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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
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)
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.
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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
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.
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)
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.
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."