Hi. Eugene introduced me earlier, and some of you may recognize my name from a recent comment thread or two. As Eugene mentioned, I work as a litigation attorney at a firm in New York City ... and I first met him at a summer school mathematics program (which, I would like to remind him, we were carefully coached not to call "math camp") thirty years ago.
I've been reading the Conspiracy faithfully for five or six years now, and recently I've noticed Eugene's series of posts about court decisions that discuss or mention Wikipedia, the free-content, mass-written, ever-growing online encyclopedia. I've also noticed that in unrelated posts and comments, many Conspirators routinely link to relevant Wikipedia articles and seem to operate from the basic assumption that they will generally be factually accurate. So I infer that there is at least some respect for Wikipedia among some Conspirators. At the same time, I saw the comments on the thread where Eugene introduced me this afternoon, so I know there is some skepticism too.
Eugene's posts, and everyone's comments, have interested me because I've contributed to Wikipedia myself, and I'm an administrator on the site and a member of the in-house Arbitration Committee. (Wikipedians may edit under pseudonyms, and until this point I hadn't mentioned my real name on-wiki, although a determined critic managed to "out" my real identity about a year ago. For anyone curious, on Wikipedia I'm known as Newyorkbrad, Brad being my middle name.)
I hope to do two things this week. First, to explain to Conspirators a little more about how Wikipedia operates and address a couple of aspects that may not have occurred to casual readers. (I might even recruit a couple of new Wikipedia contributors -- but in fairness, I'm going to link to a couple of criticism sites as well, so you'll know what you might be getting into.) And second, I hope to gather input on some important issues from contributors here who will have an intelligent reader's familiarity with the site, but no predisposition in our internal, sometimes eternal, debates.
Anyone who has spent time on the Internet has heard about Wikipedia by now and has at least some knowledge of how it works. But here are some basics for those less familiar, which the rest of you can safely skip and go on to the end or come back tomorrow.
Wikipedia defines itself as "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit." That is literally true: anyone (short of a few sitebanned people) with an Internet connection can sit down at the keyboard and start editing. The "anyone" who can edit includes you, if you are so inclined; you don't even need to register an account in order to edit an existing article, though you do in order to create a new article from scratch.
For my part, I was drawn in as many others are: I ran a Google search to locate some information, and the Wikipedia article was the top result. I saw a mistake in an article and corrected it. (The double brackets are internal wikicode for a link to another page, and I'll use that code here as well.) Interestingly, my introduction to a flaw of the wiki collaborative editing model came a short while later later, when someone took the correction I made and immediately uncorrected it. Fortunately, when I made the change a second time, I figured out how to provide a more detailed explanation in the "edit summary" field, and this time it stuck. If I'd been reverted one more time, I probably would have shaken my head and walked away, as subject-matter experts, unfortunately, often do. But instead, having made one change led me to want to make others, and then I registered to start creating pages, and it became a hobby.
Wikipedia has existed for less than eight years, and its growth and popularity have far exceeded anything that those who created it could possibly have imagined. Today, there are millions of registered "editors" with accounts, although there are probably a few thousand truly dedicated everyday contributors, and there are close to three million articles. Content can be found on virtually every subject one might wish to write about: from Poe and poetry to pomegranites and Pokemon; from Poland and Portugal to Powell and Posner; from Pol Pot and Potsdam to polarity and pottery. (Of these, there may be a disproportionate amount of Pokemon; editors come from an enormous diversity of background but have historically skewed younger, for fairly obvious reasons.)
There are Wikipedias in several hundred languages, of which English is the largest (German is second), and there are also Wiktionary and Wikinews and a Wikiversity and Wikiquote and Wikisource, and Commons (a repository for image and sound files that can be used by all the projects) and Meta (for coordination). All of this is operated under the auspices of the Wikimedia Foundation, a charitable foundation that owns the hardware and is, theoretically at least, in charge of it all. But my involvement with the English Wikipedia is probably enough for one lifetime.
So why does this matter? One reason is that a lot of people find that editing, or even administering the site, is fun. That is is essential, as virtually everyone involved is a volunteer. Another is the satisfaction of contributing to an ever-growing source of "free knowledge." In addition to being "the encyclopedia that everyone can edit," Wikipedia is "the free encyclopedia," whose content can freely be reproduced on other websites or in other media. (This actually happens. One of my first articles was a short biography of a lawyer in Alabama who became a judge in Puerto Rico, named Peter J. Hamilton. It turns out that there is a Peter J. Hamilton Elementary School in Mobile, whose website has a "did you ever wonder who Peter J. Hamilton was?" page, and the answer turns out to be my article.)
But there is another major reason that a lot of people care about Wikipedia, whether they participate themselves in it or not, and why there are many critics concerned about the increasingly widespread role of the site. Because of its popularity and also because of its interconnected network of links, Wikipedia articles tend to score extremely high on Google and other Internet searches. In particular, if one searches on an individual's name, his or her Wikipedia article will generally be among the top group of Google hits -- much of the time the very first one. This has implications that are quite significant and in many instances troubling, which I will be discussing over the next couple of days.
That's long enough for an introductory post; I'm sure many are waiting for me to reach something more controversial. Over the next few days I'm going to explore some specific issues, beginning tomorrow with the question of how Wikipedia articles about living people can affect their subjects, and continuing later in the week with issues of site governance and article quality, behavioral standards and the role of anonymity.
The comments thread should be open, and I'd welcome suggestions for aspects I might address. (I make only one request: that regular Wikipedians who are looking over my shoulder, as well as Wikipedia critics from Wikipedia Review and elsewhere, bear in mind that this is a general-interest audience. Please don't hijack the comment threads with our own internal disputes and debates. No one here wants to read who is a sockpuppet of whom or whether so-and-so's block was fair or not. We have ANI and Wikipedia Review to hash those things out later.)
And one last unrelated request. A couple of weeks ago, [[Saxbe fix]] was the day's featured article, meaning it had pride of place on the main page for a day. I hadn't contributed to the article before, but I did some copyediting while it was mainpaged, and in doing so, I came across the assertion that President Reagan nominated Robert Bork rather than Orrin Hatch to the Supreme Court because Hatch's appointment would have raised an emoluments clause issue and the administration was not convinced that the Saxbe fix is constitutional. Although I had a dim recollection of the issue having come up in passing, I found that statement as written implausible and edited the article to say that this issue played only a small role in Judge Bork's selection. However, I didn't have a good source suitable for citation in the article to support my assertion, and I've been asked for one. This certainly would seem like an appropriate audience to fill in that particular lacuna. So if anyone can help with a source on this, please let me know in in the comments thread so I can go back and add it to the article.
Or better still, go visit [[Saxbe fix]] and edit it yourself.
Related Posts (on one page):
One subject that would interest me is any demographic statistics on wiki editors and administrators.
Using an extreme example for illustrative purposes: I spent six years in graduate school learning, among other things, the ins and outs of quantum mechanics, general relativity, and their interactions. And still, my efforts can be undone by a twelve-year-old who just read The Dancing Wu-Li Masters. I don't care to come anywhere near yet another screaming match with a moron who has no idea what he's talking about.
(Andrew Keen, for those who don't know, is the fellow who maintains that online collaboration is "Communist", that search engines are "parasites", and that user-driven sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube are worse for scholarship and art than government censorship would be, because they "put artists out of work" -- i.e. that collaborative and folk culture is so vastly inferior to elite culture that it should be eradicated.)
These scholars and writers persist in telling us why Wikipedia cannot possibly work. It has always struck me that they are a little bit like the mythical aeronautics engineers who said that bumblebees cannot possibly fly; or the economists in the old joke that ends, "Sure, it works in practice, but does it work in theory?"
In other words, in arguing all their various theoretical reasons why Wikipedia cannot work, they ignore the observable fact that it does work: that it is a useful resource for thousands upon thousands of people every day. Any scholarly approach to Wikipedia has to start not from a philosopher's armchair contemplation, "What would it be like if someone tried to create a user-edited Web encyclopedia?" -- but rather from a scientist's observation that the experiment is already being done and has produced some results.
Here is a link to a Conspiracy article referring to the role of the Emoluments Clause in the Bork-Hatch episode. I hope this helps:
http://volokh.com/posts/1227548910.shtml
It wouldn't be so bad if there were experts who made sure that everything on a given topic was correct. But when it's an ideologue who controls the wikipedia pages of all of his rivals it gets rather absurd.
Wikipedia's practice of using consensus does not depend on relativism, or the notion that there are no objective facts. If anything, they depend on the notion that where there is an objective fact about a particular subject, a group of interested and reasonable people, with access to good primary and secondary sources on the subject, will be able to ascertain and agree upon that fact.
In particular, the Wikipedia editing process uses consensus (a consensus of interested editors acting in good faith) to judge whether a fact is well-established enough to include in an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia's practices do not imply the notion that "If everyone agrees that 1 + 1 = 3, then it is so." Rather, they imply the notion that "Since 1 + 1 = 2, everyone who reasonably inquires into the matter of what 1 + 1 equals, will agree that it is 2."
In philosophical terms, Wikipedia's use of consensus is epistemological rather than metaphysical. It doesn't claim that consensus creates truth, but rather that in seeking to know truth, talking about it with others, sharing information, and coming to agreement is a worthwhile tool.
[[user:bbatsell]]
2. Almost all of the external links at WP have a nofollow tag, meaning the link doesn't confer search engine "juice". So, if a WP article is based on and links to a page on another site, WP won't be giving that other site anything despite the fact that the WP article might not exist without the other site.
3. However, some links at WP don't have nofollow. Picture a huge, gigantic funnel for all that link juice coming in from other sites, and then being sent to just a small number of sites. Maybe our host could tell us what those sites are.
4. Maybe our host could provide some examples of WP's very special rules being used to keep truth out of the entries. For instance, something that's obviously true might be consider "original research" and won't be WP-ready until a "reliable source" mentions it, and "reliable source" generally means the NYT, the WaPo, the LAT, or the like. They even more or less say in their rules that if something were important, the MSM would cover it. That reduces the chances that WP will have articles about things the MSM doesn't want to discuss, and it tends to make WP a watered-down version of the MSM.
5. If our host wants to discuss a specific case, maybe he could tell us why negative information was removed from and never added back to this article. AFAIK, it hasn't had any negative information for over a year and a half, despite the fact that some people have questions about the program. If concerns about that program are too wacky to even be mentioned, where exactly is the wacky line and who sets it?
6. Hopefully Daniel Brandt will weigh in.
If a blogger then came along and said, "but, the sky is not green", that would probably be rolled back because WP really doesn't like blogs and that edit would probably be considered en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
It isn't too far from that example to things that actually happen.
8. The common defense for inaccuracy offered is, "if something's wrong, go ahead and edit it!" with a cheery smile. At the rate of 10 articles per day, I could only do a few thousand per year, a tiny fraction of WP's articles. In the meantime, many of those that were fixed would be un-fixed, and for the last article I did in the year, WP would have been spreading disinfo for at least a year. Putting me - or hundreds of me's - in charge of keeping WP from spreading disinfo is not going to work.
9. How many unique visitors saw the BHO article and were given an incomplete or inaccurate overview of the candidate?
10. How many rightwing sources are considered "reliable"?
First, I can't figure out when and why spoiler warnings were removed. The assertion is made that someone coming to read an article on a book can expect to see the book discussed in depth and needs no spoiler, but I've been very frustrated at being no longer able to look up a book just to find out general info, including how fans of the author rate the book, without risking the book being spoiled. Spoiler warnings would seem to provide a lot of benefit with no downside at all. Maybe you can explain why spoiler warnings are no longer in style, and let us know if there's any chance of that policy being reconsidered.
Second, and even more important, given the virtually unlimited capacity of an online encyclopedia, it is particularly distressing that the community has gotten very stingy in judging what people or topics merit articles. What harm is there in maintaining a very liberal policy on what information is not too insignificant to get an article? Relatedly, typically the best quick, online source for looking up information on a topic I'm very curious about is Wikipedia, and the fact that it is an encyclopedia needn't mean that in depth treatment of topics should be discouraged. Yet many articles on scholarly topics seem to go out of there way not to go in depth, not because of contributors' unwillingness to be thorough, but because wikipedia seems to have something against long articles. I'd be very appreciative if you'd discuss these related issues of topic qualification and article length.
Thanks,
Jacob Berlove
11. Another claim apologists for WP spreading disinfo make is the claim that edits that introduce fake information are corrected within minutes or hours. But, what about those people who see the article in an un-"corrected" state? Won't they think they're looking at the real article, with many of them not realizing they're looking at one containing fake information?
12. If old information keeps getting added to WP articles over time and changes keep getting made that have nothing to do with new information (such as someone winning an award or getting a new job), doesn't that mean that all the previous versions of the article - which may be the #1 search result for that person's name - were at the least not giving a complete picture of that person and may have been misleading all those who saw the article by not information them of relevant information?
They'll just claim the same reason that Earth's entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy got cut down to "Mostly harmless."
Don't use Wikipedia at all, ever, to research politics, social topics, environmental issues, religion, culture and some history. Politically incorrect information is often purged from those articles, at the behest of the no-life lefty zombies that run the site.
I agree with your observation, but not your characterization of those who run the site. It is the open nature of WP that allows the lefties to dominate - because they are more determined (as in, young and lots of time avail) and because the sourcing criteria inherently favor the left.
However, those who created and run WP seem to really be trying to make it unbiased - they just have an impossible task.
You underestimate the interest here in scuttlebutt, even if we have no idea who you're talking about. And as for Eugene outing your summer in math camp, take it from someone who spent every Saturday during high school in non-curricular math and science classes (time, my friends assured me, God wanted reserved for drugs and sex). I say fly that geek flag high and proud!
Wikipedia's systemic weakness is that leftists are over-represented and persist in unbalancing entire topics.
For instance, the entire topic of global warming is subject to the Group Ownership of William M. Connolley, Kim D. Petersen, Raymond Arritt, Stephan Schulz and some others. Some of these folks are administrators and systematically shut out any contrary opinion or fact.
Even if you think the articles are mostly free of bias, Wikipedia is clearly dominated by left partisans.
Wikipedia works on "verifiability, not truth". Three guesses as to what happens when something's verifiable but false.
I always assumed that the idea was that Russian speakers
would have trouble figuring out which English words get
the unfamiliar "w" sound and which get the normal "v",
and essentially overcompensate.
Just as modern English speakers, whose usual tongue has
"you" but not "thou", "the" but not "ye", have trouble figuring
out which sentences might call for obsolete "thou", "ye",
or "-est", and overcompensate when trying to speak period English.
Second, and even more important, given the virtually unlimited capacity of an online encyclopedia, it is particularly distressing that the community has gotten very stingy in judging what people or topics merit articles. What harm is there in maintaining a very liberal policy on what information is not too insignificant to get an article? Relatedly, typically the best quick, online source for looking up information on a topic I'm very curious about is Wikipedia, and the fact that it is an encyclopedia needn't mean that in depth treatment of topics should be discouraged. Yet many articles on scholarly topics seem to go out of there way not to go in depth, not because of contributors' unwillingness to be thorough, but because wikipedia seems to have something against long articles. I'd be very appreciative if you'd discuss these related issues of topic qualification and article length.
This is one of my principle objections to wikipedia. I understand the need to respect the privacy of individuals etc, but when that concern is not present, what is the reason for not including things? There are active movements to eliminate 'fancruft', usually arguing that only a fan would care, and therefor it is not worthy of inclusion. Interestingly, this rule rarely applies to really popular subjects, only the fringes where there are limited community members who are personally fans. If people think fitting the mold of the classical encyclopedia is important, there should be a flag that people can check for whether they want to see encyclopedic information, or all information.
My other big problem with Wikipedia is that there are transparency holes. Wikipedia should be applauded for its generally transparent governence, but it doesn't like to admit that the transparency is thrown out the window when there is even a slight threat to the wikipedia itself. Personally, I lost my love for wikipedia over the AACS encryption key controversy. Wikipedia admins took a very agressive approach to suppressing the key after it was released, and did so without transperecny (atleast intitially). Acounts were banned, edits where hidden, and no one was willing to admit openly what the admins were doing. If wikipedia really beleives in transparency, it should maintain it even if there are legal risks, and not cave at the first sign of danger.
The only person ever to try fighting this when it happened was me. Yes, really. This incident was the last straw that really soured me on Wikipedia. And no, Jacob is not a pseudonym for me.
Removal of spoiler warnings was done by a mass of subtle abuses of the system, which included:
-- Removing spoiler warnings using an automated tool which was not supposed to be used for anything controversial, but where not stopping people from using the tool ended up as a single point of failure.
-- The fact that it's much easier to remove something that you can search for than to put it in. Deletion is much easier than addition. Probably the biggest one--a few people removed tens of thousands of them. It's impossible to put them back.
-- Deleting the spoiler warnings with misleading comments implying that it's settled policy (and then using the fact that the spoiler warnings weren't put back to justify the policy).
-- Removal of spoiler warnings in stages. First changing the spoiler warning template to be useless (eradicating the words "spoiler" and "warning". Yes, really.) Not many people object to this because it doesn't directly affect any articles except to make the spoiler warnings look silly. Then removing the template because it's useless (at which point the wording is a fait accompli and it can't easily be changed back).
-- Abusing the idea that if there's no consensus you keep the status quo. If you manage to sneak through something controversial despite there being no consensus for your change, now everyone's stuck--there was no consensus to change it, but there's no consensus to change it back, either.
-- The fact that you can change articles by changing policy pages first to require changes to the articles. At the time when you're changing the policy pages, the people who are interested in the articles don't even hear that anything's going on. Then once you changed the policy page, you can come to the article and say "Too bad, we're making this change and there's nothing you can do about it. You should have participated when we were changing the policy page; it's too late now".
-- The general fact that contesting the deletion of spoiler warnings means navigating a bureaucratic maze of figuring out where the right place to object is (let's see, do you need to do the RFA or the mediation first?)
-- Also, a lot of specious arguments that kept getting repeated loudly. One person claimed that spoiler warnings are banned as "original research" on the grounds that no source exists which says that something is a spoiler. (This person later supported the idea of having quality warnings about articles; needless to say, no source exists which says that a Wikipedia article needs cleanup or quality control.) Then there was the argument that putting spoiler warnings on a plot section is "redundant" because a reader can figure out that a plot section contains spoilers. Of course, all forms of human communication contain redundancy; this argument would suggest that a clock face should never contain more than one number because putting in numbers for all twelve hours gives the user 11 numbers that are of no use whatsoever.
For matters of controversy, it's useless. The page reflects the last group who wanted to register their opinion, or on the topics that have been locked up, it reflects the group that's been placed in charge. Wikipedia doesn't have a good filter for ideological editing - either it's a battleground between multiple forces or a quasi-tyranny of whoever got put in charge. Theoretically you could put together "controversy" pages with a summary of both sides' arguments, but in practice most people don't have the time and the main article is going to get trashed by partisans anyway.
I don't know that Wikipedia can fix that, honestly. I mean, it's difficult to rely on volunteer staff and then complain that they're not showing enough professionalism, right? It might be easier to just mentally file controversial topics as "don't search them on Wikipedia" and live with that.
I also see why Wikipedia is careful to limit the amount of new entries, especially details of particular works of fiction ("fan stuff"). The problem is disambiguation. If I search for "signum", the result I'm looking for is almost certainly related to the mathematical notation, not the character from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. People who want to set up super-detailed wikis for stuff like that are free to (and in fact there's a lot of them out there, many of them even useful.)
I don't know what the ideal solution is with respect to sourcing information. Of course, there's the problem of verifiable-but-wrong. It also discourages subject experts from contributing - "I know this is wrong, but even though I've got a PhD in the subject, I've got to point to an online article saying the same thing to get them to fix it? Bugger that!" At the same time, what are you gonna do? Expert authentication is tough even in real life, with actual matters of controversy and money at stake. Nobody's going to run a background check on you so that you can edit articles about Bourbon monarchs without a hassle.
I look forward to reading Mr. Maretsky's posts!
I don't know if others have noticed this, and if this is the case, perhaps Mr. Maretsky can address it, but I've found that the articles dealing with legal issues are among the poorest-written, least comprehensive, and most error-filled articles on Wikipedia. Now, I can hear the responses already, but I don't think they apply:
(1) "Legal issues are often controversial, and all of Wikipedia's controversial articles are bad." True to an extent, but only a fraction of legal issues are particularly controversial. I expect a big fight over the Roe v. Wade article. But there are plenty of totally boring, non-controversial topics within the law (e.g., mechanic's liens or bankruptcy cram down) that suffer from the same problem.
(2) "You have advanced knowledge within the legal field, so your knowledge is going to exceed the content of the article, and you'll be able to nitpick and find flaws that the unlearned would not notice." Again, true, but the law is not the only area where I have specialized knowledge and experience. Before I was a lawyer I was a research chemist, and the chemistry articles are fine. The articles related to my hobbies are fine, too. It's just the legal articles that are terrible.
One of my pet peeve is when someone complains about Wikipedia being used as a source for papers.
I still remember my surprise, sometime in high school, when I was told that citing an encyclopedia in a term paper was bad form. My parents had purchased an encyclopedia years earlier, and we had classes teaching us how to look up material in an encyclopedia - I came to think of the encyclopedia as the ultimate in knowledge.
My teacher set me straight. An encyclopedia is an acceptable, even desirable tool for an elementary or middle school student. But at some point, one needs to learn that reading an encyclopedia isn't research. An encyclopedia, almost by definition, is a secondary source. By the time of high school and college, it is time to move on to primary sources, and for some, to move on to original research. It was an eye-opening moment.
So while I agree that Wikipedia is not an acceptable cite for a technical paper, I object to those who single out Wikipedia as not acceptable, rather than explaining that Wikipedia, just like Encyclopedia Britannica, is a secondary source, and a good technical paper should be citing primary sources.
This doesn't means a good student will ignore Wikipedia - they can use it where it is strong - read the relevant articles to get a decent summary of the subject (except for politically controversial subjects) and review the citations. Keep in mind that the citations are biased toward online sources, so make sure to load up on printed material not easily available online.
I tell students to not believe any single source w/o doing background work first. Even Encyclopedia Britannica has errors. I make it a habit at least once a week to include some easily provable falsehood in my classroom discussions. As the semester progresses, more students catch them, and they become much more vocal when they do.
I believe that Wikipedia -- and in particular it's foibles -- is itself a wonderful illustration of why we have to be more informed consumers of information.
I used to think that as well, until my son told me about how his college buddies would change such items to win bragging rights bets. Ugh! You probably never knew that Beethoven was temporarily the leader of Prussia in 1844.
And it seems to, as noted above, impose conformity on a particular world-view. The discussion page on deleting the anti-earth day page was very illustrative of this - quite clearly, some administrators were not going to consider that significant unless it was the front page of the NYT.
QFT
QFT
Thus, Wikipedia isn't an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit." It's an encyclopedia "controlled by far left ideologues who require that articles conform to a specific worldview."
QFT
Surely it's easy to see why Wikipedia does this. An encyclopedia anyone can edits has enough problem with spam, even without the google-bumping incentives. Most blog comments are nofollow for precisely this reason. I'm mystified by the concept that using "nofollow" is somehow greedy, or that being a "Blackhole of link energy" is a damning criticism. Wikipedia has certain problems, and by changing the incentives with nofollow, we ameliorate those problems.
Fellow called Gregory Kohs (who you might be) criticizes Jimbo Wales' for-profit side project Wikia because it allegedly leaches off the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. This is a good example of it.
Wikia, as you apparently know, enjoys some following links from Wikipedia. Google juice to the whole net has been turned off, no matter how reputable the site, but "interwiki links" to for-profit Wikia are allowed. For example, see the Wookieepedia articles (Order D6-66, ect.) linked from Wikipedia. That strikes me as unjustified.
See also techcrunch 2007.
That said we allow Wikipedia as a source of demographic and technical facts. BUT, we usually want them to use a refereed source if possible as backup to that and in general want a couple of cites.
This is based, in part, on the idea of having verifiable sources from generally recognized domain experts that refereed sources tend to be more accurate and reliable. That is not to say that mistakes are not made or that a journal may not have a particular slant but the larger community exerts some policing of the process to limit this.
I have now come to the conclusion that we are-- on the whole-- worse off with Wikipedia than without it. False information, or incomplete information is worse than no information. For example Wikipedia is one of the worst sources you can come to on global warming. Look at the section on cloud physics-- it's tiny with no clue that this is the Achilles heel of the general circulation models. Any attempt to correct this deficiency won't last long. I would rather people went out on the net and did their own research than rely on Wikipedia.
I certainly hope your #2 is not really being raised by anyone in defense: any decent simplification should be recognizable as still being generally true, or a good approximation, or something like that. Something that an expert will immediately identify as "error-filled" should not qualify as a decent abstract.
2. I never cite it in political discussions. Politics has gotten so polarized today that one of my interlocutors believes that the New York Times, CNN, and Wikipedia are biased to the right! So I have to really dig for facts.
3. On that topic, many Wiki entries are copies of info available elsewhere on the internet. As to who came first, I can't tell--it is, to me, equally likely that someone else copies Wiki than that Wiki copies them. (I am not a Wiki editor or anything so maybe those folks could tell). It is depressing to search a topic and then find four or five identical entries on four or five different internet sites, down to the typos.
4. If I were a student, I would not cite it in a paper nor (of course) simply copy what's there into my paper as if I had written it. If I were still a teacher, I'd (a) tell my students not to cite it, but that they could get started there but that they'd better not stop there or plagiarize it or any other source, and (b) look at the Wiki entry before grading papers and then fail any student who copied the entry plus invoke any other systemic remedies for plagiarism.
As I've noted before, if you hang around this blog long enough, you will learn that some commentors here believe the following groups in the U.S. are at least liberal and often "leftist," as a whole: the media, lawyers (including big law firms), the entertainment industry, unionized workers, blacks, hispanics, women, big businesses (with their PC affirmative action programs), Jews, poor people, rich people, pretty much anyone involved in education as a profession, and various other groups, including, of course teh gays. Of course, you can get to a majority of Americans quickly here, without even having to count all these groups, but somehow, it's all them who are out of step with the real America.
And then there's the other 99% of it. Good grief, people, its fine to turn into your parents, but did you have to turn into your crotchety old uncle?
Please soldier through. I exceedingly curious for more tales of your Wiki experience.
Also, I just checked and I'm not Gregory Kohs, whoever that is.
Making up what you claim conservatives believe again, I see.
We don't for a second believe that "...the American political mainstream is "far left"...", that is actually what the left has been trying to get us to accept for several years now. We still think this is a center-right country. We do however think that all the players mentioned by my Obamamania IV ladder match opponent below are definitely either "far left" or have been bought off by the far left (with the exception of big businesses who often have these PC programs simply out of fear of far left retribution).
And if you hang out here, you might also come to believe that conservative = Nazi from the commenters on the left.
And how exactly you get to a majority by adding up those groups is beyond me. Obama got 53% of the vote when all those groups helped totally obfuscate who he was, combined with an unpopular president (whose low ratings were heavily influenced by the incessant pounding he took for 8 years from those same groups), and the conveniently timed economic collapse from a process largely set in motion and pushed heavily by "far-leftists", that home ownership should be available to everyone regardless of the ability to like, actually, you know, pay for it or something. That caused several million moderate independents to vote against the party in power. If those few million vote the other way, Obama does not win.
Now of course, they're claiming some kind of supermajority massive huge mandate, that the American people knowingly wanted them to radically transform the American economy.
I don't know what liberals tell you, but here's what conservative Richard Posner recently said (cut and pasted from www.fivethirtyeight.com):
My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.
By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.
I realize that 538 is unapologetically Democratic. I wouldn't call it leftist, but the point is that it's a quote from Richard Posner, who is usually thought of as being on the conservative side of things. So unless you think 538 is making that quote up -- and that would be quite out of character -- I don't see what point you're making.
I don't mean to hijack this thread away from an interesting discussion of Wikipedia, by the way. Just a response to the "it's all a LEFTIST CONSPIRACY folks."
The next line (emphasis added)
And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression.
I wonder what Posner calls what happened between November 1929 and January 1, 1940.
My information here comes from a client who does search engine optimization (i.e. massages web pages to get higher placements). One of his points is that Google, in particular, is a rapidly moving target. What is true one week, may not be the next. So, this may already be well out of date.
If you read enough conservative writings, you can always find stuff like this - especially after a devastating electoral loss.
It does not, however make it true just because a conservative wrote it.
Several months ago, I reconnected with Mike Godwin, after a couple of years of not communicating with him. He is now GC for the Wikipedia Foundation. Finding that out, I told him of my love/hate relationship with Wikipedia. His response was that it is a great initial or secondary source, but you need to use it for just that, and not rely on it as a primary source. Instead, you can use it as a jumping off place for more research. Except for the most egregious political cleansing of entries, I think that he is exactly right.
Obviously. It's just that I was responding to a quote dismissing what "all the liberals" say, so I had to find a non-liberal source.
As for Bruce Hayden's comments, Google bases most of what it does on links. People sell links on their sites for that specific reason. By that I mean real links, not Javascript-based ads or similar. So, if I had thousands of other pages linking to one of my pages using a certain phrase, there's an excellent chance that my page would appear near the top for that phrase.
As for WP, some suspect that the search engines hand-edit the results so it appears at or near the top, as Google does with Youtube. However, a good part of that placement is no doubt due to links, and if WP suddenly got a lot fewer links they might fall or at least their placement would be even more suspect.
Google occasionally runs a click-through script, and I imagine that plays a role in placement although I don't know exactly how they use it. They might have Javascript that records what you click through even without the clickthrough script, so when I want to visit WP through a search I always copy and paste the link.
That's just great. The problem is that millions of people are using it as their primary source and may be basing voting decisions and the like on it. When you actually look at its impact on millions of people, you'll see that WP is as pernicious as the MSM.
On the topic of Wikipedia, I think it may serve as a fine starting point for casual research; but, I cannot imagine why anyone would place serious reliance on it as a source given its obvious shortcomings (e.g., "Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote").
But that doesn't mean I hate wikipedia. I think it is a truly fantastic resource and an even better idea. The argument that WP is bad because people misuse it or use it unwisely strikes me as pathetic. Does it apply to guns, for example? What about money? What about voting full stop?
In short, anything can be used badly or unwisely, it is hardly an argument against the thing in question. I would rather focus on improving WP, most of all (imho) by making it very hard to delete a page.
One way to do this would be to require at least 10 admins voting for deletion and greater than 10-1 admins in favour before the page goes down, and in the interim just retaining the 'flagged for deletion' banner. That would prevent the most egregious abuses and (it seems to me) be truer to WP's primary goal of disseminating information freely and widely.
I have restricted my editing in the last few years to articles about places where I live or have lived and of which I have first-hand knowledge, and articles about obscure plant taxa. Even these have ceased to be fun to edit, and I wonder at what rate editor turnover is occuring on wikipedia--i.e. the rate at which editors who would like to ensure the accuracy of pages about which they have genuine knowledge are being replaced by editors with superficial knowledge who enjoy the competitive nature of edit wars more than the search for accuracy. I once spent the better part of two months engaged in a back-and-forth over the existence of a tree growing outside my office, but which was unknown in the states and belonged to a genus that an uninformed writer had once claimed was monotypic. That writer's article was posted on the web, but the truth was only to be found in actual libraries. Trying to convince an editor with no special knowledge and only a link to an outdated article posted online by the New York Botanical Garden not because of its accuracy but because, in the the NYBG's own admission, it had very nice watercolors with it, that a tree I could walk outside and touch did not in fact exist wore me out. I haven't edited much since. I find myself doubting the accuracy of even technical articles these days, since I can visit any two articles about native North American trees and find meaningful inaccuracies on at least one them, and if I correct them, they'll just get reverted unless I have a web article to back me up. It's not worth it any more.
"I agree with your observation, but not your characterization of those who run the site. It is the open nature of WP that allows the lefties to dominate - because they are more determined (as in, young and lots of time avail) and because the sourcing criteria inherently favor the left.
However, those who created and run WP seem to really be trying to make it unbiased - they just have an impossible task."
Which makes them not unlike just about every other institution liberals (as opposed to the left) have created these last 200 years. Perhaps a better approach than endless attacks on the creators or their institutions would be a concerted effort to combat the dominators themselves, in alliance with the creators, rather than antagonism against them or endless appeals to a standard of fairness that is in fact impossible to achieve.
Holy Fuzzy Math Batman!
Let's see, Prop 8 passed with 52.24% of the vote in Kalifornia. Leftists constantly tout Prop 8 as "barely passing" or "narrow" as to its margin of victory.
Obama was elected with 52.87% of the popular vote. Yet Leftists categorize his victory as "solid" or in same cases a "landslide" or "mandate."
What a difference .63% makes.
This strikes me as prima facie false. What encylopaedia 'organised around the views of a single editor-in-chief' is actually considered more biased than WP? Names? I'm willing to consider reputable speciality encylopedia as well.
If there is any controversy in the subject material, it is LESS THAN WORTHLESS.
There was a confidential opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel to reagan on this. The issue was resurrected again during the Clinton administration. It is referenced at the Heritage site on their Cosntitution section and in the NYTimes (but I cannot link the NYT now, will try to send later).
www.heritage.org/Research/LegalIssues/wm2149.cfm
(Hello from your first job in law, btw.)
Let's take the articles for the last 2 Congressmen from Florida's 16th district (Tim Mahoney and Tom Rooney). Both articles are rather bare-bones.
The Mahoney article contains grossly obsolete statements, such as:
Has no one who read that article in the last half year noticed that sentence? I had not read the article at all until today.
The Rooney article says this about his election:
In addition to the illiteracy evident in the last sentence and the fanboy quotation in the prior sentence (I wouldn't be surprised if Joe Zarcone or someone he knows well wrote it.), there is no mention whatsoever that his victory had anything to do with a sex scandal involving his opponent - a scandal important enough to cause the major local newspaper to change its endorsement.
That was put in on May 8 by someone with no other contribution history to Wikipedia. This is an article about a member of the House of Representatives. 4 days is more than enough time for someone to have noticed the addition of junk to it. I hadn't read the article previously.
I decided to also look at the article for the newly chosen Minority Leader of the CA State Assembly, Sam Blakeslee.
His article is basically a summary of the biography on his legislative website. He's in his third term in the legislature, so people have had time to come up with more. Never fear; the WikiProject California is on the case. Of course, they have rated this as low importance. I'm not really sure how a state legislator ends up being low importance, but that's how it goes.
If you look at the chart of members of the California State Assembly, there's one who doesn't have any page at all! If you then go to the alphabetical list, 11 members aren't on it!
If you then go to the California State Senate page, you find that whoever has edited it can't even keep straight the number of members of each party in the legislature (different portions of the page say 14 and 15 Republicans). The good news is that they do have pages on all 39 current members (there's one vacancy with a special election pending).
I spent a little more time looking at CA current and former state legislators' pages.
The Nell Soto page (former St. Assemblywoman and St. Senator, who died this year) was the second one I went to - I know a bit about her because a friend of mine ran against her several years ago. It contains a real howler. In May of last year, somebody with the IP address 76.166.244.235, who has never contributed to any page other than that one, changed this:
to this:
This is grossly false. Per diem is for the legislator's personal expenses, not for staff or office expenses. Those come out of a separate office budget each legislator is given. This falsehood has been there for just under a year, without being edited. It is "sourced" with a link to a Sacramento Bee story that is now unavailable.
This is a poor record for Wikipedia on fairly significant public figures - and with one exception, it's not even ideological.
Nick
I wholeheartedly agree. Wikipedia is OK on non-controversial topics but really sucks royally on controversial topics. On controversial topics, Wickedpedia is not even a good source of references because politically incorrect references are routinely purged.
I made a suggestion for handling controversial entries: When an item is disputed, simply enter a brief description of the item, a statement that the item is disputed, and links to external websites or separate Wikipedia discussion pages where the disputed item is discussed or debated. There would be no Wikipedia endorsement of the disputed item and Wikipedia article pages would not be cluttered up with long discussions of controversial items. THIS SIMPLE, SENSIBLE SUGGESTION WAS IGNORED. Wickedpedia's preferred methods for handling disputes are censorship and endless edit wars. Wickedpedia also has a crazy set of rules that the control-freak Wickedpedia administrators exploit to "lawyer you to death" if you try to make a politically incorrect entry. One of Wickedpedia's problems is that it tries to look like a printed encyclopedia and fails to take advantage of the Internet's capability of instantly linking to external sources where disputed items can be discussed and debated.
Wickedpedia has reached the point of no return -- all the decent people have left the organization in disgust and all that is left is a bunch of crazies.
I am glad to see that there are so many other commenters here who share my negative opinion of Wikipedia.
My blog has three post-label groups of articles that attack Wikipedia [1] [2] [3]
Your link #3 has a complaint that Wikipedia wouldn't list the creationist "Of Pandas and People" as a banned book.
The book was not allowed to be used to teach science in a classroom. That's no more a "banned book" than saying that teachers can't use Harry Potter to teach science means that Harry Potter is a banned book.
The book was not in a classroom -- it was in the school library and was optional reading. The book's mere mention in a classroom was banned by a federal judge. The book was banned. It doesn't matter why the book was banned, the fact is that it was banned. B-A-N-N-E-D.
That's a straw man argument because teachers would never try to use Harry Potter books to teach science -- Darwinists are very fond of making straw man arguments. If teachers tried to use Harry Potter books to teach science and such use was formally banned, then yes, the Harry Potter books would be banned books. And it is impossible to make an objective determination of whether or not a book is a banned book if subjective factors -- such as how legitimate a book is as a science textbook -- are allowed to enter into the determination.
Anyway, there was a big dispute over whether Pandas should be listed as a banned book by Wikipedia. I proposed that the book be listed along with a statement that the listing was disputed and links to external websites where the dispute was discussed or debated. In Wikispeak, that approach would have been the NPOV (neutral point of view) approach. All sides would have been presented, there would have been no Wikipedia endorsement of the listing, and the article would not have been cluttered up with discussions or debates of the dispute. No soap -- the Wickedpedians rejected the proposal. The Wickedpedians completely rewrote the whole banned-books article just to avoid listing Pandas, showing that they really believed that Pandas qualified as a banned book under the original criteria.
Here is the Wikipedia debate -- in which I participated -- over whether to include Pandas in the Wikipedia list of banned books. This debate is a classic example of the "lawyering to death" that I spoke of -- I used logical arguments whereas a control-freak Wickedpedian administrator named Kim van der Linde kept demanding over and over again, like a broken phonograph record, that I provide a "reliable non-partisan source" that says that Pandas is a banned book.
A Darwinist commenter strikes out again.
It is true that Wikipedia has a "no original research" rule, which says that you can't decide that something is a banned book yourself; you need a source which calls it a banned book. On the other hand, the original research rule is is easily abused. It should not be used on straightforward logical deductions. The definition of a banned book is so straightforward that insisting that someone else apply the definition first is like insisting that a source which says someone was born in Detroit, Michigan is not good to indicate that they were born in the USA.
On the other hand, common sense says that a book which isn't allowed to be taught because it's not accurate shouldn't count as a banned book.
It looks like what happened is that people recognized that the book isn't a banned book simply by common sense. Like many Wikipedians, they refused to apply common sense to editing Wikipedia and instead tried to stretch the rules to give them an excuse. So you're right, but you're also wrong--their stated excuse for not listing the book is flimsy, but the book still doesn't belong. Rewriting the article so that the book doesn't count is actually a pretty good solution--obviously books which aren't accurate shouldn't count; if the article is phrased so as to allow for them, the article should be fixed.
I had been taking a course some years ago on Criminality, and during a school break, was trying to get a head start on a paper at the local library which I had not been to before. I needed some DOJ statistics, specifically on murder, and so I decided to look it up on Wikipedia. After the couple of click-throughs that always occur when I browse, I was trying to find "rape statistics" - and of course, the politically correct administrators had blocked all mention of them, because they probably are very discomfiting to the liberal crusaders who still insist you can be locked up just for being Black. The statistics on interracial rape particularly, since there are more than 30,000 black-on-white offenses and less than 10 white-on-black offenses committed in a single year.
I just rechecked the page a minute ago, and one can note that this has been marked "controversial" since 2007, and yet the tag still remains there even now, roughly mid-2009. The article is chock full of references to the "unreliability" of DOJ statistics &"under-reporting" of male-on-male rape in prison - I doubt very much that any of those statistics exist, but if they do, by all means write them up for all to see! Hilariously enough, when I checked the discussion page, a feminist administrator was one of those primarily responsible for suppression of rape statistics!
The "no original research rule" is a perfect example of a stupid, arbitrary Wikirule. This rule says,
In other words, if one reliable non-partisan source says that bears live in the woods and another such source says that bears shit, concluding that bears shit in the woods is "original research," which is not allowed on Wikipedia.
You still don't get it. The question of a book's accuracy can be subjective, and -- as I said -- introducing subjective issues prevents an objective determination of whether or not a book should be considered to be a banned book.
My main point is that there was a significant dispute over whether the book should be listed, and I proposed a simple, sensible solution for resolving that dispute: list the book, state that the listing is disputed, and provide links to external websites where the dispute is discussed or debated. Wickedpedia's preferred ways of handling disputes are censorship and edit wars.
No, it is not good solution, for reasons stated in the Wikipedia discussion.
The arbitrary, dogmatic, tyrannical Wickedpedia administrators are impossible to deal with. On the global warming issue, a journalist said,
Saying that Wikipedia sucks is a gross understatement.
Of course the "no original research" rule means that wikipedia should theoretically give equal weight to things like astrology, intelligent design, homeopathy, and other quackary since many people believe them and there are published sources out there that claim there are true. I'm not sure that that lots of people forming a consensus is a good way to find the truth...
Bolie, I came here to bash Wikipedia, not to argue about whether or not Of Pandas and People should be listed as a "banned book." I didn't even raise the Pandas issue here -- someone else did.
By not following my proposal of listing the book along with a statement that the listing is disputed and links to external websites where the dispute is discussed or debated, Wikipedia violated its own rule of covering all viewpoints held by "significant" groups, including significant minorities (BTW, I am not conceding that only a minority thinks that Pandas should be listed). The Wikipedia rules say,
If a viewpoint is held by a significant minority, then it should be easy to name prominent adherents; [link]
"Prominent adherents" of listing the book as a banned book are the Discovery Institute and William Dembski.
That is not what the "no original research" rule says.
As for the smaller wikis, I'd rather not start. I know one ethnic group on Wikipedia where all of them insist on using "martyr" and "freedom fighter" on all people of their own race. Not hard to imagine what happens on smaller mono-ethnic wikis where these guys can just post their racial supremacist nonsense in complete bliss
There's more 200 times more inconsistency on WP than there is by the most corrupt/hopeless sports umpires out there
You're missing my point. The only reason needed to keep the book out of the list is common sense. It's just that Wikipedians don't like to use common sense, so instead they abused the rules. The abuse of the rules was irrelevant, since the book doesn't belong in the list even without an abuse of the rules.
Ken Arromdee moans,
The abuse of the rules was irrelevant
What do you mean, "the abuse of the rules was irrelevant"? On Wikipedia, the rules are supposed to be everything! The rules are supposed to be sacrosanct! These rules are used to "lawyer to death" anyone who tries to make a politically incorrect entry! And I described how the rules were abused in the case of Pandas: The rules say that Wikipedia is to present all viewpoints held by "significant" groups, a group is "significant" if it has "prominent adherents," and the viewpoint that Pandas should be listed as a banned book had prominent adherents that I named, the Discovery Institute and William Dembski. And as I said, I did not ask that Pandas be listed as an undisputed entry.
Lawrence Solomon, the journalist I quoted previously, wrote in the National Review,
Again, here are links to my blog's three post-label groups of articles about Wikipedia -- [1] [2] [3]
The abuse of the rules was irrelevant because the book doesn't belong in the list even without abusing the rules.
Besides, they finally kept the book off the list by rewriting the article so that the book isn't eligible, which does not abuse any rules and which is what they should have done in the first place.
You said that already. This thread is supposed to be about Wikipedia and you are still trying to hijack it to argue about Of Pandas and People.
Even if the book doesn't belong in the list, that does not excuse abusing the rules. The rules say that Wikipedia should cover the viewpoints of all "significant" groups -- I went through that already.
The rules are still abused by the new article because a "significant" group believes that the book belongs in any general list of "banned books." Wikipedia could have followed my simple suggestion of listing the book along with a statement that the listing is disputed and links to external websites where the dispute is discussed or debated. I challenge you to tell me what is wrong with that suggestion. I have to go over these same points over and over again because you just keep ignoring them.
Also, a lot of important information was lost when the article was rewritten and rewriting it took a lot of unnecessary work.
Wickedpedia sucks and you look very foolish bending over backwards trying to defend it.
I wanted to share some of my experiences with Wikipedia here, but weariness overcomes me of late when I turn to that subject, so I'll just post a link to a vein, er, thread that I opened for that purpose over at The Wikipedia Review, whose relative quiet I hope will make it easier for me to gather my thoughts.
Cf. First Thoughts and Last Laughs on Wikipedia
Be There RB^2,
Jon Awbrey
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