity (for anyone determined) of the internet. I'd take the lesser of two evils and stick with the big, mean, elitist, capitalist run governments.
Why do you think I posted what I posted? The levels of meta were too delicious to ignore. A pedantic correction of the definition of anarchism in the discussion of an article about wikipedia editing woes, using one of the most contentious wikipedia articles as backup, which in its discussion page has similar pedantry.
I tried, but frankly, I was too weak to resist it. :-D
"This defense firmly puts the blame on the reader, for being so stupid as to take the words at face value. Silly you, for believing us, they say."
Yes. He is correct. Despite his sarcasm, users ARE silly for believing things at face value. Just because a work is published does NOT make it the definitive source for all accurate knowledge. How many scientific findings have been published, and later discovered to be inaccurate.
He seems to think that because a work is put to paper that is must have more accuracy than a work such as wikipedia. I challenge this: Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia
Wikipedia has the opportunity to be both free and more accurate than any printed work. Even an encyclopedia, devoting resources to topics they are not experts in get things wrong, such as some of the items on the list above. Wikipedia gives those out there directly working on it -- Subject Matter Experts -- to contribute their knowledge for others to share.
In regards to the fears of lawsuits, obviously due diligence would be given to review the content of articles before put to paper and widely distributed. What more can be asked for? This is the same thing that Britannica does.
Until Wikipedia is making some claim to take authority over content -- they are just like the post office, the telephone company, or xerox. They are providing a service. Just as Xerox is not responsible for people violating copyright law with their copiers, Wikipedia is not responsible for the accuracy of information on their site. If you ask me, the rules, regulations and procedures they have come up with are an amazing effort at being open to respecting others, and cooperating with them. Similar to the post office working with police to track packages.
I think something commonly being overlooked here is -- Who exactly was affected by this article? The article apparently wasn't link to from other pages -- meaning that it wasn't seeing much attention, which is why it hadn't been changed. Who cares if it was there for months, if only 5 people saw it, was he really severely hurt by this? When he came across it, fix it, move on. Hes actually created a much larger problem by bringing so much attention to this.
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
Of course they keep him on; he represents income. If you don't like it, don't read him and don't post links to him on Slashdot. You're just falling for his act.
I think you have missed the point.
I think it's obvious that it's not worth the paper. I submit that you have never even attempted to ask for authorship information from an encyclopedia. I had a physics science project I failed in GRADE SCHOOL. This was primarily due to a failure to make the correct distinction between "potential" and "kinetic" energy. I was able to bring out the physical source. The project was given a revised grade after the instructor contacted the publisher who admitted it was a known misprint.
I think you can safely imagine that medical encyclopedias are fairly well documented, 30 years later (today). After 2 open heart surgeries and countless other illnesses encountered, I know so. My current views are based on my logical assumptions and experiences. YMMV.
I believe this is because, this rev. info is just as unreliable (in terms of determining accuracy or good judgement in deciding relevant content) as any single article currently displayed in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is now the only accurate word to describe this type of unwitting and part-time collaboration. An encyclopedia, it is not.
US media has been losing much of it's clout due to corrupting and scandal involving deliberate inaccuracy. Short answer, the news doesn't state the truth, but what their agents hear or see or what agenda they wish to promote. Attempts at stating facts of discovery (like the falsified Bush military records) have continued to be a sore spot, even with accountability.
Given the rate of decline in newspaper subscriptions in metropolitan areas, look for it on your handheld in the next 10 years. It will look a lot like network news looks. Newspapers can be queried for sources in most cases. The sources are often quoted.
Finally, are there sources of information that state they are authoritative, with a guarantee of accuracy? Why yes there is. Unfortunately, there are none that guarantee accuracy AND cover anything more than a very specific topic. (statistics on Federal wage rates, ballots, Grants, operating tolerances of a 1947 Chevy engine mount, etc.) I believe what you intended to ask was, "Is there a self-proclaimed authoritative source of general information?" Nope. You will find all publications (physical and virtual) cleverly have been reworded since, I presume the 1980's, to reflect the nebulous nature of "truth". Even Britannica now claims to be a "standard for reference" rather than a source of facts.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Yes, damage control, by controlling other people.
but if I disagree with some whacked out wiki-fiddler my information (if there is any) could very easily be altered to harm my chances for success in the REAL world.
You still have the same recourse you've always had against slander and libel, file a lawsuit. It may be hard now, in this day and age where anyone can post anything, *anywhere* on the Internet(ie. NOT JUST WIKIPEDIA). But that's life. Deal with it.
Oh, but you'll claim that because it's on Wikipedia, it's more damaging. Bullshit. Unless you're famous, very, very few people will read the entry about you. The damage will be just as limited as if they posted it on, hmmm, say, Slashdot, or anywhere else on the Web.
I guess my point is, the complaints leveled against Wikipedia apply not to Wikipedia, specifically, but to the whole of the Internet. So, the logical conclusion, by the logic of those who would attempt to force Wikipedia to make changes, would be to forcefully censor the whole of the Internet, for "damage control."
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden