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.

Comments

Re:Whua!

[benjamindees]

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.