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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.'"
As I recall, Wikipedia is consistantly more accurate on concrete subjects (ie. minimally disputed science and academics) than published encyclopedias, so yes, very true.
Actually, that DOES happen. Featured articles are tagged at the release they were reviewed at.
www.sjbaker.org
Look at the little row of tabs at the top of every Wikipedia page. See the one marked 'history'? Click on that. You are now looking at a complete history of edits to that page. The handle of everyone who edited it, the date and time it was edited and the commit comment they attached to it. Isn't that enough?
You can click the radio buttons to the left and get a side-by-side comparison of the article as it was at any times in the past or you can see the entire article exactly as it was on any given date. You can click on the author's name and send them a message on their 'Talk' page if you want to ask about why they changed whatever they changed. You can go to the 'Talk' page for the article itself and see comments from the various editors - heck, you can even get a history of the edits to the Talk page!
Generally, if there are a lot of 'rv: vandalism' entries on the history page (eg on the "Computer" article that gets vandalised a lot) - then perhaps the article itself is pretty stable - but gets a lot of editing history because people are fixing up the actions of complete idiots. If on the other hand there is some kind of 'edit war' between two editors - then this is still a controversial subject - so treat the article with care. If the article had a busy period for some days or weeks - but then all the subsequent edits were spelling fixes, addition of foreign language versions and stuff like that - then this is a stable and trustworthy article.
The number of References at the bottom of the article is another good gauge of quality.
www.sjbaker.org
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
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.
Does a group of editors systematically tag all the articles at some point.
There is just too much stuff to do that methodically. 50,000 articles are added every month - just think about how many people would have be there to check them all!
Instead there are a few parallel 'top-down' efforts to make an extra-high-quality core by picking the key articles in every major subject area and flagging the stable versions. One effort is thinking in terms of a printed paper version of Wikipedia - another is looking into doing a CD-ROM version. The articles that make it into these special collections are carefully vetted and tagged - so you know that there is a stable 'known good' version backing up the latest version. However, these barely scratch the surface of the problem.
Additionally, there is a bottom-up process by which article authors can attempt to get their articles recognised for high quality. You first nominate your article for 'peer review' - reviewers monitor this list and come along to check your article. If you pass you can go on to request 'Good Article' status - another round of reviews. Next you can try for the coveted "Featured article" status (there are just over 1000 of these so far) - you get pummeled by English majors and pedants of every stripe - if you pass that then you can try to get your article into 'Article of the Day' - with yet another round of reviews.
Yet another layer is the 'Portal' system. Check out 'Portal:Automobile' for example - it covers the subset of Wikipedia articles about cars. Many portals have their own quality assurance methods and standards enforcement groups.
These quality processes work well - but there just aren't enough reviewers to effectively check the 1.2 million English language articles - let alone all of the ones written in French, Portugese...etc. Remember - English language Wikipedia is growing at a rate faster than any human can read. Nobody will ever be able to read all of it - even if they make it's their life's work.
www.sjbaker.org
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.
What they should do is have a version of Wikipedia that has already been verified by a community of editors.
Which part of 1.2 MILLION articles didn't you understand?
You have to understand the sheer size of the undertaking you propose...it's quite utterly out of the question:
340 million words.
50,000 articles added every month.
If you printed it out in the same format as the Encyclopedia Britannica it would fill 240 VOLUMES!
3.7 million changes every month.
How the heck do you review something that big?
The answer is that only a community the size of the Wikipedia contributors can possibly review something this big - so community review is the ONLY answer.
Since the number of changes per month (3.7 million) vastly exceeds the article creation rate per month (50,000) - you can tell that this process is in fact working.
www.sjbaker.org
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
In theory.
Sure there is a handful on controversial and/or current articles that get fixed that fast. But for each of those articles, there are dozens more which remain broken for months or weeks. (The canonical example - one that Wikipedia supporters never seem to mention, is of course the Siegenthaler Affair.) I have in my watchlist over two dozen pages that I know to be incorrect - that have lain untouched for as much as a year.
They are already doing something to stop the "spur of the moment" edits. Having an already established user account is required to edit the articles deemed "semi-controversial" articles. So yes, you can still register an account and make some crazy changes to the article four days later but I'd imagine most lose interest.
For those articles where established users are "disagreeing heavily" on what the article should say it is flagged as controversial and only editors can change it.
Not a perfect system but better then nothing.
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
It's kinda ironic, but almost everything you ask for is available.
"Highlighting fresh edits."
All the vandal fighting tools, like Lupin's Recent Changes, Vandalfighter (and its many derivatives and copycats) take this for granted. The neatest tool is probably Tawkerbot2, which is a custom bot that goes through recent changes and automatically reverts vandalism- it is remarkably accurate; I've only ever seen it make a mistake in cases where there were two vandalism edits which got right on top of each other before Tawkerbot2 could revert the first one.
"Detecting back and forth deletions and flagging them."
Ditto.
"Establishing a pool of problematic articles that volunteers could stay on top of."
We call such articles semi-protected; most Slashdotters see semi-protection as the problem, not the solution, though, judging from the comments in the articles dealing with semi-protection. There's also some less effective options, like the high-traffic templates.
"A day waiting period for new accounts to edit particularly problematic articles."
See above about semi-protection. More like 4 days though.
Enquiring minds want to know!
As I understand it, Wikipedia pages come with Javascript that modifies keybindings- M-e is for 'edit', M-d is another thing, and so on. Doesn't work for me at all, so I'm going by what others have told me; hope this helps explain that.
Enquiring minds want to know!
I must have missed the Left side on Fox. What Fox is reporting is the moderate Right and the extreme Right.
See, it's all about perspective.
You've got to be kidding me!
Fox News (pronounced "Faux News" if you want to use call by value) actively goes out of its way to suppress any news that it thinks could harm the current Administration, or the Republicans in general. Fox has shown absolutely no interest in presenting a balanced view, regardless of how often the mantras "Fair and Balanced" and "We report, you decide" are repeated.
For a very eye-opening documentary, see Fox News Techniques.
I have been a newsjunkie for nearly 20 years. I consider myself middle-of-the-road, and take every news report with a grain of salt. Heck, I've voted for Republicans and Democrats about evenly. But I was shocked to see the blatant pandering and partisanship displayed by Fox News. It's like the Republican Party's permanent informercial.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!! That's a good one.
What distinguishes Fox News is that, on average, people who watch it are roughly twice as likely to not know the actual facts, not partisan facts, but really basic stuff like the fact that Sadaam Hussein did not have a meaningful relationship with Al Quaeda.
Again and again, we see these comments: "Groupthink". "Bias". "Narrowing of thought".
Continually modded up. Think carefully about what that means for a second.
For those of you that haven't been around long enough, the previous gripe was simply "anti-Microsoft bias". Those comments also very often get modded up. Every OS-related story of the past several years has dozens of posts modded highly that basically amount to "Red Hat 7 was hard to install, so Linux will never get anywhere on the desktop".
Personally, I find Slashdot's moderation system works far better than most people realize. If you step back I think you'll find the "prevailing set of opinions" is just that - the more commonly held belief. But implying that somehow lesser-held beliefs and opinions don't get their fair shake? Maybe the Slashdot hordes aren't the ones with the biases, because you must be very good at ignoring a LOT of highly-moderated posts each day.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Jane Akre and her husband Steve Wilson are former employees of FOX owned-and-operated station WTVT in Tampa, Florida. In 1997 they refused to work on their story (about Monsanto's use of BGH) after FOX tried to force them to include knowingly false information. They successfully sued under Florida's whistle blower law and were awarded a $425,000 settlement. However, FOX appealed and won, after the court declared that FCC policy against falsification that FOX violated was just a policy and not a "law, rule, or regulation", and so the whistle blower law did not apply.
FOX did not dispute that it tried to force Akre to broadcast a false story, but argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports.
In 2004 FOX countersued Akre and Wilson for trial fees and costs.
Was this one case the worst possible thing that could happen? Of course not. But doesn't it give you pause that the First Amendment was used as a public justification to lie or deliberately distort news reports? On how many other stories did they exercise this right?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
I suppose we should take it for granted that it isn't just liberals, but that every fair-minded observer will label Fox News as "Faux News"?
Well, if your assertion is true, there shouldn't be any stories about Abu Ghraib, the NSA surveillance program, or the CIA secret prison story, and yet there are.
For a very eye-opening documentary, see Fox News Techniques.
I watched it. I'm underwhelmed. It "surprisingly" reveals that prominent liberal organizations and critics pan Fox News. I found it interesting that they focused so heavily on opinion / commentary segments for their claims of bias instead of actual hard news reporting. Stop the presses! People engaged in commentary have opinions!
I have been a newsjunkie for nearly 20 years. I consider myself middle-of-the-road, and take every news report with a grain of salt. Heck, I've voted for Republicans and Democrats about evenly. But I was shocked to see the blatant pandering and partisanship displayed by Fox News. It's like the Republican Party's permanent informercial.
Your stated view of yourself as "middle-of-the-road" strikes me as being similar to that demonstrated these days by many in the media:
Well, I guess that Fox News will never be another New York Times with its fair mindedness and influence on policy, or CBS News with its steady hands, or even a CNN with its thoughtful leadership. I guess they will have to live with that.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
FOX did not dispute that it tried to force Akre to broadcast a false story, but argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports.
Not quite.
Try this and this for a somewhat better description of what happened.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Fox has to report things that everyone else is reporting, otherwise their reputation will only get worse. Part of it's in the way that Fox News reports things - wordings, the details they pay most attention to, spin, etc.
Part of it's that Fox News doesn't even claim to be a legitimate news organization. Please, please, please let us not forget that Fox News is the organization that won the court decision in Florida saying they are under no obligation to not outright lie about the news.
Though, of course, I suppose that anyone who is willing to trust a news outlet that has freely admitted, "Yup, we lie about the news, and we're going to fight to defend our right to do so in court," can be free to do so. And they can be free to claim that anyone who detracts from Fox News is just being partisan, too. After all, politics in the USA has never been about right or wrong, or what's best for the country or its citizens. It's more of a 230-year-long pissing match akin to the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, with the unfortunate detail that it also has an affect on people's lives.
From one of your linked articles:
Really? So newspapers should be allowed to commit libel with impunity? What about plagiarism? No? But who enforces those laws? It couldn't be the government, could it? The media has never effectively policed itself, at least not recently. If it were solely up to broadcasters, they would probably replace the news with game shows since game shows have better ratings and ad revenue by far. You think it's by accident that every major broadcaster has a news program? No, they are required to have one through terms with Congress and the FCC.
Who gave Fox and the other broadcasters those airwaves for pennies on the dollar in the first place, those public airwaves? The government. Why did the government originally give broadcasters this bandwidth allocation on the cheap? So that they would maintain certain standards, provide education, and news on current events. I'm not asking that government okay everything before it can be published. Quite the contrary. However, I am also quite certain that if a news organization using my public airwaves makes a conscious decision to distort, I want that news editor's head on a pike. There's a difference between a mistake and a lie. I see no reason why it shouldn't apply to the New York Times just as much as the New York Post, or Fox as much as CBS. It's not about liberal vs. conservative. It's about public trust.
Do you remember GI Joe and He-Man? Remember how cartoons like them had "educational" segments in the last few minutes of every show? The reason is because broadcasters are legally required to have certain minimum amounts of educational content. GI Joe and He-Man as they originally existed had absolutely no educational or socially redeeming value whatsoever. Therefore (rather than rework the shows to be better) segments were pasted on at the end telling kids not to talk to strangers and not to go swimming after a thunderstorm.
You want government out of TV broadcasting? Fine. Tell them to give back the airwaves, and we'll call it even.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Look for the little gold star in the top right corner of articles that have been through the 'Featured Article' mill. My own article on the "Mini" for example.
www.sjbaker.org