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When Wikipedia Fails
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jul 10, 2006 07:13 PM
from the just-as-many-edits-on-the-right-side-of-the-table dept.
from the just-as-many-edits-on-the-right-side-of-the-table dept.
PetManimal writes "Frank Ahrens of The Washington Post looks at how Wikipedia stumbles when entries for controversial people are altered by partisan observers. Case in point: Enron's Kenneth Lay, who died of natural causes last week, shortly after being sentenced to prison. His Wikipedia entry was altered repeatedly to include unfounded rumors that he had killed himself, or the stress from his trial had caused the heart attack. From the article: '... Here's the dread fear with Wikipedia: It combines the global reach and authoritative bearing of an Internet encyclopedia with the worst elements of radicalized bloggers. You step into a blog, you know what you're getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.'"
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How much editorial oversight is enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some will say that IMDb has the luxury of doing this, being owned by Amazon. But IMDb has been online since before there really was World Wide Web. It was started in the Usenet newsgroups back in 1990 and didn't get a web interface until a Welsh grad student built one in 1993. They have always exercised editorial oversight and did so even back when they were a loose group of volunteers with no funding to speak of.
It used to be that IMDb's structure made it less than nimble in responding to breaking news because of an involved and complicated build process. But over the years, more modularization and granularity have been built into their systems. But even if they're right on the forefront of a news event, their editors and data managers are scrutinizing what becomes part of their "official" record.
Now, people try to trick IMDb, flood them with wrong facts and bad info. Sometimes a bit gets by their editors. But the bits still have to go by an editor before they become publicly visible. AFAICT, this isn't the case with WikiPedia and that is its fatal flaw. And it's not just the wackos and those with an agenda that need to be guarded against. More damage can be done by a cadre of well-meaning fools than a handful of agitators. And it seems that even if they need to defend their systems against the axe grinders, they need to put double the effort into defending against fools.
Maybe I'm comparing apples to oranges since IMDb is a lot more narrow in scope than WikiPedia. But they're both large repositories of user-submitted information, they both started as volunteer projects, and they're both widely regarded as great resources. The difference is that IMDb has always exercised more editorial oversight before letting user submissions go live, and IMO, that makes it more trustworthy. Perhaps Wikipedia should take a page from IMDb's book.
- Greg
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
Authoritativeness of Britannica is more a perception than reality. Read the entries from the 80's on communism or from 70's on homosexuality. It was not as unbiased or authoritative as one might have expected. For all its failings, and there are many, with Wikipedia you get to know the other point of view and controversial topics are clearly highlighted (eg. LTTE, Taliban etc).
Parent
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Movies are easy to get right - it's politics and religion and controversial stuff that's hard to do well. You can't get the sheer volume of stuff that Wikipedia has by reviewing everything. Wikipedia is growing at a rate significantly faster than a human can read - no one person could read it all - much less review it.
Wikipedia grows by 50,000 articles a month. If your hypothetical reviewer reviewed a couple of articles a day - Wikipedia would need over 1,000 reviewers - some of whom would have to be experts in extremely narrow fields. It's all very well to have a few movie buffs keep track of a few dozen movie facts per day - but the only way to handle a problem the size of Wikipedia is to have the general public do the reviewing as well as the writing - which is precisely what happens.
Parent
It has safeguards already. (Score:5, Interesting)
First, you have to remember that important article are hit thousands of times by various people, and since everyone has ability to edit, problems can often be quickly cleaned up. I feel that slashdot proves that if you though enough geeks at something, truth comes to the surface quickly.
Second, Wikipedia strongly supports citing sources. Try moving around Wikipedia, and you will soon find a header stating that "this article needs sources" and basically a warning that it may contain gibberish. When you are doing things of importance, you should always check sources. Especially when dealing with something like Wikipedia. This is also an advantage Wikipedia: unlike most encyclopedias, where you have to go find the sources, Wikipedia is point and click.
Wikipedia is the the greatest proof that the Market Place of Ideas works. It shows that when you throw enough ideas together, the truth will survive. Though we may have unfortunate events like the one in the article, almost all information is accurate, and problems are quickly solved.
Parent
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough? (Score:5, Informative)
There is just too much stuff to do that methodically. 50,000 articles are added every month - just think about how many people would have be there to check them all!
Instead there are a few parallel 'top-down' efforts to make an extra-high-quality core by picking the key articles in every major subject area and flagging the stable versions. One effort is thinking in terms of a printed paper version of Wikipedia - another is looking into doing a CD-ROM version. The articles that make it into these special collections are carefully vetted and tagged - so you know that there is a stable 'known good' version backing up the latest version. However, these barely scratch the surface of the problem.
Additionally, there is a bottom-up process by which article authors can attempt to get their articles recognised for high quality. You first nominate your article for 'peer review' - reviewers monitor this list and come along to check your article. If you pass you can go on to request 'Good Article' status - another round of reviews. Next you can try for the coveted "Featured article" status (there are just over 1000 of these so far) - you get pummeled by English majors and pedants of every stripe - if you pass that then you can try to get your article into 'Article of the Day' - with yet another round of reviews.
Yet another layer is the 'Portal' system. Check out 'Portal:Automobile' for example - it covers the subset of Wikipedia articles about cars. Many portals have their own quality assurance methods and standards enforcement groups.
These quality processes work well - but there just aren't enough reviewers to effectively check the 1.2 million English language articles - let alone all of the ones written in French, Portugese...etc. Remember - English language Wikipedia is growing at a rate faster than any human can read. Nobody will ever be able to read all of it - even if they make it's their life's work.
Parent
Too recent & controversial for an encyclopedia (Score:5, Interesting)
Things that are NOT recent but ARE controversial ('Religion' or 'Area 51'for example) are generally well written, correct and take a carefully neutral stance. Things that are recent but NOT controversial (say "2006 World Cup Soccer") are well reported immediately and bang up to date with all the right facts.
It's the intersection of recent and controversial that messes up the system because too many people are editing at once and a lot of them are nut jobs. Once the topic gets old or becomes uncontroversial, the lunatic fringe loses interest and good writing can take place.
On the other hand, if you want to know the engine capacity of a 1963 Austin Min
i or the number of casualties in the RAF Faulds explosion or the exact nature o
f the student prank involving the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge or the size of a
litter of European Red Squirrels - things that I consult an encyclopedia for rather than a newspaper - then there is no other place (on the web or otherwise) to touch what Wikipedia has done.
Re:Too recent & controversial for an encyclope (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Too recent & controversial for an encyclope (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
The rules are useless (Score:5, Interesting)
And how many Wikipedia authors follow these guidelines? From what I see, most have not even read them. Wikipedia encourages folks to jump in and start editing. Stopping to learn the rules is an optional step usually skipped.
And even if an author is motivated to read the rules, they're so complicated and disorganized, it's impossible to get a grasp on most of them.
Even when authors know the rules, they often don't have the background to apply them. When I used to play copy editor on WP, I would try to get authors to rewrite stuff that was clearly speculative — except to the author! One guy had written that a certain comic book character was obviously based on another character in a famous short story. The connection wasn't at all obvious to me, and he had no source for this information — he was just stating his own opinion. But I had a hell of a time convincing him to reword his statement: it was obvious to him what the facts were, and that was that.
One other note: you talk about "the Wiki [sic] community's guidelines" as if these rules somehow express a consensus of a large group of people. They do not. There is, in fact, little in the way of consensus building at Wikipedia. Most processes, including rule-making, are dominated by a few people. Sometimes those few people are just whoever's managed to bully everybody else into going away.
Parent
Re:Too recent & controversial for an encyclope (Score:5, Insightful)
I would agree that Wikipedia is poor at reporting stories that are both recent AND controversial - but to be fair, I don't think those are the kinds of things you should be looking up in an encyclopedia anyway.
The comment above is just the sort of comment that deserves a few 'insightful' mod points. Sometimes, pointing out the blindingly obvious is difficult when people so desperately want things to be something other than what they are. Wikipedia is, at best, something *like* an encyclopedia, and as such should serve similar purposes. Some people think that somehow there is a way to take the human element and passion out of a user-contributed site, or any site, or any work or endeavor of humankind for that matter. There isn't. Let us simply understand that you can't have the factual accuracy and neutrality of an encyclopedia for something that occurred yesterday; technology alters the quantity and speed of information, not its quality. If you want neutrality, you must wait for cooler (and further removed) heads to prevail.
Parent
This article explained (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Troll#Attent ion-seeking_trolls [wikipedia.org]
Troll article -> Slashdot links to it -> Lots of pageviews -> More ad clicks -> Profit
Parent
Square peg, round hole. (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's significant controversey, it'll usually get its own section on a page.
Re:Square peg, round hole. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
I'm not buying it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know it's not a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. It's a WIKIpedia.
You know anyone, including you, can edit it.
Whenever you read up on a controversial topic, you expect controversial results... would a traditional encyclopedia even HAVE information about some enron executive? I doubt it.
Let's not make controversy where there is none.. wikipedia is a stunning example of what the internet is good at.
WP is self-correcting (Score:5, Insightful)
The mainstream media are almost equally susceptible to being hacked -- even if you don't follow wingnuts like Rush Limbaugh or the insane propaganda and political fart-lighting on Fox News, it's not hard to spot gross errors or oversights in news reporting. "Unbiased" news doesn't exist, investigative reporting isn't anymore, and the media circus is just that -- a circus. Wikipedia may be raw, uncensored, or wrong, but at least it tends to correct itself rapidly.
For what it's worth, the science articles are rapidly becoming the most comprehensive archive of science knowledge ever aimed at the general public. (Of course the refereed literature is larger, but it's not a reference work for the layperson).
There's an expression that idiots don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet is a great resource. Wikipedia has been very good for helping me find new things to be interested in, but it's not the end solution. If anything it's the beginning and the beginning only. I use Wikipedia to find out that I want to learn more about a subject, and from there, once I have had a chance to consult or read from true experts then I can make my judgement.
Unable to understand that apples are not oranges (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, people think in metaphors. Well, that is not so bad in itself, but people often seem unable to get beyond the metaphor and understand that some things are not exactly like anything they are familiar with. Case in point, how many people equate hacking into a website with breaking into a house? Or infringing on a copyright with stealing a car? This is just another case of people unable or unwilling to appreciate that wikipedia is unique and cannot be treated like a traditional encyclopedia.
Finkployd
The best summary I've read (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2005/12/16 [penny-arcade.com]
I think it's valid criticism for non-technical articles. As noted by others, wikipedia kicks ass for noncontroversial, primarily technical topics.
Except it's not valid (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, this very set of arguments as to why wikipedia's system "doesn't work" was prompted by an incident of wikipedia's system working. Tycho tried to post false information, and Wikipedia rejected this. And Tycho got pissy and went and complained about Wikipedia on his blog.
Now given, Tycho's false information was awesome; the ELOTH:TES stuff that Wikipedia rejected is truly hilarious, and now that it's been moved to its own wiki [pbwiki.com] (where it probably should have been in the first place), it's turned into a collaborative project in its own right, as if Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" conspiracy had had as their goal to parody fantasy novels.
But it didn't belong on Wikipedia. And the incident in which it was removed from Wikipedia itself neatly refutes the complaints that the incident inspired Tycho to level against Wikipedia.
The first complaint is that "Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions... all sources of information are not of equal value... I believe there is such a thing as expertise." I don't think it's very hard to read between the lines here; we already know Tycho is pissed off because some "persistent idiot" obliterated his contributions. It's not very hard to imagine that the real issue here is that Tycho (who certainly is a person with expertise) thinks he as a source of information is of value, and the Wikipedia hivemind does not. But Tycho himself shows that the things wikipedia values are more valuable than "expertise"-- Wikipedia values facts, neutrality and whenever possible rigor, and ignores authority. If we accepted "expertise" or appeals to authority, then we'd be obligated to accept Tycho as a source of information just cuz he's a real smart person with a real popular blog. And then Wikipedia would have a series of articles about a fantasy novel franchise and ill-fated 1980s children's TV show which never existed.
Second off, Tycho issues the complaint that Wikipedia's "errors get fixed eventually" principle isn't very useful if you don't know whether the errors have been fixed yet. Simply looking at a wikipedia page, you have no way to know whether you're looking at a cleanly vetted, accurate bunch of information, or if your pageload just happened by random coincidence to fall in that 30-second gap of space between a vandal entering a statement that Ken Lay committed suicide and a watchlister rving it. This is a much more serious and substantial complaint, and one which is a serious problem for the idea of Wikipedia as an information source. The lesson to be learned here is of course that you shouldn't treat wikipedia as a primary source but rather a starting point for further information, and if the information you're taking from wikipedia is important you need to check the references like a hawk. But in the end, it still isn't a real problem-- as Tycho has shown us. After all, as Tycho found when he tried to introduce false information, that little gap of time where the Wikipedia Wave Function hasn't yet collapsed and pageloads return false information is strikingly small. This is generally not a matter of errors taking months to get fixed. It is sometimes measured in minutes or seconds. The probability of hitting at a bad moment is small enough we can effectively ignore it, unless we have some kind of ulterior motives and are just trying to make Wikipedia look bad.
Parent
"The encyclopedia that Slashdot built." (Score:5, Insightful)
They're insidiously opinionated. Instead of saying wasabi is "fried with peas," they say it is "considered quite tasty with fried peas." Gee, "tasty" is completely objective I guess, not a matter of personal, ahem, taste, at all. Someone tries to argue them down, but they know they're "right," after all they learned C++ when they were 10.
They miss the forest for the trees. The article on AIDS has wonderful information on the disease's origins, treatment and spread throughout the world. Too bad there's no fucking organization to anything in the article, and the section titled, "Global epidemic" is precisely redundant with the one named, "Current status." It's like the typical geek's desk, awash in code printouts and spec sheets. There's good stuff in there, somewhere (he's sure) but he'll be damned if he can make any sense out of it (but hey it's like a puzzle and those are fun). He should just print one more copy instead of checking if it's already there, and organizing his shit.
They don't know how to write. If the spelling and language mechanics are correct, then it's good writing (which is like saying that any code that compiles is good code). There's no rule in Strunk & White about too many clauses in one sentence! Thus, the writing is perfect. Decent style, flowing sentences, consistent tone and voice are only for the weak-minded; hackers are made of sterner stuff (well, mentally).
They're obsessed with dumb trivia. Every article must have its "In popular culture" section, just to prove that they, like Ken Jennings, know stupid references to everything.
They don't know jackshit about page layout. Does every table need a full set of borders? Must LaTeX equations be fucking huge? Why can't editors use a color wheel (or common sense) to choose nicely matching colors? Deitel & Deitel is not the standard on typesetting or formatting; use a textbook that had an editor as a guide on page layout, like "Fundamentals of Aerodynamics" by Anderson. Clean tables without distracting borders, equations modestly marked by centering and italics (no huge font necessary), headings used only when needed. It's black and white because colors would be superfluous. But it's fun on Wikipedia to add superfluous formatting, it's just like adding new features to software. Oooh, shiney! Instead of featuritis, it's sectionitist, bolditis, table-itis.
So that's what I think ails Wikipedia in a nutshell. Many of these are addressed by Wikipedia policies, but when even Wikipedia's founder (Jimbo Wales) dislikes following them [wikipedia.org], how will they ever gain decent implementation? Especially when any editor with half a brain who does support them is just another uncool, uptight elitist who should be ignored [kuro5hin.org]. It's no wonder that Wikipedia today is still a nightmare of good information. Citing Wikipedia at the college level is still academic suicide. Unless their policies and people change throughout the chain of command, Wikipedia will never evolve to a real authoritative source that is a true encyclopedia. It's fun to read, but only as accurate and objective as the rest of the internet.
Old news... (Score:5, Informative)
As you may know, on this day, Bonaparte made a coup d'État and thus became known as "Napoléon"...
Every time a single person (or institution) is in charge of the writing / editing of any article, a risk exists, and that's why a) encyclopaedias are not scholar references b) science suppose peer review.
Re:I am no nut but... (Score:5, Funny)
Now you are. Congratulations on the shiny new hat.
Parent
Re:I've always been ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hearing the tech reporting on the news is pretty scary. I imagine it's similarly painful for experts in other fields to hear their field discussed by reporters.
Parent
Re:Add a stability value to a page? (Score:5, Informative)
Look at the little row of tabs at the top of every Wikipedia page. See the one marked 'history'? Click on that. You are now looking at a complete history of edits to that page. The handle of everyone who edited it, the date and time it was edited and the commit comment they attached to it. Isn't that enough?
You can click the radio buttons to the left and get a side-by-side comparison of the article as it was at any times in the past or you can see the entire article exactly as it was on any given date. You can click on the author's name and send them a message on their 'Talk' page if you want to ask about why they changed whatever they changed. You can go to the 'Talk' page for the article itself and see comments from the various editors - heck, you can even get a history of the edits to the Talk page!
Generally, if there are a lot of 'rv: vandalism' entries on the history page (eg on the "Computer" article that gets vandalised a lot) - then perhaps the article itself is pretty stable - but gets a lot of editing history because people are fixing up the actions of complete idiots. If on the other hand there is some kind of 'edit war' between two editors - then this is still a controversial subject - so treat the article with care. If the article had a busy period for some days or weeks - but then all the subsequent edits were spelling fixes, addition of foreign language versions and stuff like that - then this is a stable and trustworthy article.
The number of References at the bottom of the article is another good gauge of quality.
Parent