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Stephen Colbert Wikipedia Prank Backfires
Vicissidude writes "The champion of 'truthiness' couldn't resist making fun of a website where facts, it seems, are endlessly malleable. But after making fun of Wikipedia on Monday night's "Colbert Report," Colbert learned some hard truths about Wikipedia's strength in resisting vandalism. Here's how the segment started: 'Colbert logs on to the Wikipedia article about his show to find out whether he usually refers to Oregon as "California's Canada or Washington's Mexico." Upon learning that he has referred to Oregon as both, he demonstrates how easy it is to disregard both references and put in a completely new one (Oregon is Idaho's Portugal), declaring it "the opinion I've always held, you can look it up."' Colbert then called on users to go to the site and falsify the entry on elephants. But Wikipedia's volunteer administrators were among those watching Colbert, and they responded swiftly to correct the entry, block further mischievous editing, and ban user StephenColbert from the website."
The Colbert report is always hilarious, and this is no exception.
Who in their right mind would use Wiki as a 'source' document?
It is a great tool and it works as a starting point. You still have to verify data.
Then again, there are people that still try to go whale watching in Lake Michigan.
After all, if administrators don't block users, than the vandals win, and that's just not patriotic at all...
~ C.
plan on voting for the Stewart/Colbert ticket in '08 !
But they've already dealt with Morons who can't agree on the facts before. He deserves it. ...and practial jokers? Draw and Quarter, it's the only solution.
I thought the goal was to be funny. Considering it was hilarious, I think it worked out perfectly.
Somebody better head over to Wikipedia and proofread the entries for 'irony' and 'satire'.
Typical really I suppose.
I went to the elephant listing on wiki that night. Apparently the population of elephants has tripled in the last three months. That is quite impressive, as each female elephant gives birth to one child at a time (twins and beyond are very rare) and there is a 22 month pregnancy period.
Hence we are shown the power of the media to change the truth, then censor themselves, then to undo those changes at which point Mr. AvgJoeCitizen is so baffled that the truth loses any meaning.
All it did was demonstrate that Wikipedia is capable of defending itself from obvious vandalism. It does nothing to further the argument that Wikipedia is anything more than a big bag of trivia, edited by people who argue endlessly about whether captain Kirk wore a yellow or marigold shirt.
Don't ban him! He may lie all the time but his words are carefully chosen to make the truth obvious. Without his voice Wikipedia will have a much harder time explaining the subtle stuff. Censorship like this, the kind that imagines that there is a single truth or something like that, is the biggest reason why my site will some day be so much tighter than wikipedia.
...not the ones that are obvious vandalism.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Well, of course they will when you can convince them that Lake Michigan is one of the Seven Seas.
It shows that they are on top of high profile coordinated mischief. But what about covert coordinated mischief? I thought his segment was great and insightful. Especially when you read and know the history of George Bush's entry...go Stephen!
As an Oregonian, this greatly offends me! Why do we have to be in the middle of all this? Being compared to third world contries and such. :(
...Wikipedia can't be reliable. People do not take it seriosly, and therefore don't care if it's facts are true. I had teachers who would put false info up to see if we would cite it or not. This is a load of bull. If people put what they were sure to almsot certain was true, we wouldn't have these problems.
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
Then again, there are people that still try to go whale watching in Lake Michigan.
Considering how many whales I've seen on that little beach across from the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago I can see why.
Are there really no whales in the lakes? No large creatures of any sort?
Seems strange now that I think about it. The lakes are so large you would think there would be giant manatees or something.
I'd hate to see someone edit out any reference to his deepthroating a banana, that's one of the funniest things I've ever seen!
All the world's a stage, all the people but players.
I saw the episode in question, and it seems to me that there's no why he could actually have edited it *on the air* like that, not with the theatrical keyboard-punching he did on the show while talking at the camera.
This strikes me as a total non-story, or worse, an invented story either to defame the Colbert Report show (possible) or a promotional stunt on behalf of the show.
(Further, anyone who thinks that Stephen Colbert, on the show, urging people to change Wikipedia actually MEANS he wants those people to do that betrays an utter ignorance of what the Colbert Report is: a dead-on satire of the right-wing talk show arena. No one should ever take anything the character of Stephen Colbert says seriously.)
If that's a joke backfiring, what's success? Having America celebrate it's 750th birthday?
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
What do you want to be that the article on elephants gets vandalised by a horde of slashdot users following this article? (Yes, I know it is locked, but only to new and non-users of Wikipedia -- this is slashdot, everyone is has a Wikipedia account, right?)
Rhapsody in Numbers
I thought it was McCain/Stewart '08
On the contrary, it proved exactly what Colbert's point was. Wikipedia's very nature makes it prone to misttatements and error. Wikipedia practically had to shut itself down after Colbert proved his point.
Seems like the submitter couldn't see the beauty of the satire. Just like Dave Barry's "Dog Ate My Toes" poetry project, it gave us all a good laugh, which is the entire point of humor and satire.
Backfired? No way. We all got a great laugh from this.
JoAnn
You can see this process most clearly, in the evolution of society's treatment of homosexuals over the past 50 years.
Funny how academia is now going through this process with Wikipedia.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
This shows nothing about Wikipedia's strength in resisting vandalism. It is like calling the cops and saying "i'm going to rob a bank now", "look i'm in the bank on Maple and Main stealing money", "Oh now i'm leaving, I'm headed home to 123 Main St."
Why do they have an article on elephants... shouldn't someone who is curious be looking it up in the singular..
I didn't see the show, but it'd have been freaking hillarious if this had transpired on live t.v.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
No one is censoring him. Colbert is perfectly free to start his own online encyclopedia with its own rules the way he wants it. Save the censor term for real censorship (i.e. when the inevitable evil mod MODS ME DOWN!)
Where were you when the voynix came?
and you need to repeatedly sample an article in order to determine it's average and standard deviation-- slowly converging on the truth.
Maybe wikipedia should include that information in addtion to the the "This article is contested" warning.
Frankly, wikipedia has a lot of information that you just can't get anwhere else and I will always treasure it for that. But trusting wikipedia for current information-- or opinion, is very dangerous.
Backfired? Quite the opposite. This proves his point. If it's left open you can end up with any facts people choose to insert. The other option is to limit edit rights, which goes against the basic idea behind the site.
I'm sure he didn't go to bed crying because he's been blocked from editing wikipedia.
Developers: We can use your help.
It's extra funny as people are now salting more slyly references to Colbert, elephants, and truthiness in scores of articles, I saw tons being cleaned. But just as many are likely getting through based on simple probability and volume. They'll be cleaning Stephen off of WP for months.
What about the people who dont announce to millions of people before they falsify or vandalize wikipedia entries? It's an inherent weakness to the wiki, and I dont think this example of locking a page and banning a user says anything impressive about the robustness of a wiki at all.
You still have to verify data.
If you care to have accurate information this statement is true of all sources.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Yeah, maybe if the Iraqi car bombers announced on national TV where and when they were going to show up next we could defend against them, too.
Taking what Colbert did as some deliberate act to sabotage Wikipedia is about as ridiculous as the Bush administration inviting him to the Whitehouse Correspondents Dinner and expecting him to shower the President with praise. Colbert was trying to make the point that the majority opinion isn't necessarily the right opinion. One of the tenets of our government is to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. So, when you hear politicians crying for straight up-and-down votes when our republican (little 'r') government empowers the minority party to fight against it (via the filibuster), you should remember that we don't live in a democracy. That whole skit was also a clever take on how those in power love to rewrite history to put themselves in a better light.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I think Colbert's point was that Wikipedia and other vote based knowledge bases ultimately conform to the beliefs of the majority, and not actual fact. The truth isn't democratic in nature (although truthiness might be). If a bunch of skinheads get together and vote that the Holocaust never happened, that doesn't make it true. Just because a moderator was watching and locked down the entry isn't a display of Wikipedia's power. The moderator can't handle everything in that fashion. If the power of Wikipedia is in the breadth and good will of it's contributors, then unlock the entry and let's see what happens.
MOD PARENT DOWN
Afterall we wouldn't want to fail to meet his expectations now would we?
-nB
BTW, while we are meeting expectations how bout some underrateds for me? Man I never get those! I want one troll and 6 underrateds! that would be awesome.
Cheers all,
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
But did anybody check for vandalism of pages about bears?
all of you sheepole use windows
linux us a superior operating system
how the fuck is it resisting when he was allowed change it in the first place and they cleaned it up afterwards
The same way a magnet resists being moved from iron. you can push it away, but when you let go, it will be drawn back.
*insert standard analogy disclaimer here*
Take a look at Colbert's block log: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special: Log&type=block&page=User:Stephencolbert and his talk page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Stephencolb ert. He's not banned, and although he was blocked at one point, that's since been removed.
Furthermore, all the blocks put on his account were due to the inability to confirm that this account actually belonged to Stephen Colbert since creating an account with a public figure's name if you are not the public figure is against wikipedia policy. His account was not blocked for vandalism.
Dear diary: Today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender.
"This strikes me as a total non-story, or worse, an invented story either to defame the Colbert Report show (possible) or a promotional stunt on behalf of the show."
Don't you get it? It is a satire of an invented Internet story, intended to defame those who have a view that "Colbert" is not a satire (along with those who think that "Colbert" is real and "O'Reilly" is a satire of "The Colbert Report"). At which point, the entire enterprise twists itself into a Mobius-strip of self-referential irony and avant-gard humour and then bursts into flame.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Only kidding, honey - it was the other women on the beach, honest!
"Look at how our system actually works: by protecting two whole articles from vandalism, because they were mentioned a nationally televised show. Ergo we are STILL the sum total of human knowledge, and bigger than the Apollo Program and Jesus."
Wikipedia is the greatest collection of random-third-party factoids the world has ever known, and a great resource, but hardly some grand visionary society of mind. I think Colbert proved his point quite nicely.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
There's only one way to fight vandalism, and it's the good old-fashioned way ... get some troops on the ground. I spent two nights ago protecting over a dozen elephant-related articles (Elephant the album, Dumbo the Elephant, Elephant Seal, etc.) and blocked a few dozen people I caught inserting false numbers about elephant populations. As Wikipedia administrators we really have all the tools that we could possibly need. I just looked at the live stream of all edits on the English Wikipedia and reviewed the ones being made to all pages related to Stephen Colbert, Elephants, or northwestern states.
(User:Cyde on en-wiki)
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I'm sure it would be quite funny if Colbert hated Microsoft and submitted something to slashdot about one of Vista's new features. "Watch! I'll make it a bad thing in 5 seconds."
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
i was listening to npr today (yes yes, i'm a nerd).
there were callers that made many good points, including these two gems:
- no one would write a credible paper with just one source. if you use wikipedia, back it up with other sources. any source can be wrong, even ones bound and published, just like wiki ones.
- think critically while reading wikipedia. think critically while reading newspaper, the internet, etc etc. don't just dump anything straight into memory, assuming it to be fact.
Wikipedia had to limit editing to pages that got vandalized. That doesn't mean any of this "truth by mob" will actually stay in... Wikipedia requires information to be cited by reliable sources, so there's no way that the statements will stick for longer than a few minutes.
Agreed that this is probably not the best way to go about things.
It would be much better for the articles to be changed in a background copy, and then upon some sort of verification, or validation of data, it gets switched to main. It would certainly stop the see-sawing of article submission reliably between fsckers and wiki admins.
That said, if we are going to build a collection of the entire of human knowledge, we are going to have a few rough edges on the data. It's an almost insurmountable task to verify each piece of data entered into wikipedia. Some data can not be verified because of current views, or differing conclusions based on research. If were to ask 30 people to go and count all elephants, I would see 30 different method of counting elephants. Some would use statistical methods to build a "pretty close count" while others would get more accurate results.
There is also the problem of verifying unquantifiable data. How many Ants are there in the world?
There are some things that are impossible. People will have to put up with the fact the the information on community based sites are going to be fuzzy at best. Wikipedia will always be in some sort of "truth flux" where the information you see may, or may not contain some truth. The point is, Wikipedia is a great starting point to get information, but linking to a wiki article in a paper as fact will get you laughed off.
I applaud the notion of a centralised source of human knowledge, even if that comes with it's own drawbacks.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
Well, it's not vandalized if it's fixed, now is it?
You resist vandalism when you actively protect and clean it up afterwards, you don't care when you do nothing(graffiti in the slums vs. graffiti downtown in a lot of cities is an example).
If you're resisting an invasion, they may make a few wins but you clean it up after them, kick them out and all that.
In Colbert's "bit", the truth wasn't in what was said or in the "call to arms" to edit the wiki, but in what he didn't come out and say. You can't challenge a "fact" that has no backing. Without sources, Wikipedia is no more than people playing professor. Even volunteer editors don't know what the hell is truth without some sort of backing. As a substitute, kids would ask me about Wikipedia and if articles would be acceptable in their bibliography. My answer was always no. If they found info on Wikipedia I expected they have something else to back it up. Colbert's stunt proves that this is the fundamental flaw in thinking of the Wikipedia as a source for anything more than opinion. BTW, I checked out the Wiki right after the show... did you know that the population of elephants has tripled in the last six months?! Incredible! -EW
"Finish your dinner." -Your Mom
His whole show is nothing more than a rip on O'Rielly. After about 5 minutes it's incredibly played. I thought it was a one show joke, but a series? Pulease! How come they don't do a spoof series on Larry King? Dan Rather? CNN? Oh right, because they're all liberals like Colbert and all of Comedy Central.
One sided humor is just lame. Sorry.
"But did anybody check for vandalism of pages about bears?"
If Colbert sh*ts on an Catholic elephant in the woods, does a bear vandalize the Pope's Wikipedia entry?
Where were you when the voynix came?
It's those subtle edits that distort what the meaning of the truth is that not only hurts Wikipedia but the media in general. I mean how often is a war refered to as a crisis? How badly has the reporting of science been over the last 5 years? I can list more but I think we all know what topics those are and it would just draw unneeded debate.
When the truth is warped and sensationalized it hurts the overall perception of facts which destroys the public trust of fact. It reminds me so much of "corporate terminology" you know the language - give bad news using positive terms so no one realizes you're giving bad news.
Anyways, as much as I love Wikipedia as a reference. It's that haggling over the subtle wording that drives me bonkers when I'm fact checking. Reading what some of those people argue over is unreal. But I have to do it because I never really know what I'm reading until I investigate. I keep thinking that some articles shouldn't be "public" or finalized until they manage to iron them out properly and remove things like POV, opinion and vaguerities. It's still rough but I think the article shows that they are making an effort to be responsive to these problems.
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Exactly. Backfired? No. Reinforced his point? Absolutely!
This guy's the limit!
Unless you have unlimited time or are documenting something very basic, at some point you will have to trust a source.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
And to sail across it, you need to take a ricky-dan-doo.
Casual users should be able to switch between the two easily and decide whether they wanted potentially less trustworthy, but more current, information, or the vice versa.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Then again, there are people that still try to go whale watching in Lake Michigan.
I find whale watching in Lake Ontario to be very relaxing.
Rod Taylor
Wikipedia is a bit larger than that, and is quite a bit hardier than you imagine.
To all potential Wiki vandals... the ceiling cat is watching.
Wikipedia is a great link aggregator but too much of the rest is too opinionated and poorly written. I altered the date of a vital foreign affairs treaty by 50 years to prove a point to a professor who loved Wikipedia. She changed it back when I told her what I had done, but it had been wrong for two weeks before then. Wikipedia generally gets the big picture right but don't trust it for details.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Wiki reminds me of one of my buddies. When he says something, I always take it with a grain of salt. On the other hand if it's about something that matters, I check it out. A couple of leads that he gave me have made me tens of thousands of dollars richer. Wiki is the same. I never rely on it for the final truth about anything but it's a good place to start looking. Most articles include enough citations to usefully point me in the right direction.
What "strength in resisting vandalism"? Some editors were watching the show on TV, so they were able to revert the changes. What about the myriad other instances where vandalism is not announced and showcased on TV worldwide?
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
But seriously folks, how did it backfire if we're all laughing?
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
Agreed. Its a starting point for me for looking quick technical things. e.g. DVI pin layouts or lookup SHA or MD5 hash. When it comes to areas where one's opinion/politics/theology can be inserted I take Wikipedia more with a grain of salt.
Sam Vaknin had an interesting article The Six Sins of the Wikipedia pointing out the problems with the Wikipedia system. I enjoy using Wikipedia but I am wary of using it has some sort of gospel or authority. The contributers are anonymous and that lack of transparency does make it sort of a problem for me. Below the article.
Sam Vaknin July 2, 2006
It is a question of time before the Wikipedia self-destructs and implodes. It poses such low barriers to entry (anyone can edit any number of its articles) that it is already attracting masses of teenagers as "contributors" and "editors", not to mention the less savory flotsam and jetsam of cyber-life. People who are regularly excluded or at least moderated in every other Internet community are welcomed, no questions asked, by this wannabe self-styled "encyclopedia"
Six cardinal (and, in the long-term, deadly) sins plague this online venture. What unites and underlies all its deficiencies is simple: Wikipedia dissembles about what it is and how it operates. It is a self-righteous confabulation and its success in deceiving the many attests not only to the gullibility of the vast majority of Netizens but to the PR savvy of its sleek and slick operators.
1. The Wikipedia is opaque and encourages recklessness
The overwhelming majority of contributors to and editors of the Wikipedia remain anonymous throughout the process. Anyone can register and members' screen-names (handles) mean nothing and lead nowhere. Thus, no one is forced to take responsibility for what he or she adds to the "encyclopedia" or subtracts from it. This amounts to an impenetrable smokescreen: identities can rarely be established and evading the legal consequences of one's actions or omissions is easy.
Everything in the Wikipedia can be and frequently is edited, re-written and erased and this includes the talk pages and even, to my utter amazement, the history pages! In other words, one cannot gain an impartial view of the editorial process by sifting through the talk and history pages of articles (most of which are typically monopolized by fiercely territorial "editors"). History, not unlike in certain authoritarian regimes, is being constantly re-jigged on the Wikipedia!
2. The Wikipedia is anarchic, not democratic
The Wikipedia is not an experiment in online democracy, but a form of pernicious anarchy. It espouses two misconceptions: (a) That chaos can and does lead to the generation of artifacts with lasting value and (b) That knowledge is an emergent, mass phenomenon. But The Wikipedia is not conducive to the unfettered exchange of information and opinion that is a prerequisite to both (a) and (b). It is a war zone where many fear to tread. the Wikipedia is a negative filter (see the next point).
3. The Might is Right Editorial Principle
Lacking quality control by design, the Wikipedia rewards quantity. The more one posts and interacts with others, the higher one's status, both informal and official. In the Wikipedia planet, authority is a function of the number of edits, no matter how frivolous. The more aggressive (even violent) a member is; the more prone to flame, bully, and harass; the more inclined to form coalitions with like-minded trolls; the less of a life he or she has outside the Wikipedia, the more they are likely to end up being administrators.
The result is erratic editing. Many entries are completely re-written (not to say vandalized) with the arrival of new kids on the Wikipedia block. Contrary to advertently-fostered impressions, the Wikipedia is not a cumulative process. Its text goes through dizzyingly rapid and oft-repeated cycles of destruction
I thought it was funny when Wikipedia started providing BibTex citations for articles. Who in their right mind would cite a Wikipedia article in their own Latex document?
I'm providing a new service called WikiSecurity. If a national broadcast personality declares on a taped broadcast that he or she is going to break into your home, we promise to clean up after they have gone and return your home to its original condition, lock the door against this national celebrity, and ask Slashdot to tell everyone how secure we have made you feel. Contact us now at the website below.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
After all, Oregon is just Hawaii's Europe...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
The editors have become pretty much snobbish pedants. I took a lot of time adding information about things that I had solid 100% reliable information on, and almost all of them were deleted because the products weren't out yet and the information was only "hearsay". Well, months later, the information turned out 100% correct, and still has yet to be added to the wiki. I could do it, but quite frankly, I don't really give a crap anymore. They had their chance.
I was threatened with a ban on multiple occasions for changing the erroneous "kibibyte"-style size measurements to their proper "kilobyte" style measurements. I participated in many debates about why kilobyte = 1024 bytes, and the pedantic elite moderators simply ignored every argument and threatened me with a ban for "vandalism". I'm sorry? Vandalism? Bullcrap. I was correcting their mistakes, and threatened to be banned for it.
For those nerd pedants who will try to argue this with me, here are my reasons:
* Kilobyte has been 1024 bytes for over 50 years. It is a de facto standard.
* The vast majority of literature uses Kilobyte = 1024 bytes.
* You only confuse people even more by changing the standard for no good reason.
* The SI has no definition for "byte" and their prefixes do not hold any standard meaning over them.
* By changing standards, you end up with things like "tonnes/tons/metric tons". Which means which? It's never clear and causes an endless amount of confusion, which you are now doing to the computer world.
* The only prefix that actually means the number it implies is "kilo", which literally means 1000. The rest have no etymological association with their numerical meanings (ie: Megaman does not mean 1,000,000 men, since Mega does not mean 1 million outside of SI)
They've foiled Stephen Colbert's future nefarious plots by banning his account. If only there was something he could do like create a new account.
Apparently the population of elephants has tripled in the last three months. That is quite impressive, as each female elephant gives birth to one child at a time (twins and beyond are very rare) and there is a 22 month pregnancy period.
I believe I read that same article. I learned that unique among mammals. elephants' legs are actually hollow, affording the opportunity for small creatures, such as mice, to hide inside without detection.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
That an editable source can be edited? Hmm. Good discovery, Archimedes.
How many stories on cable news turn out to be wrong? Or even different on differing channels for the same incident? Does that mean we abandon the news?
>Exactly, this was cleaned up so fast because it was so blatantly exposed (through tv how old media) to the public and wikipedia. In fact, I would say that Wekipedia embodies truthiness" it's "truthy, not facty". It's what "feels right" to the content's contributor. I bet most contributors are trying to put the facts into the content. Unfortunately it is possible for people to eradicate the facts they don't like.
Brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe: "Information in the noise!"
If you care to have accurate information this statement is true of all sources.
My problem with Wiki is not that you have to verify the source. You correctly point out that one has to do that of all sources.
My problem is that anonymous editing (in which I include editing by people with usernames, as they are effectively anonymous) means that you can never know the adgendas or biases of those who are publishing the facts. Some pages are obviously biased, and called out for being so. What I worry about are the specialist pages, where only a specialist could recognize an error or spot a bias.
I would like to see Wiki adopt an "edition" system, where an expert -- whose identity and credentials are verified by Wiki -- "signs" certain articles, to acknowledge that the facts are correct as s/he views them. In keeping with Wiki's philosopy, there is no reason why multiple signed "editions" of articles could exist, signed by different experts.
Under such a system, you would know who takes responsibility for the facts as they are presented, and you would know their motivations, conflicts of interest, and backgroud.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
If you use a Wikipedia article for information, you should validate that information. Just as you should take reasonable measures to confirm a fact from a book. One way to start with Wikipedia might be to look at the history of changes. You might see evolution of the disputed information.
Sometimes you can read two newspapers with different points of view on a subject and start to see the 'real picture'. The more sources hear about an event from, the more effective your intelligence can be at filtering out noise. The human mind decides on a stopping point where it is safe to assume something is true to a degree of certainty. This is what makes us fairly sure that when we walk, we will not fall through the ground during some subsequent step.
Looking at the history might give insight into how the entry took shape. We will have a larger pool of beliefs from which to harvest the most accurate picture. It's work, but that's what research is.
This raises a number of questions in my mind.
Do the wiki admins make a point of collectively watching all television shows to make sure no one is vandalising their site?
What if someone were to announce their wiki vandalism on, say, local radio -- that is, to an audience of only 80,000 as opposed to 8 million -- would they still be caught?
If Steve alters a part of a wiki entry regarding remarks he himself has made about Oregon, would he not then be making a remark about Oregon, thus making whatever new content he entered technically correct?
If Steve had not publicly announced his vandalism regarding whether or not he had compared Oregon to Portugal, would anyone besides Barry Lopez have cared?
Accuracy is proportional to the number and variety of sources used. You just need to decide how critical accuracy is to you and do the work necessary to assure that level. So, if you're posting on say Slashdot, accuracy is... okay totally irrelevant. But if it was for a published article, you might not want to source Wikipedia (though for many subject areas it's pretty damn accurate). For a doctoral thesis, I think you'll fail, if not be burned at the stake for siteing wikipedia unless it's a thesis about wikis :)
Wikipedia provides a reasonable level of accuracy on most subjects for a very little amount of effort. Plus, well written Wikipedia articles also provide sourcing to help confirm the accuracy of the information.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Who in their right mind would use Wiki as a 'source' document?
Short answer: Too many people.
I've read through tons college level papers that cite wikipedia as a source for factual information. That is scary.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
With Bush and Gore absent from the ticket, that's absolutely true.
The special bonus would be the most hilarious Vice-Presidential debate ever.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
What you are describing is the stable versions proposal. We're trying to go ahead with this but we're meeting strong resistance, even by fellow administrators. They say it's too "unwiki" and that it will no longer be "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit". I actually tried setting Elephant to a stable version last night, but was reverted by another administrator.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Yeah. I was pretty bummed when it occurred to me during my under graduate years that all of my "research" essentially amounted to consolidating and regurgitating other peoples research. (And, in some cases, THEIR consolidation and regurgitation.)
I never really proved anything.
------------
Clever trolls are master baiters of the worst kind.
"No one would be censoring you. You are perfectly free to start your own discussion website [slashcode.com] and run it the way you'd like it."
Wow! I never realized this before!!!!!
Where were you when the voynix came?
What you are describing is the stable versions proposal, and it's currently being worked on by the developers. Basically, an administrator would be able to go in and flag a specific revision as being "stable", and that's what all readers of the article would see. You could of course choose to see the development version or make edits to the development version, but it will take an administrator to update the stable version, and he will do so by comparing the changes since the last stable version and making sure everything is legitimate.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
I'm sorry, but there is nothing that stops the "truth" from being changed in any information outlet. Newspapers, television, magazines, and encylopedias all distort the facts to serve an agenda. Fact checking sources should be part of everyone's news reading.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
So you're telling me that if I try to hack a website I shouldn't announce it before hand on cable tv? I don't think this says anything about the resistivness of wikipedia, perhaps a little about their admins viewing habits...
Sam obviously hasn't learned what anarchy means. Wikipedia may be chaotic, but anarchic? no, not by any definition.
On the contrary, it proved exactly what Colbert's point was. Wikipedia's very nature makes it prone to misttatements and error. Wikipedia practically had to shut itself down after Colbert proved his point.
Wikipedia isn't really the target here. I'll bet the majority of "Report" viewers didn't even know what Wikipedia was before Colbert explained it. The target of the satire is the echo chamber of widespread opinion that becomes "fact" when repeated enough. Wikipedia is merely being used as a foil to illustrate this point. Right wing radio is famous for this kind of thing where there's little to no fact checking and mostly relying on what other people say. For instance, it's now a "fact" that Al Gore said he "invented the internet", even though the actual statement he made had nothing to do with inventing and more to do with funding.
AccountKiller
He did a bit, it was funny, that was the end of it. The ramifications on wikipedia regarding a user who is probably not stephen colbert anyway (probably a staffer) mean nothing. The point was to get laughs - Mission Accomplished!
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
Worth vandalising:
Michael Moore's entry.
Louis Farrakhan's entry.
Unknown SlashMeme Error on line -1, you insensitive clod.
You're forgetting where you are. This is Slashdot.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Somebody is living in Wikiality.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
If one were to write into the Wikipedia entry the following, "Wikipedia was practically shut down by Stephen Colbert", would that make it true?
Of course, I was being facetious....still am. My entry got +5, yours +2, so does that make my original comment on Slashdot more valid? Nah, it's just the tyrrany of the masses at work. And that was Colbert's very valid, not backfired-at-all point.
JoAnn
My problem is that anonymous editing (in which I include editing by people with usernames, as they are effectively anonymous) means that you can never know the adgendas or biases of those who are publishing the facts.
Actually those using a username would be pseudonymous, and it's an important distinction. The reason it's important is that a given user can establish credibility. That is, you can look at other things they've posted and find patterns behind the changes they make, etc. You can see if they generally add credible information, or distory something.
I tend to trust Wikipedia in relation to the controversey of the topic (and to their credit they mark controversial items as being such). So if it's an article about gravity, as opposed to say the Republican party, I can reasonably assume that the gravity article is accurate where as the one on the GOP may be distorted by either side.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
As someone who's currently reading through hundreds of obscure scientific journals while writing a paper, the idea that 'Wikipedia suffers from systematic and calculated errors' makes me chortle.
Knowledge and scientific technique are expanding so rapidly that even those scientists whom the media so often lauds as being 'at the forefront' of whatever field they specialize in can't keep up.
I keep coming across articles which blatantly misuse the chemical analysis process I'm publishing on, and I mean REALLY misuse it to the point that their information is total garbage.
The process Wikipedia represents isn't new...dissemination of knowledge has always been hampered by lies, misinformation, and happy fools. Thankfully, the same knowledge is tempered with time.
I did, and this is what I found under the sub-heading Politics and culture,
So, the entry appears "unvandalized" overall, but the reference to The Colbert Report is there.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Now, while I have never seen an actual physeter macrocephalus at the 57th Street Beach, I have found that a large number of Homo Fatua Corpulentus congregate there with an alarming fequency.
Definately one of my favorite onion articles over the years.
doesn't make you a nerd. It just means you need to better utilize your time. Unless you're dividing your attention between npr and slashdot, which is perfectly acceptable.
That's the down-side to living in these, our modern times. All the good basic stuff is already well-known. You have to spend an eternity climbing up onto the shoulders of those who came before you until you can grasp some tiny nugget of original research. Stupid Newton, ruining it for the rest of us. :mad:
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Really people, if Wikipedia really sucks that much and you really hate it and it's completely useless, here's the solution for you: STOP FUCKING USING IT! There is no one forcing you to use it but instead you whine constantly about it. It seems to be an obsession for some people.
Yeah, sure, you can edit the page and put inane shit there but my experience with it that in the vast majority of the cases, the information is correct and accurate.
Heh yeah, whales in Lake Michigan.
And Grizzley Adams had a beard.
This incident doesn't prove that Wikipedia is good at catching vandalism. It only shows that Wikipedia is good at correcting untruthiness that's advertised on a popular, national television show watched by their admins. C'mon, slashdot.
You all (except for one) missed it. The point of the whole spoof was to point out that by saying something in a media source (like TV or news print) you start a "fact" rolling. Later you can reference your "fact" and, because people have heard (or read it) previously, it is accepted as truth.
This was also pointed out in "The Word" segment. You all took issue with Wiki and missed the point he was trying to make about the Bush administration (and the republican party).
Replace "elephants" with "weapons of mass distruction" and imagine it's 3 years ago.
The point of the whole story was 2 things:
= colbert%20wiki for the sketch in question.
1) Point of a slight flaw in wikipedia.
2) Relate this flaw to a point about the Bush administration convincing americans, via half truths and out right lies, that Irag has WMD. He pointed out 2 different surveys on what americans think and it showed a significant rise (currently 50%) in the number of people that think Iraq has WMDs.
The point ( a satirical one ) was that you can make the "truth" want you want if enough people believe it, or edit a document.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFT4OfdnVpU&search
the fact that the wikipedia admins caught and corrected this means nothing. the only reason that happenend is because he talked about it on a widely viewed cable television program.
the point he was making is not even up for contention. it's widely known that wikipedia is open to such abuses and there are many documented cases of it especially in the political arena. mr. colbert probably should have done it quietly and then came back a month later to prove that it was still there.
Slashdot has an unending love-affair with Wikipedia, even despite the fact that it's been shown to be unreliable, erronious, and so censor prone that Winston Smith would shudder. Don't expect anything but spin here to make an obvious loss for Wikipedia look like a "win."
No it isn't. Papers written by college students get read by no one.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
a non biased headline? I mean at least give it a shot? Maybe once in a while?
Damn, good thing one of the wiki-sympathetic internet users watches the 'television' still.
Not hard to correct something when it's televised. Sadly, most of the stuff isn't televised and there are hugely biased opinions riddling wikipedia.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
http://tawker.com/2006/08/01/i-blocked-stephen-col bert-on-wikipedia/ - I can't believe Slashdot left that one out... that's half the story :o
The point he was trying to make, and made, directly, is that while Wikipedia is neat, it's not the last stop for any information by a long shot. It's closer to a bulletin board than a real encyclopedia. He did it as a jest, but it wouldn't be past beleif to imagine other -real life- opinion show A-Holes from directing their drooling masses at these resources to change the facts on command.
Hell it's probably already happened.
If anything he's demonstrated a potential vulnerability in our collective record. We all knew it was there waiting to be exploited en-masse, and he just pointed it out. There are also more notable people on the subject who agree with him.
[1] And Jesus, fellas, what a smug headline.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Under various accounts, using various proxies, etc. I got bored one weekend and hacked up a little script to assist me, and monitor "progress". 58 have been corrected.
First, check for and avoid the regularly-updated-and-reverted articles - there are enough OCD types already fighting for who can most aggressively adjust the content to their worldview, making them pretty crap anyway (unless they've been locked down, in which case other biases come in..). Hell, the script even collects data on who reverts the articles I've adjusted, so I can build up a list of wikipaedophiles whose pet articles (identified by recent edits) can be left alone.
For the articles where "no-one really cares", we operate most effectively. At its most basic, we can automagically change a number here and there, remove or reorder events by simple substitution of prepositions (s/before/after/ is surprisingly effective!), etc. God knows it's only a metter of time before I try applying some of the analysis tools I used when fumbling about with interlingua (RIP) a few years ago.
Much better to spin some inventive prose, then add a non-existent reference to an old tome that likely no-one has read. Build up a stub. Wiki loves to quote figures such as "number of articles" (quantity over quality, yay!), promoting the best as if they in any way represented the state of the rest, so I'm doing my little bit.
Incidentally, I wonder if similar practices occur in the field of Open Source contributions? In that case, it couldn't be a matter of contributing simple code that *doesn't work*, but volunteering sufficiently complex and functional enhancements that nevertheless include some subtle vulnerability, which following contribution and deployment provides the cracker with a waiting herd of machines to compromise.
What you are describing is the stable versions proposal, and it's currently being worked on by the developers. Basically, an administrator would be able to go in and flag a specific revision as being "stable", and that's what all readers of the article would see. You could of course choose to see the development version or make edits to the development version, but it will take an administrator to update the stable version, and he will do so by comparing the changes since the last stable version and making sure everything is legitimate.
That doesn't really sound like what he was describing. I'll admit that any distinction between "what Wikipedia shows browsers by default" and "what the last edit was" will help, but beyond that your proposals differe significantly. Using a large number of trusted users and a length of elapsed time to mark versions as "stable", like TheRaven64 suggested, will scale much better but will still be prone to determined vandals. Requiring administrators to mark stable versions, like you describe, will prevent real vandalism from being committed without "insider" assistance, but will require a lot of administrators to keep stable versions up to date.
The way you are framing the problem makes it a futile effort. You cannot say "if only everybody would do this, then..." because you will never get everybody to do one thing or act in one way. In the real world solutions involve creating systems that encourage certain behavior. Capitalism "works" because it encourages the creation of wealth. Communism didn't work out because it expected people to behave a certain way, it didn't encourage behavior.
If you look at wikipedia in this way, it is just a new type of system made possible because of new technologies. Wikipedia encourages people to contribute, and it is being refined as a system to handle uses and abuses that don't contribute to its goal. If the goal is to be an encyclopedia of human knowledge, I believe it stands a far better chance then any encyclopedia or company in history. Wikipedia is just a very efficient way of collaborating on information, with few limits. It is more like the first time the abstract class of information sharing has been instantiated, even tho its children classes have been objects for a long time. Look at a dictionary, communication is a lot more flexible than the words in a dictionary but it is still an attempt to collaborate on meaning. Look at peer-reviewed journals, its just a few people collaborating and we all trust them (for the most part) because they are experts. Look at published books, its one or a few peoples expression of knowledge.
For so long we have trusted these children objects because we believe in experts and we believe in authority. The dissemination of knowledge has always been from the top down, from authority to the masses, from experts to the laymen. The internet has gone and thrown a nice big wrench in this historical system. All of the sudden nobody is an expert, all of the sudden information can come from anywhere. All of the sudden we don't have this magical authority anymore to tell us what is right and wrong, and for many people that is unimaginable.
I firmly believe that the internet will do away with peer-reviewed academic journals, and all other sorts of authority. It may be a while off, and many people may call me crazy, but I see it. Instant communication using wiki like technologies will allow the efficient review and commenting of any academic work. I envision a system that has been worked out over time, perhaps derived from wikipedia or even slashcode that allows people to weigh in on the merits and flaws of a work. History of revision, immediate feedback and efficient communication will all supercede the percieved authority that money can buy.
Perhaps today you cannot cite wikipedia in an academic setting, but do not laugh at the thought that one day wikipedia, google scholar, slashdot, and all of the similar endevours in their vein will bring about a complete shift in what information is trusted. Bloggers were supposed to do this with news, and I argue that they have only begun. I predict in the next 5 years the media landscape will be completely unrecognizable from the one we have today, and further more todays media landscape will be laughed at for the inefficient joke that it is.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
I would say he proved his point, and in a very dramatic fashion. Wikipedia cannot be trusted as a source. Remember back a bit when our illustrious politicians were playing games on Wikipedia?
But Wikipedia itself has million sources (contributors)!
factor 966971: 966971
I changed the wikipedia entry for "backfired" so it means "brilliantly executed" now.
Here is the torrent for the show's video.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Indeed it is large and hardy: according to the Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia, it's run by a pack of elephants.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Ehh undergrad papers are largely a joke anyway. The only person reading them is the person grading them, so the only person they're hurting is themselves.
Wikipedia is a bad resource for a number of reasons, the least of which being its somewhat dubious provenance: it is never a primary source, at best a secondary source, and most often a tertiary source, neither of which are incredibly accurate or paint a very good picture of ths subject.
Wikipedia can be a good resource for beginning your research, however. If the article is any good, it will document its sources, which you can then look up and use yourself. The source material usually has more information than is posted on Wikipedia, which might also be useful to your topic.
This is kind of like his word "truthiness". I, for one, like the word "wikiality" as a way to describe that concept and I think I'll start using it!
On the contrary, it proved exactly what Colbert's point was. Wikipedia's very nature makes it prone to misttatements and error.
Actually, I think his point was that humanity's very nature makes it prone to misstatements and error. What is truth? I dunno, ask around... Check on Wikipedia maybe.
Wikipedia is just a focus point because it is a concentration of "knowledge" that is free to modify by anyone (like the body public). This makes it an easy target, and a good way to demonstrate the broader problem of determining what the facts are. He is basically restating the old adage "history is written by the victor" (Bonaparte?) with a twist.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
For instance, if you use the words, right wing before the word radio, you can create the impression that radio talk shows are somehow biased or deceitfully biased. It'd be like if we used blanket statements like, "left wing web logs" or "idiot poster" when talking about slashdot.
Although the actual statement made by Al Gore had nothing to do with funding, it was clearly an attempt by him to take credit for the internet's creation, despite the fact that this was really an ancillary effect of the funding Mr. Gore actually voted for. The statement reveals that Gore is the worst kind of liar: he uses statements that are technically true to craft mistaken impressions.
Ironically, this is pretty much the opposite of your post, which uses mistaken impressions and jingoistic terminology to make a statement that is, in fact, profoundly true.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Wonderfull satire. Are you a writer for the Report?
AccountKiller
Yet the article on Lutheranism is still shorter than the article on Truthiness. The Lutheran movement had a much larger impact on world history than the word 'truthiness'. That was Colbert's overall point; Wikipedia does not represent reality but a subset of reality which he coined Wikiality.
Wikipedia represents the state of human knowledge at some point in time which is vastly different than the Truth. In 50 years an article about Truthiness might be just one line while the article about Lutheranism will still be the same length, if not longer. Wikipedia only has the "truth of the moment" while the Truth is something timeless.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
In Soviet Russia, Wife orders YOU ! ! !
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
This user runs a revert bot which reverts legimate editors to force his POV. It has even reverted Jimbo Wales edits. Please ban this bastard from Wikipedia!
There is no way in hades that Colbert thinks this comedic-stunt backfired. He nailed front-page-top-story press in a large number of press sources that target his key demographic. Plus, this was absolutely hilarious (at least to me and most in the kingdom on geekdom). PS: Colbert loves Dungeons and Dragons; the man can do no wrong in my eyes!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
This is termed Original Research and Wikipedia has a No Original Research Policy.
Basically, Colbert tried to make Wikipedia become a Primary Source for his thoughts/opinions on Idaho, Washington, Portugal and elephants.
Because of the NOR policy, it had to be removed.
Curiously, since this has happened and has been convered by the media (which are valid Primary sources) then it may eventually become valid Wikipedia entries (which will use the media coverage as sources) instead of original content.
Stephen Colbert, John Stewart, and the whole Daily Show team are the bestest. Let Stephen play Wiki... Let Stephen Play!
Colbert failed to show that Wikipedia is less factual than books and other media.
The only thing he succeeded in showing was that Wikipedia is somewhat more malleable and more open than books and other media.
Just because a book is not open or malleable does not mean it's more factual.
Some facts are not determined by a democratic process. Some are. For example, if you want to know for a fact an opinion of some group, there is no way to find out other than to engage in a democratic process. There are many types of truth. Some are tangible and some are intangible. I love my parents. That's a truth. It's not subject to proof or examination. If I say so, someone has to basically trust me, for, ultimately, no real reason. Yes, the sky is above, and if for some reason majority voted it was below, it wouldn't mean it actually was below. But that's only one type of truth. The fact that people did vote it (let's suppose they did, for the sake of argument) was below is also a truth. Although what such vote alludes to is misleading, but that people did vote is a truth in its own right.
The faith in books is tied to belief in experts. So far, the belief in experts has been mainstream, and this is ironic! On one hand, people think only experts know all the truth. On the other hand, the majority of people do not seriously ask any expert on whether or not to believe the experts. The majority believes in experts unasked! So, even though the common opinion esteems the experts, the way in which the esteem of experts is upheld is dumb and sheep-like in its actual practice and execution. Don't you think that there is a lot of truthiness in hoards blindly believing the experts?
Don't you think that books just plain old FEEL more factual? I mean, they smell good and they are substantial. They are things that you can touch and set on fire. They are real. Therefore what's printed in them is real and factual. There is a lot of truthiness to this, right? That's why the price of books in colleges keeps going up and up and up, because in our increasingly virtual world books are the last bastions of truthiness, and people are willing to pay top dollar for what just plain feels right (even if the actual material in the book is presented by morons who couldn't teach their way out of a paper bag, look it's glossy and bleached, heavy bond paper goodness).
Colbert just plays to the common sentiment.
They were by the elephants, wheren't they?
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
How so? I think Colbert proved the point he wanted to make quite nicely. The fact that many entries contained the false statistics for at least some portion of time shows the inherent flaws with the wiki system. (Sure, it was only a short period of time - but imagine you're writing a paper on elephants.. and just happen to come upon the entry at that point in time.)
I am the maverick of Slashdot
My fiancee is in school for a degree in Library Studies, which mostly consists of learning research methods. It's been amazing how many of her classmates have put down wikipedia as a reputable source.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Actually I heard elephants are cloned by the Walt Disney Corporation and the typical gestation period is about 20 minutes.
Who's with me fellas?!
Whatever has caused you to have an irrational phobia of this project, I'm sick of hearing you all bitch about it. I don't care if you lost an edit war. I don't care if someone thought your prayer group wasn't notable enough for an entry. And I certainly don't care that wikipedia doesn't agree with your favourite news channel/conspiracy nut.
Its a good project that does what it sets out to do, and does it well. The fact its resisted what is effectively a DDoS attack from a major celebrity with millions of "zombies" at his disposal should testify to that.
No, it isn't perfectly accurate. But if people were to fact check the news as anally as wikipedia is checked, they would find it much, much worse. People find one or two inaccurate articles and hold them up as examples of why wikipedia "doesn't work" whilst failing to mention the thousands of articles that are accurate.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"it is never a primary source, at best a secondary source, and most often a tertiary source"... Well, this is true of all or nearly all encyclopedias, isn't it? They aren't doing original research themselves, right? They are documenting the state of knowledge that other's acquire.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
I love how the right wing pundits get upset about what comedians do and say.
They go on and on about Air America Radio -- a comedy news show financed by comedian and producer Al Franken.
Then they look at The Daily Show and Colbert Report as though these are genuine news outlets, when they are in
fact comedy programs. I think the whole thing is hilarious.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Well its not just college kids that do it, it their books to http://www.collegehumor.com/pictures/1686891/
Can someone please tell me why I care about this story at all? Colbert's joke was still funny and Wikipedia is still Wikipedia. Why is this news?????????????
don't ban stephen colbert from anything. the nation won't stand for this
sense of security, like pockets jingling...
"other's acquire."
Other's what acquire?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Unfortunately, current plans for a stable versus unstable Wikipedia branch don't appear to address the flaws with the philosophy behind Wikipedia, one of which is the lack of qualified scholars. A Wikipedia administrator is not, by virtue of being an administrator, anymore qualified to dub an article 'stable' than a normal user of Wikipedia.
If Wikipedia is going to go through the trouble of creating a stable branch, Wikipedia ought to consider soliciting scholars and other qualified individuals to scrutinize articles for factual content rather than mere conjecture or personal opinion. In most colleges and universities Wikipedia is not considered a suitable source for research, even as a jumping off point, because its information cannot be verified.
That's like stealing something from the office snack box to prove that the honor system doesn't work. The point is that, in the aggregate, most entries will be made and corrected by people who want to get it right. When used as a broad-brush resource, it seems to work pretty well. It just needs to be understood for what it is: a community-maintained, honor-system-based store of information.
Evil is the money of root.
my problem is that i expect that some user might follow up on a citation to wikipedia and any work that i did to verify the content that was on the page at the time that i read it is meaningless when applied to the state of the content when the reader follows my trail. so i may in my paper include the statement "the population of African Elephants has been declining throughout the 21st century [5]" where source 5 is a pointer to wikipedia/Elephants, and when the reader follows the link he finds "the population of African Elephants has tripled in the last 6 months." so now i risk contradicting the source that i cited for the statement, or do i just instead add a citation for whichever source that i used to verify wikipedia before i used that statement (which is hopefully more static)? should we cite the particular version of the document that we're citing in the same manner that one may specify an edition of a book reference?
There's an argument for some sort of flagging system in wikipedia that would differentiate between fact, fiction, speculation, opinion, etc. For instance, look up something like "Jedi".
First, there's no disambiguation - since JEDI is also an acronym for the Joint Expeditionary Digital Information system and for the Joint Enterprise DoDIIS Infrastructure you would think that there's be mention of something besides the fiction. According to Wikipedia, the only Jedi is the fake one.
Second, sometime after the first reference to fictional characters, the article goes into full authoritative mode with passages like "The Force is an incorporeal energy field that is generated by all living organisms and permeates the universe and all things within." If you skimmed over that whole fictional reference, you're in trouble. That section ends with "This life-force is known in China as qi or chi; in India, prana and in Japan as Ki. A belief in a life-force is most commonly seen in the East, practised by Buddhists, Taoists, Confucianists, and Hindus." Terrific. A billion or so people just got told that their beliefs are equated with George Lucas' fantasies.
This is also part of a larger problem with the inability of a (larger than you'd hope) portion of the general public to distinguish between fact and fiction. I teach science. For nearly a school year, back in 1986, nearly every lesson on biology that mentioned the brain brought up a question about this brain transplant that they saw on TV and it was so cool - how did they do that? This all came from one fictional made-for-tv movie about a brain transplant called "Who Is Julia?" I got more questions about that than I did about the real events that same year at Chernobyl.
Third, as a reflection of our culture, it's way out of whack with what we hold important.
The Jedi entry prints out at 17 pages.
Stephen Hawking's is 6.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Here's a link. Well worth checking out, it's a good resource.
I don't even think that it is usually the honor system. People have their own biases and they often express them in their entries. People also post facts that they think are true but are actually false.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Did anybody else try googling 'wikiality' last night, notice there were 0 hits, then try again today and see that there are (as yet) "about 209,000"?
No? Just me? Ah, well, worth a shot...
Wikipedia celebrates 750 years of American independence: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902
[citation needed]
Maxium fun with the subject, little harm to the truth.
http://www.wikiality.com/
On Notice
Dead to me
The Eagle's Nest
Iraq War
Oregon
George W. Bush
Elephant
Bears
Lutheran
Babar
Tek Jansen
8. Read about it on
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yes certain articles have to be watched and monitored. Yes he was able to put incorrect information on there. But in a few days, after the article is fixed, there will be an article on Wikkipedia about how he tried to prove that it was venerable, the adjustments the editors made, and the details of the end result.
Document that in the encyclopedia.
---------
I've got no sig, and I feel kinda naked.
-Todd
Put down the sig, and step away from the computer.
I agree, this was intended as a serious comment.
There was another very good story written about Wikipedia in the Jul 31, 2006 issue of the New Yorker. It's titled 'Know it All' and is written by Stacy Schiff. You can find it here. The history of Wikipedia is delved into at depth. Many epistemological questions are raised. The main point Stacy made was that perhaps the dynamic, self-correcting nature of Wikipedia, notwithstanding all of its deficiences, is the best encyclopedia for the dynamic nature of the modern world we live in.
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/
(Further, anyone who thinks that Stephen Colbert, on the show, urging people to change Wikipedia actually MEANS he wants those people to do that betrays an utter ignorance of what the Colbert Report is: a dead-on satire of the right-wing talk show arena. No one should ever take anything the character of Stephen Colbert says seriously.)
His intent is not the point. The point is that he used his position as the host of a TV show to encourage people to vandalize Wikipedia. Whether that's what he really wanted, whether the "sensible" viewers went along with it, etc. is beside the point. The thing is, even if it was a joke, it encouraged people to vandalize Wikipedia. Even if people looked at it and knew it wasn't serious, probably a lot of people felt it'd be fun to go along with it. His action directly contributed to vandalism of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is by no means perfect, of course, but it is an earnest attempt at building something worthwhile. I can't abide people willfully sabotaging that, much less encouraging legions of fans to do it, as in this case and the older Penny Arcade case (though PA at least proposed a very harmless sabotage).
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Colbert got his laughs and didn't get in any kind of legal trouble. I think he would still count this as a success
I've seen a lawer cite it in a brief he filed in defense of client. (NSFW language, but an absolutely hilarious piece of work.)
If you're going to refer to anything you should be quoting versions. Hell, when I write customer documentation I quote version numbers and release dates on related documents. If you want a coherent view you have to tell the reader everything they need to know about finding the document in the form you saw it.
The problem with Wikipedia is the it only works in practice, not in theory.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You could also say that the Encyclopedia Britannica is full of trivia, which in fact, it is.
You are welcome on my lawn.
My professor said that Wikipedia isn't a valid source "because anyone can edit it".
How is Wikipedia not a valid source? Anyone can put anything on their website and call it factual. Anyone can put anything in a book and call it factual. Any source is factual as declared by the author, so why not Wikipedia?
I trust the collaboration of thousands over one person - whether they are anonymous or not. Besides, I always use more than one source.
except for SpongeBob, and Mr. Crabs, and Squidward, and . . .
Resisting graffiti... Cleaning up graffiti promptly so it doesn't encourage more graffiti and without resorting to draconion methods of prevention. Or in gaming terms.. "resistance" is not "immunity".
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
If you go to Wikiality.com there's a full blown Colbert wiki set up. WHOIS lookup has the email from someone with the domain of hostingstuff.com. Hard to tell who it is, but Colbert Nation fans know he's no friend of bears!
Wikipedia represents the state of human knowledge at some point in time which is vastly different than the Truth.
That is true of all encyclopedia.
Wikipedia represents the changing state of human knowledge from some point in time forwards, with emphasis on topics of the day, and greatest emphasis on topics that impact most on the segment of society that contributes to wikipedia. THAT is why Truthiness is longer than Lutheranism.
In 50 years an article about Truthiness might be just one line while the article about Lutheranism will still be the same length, if not longer.
Probably not. Who would shorten it, and why?
Wikipedia only has the "truth of the moment" while the Truth is something timeless.
Wikipedia records changes, so you can actually view the "truth of the moment" as it changes. If they can maintain that in perpetuity THAT may be its greatest contribution to society; the ability to go back in time.
As Colbert observed, anything can be "true" as long you beleive it. But wikipedia, for all his (hilarious!) satire still wins by both enabling errors to be fixed, and enabling previous versions to be seen.
Consider that even the mainstream encyclopedias refer to the terrorist attack of 9/11. 100 years from now, it may be revered as a heroic sacrifice made by the founding fathers of the proud and benevolent Irafganistyiaraq world super-power. But if wikipedia can hold onto its principles, you'd still be able to turn the clock back and read "the version from today" too.
Similiarly if wikipedia existed a few hundred years ago we could look back and read articles about the traiter George Washington, one of the high ranking leaders of a terrorist group seeking to overthrow the government, waging a war to carve his very own country out of the British Empire...or whatever.
Revisionist history has always existed, and will always exist; wikipedia may make history a little easier to revise... but at least makes it easy to see the revisions. And that's worth putting up with a little vandalism. Here's hoping they're still around in 100 years.
lutheranism is split up among more than article, per wikipedia's non-paper rule. There's more about lutherans than there is about truthiness, just less in one article.
Yeah, but if you overhear someone talking about, say, Mickey Spillane and you want to know who he is, wikipedia is fine. That's what wikipedia is for, in my opinion. Most people, I would venture to say, learn in order to satisfy their own curiosity, not because they're writing a report. And biases are found in any information found in any context (usually, in what the writers have chosen NOT to say). Its just a fact of life that you have to learn to recognize them and read around them. And with more diversity than any other encyclopedia company, I'd bet there's less bias than any other encyclopedia.
Sorry about the double reply, but after my initial post, I did a little googling and turned up this very detailed, point-by-point response to Vaknin's rant.
Find free books.
You got it! Someone here got it! I mean, he even said have fun editing the entry on "elephants".... duh! Honestly, some folks just don't get satire. I love it!
/gam/
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
But it's not hard to establish credibility by performing meaningful edits and additions, if only for the purpose of then using that credibility to do malicious things. It also makes the credible users targets for hackers, who could hijack the account and then do those malicious things. At most web forums and whatnot I frequent, I've established credibility as a reliable source of information, so if I were feeling like an asshole some day and decided to have a little fun with the method that someone could use to safely discharge a monitor's capacitors, I could easily put someone in the hospital, if not a coffin. I'm not the type to do that, but anyone can have a bad day.
Of course for the most part, that all goes to hell with Wikis. The vast majority of the users aren't checking who the last person to edit the page was, and certainly aren't going to be following the editing trends of those people. On forums, each of my posts has my postcount next to it, and an indication of whether I've been banned. That information may be accessable in Wikis, I don't know, but it's not at the very top of each page to keep unsuspecting users on their toes. Certainly, it's stupid to assume anything on Wiki is true; likewise, it's also easy to make an educated guess as to the likelihood of a page being vandalized (as you said, gravity versus politics). Wikis have the advantage of (on well-constructed pages, which is what "the" Wiki expects) citing their sources, which although they tend to be websites as well (which can just as easily be biased or wrong), it can still give users an impression of how accurate things are. It's usually obvious when there's subjective writing in place, pages containing so-called "weasel words" often get flagged as such, but it may not stick out as blatantly biased or wrong if subtle "facts" are added into otherwise-accurate pages.
User and pseudonym tracking is great for the editors of Wikis, but they're largely pointless for your everyday users who just want to grab the odd fact. What's great is how strong the community is - well over half of the pages I've viewed on Wikipedia have some sort of warning flag on them, whether it marks a stub, inaccuracy, lack of citations, use of 'weasel words', future information, whatever. Does it mean the information is accurate? Absolutely not. But it means that the community is actively checking things, and that bizarre inaccuracies and the like are often taken care of quickly, if only marked as such and not corrected outright.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I don't see how this isn't a win/win for Colbert and a Lose/Lose for Wikipedia.
You poor, misguided, soul! You are sadly misguided if you think the "theory" of gravity is uncontroversial.
Miller was a leftist, right up until 9/11. Immediately afterwards he was a champion of the right.
To put it plainly, the terrorists scared him into becoming a conservative. Therefore, he's a coward and has no credibility in my eyes whatsoever. Watching that video of him learning how to play golf is one of the saddest and lamest things I've ever seen.
If you're going to be a conservative, then be one based upon the merits of the platform. Don't just jump on board because something spooked you.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It was always my understanding the Second World was what used to be called the "New World," i.e., what the old empires colonized, the First World being the "Old World" (western Europe) and the Third World being pretty much everything else. However, m-w.com backs you up and says "Third World" is "a group of nations especially in Africa and Asia not aligned with either the Communist or the non-Communist blocs." I admit I never heard this definition before. Still (she said defensively), the definition of "first world" is "the highly developed industrialized nations often considered the westernized countries of the world." Not western. Westernized. Implying more countries, like Mexico, join that world every decade or so. Portugal and Canada were never anything else. Only the definition of "second world" is specific to the Cold War: "Communist nations regarded in the latter part of the 20th century as a political and economic bloc." Lastly, and this is really my point, the broadest "third world" definition is "the aggregate of the underdeveloped nations of the world," which still doesn't include Canada, Mexico, or Portugal. Had Mr. Colbert referred to Oregon as, say, "Nevada's Burundi," then yes, the "third world" line would be exactly right.
User: brandongalbraith on En-Wiki
You can make it say whatever you and a sufficiently large enough motivated group of your friends want it to say. Oh it's wonderful if you want to learn about Mole's Law or the lifecycle of apples. Things that are scientific facts (like evolution wink wink) but that's it. For anything vaguely related to current events history politics religion and so on Wiki is pure crap.
His point wasn't that, you are mistaking his example for his point. His point was a much older political truism, if I lie is repeated often enough it becomes the truth. Wikipedia just happened to be a convienient method to bring up the example. He was point was the same as Nunberg's in Talking Right but dumbed down for those who don't bother to read a book.
The point of satire is to make you think the humor just makes the medicine go down easier.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Colbert's whole point was to mock they idea implicit in Wikipedia that all people are equally valid sources of authority, and that in disputes over facts the truth should be determined by which side has the most people.
By limiting the editing of the page to a small group of 'trusted editors' on the articles invovled, aren't the Wikipedia admins essentially conceding he's correct?
Of course - with three times as many elephants, they are practically everywhere now!
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
How is that backfiring? Yes, you can protect certain Wikipedia pages from vandalism -- at least temporarily -- by blocking modifications to them. And only people in power can choose to do that. Some areas of Wikipedia have gotten so bad that this needs to be done routinely.
So how does this not demonstrate that there is something fundamentally silly about having it be a collaborative free-for-all? The only way you can prevent abuse effectively is by making it non-collaborative by blocking edits and a non-free-for-all since only admins can call for such blocks. Quite frankly, it demonstrates the inherent nonsensical nature of Wikipedia quite nicely. And we're not getting into the area of libel, and the lack of responsibility therein ...
Must be under 'news for nerds' because it definitely isn't anything that matters.
Wait a minute. Why can't "truth by mob" make it in to Wikipedia? Citations by reliable sources? Who determines reliablility? No. Mob rule can easily win out. You have a large enough community dictate...err...colude...err...reach a consensus about what truths will be entered, and voila! You have "truth." You can see these throughout Wikipedia. Fundamentalist Mormons put Joseph Smith's idea of Babylonian transoceanic settlers on the pages as facts, with strawman counter arguments to refute. I'm not singling out the Mormons for special comdenation, all small groups with specialized "contraversial" entries do this. Religion just brings out the wackos dedicated to supporting their "truth." If someone puts a stronger refutation of whatever "truth" on the page, it's reverted as "vandalism."
No. It's not democracy. It's IRC OP-wars with better PR.
Click on "edit this page". Now, edit the page. Finally, click "save". Its no harder than posting on slashdot.
But likewise, an unbiased view is sometimes not even worth printing. An unbiased, encyclopedic description of a politcal debate can't capture much of what makes that debate ineteresting, powerful, and ultimately historical.
Colbert may be banned from Wikipedia, but he's always welcome at Uncyclopedia (www.uncyclopedia.org).
Say what you want, but more and more people are seriously attempting to cite Wikipedia as source material. It's quite a disturbing trend.
Colbert was just using wikipedia as an example of how people inentionally alter the facts for their own benefit. The source doesn't have to be wikipedia. Take FOX News for example.
Well I agree that Wikipedia has more information in that you can discover what a particular group of people thought about a subject at a certain point in time. Also Wikipedia records disputes in its talk pages. However that was not Colbert's point. Wikipedia like human knowledge is fluid in that is ever changing. The Truth never changes, it is always the same.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I use it only for unimportant things, like fictional lore. I have enjoyed reading Warcraft lore, Wheel of Time lore, etc. I would never right a term paper using "facts" from there, though.
Wah wah wah waaaaaaaaaaaah!
You are attempting to read sigs. Cancel or Allow?
I've seen wikipedia cited in UN Secretariat reports. Makes me wonder if they inspect what the interns are writing.
...but .. stewart is "for real" a bit on the left, and colbert is only "fake" on the right .. ? .. I get it now .. yes, excellent plan!! :-D
OOOOHHHHH!!
I for one welcome our vandalism-shielded overlords.
I've used wikipedia several times as a source document, but it's far more valid when you site it as an opinion piece rather than a heavily accurate source of information (unless a direct authoritive source is pointed out, I carry the same skepticism of public works)
Wikipedia is more like the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, it's at times wildly innacurate, biased and informed on a wide variety of subjects, but is a hell of alot more interesting than reading the much more popular and authoritive Encyclopedia Brittanica, and has largely replaced it as the repository of all earthly knowledge and wisdom.
...bloggers. With words like blog, blogging and blogosphere, it is going to be a long hard road uphill before anyone takes them seriously. Every time I hear someone on television mention the word blog I cringe.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
I wouldn't boast about the claimed strenght of Wikipedia for resisting vandalism solely on an attack that was "announced" on TV in a show watched by millions. I know Wikipedia a one of the sacred institutions of the geeks and Slashdot-average-joes but fanatism was stretched a bit too far in this case.
Perhaps today you cannot cite wikipedia in an academic setting, but do not laugh at the thought that one day wikipedia, google scholar, slashdot, and all of the similar endevours in their vein will bring about a complete shift in what information is trusted.
People are used to having experts filter inaccuracies and out and out lies from the information they read. With sources like Wikipedia, it's unclear to people how to separate the lies from the truth. (And in a climate of "truthiness", that distinction gets even cloudier...). SOME people will get better at filtering for themselves. The question is whether or not enough people will learn that skill to make the Wikipedias of the world the "goto" sources of the future. The problem is that anytime a new technology asks MORE of us as people, it fights an uphill battle.
But I do think that there is some hope for learning these new filtering skills. People who read both Slashdot and Digg have probably experienced this self-filtering already. Any sensational sounding Digg headline (even one that makes the front page (or perhaps especially one that makes the front page)) referencing an article is immediately suspect. But if the same news or article makes it onto Slashdot, the suspect-o-meter doesn't register quite so high. Slashdot doesn't perfectly filter out meaningless articles either - but the frequency for Slashdot is certainly lower than it is for Digg. Whether you prefer the Digg method to the Slashdot method has a healthy dependence on how much time you have to wade through the noise and filter it out for yourself.
The length of an article doesn't imply impact. Sephiroth has more information in his entry than any of the first seven Henry rulers of England. There's more information on Jack Bauer than on Duhamel's integral. There's more information on baseball than there is on George Washington.
The simple matter of fact is, there are more people who can accurately describe Jack Bauer than Duhamel's integral. Because more people have facts to add about baseball than to George Washington. "Pop culture" for better or for worse, is culture, and that's many people are familiar with. So they add and edit those entries. Who, besides some scholar or historian, will be able to add new information regarding George Washington? Compare that to how many people know about the Simpsons, or some pro wrestler, or their favorite movie character.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but Wikipedia is more of a reflection of many people's collective thoughts, and as such, you're going to find a lot of "fluff" topics that an encyclopedia would never even consider covering.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
As I was watching it last night, I could visualize thousands of people on their laptops first flocking to the Colbert Report entry to see if he had really changed it, along with a few immediately updating it to read that "Colbert often refers to Oregon as Idaho's Portugal." About two minutes later, I figured they would all be heading over to the elephant entry to modify that, and then I estimated that within 5 minutes, a handful of moderators watching the show would have no doubt reverted and temporarily locked down both pages.
As I look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colbert_Report I see that there were approximately 150 edits yesterday, a significant portion of them reverts, it is semi-protected, and there are probably 20-30 threads discussing yesterday's show in the discussion for the entry. However, Oregon doesn't appear anywhere in the entry if I search the page.
There's probably 300 edits to Elephant, too, and the discussion suggests that long-contributing members joined in on the vandalism.
On a side note, I think this is a perfect example of the wikipedia model working successfully. Not a claim that wikipedia is perfect, but the community successfully limiting such "organized" vandalism on such an open site in commendable.
Under such a system, you would know who takes responsibility for the facts as they are presented
Take responsibility, without sufficient compensation to offset the risk, for the accuracy of specialized knowledge in our litigious society? Surely you jest, who would want to do that?
1. The 'expert' signs the Wikipeidia article.
2. Someone uses the information and hurts themselves or others.
3. Enterprising lawyer sues...here is the guilty one your honor! the 'expert' who signed the article!
4. Profit...well for the lawyer anyway.
5. Members of the 'class' receive their checks for $0.02 each.
great idea
i support the right to offend.
Thank you for making the point that I was going to. As far as internet research goes, wiki is great, because well written articles have links to solid citations that end up being extremely useful. It's not a source for knowledge, but it is a great compilation of facts with useful links at the end.
But I'm still surprised at how many +5 postings here support Colbert and what essentially was an attack on wikipedia. Face it, he instrumented a significant waste of time for many editors. If you really wanted to, you could translate that to dollars the same way companies do after receiving website defacements.
Whether or not it was satire or funny is irrelevant. If someone you didn't idolize did the same thing (even if just to make a point or a joke), you'd be burning them in effigy.
Capitalism "works" because it encourages the creation of wealth. ...by assuming people want to be wealthy.
paintball
Yet the article on Lutheranism is still shorter than the article on Truthiness. The Lutheran movement had a much larger impact on world history than the word 'truthiness'.
Your error is in thinking that the length of an article conveys an idea of how important the topic is. I think that kind of thinking comes from the idea that there's a limited amount of space to print information, so the things that are most important get longer articles. That's not the case on wikipedia. The limitations are really one of editors and interest. It's pretty easy to expand an article on a light topic like Truthiness when you're just repeating what someone has already said (and there's a huge base of obsessed fans). It's much harder to expand on something that has a lot more depth and breadth like Lutheranism. That requires actual research and not just watching a TV show.
In 50 years an article about Truthiness might be just one line while the article about Lutheranism will still be the same length, if not longer. Wikipedia only has the "truth of the moment" while the Truth is something timeless.
Now you're confusing Truth with relevance. In 50 years I doubt truthiness will be terrible relevant to anyone, but that doesn't mean it's not something that actually happened. It's still just as "true" as Lutheranism, just of little importance. You're also making the mistake that irrelevant information should be deleted. Why? I could certainly see some kind of tag being added to information we (at the time) consider to be less important, or maybe putting it in an archive of some sort to avoid "clutter". But there's really no reason to delete the information. Personally I think deleting it would be wrong. Who knows what people 200 years from now might be fascinated to read about the current day.
AccountKiller
"I think Colbert's point was that Wikipedia and other vote based knowledge bases"
Wikipedia is not a democracy. Evidence-based, rational discussion leading to consensus, not voting, is the primary method by which article content is determined.
I really don't think wikiality is the subset of reality represented by wiki articles. I think the term wikiality means the editability and democratic debate of wikipedia being applied to history itself.
Well, if the Latex document has "wikipedia" in the title, it might be appropriate. (And in a century or so, it may be a great place to find rather nice illustrative popular-opinion and common-knowledge anecdotes.)
But, on the whole, you're right. Bibtex entries for wikipedia articles are pretty funny. (As would be a service that generates bibtex entries for print encyclopedia articles.)
1. I'm assuming that traditional encyclopedias have solved this problem, and they are not getting constantly sued. One needs only to re-use their solution.
2. The possibility of litigation is why God invented disclaimers. "Although this expert believes to the best of his/her knowledge blah blah, use this information at your own risk, etc."
3. I don't think an "anonymous" editor would be immune from this anyway. If somebody hired a private investigator who found out the editor's real identity, they could be sued in the same way. I suspect it wouldn't be impossible, given a bit of time, effort, and cash, to obtain a Wiki user's real identity.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I feel offended by envolving my country in your little problems.
"Who in their right mind would use Wiki as a 'source' document?"
/.'ers do and, no, they aren't in their right mind.
lot's of
I find it irritating that so much of the (massive) media attention on wikipedia right now hinges on a false dichotomy: whether it will (a) render the Encyclopedia Britannica obselete; or (b) implode. Reasonably, the question is not whether wikipedia will succeed, but the extent to which it will succeed. I predict that within a year, (a) Wikipedia will have adopted a /. or ebay style reputation system; (b) the scope of changes that a user may make will be, to some extent, limited by his reputation level; and (c) anonymous users will be either banned from edits or severely limited.
These changes would, while not solving all problems, solve most of the problems that have been identified to date.
Wikipedia like human knowledge is fluid in that is ever changing.
Yes, but and my point is that this is actually true of all representations of human knowledge - EXCEPT wikipedia.
Wikipedia is the one representation of knowledge where data is continually added, but never changed. If I write that that elephants have tripled in population, true or untrue, that datum will always be there, to be considered or ignored. In this case its not true, and it won't be on the "front page" of the elephant article for all time (nor should it be), but it will still be there. This is fundamentally different from previous repositories of knowledge, like encyclopedia, where both errors (and inconvenient truths) can be permanently removed, and eventually erased from memory.
The Truth never changes, it is always the same.
Agreed. And I recognize that the contrast between "our knowledge" and "the truth" was Colbert's point, along with a satirization of what wikipedia apparently lets you do to "our knowledge".
My point however is the "irony" of wikipedia. With one hand it gives everyone the freedom to contribute to "our knowledge" (or disrupt it) yet with the other hand it simultaneously "preserves the past" the way no other repository ever has.
To me it sounds like a five-year-old found a keyboard. And anyway, why would vandalising make wiki a better source. What argument is it that the service sucks if someone is a total moron and ruins it?
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
Why do you single out the Republican party instead of the Dumbocraps?
It seems to be on topic and merely his opinion on Stephen Colbert. I must admit though, being high, it was real easy picturing The Simpson's Comic Book Guy saying the above...
Boycott Sony
Articles were protected, but that didn't stop anonymous editors from asking for the fact to be added http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AFConWikipedia'sAr ticlesforCreationpageon Wikipedia's Articles for Creation page. I'm one of a group of editors who patrol that page, and decide if they're notable and reliable enough to deserve an article, and it doesn't get funny any more.
I do feel sorry for Tawker, though. He was a bit silly with the block summary, and now he's getting threats. And anyway, we block people with Dubya's name in or any celebrity, so when we see someone called Stephencolbert editing, we block and ask for confirmation that it is the Stephen Colbert.
Gunnar wrote on Tawker's blog
Wikipedia's got enough publicity. It's in the top 50 of all sites visited on the Internet according to sources such as Alexa.A good percentage of things on Wikipedia are true, and they're still trying to milk the Seigenthaler controversy nine months on.
Have you seen Mythbusters? All you need to do original research is the will to do it. :)
100 years from now, it may be revered as a heroic sacrifice made by the founding fathers of the proud and benevolent Irafganistyiaraq world super-power.
Don't you mean Israfghyiaanonanaq?
Wow - that's a heck of a lesson learned! The next time I vandalise articles on Wikipedia I will certainly be more carefull than Colbert and not announce it on an international television broadcast - thanks Steve!
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Slashdot sucks...seriously. Karma be damed but it needs to be said sometimes. Colbert's story is a day old. Colbert's idea didn't backfire. He spent a mere few minutes talking about Wikipedia and made his point. Left unchecked, Wikipedia can be rife with falsehoods. The elephants page is now correct but that's not to say the rest of the site is accurate. It's news that Colbert went so far as to do a segment on Wikipedia. Only a troll would say Colbert's story backfired, or a website trying to stir up attention.
Springer: Today, i have with me fataugie and his wife. What his wife doesn't know is that fataugie has less than $25 in his bank account.
fataugie: I have a confession... I,.. I've only got $22 in the bank.
wife: *Angry look*
wife: Well then, I have something to tell you too!
wife: *slaps* fataugie
wife: I'm not actually a woman!
crowd: ooh.... *starts cheering*
fataugie: *throws chair*
You don't like Family Guy?! The Nintendo Wii is nothing special?! Grown men playing with LEGO block is sad?! Dude, are you Jeff Albertson? :-)
Boycott Sony
Wrong! The point of the story was to reveal how the Democratic Party is hiding the truth about the resurgence of the elephant population. They will do anything to suppress the true popularity, and therefore population, of anything related to elephants, the proud image and icon of the Republican Party.
Another leftist conspiracy exposed for all the world to see. (Abe) For shame (/Abe).
Many academic facilities make this argument, and it is without credence. Unless of course you choose to redefine "research."
When using an encyclopedia, a student or researcher is supposed to use it as a basis of understanding. Then using that basis they can begin their research. One of the most important aspects of this research is finding original sources and examining them to verify the information.
In other words- you are never supposed to really believe an encyclopedia. It is always a starting point and nothing more.
Now in my day to day life, I am often satisfied with the information presented in an encyclopedia in its entirety. As an intelligent and thoughtful reader I can usually detect biases, and simply understanding the bias is enough for me without necessarily seeing the other side.
This is vastly different than academic study and research.
Wikipedia does in fact cite sources. The quality of those sources varies wildly, many being nothing more than biased web sites themselves. Still if you begin your research with Wikipedia, look through whatever sources it cites and do an independent search for your own primary and secondary sources... like you should with ANY encyclopedia, then you will have a solid basis for whatever purpose you may need to use the information for.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
To rephrase, "Encyclopedias document knowledge that other people (e.g. historians, research scientists, that sort of thing) have acquired (through original research) and published elsewhere (e.g. in books, journals, etc.)." Therefore the original comment that wikipedia isn't as good as other encyclopedias because "it is never a primary source, at best a secondary source" isn't a valid criticism, since the same criticism could be made against all other encyclopedias.
Re-reading, perhaps the original poster really meant that wikipedia is never a secondary source and at best a tertiary source.....
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
There is a connection between perceived importance and the length of an article. The more important someone thinks a subject is the more they know about it and the more they want to talk about it.
You're also making the mistake that irrelevant information should be deleted. Why? I could certainly see some kind of tag being added to information we (at the time) consider to be less important, or maybe putting it in an archive of some sort to avoid "clutter".
I'm not making that mistake, Wikipedia is. In 50 years, "Truthiness" may be seen as less important than people perceive it today therefore less people will have less to say about it. I'm sure someone will say "why is this article so long?" and will clean it up to the basic necessary facts. And no one will argue because they won't perceive it as important as we do today.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Accuracy is generally proportional to the number and variety of sources used. It is quite possible to have data from a large number of incorrect sources and still have a wildly inaccurate result OR to have data from a large number of sources and incorrectly synthesize or aggregate it, thus leading to an inaccurate result.
Having a big list of sources may be statistically more likely to lead to greater accuracy, but in any particular case, it'd be a big leap to go from "this article has a big list of sources" to "this article is therefore of greater accuracy (than one with fewer sources)". If you have an article with few sources that happen to be *better* sources, which themselves are more accurate, you can be better off than with a greater count of sources that end up being poorer sources.
That's not meant to be as nitpicky as it probably sounds, but my point really is that the number of sources can't be directly correlated to the accuracy of an article or fact. 100 wrongs still doesn't make a right, if you see what I'm getting at.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Don't you mean Israfghyiaanonanaq?
;)
Whichever is ruled by the descendants of Mahmoudahmadinawhatnow
Props on digging up the correct spelling, btw.
-cheers,
Yes, but and my point is that this is actually true of all representations of human knowledge - EXCEPT wikipedia.
Well I think wikipedia does the best job so far as recording the state changes in human knowledge and the transitions between states. If that is what you are trying to say I agree with you.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Don't... cause it's a joke.
Um, OK, but you still used a possessive when you meant to use a plural.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
brian0918 has pointed to out how the GP is incorrect, why is it still modded up? Talk about flaws in voting...
Lets all get our collective heads together and figure out a way for Colbert to really "get" the WikiPoo. If anything on this planet needs spoofing - is the pinnacle of truthiness - WikiPoo 8^)
He can head over to Uncyclopedia and mess with his entry there.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Look on the discussion page of Lutheranism and you see a group of editors that wrote the article talking about expanding the article. It probably would have been longer, if it weren't shortened for conciseness by having the content of the "history of Lutheranism" section moved into a completely separate article.
They summarized this in the main article, Lutheranism. When this occurs, they would call "history of Lutheranism" the subarticle and "Lutheranism" the parent article. "Lutheranism in the 1600s" might be a subarticle of "history of Lutheranism" in the future, when "history of Lutheranism" grows too long.
This is increasingly a main method of article growth on Wikipedia, rarer when compared to someone creating an article never evee mentioned in Wikipedia at all. For that I link to Claas Cougar as an example, the largest mower in the world (certainly not for lawns).
I think, when these subarticles are taken into account, I think they should probably all be grouped into one unit for the purposes of comparing content. That doesn't really matter in this case, though, because Truthiness has its own subarticle anyway.
There is a connection between perceived importance and the length of an article. The more important someone thinks a subject is the more they know about it and the more they want to talk about it.
Sorry, I don't see that connection. I'm not really certain I see that connection even in the print world. Is a book that's 5000 pages long more important than one that's 100 pages? When comparing two books on the same topic is the longer one more important? Where is it that length equals importance?
I'm sure someone will say "why is this article so long?" and will clean it up to the basic necessary facts. And no one will argue because they won't perceive it as important as we do today.
Why would someone "clean it up" and delete information? This strikes me as old thinking where space was limited, and content was static. Wikipedia isn't a book, and there's another option of just creating summaries of the content and hiding everything else in the full article. Even an outdated article that gets the facts wrong might be very interesting to someone. I'd love to read an article about the Aether, or geology pre-plate tectonics (and not a knowing look back, but what the authors actually thought at the time).
AccountKiller
The key word is 'perceived'.
Why would someone "clean it up" and delete information?
Because they don't think it's important. The same reason they clean/delete articles now.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
So Wikipedia is quick to fix vandalism if the vandal announces it on TV. Whoop-de-doo.
But in practice, do you know the individual writers of say Britannica, and all their individual biases?
And I could see your system making things worse - a biased "expert" could mark thinks unfairly and in a bias fashion, and there would be no way to undo that.
Not only that but if he was blocked for something that can be easily proven then why did the Wikipedians block him? Was it an underlying agenda? Doesn't look like Wikipedia is such a bastion of good will and community after all.
Wikipedia made itself as a bottom up group approach but now it has become a top down control of the masses. Oh the irony and repeating of history.
I don't think anyone here has really captured the message Colbert was really trying to convey. Wikiality is not about the tyranny of the majority, or the "undeserving" importance that some wiki entries get, but that truth is something that is decidable, that it isn't immutatable. The greatest demonstration of this effect is in wikipedia, where changing what is truth is just one edit away. He goes on to satirically say that all truths should be mutuable like this. With millions still believing the government's lies that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, I think we can all agree that wikiality has become the new reality.
Wikipedia doesn't just have a disclaimer, it has a whole heap of them, including the General Disclaimer linked from the bottom of every page.
The whole point of the segment was not about Wikipedia. It's about the willingness of people to believe whatever 'truths' are spoon-fed to them by the media, particularly the current administration's spin machine (and before all the republican slashdotters kill my dog, I'm sure this will also apply to future democrat administrations too).
Wikipedia was simply used as a pop-culture vehicle with which his audience could identify.
A One that isn't cold, is scarcely a One at all.
There's a bit of dialouge in Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaires that fits what happened to Colbert here. This dialouge takes places during the Davion invasion of Tharkad at the end of the game and it goes something like this:
Spectre: "Castle, defenders at Alpha neutralized and were moving on Beta."
Castle: "Patching you through to Central Command, Sir."
Peter Davion: "Were moving to crash there flank at Beta."
Spectre: "Defenders at Nav Alpha destroyed and were moving on Nav Beta."
Davion: "Roger. Take out those turrets. You're the anvil and I'm the hammer."
Spectre: "Roger, engaging Beta."
This is what happens when Colbert tries to attack a target and gets bit by his own plan. The defense is so swift and quick he don't know what to do.
Steven Colbert claims his "Truth" comes from the "Gut".
And on many occasions he has proclaimed his view of truth from his "Gut".
I have been impressed at the amount of truth that he can pull from his "Gut". But like the diminishing oil reserves in america, I think Steven's Gut is running out of the good "Truth". In each show, as he reaches deeper into his "Gut" for the new revelation of truth, he proceeds ever further into his digestive system. At the wikipedia segment, I believe he has finally reached the lower colon area, gleefully regurgitating the "Truth" away from his orifice.
The population still love steven's "Truth", they eat it up, hang on to each morseal, smear it on web pages for others to enjoy. America sure does love Steven's "Truth".
Quite the opposite! Wikipedia has only a select few people reviewing their more obscure topics, whereas real encyclopedias have teams of experts and editors factchecking everything. This means that Wikipedia has significantly more bias.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
No, not really. I was a fan of his comedy back-in-the-day. Then he became this scared little kid after 9/11. It took the punch out of the guy. I don't see that devil-may-care SNL guy anymore, and I can't respect anyone who just simply surrenders their balls like that. This guy sums it up way better than I can.
Besides, if I was going to pick someone on the right to bash for their opinions it wouldn't be him. Why pick such a low profile target when we have Ann Coulter for that?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You're missing the impetus.
it's not fear of "them", it's actually a trait assigned to 'traditional' liberals (protection of life/liberty types) - check out Christopher Hitchens, and Victor David Hanson's "switches" as you'd call them - due to 9/11- when they're not a switch, rather, an expression of what they see as a crucial issue stance. (VDH is still a pro-agrarian professor and Hitchens as Social Liberal columnunist)
There's an expression, not 100% true in my mind, but it fits your model: "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged"; wait for it.... and on 9/11 our country was mugged. Based on your statement above, you may find this points to xenophobia, and fear as the drivers for their 'conversion'. I submit, the mugee may still be 'liberal' as before, but want more deterrants and punative measures (pole-mounted cameras, stricter sentencing, fewer paroles, harsher on repeat offenders, etc.)
Some would say that make them 'conservative' on crime. I disagree. Tougher on crime, yes.
Just because a point of view is shared by many from a political camp, doesn't make it the property of that camp, nor those who also hold that view, members of that camp.
Amen to him standing on this issue "immediately" after 9/11, you write it like it's a fault (like he was supposed to wait a few months and reflect before deciding: "yeah, we were attacked. we've been attacked as a country consistantly by islamo-fascism since the Iranian kidnappings -> Beirut -> flights -> kidnappings -> and the domestic and military and embassy attacks of the last 10 years)
periodic re-evaluation, yes. finger in the air to check opinion polls, no.
If she floats, she's a witch.
I submit, the mugee may still be 'liberal' as before, but want more deterrants and punative measures (pole-mounted cameras, stricter sentencing, fewer paroles, harsher on repeat offenders, etc.)
True enough, and actually you're describing how I feel these days. But -
Some would say that make them 'conservative' on crime. I disagree. Tougher on crime, yes.
If it stopped right there, I'd say you were correct. But DM took it much farther. He went from this neo-hippie to a complete rewriting of his entire personality. Hosting Monday Night Football? Saying things like "George Bush has allowed us to respect the presidency again." To sum up how I feel about the guy, read The Millers Crossing.
Amen to him standing on this issue "immediately" after 9/11, you write it like it's a fault
Well, as the saying goes "Most things are ok in moderation". Too much of anything is probably bad for you. 9/11 for me? Well, I never really took being an American very seriously. And now I do. I display a flag in front of my house now. I take more of an interest in local voting issues. In short, I do my best to be an active American these days rather than a passive one. If being an American is important enough to some people to kill me for, then I better take it as seriously as they do.
But there is no way I'd let anyone scare me into changing who I am. Re-evaluation is ok, normal, healthy and good for you. But not when it comes from fear. Fearful people usually make bad decisions. Like poor Dennis.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You're kidding right ? A Mechwarrior reference to an Adult storyline ?! Colbert is a consumate actor, the part he plays is what you see... He's not right wing and he's not arrogant, he's a freeking nut, a great straight faced comedian that goes overboard "just cause".... You really missed the boat on this guy....
End of Line.
Even The Rock is better than Carlos Mencia.
Dennis Miller has finally taken his seat at the Algonquin Round Table, only unfortunately for humanity, it was moved to the Star Chamber adjacent to Richard Perle's rumpus room. Even now he's smirking his way through The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, secreted away at his Vegas lair amid stacks of John Birch Society literature, states-rights pamphlets, and sticky Jack Chick tracts. Yes, it's a dark day when the witty ally themselves with the witless, but having the spinal column of that guy who managed to be the last guy to wiggle himself into the packed phone booth, setting the world's record, does play a role here. I don't want to go off on a rant here, but Dennis Miller has as much credibility as Edward Kennedy at a water-safety course. His head is so far up Newt Gingrich's ass that he can smell the chemotherapy drugs Newt's bedridden wife was on when he filed for divorce. It wouldn't surprize me at this point if Dennis Miller was discovered entertaining Mel Gibson with "how many Jews will fit in a volkswagen" jokes as they drunkenly swerve their circuitous way to Rush Limbaugh's house to lift up his stomach so Ann Coulter can "polish the little ditto." But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Thank you.
So techinically both parties have started the same number of wars, Republicans have ended more though.
You also have two wars unaccounted for in the 'Ended' column, the two wars currently ongoing. I wonder who the oddsmakers say will end them.
Should undeclared wars count? Why not Yugoslavia? or Somalia? Pananama? Should the curent two be lumped together as the war on terror?
Why are we counting wars as credits to a party?
With Bach's music playing in the background, Schickele intones "These are the words of 'Jack' Bach, this is what he had to say . . . " and then reads from one of J S Bach's letters to a patron, complaining about not getting a promised level of compensation.
Like the GP post said, to be funny you have to know and love the material.
Do you have any sources to back up your statements?
Truthiness...
On the contrary, it proved exactly what Colbert's point was. Wikipedia's very nature makes it prone to misstatements and error. Wikipedia practically had to shut itself down after Colbert proved his point.
No, it's nature makes it more resilient than most things. Everything can be broken, by it's very nature. Buildings can be set on fire, people can be murdered, it's all very easy to do and very hard to fix. Wiki can be fixed in a way no dead tree equivalent can be and there are more people wanting to fix than there are morons wanting to play pranks.
Backfired? No way. We all got a great laugh from this.
You must be easily amused. This joke is going to get old and go away fast. Nothing is as boring as academics and the usual fun material for pranks, sex, shit and all that are already covered in eye glazing detail. The vandalism crowd is going to keep getting it's kicks rolling houses and offending local pomps with practical jokes.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
As I write, the Featured Article ("Damon Hill") consists of the text:
Youre gay!
I think it is seriously time for more editorial control. This is surely possible without compromising anyone's freedom. For example, pages should either be marked 'mature' or not (ie. they are good enough to be semi-authoritative). Such pages should not allow immediate editing; any user changes should be queueud to either be approved or rejected by a moderator. There should be live chat so rejected users can chat to moderators in case the user wasn't trolling.
Colbert praised Wikipedia for "wikiality," the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you - it becomes reality.
It's amazing how the big broadcast news companies have been making reality without opposition for so many decades. Up till now, the movers of the keys for "facts" have been very few indeed. Going from broadcast to distributed publishing and reporting has been a great thing for truth. The more impartial news sources you have, the more likely it is that you will know the truth.
Here's the fun part - Colbert actually did this. ... Colbert then urged his audience to find the Wikipedia entry on elephants [and fill it with crap]
Sometimes wrong is funny. Sometimes offensive is funny. This is not one of those times. Encouraging people to waste their time vandalizing a community resource will only destroy the community resource. This is about as funny as swapping books between libraries, or simply not returning them, so that people can't find the book they are looking for. If you want to go all out, you can have a good old fashion book burning for laughs. Most people have better things to do. Vandalism is about hatred and that's more pathetic than it is amusing.
What's really funny is that You Tube is giving complete unknowns better ratings than Stevie. Broadcast, with it's limits on who can contribute, is going the way of the dinosaur. Let's see him try to vandalize that with something smoother than his forehead.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Actually - you missed the overall point. Poking fun at the Wikipedia was simply a prop; an experiment that viewers themselves can participate in and experience directly. The overall point was the fluid nature of truth - or our ability to arbitrarily alter our perception of truth. This is not limited to the Wikipedia. After all, the Iraq WMD issue (mentioned in the segment) did not involve the Bush Administration routinely editing Wikipedia entries.
The fact that this comes from the Colbert Report should be a well appreciated irony. The show clearly lampoons Fox News. It has coined the term "truthiness" which is essentially perception of truth based on emotional response rather than fact. The basic theme of the Colbert Report is how malleable "truth" can be. And none of this involves the Wikipedia - at least not specifically. Much of this involves public perception driven by politics and the media.
Along those lines - those who appreciate irony should also appreciate the fact that Colbert's claims on Wikipedia's amount of information on Lutherans is actually incorrect. Yet that meme is being bandied about in this conversation as if it were factual truth.
I have a collection of encyclopedias published in the 1930s with copyrights going back to the 1920s. It is essentially a collection of 10 years of work - a snapshot of information from over 60 years ago. The "truth" found in that work is often in sharp disagreement with what I find in the Encyclopedia Britannica today. This discrepancy might come from being produced by different publishers. But it is certainly due to perceptions changing over time - out-dated material is easily identified by social changes and scientific advancements. In any case, the "truth" presented is hardly timeless.
The overall point was the fluid nature of truth
The Truth is always the Truth, it never changes. Don't confuse human knowledge for the Truth. Sure Wikiality could be applied to other records of human knowledge but Wikipedia is a glowing example of embracing a "democratization of truth".
Truthiness is thinking something is true because you believe it is true regardless of the Truth. Wikiality is believing something is true because the majority believe it is true regardless of the Truth.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
"A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged", yes, but "a liberal is a conservative who's just been arrested".
"On 9/11 our country was mugged" by terrorists, but now we're learning now what it is to be searched and wiretapped without probable cause, arrested without charges, and detained without legal representation.
I'm hoping that some of these fear-created conservatives will flip over to being fear-created liberals before it's too late.
As I heard it, Colbert was very funny for television viewers, but his performance wasn't very funny for the people in the room. Colbert apparently was very good at appealing to cameras, but not as good as appealing to a person situated right in front of him.
In contrast, Bush's performance was loved by the press, despite several good humoured jabs at the press. However, both performances were funny from the point of view of a television viewer.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
"his mind is not for rent, to god or government. - Rush" ;-)
Shouldn't that be "his mind is not for rent, to any god or government. - Rush"?
(Don't blame me - Geddy Lee sang it in my head when I read the sig)
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
Yet the article on Lutheranism is still shorter than the article on Truthiness. The Lutheran movement had a much larger impact on world history than the word 'truthiness'.
How does length of description correlate to impact on world history? If you look in any random paperbound encyclopedia, you'll find that many entries about unimportant things are quite long, too - simply because you need some space to describe them.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I don't think of it so much as cowardice than of naive in his convictions: he was a liberal because he thought it was hip, not because he had thought it through. The world is a dangerous place; always has been and always will be. I'm a (classical) liberal BECAUSE of that, not in spite of it. I believe that in the marketplace of ideas, liberalism will win out. But I'm also aware that others with different idealogies are going to fight my ideas with guns, bombs, and terror and my side must be willing to respond with spptriate levels of lethality when neccessary. To wit - Aghannistan sorely needed cleasned out. Iraq could have waited. In both countries, however, we HAVE to win the war of ideas with the common folk which means getting infrastructure back up and running regardless if that means we have to put 300000 more troops in. Only a small group of the enemy is out to kill americans becasue they want us out of the mid east. But there are large groups of them who are willing to do so when it's seen that the Americans are the ones who can't keep the lights on and the roads safe.
However, to get back on subject, Miller castigated the US Military every chance he got because he didn't really think they'd ever be needed for anything more than suppport for UN peacekeeping missions. When he found out that he was wrong, he jumped to the other side of the fence because he hadn't really thought that non nuclear warfare would ever be used again. He started "studying war no more" a whole lot sooner than the rest of the world did.
SO in which way DID the prank backfire now? i really don't think it did.
They get read by the same students who wrote them, you idiot - that's the point.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
GRRR...you are basing the value of the college paper on how many millions of people do (or do not, as the case may be) actually read it.
The fact is, at least one person should be reading it: the person who *wrote it*. It is *their* task to improve their lot. That's why they are given the assignment in the first place. The point is that damage is done in these papers through authors not learning how to be critical of their own sources and crafting a thoughtful argument. They pick one source, Wikipedia, and assume that it's OK.
It's in the moulding of one person's thoughts that they are led astray. Who cares if millions of people don't read the average term paper - the point is just one person, at least, read it, and that's where the damage is done.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
I should stress that the full quote of what I said was:
Sure. I believe there is such a thing as truth; being consistent with accurate fact. However, it is far more common for what we refer to as "truth" really being our perception of a truth. Such perception is prone to error and deception. As such it will be revised as we either discover our error or are continuously deceived. In that way, what we think is the "truth" becomes fluid.
Again - there is indeed a difference between the Truth and our perception of what we think is true. But for all practical purposes, our perception is what is most important as that is what we act on. Colbert's entire shtick is based on toying with those perceptions - or at least highlighting how others manipulate it. That, and tossing stones at people who put "truth" on a pedestal only to cloak it with crafted perceptions of truth.
Hey, Stephen, what are you doing on 18. Aug?
e y=7C6D1D3380D3F18D35DD11261F8EBD57
....
http://snakesonaplane.varitalk.com/receiver.php?k
By the way, I'm sure he'll read the thread and all comments without listening to the filter
Yeah, free Ipod! He is innocent!
Clever signature text goes here.
"Even now he's smirking his way through The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, secreted away at his Vegas lair amid stacks of John Birch Society literature"
Hmm you 've got it mixed up that book was made by the soviets and Republicans are really srong zionists. Democrats usually turn up at anti israel protests..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
LOL ... I love it!!!
I absolutely hate the smug-ass, liberally biased news media.
Just beautiful. I'd bequeath my mod points to you if I could. Well played, sir.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Misfire. You see, Dennis Miller is an ex-liberal who changed his voting due to hawkishness. That means he's a neoconservative Zionist Likudnik under the control of the Jewish Lobby. The John Birch paleoconservatives and anitsemetic David Duke types oppose the War in iraq.
Yes, that is precisely Colbert's point - that truth itself is irrelevant when mass perception dictates otherwise. And while he may not realize it, he's picked a particularly apt example to illustrate it.
Back in 1979, famed elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton said there were 1.3 million elephants in Africa, but declining precipitously. Never mind that over a third of that figure was a complete and utter thumbsuck - and most likely a gross overestimate - or that a meeting of experts only two years later found most populations to be doing quite well. The 1.3 million figure, and the purported massive declines stuck in the public imagination and became set in stone. The dogma was further reinforced years later, when more objective researchers excluded the wild guesses and came up with estimates of around half a million elephants - thus unwittingly vindicating the doomsayers' worst preditions.
True, the 1980s saw a lot of poaching and considerable declines in parts of Africa, and elephant range has been contracting as human populations grow, but elephant numbers in Southern Africa have been steadily growing for the last 100 years (and are still growing at around 5% per annum). The real shape of the continental trend line over the last 30 years remains a mystery for the scientists. Not so for the general public.
"Wikiality" is nothing new. Lewis Carroll put it succintly when he said "What I tell you three times is true".
Boy, I'm so glad NPR is there to save me from myself! If they didn't do it, we'd have to put cops on streetcorners with bullhorns shouting, "Please people, calm down. Use your brains."
Oh wait, sometimes we do have to do that.
+++OK ATH
First of all, your spelling and punctuation are atrocious.
Second, I'm going to guess that you don't know what satire is.
Actually the head of Wikimedia foundation was on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" yesterday. He said that the edition, or expert approval system is in the works.
CREDIBILITY IS IN THE CONTENT NOT THE CONTRIBUTOR!
Popularity does not constitute cogency. The problem is not anonymous edits. There is no problem other than that it takes time to verify, refine, disprove, re-examine, etc. the veracity of a model/view of how things are.
Go read some Thomas Kuhn or watch James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed for a clue as to where "the truth" (or "truthiness") actually exists.
Sincerely,
Anonymous Coward
I wish i had mod points right now, that was truly wonderful. Thank you.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
Yeah, like Colorado didn't already have strangely named bridges. "NAME THE BRIDGE - In 1993, citizens of Steamboat Springs followed a democratic process and named the new Stock Bridge just West of town the "James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge." On a bright sunny day, Mr. James Brown arrived in Steamboat and proceeded to set up on the bridge, belting out the classic, "I Feel Good" to the crowd's delight. Later, the ceremony moved to the Strings tent for an autograph signing session." http://yampavalley.org/history2649225.asp donour
Any mods want to consider countering the Troll mod?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Celebrities shouldn't insight DOS attacks. It's not nice.
not everything is a science experiment!
Nice job impersonating Miller to skewer Miller, but I have to call you out on borrowing from Family Guy. You said: "I don't want to go off on a rant here, but Dennis Miller has as much credibility as Edward Kennedy at a water-safety course."
Here's the relevant Family Guy line...
Dennis Miller: I don't want to go on a rant, here, but America's foreign policy makes about as much sense as Beowulf having sex with Robert Fulton at the first battle of Antietam. I mean when a neo-conservative defenestrates it's like Raskolnikov filibuster deoxymonohydroxinate...
[Peter is watching this on TV]
Peter: What the hell does rant mean?