Wikipedia's New Definition of Truth

Hugh Pickens writes "Simson Garfinkel has an interesting essay on MIT Technology Review in which he examines the way that Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word 'truth.' While many academic experts have argued that Wikipedia's articles can't be trusted because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted, studies have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. 'But wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observability. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience,' says Garfinkel. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is verifiability — that it appeared in some other publication, but there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people's written words: many publications don't do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right. Wikipedia's policy of 'No Original Research' also leads to situations like Jaron Lanier's frustrated attempts to correct his own Wikipedia entry based on firsthand knowledge of his own career. So what is Wikipedia's truth? 'Since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it's the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.'"

Comments

Food for Thought

[AKAImBatman]

[B]ut there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people's written words: many publications don't do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right.

Which raises an interesting question that no one seems to be asking: What if the problem is not Wikipedia at all? What if Wikipedia is a symptom of a much larger problem in our culture? What if the solution isn't to berate Wikipedia for that which they cannot fix, but rather to ensure the foundations upon which the system is based are fixed?

Failures in authority are of far greater reach than just Wikipedia. That's why academia seeks to correct itself on a regular basis. But the rigid standards of academia (standards which have weakened over time) are not applied to all fields that Wikipedia reports on. Using the case of Jaron Lanier, how is an impartial observer supposed to distinguish between a failure in authoritative reporting vs. an attempt to rewrite history for personal benefit? The only way to prove one over the other is to find evidence. In the case of Wikipedia, it must find another authortative party to dispute the original because doing detective work is beyond what is reasonable for an encyclopedia.

Re:Food for Thought

[internerdj]

That is if you are an empiricist there is no other way to provide proof other than evidence. I never took a philosophy class so I'm not sure of the term but I think there are far more people who subscribe to proof through consensus which would be wikipedia's methodology. An abundance of rigor tends to make alot of people shut down or at least slow mental processing down to where they are non-functional(admittedly probably by choice). I don't know that converting everyone to empiricism is actually a rational goal.

Re:Food for Thought

[AKAImBatman]

To add to my point, the Nintendo DSi announcement is a perfect example. Take a gander at the Slashdot story:

http://games.slashdot.org/games/08/10/02/2116202.shtml

"Nintendo finally came out with a solution to the Wii's lack of storage capacity -- a 2GB SD card from which users can execute games"

Sounds pretty cool, eh? Expect that it's wrong. Nintendo announced a solution to DOWNLOAD games to the SD Card. At no point did they confirm an executable solution. (In fact, they seemed intent on steering away from such an announcement.)

But Slashdot's reporting was not the worst. The worst was GameSpot, a site that SHOULD by all rights be authoritative. Yet here they are putting words into Reggie's mouth:

9:23] "Iwata is addressing the problem of Wii storage," he says. "Soon you will be able to download and store virtual console and WiiWare titles directly on your SD card, and play them off your SD card. This will make the Wii download experience much easier."

I emailed a more reputable editor who was at the event and confirmed for a fact that those words were never spoken. Yet many, many people quoted GameSpot's poor journalism as proof positive that Nintendo announced a solution to execute games off of SD Cards.

What is a site like Wikipedia supposed to do?

Thankfully, this is a case where a mountain of solid reporting existed to counteract the poor reporting. So Wikipedia reports the correct information. But what if this was more obscure information? How would Wikipedia know who to trust? How would they be able to check again bad reporting?

Answer: They can't. Reporters must be help accountable for the factual nature of their statements. (In the case of GameSpot, that means they should have issued a retraction.) If they cannot maintain a reasonable level of journalistic standards, the industry as a whole should start advertising them as an unreliable source.

Re:Food for Thought

[blahplusplus]

The problem goes deeper then that, the author comes across to me as missing the deep links between religion, gossip, and ideology -- that they trump the facts every time.

That religious or slopping thinking is the standard for all human beings, even science is subject to the same sloppy thinking they accuse creationists and other "nonscience" disciplines, peoples and opinions of and hence the dire need for peer review, criticism, and understanding, etc.

But the truth is, all truths people think are true are riddled with errors and misconceived ideas based on flawed understandings that pass as "true" during the historical period and culture in which the people exist. Cognitive science has shown that sciences understanding of truth and objectivity is deeply flawed also, science has shown the enlightenment's ideas about science and reasoning are deeply flawed also.

Most people and scientists don't even have a clue what has been discovered in the neurological sciences over the last 30 years and how it undermines the enlightenment's view of reason and enlightenment's view of education. Most people still operate under the enlightenment's view of reason

(quick version)
http://i35.tinypic.com/10fruxh.jpg [tinypic.com]

Longer version:
http://www.linktv.org/video/2142 [linktv.org]

Today, with authoritarian governments in power around much of the world, increasing authoritarian tendencies in democratic governments, and increasing amounts of power vested in unaccountable corporations, the need for openness and transparency is greater than ever, and despite wikipedia's flaws, the fact that the internet exists and "anti wikipedia" sites exist, allow us to balance it's shortcomings through open criticism.

But you have to realize that this is a fundamental human problem for every human being, regardless of status, class, intellect, or education, many of histories brightest minds were horribly wrong in enormous ways about other things. Look at Newton for instance and the amount he wrote concerning religion, etc.

(site for those interested)
http://www.isaac-newton.org/

Socrates showed a long time ago that all knowledge and claims to morals and truth is political. The truth is political, hence the phrase:

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. --George Orwell

Re:Food for Thought

[bwalling]

But you have to realize that this is a fundamental human problem for every human being, regardless of status, class, intellect, or education, many of histories brightest minds were horribly wrong in enormous ways about other things. Look at Newton for instance and the amount he wrote concerning religion, etc.

What makes you so sure Newton was "horribly wrong" about religion?

Re:Food for Thought

[bcrowell]

Which raises an interesting question that no one seems to be asking: What if the problem is not Wikipedia at all? What if Wikipedia is a symptom of a much larger problem in our culture?

In fact, I think Wikipedia has some features that make it more reliable than the culture at large.

When I read a WP article on a controversial topic, I always make sure to take a look at the talk page as well. This allows me to see what issues are really controversial, what ideological axes people have to grind, etc. That's something I can't do with the New York Times.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Expect that it's wrong

That's what I usually do while reading Slashdot.

Re:Food for Thought

[dnwq]

A highly relevant note from WP:UNDUEWEIGHT:

NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each. Now an important qualification: Articles that compare views should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views, and will generally not include tiny-minority views at all. For example, the article on the Earth does not mention modern support for the Flat Earth concept, a view of a distinct minority.

...From Jimbo Wales, paraphrased from this post from September 2003 on the WikiEN-l mailing list:

* If a viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts;
* If a viewpoint is held by a significant minority, then it should be easy to name prominent adherents;
* If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited) minority, it does not belong in Wikipedia regardless of whether it is true or not and regardless of whether you can prove it or not, except perhaps in some ancillary article.

So, despite TFA, verifiability is not the only criterion. I daresay NPOV comes into play more often: WP policy is only ever important when an issue is fought over by differing editors, after all; and it is trivial to find sources for all sorts of contradictory viewpoints.

Note that even the UNDUEWEIGHT policy is not strictly followed in Wikipedia - e.g., creationism has a lot of adherents at a popular level. It's also trivial to find cited sources and endless lines of arguments and counter-arguments. Despite this, Wikipedia is usually sceptical of creationism - statements on evolution are usually phrased "it is the case that x" whereas creationist statements are carefully bracketed as "many people believe that x".

...but who seriously thinks that this is a bad thing? WP:IAR is probably the best guideline here. Common sense, indeed...

Re:Food for Thought

[Tom]

Which raises an interesting question that no one seems to be asking: What if the problem is not Wikipedia at all? What if Wikipedia is a symptom of a much larger problem in our culture? What if the solution isn't to berate Wikipedia for that which they cannot fix, but rather to ensure the foundations upon which the system is based are fixed?

WP might not be "the" problem, but a part of the problem, I agree on that.

However, the aggregation and the claims that WP makes about itself contribute to the problem. Most people with some critical thinking don't trust everything they read on the Internet, and have a clue about how reliable certain publications usually are. Most of us know which newspapers have good reporting and which ones don't.

WP merges everything. That means loss of differentiation. Someone decides which version is "true", maybe because he doesn't know the others.

More simply put: If you read it in a magazine, you're more likely to check at least one other source. If you read it in an encyclopedia, you aren't. For the most part, the encyclopedia is the most authoritative source a normal human will check.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, the real solution is to give Wikipedia lots of good, verifiable sources with accurate information and then to cite them.

Which reminds me. Be sure to include information on my island fortress in the next revision, okay? And my IQ is 500, not 200 ... :]

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet you try to make your point with reason...

Re:Food for Thought

[tzhuge]

Argumentum ad populum ... yes that's a wikipedia link; did I just blow your mind a little?

Re:Food for Thought

[blahplusplus]

You're missing the point entirely, it was the misunderstanding of what reason is, and how it works.

Re:Food for Thought

[ajs]

There's some real danger in what you're suggesting. Wikipedia works well because it accepts no authoritative truth. In fact, nothing on Wikipedia is "the truth." Instead, it is simply a re-stating of the consensus. If Mr. Lanier had wanted incorrect information stripped from his article, he could simply have said, "there's no source for this, please remove it." If there WAS a source, and no other source disputed it, then his problem isn't with Wikipedia, it's with the fact that consensus and his sense of truth already had a dispute.

If we attempt to create an authority (be it academic, governmental, or any other source) for truth, then all we do is limit the scope of our consensus building and make manipulation of the consensus that much easier.

Re:Food for Thought

[n dot l]

Which raises an interesting question that no one seems to be asking: What if the problem is not Wikipedia at all? What if Wikipedia is a symptom of a much larger problem in our culture? What if the solution isn't to berate Wikipedia for that which they cannot fix, but rather to ensure the foundations upon which the system is based are fixed?

Sorry, but I don't even see the problem that needs fixing here. Wikipedia is a collaborative work of many authors, with a long and well documented history of bias and ideological conflicts. This is well known, and it's documented on numerous talk pages. There's no attempt at deception here that I can see, apart from the people who, for whatever reason, deceive themselves into thinking that it's a better source than it is. Consider the source and weigh that consideration against the standards you deem necessary for your intended purpose. You already have to do that with any other source - why should Wikipedia (or the news, or your politicians, or your preacher, or anyone) be treated differently?

The only problem I see is that people go about expect to have the truth (each with their individual notion of what truth is) served to them on a silver platter.

Re:Food for Thought

[cowscows]

Your specific example effectively demonstra a serious limitation for Wikipedia. One of wikipedia's flaws is not that it has such limitations, but that it doesn't recognize them. Wikipedia is not well suited for the task of distilling rumors and such to predict the future. That doesn't mean that wikipedia is worthless or somehow broken, it just means that it shouldn't have entries that try and guess.

Like you said, when operating at its fullest potential, Wikipedia is really an aggregation of well supported facts. I think everyone would be better served if Wikipedia as a general philosophy would remove topics where those sorts of facts can't be found. Keeping them around only serves to draw into question the usefulness of the entire site.

I think the more useful solution is multiple wiki's, each geared towards a more specific category of knowledge, and having the appropriate level of requirements for an entry to be considered valid. A wiki about future trends of the video game industry is not a bad thing, but it has, inherent in its subject matter, a huge amount of uncertainty. The very idea that such information would be compiled in the same collection and through the same process as something as straight-forward as descriptions of historical medieval weaponry is sort of silly. (Of course, it's also half the fun of wikipedia, following the strange paths that you can end up taking by clicking interesting links between entries.)

More subject specific wiki's do exist, and more are popping up every day, but they're all currently stuck in the shadow of Wikipedia. Hopefully as people become more savvy about finding information online, they'll start to look for more focused sources.

Re:Food for Thought

[gnick]

Newton was brilliant and nobody knows that he was wrong regarding religion. But it's not too hard to find a pair of brilliant minds and demonstrate that at least one of them is mistaken on that topic. Most people think that Newton was wrong, so if you play the odds he probably was. (Actually if you pick any person anywhere in history, most of Earth's population will think they were wrong - Let's stop picking on poor Isaac.)

Unfortunately, when it comes to religion and the supernatural, we have neither empirical nor consensual "truth". Just a lack of hard evidence and a lot of speculation.

Re:Food for Thought

[gnick]

Despite this, Wikipedia is usually sceptical of creationism - statements on evolution are usually phrased "it is the case that x" whereas creationist statements are carefully bracketed as "many people believe that x".

I jumped over to wikipedia so that I could correct you and point out that they only describe the evolutionary process as fact while leaving ambiguity about whether or not it's actually how we arrived with our current selection of species. I can't - Your example is dead on. From here:

All organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool. Current species are a stage in the process of evolution, with their diversity the product of a long series of speciation and extinction events.

Re:Food for Thought

[Benfea]

Ah, the Argument from Authority logical fallacy, and a common one at that.

If you feel that we should believe in Christianity because Newton believed in Christianity, you should also know that Newton ascribed to his age's equivalent of Shirley McClaine new age nonsense: alchemy.

Should we also believe in alchemy because Newton believed in it? Or will you accept that you are making an argument based on a logical fallacy? Keep in mind that in Newton's day, not believing in Christianity was a punishable offense.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

"proof through consensus" I think the term you are looking for is religion.

Re:Food for Thought

[truthsearch]

I think the more useful solution is multiple wiki's, each geared towards a more specific category of knowledge, and having the appropriate level of requirements for an entry to be considered valid.

That was exactly my thinking when I launched DocForge. Topics for programmers need to have a lot more information than a source like wikipedia can provide. We use some wikipedia articles as a starting point and expand from there. Sometimes opinions, especially pro / con arguments, are preferred for some articles because they provide much more insight than a flat reference. Plus we can collect subjective things like tips that don't belong on wikipedia.

I think this route of categorical wikis is very useful. But unfortunately, you're correct in that most will remain in the shadow of wikipedia for quite some time.

Re:Food for Thought

[HiThere]

No. For the most part, Google is the most authoritative source a normal human will check.

Unfortunately, most people don't check beyond the first page of what Google returns as answers, so they still only get the most popular answers.

Re:Food for Thought

[sandysnowbeard]

I just use wikipedia for the pictures, man. "Ooooh, look, it's Kyotooooo!"

That said, I was using wikipedia to look at some Van Gogh paintings a few weeks back, and one that I loved was purportedly in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Then I checked the museum archives itself, and I found out it's not there! What a load of hooey, I'm not even sure anymore that the painting is by our beloved half-eared expressionist, as it has disappeared from the wiki article, too.

The final word on veracity is to remember, folks, that "Dancing in the Moonlight" is not by Van Morrison!

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

The crux of the matter is: by writing something in wikipedia, it will sooner or later end up in print. Wikipedia consideres printed stuff as the truth. Therefore - anything you make up and submit to wikipedia, will end up being the truth sooner or later.

A real life example of wikipedia sabotage > printed media > TRUTH!

http://www.b3ta.com/links/godspants_made_it_into_private_eye

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

We can make lead into gold by nuclear means, what alchemy should be labels as is that we forever strive to do is turn worthless stuff into stuff of worth, without having to use other things of worth and/or put effort into them.

Re:Food for Thought

[Z00L00K]

For anyone familiar with B5 there is a quote:

"Truth is a triple-edged sword; My truth, your truth and the real truth".

So decisively saying that there is only one truth - you may be utterly wrong. Better to be careful with what you say and make people think instead and maybe someone will look up the real truth.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the Straw Man argument; Slashdot's greatest fallacy. The parent asked how the grandparent knows that Newton was wrong. You then reinterpreted the parents post to be a statement that Newton was correct and proceed to knock down the proverbial man of straw.

Re:Food for Thought

[LWATCDR]

The problem with Wikipedia extends way past facts.
All too often people will write opinion into wikipedia articles and present it as fact.
Facts are easy to fix if they are really facts.

Re:Food for Thought

[V!NCENT]

Wikipedia is just the central place for what society knows. What society knows is the truth of Wikipedia. Define truth? You can not. I'm having endless discussions with my dad just on what the word means.

I'd love to have another endless discussion with anyone here about the definition of truth, but in the end 'what happened' is only observed by a human being.

Re:Food for Thought

[MikeDirnt69]

Please Mod parent up; nice work on that website truthsearch.

Re:Food for Thought

[Obfuscant]

There is a more relevant quote that had read-world consequences. "Forty million Frenchmen can't be wrong."

That quote refers to something called the Maginot Line; a line of heavily fortified positions on the French border prior to WWII. The "consensus truth" (a term I doubt they had heard of back then, it is so politically correct sounding) was that the Germans could NEVER break through such a heavily defended line.

That was the French "truth". The German "truth" was that they walked past the Maginot Line (because it was fixed and could not adapt to changes in attack plans) and into Paris.

"Consensus truth" is a waste of time and an insult to intelligent people. The summary shows why. If someone who was actually there because it was his life cannot get correct information into Wikipedia, that doesn't mean his life was different than he thought. It means that the Wikipedia "consensus truth" is balderdash. In other words, forty million Frenchmen CAN be wrong.

Re:Food for Thought

[David Gerard]

That's precisely the origin of the Wikipedia phrase "truth, not verifiability" - apparently nonsensical, but "truth" is unattainable, whereas "verifiability" is humanly manageable.

Re:Food for Thought

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

I never took a philosophy class [...]I don't know that converting everyone to empiricism is actually a rational goal.

Sure things, both of them: U didn't and It ain't cuz being rational does not mean being empiricist and vice versa.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

"But the rigid standards of academia (standards which have weakened over time)"

So that stuff about science proving black people inferior was done according to rigid, unbiased standards, was it?

I think not.

Re:Food for Thought

[bunratty]

You have that backwards. The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth.

Re:Food for Thought

[bunratty]

Wikipedia acknowledges that it is not suited for predicting the future. Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. Wikipedia should and does remove topics where well-supported facts cannot be found. To include anything in Wikipedia, you must be able to verify it in a reliable source. Perhaps they could require two reliable sources, but it's already pretty hard to put in facts that are not well supported.

Re:Food for Thought

[Dekortage]

Facts are easy to fix if they are really facts.

Not really. That's the whole point of the Lanier story, who tried to correct a fundamental error in it: "It is true I made one experimental short film about a decade and a half ago.... I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again.... Twice in the past several weeks, reporters have asked me about my filmmaking career."

He's not a filmmaker. On Wikipedia, he was having difficulty straightening this out. Thankfully his entry no longer includes that particular error.

Re:Food for Thought

[David Gerard]

You are of course quite correct, please excuse my brainfart. Verifiability, not truth! "Truth not verifiability" is the motto of Conservapedia.

Re:Food for Thought

[Reziac]

Good insight. I know I've often brought an online argument to a dead halt by dragging forth an abundance of logical thought and associated proofs.

The frustrated non-film-producer brought up the comparison of Wikipedia vs Britannica ... what's interesting is that Britannica is also a series of articles by independent parties, which may or may not be vetted by disinterested 3rd parties. The only real difference is that Wikipedia is far more subject to casual editing.

Re:Food for Thought

[Yvanhoe]

And what should you have had about the Maginot line in the encyclopedias of the time ? The consensus truth was the only thing to have. In wikipedia you would have a "criticism" paragraph, in the same way that it gives some room for conspiracies theories. Some of these might be true, but the thing is, the wikipedia has no way of being smarter than the consensus. And it still is awesomely useful that way.

Re:Food for Thought

[mattack2]

There was a Nova episode about Newton's work in alchemy. It doesn't look like you can watch it online (a bunch of other Nova episodes are online), but here's the page describing it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/newton/

Re:Food for Thought

[fractalrock]

Argumentum ad populum ... yes that's a wikipedia link; did I just blow your mind a little?

I'm not sure. Can I ask around?

Re:Food for Thought

[jc42]

Creationism is a rather useful test case for things like what wikipedia is attempting to do. It's a fairly clear case where you can't reliably go with the majority concensus. Biologists are a small minority of the human population, and religious people outnumber them by orders of magnitude. So any attempt to use concensus reasoning is doomed to epic failure in this case.

But note the "weasel words" that wikipedia uses: It depends on "reliable sources" to verify its facts. It's fairly obvious that a faith-based belief in something passed down from a nebulous authority that doesn't permit any testing can't possibly be a reliable source for anything. So they can happily go ahead and ignore the majority in this case, and go with the small minority that has done actual testing, evidence collecting, etc.

Similarly, physicists and geologists are even tinier minorities, but easily qualify as "reliable sources" in subjects like determining the age of the Earth, the structure of the Solar System, etc., while religious texts fail the basic tests for reliability in such subject areas.

It doesn't really take all that much thought to figure this stuff out.

Of course, in areas like politics and other social subject areas, it's a bit more difficult to determine which sources might be reliable.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone who was actually there because it was his life cannot get correct information into Wikipedia, that doesn't mean his life was different than he thought.

Unless the information he enters is a LIE to put himself in a better light, in which case it is NO ONE'S truth.

THAT is the problem with self-editing.

Re:Food for Thought

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

exactly.

Re:Food for Thought

[Chris Burke]

The "consensus truth" (a term I doubt they had heard of back then, it is so politically correct sounding) was that the Germans could NEVER break through such a heavily defended line.

That was the French "truth". The German "truth" was that they walked past the Maginot Line (because it was fixed and could not adapt to changes in attack plans) and into Paris.

Well, and the French were right! The Germans didn't break through the line until after they had already cut off supply lines from the rear*. In fact the whole reason the Germans decided to go around the Maginot Line was that they, too, believed that they couldn't break through directly. So the problem wasn't that the "consensus truth" wasn't true. It was, more or less. No, the problem was deeper and more insidious. It was that they failed to fully realize what that truth was telling them, and what it wasn't. "The Maginot Line is impregnable", taken as truth, should immediately raise the question "Well what about the rest of the French border?" But they didn't want to think about that truth, so suddenly France was safe against any German invasion, a decided non-truth.

It's kinda like if you visit some witches who tell you that "None of woman born shall harm you", you shouldn't go "Woo-hoo, I'm invincible!", because that's not what the witches just said. You should instead go "Wait a minute, what was that bit about 'of woman born'? Were you just saying that to be poetic? I mean I know this is Shakespeare, but that just seems like a weird thing to say. Would, say, a C-section count as not being 'of woman born'? Cus I know a guy who was born that way and he'd be one of the first in line to try to harm me."

So anyway, I agree, I just think there's a lesson here too about being careful about what truth is actually telling you.

* This may not be 100% accurate. I know there were early battles where the Germans did attack the line, and that it by and large did its job as advertised and held them off, though Germany may have broken through at some spots. Maybe I should look it up on Wikipedia?

Re:Food for Thought

[cayenne8]

"And what should you have had about the Maginot line in the encyclopedias of the time ? The consensus truth was the only thing to have."

I agree..kind of like the consensus of most western nations, that Saddam in Iraq had and was further pursuing WMD's. It was a shock to everyone when for the most part they couldn't be found. (I think recently some chemical weapons were found?)

But, for the most part...the intelligence in the US, UK, France..and Russia all said he had some hidden over there. And it isn't like Saddam didn't try to perpetuate the myth that he did. Ironically...if he's allowed unfettered inspections, and went out of his way to show he had none, and truly did NOT pursue getting them, he'd still be alive, in charge....and torturing his people for fun along with his sons.

Re:Food for Thought

[syousef]

If someone who was actually there because it was his life cannot get correct information into Wikipedia,

The summary is misleading. The facts aren't in question. Jason Lanier admits he directed a film and that it was shown at a film festival. The interpretation of those facts is what is in question. Mr Lanier does not believe that makes him a film director. The wikipedia editors do. In this case I think I'd side with Lanier but often the people that are the subject of the article are the least objective and therefore shouldn't be permitted to correct it.

From the link:

"My Wikipedia entry identifies me (at least this week) as a film director. It is true I made one experimental short film about a decade and a half ago. The concept was awful: I tried to imagine what Maya Deren would have done with morphing. It was shown once at a film festival and was never distributed and I would be most comfortable if no one ever sees it again.

In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie."

Re:Food for Thought

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

Vincent, is that you? Check this out man: in a post just near yours, sandysnowbeard writes:

[...] I was using wikipedia to look at some Van Gogh paintings a few weeks back, and one that I loved was purportedly in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Then I checked the museum archives itself, and I found out it's not there! What a load of hooey, I'm not even sure anymore that the painting is by our beloved half-eared expressionist, as it has disappeared from the wiki article, too.

Re:Food for Thought

[Martin Blank]

(I think recently some chemical weapons were found?)

They were just items that had been buried during the Iran-Iraq war and were long past their shelf life even if properly stored. No one seriously used them as proof.

Re:Food for Thought

[bunratty]

I agree that people will often write opinion in Wikipedia article and present it as fact. When I catch someone doing so, I rip it out immediately. That's the beauty of Wikipedia!

If you're not so bold, you can stick a {{fact}} template on it, and it will indicate that a citation is needed. If no one adds one, any editor can remove the unverified claim.

Re:Food for Thought

[ari_j]

The problem I have here is that it's not about verifiability in any serious sense of the term. It's about having hearsay to support your statement. When the only permitted source of verification is taking someone else's word for it, then you aren't really verifying anything other than the fact that someone else said it (a fact which, under Wikipedia's definition of 'verifiability' as stated in the story summary, is itself not verifiable).

Re:Food for Thought

[Obfuscant]

And what should you have had about the Maginot line in the encyclopedias of the time ? The consensus truth was the only thing to have.

That is untrue.

"Consensus truth" is nothing more than a politically correct way of saying "opinion" that dresses opinion up in a fancy dress and makes it look like more than it really is. It's a way of making EVERYONE correct, while not having to point out that some people's "truth" just doesn't fit with the facts. It's good for their "self esteem" and politically correct not to think that some truths really are absolute.

The encyclopedia of the time could easily give just the facts about the line, which is what truth ultimately is based on. Real truth, not "consensus truth" which can ignore facts in favor of rumor and innuendo. "The Maginot Line consists of X number of fortified positions spread across a line from Y to Z, intended to defend the country against German attack". Those are facts. "The Maginot Line is an invincible fortified defense system ..." is an opinion, or what would be called "consensus truth" today.

Some of these might be true, but the thing is, the wikipedia has no way of being smarter than the consensus.

Yes, it does. The same way anyone has of being smarter than the consensus. Look for facts and not opinions. The fact that they don't allow one of their victims to correct his own biography is demonstration that truth really isn't the goal of Wikipedia, it's popularity. Let everyone participate, even if they don't know what the hell they are talking about.

Here's an example of how to beat "consensus truth". The "consensus truth" is that the current US tax system is unfair to the poor and lets the rich off the hook. ("Unfair" and "off the hook" are opinion words, a quick way to identify "consensus truth".) The FACTS show that the poor already pay nothing, or very close to nothing, in federal taxes. The bottom 50% of taxpayers by income pay just 3.3% of the tax revenues (and a large number of them pay 0) while earning 13% of the income, while the top 0.1% of incomes pay 17% of the revenue while earning just 9% of the income. That's the truth, and it directly contradicts the "consensus truth", which shows that the consensus truth is not.

Re:Food for Thought

[camperdave]

you should also know that Newton ascribed to his age's equivalent of Shirley McClaine new age nonsense: alchemy.

No, Alchemy was not equivalent to new age nonsense. Alchemy was a brand new science at Newton's time, and its boundaries and laws were unknown. It was perfectly reasonable and logical to assume that since you could change the color of compounds, or change one substance into another by mixing and heating things that there might be a recipe for turning lead into gold. Today we understand the laws of chemistry and know that lead and gold are elements and cannot, by chemical means, be transformed into each other. What we see as "new age nonsense" today was merely cutting edge science back in the day.

Re:Food for Thought

[kdemetter]

well , the scientific method used both : empirism and rationalism.

The only way to know wether something is true , is to have witnessed it (emperical) , and then think about it , and then to analyze is , and verify if it is possible.

If you only analyse what someone else tells you , that information itself could be faulty , and so your conclusion may be incorrect, but there's no way to verify it.

(Even though Jaron Lanier's knows his own life best , he can't prove it all )

If you only witness something and don't analyse it , you may draw the wrong conclusion .
( Looking at the sky , someone might think the sun revolves around the earth )

Re:Food for Thought

[smallfries]

Actually wikipedia tries not to select a version of the truth. The reason that most talk pages are filled with arguments and claims that articles lack NPOV is that the aim is to write something that is Neutral Point Of View. Rather than have one person select the truth according to their knowledge and biases, the idea is that all the people who argue about a topic can contribute something.

As long as they can back it up with a citation.

It's a low bar, but it's high enough to cut out 90% of the crap. As long as citations are provided then multiple view points can coexist in the same article. The point is to prevent somebody deciding on truth, to present the argument so that the reader can make up their own mind. To do so in such a way that there are links into the background literature that can be followed, or debate on the talk page to see which areas were the most contentious.

In short, it's the complete opposite of what you describe.

Re:Food for Thought

[hankwang]

Most of us know which newspapers have good reporting and which ones don't. WP merges everything. That means loss of differentiation. Someone decides which version is "true", maybe because he doesn't know the others.

The ideal Wikipedia article provides a source for every disputable statement from which the reader can judge how reliable the statement is.

Re:Food for Thought

[David Gerard]

Well, yeah. There is no deterministic solution to editorial quality. This sort of debate is for the sort of obsessive nerd with induced aspergism who insists the world be in black and white because they personally are no good at handling shades of grey. You know, Wikipedia editors.

Re:Food for Thought

[M1rth]

"Truth, not verifiability."

How many times has something been "verified" on wikipedia... the "verification" coming from a "news story" somewhere... only to turn out that the news writer based his story (but didn't bother to list the source) on a preexisting wikipedia entry? I've lost count.

"Consensus" also runs into the same problems it always does when people with too much power try to control the "consensus".

I love this quote. It explains everything about what's wrong with Wikipedia:

"Why is this interesting? Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control."

What's worse for Wikipedia is that even their best minds, the people who should have been welcomed and allowed to work and were essential to fixing the problems - in other words, those people who were NOT part of the "consensus" and were doing their best to work on fixing it - have constantly been abused and attacked and run off (or just banned) by people who have too much power, too many "ownership" issues over the encyclopedia, and too little sense to behave like human beings.

The blog I just linked to shows just a few of the people Wikipedia would have needed to NOT turn into a disaster, but it's too late now. They're all run off or permanently removed by stupid, insane policies that essentially amount to a carte-blanche for administrators and administrators' "friends" to be abusive.

Re:Food for Thought

[internerdj]

True and for many fields that is very important. However, we evolved to make faulty reasoning for a reason. We are capable of operating on faulty information with a reasonable chance of survival because there is a slimmer chance of survival waiting on full information before making the "right" decision. Empiricism and Rationalism asks that everyone gives up their naturally evolved sense of decision making and move towards a more rigorous, time-consuming, and evolutionarily unbeneficial method for better long-term survival. For modern society that is a great step, but it is also an unnatural step that many people can't or won't make.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

It says "Roger eats cocks".

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Argumentum ad populum has nothing to do with the GPs assertion that "proof through concensus" (concensus theory) is valued more highly than "proof through observation" (the correspondence theory on which empirism, and by extension modern science, is based). Would you care to elaborate why you think a logical fallacy is applicable to the GPs post?

If anything, I'd think you're accusing the GP of manipulating the audience by performing a false appeal on emotion. But I can't find such an appeal in the GPs statement

Re:Food for Thought

[rtfa-troll]

Yes; except all of this discussion is wrong. The French explicitly did realise the weakness of the Maginot line; had considered extending it but didn't have the funds and just simply lacked reserves to fill in for those weaknesses. The line behaved perfectly, channelling the German attack to other areas, as expected. The Belgians failed by going Neutral and the French army failed by misdeploying and being otherwise under-equipped. I think you'll find the wikipedia article about this will help you find the truth.

Re:Food for Thought

[Agronomist Cowherd]

I note you're careful to say "federal taxes". Good talking point.

You might want to look at what percentage the poor pay in sales taxes (in those states that have them) and other taxes. As a proportion of salary, the poor pay more in those taxes than the rich. And as there are so many more poor than rich, they par more in aggregate as well.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

The "consensus truth" (a term I doubt they had heard of back then, it is so politically correct sounding) was that the Germans could NEVER break through such a heavily defended line.

In a sense those forty million Frenchmen were probably correct. If you seen how that line was fortified you might have said that the Germans could never BREAK THROUGH yourself. The Germans themselves probably though this themselves which is why they went around it through a forest Southeast of the line.

Re:Food for Thought

[Instine]

abstracted again, Hume questioned our very belief in empiricism by asking why aught expect the future to resemble the past, regardless of the amount of past evidence? There is no 'logical' a priori reason to assert this...
"As to past experience, it can be allowed to give direct and certain information of those precise objects only, and that precise period of time, which fell under its cognisance; but why this experience should be extended to future times, and to other objects, which for aught we know, may be only in appearance similar-this is the main question on which I would insist."
But we belive it so, and tautologically, the more evidence we see, the more we belive the illocical, to be 'fact'.
what excites me about wikipedia, is that it is still improving, yet we are still questioning, how it could be improved. Not so of the the old encylopedia...

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you implying that the majority of people are creationists? Because from your first paragraph that is what I infer you to mean, and this is incorrect. The problem is that there are a whole lot of religious people who are not creationists.

Re:Food for Thought

[ari_j]

For me, it has nothing to do with shades of gray. It is rather that people think Wikipedia is something it is not: A repository of knowledge. Wikipedia is peer-reviewed hearsay. It's very good at that. There are two categories of people who are hurt by that, though: (1) People who think it's a repository of knowledge and (2) those obsessive nerds you mentioned, who think it should (and, by implication, can) be such a thing. They're both wrong. And no, there's no gray area there. ;)

Re:Food for Thought

[Tom]

The ideal Wikipedia article provides a source for every disputable statement from which the reader can judge how reliable the statement is.

The problem isn't with the sources that are there.

The problem is with those that have been omitted, and the simple fact that as a non-expert on the topic, you will likely never even know that something is missing.

A lot of criticism against WP isn't that articles are faked or outright lies, but against selective editing and selective removal.

Re:Food for Thought

[jc42]

Are you implying that the majority of people are creationists?

Well, actually, if you take the number of people that qualify as "biologists", the number of believing creationists could easily be 100 times that, and still be a minority of the more than 6 billion people on the planet. This is especially true if you include the people who say they accept evolution, but think that it's guided by their God.

There really aren't all that many scientists in the human population. They just have an impact much greater than their numbers might suggest. Similarly, there aren't all that many fundamentalist Christian preachers, but they also have much greater influence (especially in the US) than the average human. And the latter minority is outspokenly opposed to the former minority, while the former minority tends to ignore the dispute and quietly go about their research.

Re:Food for Thought

[DM9290]

But, for the most part...the intelligence in the US, UK, France..and Russia all said he had some hidden over there. And it isn't like Saddam didn't try to perpetuate the myth that he did. Ironically...if he's allowed unfettered inspections, and went out of his way to show he had none, and truly did NOT pursue getting them, he'd still be alive, in charge....and torturing his people for fun along with his sons.

If Hussein could do the impossible then he would have waved his hand and the ocean would have swallowed the American invasion fleet.

WMD was merely a pretense for war. The war was already decided upon. Nothing Hussein did could have prevented it.

And no intelligence agency claimed they had reliable information that any weapons of mass destruction were located in Iraq.

Re:Food for Thought

[Obfuscant]

They were just items that had been buried during the Iran-Iraq war and were long past their shelf life even if properly stored. No one seriously used them as proof.

Chemical rockets were found in the first week, but probably what it being referrred to is the sale of a large amount of yellowcake uranium to Canada from the stash in Iraq.

Re:Food for Thought

[turbidostato]

"That was the French "truth". The German "truth" was..."

The German truth was exactly the same as the French truth. That was not the problem. The problem was (as it is so usually) to *understand* the implications of the truth. The French *knew* the Maginot Line couldn't be trespassed (for reasonable ammounts of "know" and "trespass") and from this fact they *deduced* no enemy beyond the line would enter France. The German *knew* the Maginot Line couldn't be trespassed (for reasonable ammounts of "know" and "trespass"), so they *deduced* that in order to get into France they should find a different path... through Belgium, for instance.

Re:Food for Thought

[CrimsonAvenger]

The Belgians failed by going Neutral and the French army failed by misdeploying and being otherwise under-equipped.

Interesting, and here I always thought the Belgians fought the Germans until their country was pretty much overrun.

For that matter, since the French had more and better tanks, infantry, and artillery than the Germans, it's really hard to say they were "under-equipped". "Using the wrong doctrine" might be an acceptable description of the French Army, or perhaps "being run by dolts", but "under-equipped" doesn't really fit.

Note also that the French didn't really misdeploy, so much as underestimate the Germans. The Ardennes was relatively lightly defended not because the French didn't think the Germans could/would attack there, but because they thought that the rudimentary road network in the Ardennes would render a QUICK attack through there impossible, thus allowing for a French response before things got out of hand. Alas, it didn't work out that way....

Re:Food for Thought

[ShakaUVM]

>>What if Wikipedia is a symptom of a much larger problem in our culture?

Amen to that. I've found factual errors in wikipedia which are pretty easily disprovable, but because some retard on the internet has a web page that 10 people read supporting it, it's "verifiable". When trying to remove it, if there's any people who agree with the fake fact for political reasons, they will do everything they can to keep it in the article, or even make it the "consensus" view on the subject, even if it's demonstrably false.

What we're looking at is a mutated version of Marx's theory of truth, which is that there's the less-important "factual truth" and the more-important "greater truth", which conveys the point we're trying to get across... and who cares if it's factually accurate or not? For example, suppose that there's pretty much incontrovertible evidence that Julius Rosenberg was guilty. This is the factual truth. The greater truth is that America is evil and hates jews/communists/take your pick, and that we should not let mere facts get in the way with the story we're trying to convey.

In other words, as opposed to the most common historical view of truth (truth is what is in reality), this new Marxist view of truth states that truth is whatever best serves our purposes.

Re:Food for Thought

[Obfuscant]

I note you're careful to say "federal taxes". Good talking point.

I said federal taxes because federal taxes are currently being discussed in the Presidential campaign. The class hatred of the rich is being used to justify tax increases on the rich and welfare (called "tax cuts", but you can't cut taxes below 0) for the poor.

You might want to look at what percentage the poor pay in sales taxes (in those states that have them) and other taxes.

They pay the same percentage in sales tax as the rich. The rich don't get a free ride. The poor aren't treated unfairly. In amount, the rich pay a lot more than the poor, simply because they buy more. Except in Oregon, where nobody pays any sales tax.

"Other taxes" is too obtuse a reference to know what you want to discuss. Property taxes? Well, the rich, again, pay a lot more than the poor. If you don't own property, you don't pay property taxes. Excise taxes? Again, the rich pay more. If you don't buy things which have excise taxes on them, you pay nothing. Death taxes? Again, the rich pay more in death taxes than the poor.

The "consensus truth" that the poor are being treated unfairly is still not the real truth, once you look at the facts. All it takes to get past "consensus truth" is to resort to facts.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

"I agree..kind of like the consensus of most western nations, that Saddam in Iraq had and was further pursuing WMD's."

That's indeed a consensus, but only one from the USA. No other nation, no one, really believed that there were WMD's in Irak and only *some* western *governments* (not the nations people) did the theatre of seeming to believe.

In fact, the awesome part of this story is to know that USA government and people *did* believe that story -all the rest of the people thought you knew as everybody else that it was just a lie in order to go for the oil.

"for the most part...the intelligence in the US, UK, France..and Russia all said he had some hidden over there."

Wrong! all of them said that the USA intelligence said so... and everybody thought that if unbelievably there were in fact WMD's, that was a fantastic exercise of cynism from the part of the USA, since they would have been the ones selling them to Saddam.

"Ironically...if he's allowed unfettered inspections, and went out of his way to show he had none, and truly did NOT pursue getting them, he'd still be alive, in charge....and torturing his people for fun along with his sons."

Ironically, it's awesome that on this day and age there's still people in the USA believing that it had anything to do with Saddam at all: USA government had already decided they wanted Irak for a new bannana republic and that was all.

Re:Food for Thought

[V!NCENT]

Damn it! You got me... Well, there's no point in hiding the truth now... Truth is I decided not to paint that painting in the past, just to fsck up Wikipedia you know (it's fun), but when seeing my own counterpart in the past I was forced to run as fast as I could to my time machine. But being in a hurry I pressed the l big red button too soon and well... my entire body wasn't completely inside the machine, so that's where my ear went.

I'm about to go to bed now and fix my missing ear tomorrow. Keep an eye on the Wikipedia page, but don't tell anyone, OK? I have created too much time paradoxes already ;)

Re:Food for Thought

[cayenne8]

"In fact, the awesome part of this story is to know that USA government and people *did* believe that story -all the rest of the people thought you knew as everybody else that it was just a lie in order to go for the oil."

That all sounds well and good except for one thing. Where's all the supposed oil the US is getting from this 'war for oil'?

I certainly don't see it...nope, not getting oil from there cheap, we don't own it, and we're not even getting any revenue from it, Iraq is keeping it all themselves.

Try again?

Re:Food for Thought

[cayenne8]

"WMD was merely a pretense for war. The war was already decided upon. Nothing Hussein did could have prevented it.

And no intelligence agency claimed they had reliable information that any weapons of mass destruction were located in Iraq."

Wow...it has only been a few short years, and we're already at it with revisionist history?

Pretty much NO intelligence information is reliable beyond reproach. At the time, the best intelligence info pointed to Iraq having and pursuing WMD's...and there was proof they had some and had used them on the people in northern Iraq. Even Clinton is on record saying they thought Saddam had them.

Countries like the UK, France and Russia was all on board with this intelligence at the time.

Re:Food for Thought

[Falconhell]

Citation needed. (-:

Re:Food for Thought

[koekepeer]

I agree with the parent post to a large extent, but I think that maybe some things get mixed up here with regard to who is responsible for what.

The extension of human knowledge through science is based on verifiable experimentation. If I do an experiment, and publish an article based on it, the reviewers of the article require that I specify the exact circumstances needed to find the published outcome. If others cannot repeat the experiments, the speculations in my discussion are unfounded and therefore discarded.

The problem is not one of relativism and Popperian verifiability issues. The problem is that people mix up the notions of information and truth. Information, from any source, can be seen as a form of communication. One can agree or disagree, and when something new is presented, the onus is on the information provider to explain why (s)he thinks this information is relevant to a certain problem.

In the case of Wikipedia, this becomes difficult, but it's not Wikipedia that's the problem, but a general property of compendia of knowledge. Printed encyclopedia, textbooks, reviews in scientific magazines all have this property: the presentation of conclusions.

Conclusions are not the outcome of scientific research, they are merely new questions asked to the scientific community. They state: I found X, and within the current state of affairs in this discipline, I think it means Y. Sometimes Y becomes a temporary truth, a dogma, but that's not the fault of science, but of people thinking they are right ;-)

The issue at hand is the issue of critical reading. When we criticise Wikipedia for being incorrect, we are actually saying that we want them to be trustworthy enough so that we don't have to be critical anymore.

If there is a general underlying problem, it is the problem of trust, and why people seem to have adopted the notion that they should assume the worst relying on the simple dichotomy of truth and lie. There are 'factual untruths' in Wikipedia, as there are in any encyclopedia. The problem is that anyone can edit, and that we don't trust them.

Now, without spinning off into conspiracy theory land, what are the variables influencing trust that someone's intentions are genuine? I can think of a few, but it's a problem that needs collaborative solving. After all, I may be 'wrong' ;-)

Re:Food for Thought

[Hucko]

I'd dunno... PM J Howard of Australia spent considerable effort trying to convince us Iraq was a threat. PM Blair too I believe. It sort of worked too. ~ 1/3 of the people I spoke to on the street (I was a taxi driver) believed WMD were possessed by Iraq. Almost 2/3 of the remaining population (sorry, these figures are approximations) just used the bad logic "Would you want Saddam to be the president of the superpower?" as justification for backing President Bush.

Re:Food for Thought

[blair1q]

No, it's Wikipedia.

By refusing to subvert quotability to competence, it guarantees that falsehoods will outlive the facts.

Re:Food for Thought

[blair1q]

Truth is verifiable every time you test it, not just every time you check the same failed test.

Re:Food for Thought

[Oligonicella]

Webster's

1. evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true, or to produce belief in its truth.

That, by the way, is the consensus of the definition of the term. So, it don't matter squat what a million people agree to -- if there is no evidence, there's no proof.

Re:Food for Thought

[quenda]

The bottom 50% of taxpayers by income pay just 3.3% of the tax revenues

But how many of those low-tax payers are multi-millionaires? Its the high salary earners who pay the most tax, not the real rich with their offshore funds and trust accounts.

BTW, I think those numbers imply the richer half of the US get 87% of the income, or SEVEN TIMES on average the income of the poorer half. I find it a bit hard to believe that the US has become so divided.

Re:Food for Thought

[Silicon Jedi]

The parent post contains unverifiable claims.

It's "Understanding is a three-edged sword."
The followup is "Yeah, your side, their side, and the truth."

Re:Food for Thought

[crossmr]

IAR is garbage. The only time people try to invoke it is when they're trying to win a debate and can't. They can't make their case so they turn around and start linking IAR in every response.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't being killed by an animal or disease be a more plausible alternate interpretation of that prognostication than the weird c-section stuff? ;)

Re:Food for Thought

[E 99]

But you have to realize that this is a fundamental human problem for every human being, regardless of status, class, intellect, or education, many of histories brightest minds were horribly wrong in enormous ways about other things. Look at Newton for instance and the amount he wrote concerning religion, etc.

Newton was horribly wrong for writing extensively on theology???

Socrates showed a long time ago that all knowledge and claims to morals and truth is political.

Not sure what you mean by that. Socrates tried to show, probably more than anything else, that knowledges were innate. And that in the most fundamental things, learning is not really learning, but in some sense "remembering" what we already know.

Re:Food for Thought

[bob.appleyard]

It was a shock to everyone when for the most part they couldn't be found.

I know this is gloriously off-topic, but what? I wasn't shocked in the slightest. It certainly wasn't outside the range of probable scenarios.

Re:Food for Thought

[martin-boundary]

What if the problem is not Wikipedia at all?

In the case of Wikipedia and Jaron Lanier, the problem is in fact Wikipedia. More precisely, Wikipedia's articles are incomplete, in that they make no provision for a subject's right of reply.

Every wikipedia entry about a person should have a reserved section in which the actual person can, if they wish, comment on the article about him(her)self. Not other people, just that person.

This is really just journalistic common sense: if a reporter writes a story about someone (or a company), they contact that person and offer them the right to comment. Maybe that person doesn't want to comment, but they are given the option in the interest of truth.

In fact, the same principle shows up whenever truth matters, eg in a trial: the accused is permitted to confront the accusers.

Yet Wikipedia doesn't allow for a reserved section where the subject of the article can comment on the article about himself. Until they do, the problem is clearly Wikipedia.

Using the case of Jaron Lanier, how is an impartial observer supposed to distinguish between a failure in authoritative reporting vs. an attempt to rewrite history for personal benefit?

By making their mind up based on as much evidence as possible: By reading the article, and also reading Jaron Lanier's actual comments about the article about himself (if he wishes).

More evidence is always better than less evidence when truth is the goal. It's not rocket science.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

In Finland, we have a similar saying. Paraphrased, it's something close to "a millon flies can't be wrong - shit tastes great!"

Oddly enough, this saying usually gets invoked in discussions about Windows...

Re:Food for Thought

[blahplusplus]

"Not sure what you mean by that. Socrates tried to show, probably more than anything else, that knowledges were innate. And that in the most fundamental things, learning is not really learning, but in some sense "remembering" what we already know."

You missed a major point of socrates death and life. His whole reasoning for going through that and questioning others was to show that the truth also was political, and hence that is why he was known as the gadfly of athens. "... and so socrates stung athens." to paraphrase. He went through that to defend what he believed to be the good (to be on the path of a lover of wisdom) to the very last.

Re:Food for Thought

[Obfuscant]

Wow...it has only been a few short years, and we're already at it with revisionist history?

No no no. It's called "consensus truth", and it seems to be the only kind of truth that some people accept.

Re:Food for Thought

[Linzer]

In other words, forty million Frenchmen CAN be wrong.

Fortunately, this doesn't apply anymore, since there's more of them. Sixty-five million Frenchmen really can't be wrong!

Re:Food for Thought

[blahplusplus]

In case I was too vague in my last reply...

Socrates stood up for truth - i.e. when people suffer from illusions and lies, he want around exposing other peoples illusions and claims that they had it. Hence the political nature of socrates life. He believed the good encompassed exposing other peoples lies, and hence he was annoyed the living crap out of the many people of his time.

People don't like their cherished ideas, religions, ideologies exposed for the illusions they are and hence this is why socrates showed the nature of truth is political to man, for man wants to think he has the truth when the truth is most men don't have it.

Re:Food for Thought

[Obfuscant]

But how many of those low-tax payers are multi-millionaires?

None of them. I said "The bottom 50% of taxpayers by income".

Its the high salary earners who pay the most tax, not the real rich with their offshore funds and trust accounts.

You can't be one of the "rich" that Obama wants to soak with an income tax increase and not be making income. If you make no income, you pay no tax. You are part of the bottom 50%.

BTW, I think those numbers imply the richer half of the US get 87% of the income,

and pay 96.7% of the taxes. They aren't getting off scott free. The ratio gets worse as you move up the income ladder. The people who are actually "rich" in any significant way pay considerably more.

or SEVEN TIMES on average the income of the poorer half.

You've ignored the broad range of the top 50%. What is "on average" for them is really a meaningless statistic. But yes, it is possible that someone working a good job makes seven times what someone who sits around the house collecting unemployment makes. This is not a problem, in my opinion.

Re:Food for Thought

[Obfuscant]

I'm simply amazed at the number of people who are telling me that forty million frenchmen were right, despite clear evidence to the contrary. I can think of no better demonstration of why consensus truth is dangerous, not just false to start with.

Re:Food for Thought

[Prune]

it shouldn't have entries that try and guess

How about entries that try to guess?

Re:Food for Thought

[cowscows]

Nope, that ain't no good either, nope not one bit.

Re:Food for Thought

[ScrewMaster]

"proof through consensus" I think the term you are looking for is religion.

No ... democracy.

Re:Food for Thought

[ScrewMaster]

Wow...it has only been a few short years, and we're already at it with revisionist history?

No no no. It's called "consensus truth", and it seems to be the only kind of truth that some people accept.

I wonder what Stephen Colbert would make of this? "Consensual Truthiness" or something like that.

Re:Food for Thought

[ScrewMaster]

Note also that the French didn't really misdeploy, so much as underestimate the Germans.

That was a common failing among Germany's enemies at the time.

Re:Food for Thought

[Nazlfrag]

I quite liked the response from another who thought they were there, "Of course he has WMDs, the CIA still have the reciepts!"

Re:Food for Thought

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

So anyway, I agree, I just think there's a lesson here too about being careful about what truth is actually telling you.

So what you're saying is, wikipedia is wrong, and you can't believe the truth? Got it. ;)

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that could also be called social constructionism.

There is also shades of Kuhnianism in this.

I guess it comes down to wether you are a realist or an idealist.

Re:Food for Thought

[1u3hr]

the intelligence in the US, UK, France..and Russia all said he had some hidden over there

No, it did not. The "intelligence" people didn't believe it. The politicians cherry picked the reports that allowed them to justify doing what they wanted to do for entirely other reasons.

Example: http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=129012
A senior military official, who asked not to be identified, told Nightline that Cheney, a former defense secretary, was extremely selective in picking out intelligence on Iraq that supported his views, and that his staff's reports were distorted and ideological. .... "The whole emphasis," Cannistraro said, "was, 'We are sure that there are weapons of mass destruction. We are sure that Saddam is acquiring a nuclear capability. Why isn't your reporting showing this? We're getting reporting independently from the intelligence community that convinces us that that's the case. You're not providing any corroboration for that.' The weapons of mass destruction analysts at CIA took these visits as intimidation, as pressure."

Re:Food for Thought

[Chris Burke]

Wouldn't being killed by an animal or disease be a more plausible alternate interpretation of that prognostication than the weird c-section stuff? ;)

Occam's Razor doesn't apply to Shakespeare. ;)

Re:Food for Thought

[1u3hr]

Where's all the supposed oil the US is getting from this 'war for oil'?

In Saudi Arabia.

Re:Food for Thought

[Chris Burke]

Though on second thought, Macbeth being torn apart by wolves would have been pretty awesome. =D

Re:Food for Thought

[rtb61]

In your case of course is of course the presentation of an artful deception. What counts is not what percentage of total taxable revenue the rich or the poor pay but what percentage of their own individual income they pay. So some individual earning less than lets say $50,000 a year paying a higher percentage of tax than another individual earning $5,000,000 per year, seems hardly fair especially considering the sheer dollar volume of the remainder left after tacxes.

Another way of looking at it is, in a world of limited resources, certain individuals believe they are entitled to use not just 10 times, or even 100 times, but more than 1000 times the natural resources of the planet than the average person uses. This of course extends into their entitlement to generate pollution as well, some individuals actually believe they entitled to pollute at 1,000 times the average rate not as a result of their value to society but purely based upon their greed and their ability to exploit the rest of humanity.

Some individuals will even take pride in their ability to consume and pollute at 10,000 times the average, truly obscene stuff, now that is the reality and the truth. Of course the absurd belief system behind it is, that mass media and the gullible majority celebrate and aspire to it and, worship the people that do it, 'stupid is as stupid does'. Logically it makes considerable sense to tax the crap out of the rich and greedy in order to limit their ability to consume the planets natural resources and generate the pollution that is choking the life out of it and us ;P.

Re:Food for Thought

[hankwang]

The problem is with those that have been omitted, and the simple fact that as a non-expert on the topic, you will likely never even know that something is missing.

Do you have examples?

There are plenty of subjects that I'm not an expert in where I can spot nonsense (opinions of editors, marketing material) when I read Wikipedia to inform myself. If you have a critical eye for such things, you can simply click [Edit] and add {{fact}} after the dubious statement to warn future readers.

Re:Food for Thought

[dubl-u]

It means that the Wikipedia "consensus truth" is balderdash.

It does?

I have a physics textbook from 100 years ago. It talks about the luminiferous aether, but mentions nothing about relativity. By your logic, that would mean that "science" is balderdash.

I think a better way to look at it is that what people call "truth" is always just a human understanding of the world. Limited, finite, and fallible, the best we humans can do is to continuously challenge and refine that understanding. Wikipedia has its flaws, but it does open that process up to the whole world, which seems like a plus to me.

Re:Food for Thought

[Tei]

You must do as i do. Simply add && to the link:
Argumentum ad populum (note: wikipedia is broken)

Hence.. wikipedia is broken.

Re:Food for Thought

[sapphire wyvern]

Now *that* deserves modding up.

Re:Food for Thought

[WNight]

Income is not assets.

The question was how many low-income people are rich and just paying themselves token wages, thus being a misleading statistic. The poster implied that these people, who avoid most taxes by being low-income, are common enough to leave professionals (Doctors, etc) with high wages to pay the brunt of the taxes, not CEOs and business owners as you might expect.

Re:Food for Thought

[jotok]

When I took experimental methods it was explained to me that, when we analyse the results of an experiment, we are not proving nor disproving anything, only examining the information to aid in decisionmaking.

So when we think critically we distinguish between "what is really true" and "what do I know that I can use to help me make decisions."

In the case of Iraq, the USA went to war because that's what was thought to be true (well...sorta). In the case of the Maginot line, people believed in the consensus "truth" as if it were bedrock, but the idea did not stand up to any critical analysis since the Germans were able to come up with a counter-strategy fairly quickly. If you think about it as "What do I know about the Maginot line that will help me develop a strategy" vs. "True or not true: If we attack the Maginot line, we will be able to defeat it" then you can see the error in French thinking at the time.

Bottom line what I have learned is that, every so often, I have to stop doing analysis and take a look at how I am analyzing things, what questions I'm asking, and so forth. Drives my bosses mad sometimes but helps me make fewer mistakes.

Re:Food for Thought

[YourExperiment]

GameSpot [gamespot.com], a site that SHOULD by all rights be authoritative.

[citation needed]

Re:Food for Thought

[jdfox]

>They pay the same percentage in sales tax as the rich. The rich don't get a free ride. The poor aren't treated unfairly. In amount, the rich pay a lot more than the poor, simply because they buy more. Except in Oregon, where nobody pays any sales tax.

I believe the GP poster was referring to the percentage of their income paid by the poor for sales tax, not the percentage rate of the sales tax itself. For a better illustration of why this is regressive, have a read of the parable of the widow's offering in the Bible. Oregon doesn't levy sales taxes because sales tax is regressive by design, since it charges everyone the same taxes on the basics that everyone must buy in order to survive. A moral case can be made for a uniform rate of sales tax on big-ticket luxury goods, but not on food, for example.

Re:Food for Thought

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Sorry, but the 'consensus' only existed in the minds of the Americans. Most of us Europeans could smell the bullshit, MWD's or not.

Re:Food for Thought

[mdwh2]

Indeed - this whole article is based on a lie. Wikipedia hasn't redefined truth - rather, they have a different threshold for inclusion. This is to stop people putting in stuff claiming it's true, when they have no source for their claims.

Whilst it is a problem that Wikipedia is only as good as its sources, the key point is attribution. So when it says "blah blah is blah[1]", that should be read as implicit shorthand for "source [1] claims that blah blah is blah".

It's also not true that Wikipedia accepts any source - the issue of reliable sources is an important requirement, and if a source's reliability is doubted, it should not be used.

Furthermore, this is an issue with all encyclopedias, and indeed, anyone who ever cites a source. Why does the article single out Wikipedia?

For it to claim that Wikipedia is redefining truth is a straw man (and I note the irony that an article that critices Wikipedia over "truth" is itself spreading a misconception...)

I'm not quite sure of the details of the Jaron Lanier case (the link was a rather tldr rant...), but Wikipedia bends over backwards to be "nice" to people who have articles written about them (biographies of living people), and getting material removed that is disputed by that person shouldn't be any trouble at all, even if he doesn't have a counter source.

Put it this way - correcting misinformation about you in Wikipedia will be far easier than correcting it in any other encylopedia, or just about any news article.

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

> At the time, the best intelligence info pointed to Iraq having and pursuing WMD's...

[Citation needed]

Intelligence needs to be verifiable and NPOV. :)

Re:Food for Thought

[riondluz]

Oh, you and yours can just stuff it (your tax opinion) where the sun dont shine.
You cannot discuss taxation (as truth, opinion or fact) w/out addressing the revenues
that are taxed.
The FACTS there are that the rich have been given hand-outs and a meal-ticket at the
expense of everyone else. This increasing disparity is a FACT. It is the cause
of all the resentment, not taxation, but earnings.

As for taxes, federal taxation should be abolished and re-applied solely to capital
gains. (my .02)

You, sir, can take a flying leap

Re:Food for Thought

[Sique]

I agree..kind of like the consensus of most western nations, that Saddam in Iraq had and was further pursuing WMD's. It was a shock to everyone when for the most part they couldn't be found.

This consensus was never there. It was an U.S.-only phenomenon. After Colin Powell's presentation at the Security Council the head of the Council at this time, Joschka Fischer, said: "It didn't convince us." So no, except for the U.S. no one ever thought much about the WMDs in Iraq.

Re:Food for Thought

[blackest_k]

I don't suppose there is a rich man willing to swap his income with that of a poor man so he pays a lower percentage in tax is there?

I don't suppose there are any people unemployed due to a rich man deciding he could make more money by moving jobs away from the local economy to somewhere with lower costs safety standards and scruples.

While there are people intentionally unemployed, it is insulting to assume that anyone on welfare is intentionally on welfare.

you can play the percentage game all you like but there is a minimum income needed to maintain body and soul and tax shouldn't take people below that.

In the UK there is a thing called family credit where the government tops up the income of poorer families. Yes thats right the company bosses are more than happy to pay wages below the poverty level and for their payroll bill to be subsidized.

Yes it costs a lot to be wealthy, it costs even more to be poor.

Re:Food for Thought

[sumdumass]

If Hussein could do the impossible then he would have waved his hand and the ocean would have swallowed the American invasion fleet.

Actually, what he did was make sure that any question about them went unresolved until after the invasion and his loss of power. Of course he told interrogators that he thought he needed to keep the impresion of having them there because he was afraid that without them, his neighboring states would invade and he couldn't defend the country.

WMD was merely a pretense for war. The war was already decided upon. Nothing Hussein did could have prevented it.

That's actually one of those consensus fallacies we are talking about. You have no proof whatsoever at all to back up your claim but you are spouting off an opinion as fact anyways.

And no intelligence agency claimed they had reliable information that any weapons of mass destruction were located in Iraq.

Yes, and at the same time, no intelligence agency claimed to have evidence of the contrary. You had Hans Blix attempting to claim that all the warnings in the UNSCUM and UNMOVIC quarterly reports weren't valid and didn't means what they said (even the ones he was responsable for) but he was discounted because of his own actions and later connections to any war groups. But when he was in control of the Agencies who had intelligence, he went along with the game in claiming what a threat Iraq was. It wasn't until after he was replaced and war looked imminent that he opposed the idea of WMDs in Iraq.

The reliability is a reason Russia didn't join in, France claimed that even if he did have WMDs, he was contained and not a threat, we later found out that they were attempting to protect their secrete oil deals with Iraq that thwarted the UN sanctions that were supposed to force Saddam into cooperation. Why don't you take an objective look at it. You can still appose it but at least then you won't look like an idiot in the process.

Re:Food for Thought

[mfnickster]

The bottom 50% of taxpayers by income pay just 3.3% of the tax revenues (and a large number of them pay 0) while earning 13% of the income

I hate when people throw this particular figure out there, because it's deceptive. Know why?

There are about 115,000 households in the USA, and even if the bottom 50% paid 100% of their income as taxes, it would only come to a little over a billion dollars. The Federal government pays about a billion dollars per day just in interest on the national debt. A billion is a drop in the proverbial bucket!

Even if every household in the lower 50% were to suddenly earn the median income of $48,000, and paid 100% of their income as taxes, it would come to about $2.7 billion. By contrast, the government currently spends about $56 BILLION per day. The national debt alone increases by $3.75 BILLION per day. To recap: you could confiscate the entire incomes of the lower half of the country, and burn through it in a couple days without any new expenditures by the federal government.

Can you start to see why the working class is pissed off at having their children's and grandchildren's futures mortgaged?

Re:Food for Thought

[mfnickster]

Sorry to reply to my own comment - please ignore the numbers... it's late and I'm a dumbass for copy-pasting without paying attention.

Of course that's supposed to be 115 *million* households. The data was in 1000s :-P

Still, the bottom 50% earn about $4 billion per day - barely enough to cover the interest + new debt even if they paid 100% of their income as tax!

If they all made the median $48,000, they would earn about $7.5 billion per day. Even at 100% taxation, what use does the gov't have for that small money???

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

One time I threw a rock at a pidgeon that was lying on the bushes. My intentions where honorable if idiotic, it looked hurt so I wanted to immobilize it to allow me to capture it and fix it. I felt guilty about this for years, until I finally realized that it was a silly childhood mistake. You won't find this story on wikipedia :P

Re:Food for Thought

[mark0978]

Sometimes what people remember as the truth isn't what happened at all, but how they wanted it to happen, therefore they build a delusion to be more at peace with the past.

(I'm not saying this one particular guy did this, but to discount that aspect altogether is kind of ridiculous)

Re:Food for Thought

[Obfuscant]

Of couse the GP poster was referring to percent of their income. It wasn't relevant, since the discussion at the federal level by the Presidential candidates has nothing to do with sales taxes, only income taxes. The "consensus truth" in that debate is that the rich get off free and the poor are taken advantage of. This is disproven once the facts are examined. There is nothing the President can do about sales taxes, so whether they are unfair or not has nothing to do with this debate.

Oregon doesn't have a sales tax because the people there have voted many times not to have one. While the fact that it is regressive may have played a part, I suspect the simple fact that people do not want to pay more taxes than they have to, and have not had to pay a sales tax, is the bigger reason. The fact that Oregon has passed taxes on "other people" hints at that. They passed a high tax on cigarettes, e.g., based on people who don't smoke who won't have to pay it. People are often happy to vote for taxes on other people, but not themselves.

And, if you note carefully, the regressive nature of the sales tax is why all instances I know of (except for perhaps VAT in countries with that hidden sales tax) exempt "basics that everyone must buy in order to survive."

A moral case can be made for a uniform rate of sales tax on big-ticket luxury goods, but not on food, for example.

The concept of income redistribution is never a moral basis for a tax. I'm sorry that some people cannot afford to buy some things, but I, too, cannot afford many things that I'd like to buy. I do not consider my inability to buy them an ethical reason for calling for high taxes on those items. I do not consider my lack of smoking sufficient reason to vote for a tax on cigarettes, either, so I did not.

Re:Food for Thought

[Obfuscant]

I don't suppose there is a rich man willing to swap his income with that of a poor man so he pays a lower percentage in tax is there?

Of course not. But there are rich people who are quite willing to forgo working a little bit harder to make just a bit more money so they won't have to pay extra taxes. Sometimes this "work" is simply taking a risk by investing the money they have in new (or expanding old) companies. This effort on their part is often the source of jobs and income for other people. If they don't do it, this reduces federal revenues.

They are also more likely to try to find any way they can to shelter what they do make so they won't have to pay higher taxes. This, too, reduces federal revenues. It is a fact that increasing tax RATES reduces tax REVENUES and vice versa.

I don't suppose there are any people unemployed due to a rich man deciding he could make more money by moving jobs away from the local economy to somewhere with lower costs safety standards and scruples.

Like I just said, it is quite likely for rich people, who are not stupid, to find ways to avoid paying higher taxes, and moving jobs offshore is a common method. Scruples has nothing to do with it. Taxing them even more just provides more incentive for them to move more jobs offshore. You can't improve the economy and create jobs by raising taxes, not even taxes on the rich.

Do you not imagine that if someone wanted to come take things from you that you've worked hard to get, you just might try to find ways of hiding them so you could keep them?

you can play the percentage game all you like but there is a minimum income needed to maintain body and soul and tax shouldn't take people below that.

Have you ignored the very large percentage of people in the US who PAY NO INCOME TAX? It is false to claim that income taxes take anyone below a "minimum income" level. In fact, the US tax system has handouts built into it, called "earned income credit". People who aren't paying income taxes directly get credit for income taxes paid by other people they've bought things from. It's an amazing fact that you can get a REFUND for more than you've actually paid.

The "consensus truth" calls for income tax "cuts" for the poor, who already pay no income tax! The truth just doesn't match the consensus.

In the UK there is a thing called family credit where the government tops up the income of poorer families.

Yes, the UK is moving towards socialism, just as the US is. Take money from the people who have it and give it to those who didn't. It's not a new concept, even though all the people in the US who love Obama are claiming he's filled with new concepts.

Yes thats right the company bosses are more than happy to pay wages below the poverty level ...

And yet they find people willing to work for those wages. If nobody was willing to work for poverty level wages, the employers would have to pay more to get the work done. Tell me, when you look to fill up your gas tank, do you go to the station with the highest prices, or do you look around for ways to save money? Why do you think rich people would be stupid enough to look for the costliest way of doing things?

Re:Food for Thought

[Obfuscant]

So some individual earning less than lets say $50,000 a year paying a higher percentage of tax than another individual earning $5,000,000 per year, seems hardly fair especially considering the sheer dollar volume of the remainder left after tacxes.

The numbers show that the top earners pay higher percentages of their income in taxes. People who make very little pay nothing at all, they even get money back. Your statement is based on the consensus truth that the rich get off free and the poor are taken advantage of, not the real truth based on the numbers I've already provided. The bottom 50% of earners make 13% of the money and pay 3.3% of the tax, while the top 10% earned 39% of the income and paid 71% of the taxes. That yeilds a RATE that is much less for the bottom 50% than for the top 10%.

The rest of your response was irrelevant to taxation or the consensus truth that isn't.

Re:Food for Thought

[jdfox]

The concept of income redistribution is never a moral basis for a tax.

And if the majority of voters in a democracy disagree with this categorical assertion, as they have in the United States and around the world, what then? Secession?

And if the majority of editors on a Wikipedia article do not uphold your politically conservative viewpoint, what then? Secession?

Re:Food for Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

The bottom 50% of earners make 13% of the money and pay 3.3% of the tax, while the top 10% earned 39% of the income and paid 71% of the taxes. That yeilds a RATE that is much less for the bottom 50% than for the top 10%.

That doesn't follow, and it's part of the danger of talking percentages. It's perfectly possible for the bottom 50% to pay 100% of their income and still pay a smaller percentage of the total tax revenues than the top 10%, simply because they make so much less money. It completely depends on the disparity in incomes.

Re:Food for Thought

[bwalling]

I'm not appealing to Newton's authority. I'm questioning the previous post's certainty about a subject that is rather uncertain.

Re:Food for Thought

[theralfinator]

What counts is not what percentage of total taxable revenue the rich or the poor pay but what percentage of their own individual income they pay. So some individual earning less than lets say $50,000 a year paying a higher percentage of tax than another individual earning $5,000,000 per year, seems hardly fair especially considering the sheer dollar volume of the remainder left after tacxes.

The person making less than $50,000 would pay a much lower percentage of his own income than the person making $5,000,000. The person making the larger salary would be in a much higher tax bracket than the other person would be in. This means that he pays a HIGHER percentage of his salary. So he is paying a HIGHER percentage of a HIGHER salary, and so are other people like him, which is why the rich in America pay the vast majority of the nation's taxes.

Re:Food for Thought

[dangitman]

That was exactly my thinking when I launched DocForge [docforge.com].

It's not a site about forging documents? Then why name it that way?

Ob simpsons quote

[genner]

Don't you worry about Wikipedia we'll change it when we get home. We'll change a lot of things.

2+2

[oldhack]

"Even 2+2 is 4 only if everyone agrees". Sum like that.

Re:2+2

[Androclese]

[edit]
2+2=fish
[/edit]

There, fixed that for ya.

Re:2+2

[Anonymous Coward]

Hitting the nail on the head there, though I suspect there will be arguments. But it is kind of a bad example because math is a self contained and self proving system and does not relate to truth in the epistemic sense, though the same problems exist at the level of language and symbols.

But truth is far from a simple concept. The scientists have one unspoken definition that hinges on repeatability and observability. The philosophers have hundreds of definitions for different contexts.

In day to day talk we usually only mean "without intent to deceive".

My point is, that (as Wittgenstein showed) we can not know what truth is. It's not like a cow that we can point to as the final arbiter of definition disputes. So the way we think of it will change. It's natural.

Re:2+2

[solafide]

corn, not fish!

Tomato plantain tomato grass corn, spinach fish!

Re:2+2

[VGPowerlord]

"2+2=10... in base 4. I'm fine!" -- GLaDOS

Re:2+2

[Anonymous Coward]

I /TRIED/ to see five, I really did!

Re:2+2

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on Mods, can't we even make the Slashdot rating of a Funny post called "2+2" equal to 4 and not 3?

  : )

Re:2+2

[Nazlfrag]

2+2 is anything greater than 4, as we all know the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

We can only hope...

[Deag]

That slashdot isn't considered some other publication.

Re:We can only hope...

[dnwq]

You may laugh, but Slashdot comments can and have been cited as sources. A trivial example is the article about /. itself (note 28). Interestingly, the comment cited itself is modded Flamebait: 0; the citation is about the comment rather than its content.

Re:We can only hope...

[crossmr]

It wasn't being used as a citation it was being used simply to indicate the post in question. What was being used as a source was a user created journal which violates policy on self-published sources.

Simson Garfinkel

[drquoz]

Simson Garfinkel? You mean that singing duo?

Re:Simson Garfinkel

[Smivs]

Modding can be inexplicable sometimes, so don't feel hard-done-by. For what it's worth I mis-read it as well, and your comment made me chuckle and if I had mod points I'd be more than happy to give you a "funny".

Re:Simson Garfinkel

[Anonymous Coward]

You trying to tell me you didn't mis-read the name at first glance as well?

Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. So did everyone else. The fact that you took up hundreds of thousands of peoples time reading you repeating the obvious, and not only the obvious, but not even funny SHOULD have earned you a "Redundant" mod.

"Der... you mean that singing duo? Der." What an asshat.

Re:Simson Garfinkel

[evanbd]

This wouldn't be as annoying if getting both a "funny" and a "redundant" mod didn't cost a point of karma.

Re:Simson Garfinkel

[Anonymous Coward]

first thing i thought. had to read it twice.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Truth...

[gambit3]

Wikipedia: Where consistent opinions are correct opinions.

Re:Truth...

[Kjella]

Wikipedia: Where persistent opinions are correct opinions.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Truth...

[Anonymous Coward]

revert

Re:Truth...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia: Where consistent opinions are correct opinions.

Defeat lameness filter: This exact comment has already been posted. Try to be more original...

Re:Truth...

[ajs]

Wikipedia: Where consistent opinions are correct opinions.

I don't think Wikipedia takes a stand on correctness at all. At least I've never seen any such stand.

Wikipedia is meant as a repository for consensus. If you have a problem with the consensus, you should try to change it, but Wikipedia isn't the place to do that.

Re:Truth...

[TiggertheMad]

Wikipedia: Where persistent opinions are correct opinions.

There, fixed that for you

Don't bother, the OP will just revert it...

Re:Truth...

[gambit3]

I stand corrected. Thank you.

Re:Truth...

[Junior J. Junior III]

Hmm, how about... "Where persistent opinions correct correct opinions?"

A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[writerjosh]

I think we shouldn't look at Wikipedia as being absolute truth, or not truth, but "a reasonable aggregate of truth." I know that's why I look to Wikipedia when I'm curious about something: not as a source of final truth on a subject, but a starting point. Wikipedia does a great job at collecting relevant information and presenting it in an easy to read fashion, but it should only be used as one tool in research.

As the article author suggests, Wikipedia, when compared to magazine articles or books, is still only the best opinions of other humans. True, magazine articles and books typically have more fact-checking involved - because the author has a reputation to protect - but it's still opinion - just like Wikipedia. The only way a reader can assess ultimate truth is to view Wikipedia in comparison to as many other publications as possible - online or offline. This is the scholastic method and should be the method for every Wikipedia reader. I know this isn't always the case, but this isn't always the case for your average book reader or magazine reader either: they read an opinion that jives with them, and it becomes truth - no different than a Wiki entry.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[Surt]

Perhaps we should just consider Wikipedia a reasonable aggregation of information. Some true, some false.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[jellomizer]

Exactly Wikipedia is great for just knowing a little about something that you have no idea about. I recently had a sandwich with capers on it. I wanted to know what those capers are that I am eating. So I did a quick Wikipedia look up on Capers then I found that it is a flower... Because the capers that I was eating were so heavily pickled and served with fish I originally assumed that it was a form of sea-weed, but I was wrong and now I know. And Knowing is half the battle (G.I. Joeeee)

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[Tom]

"a reasonable aggregate of truth."

Many years ago, someone coined the term "consensus reality". I think that is more than appropriate here. What Wikipedia does is create "consensus truth", where things are true if there is a consensus that they are. That's independent of fact, although there is a fairly strong correlation. However, there is no causation. There's quite a bit on WP that's verifiably false - but the falsifications never make it because they violate some WP policy. Lanier is a good example, I know a couple more like that.

WP is an interesting experiment in expanding the scientific method by removing the "peer" from "peer-review". Ironically, it works exactly there where we-as-common-humans are peers - in the facts of everyday life, that are within our capabilities to verify and thusly thanks to the vast popularity of WP, there'll always be someone to spot the error and correct it.

By my estimate, it fails on non-mainstream topics, be they obscure or just complicated. Also in anything subjective, where you get edit wars because of differing opinions.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[Bishop Rook]

Quite so. People are looking at Wikipedia the wrong way. It's not meant to replace people actually seeking truth the old-fashioned way. It's meant as an aggregation of mostly-correct information about a broad variety of topics that people can use as a starting point to inform themselves.

It's not meant to replace Encyclopedia Britannica, scientific journals, textbooks, or investigative reporting. It's meant to replace, "Well I heard from my Uncle Joe who got it from his neighbor that her daughter said she heard somewhere that this Obama fellow's actually an Arab." To which one might counter, "Well I heard from Wikipedia who heard from the Washington Post that that's patently ludicrous, and I can give you the link."

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[saibot834]

What the Internet should have taught everyone is, that you can't trust anything just because it is written on a piece of paper or on a computer screen. You, the user, always have to judge for yourself if you wish to trust the information you are getting, or not.

I am a Wikipedian myself and I say, that there is much wrong information in our encyclopedia - just like in every encyclopedia or any non-trivial text. Read articles, perhaps take a look at the talk page and the version history and ask yourself whether the article is somehow strange or inconsistent. If you don't find anything suspicious, you may trust the article if you like - but not if your life depends on it.

The important part here is the user, not the encyclopedia. It's more important to teach everyone to not trust everything, than it is to build an error-free encyclopedia (which is impossible anyways).

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[crazybilly]

I whole-heartedly concur. And would add, as a twist of the knife, that Wikipedia, as a stand-in for the entire internet, reveals how difficult it is to know whether or not what you're reading (on screen or on paper) is factual or not.

Hopefully, within a generation, our internal fact-checker/skepticism meters will be more healthily developed.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[Kandenshi]

By my estimate, it fails on non-mainstream topics, be they obscure or just complicated.

eh, I don't claim to have any sort of great data on how accurate non-mainstream topics are, but anecdotally I've helped write up some pages on not-terribly-important bits of neuroscience that I think are fairly solid. Was writing a paper for a neuroscience of pleasure seminar one day and when I got tired of writing, decided to see what WP had to say on the topic just for laughs.

[blank page]

hmm *write write write copy/paste* *source source source*

I'm not sure that many people will ever visit that particular article, or some of the others I've worked on, nor that they're written in a particularly fancy style... But they were decent pages last I'd looked(had been fleshed out a bit more and restyled by some other people)

I think that certain obscure topics might actually stand a good chance of having factually correct if unweildy articles. The people who are most likely to be looking at those pages and hence editing them are the people who have an interest in that field. Stuff in between obscure and common are likely to attract quite a few hacks I'd think, but without sufficient eyes to rigorously and quickly evaluate everything posted.

y'know what? I'm bored out of my skull, maybe I'll go pick some part of the brain, plug it in, and see what upgrades I can make. See you guys again in 6 hours(by which point I'll doubtless be looking at the 'wet t-shirt contest' article or Taylor Hanson's) :P

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[owlnation]

I think that is more than appropriate here. What Wikipedia does is create "consensus truth", where things are true if there is a consensus that they are.

Occasionally that may be true. However, pressure groups, cabals and wikipedia admins enforce their version of truth without consensus. Until all admins and cabals are removed from the site it can never be trusted.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[xouumalperxe]

WP is an interesting experiment in expanding the scientific method by removing the "peer" from "peer-review".

Actually, removing the "peer" from "peer review" is probably the last thing you want to do to describe wikipedia, both in the literal sense (as all submitters are considered peers irrespectively of their meatspace credentials), and in a (social) networking sense: Where the scientific community review process operates as an asynchronous, (comparatively) small scale client-server architecture (with publications being the servers), wikipedia works as a real-time, pure peer-to-peer arrangement.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[Belial6]

not as a source of final truth on a subject, but a starting point.

While you are correct. I always hate this commonly stated phrase. The reason is that it implies that WP is not reliable. A better statement would be that WP's information is 98% reliable. So, it often depends on how important it is to be right. If I want to know how photosynthesis works, Wikipedia is a fine final authoritative source. If in the middle of the article, it says "In plants photosynthesis occurs in organelles called photoplasts." instead of "In plants photosynthesis occurs in organelles called chloroplasts.", it just doesn't matter. It would be a complete waste of my time to try to verify that everything in the article is accurate. Whereas if I were looking up information to decide if I really want to go through the risky heart operation that my doctor has presented as an option, I would definitely look beyond WP. Of course, In that case I'm not going to take ANY single source as authoritative.

I guess it boils down to, if the information is REALLY important, then their is no publication that should be considered 100% reliable, but the statement implies (and is interpreted by most people) that WP is in some special class of unreliability.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[bunratty]

For me, Wikipedia replaces a Google search. Or, more accurately, when I do a Google search I usually get a Wikipedia article that has the information I want. If the Wikipedia article doesn't come up, I usually end up searching on Wikipedia, then possibly adding the results of my findings if it isn't already there. Wikipedia should be compared to the other results from a Google search, not compared to an encyclopedia. As such, I find it a generally useful and comprehensive source of basic information.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Astrophysics.

Somehow the difference between "scientific theory", "scientific hypothesis" and "cold, hard facts" escapes most Wikiexperts.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[Tom]

Au, that hurts.

The "peer" in "peer review" doesn't mean some socio-romantic "we are all equals" dream, it is an actual statement of purpose, with meaning. Namely, that other experts within the field get to check on you. Basically, the four-eyes principle, formalized. Credentials is exactly what it's all about, so discarding that is - exactly as I said - ignoring a vital aspect of the process. In other words: Applying human rights to plants - it won't work, because you're ignoring an important part of the system.

I've got no idea about your experiences with the scientific community, but from what I know, "client-server" does not describe it very well. The publications are not part of the architecture, they are just one specific implementation. Scientists in all fields do and always have communicated directly with each other, and some of the most valuable exchanges happened in personal letters. There's a reason that letters of famous dead scientists are found so interesting that they are surprisingly often published as books.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[E 99]

WP is an interesting experiment in expanding the scientific method by removing the "peer" from "peer-review". Ironically, it works exactly there where we-as-common-humans are peers - in the facts of everyday life, that are within our capabilities to verify and thusly thanks to the vast popularity of WP, there'll always be someone to spot the error and correct it.

I don't see WP having anything whatsoever to do with the scientific method. Peer-review is NOT part of the scientific method. The scientific method is specifically excluded from wikipedia as "original research". The idea of an encyclopedia is to trust the vetting process of well-established and respectable secondary sources (hence "verifiability"), not to vet primary sources directly, or conduct actual experiments to try to determine truth.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[Nazlfrag]

I'm not so sure about the Lanier case. He denies he is a film director, yet there is an objective truth that he directed a film that was shown at a film festival, which seems notable enough to include in a biographical entry. His subjective opinion doesn't change this fact. It's quite clear he's not proud of it and wishes to distance himself from it, yet I don't think that's any reason to whitewash his past and rewrite history.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[doom]

I'm not so sure about the Lanier case. He denies he is a film director, yet there is an objective truth that he directed a film that was shown at a film festival, which seems notable enough to include in a biographical entry.

That's a ridiculously lax standard. One published story in a minor publication would not make you a professional writer. Real human beings do many different things, not all of them are notable in any sense.

His subjective opinion doesn't change this fact. It's quite clear he's not proud of it and wishes to distance himself from it, yet I don't think that's any reason to whitewash his past and rewrite history.

His problem isn't that they mentioned he made a lousy film once, his problem is that he is being described as a film director, despite the fact that he only dabbled in it, and it's hardly one of his main fields of endeavor.

I think the trouble with the Jaron Lanier example is that he had other recourse besides making an edit based on his private knowledge: he could have challenged the point with a "citation needed", hashed it out in the Talk page, preferably with lots of handwaving about "Notability" and links to pages in the "Style Guide", and eventually he would've prevailed.

But I think the trouble with that whole process is that it requires one to become a wikipedia-lawyer... it's a lot of work to go through to try to convince one stubborn pinhead to knock it off.

And any way, isn't the real objection in case like this the fear that wikipedia will be used as a vanity web site? That's the real reason it's regarded it as poor form to edit articles about yourself.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps we should just consider Wikipedia a reasonable aggregation of information. Some true, some false.

This is a more accurate representation of Wikipedia. Because of the way they select editors and the revelations about some of them, it's pretty dubious to associate Wikipedia with truth.

Re:A Reasonable Aggregate of Truth

[Tom]

Yes, WP doesn't do research.

However, research isn't the total of the scientific method. Scrutiny is explicitly part of it, and peer-review is the most common form of scrutiny. Thus I consider it a part of the method.

WP appears to work in a similar way - by having your article open for scrutiny by every random John Doe. But that's by far not the same thing, and pointing the difference out was my point.

Wikipedia takes the truth very seriously

[bradkittenbrink]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TRUTH

Re:Wikipedia takes the truth very seriously

[SpinyNorman]

Except that not only is that article clearly labelled as Humor, but more importantly (copying from another poster), WikiPedia does NOT aspire to the truth. WikiPedia's self-stated standard for inclusion is "verfiability" (i.e. you can find the same thing said somewhere else), and explicity not "truth" (i.e. what they are saying is factually correct).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

Re:Wikipedia takes the truth very seriously

[bradkittenbrink]

Yeah, it's not my fault some idiots modded my post informative without clicking the link.

Not true

[philspear]

I notice the only thing supporting the idea that wiki defines true comes from wiki, which is not an outside-wiki source. Therefore it can't be verified (without RTFA at least) and is not true.

Re:Not true

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

I notice the only thing supporting the idea that wiki defines true comes from wiki, which is not an outside-wiki source. Therefore it can't be verified (without RTFA at least) and is not true.

Truth you speak, almost: as though to make things more interesting, Hugh writes in the master post:

On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.

so then, as though it says that the truth indeed comes from within the wiki: a wiki subiectum, broken and battered, gathers its pieces of viewpoints together within itself and assembles the consensus view (all of this presumably via Descartes) of itself as the subiectum, thus attaining or approaching the truth. Oki-doki?

WIkipedia Truth

[BountyX]

If you wikipedia the word truth you will see the most popular perceptions of what truth is and how it has changed with different governments and civilizations. I think you will find that the Concensus Theory serves as an "abstract" truth in which less ambigious definitions of truth serve as components and tools of concensus. Wikipedia has not redefined the common perception of truth, it merely extended Nicholas Rescher's philosophy and it has been successfull because of its scalability and abstract nature. Concensus theory alone is nothing without derivitive explanations of truth.

And of course

[ab8ten]

there is the danger of the self-refferential wiki-loop, where an unverified statement on wikipedia gets used in a reputable newspaper, which is then used to 'verify' the original statement.

The Register loves this sort of thing: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/wikipedia_and_the_mirror/ is a minor example, but who knows what else has been elevated to truth by circular reasoning? (smart alec answers to *that* question are welcome :))

Re:And of course

[gstoddart]

The Register loves this sort of thing: is a minor example, but who knows what else has been elevated to truth by circular reasoning?

Plenty!!!

• The belief that Iraq was trying to buy Yellow Cake, had an active WMD program, and that we were somehow liberating Iraq and that they'd be our friends afterwards and pay us back for our troubles and expense.
• A lot of the anti-climate change stuff uses similar tactics -- a couple of dissenting voices are used to support the idea that there is "widespread disagreement" on the topic.
• How about the claim that Intelligent Design is a legitimate scientific theory that should hold equal weight to evolution?
• Often history depends on who gets to write the official account. You can get pretty wide differences in what happened depending on whose side you listen to. Certainly, the old colonialist powers have different stories than their colonies had.
• I'm pretty sure the tobacco industry had a bunch of them.
• The entire numbers the *AA's use to describe the losses due to "IP theft" are essentially completely fiction, got referenced once in a government document, and are bandied about without any form of supporting basis for them.

There are a lot of things which are presented as truths which are nothing more than opinion, or completely fabricated to support an agenda.

Even matters of objective fact are open to interpretation and spin. Sadly, I don't think Wiki is any more (or less) susceptible to this. If anything, the fact that we're explicitly aware of it in Wiki might make it easier. It's all the little ones we're not even aware of that are probably of greater concern.

Cheers

Re:And of course

[ajs]

who knows what else has been elevated to truth by circular reasoning? (smart alec answers to *that* question are welcome :))

We grow up with a warm, fuzzy feeling that tells us that there's History and Truth and then there's opinion and consensus. We instinctively believe that this are distinct things. They're not. Wikipedia is a repository of consensus, and as such at least as accurate as any other repository of consensus.

As a participant in the process of achieving consensus, Wikipedia will certainly affect its establishment, but that's true for all participants. The only way to participate without modifying the consensus would be to archive all sources of information and communication and to store them without commentary. Even providing a way to search that information introduces bias and value judgements.

That is to say, Wikipedia is the best, most accurate view of the whole of human knowledge to date, but that's a far cry from praise.

Re:And of course

[Anonymous Coward]

The Iraq example just goes to show how complicated the situation is. In fact US troops were greeted as liberators in Iraq--by the Kurds and Shia. Much less so by the Sunni. When the truth is complicated the effect of rule by consensus is often gross oversimplification and the elimination of complexity and nuance.

And of course when people have an ideological/political axe to grind (as you obviously do) it becomes even more complicated.

Re:And of course

[Anonymous Coward]

The entire numbers the *AA's use to describe the losses due to "IP theft" are essentially completely fiction, got referenced once in a government document, and are bandied about without any form of supporting basis for them.

With that statement you've just cost the industry another 2.5 Million. Please send a cheque made out to "CASH" to the following address...

Re:And of course

[rossz]

The belief that Iraq was trying to buy Yellow Cake

Not trying to buy yellowcake. Already bought the stuff, 550 metric tons, in fact: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/

Re:And of course

[gstoddart]

And of course when people have an ideological/political axe to grind (as you obviously do) it becomes even more complicated.

And, keeping with the theme of this thread ... just because I point these things out, doesn't make them less true.

Just because some of the Iraqis welcomed them as liberators, doesn't mean that any of the stated reasons for going there in the first place were ever true. Retroactively supporting the decision with elements which weren't part of the original reasoning is just smoke and mirrors.

I'm certainly willing to concede the fact that I have a left-leaning bias.

People don't want complexity and nuance. They want a 30 second sound bite on the evening news. Complexity and nuance implies that there are different perspectives, and that truth is more than a simple concept.

Cheers

Re:And of course

[gstoddart]

Not trying to buy yellowcake. Already bought the stuff, 550 metric tons, in fact: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/ [msn.com]

In fact, no. From the very article you cite ...

And, in a symbolic way, the mission linked the current attempts to stabilize Iraq with some of the high-profile claims about Saddam's weapons capabilities in the buildup to the 2003 invasion. ... There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

Meaning, the claims by the US government before the invasion of Iraq that they had been recently and actively trying to buy yellow cake on the open market are false.

We're talking about removing older stockpiles of this stuff, not whether or not they'd ever had any. That little bit about trying to buy it from Nigeria was quite resoundingly demonstrated to have been a forgery.

It's easy to keep repeating the same falsehood and claim it's true. In this case, the assertion about yellow cake wrt Iraq and the justifications for military action simply aren't borne out to be true.

Cheers

Re:And of course

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way to save your favorite wiki. Wikipedia should never be cited as it is always supposed to point to the original source. Citing the source directly prevents loops.

Re:And of course

[Sancho]

That's why it's always so important to cite your references.

Re:And of course

[MacDork]

A lot of the anti-climate change stuff uses similar tactics -- a couple of dissenting voices are used to support the idea that there is "widespread disagreement" on the topic.

On Wikipedia? Hardly. It has been my observation that Wiki is an echo chamber for the pro-climate change stuff. I had an article to reference, but it's gone. Apparently censored. It did exist on archive.org, but apparently it has been purged there too. Hmm, I wonder why. You can find a digg reference to it here, but again, no article text. I did finally manage to dig up some of the copy here... The cult of climate change has much more effective censors than the scientologists do apparently... For posterity, here's the interesting bit:

In contrast to the high-handed treatment that greet global warming skeptics, those who support the orthodoxy are puffed up and protected from criticism, their errors erased and their controversies hushed. This is the case with Naomi Oreskes, a scientist with a PhD who had arrived at an absurd finding: That no studies in a major scientific database questioned the UN view of climate change."

"For this reason, when visiting Oreskes's page on Wikipedia several weeks ago, I was surprised to read not only that Oreskes had been vindicated but that Peiser had been discredited. More than that, the page portrayed Peiser himself as having grudgingly conceded Oreskes's correctness.

Upon checking with Peiser, I found he had done no such thing. The Wikipedia page had misunderstood or distorted his comments. I then exercised the right to edit Wikipedia that we all have, corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.

Peiser wrote back saying he couldn't see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. Had I neglected to save them after editing them?, I wondered. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again! I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.

Nonplused, I investigated. Wikipedia logs all changes. I found mine. And then I found Tabletop's. Someone called Tabletop was undoing my edits, and, following what I suppose is Wiki-etiquette, also explained why. "Note that Peiser has retracted this critique and admits that he was wrong!" Tabletop said.

I undid Tabletop's undoing of my edits, thinking I had an unassailable response: "Tabletop's changes claim to represent Peiser's views. I have checked with Peiser and he disputes Tabletop's version."

Tabletop undid my undid, claiming I could not speak for Peiser.

Why can Tabletop speak for Peiser but not I, who have his permission?, I thought. I redid Tabletop's undid and protested: "Tabletop is distorting Peiser. She does not speak for him. Peiser has approved my description of events concerning him."

Tabletop parried: "we have a reliable source to this. What Peiser has said to *you* is irrelevant."

Tabletop, it turns out, has another name: Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as I â" no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced, preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone's views but her own. When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them out. By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensur

Re:And of course

[againjj]

Sacha Baron Cohen Wikipedia Entry Creates Circular References

Re:And of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Government and Media. Government releases information to the media, media publishes it, government acts on said information claiming it came from a reputable source.
I believe this happened with some parts of Iraqi war and the US.

Re:And of course

[rossz]

Typical. All the ingredients for making WOMD are found, and the response is always, "no proof."

I guess the only proof that would have been acceptable would be for a nuke to have gone off.

philosophically groundless criticism

[circletimessquare]

the crticism offered in the story summary is accurate, but pointless. the idea would be to find some sort of impossibly noble source of information for which the criticism leveled at wikipedia does not also apply. since all sources of media suffer from the same sort of suspect appeal to authority or questionable fact checking, then the criticism leveled against wikipedia is not valid in the sense that it makes wikipedia any different from any other media source you can find

all media is suspect, anywhere. you go through life with a good bullshit meter, or you don't go through life at all. there is no such thing, nor will there ever be, a perfectly verifiable and 100% trustworthy media, anywhere on this planet. media is a human endeavour, and as such, it is as flawed as we are. it is not a question of purposeful intent or partisan manipulation, it is a question of the unattainability of true impartiality

it is impossible for you to discover a media source that does not also suffer from the same criticism leveled at wikipedia. so continue using wikipedia, with a healthy functioning bullshit meter, teh same bullshit meter you should have on when reading any other media soruce. the criticism is useless

learn to accept the fundamental limitations of media in your world, and stop expecting the impossible out of media. it is biased, and always will be

Re:philosophically groundless criticism

[Surt]

all media is suspect, anywhere. you go through life with a good bullshit meter, or you don't go through life at all.

Or you go through life anyway, and vote republican.

Re:philosophically groundless criticism

[morgan_greywolf]

all media is suspect, anywhere. you go through life with a good bullshit meter, or you don't go through life at all. there is no such thing, nor will there ever be, a perfectly verifiable and 100% trustworthy media, anywhere on this planet.

Bingo. What media can you trust as 100% verifiable and trustworthy? CNN? Fox News? Encyclopedia Britannica? BBC? National Geographic? (Any Christians who say "Bible" will be shot on sight.)

The answer is none of the above. And you said it just right -- media is a human endeavor. Humans are riddled with errors, therefore so too will be their creations.

Re:philosophically groundless criticism

[Arguendo]

This is a brilliant insight about the larger point of truth, although Wikipedia certainly differs because there is little or no gateway controlling *who* can aggregate the information and sources. Traditional media are at least supposed to impose some form of training requirement on those aggregating the information.

Interestingly, this issue has repeatedly arisen in the law because truth is central to our entire justice system. The entire logic behind the hearsay rules is that some sources are reliable and some are not. And even then there are still a ton of exceptions to hearsay, which reflects our society's judgment that even some forms of hearsay are reliable enough to serve as a source. These rules have been evolving forever and there are still large disagreements over them. There's no clean solution to this problem and I think the experience of the law demonstrates that.

Ironically, the law does prescribe a solution. The judges do their best to filter evidentiary sources based on the rules (hearsay rules included) and then they throw questions of "truth" to twelve regular jurors and literally appeal to the authority of the many.

Seriously, Wikipedia?

[jdgeorge]

Wikipedia provides the new standard of "truth"?

We all know that nothing is "true" until it has been posted on Slashdot. Jimbo Wales is fit to polish Commander Taco's sneakers.

Re:Seriously, Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think the level of truth depends more on the number of times the same article has been posted on slashdot to the power of the number of memes it creates divided by the number of times its also been picked up by digg.

Re:Seriously, Wikipedia?

[Bastard of Subhumani]

We all know that nothing is "true" until it has been posted on Slashdot.

You appear to have misspelled "netcraft".

Re:Seriously, Wikipedia?

[lucifuge31337]

We all know that nothing is "true" until it has been posted on Slashdot.

...and confirmed my Netcraft.

No different than any other encyclopedic work

[thered2001]

Do the compilers of any encyclopedia create the knowledge which they record? Or do they concisely record knowledge from other sources?

Re:No different than any other encyclopedic work

[apathy maybe]

The Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1910 included original research, Kropotkin on Anarchism.

Of course, that was nearly 100 years ago.

The point is though, other encyclopaedias can check the credentials of their authors ("original researchers"), and decided whether or not to include them.

Wikipedia has no real verifiable method of know who is who. Even if I say that I am "apathy maybe", the only real and honest "apathy maybe", Wikipedia can't know that if I only say that on Wikipedia.

If I say here, "my Wikipedia account is 'apathy maybe'", and then I say on Wikipedia, "my Slashdot account is 'apathy maybe'", then that provides some level of verification. Except, who verifies all these links?

Wikipedia isn't like any other encyclopaedia.

Verifiability

[Culture20]

What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is verifiability -- that it appeared in some other publication,

I finally figured out what bugs me about this; it means that Wikipedia is only a repository of Media-knowledge: what publication owners want us to know (or believe). Where is the line drawn for a publication? Would the Federalist Papers have made the cut?

Re:Verifiability

[Fred Ferrigno]

Wikipedia reflects the mainstream consciousness, which is a known limitation. If the preponderance of published sources agree that Iraq has WMDs and ties to terrorists, Wikipedia has to rely on that since Wikipedia has no way to know what is actually true. Anything less would open the floodgates for all the quacks who dispute the mainstream when the mainstream is actually right.

original truth

[inaneframe]

Yeah, would wikipedia's definition of truth be considered original research?

Useful Vs. Official

[Tablizer]

Wikipedia has errored on the side of being "cited" over being "useful". Opinions that may be subjective or not cite-able can still be very useful information.

What is needed is a kind of competitor that *does* allow "unofficial" info. One can use wikipedia when they want cite-able stuff and the less formal one for less formal tidbits. (And maybe link them somehow.)

For example, in my opinion one of the most striking things about the original video game "Asteroids" that set it apart was the brightness of the phaser torpedoes, due to its use of vector screen scanning instead of raster scanning. I put a note about this on wikipedia, but the "citation police" kept deleting it. This despite the fact that most of the existing article was not cited either. (Cut-off time rules?) It was a frustrating experience. Subjective opinions about why people liked (or thought others liked) X is useful info to many of us. Personal experience from an arcade owner about customers' first reactions would be interesting also, even if not citable.

There's a niche to be tapped. I even considered starting "casualpedia.org" to serve it, but don't want to manage/rent the fat server farms needed. (I've filled my quota on personal dot-bombs already.)

Re:Useful Vs. Official

[Mr. Slippery]

For example, in my opinion one of the most striking things about the original video game "Asteroids" that set it apart was the brightness of the phaser torpedoes, due to its use of vector screen scanning instead of raster scanning. I put a note about this on wikipedia, but the "citation police" kept deleting it. This despite the fact that most of the existing article was not cited either.

When a statement begins "in my opinion", it's a good guide that it doesn't belong in the wik. And looking at the Talk page for the article, I agree that if this observation belongs anywhere, it belongs in a general discussion of vector game displays, not in this one game.

(Also, not to start a geek war, but "phaser torpedoes"? Star Trek had "phasers", which were beam weapons, and "photon torpedoes". Star Wars has "proton torpedoes". I don't know of any fictional universe with "phaser torpedoes".)

Re:Useful Vs. Official

[bcmm]

What is needed is a kind of competitor that *does* allow "unofficial" info.

It would die of revert-wars.

Re:Useful Vs. Official

[Tablizer]

When a statement begins "in my opinion", it's a good guide that it doesn't belong in the wik.

I am only saying there is a niche not being filled; whether its WP's job or somebody else's.

Also, not to start a geek war, but "phaser torpedoes"?

I couldn't think of a better self-descriptive name at the time, and if no other sci-fi show has it, then its safer to use without being accused of mis-borrowing.

Re:Useful Vs. Official

[Blakey Rat]

You could easily modify the Wiki software to allow people to "own" content they created, and approve/disapprove of changes to it. For instance, obviously nobody should "own" the article Arcade Games, but you could "own" Blakey Rat's Review of Asteroids. Of course the trick there is determining which articles should be owned, and which should be public... maybe editorial decree?

Points?

[Smivs]

Perhaps some sort of points system might work, like a democracy of truth. People could "vote" on how accurate they believe a page to be (hopefully in an informed way) and a "How likely is this article to be accurate" index shown on each page.

Re:Points?

[gstoddart]

Perhaps some sort of points system might work, like a democracy of truth. People could "vote" on how accurate they believe a page to be (hopefully in an informed way) and a "How likely is this article to be accurate" index shown on each page.

Well, because that carries with it the risk of having a bunch of organized people skewing the official vote on what is "true". Organize enough right-wing zealots to simply vote their truths into favor, and, voila -- Pi is 3!!

Ultimately, if you can sway the masses, what is actually true isn't quite as important. Just because everyone believes in it, doesn't make it any more "true". It makes it more widely accepted.

If people had "voted" on the truth of the Earth being flat in the times of Galileo that doesn't mean we'd come up with a correct answer. Sometimes such voting really just allows an organized group to shout down the voices of everyone else.

Cheers

Multiple sources

[interiot]

but there is a problem ... many publications don't do any fact checking at all

That's why multiple sources are the best. Whenever sources disagree, the more reliable sources are trusted over less reliable sources.

Verifiability is really an appeal to authority--not the authority of truth, but the authority of other publications. Any other publication, really.

That's just not true. Many talk pages are filled with disputes over "my source X is more reliable than your source Y because ...". That's ultimately a very healthy discussion. And WP:RS does say that some sources aren't reliable enough to be worth including at all.

Re:Multiple sources

[Big Jojo]

That's why multiple sources are the best. Whenever sources disagree, the more reliable sources are trusted over less reliable sources.

Not really. They don't like primary sources in regards to current Technology, for one example ... where the hierarchy tends to go (1) specifications are the primary sources; (2) comments from people involved in the specification development are secondary sources, and may have some biases but may also provide useful explanation that's not immediately clear; (3) trade rags publish articles written by people who aren't competent to participate directly, and these are tertiary sources. Wikipedia strongly prefers tertiary sources, which in these cases are the least reliable. Write an article based on primary sources, and it gets flagged as needing references. But hey, there may not be any ... and if there are, there's no way they're as reliable as the primary sources.

That's almost the same point as in the article by Jaron Lanier. He's the primary source about himself. The fact that an article about him is more about a myth than about the real Jaron ... indicates a problem.

At some level you could claim this is an illustration of the need for domain-specific ontologies ... a notion which Wikpedia doesn't currently endorse. It's one-size-fits-all, and they use a methodology better suited towards history than technology. Moreover, a method that's not well geared towards good history ... since it puts tertiary sources on a pedestal that is entirely inappropriate for current topics.

About the Article

[isBandGeek()]

[citation needed]

You shouldn't trust wikipedia!

[mcgrew]

Use the uncyclopedia instead. Wikipedia is lacking in many respects:

1. Wikipedia's incomplete. For instance, nothing whatever about Kitten Huffing
2. They're inaccurate. For instance, Wikipedia's entry on black holeslacks Jack Thompson's observation that "They suck more than I do", God's observation that "Black holes are simply where I decided to divide by zero", Steven hawking's observation that "Originally, Black Holes were known as 'Gravitationally Collapsed Stars" and Oscar Wilde's observation that "I'm going to stick something in there and see what happens".
3. Your mom likes uncyclopedia... when she's not flat on her back
4. better writing
5. No trolls
6. Wikipedia doesn't quote Oscar Wilde, unless of course you look up Oscar Wilde.

Re:You shouldn't trust wikipedia!

[mcgrew]

Flamebait? Wow, Jimmy Wales got mod points! Way to go, Jimbo!

Calling Captain Kirk...

[One Louder]

So, if somebody creates a Wikipedia article called "Everything on Wikipedia is a Lie ", will it start arguing with itself, then explode?

Re:Calling Captain Kirk...

[Anonymous Coward]

perchance to dream ...

Re:Calling Captain Kirk...

[owlnation]

So, if somebody creates a Wikipedia article called "Everything on Wikipedia is a Lie ", will it start arguing with itself, then explode?

Hopefully! It's certainly worth a try.

Re:Calling Captain Kirk...

[Anonymous Coward]

This statement is false.

Re:Calling Captain Kirk...

[blair1q]

It's already been done.

Ever looked into the admin structure and its means of adjudicating offenses against the wikipedia establishment?

Re:Calling Captain Kirk...

[juanitobanana]

Godel is exploding in his tomb

Simson Garfinkel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't they break up quite awhile ago? I really liked The Boxer and Bridge Over Troubled Water...

Notability is King

[Drakkenmensch]

There's also the accepted rule that "Celebrity equals Existance." Don't believe me? Try and write a highly detailed wiki entry about a webcomic that has been consistently updating for years but won no awards, or a music band who has been steadily working on the independant scene but went largely unnoticed by the major labels. Your hard work is sure to be rewarded by a "lack of notability" deletion notice. Does this mean that I don't exist until I get the cover page of People magazine? Wikipedia seems to think so...

Re:Notability is King

[DerekLyons]

Yep, and look at the number of otherwise 'nine days wonder' people (especially criminals) who seem to rate articles on the Wikipedia mostly because they hit the front page of CNN.

Re:Notability is King

[Sancho]

Most encyclopedias are like that. Now Wikipedia, existing entirely in the ether, could probably do away with that bias.

Re:Notability is King

[I am Jack's username]

No, it just means its not notable enough to have reliable, published, third party sources which is required for it to have an article in a tertiary source like an encyclopedia.

Re:Notability is King

[Drakkenmensch]

Try and look up my biggest labor, the stub entry for the Gamepsy.com webcomic "Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth" where I sank many working hours to bring up to par and was then picked up by many other wiki fellows and turned into a full fledged page... can't find it? Oh right, it was deleted because apparently, a gamespy.com regular feature isn't notable!

Re:Notability is King

[Mason11987]

Wikipedia doesn't think you don't exist. They think you aren't notable, which is why they would say you aren't notable, not that you don't exist. There simply can't reasonably be a page about EVERYTHING: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTE In that they explain what notability is and why such a standard exists. Also, if you aren't notable enough to have a verifiable source written about you then it's original research: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOR which is a no-no for an encyclopedia.

Re:Notability is King

[Anonymous Coward]

This is due to all the spammers and nonsense writers who have ruined it for everyone else.

Help change Wikipedia for the better (seriously)

[snarfies]

There is a real attempt at changing some of Wikipedia's guidelines going on at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability/RFC:compromise

Please have a look, and please chime in. Please strike a blow AGAINST deletionism.

Creative Anti-Realism for the win!

[EarthandAllStars]

Look up some Plantinga for what that means.

Jaron Lanier

[Anonymous Coward]

Jaron can fix the problem rather easily. Post the correct information elsewhere on the web. Now that information can be referenced on Wikipedia and is no longer "original research." The situation still kind of blows.

fish

[Smivs]

primordial slug-thing + evolution = fish

Re:fish

[JustOK]

only if t > 6000?

Re:fish

[Smivs]

I didn't bother with the Creationist version: God + desire for suchi = fish

B3tans had some fun....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.b3ta.com/links/Lazy_Journalist

Don't trust wikipedia!

Encyclopedia Dramatica

[Anonymous Coward]

The Encyclopedia Dramatica, although mostly just entertainment, manages to catch the essence of Wikipedia perfectly. Just go and read it yourself at http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Wikipedia

I couldn't seriously agree more with that article. Especially the MMORPG part.

Irrelevant

[Yvan256]

We all know that the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom.

So, unless Wikipedia adds a huge DON'T PANIC header to their website, I won't be using it.

Re:Irrelevant

[GrahamCox]

We all know that the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom.
So, unless Wikipedia adds a huge DON'T PANIC header to their website, I won't be using it.

You mean like this:

H2G2.com

People often _lie_ about themselves.

[John Hasler]

> Wikipedia's policy of 'No Original Research' also leads to situations like Jaron
> Lanier's frustrated attempts to correct his own Wikipedia entry based on firsthand
> knowledge of his own career.

Has he offered documentation?

Re:People often _lie_ about themselves.

[steelfood]

The easiest thing for Jaron Lanier to do in this case is to publish an autobiography and source that. He might even make a few quick bucks off it.

Re:People often _lie_ about themselves.

[gstoddart]

The easiest thing for Jaron Lanier to do in this case is to publish an autobiography and source that. He might even make a few quick bucks off it.

Wow, publish an actual book so you can correct an article on wikipedia??

What an odd idea.

Cheers

Re:People often _lie_ about themselves.

[Space_Pirate_Arrr]

What documentation could he possibly have proving that he is NOT a filmmaker?

Do you have documentation proving that you are NOT a filmmaker?

It's hard to prove a negative.

Re:People often _lie_ about themselves.

[Trogre]

How putting on his own website, "I am not a filmmaker".

Truth is dangerous

[fermion]

The problem is that people require truth, rather than observation, as well as an over dependence on facts. Some articles are fact based. William Shatner portrayed Captain Jame Tiberius Kirk in 79 episodes of the ST:TOS. These are widely known, verifiable facts, and anyone who disputes them is likely delusional.

Some facts are less widely known, like what Shatner was doing last week at tea time, or what motivated someone to jack a car. One might be tempted to ask Shanter or the car jacker, and that would certainly give a credible version of the truth. But what if 10 people saw Shatner at the time on the state day, or what if the car jacker just had a discussion with someone prior the incident describing what he or she was feeling. And what if the first hand and observed description of the 'truth' did not match? Do we accept the personal accounts or first hand observations? Do we accept the car jackers claim that he had been offered the car as a gift when 10 people saw the car being taken at gunpoint? The problem with truth is that we are forced to accept a single version, even though, at least sometimes, both can be seen as reasonable in certain contexts.

Which is why there is no issue here. Wikipedia deals with facts, figures, and personal statements. This is a commonly accepted fact. This is what I saw, and many people agree with me. This is the gestalt consensus of the truth at this moment. Confusing this with anything other than fallible observation causes nothing but problems.

OTOH academic observation often talks about validity. Starting with this data, and using these methods, this is what a reasonable person would conclude. Is the data good? You be judge. Are the methods appropriate? You be the judge. Do you trust that the procedures are carried out properly? That is also a judgement call. There is no truth, just observation and valid conclusions. Wiki cannot handle this because it usually just include out of context 'facts', with little context. No way to know why these 'facts' are more valid that those reported last week. It is this exact thing that makes people so confused about health and nutrition issues. People tend to believe what they are told, even though there is no reason to believe it.

Re:Truth is dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

what motivated someone to jack a car

A flat tire?

Re:Truth is dangerous

[Jack9]

Wikipedia deals with facts, figures, and personal statements.
It specifically does not. None of those are acceptable references.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

For that reason, self-published books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, knols, forum postings, and similar sources are largely not acceptable.

Wikipedia has many inherent flaws including restricted verifiability. It's not feasible to track everyone's relationships/actions and therefore articles are always flawed and often to the point of consistent inaccuracy (since the most persistent documents are sometimes factually inaccurate). Wikipedia's a place where you not only can buy a (Wiki) fact, but it's one of the only ways to change a fact (an entry in an appendix in Joe's book can change a wiki entry). It's a shame there's no way to submit affadavits yet (which would be sane).

Re:Truth is dangerous

[jesdynf]

And thanks to you, Google now thinks somebody stole William Shatner's car (third hit for "shatner car jacker") and is prepared to sell it on eBay.

Hmm. Nobody's yet reported on Wikipedia...

Every programmer knows...

[mcgrew]

Two and two is two.

Re:Every programmer knows...

[Naqamel]

And every CSE grad knows that 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2...

Re:Every programmer knows...

[mcgrew]

Someone has that as their slashdot sig

Re:Every programmer knows...

[GreyWolf3000]

No, two and two is true. :P

Wikipedia brings a whole new meaning to

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

the phrase "tyranny of the majority" doesn't it?

Re:Wikipedia brings a whole new meaning to

[owlnation]

Yes, it does. As well as providing a forum for the minority with an ax to grind to fervently manipulate truth. It's a perfect arena for those who like burning books, and wielding authority.

Wikipedia probably more truthful than most

[Whuffo]

I found the idea that "real" encyclopedias were considered to be somehow more accurate to be questionable at best. Does Wikipedia contain multiple errors? You bet it does. Does the Encyclopedia Britannica contain multiple errors? Yup. The real difference is that while the "professional" compilations don't tell you how they collect or evaluate the material they present as absolute truth. Wikipedia doesn't hide where the information comes from or how it is evaluated - this provides valuable information that the others choose to hide.

The real danger is in assuming that any other source of information is significantly more accurate, complete or truthful than Wikipedia. You'd be better served by assuming that any / all of these references are not completely reliable.

Three kinds of truth

[John Hasler]

> On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.

There are three kinds of truth: direct personal experience, consensus truth, and "faith" (which is really a form of consensus truth).

Re:Three kinds of truth

[Notquitecajun]

Four. Then there's "real truth," which is totally objective and possibly not entirely knowable. It depends (but, then again, I believe in objective, absolute truths outside of my experience, hence the faith part). The tricky thing is, what if I'm right? - What does that do to your definitions?

Welcome ...

[PPH]

...to teh internets. Post a factoid in various places around the interweb enough times and it becomes true.

Re:Welcome ...

[Bastard of Subhumani]

Post a factoid in various places around the interweb enough times and it becomes true.

[citation needed]

Re:Welcome ...

[PPH]

No problem. One of the most respected and insightful philosophers on the Interweb documented that observation right here.

The article is original research

[Andr T.]

Since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet....

...(big logical jump)...

it's the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo.

The problems with wikipedia:

[gr3y]

Wikipedia is not authoritative.

1. Wikipedia is not a primary source.
2. Wikipedia is not a reliable source.

   Wikipedia's content is generated by pseudo-anonymous individuals who incorrectly assert the public Internet is a reliable source of information. The public Internet is not a reliable source of information, therefore wikipedia is not a reliable source.

3. Wikipedia is not an objective source.

   Wikipedia's editors break the rules governing their behavior and the behavior of others if it will benefit them. As a result, wikipedia advances the subjective views and beliefs of its editors.

4. Wikipedia is not a representative source.

   Contributing factors to this delusion include the competing concepts "notability" and "neutrality", as advanced by wikipedia. Lacking from that discussion, of course, is the question: notable or neutral, to who? Rather than host disputed versions of articles, representing the majority opinion and any significant minority opinions, wikipedia prefers a version advancing assertions, but not facts, which are easily disputed by any minority.

And I frankly despise the appearance of wikipedia in search results, or having some article on wikipedia quoted in a discussion online, as if it provides information of value, in lieu of the reliable primary sources wikipedia references, as if wikipedia itself is the source of that information, and not merely a link farm with some content wrapped around it.

But then, I make a living because of the difference between assertions and facts, and I'm apt to notice such things. Wikipedia is long on assertions, and short on facts.

Re:The problems with wikipedia:

[owlnation]

Excellent post! Please mod up.

It's further clouded by the fact that some pages that have many references are in fact linked to sources which are also dubious. You see references and can be fooled into thinking they are true, but they just link to random webpages -- probably written by the author of the wp article.

Most wikipedia pages on commercial products, companies, and bands(especially) use a fansite or the official site of the product as their primary sources. Hence, large sections of wikipedia are nothing more than promotional material for bands and commercially available products. There's sentences and links to bands in many, many unrelated wikipedia pages -- if not most pages on the entire site.

The search thing is a real problem. Because of Google's skewed ranking of the site as a whole, a wikipedia page will most often appear higher in search results than that of the primary source any article is linked to. This is not good. Not good at all.

Re:The problems with wikipedia:

[pacroon]

Wikipedia is not an objective source.

Seconded. I have countless times been reverted when editing serious and completely obvious subjective articles filled to the brink with counter-claims and criticism of the subject being presented when Wikipedia of all places should rise above any point of objectivity what so ever. I have a number of times in Talk-pages asked for articles to simply be completely removed due to the fact that it is obvious they are not welcomed at Wikipedia. So why bother having them there if all editors openly discredit it?

Re:The problems with wikipedia:

[genner]

The public Internet is not a reliable source of information, therefore wikipedia is not a reliable source..

But your post is also on the internet and therefore not a reliable source.....so.

Re:The problems with wikipedia:

[Andr T.]

Wikipedia is not a primary source.

It never wanted to be. I don't think this is a problem.

Wikipedia's content is generated by pseudo-anonymous individuals who incorrectly assert the public Internet is a reliable source of information. The public Internet is not a reliable source of information, therefore wikipedia is not a reliable source.

Not quite right. I think no one believes that the public internet is a reliable source of information, and neither Wikipedia. Wikipedia works based in the work of a community guided by a strict set of rules. This community would verify, correct and, if necessary, delete the content provided by any misguided person.

Wikipedia's editors break the rules governing their behavior and the behavior of others if it will benefit them. As a result, wikipedia advances the subjective views and beliefs of its editors.

I have to ask you some evidence for that claim. And, still, editors can be wrong as individuals. What can't happen is that a majority of editors do something like you said. Then, it would be a problem.

Contributing factors to this delusion include the competing concepts "notability" and "neutrality", as advanced by wikipedia. Lacking from that discussion, of course, is the question: notable or neutral, to who?

Now I think you do have a point. Of course, in wikipedia, the neutrality or notability of an article should be related to the body of possible readers, but it will be normally decided by body of editors. Even then, I think that point could be addressed to any encyclopedia: the only difference would be that the reference would be always the publisher.

Re:The problems with wikipedia:

[againjj]

Wikipedia's content is generated by pseudo-anonymous individuals who incorrectly assert the public Internet is a reliable source of information. The public Internet is not a reliable source of information, therefore wikipedia is not a reliable source.

Actually, these individuals only assert that some sources are reliable, and that even so, are not 100% reliable -- some sources make mistakes. Here is what they say:

In general, the most reliable sources are peer-reviewed journals and books published in university presses; usually followed by university-level textbooks; then by magazines, journals, and books published by respected publishing houses; then by mainstream newspapers.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability for details.

Actually, it doesn't work like this

[saibot834]

Wikipedia doesn't say that A is true because reference X says so. Wikipedia says that reference X tells us that A is true. There is a fundamental difference:
In the first (incorrect) version, Wikipedia cites X and adds something to this, specifically that X is trustworthy and makes correct statements about A.
In the second, correct version, Wikipedia doesn't claim that A is true or false. It just claims that X claims that A is true. Wikipedia doesn't add anything, it simply accumulates facts and let the reader choose whether A is true or not, and whether X is trustworthy or not.

Nothing is true just because you can verify that someone else thinks it is true. That idea is stupid and so is this story.

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[MozeeToby]

The problem is that, in theory, there is nothing in the wikipedia guidelines that values one source over the other. In theory, you could have one article say 'People are in disagreement over when dinosour fossils were created, some say millions of years ago[1], other says just thousands[2]'. Where source #1 is every piece of scientific research in the past 80 years, and source #2 is some religions fundamentalist's website.

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[nine-times]

Yes, you're right. And further, the Wikipedia didn't invent this sort of thing. It's sort of a long-standing procedure when doing a certain sort of writing, which is why you cite your sources.

Of course, it's not quite as passive as you're making it sound. The Wikipedia authors (and other writers of that sort) don't merely accumulate facts and present every report equally all the time. They pick and choose what sources to use, and put it together in a (hopefully) coherent explanation. They may present conflicting information from different sources, but only in cases where they're aware of multiple semi-trustworthy sources giving differing viewpoints. Often, if one source is substantially more trustworthy, they'll take that as true.

However, like I said, this isn't new or different. It's what journalists and academics have done for a very long time, and it doesn't really redefine "truth".

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[billlion]

Just as you say. Wikipedia is a tertiary source, as an encyclopedia is meant to be. If you want to form an opinion as to the reliability of a claim in an article you look at the references that support it. It there are no references yet you can look at the talk page to see how controversial it is. If there are sources you can use your judgment to see what you believe.

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[Anonymous Coward]

There's Wikipedia's Undue Weight policy, which covers exactly that. On matters of pseudoscientific nonsense, there's also the precedent set by the Pseudoscience ArbCom decision and several other ArbCom cases.

The main place where this is an issue is for pseudoscience that is notable, but doesn't have significant critical sources, especially when it has a following large enough and devoted enough to undertake persistent editing campaigns: for example, coverage of Transcendental Meditation is a major problem on Wikipedia.

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Except when you add half of the WP editors into it, who go on edit warring without giving a shit about the truth, verifiability or anything but bullheaded stubbornness.

But that's the democracy and self-selection problem.

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[Requiem18th]

The problem is that the "No original research" is at odds with the older and greater principle of "being bold".

  Wikipedia's mayor strength is not that anyone can write in it but that anyone
can edit out what's wrong.

  You don't rely on the citation to be god given, you rely on the community to sort things out. In fact the whole Web 2.0 paradigm is based on the idea that most people are well intentioned.

  Original research should be no problem in a self healing wiki. [citation needed]
  is a good way of saying "we don't believe this" but lately entire sections are taken out of articles just because of lack of citations. Like TFS says, being truth and getting consensus is not enough... it must be lifted from some where else to be true.

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[aricusmaximus]

Nothing is true just because you can verify that someone else thinks it is true.

Analogously, no food you buy in the supermarket is guaranteed to be edible. Do you put your everyday food through stringent chemical analysis?

Just because you deem yourself clever enough not to treat Wikipedia as a reliable source of information does not mean that millions of people are as aware or vigilant as Lanier's experience clearly shows.

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[Anonymous Coward]

"it simply accumulates facts"

it simply accumulates assertions

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[skeeto]

Wikipedia is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[blair1q]

If Wikipedia could refer to Wikipedia, it would.

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wise Guru of the wiki, you have enlightened me.

Re:Actually, it doesn't work like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia doesn't add anything, it simply accumulates facts and let the reader choose whether A is true or not, and whether X is trustworthy or not.

That statement is nonsense. By this very admission, Wikipedia is NOT accumulating "facts" but rather pieces of information which may or may not be true. Something is not a fact if it isn't true.

So what you're saying is that Wikipedia contains a bunch of crap that may or may not be true.

Truth does not vary

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish people would stop muddying the term truth. A thing does not "become" true -- either it is true or it is not. Truth is independent of any person's or group's perceptions or beliefs. 2+2=4 is true whether you believe it or not.

Wikipedia basically presents a consensus of opinion among some group of contributors. The real problem with it is that there is no control on whose opinions get included in the consensus. If you gather a consensus among a group of informed observers, that consensus has a relatively high probability of coinciding with objective truth. If you gather a consensus among an arbitrary group of self-selected observers, that consensus has a relatively lower probability of coinciding with objective truth. If you gather a consensus among a self-selected group of ignorant or unintelligent observers, that consensus is likely to be far removed from objective truth.

Thus the key issue with Wikipedia is that, looking at a given article, it may be difficult to discern its credibility. For an intelligent and well-informed reader, this is usually not a problem -- comparing the article to one's own knowledge and to other sources provides the indication of how trustworthy the article's statements are likely to be. Unfortunately, most readers are neither intelligent nor well-informed. They are in fact all too likely to simply believe whatever coincides most closely with their personal fantasies and desires. Oh, well.

Re:Truth does not vary

[Anonymous Coward]

2+2=4 is true whether you believe it or not.

By my reckoning, 2+2=11. Of course, I count in base 3.

Re:Truth does not vary

[Anonymous Coward]

2+2=4 only has meaning if everybody is in agreement with what '2' '+' '=' and '4' mean.

Re:Truth does not vary

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Thus 2+2=4 is not truth, but a proof based upon previously agreed axioms.

Re:Truth does not vary

[Draknor]

2+2=4 is true whether you believe it or not.

The problem is, it's not that simple to define "truth". 2+2=4 is not true... if you are in a base-3 numbering system. And math is a poor example to use, because it is a system with clear & concise rules. A much better example is Jaron Lanier (from the summary). Wikipedia had claimed he was a film-director. He says he had directed an experimental film that was shown once in a film festival and never distributed.

So is he a film director?

By literal interpretation, yes he was - he literally directed a film. But by conventional (consensus?) understanding, he's no more a film director than I am a graphic designer when I doodle stick people on my notebook in boring meetings.

So what is the truth? Is literal interpretation "truth"? If so, Jaron should just STFU. But it's clearly (per the article) an issue for him, because he says multiple reporters have asked about his "film-making career" (which he doesn't have - he has directed a film, not made a career of it). Reporters were simply using the conventional understand - a director has a film-making career.

What we need is a Rebuttal-pedia

[Tipa]

Here's the million-dollar idea. Make Rebuttal-pedia, a place where Jason Lanier and people like him can post their side of the story, and it can then be used a source for Wikipedia articles.

Re:What we need is a Rebuttal-pedia

[owlnation]

No. What we need is search that actually works.

If search was more effective then you'd find pages with the actual truth ranked as highly as the Wikipedia ones. As long as Google is the only show in town, and Google's page rankings for wikipedia remain inappropriately skewed in its favor, it's going to be harder to find the actual truth.

If search worked properly there would never even be any room for wikipedia to even exist. You could easily find accurate, informed articles on most subjects easier, and contrast and compare them more easily too.

While wikipedia is the enemy of truth, the failure of search is the true cause of the war.

Research on Wikipedia is fairly easy

[east coast]

At least it's easy if you accept that anything worth referencing off of it is cited in the article. In this way you'll have what is normally a more credible source to cite instead of simply going off of Wiki's word.

I wonder how many people ever look at the references section to do further research.

Verifiability, not truth

[Stephen]

Wikipedia hasn't redefined truth. It is very explicit that doesn't claim to report truth, only verifiability. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability :

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth.

If readers sometimes look to it for truth, well, they're misusing it.

Re:Verifiability, not truth

[SpinyNorman]

Wish I had mod points - that's pretty dismal!

OTOH you'd have to be nuts, even if they DID claim to care about the truth, to accept it as such in any case where it really matters.

Re:Verifiability, not truth

[Anonymous Coward]

funny, i wonder what the "veri" in "verifiability" means

Re:Verifiability, not truth

[nine-times]

The Wikipedia is about the search for verifiable fact... not truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.

Re:Verifiability, not truth

[sootman]

Bah, you beat me to it... the first quote listed on the page.

Re:Verifiability, not truth

[SecurityGuy]

Which is laughable, considering the definition of "verify":

2 : to establish the truth, accuracy, or reality of

To verify does not mean to point at someone else who said it first.

Perhaps they've confused themselves with wikiquote, or wikinespaper, or wikigossip.

wikiPEDIA should strive to be correct, not merely point at someone else who might be correct. Certainly the referenced case, where a person accurately corrects their own entry and some nitwit keeps un-correcting it, is indicative of a problem.

Re:Verifiability, not truth

[etwills]

Wikipedia hasn't redefined truth.

Is it me, or is it only the title (and some commenters, perhaps) that suggest this? Phrases like "commonly accepted use", "wikiclaims", "wikitruth", "received truth/wisdom", and "appeal to authority" (did I even see "de facto" in its proper perjorative sense somewhere?) are well chosen, quoted in the summary, and highlight the equating of Wikipedia articles with "the truth" for the fallacy it is.

If readers sometimes look to it for truth, well, they're misusing it.

Amen to that, pretty much

Jean-Pierre Petit

[Anonymous Coward]

You also have the example of Jean-Pierre Petit, ex director of CNRS. He have been banned for obscure reasons, but mainly because his research are not in the mainstream.

e.g.s?

[Push Latency]

Does anyone have good examples of content which relied on other sources that turned out to be flat wrong? I mean, just a few good examples - I'm sure there are many...

How Wikipedia Makes People Dumb

[TheModelEskimo]

As a WP user myself, I have to say that the editing process inculcates editors with a "truth has been established"ãmindset. I've never seen the ideal of a "search for truth"ãso subtly yanked out of the toolset of a group of intellectuals so fast as has happened at WP. When "Citation Needed" is used as a weapon much more often than an honest inquiry, you know that you're standing in the midst of hypocrites.

Oh, and I *am* a hypocrite too. But I'm trying to get better at defining what lengths I will or will not go to in an intellectual argument. It's really easy to pull the carpet right out from beneath your own education by attempting to bring down others' viewpoints for the sake of ego.

Truthiness

[fahrbot-bot]

While absolute Truth may be questioned on Wikipedia, its Truthiness is usually pretty good -- as I circularly reference:

Colbert later ascribed truthiness to other institutions and organizations, such as Wikipedia.[9]

Always read the discussion pages.

[argent]

A couple of times I've had someone "correct" me pointing to Wikipedia, where the article that they're pointing to is one I'd contributed to. Sometimes the article has become self-contradictory under the influence of multiple editors, other times the article is being more actively edited by someone who he happens to agree with. Either way, I "know" at least as much about the subject as Wikipedia does.

You really can't tell what a Wikipedia entry really means without reading the discussion page. In fact, that's often more informative than the article itself.

Oops!

[Smivs]

Hopefully you all realised I meant Sushi...Doh!

So exactly how do creationists explain me, anyway?

Re:Oops!

[brentonboy]

Hopefully you all realised I meant Sushi...Doh!

So exactly how do creationists explain me, anyway?

free will, duh.

the problem with wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

What really gets me about wikipedia is stuff like Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles). The guy loses the Afd and so what does he do? Merges every episode, save that one, into List of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he engages in backroom deals to gain support.

Of course, that doesn't top Torchic. A front page featured article with 20 paragraphs and 46 citations now reduced to redirecting to a list of pokemon, with 2-3 paragraphs (depending on whether or not a one sentence paragraph counts) and no citations. Amazing stuff.

I don't believe it....

[Urger]

{{Citation Needed}}

Gold Standard for Useful Definition of Truth

[Roxton]

The gold standard for any useful definition of truth is, "What is most likely given the information available. Incorporate the uncertainty into your answer."

In this light, the Wikipedia standard is almost as good as it could possibly be.

Indeed

[autocracy]

Perhaps one of the best things to come from the Internet (for me, at least), is a high level of professional skepticism. I love Slashdot, I read it near religiously, but I know better. The truth for any Slashdot posting is usually found in the comments, or in some misreported part of the article. I know how to look at the comments, deal with conflicting statements, and find the real answer. Sure beats having a single source newspaper.

Re:Indeed

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

I'm glad to hear that you know better than slashdot. You're just too good for, just to good to be true pal:

I know how to look at the comments, deal with conflicting statements, and find the real answer.

I doubt that you could find a needle in a haystack, let alone the real answer.

Re:Indeed

[jcrousedotcom]

I agree - I often skip the original article all together and simply just read the comments - I can sometimes find them more informative than an ad oriented article originally posted.

Re:Indeed

[ScrewMaster]

Yeah, I rarely RTFA unless it happens to be a subject that I'm really interested in, and then I'll usually just go Google for it myself. Not many of the articles posted here are all that interesting or informative, but you're right: the commentary is generally much more entertaining.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

And in this story, you are that comment. :)

Not evern real verifiablity

[muuh-gnu]

Wikipedia, as I had to learn the hard way bevor I gave up working on it, does not actually require real verifiablity of the facts presented, but solely on the verifiability of the sources presented. You are not required to actually show that A+B=C, citing a source arguing that A+B=C often suffices.

So if I can source any kind of bullshit properly, regardles of any truthfullness of the actual content, it gets in. All you can do against it is find a competing source and cram it also in. If you cant, tough luck, the bullshit stays.

"the consensus view"

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever leftwing whackos have the most time to waste on revert wars.

Jaron's new definition of "film director"

[Animats]

Jaron Lanier is complaining that Wikipedia listed him as a "film director". He did make a film once. Apparently it sucked, and he's embarrassed about it. He's whining because Wikipedia mentions that part of his life, and he'd like to delete that from his resume.

That's not a Wikipedia problem.

Re:Jaron's new definition of "film director"

[SecurityGuy]

He is a director in the same sense I am a door to door salesman, mechanic, dirt bike rider, and diaper wetter.

Saying I once did those things is accurate. Saying that I "am" any of them is not because it creates the belief that I DO or have recently tried to sell something to someone, fixed broken machinery, ridden a low powered motorcycle on a dirt track, or soiled myself.

If only English were a rich enough language to denote the difference between what people once did and what they do now. Oh, wait, it is. :)

Wikipedia has damaged the impartiality principle

[Anonymous Coward]

The traditional authorities of truth have always been either scientists (typically in the field of natural science) or dictionaries. Both of these have strong principles of using as neutral, factual and conservative a language as possible.

Wikipedia claims to have a principle of 'impartiality', that has gotten so much fanfare that people seem to have accepted the conceptual framework of it as providing a form of impartiality. The new meme is that, with a lot of different viewpoints and a principle of factual references, you should get impartiality.

In reality however, Wikipedia turns out far from impartial. NPOV does not cover a large number of highly important things, such as tone, connotations, selection of focus, and the types of sources used and the way they are referenced.

As one example, one of the editors of a regional newspaper may have described a public figure as having "showed severe lack of focus in a crisis". This can be included in the article as: "NN showed a severe lack of focus in the crisis (#)", or "NN showed a severe lack of focus in the crisis according to John James at the Daily Times (#)", or "NN was accused of showing a severe lack of focus in the crisis (#)", or simply leaving it out, with the reason that a newspaper editor is not noteworthy / potentially biased / not a specialist / simply an opinion on the street / not a 'scholar'.

As another example, a public figure may in their teenage years have survived off the handouts of an uncle who ran a rubber chicken factory. If you wrote this in the article on Nelson Mandela, no matter if true, it would probably be removed. There are other individuals where it would be written in, and reinstated if removed. The fact detracts from authority, in the same way that pointing out "Dear Judge, I would like to make the point that you have very large haemorroids" detracts from authority, despite being defensible as both factual and not out of the ordinary.

Many will say that things like these don't matter at all. Which is an argument that is easy to demolish - any half competent wordsmith can take any article on a public figure, and use every trick in the book to change it from either a glorification or a crucification, and have both of which adhere to every Wikipedia policy. The reader will perceive the tone of the article, and will feel that the Wikipedia stance reflects "the public/common stance".

Does anyone care enough to do this? Naturally, it's common enough on talk pages to see people state that they e.g. have a strong sympathy or antipathy towards a subject, but they are really "looking for sources to prove it" or "ways to have it shown". Much like for adapting to tax laws; so long as the goal remains, the methods will be redesigned to fit around the laws and barriers, no matter how convoluted.

Why is this a problem? Because the sources that were used earlier (dictionaries, scientists, as mentioned) had the aforementioned principle of neutral and conservative language. Wikipedia is similarly considered impartial, but does not. I would therefore say that Wikipedia exemplifies a trend towards accepting a majority vote as 'as good as truth', rather than reserving the final arbitration of truth for specialists.

I ran into this already with Wikipedia

[YesIAmAScript]

I already ran into this a long time ago. I tried to correct some info on a consumer product I personally worked on. But my corrections were reverted because I couldn't point to sources. All the sources out there already had it wrong, so the wrong info was put back.

In the end I realized I can't fight it. The commonly accepted historical record/"facts" is influenced at least as much by errors and people who want to make it a particular way as much as it is set by the actual truth.

Re:I ran into this already with Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is the way it should be. If all sources say one thing, and then you say another with no proof or evidence, then why should the 'wikipedians' trust you?

Re:I ran into this already with Wikipedia

[YesIAmAScript]

"In the end I realized I can't fight it."

You aren't telling me anything I don't already know, it's not like I started a big revert war.

But I could easily flip the question around. Knowing what I know, that their sources are wrong? Why sould the 'wikipedians' trust their sources? They are getting authoritative information that happens to also be wrong. So their trust is not helping them, it's hurting them.

Lies create reality, so...

[dogganos]

In the extend that widely believed lies create reality, the truth is actually what most people regard as true.

Re:Lies create reality, so...

[Relic of the Future]

For an excellent (and accessible) work on this topic, see James Burke's "The Day the Universe Changed," either the book, or the companion television series (much of it available at YouTube).

He's Onto Us!

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA:

The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites.

Suddenly I find myself in an identity crisis.

Socialism

[cavemanf16]

In a very broad sense, this is why socialism doesn't work at the political or financial level, and we are only now beginning to better understand why. The web is much closer to our everyday experience than politics and the financial system are for most of us. We see in Wikipedia why Communism was such a huge failure in Russia. Eventually the corrupt bend the rules, take the reigns that some well-meaning individuals gladly gave up in the name of "helping others", and it ultimately results in a backwards system of disinformation and unintended consequences that benefit the few and punish the many even more than in a more competitive system like a free market economy or a multi-tiered political system. Neither communism or socialism or capitalism or a democratic republic are free of negatives, but it is the communist and socialist systems that are so much more susceptible to corruption.

Wikipedia is susceptible to corruption. When Jimmy Wales moves on, I can almost bet money that the next 'owner' of Wikipedia will find more ways to quickly monetize the content myself and thousands (millions?) of others have provided to benefit themselves and their immediate cadre of editors/admins to the exclusion of the rest of us who created the value and power of what they now control.

Re:Socialism

[cavemanf16]

P.S. I'm ALL FOR Creative Commons and open source type copyright for the individual, but in those systems I maintain ownership of the content I created while requiring (by law) that others make note of my original authorship of that content. I'm just concerned that a site like Wikipedia blurs the line far too much between who owns what - content, editorial control, facts, truth, etc.

Re:Socialism

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I don't even know where to start with this one. It's like the poster has been sitting at his computer just waiting for an opportunity to shoe-horn his ideology into an article.

Re:Socialism

[sheldon]

Neither communism or socialism or capitalism or a democratic republic are free of negatives, but it is the communist and socialist systems that are so much more susceptible to corruption.

This was obviously not written from a Neutral Point of View. :-)

I'm going to have to think about this claim. You don't seem to really be supporting it with any good examples, and it's not clear to me what this has to do with wikipedia.

Wiki certainly has some problems with corruption, as they've moved to a model which relies less on the wisdom of the crowds and more on a select few who seem to control the content for their own motives.

But it's not clear to me that this is representative of socialism, or any political ideology.

Wikipedia is susceptible to corruption. When Jimmy Wales moves on, I can almost bet money that the next 'owner' of Wikipedia will find more ways to quickly monetize the content myself and thousands (millions?) of others have provided to benefit themselves and their immediate cadre of editors/admins to the exclusion of the rest of us who created the value and power of what they now control.

Wouldn't this be an example of capitalism, and not communism?

Re:Socialism

[Jedi Alec]

Neither communism or socialism or capitalism or a democratic republic are free of negatives, but it is the communist and socialist systems that are so much more susceptible to corruption.

Why is it that people can't see the difference between the way the leadership is elected and the way the economics are handled? Are americans taught in school that socialism/communism are somehow the opposite of democracy? It's perfectly possible to have a democratic government in a socialist country, or a dictator running a free market.

Wikipedia is socialist in the sense that people freely share their assets(in the form of information). The difference with a country is that, unless I missed something, the leadership isn't elected.

my truth

[migloo]

"Truth" is to Wikipedia what "Insightful" is to Slashdot: a laughable consensual pretense at best.

Hyper-conTextual reading beyond the lines

[gobbo]

When I was growing up, I read hypertext years before the 'web: encyclopedias. All the related articles listed at the end of each article were links to contextual aspects of the subject.

Wikipedia takes it further. I read an article that I intend to take seriously by also looking at the discussion page, and the history of edits. It is the saving grace of WP.

Good WP articles have two new dimensions available to the reader: TIME, and DEBATE. This is an astoundingly more efficient way to stimulate critical thinking about the topic than a simple article with references. Each article has multiple exposed viewpoints, and its growth pattern is part of its verifiability.

I can't stress this enough. It is a new kind of reading, something that will eventually become crucial to knowledge repositories.

Re:Wiki BS

[tjarrett]

I agree that there's a contrast, but it's not a contradiction.

WP:Verifiability and WP:RS, as the original article states, seek to anchor Wikipedia articles with externally verifiable touchstones. But there's a difference between providing an independent source for a claim made in an article and linkspamming.

There are certainly administrators who err strongly to one side or the other, but there are mechanisms to correct against admin bias.

Re:Help change Wikipedia for the better (seriously

[Onaga]

Please strike a blow AGAINST deletionism.

I prefer to think of it as Intelligent Editing.

Citing taft shashfic properly

[TiggertheMad]

What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is verifiability -- that it appeared in some other publication,

this is a very insightful comment. I love wikipedia, but the main weakness I see is this issue. If it is published, then it can be cited. However, the quality of the publication doesn't seem to come into play. I could be some random idiot, pay to publish my opinions in a book, and all of the sudden it becomes wikicannon and a citeable source.

I speculate that this is an attempt to mimic the way acadameia cites things: if it is published, then you are ok to use it as support for your arguments. However, this works in acadameia because many of the sources you would use for a serious paper have high standards for publication. Nature isn't going to publich an article about trends in Harry Potter fanfic unless it brings something substantial to the table. This starts to fall apart when you have wiki articles about anything under the sun, and start allowing any published material as sources.

Ultimate Authority, Justice personified.

[CherniyVolk]

The fact is, most of the scientists that gave us all of our "modern" science, were likely very "racist". After all, they did grow up in those times, and time again scientist do prove susceptible to social trends. So are racists really stupid, or is it more accurately we have been told to have strong negative feelings about that point of view? To the point that we want to say they are wrong, bigoted or ignore them?

Point I'm getting to, is this. regardless of the source, the correct answer is inherently and irreversibly correct. Truth, is absolute and the only thing that ever deviates is belief and other emotive factors. Truth can be hidden, obscured or obfuscated, but whether the truth is lost or hard to find, the truth is still... the truth.

Wikipedia attempts to garner TRUE unbiased opinion and matter. Behind the screen, who cares what social trends suggest... this is a fact, and this is what I'm going to write. Even though, if your name was on it perhaps you might have to factor in the prospect of grand social opinion. Which is why, perhaps, many other sources might be hesitant on data related to race in fear that the authority might be accused of "racism", "communism", "sexism".... get my point?

Wikipedia has very well balanced discussion, regardless if we like it or not. Wikipedia as a result, is not overwhelmingly biased towards one view than the other. With the exception of Accuracy, no other view is so dominate in Wikipedia.

News Corporation doesn't control it's Content. Sony Corporation doesn't control it's Content. The governments have limited ability to control it's Content. ABC, NBC, CBS, HBO, Cinimax, Hollywood doesn't have much control of it's content. It's content is more pure, and truthful than any other source. All other sources, inherently must consider repercussions of social backlash, so they'll twist and word things carefully if it means they have to outright lie or obscure the truth.

No one has control of it's content to guide society to a particular path of believe or common sense. It is influenced by members of all cultures able to speak the languages it presents articles in. It is influenced by the man in the trenches as well as by the man in the laboratory. The plumber, and the scientist at NASA. The US Marine standing watch, and the CIA Field operative, SEAL or MOSSAD agent. It's edited by Time Life journalists, the secretary of the Chancellor of Germany, Prime Minister Putin might have even corrected something on it.

It is the most wonderful source of information in the world. And the safest of all other ills of irrelevant intent and guidance.

Re:Ultimate Authority, Justice personified.

[gad_zuki!]

>Wikipedia attempts to garner TRUE unbiased opinion and matter

It does? It seems to me to an index of stuff that can be cited and easily summarized. Its not some high-brow truth factory, but a flawed reference that is useful for simple summaries.

Why it Works

[Relic of the Future]

If each editor has only a slightly-better than 50% chance of correctness, then the optimal number of editors is infinite.

Replace "editor" with "juror" and you have Condorcet's Jury Theorem. This handily explains both why Wikipedia works better than many traditionalists would expect (most of the time), and why popular misconceptions are still so persistant.

Makes no sense

[cjonslashdot]

Wikipedia clearly states: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth." Thus, they are NOT re-defining truth. Truth is an English language word, meaning that something is true (provably correct). Wikipedia does not claim truthfulness: they claim verifiability. Although it seems that they are re-defining "verifiability" because to verify something means to check that it is true, whereas they are implying that it means to check that someone SAYS that it is true.

Self-referential irony

[bshell]

So I went to the Jaron Lanier essay referenced in the story and started reading. After a few paragraphs, I thought to check his Wikipedia entry in another browser window and see if indeed he was called a "Film Director" on Wikipedia. No. That had been corrected. Excellent. Wikpedia seems to be working as advertised. But then further down in Lanier's Wikipedia entry there is a reference to the very Edge essay by Lanier that I was reading, and it is broken down into point form, making for much easier reading and comprehension. Neat. Finally, I went back to the Lanier's original essay to read it all the way to the very end, where it says, "Jaron Lanier is a film director". Bizarre.

"Truth" hardly ever such

[Jivecat]

I find humour in the fact that whenever a Wikipedia editor writes "Truth" in the edit summary, 9 times out of 10 the edit is not actual fact but rather POV, bullshit, or simple vandalism.

right vs commonplaces nad factions

[harvey the nerd]

Because of Wikipedia's consensus and verifiability policies, information that is emergent, only lightly covered in the news (say only one side covered) or highly politicized may get correct information "suppressed". Wikipedia has some very strong political factions that can be quite biased and dominant that produce articles which are willfully wrong. Reviewing the range of information from the Talk page may include more informed discussions as well as uninformed and crazy ones. Which is which, is sometimes not obvious to the less informed in these situations.

yup

[circletimessquare]

you could go further and say something that might strike people as absurd on the surface, but actually holds some water:

a media environment of openly partisan biased media is superior to a media environment with media that assumes impartiality

huh?

my proof of this statement would be that media that assumes impartiality is suspect. since impartiality is unattainable, you never quite know what stories are being ignored or hyped by the "impartial" media

meanwhile, consider a hypothetical city dominated by two newspapers: one openly right-leaning, one openly left-leaning. if a story happens that threatens the right's biases, they will poopoo the story, while the left-leaning media will trumpet it. and when the opposite happens, the left-leaning media will shove the story to 8 pt font on the bottom of page 34, while the right-leaning media will put it front page lead

now, all you have to do is read both sources of information (the vital "gotcha" in this scenario), and you have as close an approximation of impartiality in your news as is humanly possible. the truth is of course, unfortunately, that people pick the media that fits their preconceptions, and very few will attempt to seek out sources of information that are hostile to their worldview

furthermore, those on the fringe, the far left or far right, would view BOTH sources of information as left-leaning or right-leaning. this is because extremists on the left see left-leaning folks as to their right, and extremists on the right see right-leaning folks as to their left. but extremists see all media as biased all the time regardless of the media's level impartiality, so we can ignore the opinions of extremists when it comes to a determination of media bias, since they will never be able to see it any other way

as long as you read two sources of information that are openly left-leaning and right-leaning, you get a more impartial covering of your news than reading two supposedly impartial news sources, since you have no idea what the "impartial" sources are ignoring or hyping, but you know exactly how the biased media balance each other out

i am proud to say i even put this into some practice: two of my favorite sources of news are the bbc and the drudgereport. i think between the two i'm getting some impartiality in my news, i really do

Re:yup

[morgan_greywolf]

I was with you until you said the drudgereport. Then you lost me entirely. ;)

What you just said is the whole point of Google News -- you get the same stories from a variety of different stories. Different viewpoints == closer to the truth.

Approximation of the Truth

[gertam]

I like to call it a "First order approximation of the truth." Or if I'm being snarky, A "Zeroth order approximation of the truth."

This comment may need a clean-up

[Cid Highwind]

Please see the [talk page] for more information.

However, the aggregation and the claims that WP makes about itself [examples?] contribute to the problem. Most people [who?] with some critical thinking don't trust everything they read on the Internet, and have a clue about how reliable certain publications usually are [citation needed]. Most of us [who?] know which newspapers have good reporting and which ones don't.

Historical truth

[mbone]

In History, what else is truth but the consensus view of a subject ?

Not a reliable source

[Anonymous Coward]

I've failed many a student's research essay who've used Wikipedia in their source citations. Citing Wikipedia just isn't something you'd use in a professional setting, so it isn't something I consider acceptable in any respectable university.

This is a load of bunk...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just check out this link on Wikipedia...oh, wait!

Voting for truth

[Anonymous Coward]

"On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject."
 
Yep, and in some articles that's a real problem - because Wikipedia uses as a basis for it's articles what it what is widely published. One of the things that lead me to quit editing Wikipedia was that my entries, based on specialist sources (read: serious, academic books), kept getting edited to reflect popular sources (mostly amateur websites, though the 'pros' often made the same mistakes). Didn't matter that in the field in question the books I cited were standard reference works in the field - because the people who edited my articles could point to web sources I was steadily overridden.

Whatever dude, WP doesn't do definitions

[xant]

Perhaps what you really want to know is how Wiktionary defines truth.

WRONG

[CranberryKing]

The last 23 episodes were portrayed by a William Shatner clone from the future. This is a well known fact and you can now link to this post from the Shatner Clone wiki page.

Polling is no substitute

[tepples]

People could "vote" on how accurate they believe a page to be (hopefully in an informed way)

Wikipedia already has that, in a way: discussions on each article's talk page as to which sources are the most reliable. But they usually are not structured as votes for a good reason.

and a "How likely is this article to be accurate" index shown on each page.

You mean like the warning box at the top of a poorly referenced or disputed article?

Re:Polling is no substitute

[Smivs]

I was thinking more like 'feedback' on ebay?

Dogma != truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Dogma != truth

perfect, google news, good point

[circletimessquare]

it does the gathering for you

another caveat is that this approach, of seeking impartial media and using google news, only works in a country with a robust and vibrant respect for freedom of the press

using google news in china, or russia, or iran, for example, means nothing. the governments there actively seek out and destory media that does not tow the party line. china and iran may make due with detention and "reeducation" camps, but in russia, spectacular public assassination of leading opposition reporters works just as well for intimidation purposes

(assholes)

practice vs theory

[readin]

Wikipedia may have "verifiability" as policy, but that is not necessarily followed in practice. Many articles are full of information without verifiable sources backing them up. A reference and or verifiability become more important when the information is challenged. Then "verifiability" becomes a dispute resolution mechanism, often of last resort. I suspect that one of the reasons Wikipedia tends to be so accurate is that it doesn't rely solely on verifiability. It relies on a democracy of knowledge, confirmed by verifiability when needed. Of course, sometimes verifiability is absurd. I can find many verifiable sources telling me that Taiwan is a province of the People's Republic of China. But try traveling there with your PRC visa or your PRC passport. Sometimes the verifiable sources just can't be trusted. If I could read Chinese I could probably find verifiable sources telling me wonderful Mao was and how none of the problems that afflicted China during his benevolent were in any way his fault. I pay a lot of attention to the Taiwan issue, and this is a real problem because of the political and increasing economic weight China can throw around in persuading verifiable sources to write things in a way the PRC approves of.

This article may contain original research...

[bruce_garrett]

No...what blew my mind was seeing that "This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims", disclaimer at the top of the article page. In the context of this discussion that's pretty hilarious...

Wikipedia has officially jumped le tiburon

[ROU Nuisance Value]

Consensus reality!? Dude, that's like..wait, what?

Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell do you think this site is? You can't run around correcting other's opinions like you can on Wikipedia... oh, wait...

Well duh

[joeman3429]

I mean, is this news? Since when has wikipedia not operated on the idea that the truth is what people make of it?

Irony

[snspdaarf]

After RTFA, I noticed two things: First, John Lanier is taking exception to being identified as a film director; Second, the blurb at the end of the article identifies him as a film director. I guess Simson googled John to find out something about him.

Obligatory Penny Arcade Post

[TimeZone]

I have the Power!
TZ

Re: Depends how badly you want to know....

[King_TJ]

I can certainly understand the frustration of people like Lanier, trying to remove the incorrect information in his own biography that claims he "directs films". Yet I read his long-winded essay, and found myself quickly bored with his assertions and shrugging much of it off.

I guess I've realized that "getting all the facts" on a topic is, ultimately, an ongoing process; not just something you do once and you're done.

Anyone using a Wikipedia entry as "the truth" is foolish if he/she *really* believes that's the indisputable, final truth. However, 99.99% of the time, people just want to be filled in on a subject they know relatively little about in the first place. A "mostly correct, with a few factual flaws" article, whether it comes from wikipedia, a magazine, or a newspaper, is "good enough" for them. They're likely to FORGET more correct details than the original article had incorrect, anyway.

I don't really think sites like Wikipedia mean mankind is reverting to some "group-think is superior" philosophy of life and learning. Rather, we've realized the Internet allows experimenting with publications that don't have a single "author" -- and that brings a different set of pros and cons to the whole thing.

why verifiability was introduced

[pfafrich]

Its worth remembering why verifiability was introduced in the first place: to discourage things people just made up. If something has no references at all it is very likely to be made up, or someone's pet theory, or some gossip. So verifiability is step one on the path to truth and it has proved to be a most effective tool in eliminating hokum.

That said verifiability can sometimes make things hard especially for subjects which have a oral tradition. Martial art is a case in point, where the body of knowledge is passed orally and not written down and that which is written is of a low standard. I've seen cases where every practioner of the art knows some specific details but there no written sources in existence.

Re:why verifiability was introduced

[taustin]

Any system that would reject a post on quantum physics by Stephen Hawking because he did the research himself is just plain stoopid.

Or, in simpler words:

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

I love Slashdot, I read it near religiously, but I know better. The truth for any Slashdot posting is usually found in the comments, or in some misreported part of the article. I know how to look at the comments, deal with conflicting statements, and find the real answer.

Or, in other words: (a) the Slashdot editors don't even bother to read the links to see if the submitters' descriptions are even remotely accurate, (b) you think you're smart.

Been there done that...

[3seas]

I too once had a wikipedia entry. Don't know who started it. But when I went to correct it and elaborate a little I didn't have any problem. But given the main focus of the wikipedia entry on me, I created another wikipedia entry for clairification which was then shot down and as I saw it coming I suggested they also remove the wikipedia entry on me.

All of my efforts was to correct and clarify a wikipedia entry someone else started on me.

My conclusion is simple.

Wikipedia is a hearsay site! Hearsay being "found elsewhere" first.

With this in mind, Wikipedia avoids legal issues by putting the responsibility on others outside wikipedia.

Wikipedia should have as standard, a disclaimer on ALL pages. And it is as simple as that to address the ongoing issue.

Have they done this disclaimer?

Re:Been there done that...

[xaosflux]

EVERY Wikipedia article page has a link to the General Disclaimer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer) stating "Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here."

Re:2+2 = 5

[Trent Hawkins]

2+2=5, (for extremely large values of 2)

Wikiality?

[stupido]

Ever heard of it?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: Iraqi Yellow Cake

[Anonymous Coward]

• The belief that Iraq was trying to buy Yellow Cake, had an active WMD program, and that we were somehow liberating Iraq and that they'd be our friends afterwards and pay us back for our troubles and expense.

Are you saying the cake is a lie?

Re:Indeed (Errata)

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

Well then, as I was alerted, there is a typo in my post:

the part:

I'm glad to hear that you know better than slashdot. You're just too good for, just to good to be true pal:

should read:

I'm glad to hear that you know better than slashdot. You're just too good for us, just to good to be true pal:

Sorry for the reading inconveniences.

Sincerely sincere,

ioshhdflwuegfh

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

True but unverifiable

[Anonymous Coward]

Observe what is presently happening with the Obama campaign. Many facts have been found, but the media refuses to publish them, thus they are not verifiable. Joe the Plumber has had more facts published about him than have Obama and Biden.

"Digital Visionary"

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to concur with Wikipedia's not wanting someone who refers to themselves as a "digital visionary" to edit any pages. Programmers who think of themselves as "visionaries" rather than "coders" are even worse.

in the end

[circletimessquare]

the most important thing is to take the emphasis off of "the truth". when you realize how malleable the truth is in many complicated issues, you learn to stop appealing to the ascendency of an idea which is weak and frail

the truth is often what we make it to be. so we need to trust to people's individual bullshit meters, and we need to stop appealing to some arbitrary class of people or publication or other supposed fount of authority on matters of truth that in the end is just another source of bias

Re:Wiki BS

[maxume]

Are there mechanisms to correct against mechanism bias?

Wikiality

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this is more applicable: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/72347/july-31-2006/the-word---wikiality

Page Rank

[stupido]

One of the reasons that Wikipedia is an information battleground is the 50% chance of a scoring page first page hit on google for a given topic. See http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001381.html. By editing Wikipedia, you're adding information to Google == "The Internet" about half the time.

As long as Page Rank assigns a value to each site instead of each page, Wikipedia will get high rankings for pages that nobody links to. The assumption behind page rank is that each site has reputation can be computed globally for a site. This is generally true for most web sites, but it's obviously not so for a wiki.

Various cliques manage to control chunks of Wikipedia pages by local consensus or simply by excluding non-admins from editing. Articles on Sarah Palin or Joe the plumber were locked for extended periods of time after they came into the spotlight.

Re:Indeed (Errata)

[entgod]

But he doesn't necessarily have to be smarter than slashdot to do what he claims. Usually when someone posts something incorrect as a comment on slashdot it is either modded down or someone more knowledgeable will correct it. All the reader has to do is either skip the comments modded to 0 or 1 or read the correction. Not rocket science.

Not every single article

[Britz]

One article covers some events I was part of. While I would say that those were highly debated events and I probabely should not write about it myself, because I was involved, I still think it is very, very one-sided. I tried to argue my case on the discussion pages, but to no avail. For some reason the other side (radical liberals) thinks that their view must be the neutral one. And they have some more people.

They even got into an edit war with some Wikipedia-people, because actually those events are not even relvant enough to be part of that article.

And they still won. So now when someone reads about those events and wants to find out more he might, at some point, look at Wikipedia too check out what those events were all about. And as I am saying. What is in that article is complete bs.

And all the time I am thinking if I should get more involved because of the significance of Wikipedia. I guess I should.

No, wikipedia's "Consensus" != "majority belief"

[dwheeler]

Wikipedia merely requires that something be VERIFIABLE; the "consensus" is not "the single truth". So if some people believe X, and others believe Y, it's typically not hard to provide evidence that there are some who believe in X, and others who believe in Y. In that case, a good Wikipedia article would state that there are two beliefs, X and Y, and explain each of them. Believers in X and Y may disagree, but they can typically come to an agreement on what X and Y _are_. This means that the reader will be told about both X and Y, but not told which one is the "objective truth". That is the limitation - and the advantage - of Wikipedia. This has its drawbacks, but it works "well enough".

jesus

[Anonymous Coward]

men agreeing is but men agreeing.

wiki as search result

[kurtis25]

Isn't Wikipedia a formalized search result? By that I mean Wikipedia should be similar to or a summary of what I find in the first 10 results on Google for a given subject. If I Google "Argumentum ad populum" (mentioned earlier in the comments) and read the Wikipedia article I should find similar data if Wikipedia is a social consensus from verifiable data. The article and my Google results (especially if I search Google Books or do a what is search) should contain the same data or similar data. So in this sense Wikipedia should be a formalized result of what I can find using Google and in that case it's as much an aggregator of data as it is a new form of the data. It is about.com putting the data into socially edited articles, instead of the usually about.com chaos.

Re:Wiki BS

[Anonymous Coward]

The claim that "it appeared in some other publication" is in stark contrast with it's own "WP:SPAM" zealots who won't accept any external publication, strongly favoring [[self-references]] instead.

Wikipedia is more like early north american land grabs. First to put down the stake wins. Any additional, equally valid info, is spam and must be defended against.

Oddly, I have never seen anyone reject a valid source as spam. Usually it's some crappy self-published source, such as a website hocking some quack's alternative medicine book (which I have seen plenty of). WP:SPAM isn't a valid justification for rejecting sources unless they are just being used for spam.

saying something is true doesn't make it true.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because someone says something is true doesn't make it true. Many people seem to think that just by tossing a "...the truth is..." into their sentence you will go along and say, oh gee since he says it is true oh goodness me it must be true.

Truth has nothing to do with it.

[E 99]

An Encyclopedia is a tertiary reference source, based on secondary sources. Hence, verifiability is the key. This is nothing particular to wikipedia. It is general to every encyclopedia. This is not Truth. It is not a revelation from God. Truth has nothing to do with it. If wikipedia -- or any other encyclopedia -- is successful in its endeavor, then it will be as accurate as its secondary sources; no more, no less.

The concept of truth is reserved for the domains of philosophy and theology.

Re:Truth has nothing to do with it.

[chakkerz]

True, but the issue isn't so much the verifiability as that some people take things on face value because Wikipedia articles are dynamic, and as they can be changed at any time, some people are bound to get incorrect information.

Example: Yesterday I looked up Gerard Butler (not sure how I got there, mostly clicking through) and found out that he was the son of his father (the real one) and King Leonidas. Now my understanding of biology entails a woman being involved (well ... generally speaking) so I did not fall for it, and I doubt anyone would. Take however articles about things that people do not know about, cold fusion for instance, and there is ample chance for someone to distort how effective it might be. Reading up on it the other day I was surprised that according to wikipedia they appeared to making headway.

The issue there would be that it could be factually wrong, OR it could have been worded wrong, so by implication. Reading the links that verify it were beyond my immediate interest and left it at that.

The casual reader is unlikely to use Wikipedia as a starting point on casual topics, but as a source. It is unlikely that many will fall and history will be re-written ... actually, there is a chance of that...

But you are quite right. Truth is not what wikipedia is about, its a quick source of information. The caveat has to be that it may be a poor source for some topics at some times, and an excellent for others (or the same) at other times.

Re:Help change Wikipedia for the better (seriously

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I would advise everyone not to waste their time on this.

By now, everyone knows or should know that Wikipedia is rotten. There is no point engaging in any debate whatsoever with the cabals, cliques and ultra-bureaucrats who run the place. The rules are rigged, the policies tailored to ensure dissent fails. Look at that page. Notability is not going anywhere. By the time they're done forming committees/groups/cabals to discuss, debate and probably reject all the proposals and opinions on that page, a super-admin is just going to roll in and declare the whole thing moot because it's out of date.

Wikipedia is dirty. The rot set in at the top with Wales. He did not conduct himself, in his personal or private dealings, as the leader of a major project like Wikipedia should. He is out of his depth, and it shows. Instead of offering a semblance of professionalism and implementing safeguards against corruption, he has ignored and in some cases encouraged the bad policies that have brought the site down. The people he has appointed have followed their leader and the whole site has been dragged down by the decay.

The experiment is over; Wikipedia has failed. Its accuracy, trustworthiness and ultimately utility are now all in a steady but real decline. Another poster in this discussion mentioned how a particular pokemon article went from being a feature one on the front page, to being relegated to one paragraph in a merged page. That's an acid test for decline if ever I heard of one. The bureaucrats and deltionists have triumphed and there is no point wasting any more time playing the game they have rigged.

Wikipedia is going to become Encyclopedia Britannica. The world needs to move on.

Re:Indeed (Errata)

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

But he doesn't necessarily have to be smarter than slashdot to do what he claims.

He claims he is smarter than slashdot, plain and simple, and he isn't. The question then is indeed what he's saying he's doing in the post. It's a manipulation of a sort which always resorts back to that same claim. For example: I religiously follow slashdot but I know better, I love skepticism on the Internet but I can find the truth; I know TFA are not important but I'd rather stick to the important question posed by the post, etc.

Usually when someone posts something incorrect as a comment on slashdot it is either modded down or someone more knowledgeable will correct it.

Fine, but again that's not what was written in the post I replied to. Go find your statement in: "I know how to look at the comments, deal with conflicting statements, and find the real answer."
As it perhaps becomes obvious by now, to achieve such stupendous claims, "All the reader has to do is either skip the comments modded to 0 or 1 or read the correction." is not enough. Instead, a certain judgement is implied to be always at hand and so self-assured that it is nothing left for me but to peek and poke it.

Wikipedia = Not trustable

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but anyone who uses Wikipedia as their only source deserves whatever flack they get when they are proved wrong.

There are cases where a quick grep of wikipedia is useful for establishing the direction of where to go next. However there is a lot of stuff that is more useful that is turfed from wikipedia because the editors have an axe to grind against certain things, particularly internet-only culture.

On the flip side of this is things like uncyclopedia, encyclopedia dramatica, and other sites that are basically untruth and mistruth 'lulz' become more popular because they contain this very topic. That being unverifiable information.

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=65&contentid=3568

It's in fact well known in alternative internet-only media that the quickest way to get something deleted from wikipedia is to reduce the article to unverifiable information, eg that information that could only have been written by fans or the author themselves.

The sooner people stop supporting Wikipedia with donations for deleting their own works, the better. I can't wait for what replaces wikipedia, maybe google has a project :p

Might as well...

[rantingkitten]

While many academic experts [who?] have argued that Wikipedia's articles can't be trusted because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted [citation needed], studies [which?] have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. 'But wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observability. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience,' says Garfinkel. [citation needed]

Did anyone notice

[Anonymous Coward]

That slashdot kids got a lot anti-wikipedia after it deleted their role playing articles?

Well, there's precedent

[ScrewMaster]

On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.

Pretty similar to any true democratic process, when you get right down to it. In other words, the popular will is often an idiot.

For Entertainment Purposes Only!

[kenwd0elq]

Like Google Maps, which are generally accurate but are plainly labeled "For entertainment purposes only!", Wikpedia CANNOT be trusted. Anyone who goes first to Wikipedia for more than a general overview of a topic is a fool.

Re:Indeed (Errata)

[Whiteox]

All the reader has to do is either skip the comments modded to 0 or 1 or read the correction.
I wouldn't go that far. Comments that are ranked 0 or 1 don't mean that they are wrong or not worthwhile reading. The mod system is good but doesn't mean that a mod of =>2 is definitive.
That's why your comment is currently ranked 1 (and mine too!). Both of our comments are worth reading, as are the discussion pages of Wikipedia.
I keep writing here every time Wikipedia comes up that you can get the best from it by reading the discussion pages because any debate is likely to be there. It's not the article that matters so much as the article+discussion pages.
This deals with 'Consensus' and 'Truth' and 'Bias'. In effect, philosophically there is no truth, historically there is no truth as truth is meant to be definitive. The goal of 'objective truth' seems impossible as it is dependent on our senses, feelings, instincts, flight or fight responses and individual perceptions of reality.
Is 'reality' truth? Or even better, is 'truth' reality? There is no solution for this paradox.
Where there is a solution, is in the form of a continuum, where we accept a broad meaning as 'truth' dependent of the current paradigm and world views by the contributors and audience. That's the best that can be hoped for.

Re:Indeed (Errata)

[ScrewMaster]

He claims he is smarter than slashdot, plain and simple, and he isn't.

I think you're misinterpreting the GP. I think he was trying to say, "I know better than to take everything I read on Slashdot at face value", and that's the correct stance.

So where does...

[Anonymous Coward]

...truthiness come in in this scheme? :D

(captcha: "squelch" :o )

Re:Indeed (Errata)

[1u3hr]

should read:

I'm glad to hear that you know better than slashdot. You're just too good for us, just to good to be true pal:

should read:
"... just too good to be true pal"

Truth is SO overrated

[tuxgeek]

Your link is a good example. If some inaccurate idea is repeated enough times, it becomes fact.
Some examples: MPAA, RIAA, GWB, RNC, WMD, etc, etc, etc....

The sum of... what, exactly?

[jnnnnn]

All this seems quite contradictory for a website that claims to be aiming for "the sum of all human knowledge".

Authorship

[Alistair Hutton]

More and more I realise the problem with Wikipedia (and it's most certainley just Wikipedia, I love c2.com as a source of info) is the lack of authorship coupled with NPOV. They very fact that a work on a page has no attributed author makes the whole page superficially seem like a single text. But it's clear from a reading that a Wikipedia pages is made up of multiple authors, often saying contradictory things. If the Authorship was there on the page then NPOV wouldn't be a problem, an editor could have their POV at it would be known and verifiable. The lack of discussion on a Wikipedia page, having it shunted to a obscure tab, is a criminal mis-use of the strengths of wiki. Discussion, refactored into information that evolves into discussion, that is the natural cycle of wiki.

[philosophy] born before Jesus Christ? and hell

[Mana Mana]

tzhuge:

Since you are in the neighborhood already: How does Christianity address the not going to hell of those born before Jesus Christ (b.c.)? That subject just came up with my bf last month and once again I cursed my absence from philosophy class that day.

I get how buddhism, reincarnation, and population growth are reconciled, but the above? What's the wikipedia page I should read?

Defining truth

[noundi]

Defining truth is a fools errand. Einstein explained that this is even true within the fundamentals of physics when defining spacetime. There is no such thing as absolute truth, of course, however we tend to try reaching enough common ground to bind our "truths" together. We try to isolate the object as its own organ, however whenever we handle this object in any way, the input/output is filtered through the human brain, and the more organs (not body organs) involved, the more filters between "truth" and end observer. And no matter how many lab coats you own or how many degrees you hold, you will never find absolute truth, for you can never imagine/simulate how an object displays to an infinite amount of observers. What we think of as truth is how the object is displayed from our perspective, be it individual or global.

Now you might think "well I brushed my teeth this morning, I know that for a fact and it should be seen as truth". Believe it or not but even a simple "fact" as this has infinite possibilities of being misinterpreted or even interpreted. E.g. brushing teeth might include applying toothpaste for some, and not for others. You might imply that you brushed your teeth with toothpaste, but it was never included in the sentence, meaning it leaves space for specualtion. Your next thought might be "well next time I will define it even better". Unless you're planning on defining an infinite amount of details (where, when, how, why, etc. which are the basic ones to start with) you will never be able to explain the "truth", for it will always leave space for speculation.

Book-burning Nazis

[Anonymous Coward]

I went through the same thing. I looked up the name of an online game server, Mytharria, of which I was a staff member at one time. I noted that the list of staff members who had contributed over the years which had been part of the wiki page for quite a long time, had mysteriously (or not so) disappeared. So I readded the list. Lo and behold, one of the Wikipedia Nazis decided that, because the staff list was 'unverified' (forget that I myself was one of the staff members, or that I personally dealt with most of the other staff members), the list had to be removed. So I readded the list, and went through the motions of pointing out various other locations that this 'unverified' list appeared on the web. Other Mytharria community members got involved, and the edits finally ceased to be bookburned.

Re:Help change Wikipedia for the better (seriously

[Mason11987]

This is what is known as asking for meatpuppets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meatpuppet#Meatpuppets

People should write stuff down for posterity

[Anonymous Coward]

That so little is written down on those subjects is very sad in itself. People die, and oral traditions die with them. Subjects like martial arts, which are less relevant now than they once were, are especially at risk. People should write things down for posterity, so that the information is kept for the archaeologists and historians of the future. Researchers would still have to check the material for correctness in some other way (in the case of martial arts this may involve actually trying out if it works) but if there's nothing left to check it is lost forever.

Single worst problem of Wikipedia

[Goodgerster]

The idiots would insist for a citation for the phrase "the sky is largely blue" --- documentary evidence is overridden by what some idiot with a Dreamhost account (or indeed, some idiot who writes for a major metropolitan newspaper) has already written. This must be reversed if Wikipedia can become more than a poor synthesis of the unsubstantiated ramblings of other media.

Re:Single worst problem of Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

This must be reversed if Wikipedia can become more than a poor synthesis of the unsubstantiated ramblings of other media.

It's a question of policy vs. practice.

The policies are already written so as to improve the encyclopedia, by encouraging a *quality* synthesis of the substantiated reporting from reliable other media.

The fact that most contributors don't bother to research and vet their contributions has no bearing on the principle of the thing.

Easily fixed for articles about self

[Geminii]

If you're an entertainer with a career, and Wikipedia means that much to you, create a suitable source. An official website. A blog. A fanclub newsletter. An article in some local birdcage liner or industry rag. Then cite that.

Better, do that and then instead of changing the article yourself, and assuming you don't have an agent or someone to do it for you, bring the issue up in the discussion page for the article. Presumably, the DP is going to attract people interested in your career who would be willing to make the change.

democracy, courts and the truth

[Herve5]

Democracy yes, and btw this is also how a court (a legal assembly of people) judges what the truth is... So voting for what Truth is, is not really born with Wikipedia.

One could think this doesn't prevent either the main problem with democratically-elected-truths: conservatism. For any new discovery, new concept, new "truth", there will be a point in time at the beginning where the vast majority of people (and Wikipedia editors) won't believe it, and thus it'll be discarded from "the Truth".
But with Wikipedia's way of allowing "just external references" as one of their three conditions for truth, indeed here we may have an opportunity for faster creativity. Indeed, we may discover faster from now on, thanks to Wikipedia.

Re:democracy, courts and the truth

[ScrewMaster]

Democracy yes, and btw this is also how a court (a legal assembly of people) judges what the truth is... So voting for what Truth is, is not really born with Wikipedia.

True enough ... although juries often get it wrong, mainly because facts are not relative but Truth is.

One could think this doesn't prevent either the main problem with democratically-elected-truths: conservatism

Well, from a societal perspective, conservatism is a way to slow down the pace of change. That's often a good attribute: change for the sake of change is rarely good, and well-considered changes that take longer are generally more worthwhile than immediate ones made with no forethought. There's nothing wrong with saying, "Now wait a minute: this sounds good, but is it really? I generally agree that a line is crossed when information that doesn't fit the group mindset is suppressed.

Even so, I'm not sure that conservatism is a good word regarding democratically-elected Truth: I'd say willful ignorance might a better term. Put it this way: there are more real facts available to more people for less effort than at any previous time in human history. If you're contributing to a "democratically-elected truth" there's absolutely no excuse for an uninformed decision. The only reasons for doing so are personal bias or ignorance: neither are easily curable conditions, I'm afraid.

Like that's a bad thing

[Symbiot]

Wikipedia is not a primary source. There is nothing wrong with not being a primary source if you are honest about what you're doing and you cite the sources that you use.

To use Wikipedia for research:
First read the article to get a general feel for the subject. Then grab all of the citations for the article. Consider repeating this process with some related Wikipedia articles. When you are finished you will have a good starting point for your research -- you will not yet have done any research, nor will you be ready to do research, but you will be getting pretty close to ready.

The next step will be to look at the sources you got from Wikipedia and scan their bibliographies. Take note of the authors and institutions that produce works with titles that look interesting or that you see often. Doing this takes you backwards through the chain of other people's research. To go forwards in time you need to find works that include citations to the sources you've already found. Citeseer is a good resource for this. Again, take note of titles that you see frequently or are of particular relevance to your topic. Since the sources you obtain from Wikipedia are likely to be relatively young it makes sense to work backward through a generation or two of bibliographies before working forward again through something like Citeseer. While you are doing this only keep track of the sources that you think will be really valuable.

You can use the names of authors and institutions to jump out of the chain of citations if you feel you need a broader spectrum of sources. For a little while this process will be fun and interesting as you discover the community of people who share your interest in the subject you wish to research. The moment it gets boring you can stop and start your research.

Research is just getting credible answers to a related set of questions. You can't cite Wikipedia, but you can cite any source that they do. You can also use sources that they don't: like yourself, or anyone you interview. You don't have to read all of your source material during the course of your research; instead you skim through it picking out the pieces that are relevant to your topic (reading the parts that aren't is called "taking a break"). Take notes on what your questions are, what the answers seem to be and where you got your information. Continue this process until you have come to some satisfying conclusions that you feel confidant you can support. That's research.

Having done research you can easily change the Wikipedia pertaining to your subject. Simply write a paper based on your research (with proper citations of course), publish it, and then cite it as the source for the change you want to make. Oh, "publish" can mean "stick it on a website somewhere".

Systems like this coax order out of chaos. In this case it supports the rise of credibility out of mere opinion. It's the kind of thing that makes the Internet so amazingly powerful.