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Wikipedia As a "War Zone," Rather Than a Collaboration
horselight writes "A new study by sociologists studying social networking has determined that Wikipedia is not an intellectual project based on mutual collaboration, but a war zone. The study finds that although the content does end up being accurate as a rule, it's anything but neutral or unbiased. The study includes extensive data on access and editing patterns of users related to major events, such as the death of Michael Jackson and the edit storms that ensued." The article explains that the research (here's the paper at PLoS One) looked in particular at controversial entries, not ones about obscure duck-hunting equipment or long-settled standards.
I have a PhD in molecular biology, and have worked on articles about DNA; in some very, very obscure techniques used to study DNA, I was, for a brief period, a world authority. I no longer contribute to wiki for two reasons: 1) I have to keep correcting, and recorrecting, and re re re correcting stuff; after a while, it gets tiresome to ahve to deal with people who think that RAM is part of the keyboard... 2) The copyleft allows *for profit* webpages to use my work. I find this intolerable; my hard work is used to make some loathsome 1%er rich? I don't mind if non profits do it, but I will be Dam*** if i contribute to something that can be ripped off by for profits. I would also add that the huge amount of work needed to write in markup as opposed to wysiwyg is also a deterrent; perhaps th next gen wiki will fix this and the copy left part
Yes and no. I've been involved in a POV dispute on an article because a friend of mine died under titillating circumstances, and another friend of mine is being coatracked over it. (Yes, these are real Wikipedia terms.) The death has been all over the news, mostly in very gossipy articles that quote a lot of third parties but don't do any fact-checking. And so of course a lot of people who want to pee on a famous person's wikipedia biography immediately dogpiled on it and started making gossipy edits.
This isn't the first time it's happened, and the person in question has had people cancel speaking invitations on him after he and his assistants have been out of pocket on airplane tickets. So there's a really serious side to this edit warring—even though it's celebrity gossips doing it, real people get hurt in the process.
Wikipedia is a starting point for research. It isn't the final word on anything.
I would hope that most people would understand that simple fact, but the sheer number of people that try to cite Wikipedia as a reference demonstrates that said hope is misplaced.
Wikipedia is crack for a Cliff Clavin-esque information junkie like me, but I would never stake my reputation on anything I read there unless I had at least 3 independent sources confirming it, although I admit, the articles concerning math and science I generally accept as truth (whereas the articles concerning celebrities or infamous historical figures I generally do not) because I figure if I have a hard time making it through a given article that the citation's are going to be ancient Egyptian to me. The simple English Wikipedia is obviously better in that regard, but it's too simple. Consider their article for Chaos theory...barely a stub.
Still, I'm glad I live in a time with access to such a vast repository of human knowledge, even with the bias issues. I'm old enough to remember what this was like...
mostly in very gossipy articles that quote a lot of third parties but don't do any fact-checking
Wikipedia has a lot of problems, which is why I mostly stopped contributing years ago. But all the problems basically stem directly from their list of "policies" that were erected around the time that a horde of fairly obvious disinformation agents managed to wrest control away from Jimmy Wales. The new Wikipedia "democracy" now ensures that the government with the largest propaganda budget will always be able to control the tone and narrative of any controversial articles.
One of the worst of these policies is the idea that mainsteam media news sources should be given special status. This was obviously intentionally designed to steer the revolutionary capability of truly grass-roots, crowd-sourced intelligence back into the fold of the controlled narrative. And, unfortunately, one of the most blatant abuses of this policy is the way Wikipedia is used as a vehicle to slander controversial public figures.
Gossip is one thing; and perhaps the world is not much worse off when Wikipedia is used to spread tabloid trash. But the world absolutely is worse off when Wikipedia is used as a conduit to smear everyone from political prisoners to rogue investors who make enemies of the increasingly encroaching police state apparatus.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"