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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.'"
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.
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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).
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
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.
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.
So look up pairs of movies in IMDB and Wikipedia and see which has the best coverage. I think Wikipedia wins every time...especially for new releases.
Movies are easy to get right - it's politics and religion and controversial stuff that's hard to do well. You can't get the sheer volume of stuff that Wikipedia has by reviewing everything. Wikipedia is growing at a rate significantly faster than a human can read - no one person could read it all - much less review it.
Wikipedia grows by 50,000 articles a month. If your hypothetical reviewer reviewed a couple of articles a day - Wikipedia would need over 1,000 reviewers - some of whom would have to be experts in extremely narrow fields. It's all very well to have a few movie buffs keep track of a few dozen movie facts per day - but the only way to handle a problem the size of Wikipedia is to have the general public do the reviewing as well as the writing - which is precisely what happens.
www.sjbaker.org
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)
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.
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
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Troll#Attent ion-seeking_trolls
Troll article -> Slashdot links to it -> Lots of pageviews -> More ad clicks -> Profit
If you're not similarly skeptical about information in the rest of the media, you're naive.
Hearing the tech reporting on the news is pretty scary. I imagine it's similarly painful for experts in other fields to hear their field discussed by reporters.
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.
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.
What they should do is have a version of Wikipedia that has already been verified by a community of editors. So, a process similar to the following would take place:
1) General population would add/modify/remove entries on Wikipedia with public-editing capabilities.
2) A second Wikipedia would be set-up where only a group of editors would have write-access to the content. The editors would periodically compare the two versions of Wikipedia and commit the "good" information from the publicly-edited version to the restricted version.
That would not make any sense from a Wiki standpoint. The second is not a Wikipedia or Wiki at all, it's a private organization publishing information. Who gets access? "Scholars," "Historians," people with PhD's only? People with an IQ of 180 or more?
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.
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.
It's all very well to have a few movie buffs keep track of a few dozen movie facts per day...
Try a few thousand movie facts a day.
But there are ways to make this simpler. Enable trust scoring on contributors, add a value component to the trust score. Every contribution gets checked and scored on its validity/verifiability, then it also gets scored on how much value it added (i.e. a grammatical correction gets a 1, while a large passage of new information gets a 10). When editors are reviewing a contribution, they get a clue from the contributor's scores as to how deeply they need to check it. If the guy has a 98% validity record with an average value add of 7 over 150 contributions, the editor may be able to let some of the smaller things through with a quick read-over just to be sure it makes sense. An editor could clear 30 such items an hour rather than 2 a day.
Additionally, an invite-only peer-review area could be created. Someone who has contributed a minimum of 20 items on science with a 100% validity rate and average value add of 4 or higher might be invited to review items in the science category. When 2-3 volunteer peers give a new article or significant edit a thumbs up, it's incorporated.
Now, the methods I describe may not be how IMDb does it. I don't know their data management practices for sure. But assigning trust scores to longtime contributors... that's not hard. Look at Slashdot's moderation system. Adding a Contributor Karma system to the back-end management interface for the Wikipedia editors shouldn't be too tough.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
IMDB excels at what it is, which is a database of movie credits. If you want to see everything an actor did in his career, if you like a director and want to get a list of his other works, that's where you go. I'm sure there are abuses (or just mistakes) but it's pretty hard to dick around with the credits list of Star Wars.
The abuses you mentioned are pretty much sandboxed-- movies in production (which are tumultous by nature, and no media source will have anything but speculation until they are released), the comments and "fun facts" section which should be taken with a grain of salt anyway. Perhaps the biggest potential for abuse is someone padding their credits by getting movies listed that shouldn't be there-- like a student film-- but that behavior is so under the radar it doesn't really affect other users.
Misinformation and abuse in Wikipedia is much more widespread... But that said, I don't see why there's so much hand-wringing over it. Yeah, the articles are biased and subject to manipulation. So what? It's not an academic resource, it's a repository of common knowledge. Treating it as anything but a "know-it-all friend" is a mistake (and just plain laziness.) If you're serious about a subject (or even trying to settle an argument) Wikipedia should do nothing more than give you ammo to do real research.
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.
And now you're also only bringing up encyclopedias to compare with Wikipedia. I think one should keep in mind that this guy is talking about a current event, and looking at Wikipedia right at that moment. In that case, the articles are more at risk of being partially complete, contain misinformation or not had time to be vandalism checked properly. A better parallel in this case would be reading a news paper's breaking news, and accuracy check that. Chances are the journalists can have similar misinformation there. And then it's a more serious matter, as an editor can't step in 5 second later and correct your copy of that paper.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Agreed.
Wikipedia is just as much susceptible to errors as humans are.
Once people encounter articles bering wrong information, instead of correcting them, they report it to papers and try to demote wikipedia merits. That doesn't proof Wikipedia failures, but humanity ones.
They have good mechanisms to prevent vandalism like: Posting a link in the discution tab to confirm your statements, or locking the edition by non wikipedians, if only people use them.
I imagine it's similarly painful for experts in other fields to hear their field discussed by reporters.
I'm a statistician, and I can attest that is DEFINITELY the case for me. Few days go by that I don't see or hear bad statistics in papers, magazines, radio, or television. Informal internet polls get reported as fact (I'm looking at you, Popular Science)... few statistics give any sort of error margin, and even if they do, many times the person reporting the statistic doesn't understand the importance of the error margin (for example, the infamous boys are better at math than girls claim)... Yeah. Anyone with basic software can churn out a number and claim they have a good statistic, after they've (intentionally or unintentionally) biased their results.
Most professors I know would bitchslap a student six ways from sunday from using any secondary source whenever it was possible to reference a primary. Heaven help you if you referenced Britannica, never mind Wikipedia. The more enlightened and less cranky of them advised us that we should use Britannica and Wikipedia as a good way to get a quick overview of a completely unfamiliar or tangential topic, which in turn suggests what areas of primary research to pursue (as primary research is time intensive). I consider that to be good advice.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
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
Okay fine. But then don't complain when it isn't held as authoritative as Encyclopedia Britannica. I, for one, do not think a mass 'editorial review' is necessary. I'd simply put a cap: only registered users can change an existing article. As soon as registration is required, you'd see a dramatic drop in vandalism. Most of it is spur of the moment. It would not remove all vandalism, but I bet it would drop a lot.
Wikipedia is about as correct as britanica is current.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Ah yes... slashdot's moderation and karma system. It is excellent at producing . . . groupthink? Let's face it. There is a prevailing set of opinions on slashdot, and if you follow those opinions, then you get karma and mod points, thus reinforcing the groupthink, because only those who follow it can make their way into the (large) group of people who enforce it.
Now, you could say that with a larger group of people, this is exactly what you want in an encyclopedia: the collective thought of humanity. However, slashdot's groupthink is by no means equal to the collective thought of slashdot. I would wager (now, I freely admit that I don't have good empirical evidence for this, so take it with several large grains of salt) that the karma+moderation system has a significant narrowing effect on the thought expressed by high scoring comments here. That's ok here, but not in an encyclopedia. The downside of widening the thought for wikipedia is that there is a lot of crap to trudge through.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
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.
And what's wrong with those entries? They don't conform to the shifts in public opinion among certain demographic groups? One of the conceits of the modern age is that we are necessarily smarter, wiser and more ethical than our predecessors. Some wines get better with age, and others turn into vinegar.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Are you kidding? It's supposed to be an "encyclopedia", as in "have ethics". If I want biased reporting I'll watch Fox. Without starting another pointless debate, there is a lot of benefits from things like socialism and it would be nice to see a fair analysis of both the good and the bad. If a top-flight reference source allows political bias to influence it's entries, then it simply cannot be trusted. It's no different from a Chinese reference containing a "nice-guy" entry for Mao, ditto Stalin.
If the tone of an article shifts to meet the readers bias, then it's bullshit. Encyclopedia's aren't a popularity contest.
It doesn't really matter. This is a selected event. Bias seeps out when there is are political or religious articles. But, if you're looking up something on unicorns or galaxies or some kind of rat, the articles are pretty damned good. If you're looking up some arcane thing in Scifi, the articles are too damned good.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Are you kidding? It's supposed to be an "encyclopedia", as in "have ethics". If I want biased reporting I'll watch Fox. Without starting another pointless debate, there is a lot of benefits from things like socialism and it would be nice to see a fair analysis of both the good and the bad.
It is very hard for people to do this, very few people are highly knowlegable about topics they are indifferent to. In some cases (especially if all people involved are on a even footing and inclined to be civil) a group authorship. With the likes of Zionism and Feminism this would would be virtually impossible.
If the tone of an article shifts to meet the readers bias, then it's bullshit. Encyclopedia's aren't a popularity contest.
It isn't just "readers' bias" there is also "fashion" surrounding the topics themselves, influence of political lobbying groups, etc.
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.
This would stop "casual vandals". But it's ineffective against organised politics and lobby groups. If anything a "cooling off period" can be counter productive, since it does little to put off (even quite loosely) organised groups and fanatics. Whilst being likely to deter an average person.
It can be a fundermental problem that the people you most want to deter are those least easily detered. Sometimes known as the "jerk pass" filter effect.
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.
There are a couple of problems here. The first is what happens if the editors are biased towards one "side"? The other is disagreement may be part of the topic in question and to deny this makes the whole thing meaningless.
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.
I think it's more that flamebait gets modded as insightful if it matches the groupthink, not that well-reasoned posts are modded down if it doesn't. For example, if I make a crack about Bush being a retard or Ballmer being a maniac, there's a good chance that gets to +5. If I do it for most other neutral figures, that gets modded to oblivion. So I think there is still a bias to some extent.
That said, the quality on slashdot has gotten immeasurably better since the rise of another popular tech website that will remain nameless *cough*DIGG*cough*. I think the teenage fanboys have been sucked off to the flavor of the month. Thank God.
Ken Lay died at 10. By "Wednesday afternoon", according to TFA, the Wikipedia page had settled down and presented a reasonably accurate view. So what exactly is the point of TFA? It sounds to me like Wikipedia works just fine. Within hours, an informative, freely-accessible article was available to the whole world.
What everybody in the media seems to be missing about this story is this: where is the beloved Britannica's article on Kenneth Lay? You know, the authoritative source used to compare these things. The one used by Wiki's detractors to say, "Oh, look how inaccurate their initial drafts of the Ken Lay article are! That would never happen in traditional encyclopedias". I searched Britannica's site, can't seem to find it. Tried Kenneth Lay, Ken Lay, Lay, Kenneth, nothing. Maybe it's behind their paywall? Oh, wait, there is another point for Wikipedia: no paywall.
So when the author of the TFA writes "[u]nlike, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia has no formal peer review for its articles", I would counter with this: "Unlike, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia actually contains articles on the topic we're discussing. Oh, and it's free too."