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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[bunratty]

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

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

[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

[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...

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.)

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.

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: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.

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: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: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: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?

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.

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.

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.

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.