Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Are you kidding? It's supposed to be an "encyclopedia", as in "have ethics". If I want biased reporting I'll watch Fox. Without starting another pointless debate, there is a lot of benefits from things like socialism and it would be nice to see a fair analysis of both the good and the bad.
It is very hard for people to do this, very few people are highly knowlegable about topics they are indifferent to. In some cases (especially if all people involved are on a even footing and inclined to be civil) a group authorship. With the likes of Zionism and Feminism this would would be virtually impossible.
If the tone of an article shifts to meet the readers bias, then it's bullshit. Encyclopedia's aren't a popularity contest.
It isn't just "readers' bias" there is also "fashion" surrounding the topics themselves, influence of political lobbying groups, etc.
Authoritativeness of Britannica is more a perception than reality. Read the entries from the 80's on communism or from 70's on homosexuality. It was not as unbiased or authoritative as one might have expected.
Or you might say they are more or less what you'd expect given the time when they were written...
For all its failings, and there are many, with Wikipedia you get to know the other point of view and controversial topics are clearly highlighted (eg. LTTE, Taliban etc).
Assuming everyone has an equal ability to alter them. Where there are likely to be problems is where people with one viewpoint have the ability to exclude other viewpoints. Either by force of numbers or by being in positions of elevated power. Especially when minority/less powerful viewpoints are closer to an objective truth. If people have managed to (knowingly) sell a lie as being truth they are likely to want to censor anything which potentially contradicts.
Claiming Wikipedia doesn't have problems because users can fix the bad data just doesn't cut it. We know plenty of people won't bother, others won't know it is wrong, and corrections risk getting undone.
This kind of ability to fix only works with mistakes made in good faith. If the "mistakes" are the results of malicious intent any corrections are likely to get undone PDQ.
The question is what to do about it. Hopefully they will get around to doing the two version of pages talked about, current free for all, and fixed, fact checked, edited ones.
How do you ensure that the "fact checkers" are actually checking facts?
For the record I like and use Wikipedia, but at the moment I would never bother looking up anything controvesial,
I'm not sure if there's an easy solution. Any such topics tend to involve attempts to pass off at least one set of lies/half truths (many untruths are actually part truths or distortions of the truth, because these can stand up to examination better than absolute lies) as facts (sometimes very succesfully)
or about modern politians
It need not be a modern politican whilst the aim tends to be in the cause of contempoary politcs even a politican from the Bronze Age can get his or her biography "tweaked".
There are a number of sites that are based on user-submitted data. One that immediately comes to mind is the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com).
Sometimes known as the "Inaccurate movie database":)
Now, I'm not intimately familiar with the workings of Wikipedia, but based on TFA, the main difference I see between them and IMDb is that IMDb has a more restrictive additions policy. With IMDb, any registered user can submit information, but every iota of information (aside from some user reviews/comments, which are presented as such) must pass through an editorial review.
This relies upon editors being knowlagable and impartial. Something like Wikipedia includes the likes of politics, current affairs (even news) and history. Virtually all of these are controversial to some extent or other. How do you ensure oversight of the editors, especially given that the position is likely to attract people with axes to grind and party lines to push.
$1 bills are too easily counterfeited - they should provide a hard-to-duplicate 'certificate', possibly with a hologram to guarantee it's 'autenticity'. Then they could put the serial number on this 'certificate' of 'autenticity' and there you go...
No doubt there are "Dollers" with all these (and more) security features, even if the USD is still playing catch up.
You only need to be aware of an obey the GPL if you plan on distributing copies. Normally copyright law forbids that; the GPL grants you a license to do so provided you agree to some restrictions.
If you are not distributing copies of software the conditions in the GPL arn't relevent. It only becomes relevent when you want to distribute (or create a derived work). Rather than at the point of making a copy. Where as EULAs often claim to restrict your permission to make a copy. The GPL is really only concerned with matters related to (traditional) copyright. Whereas EULAs tend to be a complete mixture of legal claims.
An EULA is a contract offer. No contract exists unless you choose to Agree to be bound by a contract. That's what the A is for in EULA, agreement. Of course if you decline an EULA contract offer, then you receive nothing that contract offers. But as I cited above, you do not need any licence at all to legally install and use software.
To be valid an EULA must fit with that part of the "law of the land" which relates to contracts. Just because an EULA might state something does not, by itself, mean anything. Indeed it's quite common for all sorts of contracts to contain bogus terms as bluff.
The GPL EXPLICITLY states the exact opposite. The GPL explicitly states that it is not a licence to use, and explicitly states that that you do not need to accept the GPL to use the software.
The GPL is not an EULA.
The GPL is in fact a license offer - one which you are perfectly free to decline. What the GPL offers to licence to you is the right to create and distribute NEW COPIES. Copyright law prohibits you from creating and redistributing new copies (and public performances).
Unless you have permission from the copyright holder. Something like the GPL grants you conditional permission. Whereas EULAs often either enumerate copyright law or go on about things utterly irrelevent to copyright law. In a sane world no-one would accept them without running them past at least one lawyer. Especially if "you" are a corporation, since it is often unclear how these apply to "corporate people".
1. just buying your computers without an OS, if you have your corporate license anyway. (Believe it or not, it actually went on record as saying that the corporate licenses were some sort of "upgrade" to the Windows OEM license bought with the computer, and hence illegal to install on a blank machine.)
If you did this it's perfectly possible to have licenced machines without a COA on. All you have is one piece of paper somewhere which says you can install on X machines...
You're right that nobody has the right to revenue, but I will maintain that artists do have a right to try to collect revenue for their work.
If the idea is to encourage creation/publication giving the creator "first bite at the cherry" may be a good idea. But it's also necessary to pick an optimum length of copyright for this. Whilst "too short" can have the problem of works becoming public domain before something can be "brought to market". Having them "too long" can lead to lots of dead horses being flogged.
It's a common problem to the point of all sorts of linguisting hoop jumping to call "good terrorists" something else.
In the anglophone world we have our view, but it still is a slippery word to define. Are the Israelis terrorists? Common thought in the wsst says "no", but I think vast swaths of the world (mainly Muslim, but not exclusively) think otherwise.
Even using a "duck" definition the number of Israeli terrorists is almost certainly longer than just Dr Goldstein. However Israeli "settlers" shooting unarmed Palestinians dosn't appear to get much coverage in the Western (Mainstream) media.
In a strictly technical definition you could say the opening salvos of the current Iraq war were terrorism, as well. "Shock and Awe" seem to infer wanting to drive terror or fear (awe) into the hearts of the local populance.
Followed by an occupying army. I don't think there has been a military occupation in history which hasn't included an element of terrorising the occupied population. (As well as the occupiers bad mouthing any resistance.
I think we should just call anyone who deliberatly targets civilian populations for ideological or political reasons a "blood-thristy asshat", or a "sociopath", this way we can remove some the the western-centric bias, and perhaps see the motivating factors behind asshatery.
That dosn't work up will come terms like "collateral damage" together bad mouthing "militiamen" for "hiding" in amongst civilian populations and those populations for "shielding" some "bad people".
I like it how you insist that I should trust you. Sure they are less than 1%, the rest are terrorist attacks that take place within Israel and Iraq, you were just too lazy to follow the links, but the links are there, for each year in their own categories.
It's unlikely that 99% of the world's terrorist attacks would take place in just two countries.
Netiher was the post you just replied to! IRA and Basque folks are external to the US, as are/were November 17 and a host of other "fun" groups.
Since the IRA was funded from the US it is hardly "external to the US". Even in the US all the fuss about "Islamic terrorists" just does not reflect reality, there are plenty of terrorists and terrorist groups which are non Islamic (even anti-Islamic) active in the US.
Correction: most terrorist acts within the past 20 years were commited by muslim extremists.
If you went by terrorist acts you'd probably find "animal rights" or anti-abortionists at the top of the list in somewhere like the US. It all depends on exactly how you define a "terrorist act".
No matter how many tax dollars you throw at the problem, terrorism is a tactic that can not be fully countered. So instead of fucking with people - 99.999% of whom have nothing to do with terrorism - spend it on the infrastructure that minimizes the damage.
At best the former is utterly useless, at worst it actually creates more terrorism.
While there is nothing wrong with creating laws to punish people guilty of theft and fraud, there are big problems with creating a system where everyone must prove their innocence on a regular basis or be considered guilty. Especially, like in the Sarbanes-Oxley, it is a series of vauge rules that are very difficult to comply with and can be arbitrarily enforced. This is more fodder for the government to go after it's critics, or to demand political donations as protection money for non-enforcement, or to help a company with political connections by going after it's competitor, and the fixed costs of compliance help keep smaller buisnesses with competing with large corporations. It is not going to stop this kind of corporate crime, it is just another tool for the government to aid certain corporate criminals, and harrass other people they don't like.
At best this sort of thing just takes away resorces which could otherwise be usefully used to identify criminals. At worst it actually gives criminals a way to hide what they are up to.
Email postal address? This must be part of the US Government's revolutionary new program to send mail from place to place via the postal service allowing actual paper mail to be sent from place to place rather than just data! Revolutionary!
It was not unknown for the German post office to sucessfully deliver letters with only an email address on them something like 15 years ago.
Weird, I know that sharing seems to be some kind of leftist hippy idea, but that is the only thing bringing our civilisation forward: sharing of information (especially the beneficital ones, like science).
That would presumably make the people who wrote the US Constitution "leftist hippies". Given that encouraging sharing of information is the only reason the US Constitution allows the likes of copyrights and patents.
As a European, I feel more confident in the future of the Internet if DNS remains into American control than if it were to be placed into the hands of a UN-like international body. There are too many dictatorships in the world who would seek to hinder freedom on the net, and who often rise to positions they are unworthy of in international bodies (remember the fiasco with the UN human rights commission?); and there are too many small, underdeveloped countries whose votes can simply be bought (and routinely are in the UN assembly).
Bribary and vote buying appear to be quite common in the US Government (as well as in other "first world" countries, e.g. Italy).
What is nutty about allowing.xxx? So far, the only complaints I have heard are against requiring.xxx, which is a total straw-man argument that has no bearing on allowing.xxx as a TLD.
Actually there are plenty of arguments against adding additional TLDs.
Because if you have WGA do the killing, then what does Microsoft do when it fucks up and kills *legitimate* copies of Windows by mistake. And don't tell me that won't happen. So far since Microsoft started doing their WGA rollout, I've had 4 different systems with totally legitimate and legally purchased (by me) copies of Windows XP where WGA has come up and informed me they were pirated.
It would also be fairly trivial for a piece of malware to break Windows in such a way as to generate a false positive for any "pirate test".
Are we talking about the same Windows OS here? With Linux I can easily throw the disk into another system but WinXP, without fail, croaks when you change CPU/mobo suitably.
This can fail with Linux, if you have an optimised kernel. But it's rather easier to change the kernel on a non functional Linux system than it is to change the HAL on a non functional Windows system.
Cloning work only on almost identical hardware and there are some tools to make windows do a complete driver discovery on next boot but they still don't work everywhere and reasons are always fuzzy.
In some cases Windows will insist on doing hardware detection even with virtually identical hardware. Looking for HDD serial numbers and suchlike.
I don't buy into any of those eiter. But, the claims of some of the more intelligent people stating that it was a conspiracy state a few things which should very easyly be dismissed as proven nonsense or be proven to be correct
It would be rather hard for there to be no conspiracy, indeed non conspiracy theory would tend to be utterly incredible. Note that parts of the conspiracy theory promoted by the US Government, such as the identities of the 19 alleged hijackers, were very quickly shown to be nonsense.
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Are you kidding? It's supposed to be an "encyclopedia", as in "have ethics". If I want biased reporting I'll watch Fox. Without starting another pointless debate, there is a lot of benefits from things like socialism and it would be nice to see a fair analysis of both the good and the bad.
It is very hard for people to do this, very few people are highly knowlegable about topics they are indifferent to. In some cases (especially if all people involved are on a even footing and inclined to be civil) a group authorship. With the likes of Zionism and Feminism this would would be virtually impossible.
If the tone of an article shifts to meet the readers bias, then it's bullshit. Encyclopedia's aren't a popularity contest.
It isn't just "readers' bias" there is also "fashion" surrounding the topics themselves, influence of political lobbying groups, etc.
Authoritativeness of Britannica is more a perception than reality. Read the entries from the 80's on communism or from 70's on homosexuality. It was not as unbiased or authoritative as one might have expected.
Or you might say they are more or less what you'd expect given the time when they were written...
For all its failings, and there are many, with Wikipedia you get to know the other point of view and controversial topics are clearly highlighted (eg. LTTE, Taliban etc).
Assuming everyone has an equal ability to alter them.
Where there are likely to be problems is where people with one viewpoint have the ability to exclude other viewpoints. Either by force of numbers or by being in positions of elevated power. Especially when minority/less powerful viewpoints are closer to an objective truth.
If people have managed to (knowingly) sell a lie as being truth they are likely to want to censor anything which potentially contradicts.
Claiming Wikipedia doesn't have problems because users can fix the bad data just doesn't cut it. We know plenty of people won't bother, others won't know it is wrong, and corrections risk getting undone.
This kind of ability to fix only works with mistakes made in good faith. If the "mistakes" are the results of malicious intent any corrections are likely to get undone PDQ.
The question is what to do about it. Hopefully they will get around to doing the two version of pages talked about, current free for all, and fixed, fact checked, edited ones.
How do you ensure that the "fact checkers" are actually checking facts?
For the record I like and use Wikipedia, but at the moment I would never bother looking up anything controvesial,
I'm not sure if there's an easy solution. Any such topics tend to involve attempts to pass off at least one set of lies/half truths (many untruths are actually part truths or distortions of the truth, because these can stand up to examination better than absolute lies) as facts (sometimes very succesfully)
or about modern politians
It need not be a modern politican whilst the aim tends to be in the cause of contempoary politcs even a politican from the Bronze Age can get his or her biography "tweaked".
There are a number of sites that are based on user-submitted data. One that immediately comes to mind is the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com).
:)
Sometimes known as the "Inaccurate movie database"
Now, I'm not intimately familiar with the workings of Wikipedia, but based on TFA, the main difference I see between them and IMDb is that IMDb has a more restrictive additions policy. With IMDb, any registered user can submit information, but every iota of information (aside from some user reviews/comments, which are presented as such) must pass through an editorial review.
This relies upon editors being knowlagable and impartial. Something like Wikipedia includes the likes of politics, current affairs (even news) and history. Virtually all of these are controversial to some extent or other.
How do you ensure oversight of the editors, especially given that the position is likely to attract people with axes to grind and party lines to push.
$1 bills are too easily counterfeited - they should provide a hard-to-duplicate 'certificate', possibly with a hologram to guarantee it's 'autenticity'. Then they could put the serial number on this 'certificate' of 'autenticity' and there you go...
No doubt there are "Dollers" with all these (and more) security features, even if the USD is still playing catch up.
You only need to be aware of an obey the GPL if you plan on distributing copies. Normally copyright law forbids that; the GPL grants you a license to do so provided you agree to some restrictions.
If you are not distributing copies of software the conditions in the GPL arn't relevent. It only becomes relevent when you want to distribute (or create a derived work). Rather than at the point of making a copy. Where as EULAs often claim to restrict your permission to make a copy.
The GPL is really only concerned with matters related to (traditional) copyright. Whereas EULAs tend to be a complete mixture of legal claims.
An EULA is a contract offer. No contract exists unless you choose to Agree to be bound by a contract. That's what the A is for in EULA, agreement. Of course if you decline an EULA contract offer, then you receive nothing that contract offers. But as I cited above, you do not need any licence at all to legally install and use software.
To be valid an EULA must fit with that part of the "law of the land" which relates to contracts. Just because an EULA might state something does not, by itself, mean anything. Indeed it's quite common for all sorts of contracts to contain bogus terms as bluff.
The GPL EXPLICITLY states the exact opposite. The GPL explicitly states that it is not a licence to use, and explicitly states that that you do not need to accept the GPL to use the software.
The GPL is not an EULA.
The GPL is in fact a license offer - one which you are perfectly free to decline. What the GPL offers to licence to you is the right to create and distribute NEW COPIES. Copyright law prohibits you from creating and redistributing new copies (and public performances).
Unless you have permission from the copyright holder. Something like the GPL grants you conditional permission. Whereas EULAs often either enumerate copyright law or go on about things utterly irrelevent to copyright law. In a sane world no-one would accept them without running them past at least one lawyer. Especially if "you" are a corporation, since it is often unclear how these apply to "corporate people".
1. just buying your computers without an OS, if you have your corporate license anyway. (Believe it or not, it actually went on record as saying that the corporate licenses were some sort of "upgrade" to the Windows OEM license bought with the computer, and hence illegal to install on a blank machine.)
If you did this it's perfectly possible to have licenced machines without a COA on. All you have is one piece of paper somewhere which says you can install on X machines...
You're right that nobody has the right to revenue, but I will maintain that artists do have a right to try to collect revenue for their work.
If the idea is to encourage creation/publication giving the creator "first bite at the cherry" may be a good idea. But it's also necessary to pick an optimum length of copyright for this. Whilst "too short" can have the problem of works becoming public domain before something can be "brought to market". Having them "too long" can lead to lots of dead horses being flogged.
The problem comes from defining terrorism.
It's a common problem to the point of all sorts of linguisting hoop jumping to call "good terrorists" something else.
In the anglophone world we have our view, but it still is a slippery word to define. Are the Israelis terrorists? Common thought in the wsst says "no", but I think vast swaths of the world (mainly Muslim, but not exclusively) think otherwise.
Even using a "duck" definition the number of Israeli terrorists is almost certainly longer than just Dr Goldstein. However Israeli "settlers" shooting unarmed Palestinians dosn't appear to get much coverage in the Western (Mainstream) media.
In a strictly technical definition you could say the opening salvos of the current Iraq war were terrorism, as well. "Shock and Awe" seem to infer wanting to drive terror or fear (awe) into the hearts of the local populance.
Followed by an occupying army. I don't think there has been a military occupation in history which hasn't included an element of terrorising the occupied population. (As well as the occupiers bad mouthing any resistance.
I think we should just call anyone who deliberatly targets civilian populations for ideological or political reasons a "blood-thristy asshat", or a "sociopath", this way we can remove some the the western-centric bias, and perhaps see the motivating factors behind asshatery.
That dosn't work up will come terms like "collateral damage" together bad mouthing "militiamen" for "hiding" in amongst civilian populations and those populations for "shielding" some "bad people".
I like it how you insist that I should trust you. Sure they are less than 1%, the rest are terrorist attacks that take place within Israel and Iraq, you were just too lazy to follow the links, but the links are there, for each year in their own categories.
It's unlikely that 99% of the world's terrorist attacks would take place in just two countries.
Netiher was the post you just replied to! IRA and Basque folks are external to the US, as are/were November 17 and a host of other "fun" groups.
Since the IRA was funded from the US it is hardly "external to the US". Even in the US all the fuss about "Islamic terrorists" just does not reflect reality, there are plenty of terrorists and terrorist groups which are non Islamic (even anti-Islamic) active in the US.
Correction: most terrorist acts within the past 20 years were commited by muslim extremists.
If you went by terrorist acts you'd probably find "animal rights" or anti-abortionists at the top of the list in somewhere like the US. It all depends on exactly how you define a "terrorist act".
It always drives me nuts when I hear "war on terror". It should be "war on x group of terrorists", if anything.
Especially given that the governments making all the fuss frequently support or ignore all sorts of terrorists.
No matter how many tax dollars you throw at the problem, terrorism is a tactic that can not be fully countered. So instead of fucking with people - 99.999% of whom have nothing to do with terrorism - spend it on the infrastructure that minimizes the damage.
At best the former is utterly useless, at worst it actually creates more terrorism.
Wheras it may be true that these people don't have a right to revenue, somebody does. This group of people are called artists.
Actually in a "free market" nobody has such a right.
While there is nothing wrong with creating laws to punish people guilty of theft and fraud, there are big problems with creating a system where everyone must prove their innocence on a regular basis or be considered guilty. Especially, like in the Sarbanes-Oxley, it is a series of vauge rules that are very difficult to comply with and can be arbitrarily enforced. This is more fodder for the government to go after it's critics, or to demand political donations as protection money for non-enforcement, or to help a company with political connections by going after it's competitor, and the fixed costs of compliance help keep smaller buisnesses with competing with large corporations. It is not going to stop this kind of corporate crime, it is just another tool for the government to aid certain corporate criminals, and harrass other people they don't like.
At best this sort of thing just takes away resorces which could otherwise be usefully used to identify criminals. At worst it actually gives criminals a way to hide what they are up to.
Email postal address? This must be part of the US Government's revolutionary new program to send mail from place to place via the postal service allowing actual paper mail to be sent from place to place rather than just data! Revolutionary!
It was not unknown for the German post office to sucessfully deliver letters with only an email address on them something like 15 years ago.
Weird, I know that sharing seems to be some kind of leftist hippy idea, but that is the only thing bringing our civilisation forward: sharing of information (especially the beneficital ones, like science).
That would presumably make the people who wrote the US Constitution "leftist hippies". Given that encouraging sharing of information is the only reason the US Constitution allows the likes of copyrights and patents.
As a European, I feel more confident in the future of the Internet if DNS remains into American control than if it were to be placed into the hands of a UN-like international body. There are too many dictatorships in the world who would seek to hinder freedom on the net, and who often rise to positions they are unworthy of in international bodies (remember the fiasco with the UN human rights commission?); and there are too many small, underdeveloped countries whose votes can simply be bought (and routinely are in the UN assembly).
Bribary and vote buying appear to be quite common in the US Government (as well as in other "first world" countries, e.g. Italy).
What is nutty about allowing .xxx? So far, the only complaints I have heard are against requiring .xxx, which is a total straw-man argument that has no bearing on allowing .xxx as a TLD.
Actually there are plenty of arguments against adding additional TLDs.
Because if you have WGA do the killing, then what does Microsoft do when it fucks up and kills *legitimate* copies of Windows by mistake. And don't tell me that won't happen. So far since Microsoft started doing their WGA rollout, I've had 4 different systems with totally legitimate and legally purchased (by me) copies of Windows XP where WGA has come up and informed me they were pirated.
It would also be fairly trivial for a piece of malware to break Windows in such a way as to generate a false positive for any "pirate test".
Are we talking about the same Windows OS here? With Linux I can easily throw the disk into another system but WinXP, without fail, croaks when you change CPU/mobo suitably.
This can fail with Linux, if you have an optimised kernel. But it's rather easier to change the kernel on a non functional Linux system than it is to change the HAL on a non functional Windows system.
Cloning work only on almost identical hardware and there are some tools to make windows do a complete driver discovery on next boot but they still don't work everywhere and reasons are always fuzzy.
In some cases Windows will insist on doing hardware detection even with virtually identical hardware. Looking for HDD serial numbers and suchlike.
"legal" or not, mass spying on civilians is not a tool to be tweaked. it's a weapon to be dismantled.
Or simply shut down and left to rot. Such schemes tend to be expensive, but useless when it comes to actual law enforcement.
I don't buy into any of those eiter. But, the claims of some of the more intelligent people stating that it was a conspiracy state a few things which should very easyly be dismissed as proven nonsense or be proven to be correct
It would be rather hard for there to be no conspiracy, indeed non conspiracy theory would tend to be utterly incredible.
Note that parts of the conspiracy theory promoted by the US Government, such as the identities of the 19 alleged hijackers, were very quickly shown to be nonsense.