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The Dangers of Open Content
gihan_ripper writes "Recently released open movie Elephants Dream found itself in hot water with Catalonians after accidentally using an offensive word instead of 'Català' in the subtitle menu. The cause? Designer Matt Ebb had used Wikipedia to look up the Catalan word for Catalan on a day when the entry had been vandalized. He writes about this experience on the Elephant Dream blog.
We may have scoffed at John Seigenthaler over his criticisms of Wikipedia, but it gives us pause for thought when we to heavily on Wikipedia."
However, this is more about the troubles with doing international work - its hard to understand the sensitivities & languages of multiple (over 30!) cultures. Companies as large as Microsoft have made mistakes like this before, withlout using open content.
As the (google cache) blog author says:
*shrug* - not that big a deal, and an internationalisation, not open content problem.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Just for your info, guys: I just visited the article and removed the offensive terms, also leaving a small explanative note about the term itself just in case someone hears it again knows what it is all about.
;-)
A_10_es: si et plau, dóna-li una ullada quan puguis, a veure si m'he deixat alguna cosa. Gràcies.
[A_10_es: please, give it an eyeball when you have a moment, to see if I forgot something. Thank you.]
That was a sample of Catalan language; will somebody give me a +1=Informative?
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This is a good example of a more general problem with WP, which is that the design was optimized for getting an encyclopedia off the ground initially, not for maintaining it in the long-term. It's analogous to an internet startup company that kludges up their software real quick using Visual Basic code, lots of gotos, and no comments; what they care about is getting it working initially, so they can make their IPO.
A lot of people don't realize that WP's design emerged after an initial period of uncertainty and experimentation over what model to use. There were alternative models, like Nupedia's, but they failed mainly because they were too cumbersome for new writers to get involved in.
My experience as a WP editor over the last few years has been that in the early stages, both the number and quality of the articles improved rapidly, but that within the last year or so, there have started to be severe quality problems. In the early stages, the problems came from not having enough users. For instance, the early versions of the article on astrology were ridiculously credulous, and when I tried to make it more balanced, I couldn't make any progress, because there were only roughly three of us working on the article, and the other two were true believers. I gave up on the article, but when I came back and looked at it again in a couple of years, the problem had been pretty well corrected, presumably because the continuing influx of new users made it impossible for a couple of fanatical true believers to continue using the article to push their POV.
But recently, there's the opposite problem. There are so many people editing WP that it's become virtually impossible to keep a good article good. It's an interesting exercise to look at an article that became a featured article, say, a year ago, and compare its quality then with its quality now. In most cases, you'll find that it's gotten worse because of lots of random, uncoordinated edits by people who may have a POV to push, or who may just not be very knowledgeable.
WP's design is an exteme design, going about as far as it's possible to go toward openness and ease of use. I don't think that design is working at this stage in WP's evolution, which is why I've mostly stopped editing on WP.
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Between the trolls, complete loons, insane geological theories, loons engaging in revisionist history, bad biological science, and racists. Clearly because some parts of the internet are bad, the entire thing is totally worthless. But if you say this sort of thing, you get shouted down by people who've drunk Tim Berners-Lee's kool-aid. Clearly the logical course of action is to spend my time loudly complaining about how awful the Internet is, how anyone posting content to the web is wasting their time, and how only a web-cultist would claim that even though the web is flawed that there is any value to it.
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this is the fundamental problem with wikipedia -- and it's unfixable.
as it remained cultish and unknown, this was not a problem, both from the random vandalisation and trust of unfamiliar users standpoints. now, there are multiple issues as people think of it as the equivalent of britannica.
another is this -- it is very difficult, in certain circumstances, for objectivity to survive. i, for example, work in politics. information about a candidate for office in my city is erroneous and biased intentionally. however, i lack the clout within wikipedia to have my corrections upheld by editors -- the candidate's opponent's supporters are merciless about arguing and re-subjectifying the content. there's no recourse.
we've developed a new AOL (new users not understanding the internet and causing and experiencing challenges) -- from the standpoint that wikipedia has grown to the point that users don't know it's not perfect and can be harmful, and there are going to be a number of growing pains as a result.
go get it