Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia and the Politics of Verification
In its simplest form, couldn't a person's academic credentials be verified by sending a confirmation link to their .edu e-mail? (Which could be identified as a faculty address either by a domain name like "faculty.schoolname.edu", or by a Web page in the faculty section of the school's Web site identifying the person's e-mail address?) And then once the user's bona fides have been verified in this or some other way, couldn't they put their seal of approval on any article whose contents need to be considered reliable, or that readers want to cite as an authoritative source? In this way, with only a few minutes of effort and without changing a single word of the article, its value is increased many times -- surely one of the best possible trade-offs in terms of effort versus reward. (As for the question of "What experts would do this?", the answer is, presumably the same people who contribute to sites like Wikipedia currently. If their motives are altruistic in the first place, hopefully they would be willing to take this extra step if they knew it would increase the article's usefulness.)
Something like this model is planned by the operators of Citizendium.org, a Wikipedia alternative (I balk at using the word "rival" although it is inevitable that people will see them that way). The last time I wrote about Citizendium, some thought it sounded like such a valentine to the project that they wondered if I was a shill; actually, sometimes a project just comes along that aligns almost exactly with what I would have done if I could have re-done a popular project like Wikipedia with a few design changes, and when that happens, I just say so. Some others may have wondered if I was sucking up for a board position or something. No, that would be, like, work. But I think they have some good ideas that will make them a more useful alternative in some cases, unless Wikipedia copies back some of their ideas in order to serve both needs at once, which would also be a good thing.
Consider the two major issues on which Citizendium is planning to take a different approach from Wikipedia: (1) user verification, and (2) putting published articles into an "approved" state under the stewardship of a credentialed editor, who has to sign off on any future changes to the article. The issue of user verification can be further divided into two sub-issues: (a) verifying users for the purpose of ascertaining their credentials, and (b) verifying users for the purpose of limiting the amount of vandalism committed by new users under pseudonyms. (While editorial control on Citizendium means that it is not possible to vandalize the public-facing version of an article after it has gone into an "approved" state, users can still vandalize an article while it is a "work in progress" being built up towards the first milestone where it can be approved. Citizendium founder Larry Sanger says that such vandals are surprisingly, pathetically motivated even though their work is only seen by a small audience.)
On the first issue, the one of verifying user credentials, I think the verification of .edu addresses especially would be a cheap and easy way to increase the value of every article that that user writes, or signs off on. I don't think, however, it's necessary to go as far as Citizendium is currently planning on going, by requiring real names and biographies of all users. My thinking is that if an article is synthesized by 100 monkeys with typewriters but the finished product is giving the blessing of a credentialed professor of physics, it's pretty much just as reliable as if the professor had written it themselves. And if the same article gets the blessing of multiple credentialed experts, it could justifiably be considered more reliable than many printed sources written by a single author. The point is that the credentials that matter, are those of the people who stake their reputation on the accuracy of the article, not necessarily those of the people who contribute to it. So on this front, I think that while Wikipedia asks too little of users' backgrounds, Citizendium's current plan would ask too much, because as long as you have the credentials of one person who has signed off on an article, collecting non-verifiable bios of the article's other contributors doesn't actually gain anything.
The other side of verifying credentials is the use of credentials to prevent vandalism. In this situation it's not necessary to verify that the user actually is who they say they are; the system only needs to ensure that the same user is not signing up over and over again after previous accounts get banned for abuse. (You could ban users by IP address, but tools like Tor make it easy for users to connect from what appears to be a different IP address every time.) A blog post from Citizendium founder Larry Sanger lists three possible approaches instead: (a) requiring existing user X to vouch for new user Z before Z can join; (b) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page establishing their identity; or (c) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page of some person X who can vouch for Z's identity. I don't know how quickly a system could grow by referrals only -- after all, I was surprised that GMail took off so quickly during the period when you could only join with an "invite" from an existing user. Then again, GMail was giving away something for free that almost everyone could use, so most people who wanted it, would find themselves closely linked to someone else who had it. Citizendium, on the other hand, asks not what they can do for you but what you can do for them, and so might not achieve enough penetration to spread by referrals only.
I suggested that one alternative would be to send a postcard to each new user's physical address with a unique six-digit number, which they would have to enter in order to complete their registration, in order to verify that new users really were unique. The problem here, apart from the privacy concerns, is the delay that users would incur before their registration was complete, which would take away the "instant gratification" that they could get from starting to contribute right away. (You could let users edit before their address is verified, but that would just enable the same person to keep re-creating new accounts with unique but fake addresses, and use them to commit vandalism before the account was found out.)
Another idea would be that for new users, their first, say, three edits would go into a queue to be reviewed by verified users, and once the first three edits have been approved, the user is able to make edits in real time. (Since anybody would be able to review a new user's edits to make sure they were not spam, the new user's edits could be reviewed very quickly, since any Citizendium volunteer who was online, could review the latest entries in the edit queue and approve them.) It's true that a user could game this system by, for example, submitting three minor improvements, and then using their unblocked account to vandalize articles while they're being worked on. However, even in this case, the "vandal" would probably end up having a positive contribution to the site, because of the three small improvements that they'd already made. If a legitimate Citizendium volunteer would have to spend more effort making those three small improvements, than it would take to let a new user make those constructive changes and then ban them and revert their destructive changes once the user is caught committing vandalism (and the latter wouldn't take much effort at all), then Citizendium has actually gotten a good deal out of the "vandal"! (To make this work, a user's first contributions could not be "neutral" changes like replacing one word with a synonym; they would have to be actual improvements, even small ones, thus ensuring that the net effect of a potential "vandal" is positive.) There may be other possible solutions. These are just alternatives in case the model of referral by trusted users turns out not to work.
Now switching to the other side of the reliability issue: Whether the default article that is displayed to the public for a given topic, should be the latest "stable" version approved by credentialed users, or the very latest version incorporating all edits submitted by any user whatsoever. Having talked with members of the Citizendium and Wikipedia communities in their respective forums, there appear to be three schools of thought on the article stability issue. The first is that the whole idea of putting articles into an "approved" state and moderating all changes going forward, goes against the "spirit" of wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. The second, suggested on the Wikipedia discussion list by Sheldon Rampton, is that it would be a useful feature if credentialed users could select certain page versions in the page history and "sign off" on the accuracy of one of those past versions; the page displayed by default would be the bleeding-edge latest one (with all of the possible vandalism and inaccuracies that entails), but users who wanted a reliable, citable source could look in the history. The third school of thought is that reliability is so valuable, that the default page displayed to the public and carrying the stamp of the project, should be the latest version approved by credentialed editors -- the model that Citizendium currently has in mind.
I'm not really partial to the first view, since I think the success of the project should be defined by how it achieves its goals (whatever you define those goals to be) and not in whether it kept with its original "spirit". Since Wikipedia has far more readers than contributors, if your motivations for contributing to or maintaining Wikipedia are at all oriented towards doing good for other people, presumably meeting the needs of readers is more important than keeping the party going for contributors (provided, of course, that the environment for contributors is at least pleasant enough to keep them contributing). The choice between the second and third points of view is more interesting. There's no obvious best-of-both-worlds choice here, because what motivates many contributors (the fact that their changes go live to the entire world, right away) is also what motivates vandals.
On the other hand, the problem doesn't sound unsolvable. You could go with the Citizendium model of editor-approved changes but create a prioritized system for "urgent" updates, in the case of changes to an article made to incorporate current events. Suppose users (who have been verified using one or more of the methods above) are each issued a certain number of "credits" that they can use to mark a proposed update as an urgent, breaking change. (Misusing these credits to mark changes as "urgent", that really aren't, would be considered abuse tantamount to spamming or vandalism.) Then let's say, for example, Anna Nicole Smith dies. A user could submit this change to the Anna Nicole Smith article, along with a link to a reliable news source (e.g. a wire service story) and a credit marking the change as "urgent". Since an editor would not need any particular expertise to view the article and verify that the change was accurate, any editor could review the "urgent request queue" and approve that particular change for publication, ensuring that the queue was checked frequently throughout the day and urgent updates would get pushed through quickly. Thus the site could keep pace with breaking current events without the kind of inaccuracies that plagued Kenneth Lay's Wikipedia entry when he died.
So there's a trade-off there, between displaying all the latest changes by default and motivating people to contribute but also running the risk of vandalism, versus displaying only the latest editor-approved page. Where there is not a trade-off, that I can see, is in the option of simply having an editor-approved version of a given page -- whether it's displayed by default, or only stored in the version history where people can look for it. To me, both of these steps seem to consist of pure gain for relatively little effort:
- Verify credentials of academic professionals by poking their .edu address.
- Allow them to give their "blessing" to certain versions of a page in the page history, so that users can rely on those specific page versions and even cite them as sources where appropriate.
So I hope that Citizendium will help bring more prominence to the idea, and that something similar might get incorporated back into Wikipedia. The approval of an identity-verified expert can improve an article's value so much, for such comparitively little extra effort, that it makes no sense not to have that option.
here is a question, what creditationals do you need to report someones death? or how about reporting the plot line of a TV show? I mean do I need the nod of the TV geek from beat the geeks or something? I dont mean to poke fun at the issue here but lets be honest, if I wanna say that the number of bears is on the rise in the wild I can convince someone with the cred I need to do it for me... The power or Wiki is that anyone can edit, so anyone can fix the mistake.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
I don't think demanding credentials from people is going to make any difference. Some people will be more than happy to have their real names associated with pranking an online encyclopedia. I think the only realistic way to ensure that only "acceptable" material makes it into "print" is to have edits submitted to an editor to be proofed before they go live. Oh, and distrust anything you see on the internet regardless of who wrote it.
Life needs more saving throws.
1) Not all experts have an EDU address
.edu address. Others will rely on the reputation they develop within Wikipedia or among several web sites where they use the same psuedonym.
2) Many experts with institutional addresses can't or won't get their employer involved in authenticating them
3) "Underground experts" such as black-hat security experts value their anonymity greatly.
4) The same goes for political dissidents who have expertise to share under a pseudonym.
On a site like Wikipedia, some people will choose to post their biographies on their user pages and provide ways to contact them through "verifiable" email addresses such as an
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Really nice, and I mostly agree. Basically, you are asking for peer review for Wikipedia, that's something I really want.
I see three main problems: .edu address is not a good technical solution. I am a Ph.D. student in Italy, and we don't have .edu addresses (my university address is @unibo.it). OTOH, I don't know if ALL .edu addresses come from respectable institutions (I remember I heard that some diploma mills had .edu addresses)
- A
- There are subjects that are basically hard to be covered by academic institutions. Internet fads, TV series, web comics, urbant legends... What kind of academic peer review can be done on these articles? (Yes, they are important articles IMHO. They make of Wikipedia a resource that a traditional encyclopaedia cannot be).
- On the other hand, sometimes someone doesn't need to be a Ph.D. to be autoritative on a subject. A 16-y.o. hacker can be more autoritative on some software details than an informatics professor.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
I'm an automotive engineer without an .edu address. I'm probably more qualified to edit content related to my particular field of study than some academic schlub that's never built a thing in his or her life.
--Jim (me)
Bias. Slander/Libel. Misrepresentation of academic credentials...and other malfeasances. These are unique to wikipedia? Hardly. These very things happen in the mainstream mass media from outlets we all know -- for example, the New York Times. Have they forgotten about Jayson Blair?
Blair is only one example of many. Fox News has had David Milloy, discredited author of junkscience.com on their payroll for years. Reuters has been shown to doctor photographs of Beiruit. And so forth and so on. Yet these organizations will tell you that they maintain the highest standards, and that they can be trusted. Thing is, their history shows that they make mistakes too. That they have been burned by liars and miscreants in their employ.
So what's the real issue here?
It has to come down to money, somehow, somewhere. Wikipedia is a free open-source reference center that sees widespread usage. This surely has to displease those that operate similar services in the for-pay space.
Yes, wikipedia needs to evolve and put in controls to limit vandalism, bias and academic fraud. But that does not imply for one second that other sources are any better and that they are free and clear of these problems themselves.
There's also readability. And trust me, I know all too well that experts in the field don't always write the most understandable, remotely well written (or even grammatically correct) articles. Locking down to approved versions as the default display will discourage mildly knowledgeable people from cleaning up articles for the purpose of understandability. If you can't see your edits taking effect live, I'd bet that many people will loose the impetus to make little fixes. After all, who am I to mess with an "authoritative" article.
A better approach is the one where the "bleeding edge" version is displayed by default. But it could get a badge saying "This article contains up to the minute edits, click here for an expert verified version." Digging into the history is asking too much, but that would give the best of both worlds.
Also, for the many users who would prefer to see only the authoritative versions, there could be a box to click when searching to display authoritative versions by default or even to search only authoritative versions returning nothing if there is no expert verified version. That way people can use Wikipedia however works best for them. There's enough room here for all of us, we're not trying to squeeze this thing into physical book after all.
Credentials shouldn't matter on Wikipedia. People aren't supposed to post original research there, so we shouldn't have to take anybody's word for it that they're more correct than someone else because of their credentials. Cite your sources so that other people can evaluate them, and do a good job of interpreting those sources for the layman when you edit an article, and you're doing your job.
Besides, how many Wikipedians are experts in a field, but never purport publicly to have a particular credential? Are those editors somehow less worthy of editing a technical article because they don't say they're a well-published physicist, even though they actually are? As long as Wikipedia doesn't require everyone to specify their expertise, credentials will be worthless.
If you think "academic schlubs," especially ones teaching auto mechanics don' know their field, you are sadly mistaken. I've always found it funny how blue collar folks like to deride educators precisely because they are educated. Grow up, maybe you'll learn something from them.
Sorry but to simply make an article out to be good based on a person's current job or education doesn't cut it for anything but hard sciences. When it comes to soft sciences, politics, religion, or hell even fashion, who is going to be the deciding factor?
Whats to prevent some anti-(insert favorite group) person getting in with credentials? They can then prevent edits to articles they get stewardship over. What if the group you use to determine an article's accuracy all has the same view? Its not hard when you get into politics. Just assuming they will be fair is meaningless when they can determine what is fair.
Sorry, I doubt it will be better than Wiki. Wiki is at least being held to new levels of scrutiny because they screwed up. This new one is just trying to gain traction by pointing towards the successful one and going "look at me, look at me" and spouting good sounding, at the surface, ideas in hopes people will pay attention.
I'll stick with Wikipedia for now. I know where their bias is and avoid those articles.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
they want people be forced to stick to encyclopedia britannica and the like, which are sources of 'information' that are from companies which are controllable by big capital. wikipedia is not.
hence, first stuff about 'wikipedia going bankrupt' in order to turn it to a capital corporation, then exagerrated news about vandalism in order to prevent uncontrolled knowledge entry.
not so much out of sync with the anti net neutrality crowd.
Read radical news here
You know, I really don't think it matters whether the owners are old, rich, or white, but I think you are onto an insightful issue. The real issue is that these media companies are built to be a method of disseminating information, and the people who are making careers in these companies view themselves in a particular way. They seem to want to think that they're the real source of information, and that they have a mission to make the world see things in a particular way.
Whenever you build a system and have people devoting their lives to that system, those people will view opposing systems (or even things outside their system) negatively. There are plenty of people within the big-media system who view the Internet as a threat to their mission. It's an alternative source of information which they don't get to filter, reframe, or control in any way. The most they can do is try to participate, which still puts them on equal footing with some random 14 year-old who just started a weblog. Since they've devoted their lives to the thing, the idea of being put on equal footing with everyday people is insulting.
Every professor I've had has warned us vehemently not to use Wikipedia. It's useless for scholarly work as you have no idea if the material is plagerized or just down right incorrect. I've come across multiple errors myself, especially concerning some of the more subjective material. To use Wikipedia for scholarly work you would have to double check virtually every word, defeating the purpose in the first place.
I view Wikipedia as a fun tool and nothing more. You may or may not be getting the right info but regardless, it's still better than word of mouth. So long as people understand its place I don't have a problem with it, but when people start linking Wikipedia articles like a Christian would link the bible I have to call them out on it. It is NOT a scholarly source, even if a scholar submitted something to it. I in fact met someone in a class who thought it was funny to screw with Wikipedia articles, simply knowing human nature as I do, I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.
> In its simplest form, couldn't a person's academic credentials be verified by sending a confirmation link to their .edu e-mail
Sure, if you can name a single educational institution with an edu address outside the US. Like the government sites here in Germany, our universities use country-codes. Banning Quatar's single IP address is one thing; alienating academics outside America is quite another.
My understanding of Wikipedia is that because submissions and edits are open to everyone that ultimately the users themselves are responsible for ensuring accuracy. Once a sufficiently large and varied group of people are visiting the site there will inevitably be enough informed people available to spot problems in articles. It's sort of like a libertarian version of an encyclopedia. Nothing is perfect, and perhaps that fraud should have been spotted sooner, but the fact remains that the problem was eventually identified.
What I find more concerning than obvious errors, defacing and blatant bias is a more subtle bias creeping into such encyclopedias. Once the submitters and editors are reduced to a select few it creates a potential for that sort of situation. It's already a problem elsewhere. We've already got people who dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as extremists regardless of facts. That's an important, because you'll have people who are convinced they're being unbiased but in reality are merely pushing one idea or another. It's already a problem with many blogs; people who are presenting opinion and rumor as fact. Someone runs a story they've found on another blog, which they're presenting as concrete fact. Follow that link and it turns out they've linked the story from a third blog. Dig far enough and it turns out the story is all rumor, speculation and hearsay. All they care about it that it's consistent with their own opinions. The mainstream media is already bad enough, but at least they pretend to engage in fact-checking.
So that's my concern with a more closed encyclopedia. It may start with devotion to fact and impartiality, but it can easily degrade into anything but. And as many others have mentioned here, just because someone has impressive credentials doesn't necessarily make them better informed about a subject than a regular person.
If a professional media source doesn't present an advantage over free amateur sources of information, there is no reason for anyone to pay attention to the professionals. These advantages can include quality, accuracy, and time to deliver the information. The professionals will usually have the advantage in time delivery, but the other two are slowly slipping away from them. Instead of improve their quality, they rely on sensationalism stories to shock or guilt viewers into watching. They instill fear and uncertainty into their viewers to create a sense of dependence. Instead of improve accuracy, they report with a strategy of false confidence. If you sound right, you are right. By the time anyone cares to correct the issue, the story is long forgotten and no harm was ever done to your credibility. If the story is still in the memory of the public, other stories will be moved to the front page, to the top story, in order to distract from the previous problems.
Professional media feels threatened that the public can get their information from other sources. So they attack the problems with amateur sources. Sure wikipedia can be innacurate. It can be downright false. It can have quality issues. It can be slow to deliver information. But those are all problems that the regular media has as well. So they attack it anyway and discredit it, using the very same tactic that wikipedia editors attempt to use. False confidence. The public believes what is presented as confident.
The professional media has just as many problems as the amateur media. Fact checking is at an all time low. Errors are at an all time high. Corrections are a thing of the past. But why bother improving when you can launch a smear campaign and discredit alternative sources with one fell swoop? Fox news is particularly guilty of this. Watch fox news shows like Bill O'Reilly. They'll take other cable news clips and edit them to make them appear inaccurate or unbalanced. They'll take clips of the Daily Show, or the Colbert Report and edit them to discredit any news value the segment might have. Those two programs use satire and wit to make points and present news or make a political commentary. But when you watch an edited clip of one of those programs on Fox News, all you see is the silly actions of the hosts and they are made into goons rather than smart political commentary. If you don't watch either program, you can find some user submitted comparisons of these video clips on youtube with some searching. (I would post links, however I am at work and youtube is blocked).
All in all, most of the media out there is just plain horrible. Information is hard to come by. You can't trust any single news source or source of factual information these days. You have to look at several sources to get a full picture. Fair and balanced news just doesn't come from one source just because they say so. None of the media outlets are fair and balanced, and if you care to follow a money trail to who owns the parent companies, and what time of campaign contributions they make, you'll see that none of the major news sources can be trusted for anything.
The information wars are here, and I don't think there are really any winners.
Last I checked, profiling was generally legal, and only illegal under certain conditions (such as police choosing who to pull over based on race.)
And racial profiling is not the only sort of profiling done. It has been shown that drivers under 25 have more accidents -- so insurance companies charge them higher rates, and car rental places often won't rent them a car. It's age profiling ... and it's not illegal, or even frowned upon (unless you're under 25, I guess.)
Oh, that was just a troll. Revolution isn't the answer, it always leads to the most brutal and ruthless rising to the top, and becoming what you rebelled against.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Or for that matter, what about the personal responsibility of the rich themselves? Why is it okay for them to use money and power to keep the poor poor and them rich?
I have to say, I'm sick and tired of this argument. Of what use is it for a "rich" person to intentionally work to keep a "poor" person poor? Other than the odd sociopath who does it merely to inflict pain and suffering (the likes of which is not limited to any particular economic class; it's only the means with which to inflict pain that differs), there is no sense in this argument.
In fact, if you assume that most rich people earn (or get) their money through running a successful business, then it most certainly is not in their best interest to "keep the poor poor"[1]. They need someone to buy the stuff they are selling. Also, there is typically a certain ego involved that is stroked by running a company that employs more people than the competition. That tends to provide a way for the motivated poor to earn a living and potentially work their way up.
Are these "poor" going to become "rich" this way? Statistically it's unlikely, but any step up in economic status provides that much more opportunity (and comfort as far as standard of living). And yes, I'm aware that companies pay as little as they can to employees, but that's market driven and not purely a decision made by executives.
On the flip side, it's just as ridiculous to make the blanket statement that "The poor remain poor because of their own choices". There are far too many factors and individual situations to lump all poor into the same "lazy" or "stupid" bucket. Just as there are those rich people who really did nothing to earn or deserve their money, there are those poor people who have through no fault of their own not had the opportunity to better themselves. This is not a black and white issue.
[1] This doesn't apply to drug dealers and such who benefit from keeping their clientele in misery.
I'd like to see some statistics about old money. Another poster made a similar point, but had no statistics. I went looking, but also couldn't find anything concrete that didn't have an obvious bias. On the flip side, I did find an article about some recent research that shows it takes, on average, eight generations for a poor family to become middle class.
Just from a common sense point of view, your statement makes no sense. You don't need business acumen to stay rich, when you are rich you can hire people with business acumen.
As for ownership and me not being able to say what someone else should be worth, why? It's all just a big game, and WE are the ones who make up the rules. We can change them any time we like. No, I'm not buying the "Natural Right To Any Wealth Level Whatsoever, No Matter The Consequences For The Rest Of The World" argument. See, the thing is, it requires initiation of force to maintain that level of inequality, which is against my moral beliefs.
If a group of people set up a system that unfairly rewards them, while excluding you from the rightful rewards of your work, would you let them tell you you can't change the system? I wouldn't. No one has a moral right to tell me what systems I must or must not work with. The wealthy got where they are without consideration of me, why should I give consideration to them?
In short, I think people have every right to place whatever limits they want on others, as long as no coercion is used. That only leaves open withdrawal of reward. So groups of people can say, if you want to do business with us, you must respect an income and ownership cap. And you must not do business with people who don't respect that cap. There are far more people who would be below any reasonable cap, and it would be in their best interests to agree to such a system. It is entirely fair, and there is nothing the small minority of wealthy people could do about it without resorting to force.
Unfortunately, the wealthy often resort to force. They may not know it, but much actual force and coercion is used in maintaining such inequalities in distribution of wealth. They are also the beneficiaries of much hidden socialism. Although much of what our government does benefits everyone, most of it benefits the rich more.
In short, the wealthy have an unfair advantage that is unrelated to excellence or diligence. Despite your anecdotes and wishful thinking to the contrary, the rich tend to not only stay rich but become more so. The middle class is shrinking, it's an incontrovertible fact and it has been going on more or less since the sixties. There is no moral reason for anyone to lay back and let themselves be raped. And people can stand up to power without using force if they will only organize around their own common self interest.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton