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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.
Nuff said.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
is show the importance of checking multiple sources, especially when you are relying on it for something important! However, I believe that Wikipedia is already looking at a stable version, in which a stable and unstable branch of the project are maintained with the unstable changes merged in reguarly. This would remove problems like this one, for the most part anyway.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
I'm catalan. And I can say that lately there's been a lot of hatred against our nation pushed by some spanish political parties (Yet I don't to turn this into a political discussion). This problem appeared because of a vandalized entry in wikipedia, but could also have appeared if a person had modified the film or written it wrong from the start, so the problem here is not the reliance on open content, but the reliance on people's goodness, which in the open [content, source, ...] is mostly there, but can be displaced by some feelings, most of them learnt and fueled since childhood.
But the same thing's been happening throughout the history. Surely if you looked on recognized encyclopedias some time ago, a lot of entries about slaves would be unaccpetable by today standards. The same happens over conquered soil after a war, when the losers become the vermin that had to be erradicated and the winners the saviors of the people (and usually end up being as bad as those they overthrew). And many other examples could be given.
So the problem here is the open content or close-minded people?
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?
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
I think I found the real problem.
I do a fair bit of international coding. Problem is, I am not fluent in many of the languages I am building software. When putting together my language bundles, I always have someone do a quick walkthrough of the application who knows the language and context. You cannot count on software to give you a proper translation. Last year I was building some portlets for a French company. I added navigation and hit the fish to translate some of the finishing touches. I added a 'back' button - only to find the word I used was a person's back (not return to the previous step) in my i18n resource bundle.
How do they say - nothing is as permanent as that which was deemed temporary? Not uncommon for stuff like this to not get checked by QA.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Why scoff at Seigenthaler? I met the man a few months ago, and we discussed his history with Wikipedia. He was very level-headed and reasonable about the whole thing. He acknowledged it's an interesting social experiment, but was very worried for what it can do to the reputations of good people if taken seriously as an information source.
It's worth noting that Seigenthaler DID eventually track down the malicious poster. Seigenthaler's an adamant free-speech advocate (and a head-honcho muckety-muck at the First Amendment Center), with an extreme distaste for libel and slander laws - he'd rather see lies and mischaracterizations flushed out through the marketplace of ideas. So he didn't sue, but he did go on TV and demand an apology from the malicious poster. That seems like a reasonable thing to me; the poster embarrassed Seigenthaler through his lies, and Seigenthaler embarrassed the poster through a demand for truth.
Seigenthaler also told me that when the poster's boss threatened to fire the poster, Seigenthaler called and asked the boss not to; he said the matter was settled was the truth was on the record.
He said the incident pushed and strained his belief in the marketplace of ideas, and that he was awfully tempted to go ahead with a libel suit. I'm glad ultimately he stayed true to his core values.
The problem is not "open content", Wikipedia, or vandals. The problem is people who rely on a single unaccountable source for any knowledge. That is a recipe for failure.
This has also been the problem with "authoritative" sources, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, NY Times or White House Spokesman. Those sources are highly managed, consciously or unconsciously, so they don't usually go as obviously haywire. Instead they mislead to usually workable misconceptions. In the service of the writer/speaker or the organization that produces/publishes them.
Now that the world is finally filling with lots of smalltime publishers, as publishing has become so cheap, easy and scaleable, we're all seeing the limits of sources. So we all must learn what the past publishers learn: power of the press belongs to people with presses, and power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The only way to handle the corruption is to match power against power, cross-reference information from independent (of each other) sources.
Wikipedia will be even better when it includes an independent "fact checking" feature, like automated Google/Yahoo/MSN searching of citations. Until then, its superior power to managed press is just raw power that requires users to do that for ourselves.
--
make install -not war
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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Professionals use professional translation services. 'Nuff said.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!