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Sacha Baron Cohen Wikipedia Entry Creates Circular References
Lantrix writes "An anonymous user added information to Wikipedia's entry on Sacha Baron Cohen three days before the now-referenced external article was written. The Independent wrote the referenced article apparently using Wikipedia as the source establishing his 'Goldman Sachs' career. Now Wikipedia uses as a references the article that came after the initial modification to Wikipedia itself."
And in English?
You just have to use it for what it is... It helps you start research. It is a lead generator, or an index. But if you think it actually has answers, or your research can end there, you are an idiot. But you have a lot of company.
I agree. This doesn't even seem to be as big a deal as the article makes it out to be.
Now wikipedia uses as its references the articles that came after the initial modification to Wikipedia itself
I found the summary particularly inflammatory for no apparent reason. I mean, wow! People sometimes misuse wikipedia! We had no idea! This isn't standard practice or any guideline set down by admins. It's one case where some anonymous editor acted foolishly.
You can take this and make a point about how lightly people these days treat information. They don't even consider verifiability and good practice like that. What you can't do is somehow take this and make it a crusade against wikipedia like the summary hints at.
I got a catholic block.
And what happened to fact checking? There was a time when a small army of fact checkers would verify things like this before they were published. The Internet is a great tool but it's pulling the rug out from under the newspapers and we will all suffer from the loss of reliable, fact-checked information.
You'd think Slashdot was turning into The Register. Or a cheap tabloid. (Oh, but I repeat myself.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Well, if Wikipedia AND the Independent say it's true, it must be. Right?
This story reminded me of 1984's Ministry of Truth, which regulary "edited" history to match the current political scene. Writing stuff in Wikipedia makes it true.
I was talking to someone recently who bragged about regularly trolling wikipedia to intentionally and actively create dead end and circular references. He was practically giddy with the notion that wikipedia "only requires some kind of external citation, but you can really mess with this because people rarely check them." I'm a wikipedia fan, so was quite annoyed with him, so beat him about the head and chest; this is clearly a 2nd order loophole that should be actively combated. I realized I would be naive to think otherwise, but I still found it illuminating to be reminded people are actively out there creating dead and circular links . It is a more subtle way to create noise in wikipedia rather than the more obvious act of injecting copious uncited nonsense into an article.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
The whole Web 2.0 Internet is a just a mass of circular references. Be thankful that it isn't telling you the holocaust never happened, or something else obviously untrue.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The "easy" answer is: "Wikipedia is unreliable".
A better answer might be: "Journalists are unreliable".
I find it interesting when I hear about people complain about errors in Wikipedia, but don't put it into the same context as errors appearing everywhere else. How many people have read an article about something they had personal knowledge of written by some journalist, and found glaring errors in it? I know I have.
People need to stop trusting single sources of information blindly. All information can be wrong, even "conventional wisdom".
AccountKiller
Great Success!
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I wish I had mot points. Obviously untrue disinformation is not a threat, People will use information hygiene techniques(verifiaibility, checking sources, even debate). It's not so obviously untrue disinformation, which is dangerous. If you slowly, over time, change some story from the truth to something untrue. If it happens slowly enough, people will not have the reflex to check the information, and in time, it will be established as the truth.
This issue isn't black-and-white; the journalist is to blame, the editors are to blame, and wikipedia too is to blame.
How come the latter? Well, over the last few years the average Internet-user has had quite a few articles comparing the reliability of Wikipedia against Encylopedia Brittanica. It was always a study comparing a fixed set of articles, but this has lead to the public perception that Wikipedia is comparable to EB.
This wouldn't have been a problem, if the Wiki-cabal wasn't trying to reinforce the meme that the two are comparable. The public is increasingly relying on Wikipedia to be correct, but due to its nature you have to take each and every article with a large grain of salt. Nowhere on your average Wikipedia-page is this stated.
I'm not talking about a 'disputed' block, but a 'wikipedia-is-not-an-encyclopedia' block on each and every page. Until that time, you can't put all the blame on the (mis)users of Wikipedia.
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Wikipedians like to think that given enough time, the wikipedia will be perfect, and use this to brush off complaints of someone seeing factually incorrect information.
This, however, doesn't really fly; whether it could one day be perfect is irrelevant when people are seeing false or misleading information in the *now*. People aren't going to constantly check up on a page. Any misinformation in the now is "damaging" as it tells people incorrect things. That's true of all media, but the fact that it can be changed on the page later doesn't diminish the fact that everyone who sees it in the now is getting (and possibly spreading) incorrect information--just like a newspaper that makes an error. Unlike a newspaper, however, you often have complete crazies and idiots edit wikipedia and I've seen that information stay on there for a long time or until I had to correct it--things that should have been caught long ago.
Additionally, not only are corrections made to wikipedia but errors are constantly introduced as well. It'll never be perfect precisely because, to be direct, IDIOTS edit the wikipedia frequently throwing in nonsense and bullshit, often those with an ideological bent and don't know how to be objective.
And often, if errors are "fixed" they error-fixer doesn't realize that it was nonsense to begin with! I once saw a circular reference on Michael Shermer's article get changed to an outside reference like it should have, but it didn't change the fact that the "information" was misusing Shermer's words and meaning completely out of context, possibly out of the original writer's ideological bias.
And if you got a true nutcase on your hands, they'll just edit it back in. I don't know if these rules are still in effect, but back when I edited wikipedia I was watching a real lunatic edit in bizarre stuff on an article. When I sought help on their IRC channel they told me not to worry and let the community deal with it. Since they didn't seem to care, I waited and saw it still there a month later.
Additionally, I would edit the page but was not allowed to revert over three times per day, as per the rules at that time. His information was obviously bogus, talking about people with no brains in their heads still acting normally (no joke!), angels, conspiracies, etc, some really weird websites he was citing. And when I edited over three times anyway, because hey, it was PURE NONSENSE, I got reprimanded for breaking the rules. The page got locked after awhile--on HIS reversion, the one with his bias and nonsense, and in IRC they just joked about the page always being locked on the wrong edit.
They don't really have a concern for the truth. They're roleplaying a bureaucracy there. It's run by people who want to make a name for themselves, to feel like they have power over something, and to bludgeon other people with their own POV biases.
Eventually time did fix the article in question, so I suppose I won out in the end, but that doesn't change the fact how they, at least in the past, dealt with wrong information and basically jerked around good editors.
And before some relativistic wikipedia comes in and says that the other guy probably thought the same of me, know that I was citing mainstream science while this guy was editing in bizarre theories, talked about "protoscience", he was a true crank.
The article was "scientific skepticism", by the way.
Wikipedia isn't mean for serious academic research any more than a yardstick is meant for making precision measurement.
It's just a tool for getting in the ballpark. I'm amused at the hysteria that always ensues when a story like this comes out.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You could counter the argument by providing a citation, right?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
What a very good analogy! I already sort-of addressed it, so I suppose that's yet another wikipedian form response to a complaint.
Yeah, and I'll expand on that analogy. Wikipedia is geared towards the normal reader. Do a google search, and you'll often find wikipedia at the top.
Do normal users run software straight from CVS? No, because normal users don't try to look for and find bugs, they're there for the software. Wikipedia is like software straight from CVS HEAD released directly to the public--they're not trying to find errors, they're trying to find information.
HOWEVER, software doesn't have ideologues (well, okay, it does, but not in this way...) edit in a bugfix only to have it reverted by someone who thinks the program-breaking bug is a "feature". And if it does, you have problems, and it's typically the person blocking the bugfix that should be punished, not the guy trying to push the bugfix.
There is absolutely no way Wikipedia can "defend" against abuse like that. The weak link is the journalist No, the weak link is the amount of trust folks put in Wikipedia. Humans are human and it is human nature to game the system whenever the rewards outweigh the risks.
So you're saying if the journalist had used Encyclopedia Britannica, it would be a-okay? It would be just as shitty journalism if that were the case.
Since when is using an encyclopedia indicative of well-done journalism or research in general? Here's a hint: it's not.
It would be because the rest of the English-speaking world is way left of the US. And in fact English Wikipedia has a large contributor base from non-English-speaking countries, because English is the current lingua franca. It could be that the rest of the world averages out to what the rest of the world averages out to, and it's the US that's skewed right.
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