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When Wikipedia Fails
PetManimal writes "Frank Ahrens of The Washington Post looks at how Wikipedia stumbles when entries for controversial people are altered by partisan observers. Case in point: Enron's Kenneth Lay, who died of natural causes last week, shortly after being sentenced to prison. His Wikipedia entry was altered repeatedly to include unfounded rumors that he had killed himself, or the stress from his trial had caused the heart attack. From the article: '... Here's the dread fear with Wikipedia: It combines the global reach and authoritative bearing of an Internet encyclopedia with the worst elements of radicalized bloggers. You step into a blog, you know what you're getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.'"
There are a number of sites that are based on user-submitted data. One that immediately comes to mind is the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com). Now, I'm not intimately familiar with the workings of Wikipedia, but based on TFA, the main difference I see between them and IMDb is that IMDb has a more restrictive additions policy. With IMDb, any registered user can submit information, but every iota of information (aside from some user reviews/comments, which are presented as such) must pass through an editorial review.
Some will say that IMDb has the luxury of doing this, being owned by Amazon. But IMDb has been online since before there really was World Wide Web. It was started in the Usenet newsgroups back in 1990 and didn't get a web interface until a Welsh grad student built one in 1993. They have always exercised editorial oversight and did so even back when they were a loose group of volunteers with no funding to speak of.
It used to be that IMDb's structure made it less than nimble in responding to breaking news because of an involved and complicated build process. But over the years, more modularization and granularity have been built into their systems. But even if they're right on the forefront of a news event, their editors and data managers are scrutinizing what becomes part of their "official" record.
Now, people try to trick IMDb, flood them with wrong facts and bad info. Sometimes a bit gets by their editors. But the bits still have to go by an editor before they become publicly visible. AFAICT, this isn't the case with WikiPedia and that is its fatal flaw. And it's not just the wackos and those with an agenda that need to be guarded against. More damage can be done by a cadre of well-meaning fools than a handful of agitators. And it seems that even if they need to defend their systems against the axe grinders, they need to put double the effort into defending against fools.
Maybe I'm comparing apples to oranges since IMDb is a lot more narrow in scope than WikiPedia. But they're both large repositories of user-submitted information, they both started as volunteer projects, and they're both widely regarded as great resources. The difference is that IMDb has always exercised more editorial oversight before letting user submissions go live, and IMO, that makes it more trustworthy. Perhaps Wikipedia should take a page from IMDb's book.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
I would agree that Wikipedia is poor at reporting stories that are both recent AND controversial - but to be fair, I don't think those are the kinds of things you should be looking up in an encyclopedia anyway. Look back at this same article in six months and I guarantee it'll be correct and unbiassed. It just takes time for the community to settle on the right wording.
Things that are NOT recent but ARE controversial ('Religion' or 'Area 51'for example) are generally well written, correct and take a carefully neutral stance. Things that are recent but NOT controversial (say "2006 World Cup Soccer") are well reported immediately and bang up to date with all the right facts.
It's the intersection of recent and controversial that messes up the system because too many people are editing at once and a lot of them are nut jobs. Once the topic gets old or becomes uncontroversial, the lunatic fringe loses interest and good writing can take place.
On the other hand, if you want to know the engine capacity of a 1963 Austin Min
i or the number of casualties in the RAF Faulds explosion or the exact nature o
f the student prank involving the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge or the size of a
litter of European Red Squirrels - things that I consult an encyclopedia for rather than a newspaper - then there is no other place (on the web or otherwise) to touch what Wikipedia has done.
www.sjbaker.org
...or has this come up before on Slashdot?
So does this mean I will need to rewrite my senior thesis on the growth of global corportate networks sourced entirely from wikipedia?
The person submitting the story is even wrong. As far as I know and what I read last week when the story broke, they said sentencing wasn't until October.
Gorkman
You don't go to Wikipedia to learn things about actively controversial subjects. You go to Wikipedia to learn things that nobody cares to dispute. Like science, math and biology. Or even history.
If there's significant controversey, it'll usually get its own section on a page.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
The management and presentation of data on wikipedia is good, but it should be built upon.
Just like we have meta moderations and discussion2 (some of us) to filter the good from the bad, so should wikipedia.
Let the viewer decide if they want neutral POV articles, whether they want partisan tagged elements, personal facts, myths and gossip or just the facts.
Wikipedia SHOULD be open to everyone and whilst we strive for equality and "as-one" its quite easy to see cultural differences happen, political, religious, fanatical and personal elements combine to mean something slightly different to the reader of that article (vi vs emacs anyone *).
Inserting sections of football club preference (calling your town rivals rubbish for instance) into it should allow all local supporters to see an informative and possibly illuminating article with a bias towards supporting the local team.
A person viewing the same page from (for instance) another country doesn't really have a bias toward either team so just wants the facts.
And finally a person from the other side of town supporting the opposing team, they also want some bias but with a different focus.
However this is not what wikipedia strives for, the current overlords want none point of view. With everyone in the world having a point of view, boiling the information down so all parties are happy can be difficult.
Since all the information is given from local interested parties we of course would expect biased information. The supporters of the opposing team will be up in arms when a none neutral portion is added and an edit war will commence.
If they could all insert they bias and mark the others in a similar way, then BOTH viewpoints can remain and yet the information presented is proper and correct.
* I use notepad but pine for a port of the amiga version of CygnusEd.
liqbase
The whole point of wikipedia is not to be instantaneously accurate at every single second of the day. The whole point of it is to use the entire weight of the Internet to amass data. Just like Warren Buffet, he may have a day where his stocks go down, but over the long term, he goes up and he became a billionaire with that method. It's the same with wikipedia... Yes, maybe for a few days or weeks, there may be discrepencies and people trying to pollute entries, but over the long haul, the collective mass and wits of the Internet will win, and you can expect the information to be accurate.
In a few weeks or months, the entries for Ken Lay will stabilize and the truth will reign supreme, just like every other topic, except maybe religion.
You step into Wikipedia, you understand what's up.
You know it's not a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. It's a WIKIpedia.
You know anyone, including you, can edit it.
Whenever you read up on a controversial topic, you expect controversial results... would a traditional encyclopedia even HAVE information about some enron executive? I doubt it.
Let's not make controversy where there is none.. wikipedia is a stunning example of what the internet is good at.
The advantage of WP isn't that it's right all the time, it's that it is (through the tireless effort of zillions of people on five-minute breaks) self-correcting. When the AP screwed up their Ken Lay story, it took overnight before a retraction was posted. WP's story is screwed up for 5-20 minutes at a time.
The mainstream media are almost equally susceptible to being hacked -- even if you don't follow wingnuts like Rush Limbaugh or the insane propaganda and political fart-lighting on Fox News, it's not hard to spot gross errors or oversights in news reporting. "Unbiased" news doesn't exist, investigative reporting isn't anymore, and the media circus is just that -- a circus. Wikipedia may be raw, uncensored, or wrong, but at least it tends to correct itself rapidly.
For what it's worth, the science articles are rapidly becoming the most comprehensive archive of science knowledge ever aimed at the general public. (Of course the refereed literature is larger, but it's not a reference work for the layperson).
I find that for satisfying my own curiosity about things where factual accuracy is appreciated but not vital, such as the general nature, history, and operation of air-to-air missiles, Wikepedia is a powerful and satisfying tool.
For all other purposes, I generally ignore Wikipedia altogether.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
skeptical about such information. When I first started using, I was shocked to see that anyone could alter the content.
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and that is, "consider the source." If someone is dumb enough to believe uncorroborated reports without any kind of consideration for the fact that the reporter could be wrong, lying, misinformed, or promoting an agenda then they get what they get.
The Internet is a great resource. Wikipedia has been very good for helping me find new things to be interested in, but it's not the end solution. If anything it's the beginning and the beginning only. I use Wikipedia to find out that I want to learn more about a subject, and from there, once I have had a chance to consult or read from true experts then I can make my judgement.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This is simply a case of people not being able to understand that wikipedia is not the exact same thing as Britannic. You have to look at the talk page, you have to hit a few revisions if you want to be comfortable about the accuracy of data. At times I have learned more reading the debate back and forth of two opposing viewpoints than the entry itself.
Unfortunately, people think in metaphors. Well, that is not so bad in itself, but people often seem unable to get beyond the metaphor and understand that some things are not exactly like anything they are familiar with. Case in point, how many people equate hacking into a website with breaking into a house? Or infringing on a copyright with stealing a car? This is just another case of people unable or unwilling to appreciate that wikipedia is unique and cannot be treated like a traditional encyclopedia.
Finkployd
The idea that you observe the truth by reading anyone's interpretation of it is absurd. All truth is subjective when it comes from someone else. It's only objective when observed at first hand and not even reliably objective even then.
Deleted
As far as I know, one does not check an encyclopedia for things that have happened in the last couple of weeks. That's why we have newspapers (online and otherwise).
"When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself." ~ Jack Gurney
Well said. Additionally, the article doesn't support the headline. There were only a couple of bogus entries and those were corrected within one or two minutes. The article also takes issue with statements like: "Speculation as to the cause of the heart attack lead many people to believe it was due to the amount of stress put on him by the Enron trial." Where's the problem with that statement? It's clearly labeled as speculation, and many people, rightly or wrongly, still believe the stress of the trial led to his heart attack. Perhaps such speculations are best left out of Wikipedia articles, but one can't reasonably argue that it's incorrect or misleading when it's clearly listed as speculation. In short, this is a desparate attempt to nit-pick Wikipedia and it even fails at that.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
The problem with this article is that it assumes people do not have skill at dealing with Wikipedia. I think that's not really the case... much as people develop skills at reading blogs and newspapers, people develop skills at reading Wikipedia. Like much of the rest of life, a properly-tuned BS detector is required to separate the wheat from... what used to be wheat, right?
And people develop these BS detectors, so its not a big deal. We're not children, we can actually do a fairly good job of sorting out correct information in an unreliable world.
You don't expect the encyclopaedia on your shelf to be up to date and accurate on something that happened half an hour ago. Wikipedia was never intended as a news service, anyone who treats it like one is going to be sorely disappointed.
The role of Wikipedia is for reference, give it time and the information there settles down to the truth or at least something close to it.
Don't ask it to be something that it isn't any you won't be disappointed.
This is precisely the reason that Brittanica still reports that, "Mentally the negro is inferior to the white[. . .]".
Oh, wait, human knowledge isn't static.
-Peter
> who died of natural causes last week
What's the story? Slashdot and Ken's lawyer are reporting natural causes. The MSM is reporting a heart attack. Maybe the reason Wikipedia is writing controversial articles is because there's a controversy?
When a Wikipedia page gets controversial and wild swings in the content are being made, there's usually a warning of disputes at the top of the page. Maybe an additional bit of information could be a stability index. How much of the page has changed, both recently, and over time. In the utopian Wikipedia world, a topic might go through several changes as the wording is refined, sources cited and then eventually settling down. A value or other indicator might be a handy thing. You could always read the page history, but many people wouldn't. They might if the topic was marked "in flux".
This would be handy even if the topic wasn't being disputed (yet) but substantial changes had recently been made and therefore had less review by others.
Despite major swings in the content of a story, Wikipedia is very useful when it gives you more information that can aid you in additional research. Even with a dead tree encyclopedia, relying on a single source when doing research would be bad. But with even a questionable source and an unfamiliar topic you may glean additional information needed to start new queries.
History books are written by the winners. Science publications/journals are prone to politics and following groupthink on the currently theories in vogue, with scientist throwing out facts to fit their models. And lets not even begin the popular media.
Just don't believe everything you read anywhere, think for yourself.
And wiki is a good source to begin your search on a topic you knew nothing about. It improved searching for quick facts or overviews on a topic by orders of a magnitude rather than the tedious method of sifting through all the useless keyword sites on a search engine.
Agreed. Even today's earlier post about the power-law decay of interest in web news supports the fact: hype has a characteristic decay. If you've heard about it on the morning news, don't believe the wikipedia entry. 'Nuff said.
.. wikipedia had a penny for everyone who bashed it, the wikipedia organization would be richer than Gates.
..
I for one cherish WP, and use it as a jumping point for most anything. It's probably my second most referenced general research tool after google.
The thing is, those who bash it are rarely saying anything all that new, and certainly nothing new to anyone who uses WP on a regular basis
Every (honest) caveat that these bashers stipulate is pretty much a gimme - but the real issue is, is this not true for ALL information sources which you have not personally fact checked? What one shouldn't look at in terms of the end result is not so much "who gets to edit", but what the over all process is. WP's process ensures a high signal to noise ratio, even though the noise itself may sometimes be worse than other sources. In terms of editorial policy, WP answers the long asked question "who watches the watchers" with a resounding "WE do!"; thus far I have faith in this process - and near as I can tell, I always will.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
Seems rather like criticising today's newspaper for being less than forthcoming on the Long-tailed Planigale. Horses for courses....
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I would agree that Wikipedia is poor at reporting stories that are both recent AND controversial - but to be fair, I don't think those are the kinds of things you should be looking up in an encyclopedia anyway.
The comment above is just the sort of comment that deserves a few 'insightful' mod points. Sometimes, pointing out the blindingly obvious is difficult when people so desperately want things to be something other than what they are. Wikipedia is, at best, something *like* an encyclopedia, and as such should serve similar purposes. Some people think that somehow there is a way to take the human element and passion out of a user-contributed site, or any site, or any work or endeavor of humankind for that matter. There isn't. Let us simply understand that you can't have the factual accuracy and neutrality of an encyclopedia for something that occurred yesterday; technology alters the quantity and speed of information, not its quality. If you want neutrality, you must wait for cooler (and further removed) heads to prevail.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.
Certainly it is true. Also, at their worst, people are active deceivers, powerful tyrants, not saints.
Wikipedia is a good resource for getting your foot in the door on a topic, but it is imperfect just as people are imperfect. If you take it for what it is, it does no harm.
It is true that the worst sides of humanity are able to emerge when there is little oversight. But it may also be true that the best sides can emerge under the same circumstances.
I am one of the long term vandals of the project. I actuall tried some good faith edits and I didn't last a day due to the idiocy of the editors. I had some sad college student vandalizing various articles I had written. Wikipedia was always a good concept, but the reality is that it is full of fancruft, POV, trolling and thosands of unwikified articles dumped by lazy editors, and who ever trys to get it cleaned up gets harrassed by deletionsts with no life.
I support vandals like Willy on Wheels, Celing Cat, Pelican Shit, Juggernaught Bitch, Marmot and all the other big vandals. Keep up the big work. I'd also like to say a big get a life to the following "editors"
Astrotrain, Extaordinary Machine, Pilotguy, Essjay, Raul654, Curps, Cyde Mor[w/v]en, Nackoncantri, Tawkerbot2/3/4/5/6 and all the other fuckers I forget! The list of Missing Wikipedians is growing! Even my worst enemies such as Radiant and RickK have left. Takwer will be next. The backlash against his bot will grow
-1, Truth!
A message to everyone! Just move random pages on wheels and get the fuck out of Wikipedia. Anyone who recommends Wikipedia anymore is basically insane.
1.3 Million "articles" my ass. Theres articles on the stupidist of things, yet the deletionists vandalize the real articles to make more room for their fan cruft. Even Thomas The Tank Engine now suffers from fancruft.
If you are still deluded, check out some World Cup related articles. Tons has to be semi-protected such as Zinedane Zidane, Christino Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Portugal and more.
WIKIPEDIA IS A CULT! WIKIPEDIA IS MADNESS! DO NOT CITE IT! IF I WAS YOUR PROFESSOR I'D KICK YOUR ASS RIGHT OUT OF COLLEGE AND SNED YOU CRYING UNTIL YOU FLODDED YOUR ENTIRE HOUSE OUT!
I am not a conspiricy theorist...
Now you are. Congratulations on the shiny new hat.
Do you state that all truth is subjective as an objective truth?
That said, when you look at Wikipedia, you should be checking the references. If there are no footnotes or a references section on a Wikipedia article, read the article with interest but don't trust it for anything.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Of course, if the article itself was editable, someone could go in and fix the omission. But instead we are stuck with Mr. Frank Ahrens' singular agenda of spreading FUD about the whole concept of a community-written reference. Ironic, isn't it?
Also, Wikipedia marks articles that involve current events and controversey as such to make it clear that it's not necessarily an objective and concise source of information. So long as they are forthright about that, I don't see a problem.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Observable situations can't ever be said to be "objective facts". This was Hume's problem with induction (and similarly the problem Hobbes had with the science of his time). It will never be an objective fact that all swans are white, because it is untrue, but if you had only ever seen white swans you might (erroneously) believe this to be the case... if you had seen millions of white swans you might feel pretty confident with it, but it would still be wrong.
Similarly you can't ever say that wikipedia is a repository of objective facts, becuase there is no such thing... Although if I wasn't nit-picking I would say that you could always say that when the topic wasn't controversial it didn't contain information which we explicitly know to be false
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
You could always read the following quote from the above /. article summary:-
as itself being partisan in assuming the "rumours" are "unfounded" and the death was owing to "natural causes". Please note that I am not suggesting an opinion either way on the facts of Kenneth Lay's death, only pointing out that accusations of partisanship in the media (including "The Washington Post" and even "Slashdot"!) work both ways!
I'm not sure I can consider any article using the word "agitprop" to be information, either.
*shrugs*
You step into a blog, you know what you're getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.
I don't understand. Why do people insist on making Wikipedia something that it is not? Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a Wikipedia. If you know what the term "wiki" means, how can you expect perfect accuracy? If you don't, aren't you curious what those four funny sounding letters out front of "pedia" mean?
Wikipedia is what it is. And it is brilliant for what it is. As far as I know, it is the world's best example of what it is - it is it's own archetype. Isn't that enough?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
"Finally, by Wednesday afternoon, the Wikipedia entry about Lay said that he was pronounced dead at an Aspen, Colo., hospital and had died of a heart attack, citing news sources."
... wait for it ... news sources?! and not encyclopedias?!! wtf!?) in the end it was updated with citations and sources, and ended up better, thereby achieving what it set out to do, while, the "blogging" aspect of wikipedia, even though it is not a blog, has failed.
So, while it was incorrect minute to minute(meaning, for live news, you should be reading
I really don't understand the article, it says a lot of stuff, and correctly, but it's stringed together in such a way and it makes incorrect presumptions, that it reaches an invalid conclusion.
Oh wait! I get it, it's a parody of a real wikipedia article, which some of them end up stringed together in terrible ways and reaches bad conclusions. But unlike wikipedia, this article probably won't be updated, with sources and citations.
Wow, who woulda thought that wikipedia is a living, evolving, growing encyclopedia, not CNN. Poor guy, what a mistake to make!
(Note, I've never contributed to wikipedia, and never really thought about it, there's enough crazy people doing it already. Nor do I think wikipedia is the end-all-be-all, but this article is just drivel, I mean come on).
Wikipedia is not ridiculous if you use it like you would a big, heavy 40 volume paper encyclopedia. That's what it's for. If you want news go to the BBC or NYTimes or something.
If you look up something that's been known for more than a few months - the facts are there - they are about as reliable as any paper encyclopedia (this has been well established in MANY independent tests) - and the coverage is vastly better than any paper encyclopedia...particularly on subjects considered too low-brow or too high-brow for paper encyclopedias.
What Wikipedia isn't good at is as a newspaper. There simply isn't time for the community editing process to settle down for something as recent and controversial as Ken Lay's death. Come back in a few months - I personally guarantee that this page will be well researched, annotated with references for you to go and check if you desire and quite stable.
www.sjbaker.org
You're exactly right, you know. Anything recent and controversial on wikipedia is very likely inaccurate - and most users find this out pretty quickly, whether through common sense (ie: you have regular people editing articles) or through experience (such as this Ken Lay thing).
As a result, you quickly get the idea that WIKIPEDIA IS NOT FOR NEWS. Meanwhile, the author of TFA seems to be under the impression that its information should always be bang-on accurate immediately. This ain't gonna happen. Just like the collective consciousness, any event that's got the masses riled up is going to be poorly portrayed in its opening hours. Fortunately, the strength of Wikipedia is that, soon enough, its accuracy is recovered.
A good example is the Ken Lay thing. Take a look at it today; it's pretty accurate at the moment. This may change; a lot people are still pissed about the guy, even years later.
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His Wikipedia entry was altered repeatedly to include unfounded rumors that he had killed himself
Yeah, for what, a grand total of two and a half minutes, over a series of vandalism attempts which were each corrected within thirty seconds?
And how long does it normally take the Washington Post to issue a retraction when they have an error? More than thirty seconds?
This article is just FUD from a media which can't compete against new information sources on their own terms, and so must turn to smearing them. The newspapers can't consistently be a more accurate source of the truth than even a messily-administered project like Wikipedia, so they must defend themselves by pointing out that for two and a half minutes, Wikipedia was wrong about something.
A nice thing about Wikipedia is that when something's controversial you can usually tell. In contrast, a reporter for the Washington Post can single-handedly decide to report something as if it is uncontroversial established fact and you'll never know the difference.
I needed to get the pinouts for different styles of Ethernet and phone connections, and Wikipedia came through with flying colors. So there.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Troll#Attent ion-seeking_trolls
Troll article -> Slashdot links to it -> Lots of pageviews -> More ad clicks -> Profit
Sony ha
you sure?
as far as I can gather, that was the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-11).
>Oh, wait, human knowledge isn't static.
Quite right. That might be the reason for WP's success, because it's built to represent that fact.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
Thank you. Perfectly said. Now I don't have to say it.
Wikipedia also provides disclaimers on pages which are under such influences.
I actually feel this enhances the wikipedia experience, unlike a printed reference, wiki can evolve to include new information as it becomes available. Old versions of britanica for example will always keep the errors of the day. (Including items which aren't specifically important to modern day life, such as mistaking the identities of dinosaurs, to definitions of modern vernacular.)
The number one rule of research is to use multiple sources (it also helps avoid plagarism.)
Maybe this is just me living in a liberal echo chamber, but I didn't think Ken Lay was "controversial." I assumed he was universally despised.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I'm surprised that so many slashdot readers take seriously the idea that the Washington Post (owned by the Moonies) is a non-partisan observer. If anything, it is more partisan in the sense that it represents a narrow subset of the American political spectrum in content. Like any other newspaper I know about it the Washington Post has an editorial policy, endorses political candidates, chooses columnists that match its target audience (no fascists, communists, socialists, anarchists, etc...). It is also of course implicity pro-American, discussions center around whether whether America should "pre-emptively" attack Iraq, not whether Iraq should "pre-emptively" attack the United States. I'll take the diversity, kooks and chaos of Wikipedia any day of the week. Those opinions may seem like "agitprop" to some, but go to another country, another time, another group and they are unremarkable.
You would think by now that people would have given up the notion of an unbiased media source but I guess some habits die hard.
Anyone who trusts a single source for all their information has problems editorial oversight can never fix. Having to cross-reference, check facts, look at alternate sources, etc. is *basic good scholarship*, and to overly rely on *any* source is purely lazy.
Besides, something tells me that the humor value of opening the entry on "Bushido" and finding every occurence of "honor" or "duty" replaced with "penis" would be lost on the old fuddy-duddies at Britannica. ;)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
The sentence violates several of the Wiki community's guidelines for article authorship. Using the word "speculation" is not enough. There has to be a credible source cited to be behind the speculation so that the "fact" of the speculation can be established as either belonging to a majority or significant minority. Otherwise the sentence is reporting nothing more than an individual opinion(whether it is the author's or not, or whether it belongs to many people) and can slant the overall impartiality of the article - simply mentioning such speculation can skew a future reader's opinion of the subject of the article. In any case, it's way too soon to tell what the concensus is regarding Lay's death, so remarking on such speculation as fact is ridiculous.
There's a difference between universal 'truth' and human knowledge. Human knowlegde is based on the exact instance you query for it. Wikipedia deals in this, not truth.
If you're looking for some universal thruths, go find religion. Otherwise, take anything you read or hear with at least a grain of salt and at most a kilogram of driveway grit.
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The big problem with Wikipedia that depsite its mass inaccuaracies, still comes up top in many search results, which lead many naive web users who do not know the Wikitruth being fulled into thinking Wikipedia is actually an authoitative source.
We, in order to take back the search engines need to start taking action. Willy on Wheels has written a guide to filtering and blocking Wikipedia when using Firefox.
If Wikipedia is removed from the search results then it would lose most of its traffic and would soon self-implode with all the edit wars and vandals that remain, and the Internet would become useful again.
You don't recognize the most basic, and important truth - Wikipedia is not meant to be somewhere that you find breaking news, and even when articles are updated poorly, the 'community' quickly corrects what ever has been broken. As a reference, having had the Ken Lay article be factually correct so quickly is not something Britannica could ever do - if it even HAD an article on Ken Lay, which I doubt it does.
Wikipedia also does something that traditional media cannot - it's a knowledge repository that isn't limited by physical space. Think of it as Douglas Adams 'Hitch Hikers Guide' but less portable, and without the all important button that you needed to read - don't panic.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
http://macpchobo.ytmnd.com/
lol install lunix prublem sulved
it's appropriate that something with modest checks and balances hoses up the reporting of someone intimately tied up in taking advantage of a system with modest checks and balances.
It's good for Frank Ahrens to get the issue on the table, but his language is inflammatory and his conclusions are wrong. People know what they are getting into when they read Wikipedia, better than they know what they are getting when they read the Washington Post. Using terms like "agitprop" to equate Wikipedia to Stallin's communist slaughterhouse is reprehensible.
The Washington Post, as disinterested as it seems, has owners and everyone has their opinion. While we might not expect the Washington Post to have opinions about Ken Lay, they might be interests closer to their hearts. For instance, two of the largest US TV broadcast groups are owned by GE and Westinghouse. Most people don't know that and are unaware of the conflict of interest whenever those networks report on anything to do with energy production. Wikipedia gets around those problems by allowing everyone to have their say. It seems to be working for the most part and everyone who puts more than a minutes' though into it realizes the downside and further realizes that the resource will normalize to the truth in time when the interested parties have moved on .
It's bad form for Frank to wrongly accuse a "competitor" like that but worse for him to use terms like "agitprop". It kind of reminds me of M$ using terms like "cancer" and "software communism" to describe free software or the RIAA describing people who dare to make copies of their music as "pirates". It's just namecalling, and people who do it usually don't have much to stand on.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Wow! Are people really claiming that an older guy under incredible stress who had a heart attack might have suffered it because of the stress? It's unbelievable that such radical people should be editing Wikipedia in such a partisan manner. Don't these kind of radicals get picked up by the FBI and sent back to whatever communist hellhole they came from? Shocking I say!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I think it's the best site on the internet!
john@escolapias-astorga.es
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2005/12/16
I think it's valid criticism for non-technical articles. As noted by others, wikipedia kicks ass for noncontroversial, primarily technical topics.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Wikipedia doesn't just have problems with controversial people, but with any kind of controversial issue. Look at the whole Net Neutrality debate. Many people point to the common carrier status as to why ISPs should be regulated to enforce net neutrality. This has lead to the Wikipedia entry for common carrier to be obviously biased. It states that ISPs have succesfully argued that they should not be considered common carriers based on seemingly weak arguments ("we're information carriers, not communications carriers".) However, it fails to mention that ISPs were originally classified as common carriers. This lead to ISPs being more regulated than their cable and satellite compettitors. It made little sense for a telco to invest in infrastructure that it was going to have to turn around and share. It was to promote compettition between DSL and cable that ISPs were de-regulated and not classified as common carriers. In the wake of this de-regulation, DSL prices have been slashed. Cable prices have stayed high, but cable companies have been forced to provide greater service (my connection speed has quadrupled in the last three years) to justify the higher price.
The point is that you won't see any such statements in Wikipedia. Their "version" of things is clearly tilted to fit somebody's view point. This may be true of traditional reference books and even educational materials, but the dynamic nature of Wikipedia makes it much obvious and intrusive.
Indeed. I had not realized that wearable Faraday shielding had become so popular.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I've been critical of Wikipedia in the past, but I do find myself drawn to it to get a summary of some subject, particularly cultural subjects that change often. I've also noticed it getting quoted in mainstream news articles (even sports articles).
I think I know what the big problem with Wikipedia really is... the problem is calling it an encyclopia. That just invites controversy, because it really isn't exactly an encyclopia in the traditional sense, and all the debate seems to be centered around whether it is or it isn't. Who cares whether it is or isn't? It's an information resource, with it's own set of advantages and flaws.
I think that's the whole solution to the "controversy". Stop calling it an encyclopia, and do away with the entire debate. Let it be whatever it is. Call it a Wiki... that's as good a term as any.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The Washington Times is owned by the moonies.
The Washington Post is a completely different newspaper, and is not.
Please, please tell me you don't contribute to Wikipedia. We need better fact-checking skills than this there.
And if there are references, it's probably a good idea to check and see that they're actually quoted / paraphrased correctly.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
The only problem is that people do not have the ability to filter or look for sources of confimation. For instance if Fox news says that Stalin is still alive and about to launch a secret arsenal of nuclear missles, many would believe it. It is the same thing with Wikipedea, and google just makes it worse. If enough people say it, and enough people link to it, then the truly stupid will believe it without any physical evidence.
As far as I know, wikipedia has already set procedures to limit these edit wars. I don't see what else can be done. Wikipedia does not set itself up as the arbiter of all truths. Probably answers.com need to do a better job of stating the content from wikipedia is heresay. But Ken Lay committing suicide? That is what we all think. I am no conspiracy theorist, but since he was never sentenced he is not a criminal. His death probably saved his hiers from relative poverty. it is very convinent. Sometimes peopl in ill health just will themselves to die.
You see, I just wrote something. Don't make it true. It is not my fault if some daft people believe it. Perhpas you do believe it is my fault, and perhaps, in the words of Eminem, you belive I can "load a gun up for you, and cock it too," just with the magic of mind. Boo!
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
What is truth anyway?
Look at the article for Sept. 11th. In the Britannica, there would be a factual story based on "official" commentary, "official" statements, etc. In Wikipedia, you get the little additional fact at the bottom: Some groups believe in a non-official conclusion that the planes were not piloted by Muslim/Arab terrorists.
Now, in Britannica, they couldn't say that, largely because a lot of their funding comes from Governments (public school libraries, etc.) so they can't go against the official stance of the government. Wikipedia isn't SAYING anything, just stating a neutral fact that some people don't believe the official stance, which is in this case "closer to the truth" of the world than not mentioning it.
You see, just because you don't like something and turn your back to it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There ARE hundreds of thousands of people who DON'T BELIEVE. Whether they are right or not, well, that's in doubt. But the mere mention is not saying one way or the other, merely acknowledging the debate (no matter how crazy).
A BAD Wikipedia entry would be one which states that anything is a fact about 9/11, one way or the other, and not allow any debate. Once everything is settled (and it never will, because all evidence was trucked away in a few weeks after, melted down, etc.), people will stop changing the page and it'll be "truth" more or less.
So, really, Wikipedia is probably closer to the real truth of the world (ie: a picture of the actual world in words) than anything else (on average). At any given moment, you could be reading total shit. But the beauty is that if it IS total shit, and you KNOW it, you can edit the page and fix it!
Now, what gets my goat is the alleged tampering with historical fact that sometimes happens. For instance, congressional staffers "editing" their congressperson's page to erase factual, but possibly negative information. I think people who do that should be fired. It does go to show how far campaigns work to cover up the truth. "Campaign financing" is really just cover-up money used to erase a politician's bad past deeds. But, I digress.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
This is probably why you see so many "Citation needed" notes or whole sections labeled "This section needs to define the sources for its material".
Good material is cemented by good source references.
any encyclopaedia suffers from the same problem. an entry is written by a particular person at a particular time. you're exactly right, but your beef is not with wikipedia per se.
I am from Brazil, and I was surprised when I read regular encyclopedias about Brazillian things and they were very wrong. So, the fact that the information is bad does not come from that fact that is submitted by users.
The posters above are right to say that Wikipedia is primarily useful as a resource for noncontroversial topics. What I would add is that Wikipedia is *particularly* useful if you are researching topics in information technology. The people who are most interested in contributing to Wikipedia tend to also be interested in the Internet and the underlying technology, and the detail and quality of articles in those topics is deeply impressive. For example, look at the article on "internet protocol suite". Articles like that one are good enough that I use them as a reference for programming along with the O'Reilly books, w3schools.com, etc., and I don't know of any resource that is better on a meta, qualitative level (as opposed to a technical level). In general, as long as the topic is not controversial, the primary benefit of Wikipedia is the sheer amount of detail that you get with so many contributers. Also, traditional encyclopedias with a defined publisher/editor tend to restrict how much they say in order to only state facts that are beyond question. That makes them more authoritative than Wikipedia, but often results in a poverty of information that leaves the articles unhelpful. Encarta Encyclopedia is a great example of this problem. As long as you take Wikipedia with a grain of salt, the benefit of this increased information can outweigh the cost of not being able to fully trust it. However, this discussion does raise one thing that needs to be fixed about Wikipedia - the home pages of the language sections currently focus on current events and news stories, implying that Wikipedia should be used to research such information. It is clear to most people in this discussion that Wikipedia cannot be trusted on that time frame. So, I think Wikipedia should perhaps retreat a little and stop trying to be a encyclopedia-style Associated Press. WikiNews doesn't work. Stephen (PS: This is my first post!)
For proof look at the fact that USA Today had an article on the same subject dated 4 days earlier.k ipedia-ken-lay_x.htm?POE=TECISVA
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-07-05-wi
This is really a non-story to begin with so you know the Washington Post is digging when it rehashed 4 day old news and calls it it's own. Of course Wikipedia Entries on recent events are not perfectly accurate but neither are news stories. You won't see a front page article on how the Washington Post got an article wrong though. It's just assumed.
Mygosh! I didn't realise the Brittanica had such a powerful lobby!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
(As a good measure of such things: those who have been legitimately slighted tend to be more just "well... blah" whereas those who are screaming "stabbitystabbity die die die" or setting up sites like "Wikipedia Watch" or Jimmy Wales hate-sites and the like are slightly less well-inclined.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
What you say is generally true but I did find a counterexample.
The wikipedia entry on Kryder's Law, which is just Moore's law for hard disks was an example of a technical article older than 6 months, which should not have been controversial. It turned out to have some serious problems, like there never was any such thing as Kryder's law until Wikipedia invented it.
Since I originally pointed out the error, the article has been updated. You can read about what was wrong with it at http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/Kryder's.html
The author of that article missed the point. The reason that article was in flux was because that was 0 day news and the facts were not known. Many newspapers reported the same mis-information as wikipedia.
Look at the article now: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Lay)
"While vacationing in Colorado on July 5, 2006, Kenneth Lay died. The Pitkin Sheriff's Department confirmed that officers were called to Lay's house in Old Snowmass, Colorado, near Aspen at 1:41 AM MDT. Lay was taken to Aspen Valley Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 3:11 AM MDT. Autopsies indicate that he died of a heart attack brought on by coronary artery disease. Pending toxicology reports will be completed later in July."
It's non-partisan and factual.
And how many Wikipedia authors follow these guidelines? From what I see, most have not even read them. Wikipedia encourages folks to jump in and start editing. Stopping to learn the rules is an optional step usually skipped.
And even if an author is motivated to read the rules, they're so complicated and disorganized, it's impossible to get a grasp on most of them.
Even when authors know the rules, they often don't have the background to apply them. When I used to play copy editor on WP, I would try to get authors to rewrite stuff that was clearly speculative — except to the author! One guy had written that a certain comic book character was obviously based on another character in a famous short story. The connection wasn't at all obvious to me, and he had no source for this information — he was just stating his own opinion. But I had a hell of a time convincing him to reword his statement: it was obvious to him what the facts were, and that was that.
One other note: you talk about "the Wiki [sic] community's guidelines" as if these rules somehow express a consensus of a large group of people. They do not. There is, in fact, little in the way of consensus building at Wikipedia. Most processes, including rule-making, are dominated by a few people. Sometimes those few people are just whoever's managed to bully everybody else into going away.
I can see the coder-geek authorbase as the primary cause of Wikipedia's problems. Here are the issues I've noticed in the past. Many of these examples may have been rectified, but they still exist in countless other forms:
They're insidiously opinionated. Instead of saying wasabi is "fried with peas," they say it is "considered quite tasty with fried peas." Gee, "tasty" is completely objective I guess, not a matter of personal, ahem, taste, at all. Someone tries to argue them down, but they know they're "right," after all they learned C++ when they were 10.
They miss the forest for the trees. The article on AIDS has wonderful information on the disease's origins, treatment and spread throughout the world. Too bad there's no fucking organization to anything in the article, and the section titled, "Global epidemic" is precisely redundant with the one named, "Current status." It's like the typical geek's desk, awash in code printouts and spec sheets. There's good stuff in there, somewhere (he's sure) but he'll be damned if he can make any sense out of it (but hey it's like a puzzle and those are fun). He should just print one more copy instead of checking if it's already there, and organizing his shit.
They don't know how to write. If the spelling and language mechanics are correct, then it's good writing (which is like saying that any code that compiles is good code). There's no rule in Strunk & White about too many clauses in one sentence! Thus, the writing is perfect. Decent style, flowing sentences, consistent tone and voice are only for the weak-minded; hackers are made of sterner stuff (well, mentally).
They're obsessed with dumb trivia. Every article must have its "In popular culture" section, just to prove that they, like Ken Jennings, know stupid references to everything.
They don't know jackshit about page layout. Does every table need a full set of borders? Must LaTeX equations be fucking huge? Why can't editors use a color wheel (or common sense) to choose nicely matching colors? Deitel & Deitel is not the standard on typesetting or formatting; use a textbook that had an editor as a guide on page layout, like "Fundamentals of Aerodynamics" by Anderson. Clean tables without distracting borders, equations modestly marked by centering and italics (no huge font necessary), headings used only when needed. It's black and white because colors would be superfluous. But it's fun on Wikipedia to add superfluous formatting, it's just like adding new features to software. Oooh, shiney! Instead of featuritis, it's sectionitist, bolditis, table-itis.
So that's what I think ails Wikipedia in a nutshell. Many of these are addressed by Wikipedia policies, but when even Wikipedia's founder (Jimbo Wales) dislikes following them, how will they ever gain decent implementation? Especially when any editor with half a brain who does support them is just another uncool, uptight elitist who should be ignored. It's no wonder that Wikipedia today is still a nightmare of good information. Citing Wikipedia at the college level is still academic suicide. Unless their policies and people change throughout the chain of command, Wikipedia will never evolve to a real authoritative source that is a true encyclopedia. It's fun to read, but only as accurate and objective as the rest of the internet.
Not according to this source online.
Why not insert some sort of time delay where the front page shown to users isn't updated for some period of time after an edition (like 4hours)? You could still allow the normal notifications to go off and editors would then have time to reject additions or review additions on conentious pages. Since this is not a breaking news site, it shouldn't hurt to have a 4 hour delay.
for being a personal page ala myspace.
Someone hates these cans.
Wikipedia does have some features somewhat similiar to meta-moderation, etc. Every article on Wikipedia potentially has a linked discussion page where contributors can discuss what should be in the real article. You can also look at the change history to note where there are points of contention, even on relatively recent and controversial subjects so long as they are fairly regional in scope. If a topic has a lot of updates, then it starts to become impractical to analyze the history, but so long as there's only a few people editting back and forth, it tends to work.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wikipedia has grown alot and more responsibilities should be implemented.
They could open sub domains, wikinews or wikiblogs, rather than trash whats been established...
God must be a civil engineer who else but a civil engineer would put a waste water outlet thru a recreational facility.
The Hurricane Katrina articles are a reasonably good example of this. Back in September of last year, when all this was happening, the article saw several edits every minute and lots of people would insert all sorts of stuff in there. Most of this was actually legitimate, but poorly organized since things were happening and being posted on the fly. Of course, there was the usual assortment of conspiracy theorists adding stuff as well, but most of this is gone now. The article (actually articles, since there are quite a few dealing with many aspects of the hurricane) have stabilized, references have been checked and properly formatted, and bad references (such as personal blog entries and editorial stuff) have been largely deleted. By late June, the main article was promoted to being a featured article.
Of course, there's still work to be done, and it's not perfect. The criticism of the government response and political effects articles are still pretty atrocious, with all sorts of bias; the former article of which still has an NPOV tag. Of course, this is the whole point ... most of the info on scientific facts and timelines and stuff is generally valid and not disputed; it's the articles dealing with political commentary and personal views that are the problem.
The Wal-Mart article is another one that seems to have too much personal and political bias inserted into it. Though the Google article is relatively clean and has been pretty tame for several months now.
The article seems to indicate that for some fleeting moments there were some inaccuracies in the Ken Lay biography. I read it a couple of days ago and I just read it now. I didn't see any such inaccuracies.
Contested articles are flagged as "under dispute." That, plus a tiny bit of savvy, is all that is necessary to avail one's-self of the vast wealth of information available at Wikipedia.
He was also a middle aged man who, I'm guessing, liked his steaks.
Enron's Kenneth Lay, who died of natural causes last week, shortly after being sentenced to prison.
Do you really believe that? I have no idea who this guy is (I heard about Enron, but haven't read any news about it in last months), but it sounds very unlikely. It is always "Natural Causes" in prison.
What you don't mention is Tycho's motivation in writing this rant against Wikipedia, as revealed by the part of the article you didn't quote: He was pissed off because they deleted some of his articles. Articles about a book series called "Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga". A book series that doesn't exist.
In other words, this very set of arguments as to why wikipedia's system "doesn't work" was prompted by an incident of wikipedia's system working. Tycho tried to post false information, and Wikipedia rejected this. And Tycho got pissy and went and complained about Wikipedia on his blog.
Now given, Tycho's false information was awesome; the ELOTH:TES stuff that Wikipedia rejected is truly hilarious, and now that it's been moved to its own wiki (where it probably should have been in the first place), it's turned into a collaborative project in its own right, as if Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" conspiracy had had as their goal to parody fantasy novels.
But it didn't belong on Wikipedia. And the incident in which it was removed from Wikipedia itself neatly refutes the complaints that the incident inspired Tycho to level against Wikipedia.
The first complaint is that "Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions... all sources of information are not of equal value... I believe there is such a thing as expertise." I don't think it's very hard to read between the lines here; we already know Tycho is pissed off because some "persistent idiot" obliterated his contributions. It's not very hard to imagine that the real issue here is that Tycho (who certainly is a person with expertise) thinks he as a source of information is of value, and the Wikipedia hivemind does not. But Tycho himself shows that the things wikipedia values are more valuable than "expertise"-- Wikipedia values facts, neutrality and whenever possible rigor, and ignores authority. If we accepted "expertise" or appeals to authority, then we'd be obligated to accept Tycho as a source of information just cuz he's a real smart person with a real popular blog. And then Wikipedia would have a series of articles about a fantasy novel franchise and ill-fated 1980s children's TV show which never existed.
Second off, Tycho issues the complaint that Wikipedia's "errors get fixed eventually" principle isn't very useful if you don't know whether the errors have been fixed yet. Simply looking at a wikipedia page, you have no way to know whether you're looking at a cleanly vetted, accurate bunch of information, or if your pageload just happened by random coincidence to fall in that 30-second gap of space between a vandal entering a statement that Ken Lay committed suicide and a watchlister rving it. This is a much more serious and substantial complaint, and one which is a serious problem for the idea of Wikipedia as an information source. The lesson to be learned here is of course that you shouldn't treat wikipedia as a primary source but rather a starting point for further information, and if the information you're taking from wikipedia is important you need to check the references like a hawk. But in the end, it still isn't a real problem-- as Tycho has shown us. After all, as Tycho found when he tried to introduce false information, that little gap of time where the Wikipedia Wave Function hasn't yet collapsed and pageloads return false information is strikingly small. This is generally not a matter of errors taking months to get fixed. It is sometimes measured in minutes or seconds. The probability of hitting at a bad moment is small enough we can effectively ignore it, unless we have some kind of ulterior motives and are just trying to make Wikipedia look bad.
Now, in Britannica, they couldn't say that, largely because a lot of their funding comes from Governments (public school libraries, etc.)
No, in Britannica they wouldn't (not couldn't) say that because their isn't a shred of evidence to support the kook...er...alternative conclusions.
Gee, requiring empirical evidence. Whatever next?
Everything in the history texts, every biography, every article in the encyclopedias are colored by the authors. Read a newspaper article and the "bad" guys are the "militants" and the "good" guys are the the "forces", never mind that both sides are "soldiers". Listen to a newscast and the sides were presented as "another chance to fix" a problem for one side and "yet another excuse from the" opposing party. In our history texts some pirates are lauded for helping the Queen, but others are condemned. Hell, when a large software company visited Miami several years ago, the Miami Herald ran a bunch of puff pieces praising them for giving software to a school, yet as other schools were being sued for license violations. That stuff doesn't get reported. There was a time when journalism classes stressed the accurate reporting of the facts, free from the emotions of the person doing the reporting. Not any more. Blame television, blame the Internet, blame our shortened attention spans, but people don't want facts, they want entertainment.
As time has gone by, the situation has gotten worse. As far as I'm concerned, Jimbo Wales input into how to deal with generally hurts the situation, and his like-minded lieutenants follow along. To show the cultish aspect of this, anyone who points this out is called a "troll" or whatnot, I'm sure I'll be called a troll here and modded down by Wikipedia partisans, which kind of proves my point. Another cultish aspect is that no one is allowed to post links to sites truly critical of Wikipedia like Wikipedia Review on the Criticism of Wikipedia page.
What it really is is that old adage of how little problems not dealt with become huge problems as time goes by. Wikipedia has done such a good job with articles on math, science and that type of thing that people tend to ignore how the historical articles are garbage. Aside from the enormous bias of the professional English-speaking Westerner view throughout English Wikipedia, there is focus - Leeroy Jenkins of World of Warcraft fame has an article, while leaders of sub-Saharan African countries get no articles whatsoever. If you combined the Star Trek and Star Wars articles, they would dwarf the size of text written about, say, South America, on English Wikipedia. Anyhow, these things will become more apparent as time goes on, they're apparent to many already, or Wikipedia Review, the site linking of is banned on Wikipedia, wouldn't exist. I don't think Jimbo Wales or Wikipedia will change, and I see a fork certainly coming in the future. I nowadays make about an edit to Wikipedia a month, most of my stuff I put on alternative wikis.
Why not have a second, JavaScript scrollbar on the same side as the regular scrollbar, that instead of scrolling down the page scrolls back in time through previous page versions. This would enable any casual reader to easily see how the page has changed.
Alternatively, why not highlight text that has been changed recently - red for the last 12 hours, orange for the last 24 hours, green for the last week. Clicking on the text would carry you through to the previous version of the page, with the colour of the text changing accordingly.
I have a problem with the concept of 'authoritative'. It is standardised political delusion. We don't need this. What we do need is a quick way that the reader can detect sabotage. It is then up to the reader to weigh what is said, and determine what to believe or not. The uncritical reader will always be wrong. What we need is a convenient tool for everyone else.
Regards,
Roger
Editorial Oversight does not necessarily lead to fair and balanced articles, or even truthful articles. For a great living example of this statement, pick up a copy of The New York Post or tune into FOX News.
Each page(sometimes a grouping) needs to become it's own community. I run a forum about writing operating systems and I've just setup a mediawiki to contain osdev(as it's called) information. My mediawiki requires accounts to edit/post content to the wiki and (with a free mediawiki plugin)the accounts are just forum members that I've placed in a certain group. Myself and fellow moderators can very easly determine who has valid content to contribute to a osdev wiki but it's just to overwhelming to try to maintain that level of control for topics I'm not familiar with. You compare just the "amateur systems" section on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osdev with my project list at http://www.osdev.org/wiki/index.php/Projects, 23 vs 132 OS projects listed. I'm not saying that people visiting the Osdev page on wikipedia should be redirected to my site, I think more community features need to be added to mediawiki. I say lock all pages and require community involvement to gain editing rights. You might lose a poster that just wanted to dump off information but that's why I have a forum for people to make requests in. Basically the forums become the filter/distiller for the wiki in the long run.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
I'd like to see articles just got locked to prevent editing for a couple days when they're in the news. Most of these editing rampages seem to occur when someone is in the press suddenly (like yesterdays mass editing of Zidane's entry after the headbutt incident in the World Cup).
It'd be neat if Wikipedia could somehow scan the news for headlines and if someone starts cropping up repeatedly, just lock the article for a couple days until the hysteria dies down and all the short attention spam idiots have fucked off onto something else.
Everyone knows you can't have a Profit without a ???.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
As you may know, on this day, Bonaparte made a coup d'État and thus became known as "Napoléon"...
Every time a single person (or institution) is in charge of the writing / editing of any article, a risk exists, and that's why a) encyclopaedias are not scholar references b) science suppose peer review.
"...or the stress from his trial had caused the heart attack." Actually, most sources I've read online and on paper have surmised this. How is this "radical blogging" when even some family members have suggested this? I smell FUD.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
They'll probably be more successful at moving troll matter on the front-page than what CmdrTaco would ever be. Who hasn't editted their competitor's page?
-SlashdotTroll
Non-story.
If you want breaking news go to CNN or whatever.
What this moron describes is the process of getting the article right. And it's done in public, warts and all.
Silly story. There are much bigger probs at WP. This is not really one of them.
the idea of Wikipedia. I admire the effort and expertise of those who have made it a superb resource. Why can't the mainstream media (in this case, the WSJ) accept it for what it is? "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Isn't that a straightforward enough warning? I saw fit to quote from Wikipedia in my own first book, on the subject of medical tourism. But I certainly didn't take the entry as a final word, or even as a trustworthy one. But the *history* of the term was interesting -- when did it first get noticed and how has the Wikipedia entry for it changed? And I can look at the change history now with some amusement and see that, sure enough, there have been editorial efforts to tilt the content one way and another, in favor of different destinations for medical tourists (people who travel outside of their own country for health care, for whatever reasons.) I'm almost certainly among the more qualified people in the world to actually write and maintain the entry on this off-the-beaten path subject. I've written a book on it titled Beauty from Afar ; I'm a journalist and I've spent the better part of the last two years researching medical tourism. And I've been tempted to edit the Wikipedia entry more than once ... but what for? The entry *is* a blog, really. I don't own it, nor should I. It would make me crazy to try to keep it "correct" (from my point of view) and up-to-date.
Wikipedia is a wonderful and evolving resource. I don't see how anyone can expect it to be the final word on anything that represents a moving target.
(mea culpa for the book plug, but I think it's a good example.)
don't go to Wikipeida to get your news. Google News is probably the least biased way to go for now. Unless it's for a story against Google!
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
Wikipedia has already taken care of false information problems, in a variety of creative ways.
First, you have to remember that important article are hit thousands of times by various people, and since everyone has ability to edit, problems can often be quickly cleaned up. I feel that slashdot proves that if you though enough geeks at something, truth comes to the surface quickly.
Second, Wikipedia strongly supports citing sources. Try moving around Wikipedia, and you will soon find a header stating that "this article needs sources" and basically a warning that it may contain gibberish. When you are doing things of importance, you should always check sources. Especially when dealing with something like Wikipedia. This is also an advantage Wikipedia: unlike most encyclopedias, where you have to go find the sources, Wikipedia is point and click.
Wikipedia is the the greatest proof that the Market Place of Ideas works. It shows that when you throw enough ideas together, the truth will survive. Though we may have unfortunate events like the one in the article, almost all information is accurate, and problems are quickly solved.
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
That is true, but I would argue simply that an encyclepedia that is 100% correct cannot exist, even if you exclued the recent and controversial. I think thats a true statement. Or rather, I think it could be made, but most people wouldn't agree that it was 100% correct. Most people simply disagree on the truth, although that does not mean that objective truth doesn't exist. Do you see what I'm saying? It gets really complex, just trying to talk about it.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It should have been called opinionpedia. You can't give the entire population of the planet the ability to edit and correct an encyclopedia and expect them to only include facts. Everybody has an opinion, and everybody considers thier opinion to be the truth..
God Be Gone
I think the Wikipedia issues raise a bunch of questions everybody should think about. How do you know what you know? How do you verify it? Why should you trust the New York Times or Washington Post any more than your neighbor?
In the end, you can only determine fact by obtaining confirmation from multiple, independent sources. A single article, whether in Wikipedia or in the New York Times is not a reliable source to base important decisions on.
As for Ken Lay, I'm not even completely convinced he is dead, or that if he had committed suicide or his death was caused by stress, we'd know about it. With the kind of money and influence the guy had, anything is possible. Fortunately, it doesn't matter, so I don't really care whether Wikipedia or the NYT is correct.
Thank you for translating the original post into idiot.
I am outraged at this. This editor obviously has no understanding of the colossal amount of effort that has been put into making Wikipedia a broad, diversified information source that gives everything and DEMANDS NOTHING IN RETURN. If you don't like it, don't donate to it, but don't spread FUD like this.
I normally like the Washington Post, but this editor is way out of line. Sure, people vandalizing articles is a problem. But it doesn't automatically make the whole thing a failed effort and travesty. As others have mentioned, many articles on non-controversial subjects are actually more accurate (and much more detailed) than you will find in any other encyclopedia. In fact, lots of articles compare to specialized reference volumes in detail, not encyclopedias. Try looking up MD5 hashes in World Book - maybe a passing reference, but no several pages-long overview of how it works.
This sounds a lot like FUD from the for-profit reference volumes.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
I think the correct solution in this case it not to argue content but to file a 'Request for Deletion' - explaining that the term is a neologism. That - together with the "No original research" rule should get rid of the offending article in short order.
www.sjbaker.org
Yes, and at its best, it's pretty darn cool.
Welcome to Wikipedia.
And during current events such as that example he brings up, there was most likely a high visibility template on top of the article saying something like "this article documents a current event, information may change rapidly". I think that should be taken as a sign the content and information is in flux. I advise against using Wikipedia as a sole information source particularly during breaking news events. I'd try newspapers with good reputations for that, although they're keen on spreading misinformation as well at times.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Winnie was the sort of guy who expected the political nation to recognize his paraphrase of Herodotus. He was decidedly not the sort to recognize the levels of samizdat burdening every eschatology. The oft-garbled rest of the quote:
. . . agitprop is written by the losers.
illegitimii non ingravare
here we go again with some wikipedia bashing.
i think wikipedia presupposes just a bit of critical thinking on part of the user. that is, looking up an article on a controversial subject or person (such as ken lay), one has to expect some editorial liscense. luckily, wikipedia is usually pretty quick to have a warning with a link to a discussion page, which often makes better reading than the article -- and this brings up an interesting point:
if i visit the ken lay page, eg, i do want some facts, but the facts aren't necessarily what is interesting -- i may read about his birthplace, childhood, and the fact that he was an executive at enron during the peak of its scandal. but this is where the facts will end, and this in itself is informative, but not about the ISSUE -- that is, and this is key, the going back and forth with posts (hopefully they'll be quarantined to the discussion page quickly) can clue the reader in to the issues and the opposing viewpoints on a subject.
i don't think that wikipedia fails, i think it's mainly that people expect it to behave like an old dusty book on a shelf, and that, thankfully, is just what it isn't -- it's alive with the issues of our contemporary world -- sometimes up to the minute.
i'll put it another way -- the fact that ken lay's page was "vandalized" is in of itself a barometer of the current climate on the subject.
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
Obviously, you haven't seen this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPTIT0IaHko
Why do so many people want Wikipedia to fail? So what if an article is wrong? Fix the damn article instead of writing about how it's wrong! Damn people...
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
That's not the point. The point is that there exists a historically significant alternative truth movement, and regardless how baseless their accusations may be, they deserve mention because of their sheer magnitude. Look at the various professors, journalists, and activists, who've presented arguments. Discrediting them as "small" would be a disservice to an encyclopedia.
We may not agree with Bin Laden's views, but that doesn't mean he's omitted from encyclopedic entry. Geez, watch what you're saying, you're advocating indirect censorship.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
Wikipedia has no business creating biographies of living persons without their permission. A case might be made for doing this to a public person such as Kenneth Lay, but when it comes to someone like me, who is not notable, it can be distressing.
Last October I started http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/ because an anonymous administrator at Wikipedia, SlimVirgin, started a biographical article on me without asking, and with a preconceived notion that I was someone that needed to be put in his place because I had political views that were incompatible with hers.
There are more anonymous teenagers who are administrators at Wikipedia than you can believe. The subject of a biography is not allowed to contribute to his own article, and if he tries, they ban him like they banned me, and they also start getting downright nasty.
Wikipedia is okay on pop culture, on high-tech and scientific topics, and also on trivia that no one cares about. But when it comes to social and political issues, and biographies of living persons, what they need is a big fat libel and invasion-of-privacy lawsuit to stop them in their tracks.
It's not an encyclopedia. Instead, it's more like a video game that escaped from its box. It can be devastating to the victim, because all the search engines rank Wikipedia near the top. Human Relations departments are increasingly googling applicants before they call them for interviews.
The entire situation of some anonymous teenager having the power to ruin someone's life because it's fun and interesting, is something that has to stop. I don't mind a newspaper reporter writing about me because reporters and newspapers are identifiable and accountable. More importantly, when they write about me it's generally within a very narrow context, and several days later the same newspaper is used to wrap fish. The short shelf life makes a newspaper article, even if it is negative, a non-issue for me.
Wikipedia, by comparison, stays at the top of the engines forever. I have to watch my biography every day, because I never know who might have vandalized or distorted it last night. John Seigenthaler's biography is still getting vandalized, and it's taking three hours before some of them are reverted. His article is one of the most-watched by the vandal patrol of all Wikipedia articles. What about someone like me? If I don't watch it, who will?
I want them to take my biography down, period. I've been trying for nine months. They just laugh at me.
Okay, if the Marketplace of Ideas doesn't work, why the hell am I listening to you guys?
Both rely on similar principles to insure good content. One uses mod points, the other uses the talk page and modification, but the principle is the same. You may think that, "Well a lot of brainless things are said on slashdot," and yes your right, but the information gets mod-ed down quickly. Same can be said of Wikipedia.
And at least on Wikipedia you can shut the idiots up, unlike other media areas (*ahem* Fox News) where they can say whatever misinformation they want. And no source gets it completely right: my father once watched the fly-by of Neptune on the satellite feed, and then watched the news on the issue the next morning. None of the programs got more facts right than the name of the planet and probe.
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
Look, I am usually the guy that is anti-open-source and anti-wiki and anti-[insert fad fud here], but the Wiki, in general, is really pretty good.
/. earlier about Wiki-goodness, I decided to REALLY look some things up and see if it was as slanted and politicized as I believed it would be. Turns out, if you look up both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, you will get quite a bit of information, and it will be quite fair to all but the most kooky ideologs. The same goes for religion and a lot of other polarizing topics.
I won't share my political leanings, but after I read an article on
The only exception I would make might be that there are some articles that go TOO far to be "fair" and almost hint at being politically correct.
Someone said it above, it is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone...treat it as such.
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
Actually, Mr. Lay died while *awaiting* sentencing, not following sentencing!
If this had been Wikipedia, that embarrassing error would have been fixed by now.
I wanted to post the acronym FUD several times in a row... However slashdot wouldn't let me as it interpreted it as YELLING.... It would seem that yelling detection failed..
FUD FUD FUD FUD
some teachers say they will fail any student who lists wiki-pedia as a source.
Well, people on Wikipedia have a certain amount of pride in what they do, and they therefore want to address the complaints of people who have been legitimately slighted, as those indicate real flaws. So people with legitimate complaints tend to find that the article has been changed to essentially what it should say (although sometimes it takes a few rounds of corrections).
WP is an Internet marvel. It has achieved what few people thought was possible: an extremely thorough (probably the most thorough) encyclopedia that is truly free. No high pressure sales tactics to guilt parents into buying a $1000 set of encyclopedias so their child won't fall behind. No advertisements or teaser articles to get you to pay a subscription fee to see the full article. No (top-level) editorial bias.
That's not so say it's perfect. In fact, I'm a little sceptical of everything I read on WP. Some people might not be because they aren't familiar with how it's written. So, finally, here's my point: Wikipedia should have an unmistakable warning at the top saying that its content is not written by paid experts, and what they're reading may not have had any editorial review at all. Then maybe we would stop hearing so many articles from people who have a vested interest in the traditional publishing industry whining about how dangerous it is to have something published without their prior approval.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
The unfortunate truth is, however, that wikipedia is an EASY reference, and usually a google search on a topic points to the wikipedia entry first, even though the entry is hopelessly biased (articles on US, Israel etc edited by muslims and Islamic Fundamentalists etc). Wikipedia is a tragedy, except maybe for technical articles, or wherever unfounded bias is impossible.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Look, this crap keeps coming up about Wikipedia, but it's not Wikipedia. It's just the internet. It's like all those stupid e-mails people pass around about how those mops with the cleaner built in are poisonous and will kill your pets, or the other stupid urban legends that go around. Some people know the internet well enough not to trust every single thing they read on it to necessarily be fact and others just haven't figured it out yet.
I use Wikipedia all the time and find it to be exceptionally accurate, but I use it for stuff I know it will tend to be accurate about. Stuff that isn't controversial. Stuff that's generally science-based. If I want to know about something that's more controversial, I might read Wikipedia, but I know the internet well enough to take what I read with a grain of salt. It's just like those stupid urban legend e-mails. Some people understand this and others simply haven't figured it out yet.
Why Slashdot has to run this and similar stories about Wikipedia over and over is beyond me. I suspect most people on Slashdot are in the crowd that have figured this out. If this is news for nerds, this is old news for nerds. But really, this is news for non-nerds.
What's the solution for Wikipedia? There isn't one. It's publicly editable, the way that it was designed to be and should be. It works exceptionally well 99% of the time. So what? They should change the way it works because of the 1% (or probably far lower than that) of articles that are controversial enough that people are putting crap into them? That's just ridiculous.
I'm a fairly frequent user of Wikipedia and, I have to say, although the problems exemplified by the Ken Lay episode are of real concern, overall, I've been quite surprised and how consistently I find solid information on Wikipedia--Generally, carefully done and well-written articles. I would have predicted that Wikipedia, by virtue of it's open policies, would have fallen into complete chaos by now.
He's in a witness-protection program.
The body is that of some drifter they found in New Mexico, who looks kind of like Ken Lay.
What - you didn't expect Ken Lay to actually do time did you?
Just like you didn't expect Kenny Boy to actually be charged with Baxter's murder either.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I use wikipedia for mostly static articles, such as within astronomy, science in general, or human history/geneology. Those for the most part have a lot of useful information. I research individuals in my home town library, as if I read wikipedia for them, I usually get a chuckle out of the information about them which is posted.
You step into a blog, you know what you're getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information
And other media aren't?
We all familiar with media bias on controversial issues in news media. But the same is true in authoratitive media - encyclopedias, scholarly journals, textbooks, and so on.
Two I'm familiar with:
Starting in the late '60s the war on drugs began to bais research reports on prohibited drugs. First there was a period where reports on research into effects - beneficial or otherwise - of these drugs would have stated conclusions that were transparently at odds with the data published in the article. (Apparently this was a reaction to the government chosing only to fund those researchers who published anti-drug conclusions.) Later the cat-and-mouse game was apparently replaced by a simple stoppage of most funding for research into the drugs in question.
Starting in the mid '70s the war on private guns produced an avalanche of bogus research and historical revisionism. This appeared in places like medical journals (attempting to usurp the function of criminological journals by treating guns use as an epidemic), historical journals, and of course the major media. But it also crept into such venues as mainstream encyclopedias.
The problem with authoritative media - scholarly or otherwise - is that they create a dominant paradigm and suppress publication of works that are in conflict with it. When the dominant paradigm is something that is factually correct (or essentially so) and the works in conflict are defective (attractively plausible but wrong or hairbrained) this works out well.
But organizations reaching a consensus on and promulgating a dominant paradigm are susceptable to honest error, ignorance, political interference, and social/religious/ideological fads. When the paradigm is wrong through error, corrections may be suppressed. When it's wrong through political/social/religious/ideological issues, such organizations become (perhaps unintentional) propaganda outlets, in two ways. First: they propagate a Big Lie. Second (and more significantly): they suppress truth and divergent opinion.
Wikipedia is an attempt to eliminate the problems of such systems by creating an encyclopedia open to editing by all. This eliminates the sin of omission, but opens it to hairbrained claims and politcal astroturf. This may go too far in the other direction. But publishing the edit history keeps the latest edit from completely suppressing its predecessors, limiting the usefulness of such openness to the malicious.
Given that Wikipedia depends on honest effort by its contributors but doesn't do much to vet them, it leaves its articles latest versions vulnerable to damage by even a small number of dishonest or psychopathic editors. Perhaps, as it becomes an ever bigger target (in the presence of millions of net-connected psychopaths) the resulting havoc will become great enough to drive the organizers to apply some sort of reputation system filtering. This would tend to reduce the vulnerability to kooks, vandals, and astroturfers, at the price of seeding the growth of a new paradigm-driven suppression of viewpoint.
Meanwhile the current system seems to be working remarkably well - especially if the user checks the edit history for paradigm thrashing. With Wikipedia, more than most authoritative sources, "the truth is in there" - usually on the surface, sometimes buried in the edit history.
Of course you can't use its surface for an authoritative source. But you can use it for a fine set of starting point, then do your own checking. Meanwhile, it attracts reasonable voices on all subjects, and a paradigm fight, astroturf battle, or other propaganda campaign will show up as an edit history thrash. So it carries with it its own alarm for situations where its surface articles may be unreliable due to controversy or vandalism.
What convenience!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wikipedia is a duplicate of what the wiki community believes the world is. If 10% of people are convinced that Elvis faked his death (or whatever) then 10% of the time, that will be on Wikipedia.
For example, I edited the articles for the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA to state that they were "organized crime families, that...da da da" That stayed in place for over a year before some evil, black-heareted editor removed the truth that the wiki community had agreed on.
The morons who think they know everything will claim that wikipedia should only be edited to show the "truth" as they know it. These are the same people who would deny that any media ever gets any story wrong. I'm certain that half of everything I know is wrong, so I'm always intersted in another point of view.
Andy Out!
All this vitriol about Wikipedia's abominable quality virtually always concerns current/recent events, persons still living, etc. The simple answer is that an encyclopedia is not where you go to find information on those topics (ever notice the "News" tab on Google?).
And yes, when a major and controversial event happens, it's like watching two dozen rabid, partisan bloggers forced to share a single soapbox - but so what? Does that somehow invalidate the hundreds of thousands of useful articles on there?
Incidentally, how good is the Britannica article about Ken Lay's death?
sic transit gloria mundi
What if Wikipedia did this:
1. Someone edits/creates an article and submits it.
2. The Wikipedia system randomly selects a user to review and accept the change.
3. If the randomly selected user does not respond (ie: after 2 days) then go back to 2.
It seems simple to implement.
The only problem I can think of is multiple users submitting changes and merging those changes. Any better ideas?
-Joe
You missed my point spectacularly.
Of course the current Britannica doesn't say that. I was countering the OP's argument.
-Peter
I was reading along fairly smoothly until:
And everything ground to a painful halt. Are you saying that, in a community with a diversity of opinion, people adverse to the subject at hand should not have a hand in editing, but those who are not should? Are Swiss people going to be the only ones doing Country articles from now on? And then who does Switzerland? ;) I know this is painful for some to realize, but the perspectives of, for the current example, Muslims on the State of Israel represent a facet of the truth, important in itself, with its own strengths and biases. Is it *more* important than that of Israeli citizens? No, of course not. That's the point of the Neutrality policy. And the demand for citations and sources allow any claim made from one of these points of view to be trackable back to its source (a la the Phenomenological Method).
An article written about the US, or any other nation, without contributions from critics and patriots would be an article impoverished of critical aspects of the truth that fall well within the ability of an encyclopedia to treat, within the bounds of its own policy.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Where's the problem with that statement?
Actually I think it demonstrates one of the real problems with Wikipedia (as opposed to the imaginary ones you read about on The Register) - all the author did here was fudge up an irrelevant rumor with words like 'speculation' and 'many people believe' to make it seem "encyclopedic," and therefore acceptable; only because he wanted to talk about the stupid rumor. There is no reason for Wikipedia to parrot unsubstantiated rumors and gossip, even if the article clearly calls them unsubstantiated rumors and gossip.
In the end it's a combination of overemphasizing the bleeding obvious (like the articles that breathlessly go on and on about what a chair does) and glorifying the completely irrelevant (like the endless lists of video games in which chairs have been featured).
(though to me, at least, the wealth of excellent information on WP far outweighs these expected shortcomings)
sic transit gloria mundi
"When you look at an information source, you should be checking the references. If there are no footnotes or references, read the article with interest but don't trust it for anything."
There, fixed it slightly for you. I still think that in the end, Wikipedia's single greatest contribution to society will be finally getting that statement through to people.
sic transit gloria mundi
Just head over to any article discussing a Japaan-Korea coflict, like the naming of the Sea of Japan or discussion of additional reparations for the Japanese empirical period. Wow! Racist hate trash talk for everyone to read between countries just across the sea from each other. For a launching place, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disputes_between_Japa n_and_Korea.
Put identity in the browser.
The fact remains that for controversial topics, depending on the time of day I hit the page, I'm presented with different information. That's not a good thing.
You're also presented with a button to give you the edit history. Use it.
The older versions are still there. And the comments of the people who made the changes about WHY they did so are there, too. You'll be able to tell if there is a controversy in progress and what all the sides of the argument are. Then make your own choice.
Try THAT with Brittanica. Or the New York Times. Or CBS News.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I could not agree with you more :-)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Case in point: Enron's Kenneth Lay, who died of natural causes last week, shortly after being sentenced to prison.
Actually he hadn't been sentenced yet and I don't think it was scheduled until September or October. Also the conviction will be vacated since he died before sentencing and appeals.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The sentence could just as easily read: "At its worst, [The Washington Post] is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information."
On the other hand, if you want to know the engine capacity of a 1963 Austin Mini or the number of casualties in the RAF Faulds explosion or the exact nature of the student prank involving the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge or the size of a litter of European Red Squirrels - things that I consult an encyclopedia for rather than a newspaper - then there is no other place (on the web or otherwise) to touch what Wikipedia has done.
In other words, it's a convenient place to look up easily verifiable facts.
honeslty I don't see this as fud. Fud to me is someone needless, or warrantless spreading doubt about something. Doubt about wikipedia is justified. As a whole, society and people are stupid. When groups get together things inevitably turn into a gong show. Wikipedia is just another example of something that got ruined by a bunch of people using it.
As I said on the other wikipedia article here not too long ago:
its very easy for a few idiots to get together and muddle things into no concensus. You could write an article on something remotely notable that couldn't possibly have any sources and easily have it kept by having a few buddies show up for the AfD. They don't get major exposure, and all it takes is a handful 90% of the time. Part of the blame for this lies with the admins. Most seem lazy and unwilling to do anything that requires work. AfDs are supposed to be debates, and they insist that what it is, but admins often just tally the responses and go based on that, if an AfD look like this:
Delete - Violates WP:OR
Delete - not notable, original research, violates WP:V
Delete - as above
Keep - pickles
keep - spork
keep - I like ponies!
they would simply close it as a no concensus even though its clear the people who want the article kept are brain damaged.
Admins also aren't content editors. In a content dispute, they'll protect the article or block those involved in an edit war, but they won't go "Yeah, you're full of crap, stop trying to add that ridiculous information". Which basically means when blocks and page protection expire, they go at it again. There are two IPs that have been warring over Herner Werzog's nationality, an admin will randomly semi-protect the page, but it expires and they come back and fight over it again. These kind of things damage wikipedia a lot. Until they start actively dealing with these things, its going to suffer, and likely fail.
The fallacy in your argument is that wikipedia does NOT favor a neutral point of view. Wikipedia favors the person who is most DETERMINED to present his point of view. The Islamic extremist is a classic example of that. The moderate may try to neutralize the article, but then he will be attacked by users with suspiciously muslim names, blocked from editing, banned, have their user pages vandalized and defaced, threatened, insulted, the list of libel and slander is rather large...
Take articles on Hindu-Muslim communalism on wikipedia, for instance. The articles are hopelessly biased in favor of muslims, and either ignore or excuse all of their violence towards Hindus. However, they mercilessly attack all hindus and all of India (despite the fact that a nontrivial fraction of India's popolation is muslim), filling it with anti-India/anti-Hindu bile and outright hate-speech. If you look at the article history, all of the editors have muslim names or are sock puppets of muslims disguised with hindu-sounding names (you can tell that they are sock puppets by looking at their edit history). Administrators who are largely ignorant of this go with the 'majority' consensus and keep the Islamist POV on wikipedia.
This problem has even leaked into articles on Zionism and Israel, where muslims vandalize articles relentlessly with biased anti-Semitic and outright RACIST POV (most articles on Zionism have been protected from editing for this reason), filled with all of the usual anti-semitic canards like blood libels , Protocols of Zion, carrot-and-stick etc. Unfortunately, Hindus are a softer and weaker target than Jews and so they don't neutralize articles about us that are edited by muslim extremists as well as we need to.
The bottom line is that wikipedia is not edited by people with a scholarly detachment, and articles often become highly polemical, biased and often full of hate-speech and bigotry.
Now, in a country such as the United States (where wikimedia servers are housed), free speech rights mandate that all speech, even hate-speech, disgusting as it is, should be allowed. The problem is the PROMINENCE with which it is displayed (on wikipedia) and the fact that it is disguised as scholarly work on wikipedia. A google search on a topic points first to the corresponding wikipedia article, and people are misled into thinking that the hate-speech is factually accurate, leading to subtle forms of brainwashing that, in turn, breeds more hate.
Wikipedia has become little more than a electronic supermarket rag when it comes to articles on politically charged issues.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
wikipedia only does a poor job if you expect your recent news to be served up in well digested, carefully edited textbook fashion.
If, as others have said again and again, you look at the discussion page and read with a skeptical viewpoint (should you ever read news without a skeptical view!?) then wikipedia is a great starting place to find links to other sources and information.
For example, where else on the internet can you find so much cited information about Haditha? Sure, trolls will edit congressional representative's, Donald Rumsfeld's or Ken Lay's page but still, assuming you view it with a skeptical eye, where else will you find so much good information on the subject you want to see in one place?
For controversial articles there will be lots of people discussing bad edits and the poorly vetted stuff is soon excised. HINT: if you look at the page history and see massive edits every day then perhaps there is not a concensus about which information is accurate and which is bogus!
Encyclopedia Brittanica and other carefully edited works are not a substitute for using your own brain!
Wikipedia is a source of information, however, not a primary source. Is it possible that the Washington Post perceives it as such?
I didn't like this description of the authors of Wikipedia articles.
Fact of the matter is that some news stories have broken on the blogs before they did in other sources. Sounds to me like a case of jealously on the part of some at the Post, as they may not know how to use the internet as a source of information as well as others do.A similar (but much less notable) situation happened in Canada - a journalist's credentials, posted in wikipedia, were questioned - and I was interviewed by our "National Newspaper" (the Globe & Mail) on the same theme: "isn't this an example of how wikipedia is broken?"
k ipedia . My main argument is that wikipedia is about the social production of knowledge, and it should be regarded (and celebrated) as such.
...r
The journalist doing the interview had absolutely no sense of the irony of that question - how it is the very openness of wikipedia that encouraged her to ask that question, and enter into the discussion to "correct" the misinformation if she saw fit. The Washington Post is part of the solution - many eyes make bugs (errors of fact) shallow - and it doesn't even know it.
I posted my thoughts about the issue here: http://arago.cprost.sfu.ca/smith/Members/admin/wi
Mainstream media cannot seem to get their heads around that someone else, other then them, could be involved in the production side of media and that it might have some value. It is the obvious challenge in wikipedia, but they continue to get sidetracked with nattering about the final product and forget about the process.
"Connaître, decouvrir, communiquer - telle est la destinée d'un savant." - F. Arago
I've worked on some of the religion articles, and the quality is mixed. Some of the contributors are really sharp, knowledgeable, and effective writers. Others are agenda-pushers. It's really hard to do a good NPOV job on something as volatile as religion. Nevertheless, I agree that over time, the articles do improve.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
A more dangerous scenerio, of which we are all victimized is when such a controversial situation is supported by either side under the shroud of authority.
Britannica decides to take a conservative political view, Time Life decides on a Liberal point of view. Both "respected", but for no real reason other than familiarity; be honest with your self, you don't know a single editor on a first name basis much less even challange any of the credentials implied or explicitly noted if noted within any "respected" source.
On Wikipedia, controversial issues are blatantly controversial. Furthermore, it gives a feel that the whole issue is for debate. While some would prefer not to debate with just anyone, the danger in Britannica is that you can not demonstrate your retort after composition; no matter how truthful, logical, reasonable it might be. All you can do, is scribble in the pages... which might hold merit, might not, regardless the most probable situation is that your arguement is never seen by anyone than yourself. Others, will rebuke your propositions based off the fact they might have the same book; minus your scribbles, and becuase they are mentally lazy, they will consider Britannica's "opinion" (if you can even manage to convince them it's an opinion) as "factual".
One of the reasons I hate citing sources. Not that I'm unable to, but Truth is absolute and if the listeners only gauge for acceptance is who else agrees, then he suffers from a number of things; he doesn't know enough of the subject to really hold a discussion, he doesn't understand your view and is looking for someone to blame should he be wrong (he want's 'easy' knowledge), he really isn't listening and just wants to tally up who else might agree (with whatever) or, as the usual case, trying to find a reason to discredit your argument without actually thinking it through as you had (the lazy sage technique).
Let me get this right. Because it took 4-5 hours for the story to settle down to a factually accurate state, it's gloom and doom for Wikipedia?
I've seen the evening news (supposedly a professional news gathering organization) do worse. One afternoon, apparently a local man died in a shooting, was ressurected at the hospital and then died again after returning to the scene (based on reports at 5:00, 5:30, and 6:00). Or perhaps they just didn't actually know if he was dead or not.
Closer to the topic, I just looked up "ken lay" on Britannica and came up empty (entries for "lay, elzy", "lay", "ken keasy", "ken thomas", etc, but no "ken lay". Looked up Kenneth Lay and got a few articles from 2005 and earlier. I'm guessing they're even less accurate regarding his death (that is you'd never know he's dead if you read those). I can't say for sure since I don't have a membership. No references at all in the free results. Obviously the print version won't mention his death.
Interestingly in both of the above cases, the ads by Google came up with several references including reports of his death.
Meanwhile, I search "ken lay" on Wikipedia and there it is.
I get the point that Wikipedia's information isn't perfect, but then what is? It's hardly a critical weakness. The more authoritative encyclopedia doesn't even know the guy's dead. To be fair to Britannica, they never claimed to be a news organization.
The idea for using it for Documentation is great, but for 'knowledge' You HAVE to have a CLOSED System that publishes their works... (like world book, Britannica, etc..) Otherwise ANYONE can put ANYTHING in their and it is up to a bunch of human eyes to catch it... and human error and lazyness results in bad articles of information... Including just plain outright lies, changed legit articles, and even giberish and racist rants.... At least a Legit publisher has a reputation and income source to protect in the satisfaction of the readership... Wiki cares about its reputation, but other folks abuse it because they don't care about their reputation with fake accounts or AC. And ther is no income from entering or changing or selling the IP, so it only gets the attention from those folks who don't care to pay for something in the first place...
... ad infinum
Besides, the Wikipedia has 2 strikes against it on birth, and that is why I will NEVER use it as an authoritive source.
1) Do you believe EVERTHING YOU READ!?
2) "I saw it on the internet, so it has to be true."
Hell people, go to a Library if you don't want to BUY books... At least that takes #2 out.. (or you could subscribe but lets not go there...) One of my biggest pet peeves that I have to tell the Students AND TEACHERS:
The INTERNET is NOT a replacement for the LIBRARY!
Again, on the board, 100 times...
the INTERNET is NOT a replacement for the LIBRARY!
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Hotbed topics are indeed biased (if not flat out wrong) in Wikipedia and in the news at large, but the elapse of time gives way to hind sight and finally the truth.
I wish people would stop rippin' on Wikipedia. Let's face it: Wikipedia's an awesome resource; a marvel of the internet age. No, it's not perfect, but in the end, time always distills the facts from the lies.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
But Wikipedia is more than simply an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. A characteristic of Wikipedia is that article quality varies. Some articles are fabulous. Others are unimpressive. Others are misleading. And others are out and out lies. Fortunately, Wikipedia does a reasonable job of identifying the quality of articles.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
He even said that it was eventually corrected, also the articles like that are sometimes temporarily locked to prevent vandalism.
At least it can be peer edited, if it were left up to the author he could spout crap and never correct it. Just like Frank Ahrens of The Washington Post.
Considering these edits were caught by the public (or possibly the regular moderating members of wikipedia) solidify that many additions that are un-factually-informable are caught by such members/browsers?
I happen to read Wikipedia on a regular basis and find its articles to be quite informative.
Lets make a collaborative cake !
R.
Yep, and he died of "severe coronary artery disease," not natural causes!
How can the author confuse artherosclerosis with natural causes, unless he wants to?
Ironically, if you actually read the Reuters story, you will see that Reuters released a correction to its story on inaccuracies in Wikipedia! While at first, they said that the family spokesperson reported the cause of Ken Lay's death, later they changed it to having been the family pastor. Why is the mainstream media, "wary of Wikipedia," according to CBS, paying no attention to errors in Reuters, which, when I last checked, had churned out 30 corrections in the past 12 hours?
CNN and the Washington Post use Reuters as a source, do they not? While the mainstream media is "wary of Wikipedia," now I'm "wary of the mainstream media" for having seen their blatant hypocracy. A former professional journalist commented in a blog owned by the Chicago Tribune that while people expect, when an Associated Press story comes out, that there will be many updates correcting and expanding information, but an encyclopedia is supposed to be static. That suggests Wikipedia is to be held to higher standards than the mainstream media, by admission.
The Wikipedia error was fixed after 6 minutes. The Reuters story was fixed after about 24 hours.
Wow.
The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.
Ad Hominem.
I win. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Scott Thompson, chief deputy coroner in Pitkin County, Colo., said Lay died of natural causes. Dr. Robert Kurtzman, Mesa County coroner in Grand Junction, Colo., said an autopsy showed Lay died of heart disease. He said there was evidence that Lay had also suffered a previous heart attack.
R /Ex-Enron-CEO-Lay-Maintained-Innocence-Until-Death .xhtml
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/q0yIIhGFSQ1TG
Also, if you search Google News for "kenneth lay natural causes," you can search the links to see they have been edited to remove natural causes.
How many newspapers are still only copying wire services texts?
I guess, all of these will disappear in the long run, and traditional newspapers like the Post will have to work much harder to provide genuine investigative journalism. Another middle man gone, thanks to the Internet.
The statement of Wikipedia "failing" is pure FUD. Given enough eyeballs, all articles are unbiased. Just look at the Zinedine Zidane article right before, during and after his infamous World Cup Finals headbutt (this thing is HUGE on youtube at the moment): 568 edits by 261 authors in 34 h, although the article was protected for anonymous editors over the last 30 h. No Non-NPOV whatsoever.
Well, there still *is* a problem with "niche" lemmata, but, hey, there are also dark corners in the Linux kernel source, and yet it is widely used as a production system. I have seen major German online newspapers (e.g. SPIEGEL online, Alexa traffic rank of 149, 650m page views per day) bluntly copying de.wikipedia content.
Now, regarding Mr. Lay - here is the content of the current revision:
So, where exactly is the insanity, Mr. Ahrens? Ironically, the article contains a link to the Washington Post. Under "Death and abatement of conviction", more details follow, consequences for the trial, plus links on NYT, LA Times, and CNN. Copy edited several hundred times.IMO, the main problem with Wikipedia is still its lack of consistency, but nevertheless, it is here to stay.
The common whine about Wikipedia and "editorial neutrality" reflects the common ignorance of the fact that ALL sources have biases. At least in Wikipedia's case, the issue of bias is openly accepted, discussed, and worked around/with.
Now you're perpetuating the myth that fat comes from fat. To fatten cattle they are fed things like corn, not fat.
But newspapers have no warning-shields and discussion-pages.
I think things like this are always going to happen, with high-profile entries, anyway. I primarily use wikipedia for basic informational stuff. Like say, the history of Canon, or old photographic techniques and technical terms... Sometimes I 'wikisurf' through the (comics) entries, too. Those entries seem to be some of the most detailed on the site...reading through a couple of character backgrounds is almost as good as reading the comics. Heck, I've even used it to look up information on medications I've been prescribed.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Make newer entries show differently.
So brand new entries might be italic red.
Entries between a week and a month old show normal red.
Older entries go stable.
They also need to have some trusted editors who can audit the problem areas if this issue is reported.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
i or the number of casualties in the RAF Faulds explosion or the exact nature o
f the student prank involving the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge or the size of a
litter of European Red Squirrels - things that I consult an encyclopedia for rather than a newspaper - then there is no other place (on the web or otherwise) to touch what Wikipedia has done.
That's exactly it: wikipedia certainly does struggle with immediate reporting of events that are controversial or not yet authoritatively reported by other sources, but it is still a great source for a huge amount of general knowledge. Even considering the wikipedia entry question, the site corrected itself in less than a week, no? I wouldn't suggest using it for news that happenned five minutes ago, but if you just need the main info on a lot of subjects, it is a great starting point.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
It was suggested for deletion. Then it was kept.
The problem is that the term now exists outside wikipedia. The term was "old" before it was discovered how it was created.
Should wikipedia refuse to document any term it accidentally started but that is now commonly recognised outside the encyclopedia?
The real threat here is the moniker "radicalized bloggers", that's something the right could use till cows come home.
Here's a problem I encountered, for which I've never encountered an adequate solution. After I took a college biblical archaeology class, I started cleaning up a variety of articles related to the topics I studied. I came across an article titled "History of ancient Israel and Judah". I immediately recognized the article as very strange, it's a historical narrative of Israel woven from several religious texts (whose authorship spans thousands of years). Mostly the article ignores archaeological evidence except in cases where archaeology supports the religious history. The editors of the article were smart people, but unfortunately for me, *very* dedicated to an academically marginal point of view. When I attempted to bring the article in line with...well, reality, the editors got extremely aggressive. Rather than debate with opposing opinions, the editors of this article have retreated to an unnoticed corner of wikipedia and constructed an impenetrable barrier around their alternate reality. Is this acceptable? Is this sort of fragmentation of viewpoints to be expected? If not, what can be done?
I don't like it either.
I personally have never considered Wikipedia to be a reliable source of informaiton, nor do they claim that it is. But I do take it for what it is. Some of the information I've looked up there even though may have a certain bias towards one thing or another is still an interesting read. No different than picking up different news articles based on the same thing.
Well that all depends on the article in the question, and how popular the subject is. I noticed that articles to do with the FIFA World Cup 2006 were being updated pretty well live - look at the history for articles on Wayne Rooney and Zinédine Zidane. However find a topic that isn't so popular and I think you're in for a long wait to get changes made. Look at the history of the OLSR article. I made a change on 27 June, and asked a question on the Talk pages. No responses yet. I was really suprised, a computer based article, I would have though geeks would have jumped to provide more information.
Now I know this is nothing like the publishing time compared to something like Brittanica, but the variance (almost instant to several weeks) does show that "problems are quickly solved" is a wiki myth. I'd say it depends more on the participants' areas of interest.
Before the days of the internet and such I remember reading my home's copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica's entry on American Indians. It was blatantly racist by today's standards. I'm sure Britannica has since changed their entry on American Indians and maybe even changed the title to something more in line with the times. Their previous version of the truth is no longer acceptable.
I'm tired of hearing these old world news agencies and/or previous purveyors of the truth complain about Wikipedia as if suddenly we're all being lied to. We've been lied to the whole damn time. The only difference is that now the people coming up with the lies aren't a small group of intellectuals. It's a much larger group of intellectuals, semi-intellectuals and armchair historians who have all kinds of differing motivations. Isn't this more interesting?
Let's setup another Wikipedia or ten more Wikipedias all with different versions of the truth. Then let the readers decide what the truth is. And maybe the readership will discover more and more that it's not what is said that matters most. But who is saying it.
What these people actually lament is a time when their small cabal could influence things. Your power is waning NYT. Get over it!
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
Folk on Slashdot may know that anyone can edit it, but I doubt most people do (very few even who email the OTRS seem to realize this).
Most people probably find Wikipedia articles thru search engines, and go straight to the article, which says "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" under the article title. People think it's an encyclopedia that doesn't charge you anything to read it.
One tiny way we can educate people as to Wikipedia's nature is to change the tagline to something like "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit".
As I have learned over and over, Wikipedia is still the best source for information. Better than any of the media outlets that everyone takes for truth. Wikipedia has been and still is more accurate than CNN, NBC, ABC, BBC, etc. Wikipedia is also more accurate and contains more information than any of the leading newspapers, such as The New York Times, USA Today, and the likes. I guess I treat it more like a news source than an encyclopedia.
Sure it's not perfect, but from personal experience it is the best. 'Nuff said...
The Internet is providing the foundation for a large number of new tools, which people have to learnto use. Wikipedia is no different from other tools in that regard, it is very valuable if you know how to use it, and and you can cut yourself if you don't.
For Wikipedia, depending on how important the information is to you, consider if the subject area you looked up is from of Wikipedias strength. Read the talk page. Look at the history. Is it essentially one mans work?
For printed encyclopedia you should also look at the publisher, is it one with a good reputation? That a book calls itself an "encyclopedia" and is printed does not make it reliable, there are partisan encyclopedia, and artistic encyclopedia, as well as simply poor workmanship out there. But a few of them has a good reputation, which makes them valuable as autoritative sources. We know which ones.
So, as always, know your tools.
is just stupid. It isn't. Assuming you go into Wikipedia knowing that anyone can contribute, and that the contents can be inaccurate and biased, it's an invaluable resource.
Treat it on its own merits.
Oops. Can you give some examples of such debates?
Although Wikipedia had many errors over time (usually immediately corrected), this is the first time someone says that Wikipedia is a dangerous thing, because "it is held as authoritative as Britannica while it is radical as a blog". And the reason is that Wikipedia had an error concerning a very rich person, a person of the establishment, a person of the high society...and of course those who control the media got frightened.
Ok, let's shut another free voice down. But then don't complain if people are ignorant...the next time a neo-nazi plants a bomb or a muslim hijacks a plane, one of the reasons could be that people are kept ignorant because the possible sources of knowledge have been hidden/diverted to the "accepted truths" only.
Geez, watch what you're saying, you're advocating indirect censorship.
Try not to be completely ridiculous.
I really love Wikipedia and I find myself using it every day, whether I'm just doing a reference check or learning something new. But I have to take everything I read on wikipedia with a grain of salt, anything could be mis-information or a prank, even the most obscure "fact." I don't worry about this too much when I'm learning about new subjects via Wikipedia, there's always this thing in the back of my mind that reminds me to verify any information that would somehow be useful outside of my mind, but it's too bad that this is needed.
I initiated an experiment with Wikipedia back about 3 months ago, I edited certain circumstances about a famous historical figure. This material could have been debunked and deleted by anyone who has at least seen one of the hour-long documentaries of the person on the Discovery or History channel, but guess what, it hasn't been! The altered history is semi-obscure and written in an authentic manner to fool the typical uneducated vandal patrols, but any student writing a report on this person would get laughed at by any professor worth his weight.
What, you mean like an article about cloning didgeridoos that stayed up for more than a year on the German wikipedia? Yeah, that's gotta be impartial and correct because it's (claiming to be) biology
Oh wait, there comes standard Wikipedia hand-waved defense #2: "Well, if it's an obscure scientific subject that not many read, a mistake can go unnoticed for that long." Teh oops. Guess I _shouldn't_ go there to learn about quantum physics or other "obscure" scientific topics either.
Then what should I learn from it? If I'm looking for a topic I don't already know, for me it's already either "obscure" or "controversial". How am I supposed to know if it's controversial enough to be biased or obscure enough to be just an urban legend or joke that nobody else has read and corrected yet?
And what if there isn't signifficant controversy yet? What if, for example, just been edited twice back and forth, then one of them gave up. How do you know if it's controversy building up, or defacement, or, pay attention, someone who's an actual expert tried to correct a bogus entry on a science topic and got overriden by an ass-clown who "corrected" it back to the urban legend version. It's happened before.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wait, World Cup Soccer isn't controversial?
It must be pointed out that, if you are one of those FOX-watchers too, your post and the one you dispute, could *both* be in accordance with eachother.
In that case, there would be no contradiction, and you would be further substantiating the post you rile against.
Thus, the question arises: do you watch FOX?
Depending on the answer, your post could become self-explanatory.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
The problem with the statement that "Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is that it isn't true. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit -- if they are smart enough to figure out the wikitext syntax and have enough time on their hands. Many non-geeks that I know do not fall into that category and some of them would likely get pretty confused by it.
Nasty things gubernatorial candidate Dick De Vos has done
Awesome things gubernatorial candidate Jennifer Granholm has done
People simply need to learn to consider all information critically. Wikipedia will never be a pipeline to absolute truth. It's a good source of information. You can go and read Wikipedia and get a whole bunch of ideas, and maybe make some useful conjectures based on them, but you shouldn't read them and then go of ranting like you're Bill O'Reilly or some other demagogue. There's really no source that is so authoratative that it justifies that sort of ranting(excepting of course, The Bible, or maybe the Koran or the Torah, I can't remember which one). Wikipedia is a wonderful thing. It's also just as likely to contain nonsense as any book or the average person's head.
Oh man.... Now I have to go Wikipedia 'agitprop'.
Make it a malt liquor. I want to be as clever and handsome as possible.
It is interesting to note the "official media" (including this story) and it's obsession with Wikipedia's stumbling over this particular story. When Lay died, the stories about Wikipedia and its Lay article were as common as the stories concerning Lays death! The regular press insisted on whitewashing Lay's career and painting him as some sort of tragic figure; very few of them really mentioned, let alone stressed, his fantastic & obscene criminality. The man was one of the worst criminals of the twentieth century; he deserves nothing more than to be remembered for that fact alone.
One thing to keep in mind is that while most newsrooms keep their editing process quiet and you only see the "polished" product, the process of creating Wikipedia articles is out in the open, misspelling, factual errors, rumors, and even incompetance. You see some of that now with 24-hour news channels, and there have been some famous mistakes by traditional media organizations on their web pages, but most of that is behind the scenes where you don't see the truly outrageous content before it is screened by an editor.
This is also hardly a new issue for Wikipedia, where suggestions have been made to have a "draft" and "published" version of featured articles. Certainly changes to Wikipedia could be done that would help out a bit, but Wikipedia simply is what it is, and people need to get used to it if they treat it as an authoritative source.
I don't know if this is already implemented, but if an article gets an unreasonable amount of edits in a day (and perhaps pageviews as well), then it should be flagged and marked locked for 24 hours until someone 'in charge' reviews it.
Yes, someone can then edit a page on an off-day or on a less popular topic, but who cares if the entry for 'toast' gets vandalized? It seems the problem happens most when something big happens in the news.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
JonBenet Ramsey's killer did Ken too.
I'd love to see a count of edits, time of the most recent, scope of the changes quantified -- I'd love to have a glance at how stable a page is, too, to garner trust in its information.
Hasn't this been an issue for many months now and wasn't Wikipedia going to do something about it such as moderating edits on controversial people? I know it takes a lot of manpower to moderate an online encyclopedia, however I think they need to add an system where users are held liable for unfounded updates they make. I know that defeats the purpose of a freely run, online encyclopedia, however, their current model is flawed by the "human idiot factor."
...one wacko's opinion?
That is the problem -- too many un-supportable, un-cited "alleged", etc. items that get shoved into articles under the guise of examining all sides of the issue.
As an example that seems to plague a number of articles in a more general manner, one author was accused of racism solely based on someone's idiotic interpretation of a fictional character; no citations, no references, etc. Pure interpretation. Nevermind the fact there were citations and quotes from the author to the absolute contrary -- you could not convince the editor of that -- everything was to be included to "cover all sides" regardless of how rediculous the side is or how much of a character assasination is being attempted.
Documenting controversy, conspiracies, "alleged-lies" isn't the job of a system that is purports itself to display truth.
Show all modifications, but clearly show modifications that have not yet been through an editorial review. Also, when a user makes repeated erroneous additions that are surfaced through review, restrict their ability to contribute in the future, though to make that work there would have to be an incentive to keep one account instead of multiples, something like an ebay scoring system. Just some thoughts...
Hmmm...I had to look "agitprop" up on Wikipedia.
-K
Everyone has an agenda. The difference is that Wikipedia gives a voice to the masses while official history usually gives voice to the fascist state.
o n1 5/1352207&from=rss2 .html
Is there anyone left on the planet who thinks that "official" history isn't propaganda? I don't think I have to enumerate the lies that you were told in school or are told everyday by FOX, CBS, NBC, Disney, and CNN. The real problem that these people have with the internet is that it threatens the disinformation structure that major corporations and governments have been honing for hundreds of years.
FACT (something that is verifiable):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precisi
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060323-644
The only group of people dumber than the people who believe what they see on TV is the qroup of people who believe what they read.
Any sane person knows that anything that is a matter of history is a matter of probability. Anyone who makes statements about "objective history" or even just "impartial history" is a raving lunatic.
I looked up agitprop on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agitprop
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
In other words, it's a convenient place to look up easily verifiable facts.
There is some truth in that - but facts that aren't verifiable don't belong in an encyclopedia because there is too much risk that they aren't facts at all. If the fact is hard to verify, it's hard to get it into the encyclopedia - and there is nothing wrong with merely cataloging easily verifiable stuff because there is a lot of convenience to having all of those facts marshalled together, cross-linked and referenced in one handy web site.
In my examples above (all written by me incidentally), some facts WERE easy to verify (the engine size of the Mini and the number of red squirrels in a litter for example) - others were hard.
For the student prank at the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge, I noticed that the car that was allegedly dangled under the bridge was not manufactured until two years after the prank was alleged to happen. It took over a month of emailing around to finally get an email from a librarian at Cambridge who sent me scans of two newspaper articles with photos of TWO very similar pranks - separated in time by 10 years. Those two pranks have been merged together into one in the minds of many people (no helped by the fact that ALL of the Cambridge tour guides tell the broken version of the story!) - and my research has set the record straight.
That's definitely not an easily verifiable fact (although it IS verifiable).
www.sjbaker.org
...if you're a moron who believes everything you read. --- GOTO 10
HUMOR: The ability or quality of people, objects or situations to invoke feelings of amusement in other people. The term encompasses any form of entertainment or human communication which invokes such feelings, or which makes people laugh or feel happy.
For Example see subject line and first sentence above.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I used to be a Wikipedia believer... Until I realized certain articles were dominated by advocacy groups that aggressively edit out information that does not conform to their beliefs. Just as an example, look at the Marijuana article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana I still like to read some articles here and there, but I no longer believe that it has the potential to be the dispassionate dispenser of human knowledge that I once did. There are still lots of articles about math or science and that are accurate and relatively free of bias because nobody really cares. Here's an example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic
Can you direct me to the page on the Wikipedia web site where it makes this claim?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I can't agree with you more. Why people would look to an encyclopedia for a developing story is beyond me. Having said that, the fact that a developing story in in an encyclopedia is amazing in and of itself. I'm willing to bet that Encyclopedia Britannica's Ken Lay article is not nearly so current. The fact an article may take a few days to get all the facts straight should just be considered part of the editorial process. Unlike traditional encyclopedias, this is a public and open process, which, in my opinion, is a very good thing.
The Gödel post, G:
There is a post, G, which is both true and insightful, but which cannot be modded up.
No, he just tried to directly influence a presidential election with known fabrications about Bush.
Which part was the fabrication, the memos themselves or the revelation that he skipped out on his National Guard duties? Because one was a fabrication, and the other was not. This is why we discussed one and not the other. Darn liberal media!
Where is Bill O'rielly's head on a pike for swiftboating John Kerry? Known fabrications about a political opponent and during an election cycle, no less! You don't say! This is an outrage I tell you! an outrage! Or...it's the reality of American politics. Most people decide the fate of this nation on which candidate's lies were most believable.
Too bad there's no fucking organization to anything in the article, and the section titled, "Global epidemic" is precisely redundant with the one named, "Current status."
There is neither a section named "Global epidemic" nor one named "Current status" in the AIDS article.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
The establishment media is hopelessly left-biased (as compared with the political center of the voting population according to an objective measure developed by researchers at Stanford and UCLA).
You're telling me that you trust the liberal elite ivory tower college professors when they tell you that they have given you objectivity? You're joking, right?
Indeed. The system works towards strong arguements (as in strong-of-opinion, or strong in a given direction). Those particular arguements tend to get modded up regularly, but that doesn't mean that the overall moderations are one-sided. Quite often two +5 moderated arguements will be strongly on opposite side of the fence. In fact, one thing that slashdot tends not to mod up are the fence-sitters.
By the same token, the grandparent's post about bias wouldn't have really gotten modded up if the bias were single-sided... making that a self-defeating arguement in many ways.
I remember I saw an article highlighted on Scroogle about Wikipedia and editing. Their editing team simply cannot keep up with the amount of illigitamate crap that even encyclopedia dramatica would't take in coming into the wiki. I could put in facts that look legitamate enough, and no one would bother. For example, an article about a person was looked up by the person himself. He found many factual innacuracies in his article. The only thing the Wikipedia editing team did with these factual innacuracies was fixing minor spelling errors. That is all I'll delve in, though there is quite more to the story.
It is the owner that crashes the system. If you are enough of an idiot to put 50 background processes in Windows you sho
.... the EB, overall, is fairly current.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Agitprop From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Agitprop poster by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Enlarge Agitprop poster by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Agitprop is a slang word applied to any form of mass media, such as a television program or film, that tries to influence opinion for political, commercial or other ends, especially if it aims to convince people through agitating their minds with highly emotional language of problems in present-day society or politics (which may or may not exist if analysed in an unbiased manner). Agitprop sometimes although not always uses indirect methods to reach its goal, such as conveying a political message via a television drama that's marketed as a form of entertainment rather than political education, for example.
Paul Farhi, writing in the Washington Post's "Style" section (1/16/02), lamented that Enron was an IWS--an "Incomprehensible Washington Scandal." Outside a "few nerdy journalists," Farhi worried that "the simple story becomes so barnacled with facts and accusations, so encumbered with major and minor players, that the core is no longer recognizable."
(http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1098)
So if the Washington Post was in control, we would never have been told anything - the fact that "Kenny Boy" paid $3M to Bush's electoral campaign might just be considered too complicated for our poor little brains to understand.
I'm glad someone has noticed this problem. You would think that it would be pretty obvious, but everyone seems obsessed with the silly vandal scenarios.
Wikipedia is at risk of going the way of all volunteer organizations that try to use "consensus" decision-making: the most annoying people win. The reasonable people bail.
And here's a nightmare scenario for you: wikipedia continues to increase in popularity, to the point where it's actually politically significant what gets said in wikipedia articles. A Karl Rove-type hires 100 people and tells them to each get five wikipedia accounts, and develop reputations as responsible contributors. A year later, he's got 500 accounts he can play with to do spin control.
Variation: substitute slashdot for wikipedia. The 500 accounts all mod each other up.
Conclusion: anonymity is only good for toy sites; it's not for serious use.
And in the end, The Wikipedia begot The AntiWikipedia.