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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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Incite and flee.
The worst Wikipedia can do is call you a chicken fucker, and you can very easily erase that insult.
The worst the government can do is disappear you, torture you, or kill you. If you try to "gang up" on it, odds are very good that at the very least you will be herded into a cage at gunpoint.
Pardon me if I find the notion that the government is "the lesser of two evils" in comparison with a website, an incredible conclusion.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"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.