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User:Hillman/Media commentary on Wikipedia

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In support of the arguments developed on my Wikipedia user page and elsewhere in my Wikipedia user space, I have collected here links (and some quotations) to some commentary on Wikipedia which I have come across outside Wikipedia. The links are listed by author (with the most astute critics listed earlier) and then by chronological order.

The first section is my attempt to pull out some common threads with my own perceptions concerning the woes of Wikipedia.

Summary

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After some struggle, I believe one can extract from the following links and from my own essays a number of common conclusions:

  1. A stunningly naive cornerstone of the Wiki Faith states that "wiki pages will be naturally attracted to a state of perfection"; this conviction has proven to be utterly contrafactual, but continues to be regularly repeated by people who ought to know better,
  2. This overlooks not only Wikipedia's absurdly cumbersome procedures for dealing with vandalism, hoaxes, POV-pushing, guerrilla marketing, and other malicious edits, but also an important phenomenon which I call edit creep: over time, an article will tend to degraded by edits by inexperienced or careless writers who are unaccustomed to thinking about considerations of
    • organization,
    • balance (the relative weight given to different subtopics),
    • style,
    • consistentency of paragraph structure, verb tense, spelling, notation and terminology,
  3. Wikipedia policies and other "official" statements completely fail to stress some essential points:
    • every encyclopedia exists to serve its readers,
    • the editors serve the readers not by merely compiling information, but by evaluating, screening, sorting, organizing, and summarizing information in a concise and coherent fashion,
  4. Wikipedia's notorious instability (an excellent article as of this minute may be vandalized or munged by a well-meaning incompetent in the next few minutes) is distracting, disorienting, and does not serve the reader well,
  5. Wikipedia's unstructured collaborative writing process tends to suppress many elements of good writing, such as character, style, wit, and even values,
  6. As such, Wikipedia actually tends to promote a global trend toward erasing individual expression; this is highly inimical toward the freedom of expression that many Americans cherish,
  7. Wikipedia appears to ignore not only the needs of its own readers but also appears hostile toward its most expert contributors, an attitude which is particularly self-defeating when it comes to highly technical topics in science and mathematics,
  8. Wikipedia's encouragement of anonymous editing and tolerance of sockpuppetry discourages contributors from taking intellectual responsibility for their contributions, or even for assuming any individual responsibility whatever for their behavior at this website, with predictable results: rampant
  9. Wikipedia and Google are excellent at compiling information but absolutely dreadful at evaluating information; they render the finding of information so easy that the time consuming and intellectually far more demanding task of evaluating what one has found increasingly seems too onerous to be worth the trouble,
  10. By failing so badly at the filtering and evaluation of information, Wikipedia is failing miserably in its primary mission as an encyclopedia,
  11. Far from getting good information to the people, paradoxically enough, the ultimate effect of Wikipedia may actually be to impede the filtering/evaluation of raw information by students, teachers, reference librarians, journalists, other information brokers, policy makers, and even by academics--- which would be an extremely dangerous development, highly inimical to the best interests of a free society,
  12. By failing to state an unambiguous and self-consistent mission for Wikipedia, and to promulgate effective policies which further that mission, the Wikipedia leadership has failed to lead.

Larry Sanger

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Larry Sanger is the father of Wikipedia but now an apostate who has departed from Wikipedia and has joined Digital Universe, a new rival which aims to address some of the problems discussed here and elsewhere in my user pages.

As such, he is one of the most knowledgeable critics of Wikipedia from both an internal and an external perspective.

(The other principals of Digital Universe are Joe Firmage and Bernard Haisch, a highly ironical fact which raises grave doubts in my mind about whether the leadership of Digital Universe is even more unsuited to their role than Jimmy Wales is, as I argue, unsuited to lead the Wikipedia. I argue elsewhere that Sanger should be lured back to head a new and improved Wikipedia, although I despair that this might ever happen.)

The epistemology of Wikipedia

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In this memorandum, Sanger challenges a core precept of the Wiki Faith: the notion that a wiki article will be naturally attracted to perfection. He asks: "Is there anything about the Wikipedia process by itself, unaided by an approval process, that tends to the overall improvement of the reliability of the articles?"

Wikipedia and why it matters

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This is the text of a talk delivered to the Stanford University Computer Systems Laboratory EE380 Colloquium, on January 16, 2002.

Wikipedia is an excellent example of a new kind of website: a radically collaborative, truly open website, that actually produces content that the general public might want to read...The Wikipedia project is self-consciously an encyclopedia--rather than a dictionary, discussion forum, web portal, etc.--or even just a typical wiki... there is a bit of a tension between the facts that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia project and that it is a wiki. When people arrive at the website and see that they can edit any page, and that there is little central oversight, it is immediately evident that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia only because we decided to make it one. The website, when we first set it up, was just a blank slate. It required myself and some other people to declare, "We're making an encyclopedia here on this wiki"--we had to make that declaration repeatedly in order for people to know that indeed, we wanted to make an encyclopedia. We could have instead made a poetry forum, a dictionary, or a chat area. But we didn't want to. We wanted it to become an encyclopedia, and that is what it has become...How can we respect the credibility of a project to which any anonymous user can drop any string of characters onto a Wikipedia page?...The short answer... is that we are constantly editing each others' work via the same process that makes easy article creation possible in the first place--and this turns out to be a reasonably powerful, though far from perfect, review process in itself.

— Larry Sanger, January 2002

(To judge from his later writings, Sanger seems to have since largely abandoned these high hopes for Wikipedia.)

A particularly interesting passage describes a dangerous feedback loop:

We believe that we are, happily, in a positive feedback loop with Google, as follows. We write a thousand articles; Google spiders them and sends some traffic to those pages. Some small percentage of that traffic becomes Wikipedia contributors, increasing our contributor base. The enlarged contributor base then writes another two thousand articles, which Google dutifully spiders, and then we receive an even larger influx of traffic. All the while, no doubt in part due to links to our articles from Google, an increasing number of other websites link to Wikipedia, increasing the standing of Wikipedia pages in Google results.

— Larry Sanger, January 2002

The reason why such feedback is so insiduous is because this phenomenon has been explicitly recognized (see below) by cranks and guerrilla marketeers as forming the basis of a method for manipulating Google to sell your product (intellectual or commercial, metaphorically or literally).

Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism

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Wikipedia is better described as one of those sources regarded as unreliable which people read anyway...The root problem: anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise...As a community, Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, ... it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated)... One thing that Wikipedia could do now, although I doubt that it is possible in the current atmosphere and with the current management, is to adopt an official policy of respect of and deference to expertise. Wikipedia's "key policies" have not changed since I was associated with the project; but if a policy of respect of and deference to expertise were adopted at that level, and if it were enforced somehow, perhaps the project would solve the problems described above. But don't hold your breath. Unless there is the equivalent of a revolution in the ranks of Wikipedia, the project will not adopt this sort of policy and make it a "key policy"; or if it does, the policy will probably be not be enforced. I certainly do not expect Jimmy Wales to change his mind. I have known him since 1994 and he is a smart and thoughtful guy; I am sure he has thought through his support of radical openness and his (what I call) anti-elitism. I doubt he will change his mind about these things. And unless he does change his mind, the project itself will probably not change.

— Larry Sanger

Robert McHenry

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Robert McHenry is one of Wikipedia's most astute "external" critics. He was Editor-in-Chief of Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1992 to 1997 and has written several essays which explore various internal contradictions and challenge certain dogmas cherished by the wikifaithful. McHenry often writes for Tech Central Station Daily. He is the author of several books, including the following, which explores a highly pertinant question: why hasn't the dawning of the information age made the average human any better informed than he was before the advent of Google and Wikipedia?:

  • McHenry, Robert (2004). How to Know. Booklocker. ISBN 1591135230.

McHenry maintains a website called How to Know, where he explains that McHenry's law states:

85% of human behavior amounts to yelling out "Hey, look at me!"

— Robert McHenry

(Hmm... I think I'd reverse these percentages: 85% percent of human behavior consists of whispering "Hey, just look at that jerk!" and the other 15% consists of yelling "Hey, look at me!", and any remaining points are devoted to struggling with simple arithmetic. But I digress...)

The Faith-Based Encyclopedia

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In this famous essay, McHenry

  • criticizes the idea that "wiki pages will be naturally attracted to a state of perfection",
  • decries Wikipedia's systemic disregard for the readers it presumably exists to serve,
  • gives the earliest description I have seen of edit creep,
  • points out that Wikipedia is good at compiling information, but terrible at evaluating it; yet, as he says, the latter task should be the primary function of the editorial team preparing any encyclopedia.

To put the Wikipedia method in its simplest terms: 1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published. 2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified. Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step: 3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy...The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.

— Robert McHenry
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This is McHenry's response to the Siegenthaler defamation scandal.

The Scribe's Problem Child

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My criticisms of Wikipedia have been chiefly of the process, which is too open and unguided to produce reliably good output. Many Wikipedia articles are, as its defenders never tire of saying, good and even excellent. Fine. How do I, the user, know which ones are and which aren't? How do I know that one properly described today as excellent will be excellent when I look at it tomorrow?

— Robert McHenry

The real bias in Wikipedia

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Wikipedia's visionless, self-selected, value-light online encyclopedia is a deformed shadow of what the global public deserves, says former editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, Robert McHenry. This essay contains McHenry's most pointed criticism to date of the problems which flow from the stunning failures of leadership at Wikipedia. In particular, he points out that what I call balance cannot be achieved without careful planning:

Is imbalance in Wikipedia "systemic"? I should rather say that it results inevitably from a lack of system. Given the method by which Wikipedia articles are created, for there to be any semblance of balance in the overall coverage of subject-matter would be miraculous. Balance results from planning.

— Robert McHenry

Because the wiki model depends upon attracting volunteer editors knowledgeable about topic X and willing to collaboratively author a good article on topic X, I doubt that Wikipedia can hope to achieve global balance, but I believe it can and must try to achieve local balance within each subject area in which Wikipedia can boast a core pool of knowledgeable editors. This would however require drastic changes in the sociopolitical and technical structures, in order to ensure that the most experienced/thoughtful writer/editors can control the organization and guide the continued improvement of mature articles.

He also points out that Wikipedia is systemically hostile to

  • its own readers,
  • its most expert contributors

I speculate that for most readers and editors, using Wikipedia is like going to a convenience store where the clerk is rude, or staying in a job with an overbearing supervisor: many people will tolerate considerable abuse in exchange for convenience.

That vision of the goal must do something that Wikipedia and Wikipedians steadfastly decline to do today, and that is to consider seriously the user, the reader. What is the user meant to take away from the experience of consulting a Wikipedia article? The most candid defenders of the encyclopedia today confess that it cannot be trusted to impart correct information but can serve as a starting-point for research. By this they seem to mean that it supplies some links and some useful search terms to plug into Google. This is not much. It is a great shame that some excellent work – and there is some – is rendered suspect both by the ideologically required openness of the process and by association with much distinctly not excellent work that is accorded equal standing by that same ideology. One simple fact that must be accepted as the basis for any intellectual work is that truth – whatever definition of that word you may subscribe to – is not democratically determined. And another is that talent, whether for soccer or for exposition, is not equally distributed across the population, while a robust confidence is one's own views apparently is. If there is a systemic bias in Wikipedia, it is to have ignored so far these inescapable facts.

— Robert McHenry

Jaron Lanier

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Jaron Lanier is a composer and technocrat who writes about the social implications of new digital technology.

Lanier has contributed one of the most fascinating--- and most damning--- indictments of Wikipedia which has yet appeared. He notes that Wikipedia, in common with numerous other contemporary digital ventures, is rushing to amalgamate all information, and asks: is this really a good thing?

The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself...the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous...The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites...What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments, and major universities have all gotten the bug.

— Jaron Lanier

Like Sanger and McHenry, Lanier challenges the assumption that wiki articles will be attracted to perfection:

A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out.

— Jaron Lanier

I myself have pointed out that because the collaborative wiki process tends to suppress any individual style, it tends to eliminate any trace of humor. Picking up this theme, Lanier notes that, more seriously, Wikipedia also tends to eliminate any trace of values, character, or soul (if I might so put it). All too often, the result is that Wikipedia articles appear pallid and pithed:

it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality...The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning...The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.

— Jaron Lanier

He points out that while Wikipedia claims to have the laudable goal of bringing information to the people, by dominating Google (see the feedback loop described by Sanger above), it can have quite the opposite effect:

For instance, most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use.

— Jaron Lanier

I have argued that one of Wikipedia's most damnable failings is its striking tendency to discourage editors from taking intellectual responsbility for their edits, and more generally (given Wikipedia's tolerance of and even encouragement of anonymous and/or multiple identities), from assuming any individual responsibility for their behavior at Wikipedia. Perhaps Lanier's most acute observation is his suggestion of what might be driving the rise of Wikipedia and other innovations whose ultimate effect, he argues, is (paradoxically enought) to erase individual expression from the web:

It's not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual... It's safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the possibility of being wrong. Except when intelligent thought really matters. In that case the average idea can be quite wrong, and only the best ideas have lasting value. Science is like that.

— Jaron Lanier

He specifically contrasts the Wikipedia "hive mind" with the scientific community:

Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals. These people focused the collective and in some cases also corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing projects. There's a lot of experience out there to work with. A few of these old ideas provide interesting new ways to approach the question of how to best use the hive mind...Scientific communities...achieve quality through a cooperative process that includes checks and balances, and ultimately rests on a foundation of goodwill and "blind" elitism — blind in the sense that ideally anyone can gain entry, but only on the basis of a meritocracy. The tenure system and many other aspects of the academy are designed to support the idea that individual scholars matter, not just the process or the collective.

— Jaron Lanier

Why should we care? Lanier warns:

Some wikitopians explicitly hope to see education subsumed by wikis. It is at least possible that in the fairly near future enough communication and education will take place through anonymous Internet aggregation that we could become vulnerable to a sudden dangerous empowering of the hive mind. History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind outbursts have been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious, and these are only a small sampling. I don't see why there couldn't be future social disasters that appear suddenly under the cover of technological utopianism.

— Jaron Lanier

Indeed, this would be a good place for many readers to jump out of this page and read some recent writings by Salman Rushdie on the contemporaneous epic struggle between the forces of Fundamentalist religions and the tattered remnants of the Enlightenment. Then compare the You Tube phenomenon with Islamic terrorist websites featuring on-line video repositories.

Stacy Schiff

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Schiff offers a good summary of history of Wikipedia, and reiterates some now familar points:

Wikipedia is populist rather than scholarly-elitist:

Wales’s most radical contribution may be not to have made information free but—in his own alma-matricidal way—to have invented a system that does not favor the Ph.D. over the well-read fifteen-year-old. “To me, the key thing is getting it right,” Wales has said of Wikipedia’s contributors. “I don’t care if they’re a high-school kid or a Harvard professor."...Wikipedia may be the world’s most ambitious vanity press. There are two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom about thirty-three hundred—fewer than two per cent—are responsible for seventy per cent of the work

— Stacy Schiff

She stresses the increasing tendency of discussions about policies and procedures to dominate content creation/improvement:

Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate hierarchy of users and policies about policies. Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two researchers at I.B.M. who have studied the site using computerized visual models called “history flows,” found that the talk pages and “meta pages”—those dealing with coördination and administration—have experienced the greatest growth. Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site’s content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it, “People are talking about governance, not working on content.” Wales is ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are necessary. “Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting,” he told me.

— Stacy Schiff

She quotes Eric Raymond, who make a key point:

Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that “ ‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is “infested with moonbats.” (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. “The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks,” Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn’t. There is no such test for truth.

— Stacy Schiff

She stresses the tendency of Wikipedia to promote the notion that what matter is rapidly and conveniently finding an answer to any question, not finding a good answer, and quotes various prominent critics who decry this trend:

Jorge Cauz, Britannica’s president, told me in an e-mail that if Wikipedia continued without some kind of editorial oversight it would “decline into a hulking mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and, many times, unreadable articles.” Wales has said that he would consider Britannica a competitor, “except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within five years.” ...Larry Sanger proposes a fine distinction between knowledge that is useful and knowledge that is reliable, and there is no question that Wikipedia beats every other source when it comes to breadth, efficiency, and accessibility. Yet the site’s virtues are also liabilities. Cauz scoffed at the notion of “good enough knowledge.” “I hate that,” he said, pointing out that there is no way to know which facts in an entry to trust...The bulk of Wikipedia’s content originates not in the stacks but on the Web, which offers up everything from breaking news, spin, and gossip to proof that the moon landings never took place. Glaring errors jostle quiet omissions. Wales, in his public speeches, cites the Google test: “If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist.”

— Stacy Schiff

She somewhat murkily recognizes phenomena such as chronic imbalance (both local and global) and edit creep, saying:

Wikipedia remains a lumpy work in progress. The entries can read as though they had been written by a seventh grader: clarity and concision are lacking; the facts may be sturdy, but the connective tissue is either anemic or absent; and citation is hit or miss. Wattenberg and Viégas, of I.B.M., note that the vast majority of Wikipedia edits consist of deletions and additions rather than of attempts to reorder paragraphs or to shape an entry as a whole.

— Stacy Schiff

She points out that the Encyclopédie was also as much a political manifesto as an information resource, saying:

What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate? Over breakfast in early May, I asked Cauz for an analogy with which to compare Britannica and Wikipedia. “Wikipedia is to Britannica as ‘American Idol’ is to the Juilliard School,” he e-mailed me the next day. A few days later, Wales also chose a musical metaphor. “Wikipedia is to Britannica as rock and roll is to easy listening,” he suggested. “It may not be as smooth, but it scares the parents and is a lot smarter in the end.” He is right to emphasize the fright factor over accuracy. As was the Encyclopédie, Wikipedia is a combination of manifesto and reference work. Peer review, the mainstream media, and government agencies have landed us in a ditch. Not only are we impatient with the authorities but we are in a mood to talk back. Wikipedia offers endless opportunities for self-expression...This is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an élite, or cast a harsh light on certitude. Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad. We’re on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We’re free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. Your truth or mine?

Over all, one of the best outside assessments of the state of Wikipedia which has yet appeared.

Clay Shirky

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In this fine essay, Shirky responds to a piece by Nicholas Carr, who once wrote "The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work. Community without hierarchy means mediocrity" (an insight with which I agree), but who later expressed fears about the "death of open-ness" in the Wikipedia, e.g. with the advent of semi-protection.

Openness allows for innovation. Innovation creates value. Value creates incentive. If that were all there was, it would be a virtuous circle, because the incentive would be to create more value. But incentive is value-neutral, so it also creates distortions — free riders, attempts to protect value by stifling competition, and so on. And distortions threaten openess. As a result, successful open systems create the very conditions that require a threaten openess. Systems that handle this pressure effectively continue (Slashdot comments.) Systems that can’t or don’t find ways to balance openess and closedness — to become semi-protected — fail (Usenet.) A huge number of our current systems are hanging in the balance, because the more valuable a system, the greater the incentive for free-riding. Our largest and most spontaneous sources of conversation and collaboration are busily being retrofit with filters and logins and distributed ID systems, in an attempt to save some of what is good about openess while defending against Wiki spam, email spam, comment spam, splogs, and other attempts at free-riding. Wikipedia falls into that category. And this is the possibility that Carr doesn’t entertain, but is implicit in his earlier work — this isn’t happening because the Wikipedia model is a failure, it is happening because it is a success. Carr attempts to deflect this line of thought by using a lot of scare quotes around words like vandal, as if there were no distinction between contribution and vandalism, but this line of reasoning runs aground on the evidence of Wikipedia’s increasing utility. If no one cared about Wikipedia, semi-protection would be pointless, but with Wikipedia being used as reference material in the Economist and the NY Times, the incentive for distortion is huge, and behavior that can be sensibly described as vandalism, outside scare quotes, is obvious to anyone watching Wikipedia. The rise of governance models is a reaction to the success that creates incentives to vandalism and other forms of attack or distortion. We’ve also noted before that governance is a certified Hard Problem. At the extremes, co-creation, openess, and scale are incompatible. Wikipedia’s principle advantage over other methods of putting together a body of knowledge is openess, and from the outside, it looks like Wikipedia’s guiding principle is “Be as open as you can be; close down only where there is evidence that openess causes more harm than good; when this happens, reduce openess in the smallest increment possible, and see if that fixes the problem.”

— Clay Shirky

Roy Rosenzweig

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This long paper is one of the most important profiles of the Wikipedia which has yet appeared! Detailed commentary to follow.

Elizabeth Svoboda

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One of the most intelligent introductions to what Wikipedia is and how it works (or fails to work). By the way, for anyone who doesn't know, IEEE Spectrum is a widely read magazine published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which is regularly read by most information theorists and also by many computer scientists.

Svoboda well describes the importance and difficulty of cruft patrol at Wikipedia:

As the first-ever major reference work with a democratic premise—that anyone can contribute an article or edit an entry—Wikipedia has generated shared scholarly efforts to rival those of any literary or philosophical movement in history. Its signature strength, however, is also its greatest vulnerability. User-generated articles are often inaccurate or irrelevant, and vandals like the political jokesters are a constant threat...The influx of information is so great that it's easy to characterize content-control efforts as potshots into a crowd, but Wikipedians—as regular contributors like to call themselves—claim the review process is actually carefully executed and multilayered...Many publishers and academics, however, have criticized the Wikipedia model on the grounds that it generates the informational equivalent of sludge. The lack of formal gatekeeping procedures, they say, ensures that the lowest common denominator will prevail—and since no experts or editors are hired to vet articles, no clear standards exist for accuracy or writing quality. "If you take any group of people that claim to know something, many of them will be wrong, but all of them will be equally confident," says Robert McHenry, former editor in chief at Britannica. "Leaving the [Wikipedia] encyclopedia open for anyone to contribute guarantees that its content and accuracy will tend toward the mediocre." McHenry also points out that the Darwinian strategy falls through when contributors submit articles on obscure topics, as few people have the knowledge necessary to criticize or edit the articles.

— Elizabeth Svoboda

She picks up Sanger's theme of Wikipedia's hostility toward expert contributors, recounting experiences like this one:

Wikipedia's power structure has spawned other problems as well. Like most other encyclopedias, it derives its reputation from readers' faith in its objectivity. However, according to Jeremy Hunsinger, a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, in Blacksburg, who has contributed articles on political science topics, this faith is sometimes misguided. Hunsinger has witnessed members of the Wikipedia establishment overlook the contributions of established authorities—the kinds of experts World Book and Britannica hire to evaluate their content. "You can give your academic credentials, but that doesn't necessarily travel very far in the Wikipedia culture," Hunsinger says.Elizabeth Svoboda

Her conclusion is much more optimistic than that of Sanger, McHenry, Lanier, or myself, however:

Still, many users and contributors agree that the system works well, if not perfectly, in practice...That's not to say Wikipedia users should ever feel so confident as to take the encyclopedia's content on faith. Wales advises readers to check their online finds against other sources and to be aware of Wikipedia's unique strengths and weaknesses, especially when gathering information for research projects. "No encyclopedia article is intended to be a primary source—it's just an introductory summary, and people should approach it that way," he says. "Wikipedia's timeliness is really impressive, and so is the sheer amount of brainpower we bring to bear on complicated questions. But because everything is so open and fluid, you have to be aware that anything on the site could be broken at any given moment. It's a live work in progress.

— Elizabeth Svoboda

Scott McLemee

[edit]

Inside Higher Ed is an American newsmagazine for college and university faculty members (also read and enjoyed by graduate students).

Like many critics, McLemee notes the instability, dubious reliability, and the lack of accountability in Wikipedia articles:

With Wikipedia, only a very modest level of control is exercised by administrators. The result is a wiki-based reference tool that is open to writers putting forward truth, falsehood, and all the shades of gray in between. In other words, each entry is just as trustworthy as whoever last worked on it. And because items are unsigned, the very notion of accountability is digitized out of existence.

— Scott McLemee

Like McHenry, he stresses the fact that the lack of any coherent evaluation of information presented at Wikipedia is a crippling defect in a nominal information resource, and like Lanier, he fears that far from empowering more traditional information resources such as journalists and reference librarians, it may actually be helping to destroy these professions, with presumably deleterious results for a free society:

Basic cognitive literacy includes the ability to evaluate the strengths and the limitations of any source of information. Wikipedia is usually worth consulting simply for the references at the end of an article — often with links to other online resources. Wikipedia is by no means a definitive reference work, but it’s not necessarily the worst place to start. Not that everyone uses it that way, of course. Consider a recent discussion between a reference librarian and a staff member working for an important policy-making arm of the U.S. government. The librarian asked what information sources the staffer relied on most often for her work. Without hesitation, she answered: “Google and Wikipedia.” In fact, she seldom used anything else. Coming from a junior-high student, this would be disappointing. From someone in a position of power, it is well beyond worrisome... You don’t find any of Wells’s meritocracy at work in Wikipedia. There is no benchmark for quality. It is an intellectual equivalent of the Wild West, without the cows or the gold.

— Scott McLemee

A followup comment by a reader, incidently, supports my contention that the ease of manipulation and almost complete lack of individual responsibility at Wikipedia is fueling a dangerous trend toward widespread manipulation of information in the Wikipedia:

I heard a rumor of a graduate student in theology who edited the Wikipedia entry for a certain contemporary philosopher — not in order to correct or add anything, but solely to put in a link to his own review of one of the philosopher’s books. If this is the kind of shameful, self-promoting behavior we can expect from academic Wikipedians, perhaps it’d be best if they kept their nose out of it!

— Adam Kotsko, commenting on McLemee's article

Somehow this trend reminds me of an interesting conversation I once had with a colleague from India, where corruption is endemic. He told me, in essence, that while corruption is certainly all to common in the United States, he felt that Americans who have not directly experienced the kind of endemic and open corruption which prevails in his own country fail to appreciate the enormous social and economic damage with a culture of corruption causes. Much as we Americans love to loathe our journalists, should it ever come to pass that no-one is even paying lip service to trying to provide some approximation to truth, it might be far too late to do more than belately recognize what we have lost.

Andrew Orlowski

[edit]

Orlowski slams the tepid and self-justifying response by the Wikipedia leadership to the Siegenthaler defamation scandal as an un-subtle attempt to duck the primary responsibility of any encyclopedia (to screen, sort, and summarize information, rather than merely presenting masses of raw information, misinformation, and disinformation; see above):

Wikipedia co-founder founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales has warned students not to refer to Wikipedia...Last year criticism of the site, which is popular with teenagers and the unemployed, was met with the counter-attack that the user was being morally delinquent if they failed to correct the mistakes themselves...So now the second line of defense takes prominence (we ran up a a taxonomy of popular Wikipedians' whinges here last year) - and it's a variation on caveat lector. It stresses the fact that no resource can be trusted. You can see this line of argument being practiced in the comments beneath the Chronicle's article. Whether the idea is to make people so distrustful of resource material that they need a tinfoil hat before they embark on their research, or whether it's simply to condition them to the low-grade, poorly written material found on Wikipedia we don't know.

— Andrew Orlowski

He picks up another idea which has been noted above: far from empowering students, Wikipedia may actually be further eroding the chance that they will actually learn any useful skills before being desposited in the job market:

While academics may balk at the suggestion, the educational system rewards rote cutting and pasting, leaving little room for critical thinking. This pervades both junk lit-crit and junk science, which are increasingly the flavour of the day throughout academia. So what could be a more appropriate resource for an ignorant and lazy student, than reference material prepared exclusively by other ignorant and lazy students? We also have one piece of advice for any student insane enough to cite Wikipedia: have patience. Wait until you have secured academic tenure, or, say, an untouchable bench seat in the circuit courts. Then you can be as insane as you like, and quote Wikipedia to your heart's content. And no one will be able to do a damn thing about it.

— Andrew Orlowski

Steven Strauss

[edit]

Strauss mentions that, while on the job as a reporter, he was misled by a WP science article, wrote a factually inaccurate news story as a result, and it came back to bite him. But mostly he criticizes both Brittannica (peevish and petty) and Wikipedia (far too tolerant of abusive and slanted articles) and even Nature (snooty and unhelpful).

Robbie Hudson

[edit]

I have argued in Wikipedia talk pages with more than one user who claimed that no intelligent person could possibly be deceived by a slanted article touting something like polywater (a pseudoscientific "no cost energy" scheme, apparently being promoted at Wikipedia by someone hoping to attract private investment in his alleged "technology"). Hudson provides some anecdotes which support my contention that many people are easily fooled, and many even appear to be eager to be fooled (a characteristic which is of course exploited by many con artists):

The world is full of people who uncritically believe what they read. I recently sat next to someone in a cinema who claimed that The Da Vinci Code movie received bad reviews because “the Catholic church controls the media”. Online, fact and fiction look the same, especially on a site such as Wikipedia, which has become an Aunt Sally in the debate over dumbing down. This problem lies not with Wikipedia, but our society’s criminal lack of media literacy. We are failing our children if they are so ignorant that they take Wikipedia on trust.

— Robbie Hudson

See again the commentary by Orlowski and Strauss cited just above!

Sam Vaknin

[edit]

In common with many other observers, Vaknin notes the lack of individual accountability at Wikipedia, its anti-elitism, the anarchic nature of its growth, and he too attacks the idea that Wikipedia articles are naturally attracted to perfection:

It is a question of time before the Wikipedia self-destructs and implodes...no one is forced to take responsibility for what he or she adds to the "encyclopedia" or subtracts from it...The Wikipedia is not an experiment in online democracy, but a form of pernicious anarchy. It espouses two misconceptions: (a) That chaos can and does lead to the generation of artifacts with lasting value and (b) That knowledge is an emergent, mass phenomenon...Contrary to advertently-fostered impressions, the Wikipedia is not a cumulative process. Its text goes through dizzyingly rapid and oft-repeated cycles of destruction and the initial contributions are at times far deeper and more comprehensive than later, "edited", editions of same...The Wikipedia's ethos is malignantly anti-elitist. Experts are scorned and rebuffed, attacked, and abused with official sanction and blessing. Since everyone is assumed to be equally qualified to edit and contribute, no one is entitled to a privileged position by virtue of scholarship, academic credentials, or even life experience

He too warns that far from improving the quality of public education, Wikipedia may be further degrading it, and he too notes its vulnerability to manipulation by anonymous users pursuing some hidden agenda:

The Wikipedia thus retards genuine learning by serving as the path of least resistance and as a substitute to the real thing: edited, peer-reviewed works of reference. High school and university students now make the Wikipedia not only their first but their exclusive "research" destination...the Wikipedia is a hotbed of slander and libel. It is regularly manipulated by interns, political staffers, public relations consultants, marketing personnel, special interest groups, political parties, business firms, brand managers, and others with an axe to grind. It serves as a platform for settling personal accounts, defaming, distorting the truth, and re-writing history.

— Sam Vaknin

Incidently, Vaknin claims that this essay earned him some unsubtle retaliation:

A group of Wikipedians apparently decided to take revenge and/or to warn me off. They have authored a defamatory and slanderous article about Sam Vaknin in their "encyclopedia'. To leave no room for doubt, at the bottom of this new entry about me, they listed all my articles against the Wikipedia. After repeated complaints, the article was removed, though any "editor" can still write an equally-slanderous new one at any time. Additionally, I received an e-mail message from Brad Patrick, the Wikimedia's General Counsel (attorney), asking me to copy him on all future correspondence with Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, or anyone else associated with the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. I declined his "request". He then proceeded to ask to communicate with my lawyer since "I raised the issue of suing his client." Couldn't be subtler. I was also banned from posting to the Wikipedia - my punishment for what the Wikipedia calls "sockpuppetry" (essentially, editing articles without first logging in to one's account). It is ironic, since the vast majority of Wikipedians - including the administrator who banned me - edit articles anonymously or hide behind utterly meaningless handles and screen names. There is not a shred of proof, of course, that I have edited any article, with or without logging in.

— Sam Vaknin

Since the article Sam Vaknin has been deleted, I could not attempt to verify the substance of these allegations.

Linda Knapp

[edit]

Linda Knapp is a freelance writer who writes for the Seattle Times.

Wikipedia can be useful tool (sic)

[edit]

Rather naive, with a somewhat misleading description of how Wikipedia cruft control operates (or rather, all too often, fails to operate).

Wikipedia a lesson on verifying research (sic)

[edit]

Melanie Boaz, a high school English teacher from Mukilteo, noted that her students love Wikipedia for its ease of use, broad coverage of current pop-culture topics, and generally accessible style. But Boaz doesn't allow it as a source for research papers. Why not? It's not completely reliable. Boaz knows of some students who submitted an article they made up that's still posted on Wikipedia. Though that prank may have been harmless, some articles have included false information that can be harmful to certain individuals... Should Wikipedia be allowed in school? Frankly, I think teachers should use it as a source for helping students see that everything on the Internet, and everything in print, is not always correct. Many kids believe that reference sources are invariably right. So studying Wikipedia — with all its flaws — could help them learn to become more critical readers.

— Linda Knapp

Alexandra L. Smith

[edit]

Smith notes that Google and Wikipedia can be used as a powerful and convenient device for generating plagiarism:

If the age-old problem of plagiarism was not already bad enough, Google and other information sites like Wikipedia, have turned it into an out-of-control plague threatening to damage the reputation of academia.

— Alexandra L Smith

She briefly discusses some proposals to thwart plagiarism by junior high schoolers by using special purpose software, but fails to pick up a more worrying trend: increasingly widespread plagiarism by nationally recognized journalists. A little known fact is that despite the widely publicized tragicomedies of figures like Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke, and Jayson Blair, these journalists in fact often continue to work as journalists despite repeated exposure as habitual plagiarists. C.f. for example Nina Totenberg.

Dave Watson

[edit]

Obviously it’s much more than just an encyclopedia, given the widespread public interest. Wikipedia combines features of a news portal, a community hangout, and a powerful search engine, in addition to browsing-oriented subject areas...Most of the articles in question are only “semi-protected”, which means that only people who have been members for at least four days can alter them, and the protection status is lifted after the controversies fade a bit. We’re talking about a pretty microscopic percentage of the total information located on Wikipedia, and it’s not like the Internet doesn’t offer plenty of room for alternative viewpoints to be expressed elsewhere. At some point the right of people to offer opposing opinions at the extremes of an issue (and the proclivity for some folks to be argumentative merely for the fun of stirring up some drama) needs to be reined in so that Wikipedia can become a better and more reliable reference site, not just a home to the same old squabbles you can find on Usenet and blogs. And besides, when the Wikipedia model works (as it clearly doesn’t with some controversial subjects), it can be very, very good. The core group of approximately 1,000 volunteer administrators and the tens of thousands of other contributors have built a very useful collection of data. I often encounter entries through Google searches and usually find clear and concise summary reports—exactly the sort of thing you hope to find in an encyclopedia. And you can’t beat the speed at which topics are added or updated—it’s almost like stuff gets invented just to be explained there.

— Dave Watson

I have contended that the likely result of Wikipedia/Google is to degrade the quality of information available on the web, not to improve it. Despite his generally positive review, I think it is telling that Watson is the only journalist (AFAIK) who has managed to read the fine print with sufficent care to correctly describe the semi-protection policy! See my comments about the apparently degrading effect of Wikipedia is having on the journalistic profession.

Sharda Prashad

[edit]

Prashad compares Encyclopedia Brittanica, Encarta, and Wikipedia. She says of Brittanica:

Since 1768, the company that was founded in Scotland and moved to America when purchased by Sears in 1920, has been publishing its 32-volume encyclopedia backed a stable of experts. Former contributors include Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie and George Bernard Shaw, while current ones include the Dalai Lama, Yo-Yo Ma and Stephen Hawking. In fact, Britannica's collaboration with experts has always been and will continue to be its stock in trade. The Toronto Public Library sees the traditional encyclopedia model as still relevant. Its annual budget for rights to electronic and traditional print encyclopedias has remained relatively steady at about $180,000 the past three years. "When users want good solid facts, they turn to the traditional encyclopedia," says Joanne Lombardo, the library's collections librarian for electronic material. ...The company plans to rewrite content to be more user-friendly and engaging to better relate to its audience. It also plans to provide more diverse product offerings and add more and more-varied content....To regain its place, Joshi says Britannica needs a sales pitch that promotes its high-quality, independently verified and authoritative knowledge, "thereby indirectly criticizing Wikipedia." Cauz seems to understand this, but he won't directly criticize Wikipedia: "The competition from Wikipedia has allowed us to find a crisp voice of who we are. In terms of accuracy and objectivity, there is no match to us."

— Sharda Prashad

Daniel Terdiman

[edit]

Back when WP had only a half million articles, Terdiman profiled some of the most prolific contributors, including Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics's very own User:Charles Matthews and User:Derek Ramsey (whose name is also familiar to long-time sci.math readers).

Robert Steele

[edit]

Effective immediately, the Open_source_intelligence page of Wikipedia will be where we encourage all individuals of all nationalities to create sub-pages relevant to the creation and sharing of public intelligence. At the same time, we urge all who care for freedom and liberty to support the Co-Intelligence Institute, founded by Tom Atlee, whose vision for a wise democracy through collective public intelligence is the strongest possible antidote to the questionable policies and practices of the present Administration.

— Robert David Steele, CEO of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)

I am squirming here, because while I tend to agree with the outrage of Steele, he is explicitly calling for members of his group to join him in slanting a particular Wikipedia article, which is precisely the kind of manipulation to pursue a hidden agenda (presumably hidden at WP, at least) which I am warning about!

See also the AfD debate for the article in question.

Ivor Tossell

[edit]

I like the Wikipedia a great deal; it's the ultimate resource on subjects that don't matter

— Ivor Tosssell

So he vandalized it, and earned the customary warning on his user talk page. Tossell continues:

The Wikipedia isn't the anonymous free-for-all it was cracked up to be. It's taking down names and numbers, and if you do something it doesn't like, it won't just fix the problem, an 11-year-old with a bowl cut and spectacles will track you down and berate you for it...As it grows and grows, the Wikipedia system, formerly a free market of ideas, finds itself increasingly laden with checks and balances. Last fall, it forced users to log in if they wanted to add articles. Last month, it announced that certain contentious articles (among them: "Al Gore," "John Wayne," "Jesus") cannot be edited by users whose accounts are less than 96 hours old. And owing to ongoing disputes about their content, other pages can no longer be edited at all -- some for obvious reasons ("Israeli apartheid"), others for less obvious ones ("Elvis Presley"). There used to be a simple joy to editing Wikipedia articles. Now, there's an emergent bureaucracy.

— Ivor Tossell

Sheesh! And no, unfortunately, I do not think he is kidding.

Eric Zorn

[edit]

Eric Zorn is a journalist and a grandson of mathematician Max Zorn, who frequently writes about mathematics ((which is a highly unusual activity for a journalist, alas).

Sigh...this is getting a bit stale: Zorn admits to violating WP:POINT in May 2006 by creating a hoax article on Zorn's law (the name echoes the famous lemma attributed to this illustrious grandfather):

So far, so good with my effort to publicize Zorn's Law. The screeners at Wikipedia threatened to remove my attempt to advance the notion that in any debate, the first person to hurl the insult, "get a life!" is the loser, but I have temporarily stymied them. For some reason they don't want their online encyclopedia cluttered up with whims and stunts. (UPDATE -- a friend of the blog and of Wikipedia writes to urge me, "get some of your friends to start using it in articles, and the wikiarticle's set!" So, please, fellow bloggers, a few citations if you please!)

— Eric Zorn

Eric and Ivor, you are not helping! with this kind of prank.

Francois Joseph de Kermadec

[edit]

Kermadec says: even if it were to become the worst, most inaccurate encyclopedia around, it would still have its place on the web. I think he means that Wikipedia probably won't build a better Brittanica, but it might build a better blog (see my user page).

Gregory M. Lamb

[edit]

"Serbs and Croats are also working together on Wikipedia articles"? What is he smoking?

Guerilla Marketeer Handbook

[edit]

A guerrilla marketer's howto on manipulating the Wikipedia to sell your product.

ABC News

[edit]

This article describes an example of digging which most people would term legitimate. A registered sex offender in his early twenties apparently created a hoax article at Wikipedia on a nonexistent "Duke of Cleveland" explicitly in order to pursue a criminal agenda, in which he registered as a student at an American High School under false pretenses. Four genuine high school students became suspicious and used Google and Wikipedia to uncover his true identity and his status as a registered sex offender.

Reuters

[edit]

A minute by minute account of the latest rumor mongering in a high profile Wikipedia article on a subject current interest, the recent death of the late and unlamented felon, Mr. Lay

Cyrus Farivar

[edit]

In this opinion piece, Farivar discusses how he discovered hoax articles in the Wikipedia and elsewhere on an alleged practice called Greenlighting, which were apparently produced collaboratively :-/ by the members of an organization called Wookiefetish. Farivar boasts "Yes, I added an entry on myself to Wikipedia. Why haven't you?".

See also

I'd like to add here a link to recent news stories in Irish newspapers on the controversy over an allegedly malicious depiction of the town of Ballymena in Ireland in said WP article as the heroin capital of Northern Ireland, but

  1. the news stories are apparently not available without a subscription,
  2. it seems that the suspect characterization was not inaccurate after all!

Romi Carrell Wittman

[edit]

In a generally positive review comparing WP with Encarta and HighBeam Encyclopedia, Wittman cautions "beware its free-edit, free-posting nature. Since people are free to post items, the veracity of the site's content can sometimes come into question. Just remember: You can't believe everything you read".

Bernard Haisch

[edit]

Motivated by his recent bad experience re Bernard Haisch-Stochastic electrodynamics, Haisch makes some points very similar to some I have been trying to establish:

The belief among Wikipedians is that somehow, through a process of group trial and error, something credible will emerge by and by...what is more insidious are the negative slants and biased cherry picking of facts that can paint a quite inaccurate portrait of something or someone. This is as hard to fix as a flat tire in a blizzard. And if it does get fixed, it could change again five minutes hence

Haisch argues that trying to improve a WP article is so exhausting that this places an intolerable burden upon someone who feels the current version of some article is intolerably flawed, but adds that simply ignoring a bad article may not be a viable option either:

I discovered in June that a Wikipedia editor had written an article on me that concentrated almost solely on the latter topics while virtually ignoring the 100-plus scientific papers I had published. It was a draining editing battle to try to coax the article into something halfway reasonable, which was helped by the decision of the "editor" to drop out of Wikipedia...Unfortunately, telling yourself that it really doesn't matter what Wikipedia says is not a realistic option anymore. Wikipedia is growing rapidly in its number of articles and users, and for many people Wikipedia will be the first and only source they'll see.

Ironically, of course, that editor was me :-/ FWIW, I think Haisch misunderstood my motivations and badly mischaracterizes my version of his wikibiography (which survives almost as I left it months ago), and I feel that his impatience with our wikiways was in fact largely responsible for the edit war he mentions. Haisch opens his editorial by quoting (seriously out of context, in a highly misleading fashion; see Talk:Bernard Haisch for the original) part of a talk page message from User:KSmrq:

YOU DO NOT get to choose whether or not an article on you appears in Wikipedia, and you have no veto power over its contents. The article can cast you as a genius or an imbecile, a respected scientist or a crackpot…. a vandal could replace a page, any page, with total gibberish. The page on Einstein might have a statement inserted to the effect that he was a Nazi collaborator, or that his theories have been totally discredited, or that he was a silicon-based life form from Proxima Centauri…. Wikipedia does not operate by your rules but by its own conventions; I suggest you learn to accept it…. I can assure you resistance is futile."

— KSmrq

It is unfortunate (but perhaps inevitable given human nature) that Haisch omitted to mention that Bernard Haisch appeared in the context of my uncovering and challenging his own questionable Wikipedia edits as an IP anon! Or that KSmrq was chiding him for repeatedly calling me "Christine", despite being told repeatedly that I go by "Chris". IOW, I was acting as an editor of good faith trying to combat wikishilling (the manipulation of information presented in WP articles, in a manner consistent with seeking financial gain or other clear personal benefits, by an editor who misrepresents his IRL identity in order to disguise his hidden agenda), and KSmrq was urging Haisch to behave with greater civility in an admittedly difficult situation.

But context aside, I tend to agree with the main points of his editorial. The common denominator seems to be this: Haisch and myself have both concluded that Wikipedia may become more of a Danger to Everyone than providing as originally intended (reliable) Knowledge for Everyone, but unfortunately by focusing on the single issue of living persons who object to their wikiprofiles, his essay might appear too personally aggrieved in tone to appeal to many readers. Also, I think my view is far more nuanced than his, as one might expect given my far more extensive experience as a Wikipedia contributor.

Seth Finkelstein

[edit]

Finkelstein is a programmer who has been honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He describes his unhappy experience in unsuccessfully attempting to get his own wikbio deleted after it was turned into (he says) something resembling an attack piece, saying:

Wikipedia describes itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". With some minor exceptions, anyone can change any article - for good or ill. While the benefits of such a low barrier for participation have been widely touted, the concomitant problems are less well known. Such as, what if you find yourself in it, but don't want to be? ... [Wikpedia] says, to every troll, vandal, and score-settler: "Here's an article about a person where you can, with no accountability whatsoever, write any libel, defamation, or smear. It won't be a marginal comment with the social status of an inconsequential rant, but rather will be made prominent about the person, and reputation-laundered with the institutional status of an encyclopedia." Where living people are concerned, there is a cost-shifting aspect: instead of falling on Wikipedia's poor quality control, any negative effects are usually borne by the aggrieved party, except in the very rare case where he or she has enough power to publicise Wikipedia's failings.

— Seth Finkelstein, op. cit.

Haisch mentions similar fears about the possible public perception that Wikipedia has the "institutional status of an encyclopedia". I think the cure for this lies in campaigning to inform the public that Wikipedia not does not in fact enjoy the status of its elder rival, the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Indeed, it is not an encyclopedia at all (despite the presence of a million "articles", a tiny handful of which at various times have not been inferior in quality/reliablity to Brittannica articles, but who knows what they look like right now?), but rather a kind of überblog.

Finkelstein also mentions the Siegenthaler defamation scandal and the Angela Beesley affair (commenting that the latter represented "a pretty stunning vote of no-confidence", and I'd agree). He adds:

I'm intrigued by Wikipedia, not from any utopian view, but rather by how it manages to induce people to work for free, and how the project has evolved elaborate rhetorical responses to criticism. Since it's alleged to be an encyclopedia, active participants often want the prestige and imputed influence which comes from such intellectual endeavors. This desire leads to minimising and trivialising of failures in quality control.

— Seth Finkelstein, op. cit.

I entirely agree: the Wikipedia community has been unwilling to acknowledge deep-running contradictions at Wikipedia which have undermined the encyclopedic mission, or to recognize the seriousness of the many threats to the integrity of information in Wikipedia articles. I for one have concluded that these failures of insight and of moral courage, and a stunning inability to adapt to changed circumstances, are fatal institutional flaws which are essentially unfixable, at least at Wikipedia itself. The result is that all the work by a relatively small but very dedicated band of true-hearted encyclopaedists at Wikipedia has been for nought, which I find very sad. The alternative überblog mission seems to have captured the soul of the Wikipedia, and I fear that this website will probably become a domain where political attack groups, disgruntled employees, angry ex-spouses, and disaffected persons generally, can vent their spleen or attack individuals they dislike under guise of "informing" [sic] the public.

Ben MacIntyre

[edit]

MacIntyre mentions the recent Congressional staffer WP editing scandal and other widely publicized recent incidents, saying:

The incident was only the latest skirmish in a growing war between the new Wikipedia and the older forms of reference. This is more than a conflict between new technology and a more academic approach, between paper information and digital information. At stake is the nature of knowledge itself, and truth. The internet had evolved a new form of information, a shallow, broad, fast, patchy and extremely useful reservoir that should be absorbed with caution and used only for specific purposes. Wikpedia has the same relationship with an encyclopaedia that yesterday’s news reporting has with tomorrow’s history book. Wikipedia is a first draft. It is not truth. But so long as it is understood and used in that way, it may prove to be one of the most spectacular inventions of the 21st century.

— Ben MacIntyre

He mentions Digital Maosim (but fails to cite Jason Lanier; see above; maybe that is just the nature of The Times style of op-ed):

Any trawl of Wikipedia reveals that this is not a democracy, but a self-selecting oligarchy. The people who have the time and inclination to write and edit Wikipedia tend to be younger, and interested in pop culture or technology. The space devoted to the glamour model Jordan’s breast implants is as long as the entire entry for the Yi language, spoken by 6.6 million Chinese. There is also a danger of what some critics call “online collectivism”, or “digital Maoism”. Just because a majority of people happen to believe something does not authenticate it. History is littered with unpleasant examples of moments when the collective voice, ignorant or misled, has drowned out dissent. Wikipedia gropes towards a consensus, but that is very different from truth.

— Ben MacIntyre

He concludes by echoing a point made by Haisch:

Wikipedia is here to stay, gradually improving, and growing more influential by the minute. If there is a subject that you know and care about, then it is becoming an intellectual duty to ensure that the entry on Wikipedia is as accurate as possible...Wikipedia should always be taken with a pinch of salt. But the more we contribute and revise, the less salt we will need. We are all Wikipedists now.

— Ben MacIntyre

This is actually quite close to a comment left on my user talk page.

Daniel McNally

[edit]

McNally suggests the next sacred text may be written on a wiki. He's joking, but it's an intriguing thought.

Onion staffers

[edit]

My favorite vegatable explains why The United States of America is notable:

"At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world's oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition," Wales said. "According to our database, that's 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven."

Bill Thompson

[edit]

Wikipedia is, and will continue to be, a work in progress, a best effort by thousands of people to create an accurate, impartial and useful repository of human knowledge. As such it has succeeded in covering more topics, in more languages, than any other encyclopaedia. But it necessarily contains errors, some placed there deliberately by writers with a specific agenda and others simply mistakes that have gone unnoticed... The errors are not a reason to dismiss the site's usefulness or importance. While Wikipedia should never be the last place one looks for information about a specific topic, I increasingly find that it is the best starting point for an exploration of a new subject. However the nature of the "Wikipedia" itself seems to be shifting, largely as a result of policy decisions made since the Seigenthaler case, and this may well affect its continued usefulness...But now there are suggestions that a new architecture of control will be introduced for Wikipedia as a whole, if it proves successful when it is applied to the German-language site next month, and this could have far wider implications...The large number of control features that are being added to Wikipedia, raise an interesting question for all who care about the site and its content: when does the Wikipedia stop being a wiki and just become another website? After all, if the special thing about a wiki is that pages can be edited by any user, then introducing layer upon layer of editorial control must mean that at some point Wikipedia becomes no different from any other online publication where content is approved before it is displayed.

— Bill Thompson

Needless to say, I think that in focusing on the wikiness, Thompson has

  1. utterly forgotten that Wikipedia is a social experiment whose stated goal is to build an encyclopedia; given the experimental nature of Wikipedia, it's not written in stone that Wikipedia must be "forever wiki"--- being a "truly open wiki" might be appropriate for very small and youthful wikis, but obviously is not appropriate for one of the largest and most popular websites on Earth,
  2. hugely underestimated the problems posed by manipulation of information presented at Wikipedia to further some hidden agenda (to give just one very recent example, see Edits by Danras for my comments on a veritable farrago of misinformation inserted by a registered user, Danras (talk · contribs), into Black hole),
  3. hugely underestimated the unacceptable burden placed upon loyal contributors in
    • reverting bad edits, including vandalism (to give just one very recent example, see Recent bad edits by anons over approximately the past 15 days for my recent study of vandalism rates at Black hole, which shows little if any improvement from vandalization rates over last year), vanispamcruftvertisement, edit creep, and so on,
    • curbing problem editors, e.g. in AfDs, RfCs, RfAs, etc.,
    • dealing with retaliation by angry editors whose ambitions to manipulate information to further their personal agenda has been thwarted, and so on,
    • trying to contribute thoughtfully to tortuous policymaking discussions, and so on.

Nonetheless, Thompson suggests an alternative to the first tentative baby steps toward some kind of stabilization/bastion system in the German Wikipedia:

If Wikipedia can find a way to combine community participation with greater oversight, perhaps by encouraging every registered user to check changes and edits instead of leaving it largely to the central cabal of administrators, then they may be able to make the new approach work. Perhaps we should all be asked to check one random page for every ten or twenty we look at, giving our time to make the site work in return for better content?

— Bill Thompson

This thoughtless proposal completely ignores the fact that the burden already placed upon loyal contributors who have, to use the phrase of User:DV8 2XL, become "stakeholders", to try to control cruft and revert thoughtless bad edits, vandalism, and so forth, in articles they have worked very hard to improve, is already utterly unacceptable. This burden has in fact has driven many loyal contributors out of the Wikipedia entirely, particularly experienced contributors with expert knowledge of some highly technical or otherwise challenging field of scholarship, i.e. the very contributors Wikipedia most needs to deploy during the promised Year of Quality; see User:Dbuckner/Expert rebellion. This proposal also completely overlooks the fact, which I should think would be utterly obvious, that having absolutely no interest in or knowledge about most of the often bizarre topics covered in random Wikipedia articles (e.g. obscure sports stars or pop music groups), I cannot be expected to "check" articles on such topics. Even more to the point, how on Earth is a random Wikipedia to be expected to "check" gtr-related articles? From talk page discussions (and much prior experience in newsgroups), it is very well established that the best we could expect is that such readers acknowledge their own bafflement and decline to make any changes on the grounds that they have no idea how to improve the article. At worst, there is a certainly positive probability that some reader will make a very bad guess, incorrectly "correcting" [sic] an article, as in this edit at 00:57, 13 August 2006 to Black hole, in which 24.77.216.252 (talk · contribs · WHOIS) (the shawcable.net anon from near Kelowna, British Columbia) changed a correct statement to an incorrect statement. Hmm... bad example, checking more recent contribs shows this anon has established a clear pattern of both POV-pushing edits and vandalism.

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