to increase everyone else’s ability about media literacy. That to me is the real problem here.

Quite true, Tim, but what would you propose as a solution?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Linux!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

“John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.”

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…

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

I can see how some people would have a problem with that.