Slashdot Mirror
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.
Editing wars on wikipedia? Say it ain't so!
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Wikipedia is a starting point for research. It isn't the final word on anything. And it does really well at being a starting point, better than anything else before it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Except for search engines, which work just as well as a "starting point." Or Google Scholar, which also works well as a starting point, for those who want the scientific angle.
While the so called summary claims that wikipedia is supposed to be this "war zone", the article's fucking summary states that they have concluded that "edit wars are mainly fought by few editors only." The article then proceeds with statements such as:
and even
So, fuck you slashdot for posting a story with such an inflamatory, patently wrong and misleading pile of crap which was supposed to be the summary. If you have to lie to desperately generate page hits then it's a clear sign that you are dead as a communications medium.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Funny, cause I thought Michael Jackson was well known as the best selling artist of a number of studio albums, as well as a performing artist whose concerts have touched millions across the globe. (As evidenced by the loud outpouring of grief from all over the planet when he died.)
What planet do YOU live in where the death of Michael Jackson is not a major event?
Famous for being well known, is that like being dark for being black, or loud for having a high volume?
Except for search engines, which work just as well as a "starting point."
Wikipedia is good for use as a URL representing a given real-world subject. For example, an article about graphics in Linux could refer to "this DRM, not that other DRM". And I haven't yet found a search engine that presents a single page summarizing the consensus of how reliable sources view a subject.
Or Google Scholar, which also works well as a starting point, for those who want the scientific angle.
Not everybody wants to get on a bus and go to a local campus university every time he or she runs into a paywalled article.
Michael Jackson [...] touched millions across the globe.
That could be so taken the wrong way.
Wikipedia is a great resource for getting a basic overview of topics that are essentially settled.
The problem comes in with new stories, whose only sources tend to be news articles that are written to evoke controversy. This is despite the fact that most articles don't really need any more information than is given in the headline, or because there is essentially no factual information available, so the "controversy" is just pure speculation.
The same thing happens with /. articles.
Just looking at recent ones, "Intel Releases Ivy Bridge Programming Docs Under CC License," really doesn't need any more information, unless you don't know what those words mean. And actually, this is a good time to check Wikipedia, because "Intel," "Ivy Bridge," and "CC License," are all fairly settled topics.
On the other hand, "SOPA Protests 'Poisoned the Well,' Says Congressional Staffer," is taking the personal opinion of someone who is employed by someone who was elected to congress, adding the statement that "the internet is at risk," to drum up controversy, and intentionally trying to split people into "us and them."
If the challenges are in the source itself, so much the better.
And that's exactly the sort of challenge you'll find in a good article on Wikipedia: documenting that one reliable source disagrees with another. A good article will maintain neutrality by describing the controversy.
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
War zone? Ridiculous!
It's nowhere near that good.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Picking controversial entries is bound to lead you to examples of contention, on Wikipedia or elsewhere. And as GreatBunzinni (642500) pointed out, the Slashdot summary misrepresents the study just to be sensational.
Exactly: accuracy and reliability reputations. Not quite the same as accuracy and reliability.
Actually, I've never seen evidence of this sort of thing in articles on subjects about which I really cared.
And, of course, in Wikipedia it's all there. What are the chances that a commercial encyclopedia would publish all the correspondence between its authors and editors?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It ain't so.
But in the interests of WP:NPOV, it is so.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Just because Wikipedia is not for-profit doesn't mean the same rules don't apply.
If a commercial encyclopedia is not good enough (what you describe as "accuracy and reliability reputation"), it means people won't buy it and so the publishing company will go bankrupt.
If an open encyclopedia like Wikipedia is not good enough, it means people won't visit it. And that means nobody will edit it and nobody will donate to it and so the publishing organization will have to close down. And even if it would technically keep running, no visitors and no editors means it's a dead project anyway.
Either way, if an encyclopedia is not good enough, it will eventually go down. It doesn't matter whether it's made for profit or not.
Instead of a single-bias publication which is solved behind closed doors, we get plenty of people with different biases arguing and trying to make their points stand. How is not that a huge improvement?
+1
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Thanks, sociologists, for once again stating an obvious fact of human nature. News flash: Wikipedia suffers from the same vicissitudes of human behavior as every other compilation of knowledge on the planet.
Did you ever read Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica in their day? As an example, one showed Napoleon as a hero and one showed him as a villain ... yep, all you're seeing with Wikipedia is a collaborative environment is struggling to globally define things ... it's no surprise.
Was Genghis Khan a mass murder/rapist? It depends on where you're from - some see him as a hero.
Now Wikipedia has several approaches to this dilemma. One involves presenting conflicting views, another alternative is for "political correctness" and avoids any conflict or bias. I know which i'd rather prefer.
Oh yeah, iTunes sucks donkey balls. Sorry - had to say it :) Just my bias.
AC
Everyone has their own political opinions, as does Jimmy Wales. He used to run a mailing list devoted to Ayn Rand. Speaking of Wikipedia and conservative economist Friedrich Hayek, Wales has said "Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. One can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek." Thus, his opinions on politics, and what used to be called political economy, have bearing on Wikipedia's structure.
Of course, a project which gets large enough can't be run as an absolute dictatorship, or it falls apart (or everyone moved on to a split). The official Wikipedia explanation page for the 2005 Elections is laughable. First of all, if you read the mailing lists and Wikipedia posts, Jimbo didn't even want a binding election, he wanted to appoint everyone himself. There was such resistance to this he backed off. Then fanatical Point of View pusher JayJG ran in the 2005 election for the Arbitration Committee. By any measure, he lost the election, partly due to such an overwhelming number of no votes, because so many people thought he lacked fair-mindedness and balance. So Jimbo ignored the election votes and appointed JayJG to the Arbitration Committee. Because they were ideological allies. This is all glossed over in the official entry on the elections above.
Nowadays, it probably seems silly to have been so involved in it, but when Larry Sanger's Wikipedia came out (another person thrown under the bus by Jimbo, once Sanger's Wikipedia idea started taking off, Wales took over and tried to write Sanger out of history) it had a lot of potential. So much of what happened is despite Wales, not because of him. I think it could have been even better, but it was not meant to be, not in this iteration of the wiki encyclopedia idea any how.
Speaking of neutral point of view, the recognized systemic bias etc., let's take a look at the opening two paragraphs of the Abu Nidal biography and see if sounds encyclopedic or not:
"Abu Nidal...born Sabri Khalil al-Banna...was the founder of Fatah–The Revolutionary Council. At the height of his power in the 1970s and 1980s, Abu Nidal, or "father of [the] struggle," was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian political leaders. He told Der Spiegel in a rare interview in 1985: 'I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing ... nightmares.' Part of the secular Palestinian rejectionist front, so called because they reject proposals for a peaceful settlement with Israel, the ANO was formed after a split in 1974 between Abu Nidal and Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)...Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal's biographer, wrote of the attacks that their 'random cruelty marked them as typical Abu Nidal operations.'"
I doubt even Haaretz would publish something like this. Yet it's an encyclopedia entry on Wikipedia. Whether you like Nidal or not, this is not neutral and encyclopedic writing. If you don't think this is biased or unencyclopedic enough, it gets worse as the article goes on. And there are worse examples, this one just comes to my mind. If your answer is "It's Wikipedia, just change it yourself", you've missed the point of this post. Go to Wikipedia Review to really get an answer to that question.
In theory, but do you really think that's easy to pull off? Can they really charge more than their middle-man repackaging justifies? Repacking is a value add if done to high standards.
The mandate is to spread knowledge to the whole of the world's population. If middle-men can't make engage in any kind of fee-based recovery concerning editorial costs, you're not going to attract much participation with the dissemination task. I don't see many flowering plants harshing honey bees. I think you've got the wrong picture of the ecosystem.
I learned that lesson early. It's a huge mistake to take pride in bunny-suited textual purity. Wikipedia is a pig farm. Even the most conscientious farmer gets shit on his boots. Also, Wikipedia doesn't exactly encourage subject matter experts to take on leading editorial roles. It's more into the kind of loose accuracy obtained at arm's length remove. I would almost say that Wikipedia actively resists excellence. This is hard concept for many people to comprehend. The highly cultivated "feature articles" are a bit of a Potemkin village. Featureness degrades rapidly after the parade moves on.
My sense is that you'd have been happier contributing to uberpedia. "wiki" is German for "I wouldn't go so far as to call the brother fat. He's got a weight problem. What's the nigger gonna do? He's Samoan." For all its warts, the constructive sentiment is loud and clear.
http://filkertom-itom.blogspot.com/2007/08/049-wikipirates.html
They've got nothing else to do..."
"Bah!" - Dogbert
The question is who reads Wikipedia for "current events"? Nobody, if you want to read about Michael Jackson dying go to fucking CNN.
If Wikipedia required a two-week waiting period before something was updated, it would kill about half the edit wars. That will never happen though because Jimmy thinks raw edit counts is a useful statistic.
That's why the greatest innovation of Wikipedia is not that it's so comprehensive or that it's free or that anyone can edit it.
The greatest innovation of Wikipedia is the "Talk" tab, where disagreements over the content of an entry is hashed out.
One of the worst aspects of the old Encyclopedia Britannica with which I grew up was that articles were presented as the last word on a topic, even though there was almost certainly similar disagreement over many entries.
Whatever you might think of Howard Zinn, he gave us one very important thing to think about: That facts may be facts, but they can look very different depending on whether you're the hammer or the nail.
On the other hand (I'm arguing with myself here), the Talk pages are also filled with propagandizing, bullying, efforts at obfuscation and outright lying. There is definitely an element of devaluation of expertise and an overall "Fox News-ing" of facts.
Takeaway is, as many have said, make Wikipedia (or Britannica) the starting point if you want to learn something, not the end. And blogs should never be taken as authoritative.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Oh well, I learned my lesson, eh? I will never again even bother to try contributing to Wikipedia. My story isn't unique, you'll probably see it repeated several times in these comments.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
looked in particular at controversial entries, not ones about obscure duck-hunting equipment or long-settled standards.
Wow, so editing of controversial entries turns out being not very collaborative. What's next? Victims of abuse are more likely to be unhappy in their marriage? Come on. what's the point here? Signed, a guy who didn't RTFA. :-)
Currently hooked on AMP
'Famous for no good reason' would be a good way to phrase the idiom without the apparent tautology. I like the sibling AC's example of a Kardashian.
This is as opposed to being famous for being a really good musician or whatever.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Alternatively one could interpret that the researchers are seeing what they want to see. A little bias anyone?
If a commercial encyclopedia is not good enough (what you describe as "accuracy and reliability reputation"), it means people won't buy it and so the publishing company will go bankrupt.
Conservapedia.
encyclopedias from the early 1900s were blatantly racist and often stupid.
encyclopedias from the 1950s reflected the cold war biases of their authors.
wikipedia is a steaming pile of shit, but its better than anything that came before it, which is why people use it and why encyclopedias are dead as a medium unless someone can figure out a new business model where the authors get payed for their work.
(hint - wikipedia already has many articles where authors have been payed, its a dirty secret that nobody likes to discuss, but fundamental to understanding how the site works)
Typical inflammatory Slashdot story that gets it so wrong you have to wonder whether the submitter read TFA. The Slashdot summary says:
What the paper actually says:
The paper does say there are some articles are the subject of what appears to be permanent edit wars. But they are a tiny proportion:
The summary says:
The paper is a study of human interaction in social media. It is not a study into the quality of Encyclopeadia's. It draws no conclusions on the accuracy, neutrality, or bias in of Wikipedia's articles whatsoever. Nonetheless when they set the scene in the introduction they quote this result from another paper:
It depends on how inflated the ego is of the existing editor (or yourself if you have contributed a lot to a page).
When I used to contribute some pages were truly co-operational with multiple people (hopefully) trying to get a decent article together.
On other pages you came across someone who "owned" that territory and would often undo or edit new contributions rather than welcome some new input. These were definitely "war zone" pages. And lets not get started on the overwhelming armies of content deleters, when that hit it was like 5 people with pitchforks encountering a Roman Legion, there was no way to ever win that one.
That doesn't make it less of a war zone. I'm a former Wikipedia editor, and I can tell you that if you're a long-time editor, every time someone reverts your good-faith edit, you'll recognise the user name. There is a limited group of POV-pushers and idiots who don't know they're idiots, whose vandalism the present rules and guidelines don't cover and who are in any case excellent at subverting the rules that are there and one or two were even administrators. They also seem to have an extraordinary amount of spare time. When I saw one of those user names, I knew in advance how it was going to go. Everyone would just give up and while most editors would simply edit something else, I decided that I couldn't possibly continue to work on an encyclopaedia which I knew to be faulty, so I left.
The researchers say they focussed on controversial subjects. Well, I have news for them: any subject area, no matter how small and obscure, is controversial to these people. Large swathes of Wikipedia are a war zone, but worse are the even larger areas where the war has moved through and no one is left alive.
...it takes approximately an hour and an internet connection. Further, it's not just a massive edit war, it's a multi-directional war in which a few sides always seem to out-gun the other. Whoever has more administrators on their side ultimately end up deciding what happens. The only good thing is that there is very little large-scale coherency, so the bias is more random noise than outright propaganda. However, there are some wide reaching factions (inclusionists and deletionists) which do serve to screw things up in their own ways, not to mention the higher ups have proven incompetent and unreliable in many cases.
Unfortunately, this all doesn't make wikipedia that much worse than anything else. In a way, it makes people assume what they are reading might have been fiddled with, which is, I think, good. Blind faith in any source of information, no matter how reliable, is bad. That people learn to treat at least wikipedia as a useful but not fully reliable source of information means they might learn to do so elsewhere.
Great Intellect...
A reasonable educated individual should understand that any real history needs 50 years for a significant number of facts and color to come out. Even then, cultural bias will have a big influence, but before the 50 year limit, there minimal real facts in which to draw conclusions and form actions. WWII history has started to reached maturity. Any one taking any action or forming an opinion based on a single MJ article probably shouldn't be allowed to walk around without a responsible adult. One has to really try to understand why anyone would expect any online or printed source to have a balanced view. Good grief, the major news outlets take years to get their own facts and reporting correct.
The question is who reads Wikipedia for "current events"? Nobody, if you want to read about Michael Jackson dying go to fucking CNN.
....And go to Wikipedia, for what exactly? Horribly misleading articles fully of misinformation, policed by basement dwelling geeks with nothing better to do than enforce their version of the truth? Ha! Some people get the naive idea they are going to improve Wikipedia by at least adding some new article on a subject many people might be interested in, thus making it a more complete source of information, only to see their articles shot down in flames because --- OMFG --- this article wouldn't belong in a 500-lb ink and paper Encyclopedia set, so of course we absolutely can't have it stored in digital format along with all sorts of other relevant information, no sir!
The problem is that the people who use Conservapedia believe it IS accurate and reliable.
Actually, the funniest thing about Wikipedia is the idea of having an Edit button when you see content you don't like, or agree w/
I, for one, can live with the fact that a few adolescents think that the article on Micheal Jackson is important enough to make a fuss about. Same with GW Bush. The lemmas that are mired in controversy, are usually the ones where you know about it, and have your own opinion on.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
[citation needed]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
While yes, slashdot summaries are often dubious and partially wrong, I'd like to point out that the summary does consider your counter-argument:
The article explains that the research (here's the paper at PLoS One) looked in particular at controversial entries,
Thus, the 'war zone' is only talking about a very small, but arguably very important part of wikipedia.
and give him a sandvich.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
When I was very young, my parents invested in encyclopedias. I read the Encyclopedia Americana A-Z cover to cover. Later, in 6th grade, I did the same thing with the current edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. This gave me a HUGE boost in school and life.
Unfortunately, I don't see how the same is possible any more. There's just too much in any electronic encyclopedia to read all of any more. On the other hand, instant access to any information, porn and billions of opinions all easily from a variety of search engines totally makes modern internet a paradise for me.
The only excuses for stupidity nowadays are laziness or mental disability.
Once again, Mom, thank you for forcing me to learn to touch type.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
What a boatload of shit. A "war zone" is a place where real combat takes place. Where bodies are cored through by high-velocity projectiles, where jugulars are severed by blades, where grotesque half-men scream in unspeakable pain while crawling on the stumps of their arms, trailing torn, bloody entrails.
You're right; Wikipedia is nothing like a Chuck E. Cheese's ball-pit.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Brother, ain't that the truth.
Thanks to Mom, and Mavis Beacon. I would so totally do her (not Mom, Mavis).
You are welcome on my lawn.
I posted a link to a homepage I wrote about a medical condition I have. Over the years many professionals (doctors, nurses, professors, etc.) have written to me to say that I have written a great site.
Despite this when I added a link to my site to the relevant Wikipedia page in the "External links" section it was removed.... and the editor referred to the addition as "an act of vandalism"..... this was a person who, on the same day, had done something similar on 100's of different subjects. The chance that is, that this person wouldn't be able to tell a useful site from a useless one.
The links that have been allowed are general medical sites that have at most a couple of paragraphs about this specific condition...
Just because the link is to an "authoritative site" doesn't make the link useful.
ps. my sites easy to find in google... so people who are looking for the subject will find my site. Wikipedia is just one extra link.
If there are heated wars over a topic, with factions constantly making changes... well damn, that tells you a lot right there. So long as the changes are documented and the history available... that's a very good thing. I learn more in the comments of places like slashdot, reddit and google+ than I do in the original post or argument. often quite a bit more.
Same applies to wikipedia. If mr Alpha says one thing and Mr. Beta says another thing... and you see a whole string of alpha and beta modifications... well then. I guess you've got to use a little deductive reasoning and personal judgement...
All I know for sure... is if I query "what is...." and I look at the list of results.. my favorite first choice is wikipedia.
Just like every time you see an article knocking google... you have to check and see if facebook paid for it, seeing as how they got caught doing it....
Any article knocking Wikipedia, a reader has to consider whether its a real complaint or yet another top down knowledge distributor annoyed at bottom up methods ruining their business model.
This struggle has been going on for a long time, but now we are privy to it. Before Wikipedia money changed hands and the truth is decided.
--Brenda Make
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
On a controversial page where there are few experts.
It is hard work being an editor. Expect to put many hours in trying to make changes which will be constantly reverted and argued against by multiple people on talk pages. Experts probably have better things to do. If you're not available at the right time, all your work can can be removed in days.
Add to that, the massive learning curve for Wikipedia: people who are contracted by the majority of scientific papers can impose their bias on a page simply because they understand the edit system better than you do. And where they can't, they might just make the environment so unpleasant that you don't want to hang around.
One of the rules is consensus. If you are the only NPOV editor vs 2 or more people with an agenda, forget about it. They override facts presented in scientific papers in terms of things how much of the article can be devoted to it. Even if it's just one person with 2 accounts.
However, 6 months later, another expert might come along and go through the same bullshit you just went through. So unless you're there to back them up knowing the edit system inside out, your fellow expert will probably never come back.
And even if you manage to get the article more or less NPOV, don't expect it to last. Sooner or later, those with an agenda will make an attempt to impose their bias again and if you're not there to defend it, they will succeed.
In my experience, such POV pushing editors edit several Wikipedia pages full-time. Whether they are bored students/office workers/unemployed, I don't know.
I scanned through the paper and didn't find it illuminated much. Notably, they didn't look at talk page activity vs views of the main page.
Every time you see a terrible Slashdot article or headline, check which editor posted it.
If you're like me you'll learn to just say "fucking timothy" when it happens.
and the difference between how wikipedia works and how academia works is what exactly?