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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.'"
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 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.
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.
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.