![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Bad Information on Wikipedia
I just read an article by John Seigenthaler, Sr. who was the “victim” of an erroneous biography on Wikipedia. The guy complains about his reputation being tarnished by an anonymous person who he can’t even effectively track down or punish. And it’s intended to be all “Woe is me!” with a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about how bad it all is.
But the thing that really strikes me here is that his problem of Wikipedia is simply one of needing a paradigm shift to actually understand how it all works. Instead of getting all grumpy and contacting a lawyer, he could have simply logged onto Wikipedia (hell, you don’t even need to sign in or create an account if you don’t want to) and actually made the appropriate corrections himself! Thereby saving everybody the headache of hearing him have to bellyache about the whole thing.
Every article I’ve read which has been critical of Wikipedia always takes this same angle: of the beleagured scientist, author or intellectual who comes out of his ivory tower every ten years to use the internet, and discovers - Lo! There’s a factual error in Wikipedia! And then before you know it, they’ve convened a fucking press conference to denounce the technology. When instead, they could have done what the rest of us who actually make sites like Wikipedia work routinely do: they could have fixed it and made it better!
In a nutshell, the weaknesses of this type of technology (or approach to technology) is precisely the same as it’s strength. It’s just a matter of what you’re ready to focus on and do about it.
PS. Here’s Siegenthaler’s entry on Wikipedia, if anybody is interested in mucking it up again (not that I advocate such things), or conceivably you could just read about him. Also, here’s a decent article examining a more balanced view of the issue as well as the very nature of truth itself via News.com
December 4th, 2005 at 8:12 pm
Though I’m sympathetic with both his problem and his politics, it sounds like he wrote the current version entirely by himself.
December 4th, 2005 at 8:42 pm
Instead of people being held accountable for the truth of what they publish, it is now our responsibility to edit anything erroneous (or libelous) that has been published about us?
I can see how some people would have a problem with that.
December 4th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
Did I anywhere say people shouldn’t be responsible for what they say or write? What I’m saying is that litigation isn’t an intelligent way to ensure quality of information in a forum where any and everyone has the ability to enter information freely.
December 4th, 2005 at 10:32 pm
everything’s true, nothing is missing!
i love wikipedia because it’s out of control. if i want regulation i’ll prostrate myself before the king.
observe the trees of the forest, the birds and butterflies. who regulates?
so much happier than we are they
December 4th, 2005 at 10:55 pm
Yeah, I mean, I LOVE Wikipedia. I think it’s brilliant, and I think the type of thing described in this article is a VERY SMALL price to pay in exchange for an enormously powerful tool with typically extremely high quality of information. And any time the information isn’t high quality, you have the opportunity to make it so.
December 4th, 2005 at 10:59 pm
The other thing I wonder about… in the article, it quotes the “erroneous” Wikipedia entry as saying:
I don’t personally know anything about Seigenthaler, but *maybe* it’s even factually true to suggest that “for a brief time” he was thought to have been involved. So long as one single person somewhere thought that for a brief period of time, it’s technically accurate. Isn’t it? And the phrase “directly involved” could be interpreted any number of ways, not all of which finger him as a conspirator. I know I’m splitting hairs here, but I think there’s inherently a need to somehow determine what facts and truth really are…
December 5th, 2005 at 12:48 am
What facility does Wiki have to prevent edit/re-edit/edit/re-edit wars? I am just not familiar enough with Wiki to know, so please forgive me if this is commonly known.
I ask because if there is no such facility it seems that the most controversial ideas (being the most interesting ones!) will be much more susceptible to this sort of corruption than the uncontroversial (and in a sense “dead”) ideas. Imagine an entry on the holocaust by Elie Weisel, edited by von Ribbentropp, re-edited by Weisel, etc., and compare that to an entry on the definition of a protein. On any given day would you trust both entries equally?
If not then it seems to me that Wiki really provides only the lowest common denominator of information (at the level where the information is not disputed and the inquiry is essentially dead), and only a jumping off point for more interesting (live!) discussions, which must be found elsewhere.
Thoughts?
December 5th, 2005 at 12:55 am
Mr. Seigenthaler, Sr. is perfectly right to want to know who has been defaming his character in a public forum, whether he can swoop in and change what was published or not. The fact remains that the article was presenting false information (his living in the Soviet Union, that he was suspected to have been involved in assassinations) for months, and someone put it there, either having not bothered to research what they posted or being purposefully malicious.
We’ll probably never know which it was, and neither will he. That is what seems to bother him.
Wikipedia is great, useful, and entirely unaccountable to anything but the community. It is wonderfully democratic, relying on oversight by the community to function. The trade off is that personal responsibility cannot be enforced, so people get burned if the eyes of the community aren’t ever vigilant. Articles that the community doesn’t pay mind to slip through the cracks.
That’s the price some people will pay for the rest of us to have the freedom and safety of anonymous posting.
Sucks to be them if they don’t like it.
December 5th, 2005 at 1:09 am
Just a small amplification, I haven’t looked it up but I wonder what the Wiki definition of “occult” is and how it compares to the information available here.
December 5th, 2005 at 1:14 am
Paul, I’m not intimately familiar with the inner workings of their system, so I can’t adequately answer that question. I know that pages can be “locked” if such things happen, but I’m not really sure what the protocol is in those situations, or who decides which version it should be locked at. I’m guessing in situations like that, it’s not simply one person’s word versus another’s, but a process of community review.
There’s a pretty lengthy page about the process on Wikipedia here if anybody feels like delving into the specifics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protected_page
That said, I’ve gone in myself and added things to various Wikipedia pages only to have other people take them out later. So in a sense, the person who is the most vigilant (or who is I guess invested with more authority in the system) ends up being the winner. So in one sense, it ends up being not especially fair or equal either.
I don’t know what the solution is really, but I know that from my experience, the information quality is usually very very good, and they must be doing *something* right - whatever the flaws - to have it reached such a high level of quality in so many diverse areas.
In any event, to clarify, I’m again not saying that Seigenthaler or anybody else shouldn’t take his approach. I more was using that as a rhetorical launching point for a discussion of the conflict of paradigms which is occurring in this area of information control. I think in the end that the law is far far behind in dealing with these types of things - and if the law is so far behind, what other options do people have? Those are the questions I was hoping to discuss.
December 5th, 2005 at 1:24 am
Hi Tim,
I guess the conflict I feel in Wiki is between “democratic” and “authoratative” governance. If anyone can post anything, that is “democratic” in a narrow sense of the word. But if all entries are, say “peer-reviewed” by a “community,” I think that is a completely different thing, and in fact not much different than the Encyclopedia Brittanica other than the benefit of having millions of sources to choose from. Who decides who is part of the “community?”
But if Wiki is instead “democratic” in the narrow way I am using that term, I don’t see how to keep it uncorruptible. How about an entry on the 2004 presidential election. Given a million contributions, would the entry end up being fair, or accurate? And if Wiki were to attain a position of real influence, does anyone doubt that millions and millions of dollars would be spent trying to shape its entries?
Just thinking out loud…
Paul
December 5th, 2005 at 1:33 am
if people like “plautus_satire” are allowed to write information on the wikipedia, then you know it can’t be totally legitimate source of information
December 5th, 2005 at 1:34 am
I suppose that to really evaluate Wiki we need to study Wiki’s policies regarding what is included and what is rejected. Tim’s link looks like a great starting point.
December 5th, 2005 at 1:37 am
Well the key thing in my opinion is that people not rely on any one source of information. I think there are places where a democratic Wikipedia-style system works best and places where authoritative systems work better. I think they can and should co-exist and that people should draw from both if they want to see all sides of an issue.
I think a major part of what needs to happen to address all this is a great deal of education in media literacy. Especially in terms of where information comes from, how to track down sources, spot bias, etc. I think part of the greatness of Wikipedia is that it essentially forces these questions to the forefront where they might never be discussed otherwise.
December 5th, 2005 at 1:40 am
A good example of where authoritative and community-oriented content could work together really well.
A company puts out a product, and with it releases certain technical specifications or a manual of how the product works. And then individual people extend that product in new ways and document their process and results. It adds to the usefulness of the product, without ever diminishing the “official” information regarding it.
December 5th, 2005 at 1:44 am
Linux!
December 5th, 2005 at 2:00 am
Right, and I think that open-source development philosophy is where Wikipedia comes from as well. The sticky problem of course is that there’s no central authoritative source to complement all the community development, since there are so many different subject areas.
Maybe a better example of how this problem is handled though is something like Answers.com, which automatically takes results from Wikipedia, but also from “authoritative” sites with locked-down sets of information. And then you can compare them all side-by-side. You mentioned “occult” earlier - here’s their link for that:
http://www.answers.com/occult
Maybe that’s not the best one though, because there are others which use results from Britannica and from other encyclopedia sources. If you hunt around, you should be able to see it.
December 5th, 2005 at 2:12 am
Come to think of it, we needn’t go so far afield to look at a site which compares authoritative with community-authored content. Just look at my site. I get the ball rolling, and then other people add in information to it which enhances it and often corrects it. Part of what I like about the blog format is that it shows vividly the process by which all this occurs, rather than just simply a finished product. Wikipedia’s “talk” page for any article serves essentially this same purpose, although I usually don’t find them nearly as useful.
December 5th, 2005 at 2:25 am
I agree! Which I guess is why I prefer your site to Wiki for these types of discussions. You don’t discuss “lowest common denominator” ideas, you reach much higher, which generates discussion about concepts that are still “alive.”
I’ll check out Wiki’s “talk” page, was not aware of that.
December 5th, 2005 at 2:31 am
Well, honestly, I think Wikipedia has some really fantastically high-level discussions in certain areas. It’s by no means *always* lowest common denominator.
December 5th, 2005 at 2:43 am
I’m sorry to belabor the point, but in what areas are there “fantastically high-level discussions” on Wiki? Could you post an example?
December 5th, 2005 at 2:51 am
I’ll find some tomorrow. I have to wrap up some non-site related work, which I’ve been juggling all night.
December 5th, 2005 at 3:48 pm
Wiki and blogs have entirely different focus.
A blog is designed for holding discussions. A wiki is designed to build a document. A document that may be corrected and expanded upon over time, but not a discussion. Sure, discussions happen on wiki, and more or less permanent information happens in blogs, but each has its own goal.
The question of holding someone accountable or fixing the information has two different sides, two different answers. The victim is best advised to correct the information. The culprit should understand he is responsible for his words.
Most wiki systems that I’ve looked into have an automatic backup, and if a page is erased or defaced, rolling it back is no problem at all. Some also record IP addresses of those who edit pages, so posting libel is risky.
December 5th, 2005 at 6:19 pm
yahoo just posted an article stating that wikipedia is going to have people register to post information, but that corrections can be made anonymously.
December 5th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
Can you provide a link Alistair? As far as I know, that’s essentially the same policy as is in existence right now…
December 5th, 2005 at 7:26 pm
tim, i just got that off the yahoo headlines.
SAN FRANCISCO - Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is tightening submission rules after a prominent journalist complained that an article falsely implicated him in the Kennedy assassinations.
Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering.
The change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler, a one-time administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, complained in an op-ed published in USA Today that a biography of him on Wikipedia claimed he had been suspected in the assassinations of the former attorney general and his brother, President John F. Kennedy.
i copied this article from the yahoo technology news section. my apologies to the yahoo copyright lawyers. the file is still available on yahoo. it wouldn`t let me copy a link.
December 5th, 2005 at 9:56 pm
I don’t get how this solves the “problem” here though. So what if you can track the person who originally created the article? Unless you’re tracking everything said by everybody, then the problem is exactly the same.
December 5th, 2005 at 10:04 pm
Thus the eternal problem with democratic structures:
Personal responsibility
If no one feels responsible to the system, or at least considers the age-old phrase, “Do unto others, as you would have done unto you”, then chaos infiltrates and destroys the democratic system. This can be applied to the US, and how democracy died shortly after Washington. No responsibility in those who control the system, and it reverts to authoritarian-based systems to avoid a collapse into complete anarchy (see: problems after War of 1812 up to Civil War).
December 5th, 2005 at 10:59 pm
yeah.. according to wired… registration is now required… never posted to wikipedia before. was it a totally open system before?
December 5th, 2005 at 11:59 pm
Here’s the link:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69759,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2
I sort of see this as a crock of shit though. Requiring people to register to post on Wikipedia is great, but that’s like sticking a damn that’s about to explode from the world’s largest tsunami. I mean, if people want to post information that is bad or wrong or whatever, they have a BILLION opportunities to do so all over the internet. This measure does absolutely nothing to stem that tide.
In any event, I guess I realized just now why I don’t see Seigenthaler’s complaints as being all that noteworthy: namely, that I’ve spent so much time on the fringes of accepted knowledge whether its conspiracy theory or occult or paranormal or whatever, that I’m absolutely used to taking every single thing I read anywhere with a grain of salt and backing up with multiple sources and tracking down original sources on various things. It just seems sort of commonplace for me to do that at this point, but then I do spend most of my time researching on the internet.
I still do think that a better measure isn’t to restrict people’s ability to speak or post or whatever, but to increase everyone else’s ability about media literacy. That to me is the real problem here.
December 6th, 2005 at 12:16 am
Quite true, Tim, but what would you propose as a solution?
December 6th, 2005 at 12:22 am
This… this is the solution. People talking about the issues at stake. Debating it, researching it, sharing ideas. Also, as far as I know in Canada, media literacy is a required course in public schooling. That’s way past due here as well. (Although public schooling is a whole other issue)
December 7th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
[…] ir ranking algorithm (hopefully) and user popularity. Also, with the recent brouhaha over bad content on Wikipedia, I think there is a mental space that has bee […]