Scripting News: What's wrong with Wikipedia (Scripting News)
paulbradshaw
· 1 year ago
A sound idea. Wikipedia's biggest weakness is when it gets personal, and that tends to be about people entries. Perhaps also a general disclaimer for biographies that says 'As this is an entry about a person, contributors may make unsubstantiated personal attacks' or similar.
tdaonp (Henk de Kruyff)
· 1 year ago
It's the way of humans: if anyone sticks his or her head above the parrapet, it's going to get shot at. At first i thought that the democratic principles on wikipedia would balance out, and it should. But as soon as money starts playing a role the balance is gone for ever. I hope they realise in time what a potentially fantastic product they are screwing up if they disturb the balance!
John Minnihan
· 1 year ago
The fact that edits can be made anonymously is the key here. It is no secret that many (most? I have no hard data) elementary & secondary schools have banned students from citing Wikipedia as an authoritative source for reports & projects.
Wikipedia could take two steps to fix a lot of this.
1) Make all edits attributable to real people. There may be difficulties implementing this in a non-gameable manner, but we could get close.
and 2) Allow each Living Bio page to contain a Rebuttal/Clarification section at the bottom. That would be the area where the real person being BIO'ed (see #1 for controlling this) could add his/her own take on parts of the bio that they felt were inaccurate, incomplete or simply misleading.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
You can't actually edit Dave's page on Wikipedia anonymously: you have to register, as the page is "semi-protected" (in wikipedia parlance). Of course, you can register just to edit the article, but this tactic and sock puppeting are easy to spot.
Dave, what exactly are you unhappy about?
Derrick Schneider
· 1 year ago
Outside your main topic: For getting a really in-depth analysis of BSG, I highly recommend the televisionwithoutpity recaps. Jacob (Jakob?) does the recap but weaves in extensive knowledge of theology and mythology (if you separate the two) and very sharp observations about very subtle things. Fascinating reading, even on its own.
Marion
· 1 year ago
I think you're misinterpreting why your absence in Wikipedia articles has had a negative affect on your career.
It's not because people look in Wikipedia, don't find you, and figure you had nothing to do with any of those technologies.
It's because everybody knows you had something to do with them, but interpret the fact that you're not mentioned as evidence that you have a lot of enemies.
And people tend to steer clear of those who develop a lot of enemies.
dave
· 1 year ago
That's quite possible, I've considered that, but people generally don't explain this stuff, I'm left guessing.
But I have seen what you describe. I once had a meeting at a big publisher who met one of my anonymous detractors at a conference, who gave him an earful about what a charletan I am, how I claim credit for his and other people's work and how no one likes me. He wouldn't tell me who it was, and seemed to blame me for dragging him into this mess. Of course I didn't drag him into the mess, but it's unavoidable that people blame you for this kind of stuff.
This has happened over and over and will continue, and of course it will happen to many other people. I think we can do a lot to ameliorate it. Wikipedia is a good place to start, imho.
WikiWatcher
· 1 year ago
Part of the problem with Wikipedia is the fact that, why there are some very good moderators and administrators, enough people can form a group that encourages "group-think". Bias does come into play, especially if you have a special interest group.
Case in point. The most offensive entry I have found on Wikipedia is not a person's bio or a political topic, but the entry for hallucinogen. If you look that word up in WP, they have changed the topic's entry to say "Psychedelics, dissociatives and deliriants". Reading it and reviewing the history, I've found somehow just a few people decided that the term "hallucinogen" was biased, and that it should be turned into the PC term "psychedelic", but yet the former term is used in Science Journals, Legal terminology and medical terminology. An encyclopedia is supposed to define a subject based on facts and other written terminology
Over the past year I see people changing the term and I think it's a case of (a) nobody from the science or pharmaceutical company deciding to challenge these terms and (b) a "WikiProject" devoted to people who enjoy and advocate using or decriminalization of those drugs.
I'm not judging people who decide to use those drugs, but that they are trying to actually change terminology that's in current use--that's what I find offensive. Bias tends to creep in a lot and it's more subtle.
"Based on the principle that one has the right to confront his accusers..."
And that, in a nutshell, is why you are wrong about Wikipedia. The golden principle that the entire thing works by is consensus: there is no place on Wikipedia for "confronting". Wikipedia is not a soapbox; it is not like this (and most) blogs, which are all about a single voice and a single opinion.
dave
· 1 year ago
Don't take it so literally.
How about the "right to rebut your accusers."
Or the "right to know who your accusers are."
For example, suppose Barack Obama edited HIllary Clinton's profile page.
We (and she) would have the right to know that the changes came from Obama because that would color the changes, and we would be able to decide for ourselves how likely they are accurate.
Even better would be if Hillary could rebut her own profile page, with her own version of her profile page. Then it would be clearly important that the reader know that they're reading a profile written by the person being profiled.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
This isn't the first time you've talked about Wikipedia in terms of "confronting" people, so I think I'm justified in asking why you're using that language.
But to move on from there, who's accusing you? I don't see anyone accusing you of anything. You make it sound like they're rewriting your Wikipedia entry to accuse you of being a terrible person. No one is, except perhaps the odd vandal who's entries quickly get deleted.
Your entry gives you proper credit for your achievements, according to the consensus of what they are. Now obviously - and I don't blame you for this - you think that the extent of your achievements is under-acknowledged.
You already have the option to write yourself a profile page: just not on Wikipedia, on here.
dave
· 1 year ago
I should have responded to your second post as well, sorry for that. This isn't about my profile Ian, it's about Wikipedia. I use it and the others as examples because I know the subject matter at a very intimate level, but the inaccuracies in those pieces are what make me question the authority of Wikipedia on subjects I don't know cold. I won't get into a discussion of particular pages Wikipedia, this piece is based on years of using the service, as I said very clearly up front, and am citing here by reference. If you want to continue this discussion please do so in your own space. Peace.
asdf
· 1 year ago
Do you want both a rebuttal page and an autobiographical page?
Perhaps biographies of living persons should include links to both.
ppearlman
· 1 year ago
so i wrote this a while back re knol and believe it implicitly points to some of wikipedia's weaknesses.... identity is central to the post and i stand by it still...
Dave's pointing to really hard problems for which there may not be perfect solutions.
There are benefits to the relative anonymity WP generally allows, especially since determined vandals could very likely get around an ID requirement.
It's tempting to add lots of tabs to each WP entry, including perhaps Dave's eye witness narrative tabs. Likewise, providing the living subjects of bio entries a way to point to a version of the article they think is right, or to provide their own counter testimony, sounds useful to me. But, maybe WP's reluctance to do this sort of thing is based in its goals of (1) sticking pretty strictly to the standard form of encyclopedias and (2) striving mightily to force people into coming to a consensus. I can see the value of that way of thinking; providing ways to give alternative views creates an escape valve that can lessen the pressure to come to agreement about what constitutes a neutral entry. But, when it comes to really problematic sorts of entries -- living bios, for example, especially of controversial people -- we may be discovering that consensus can't be created. If so, then WP needs some more non-traditional mechanisms to get to neutrality.
asdf
· 1 year ago
What is an eyewitness narrative but just another narrative to be disputed.
Eyewitnesses have been known to be unreliable, anyhow.
Hanan Cohen
· 1 year ago
Wikipedia has a policy on Biographies of living persons
I think you have brought up some great points about Wikipedia, and it's accountability / usability, especially for subjects an inquirer is totally in the blank about. The more you think about this, the more scary it becomes. I know I use Wikipedia almost every single day for these kinds of queries.
Penguin
· 1 year ago
"It has already come out that a gift to the Wikipedia Foundation will assure that your point of view dominates your profile page."
You have absolutely no proof of this, save perhaps for the allegations of a well-known crank about events that supposedly took place a few years ago. If this were true, why didn't he speak out at the time? Why did he wait for a sex scandal involving Jimmy Wales? Give me a break.
Anyway, back to the original problem. There is in reality nothing much new in Wikipedia's anonymity. The press is full of anonymous reporting. Most of what you read in newspapers is based on reports churned out by Reuters, Associated Press etc., whose journalists do not sign the papers. Ask anybody who has ever dealt with mistakes in a newspaper article: you're told that the error was made by Reuters, you call Reuters and they'll tell you that the error is from another office, and in practice nothing ever gets corrected.
The media is also full of people with axes to grind, and of groupthink. The person who signs a hostile column may or may not be the one who has something against you - journalists have bosses, newspapers have owners and advertisers, and so on.
"Make all edits attributable to real people."
Nobody has ever made a sensible proposition on how to implement this.
anonymous rock star
· 1 year ago
what a great comment.
with a sigh of relief i suddenly feel like i'm not the only one.
all kinds of unsubstantiated crap and impotent accusations masquerade as "encyclopedia truth" when it comes down to current movers and shakers.
the glorious volunteer army should beware lest they become the new Ministry of Truth.
webframp
· 1 year ago
i think it's been established that wikipedia has many issues, namely with accountability issues in my mind. it might be argued that if there was more accountability, it would have had a much different form of growth.
Steve
· 1 year ago
Wikipedia the process has always been more interesting to me than Wikipedia the product. The process seems to be more neutral in its coverage of technology and Science Fiction, and a bit less than objective elsewhere...
David Terei
· 1 year ago
I agree that somehow people need to be held accountable for the edits that they make on wikipedia but it seems a hard problem since the internet is anonymous. I personally like the way in which Citizendium has been setup which seems much closer to the opensource model since while anyone can change the code, you need it to be approved for acceptance.
In some respects, what you're pointing toward is what the Citizendium already does. We're a new project, but I think in the next few years you're going to see a lot more of us and a lot more considering the merits of our sort of project.
dave
· 1 year ago
Larry, thanks for checking in. I've received emails from Wales and one of the directors of the Wikipedia Foundation. Neither of them offered to help set the record straight in how Wikipedia covers my work, they were only interested in me changing the way they were covered on Scripting News. What a selfish group. The whole thing needs serious reforming.
lhenriquez
· 1 year ago
Dave
I'm working on a new online service that tries to address some of the issues you bring up in this post. Its not a wikipedia replacement, but instead a search/tagging/feed aggregation service that incorporates rating/ranking of information that may reside anyware. I'm curious if you have some specific suggestions as to how to address the issue of increasing the accuracy of information. The obvious tools such as voting on information, weighting votes based on the reputation of the voter, using implicit and explicit ranking mechanisms have been considered. I find that so called authoritative information sources such as NYT or various professional organizations have as much groupthink, bias, and downright error as the crowd sourced information, so there isn't an easy answer.
Domains such as science that have records of eventually getting close to the truth do so via testing theory with experimentation. This process is hard to duplicate in an online service. The question I'm asking myself is can one somehow link the practice of testing a hypothesis, providing evidence, and duplicating results to an online service?
This is a great article highlighting an unfortunate side of a "donate what you will"-style "encyclopedia. If you stick to areas like math, geographic info--where they've clearly done massive downloads of info--and lots of basic info/technical *subject* areas, I've found the info to be good. In some areas, the info is of limited usefulness due to having a predominance of entries which are, themselves, limited; what I'm thinking of is law-related entries, where I found many written from the point of view of British law which is of limited usefulness to me as an American. ;-)
But the entire "encyclopedia" idea falls down when you realize that it is based upon user submissions, and users may be complete...well, idiots, etc. ;-) I am sure that there ARE high-quality areas (as I noted), but that there are also low-quality/compromised-quality areas, and it is unclear to the casual user how this all sorts itself out.
All Comments
Wikipedia could take two steps to fix a lot of this.
1) Make all edits attributable to real people. There may be difficulties implementing this in a non-gameable manner, but we could get close.
and 2) Allow each Living Bio page to contain a Rebuttal/Clarification section at the bottom. That would be the area where the real person being BIO'ed (see #1 for controlling this) could add his/her own take on parts of the bio that they felt were inaccurate, incomplete or simply misleading.
Dave, what exactly are you unhappy about?
It's not because people look in Wikipedia, don't find you, and figure you had nothing to do with any of those technologies.
It's because everybody knows you had something to do with them, but interpret the fact that you're not mentioned as evidence that you have a lot of enemies.
And people tend to steer clear of those who develop a lot of enemies.
But I have seen what you describe. I once had a meeting at a big publisher who met one of my anonymous detractors at a conference, who gave him an earful about what a charletan I am, how I claim credit for his and other people's work and how no one likes me. He wouldn't tell me who it was, and seemed to blame me for dragging him into this mess. Of course I didn't drag him into the mess, but it's unavoidable that people blame you for this kind of stuff.
This has happened over and over and will continue, and of course it will happen to many other people. I think we can do a lot to ameliorate it. Wikipedia is a good place to start, imho.
Case in point. The most offensive entry I have found on Wikipedia is not a person's bio or a political topic, but the entry for hallucinogen. If you look that word up in WP, they have changed the topic's entry to say "Psychedelics, dissociatives and deliriants". Reading it and reviewing the history, I've found somehow just a few people decided that the term "hallucinogen" was biased, and that it should be turned into the PC term "psychedelic", but yet the former term is used in Science Journals, Legal terminology and medical terminology. An encyclopedia is supposed to define a subject based on facts and other written terminology
Over the past year I see people changing the term and I think it's a case of (a) nobody from the science or pharmaceutical company deciding to challenge these terms and (b) a "WikiProject" devoted to people who enjoy and advocate using or decriminalization of those drugs.
I'm not judging people who decide to use those drugs, but that they are trying to actually change terminology that's in current use--that's what I find offensive. Bias tends to creep in a lot and it's more subtle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Alexandra_D...
she prolly also wants her page to be different.
And that, in a nutshell, is why you are wrong about Wikipedia. The golden principle that the entire thing works by is consensus: there is no place on Wikipedia for "confronting". Wikipedia is not a soapbox; it is not like this (and most) blogs, which are all about a single voice and a single opinion.
How about the "right to rebut your accusers."
Or the "right to know who your accusers are."
For example, suppose Barack Obama edited HIllary Clinton's profile page.
We (and she) would have the right to know that the changes came from Obama because that would color the changes, and we would be able to decide for ourselves how likely they are accurate.
Even better would be if Hillary could rebut her own profile page, with her own version of her profile page. Then it would be clearly important that the reader know that they're reading a profile written by the person being profiled.
But to move on from there, who's accusing you? I don't see anyone accusing you of anything. You make it sound like they're rewriting your Wikipedia entry to accuse you of being a terrible person. No one is, except perhaps the odd vandal who's entries quickly get deleted.
Your entry gives you proper credit for your achievements, according to the consensus of what they are. Now obviously - and I don't blame you for this - you think that the extent of your achievements is under-acknowledged.
You already have the option to write yourself a profile page: just not on Wikipedia, on here.
Perhaps biographies of living persons should include links to both.
http://www.eightfatswine.com/view.aspx?bid=99
There are benefits to the relative anonymity WP generally allows, especially since determined vandals could very likely get around an ID requirement.
It's tempting to add lots of tabs to each WP entry, including perhaps Dave's eye witness narrative tabs. Likewise, providing the living subjects of bio entries a way to point to a version of the article they think is right, or to provide their own counter testimony, sounds useful to me. But, maybe WP's reluctance to do this sort of thing is based in its goals of (1) sticking pretty strictly to the standard form of encyclopedias and (2) striving mightily to force people into coming to a consensus. I can see the value of that way of thinking; providing ways to give alternative views creates an escape valve that can lessen the pressure to come to agreement about what constitutes a neutral entry. But, when it comes to really problematic sorts of entries -- living bios, for example, especially of controversial people -- we may be discovering that consensus can't be created. If so, then WP needs some more non-traditional mechanisms to get to neutrality.
Eyewitnesses have been known to be unreliable, anyhow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biograph...
You have absolutely no proof of this, save perhaps for the allegations of a well-known crank about events that supposedly took place a few years ago. If this were true, why didn't he speak out at the time? Why did he wait for a sex scandal involving Jimmy Wales? Give me a break.
Anyway, back to the original problem. There is in reality nothing much new in Wikipedia's anonymity. The press is full of anonymous reporting. Most of what you read in newspapers is based on reports churned out by Reuters, Associated Press etc., whose journalists do not sign the papers. Ask anybody who has ever dealt with mistakes in a newspaper article: you're told that the error was made by Reuters, you call Reuters and they'll tell you that the error is from another office, and in practice nothing ever gets corrected.
The media is also full of people with axes to grind, and of groupthink. The person who signs a hostile column may or may not be the one who has something against you - journalists have bosses, newspapers have owners and advertisers, and so on.
"Make all edits attributable to real people."
Nobody has ever made a sensible proposition on how to implement this.
with a sigh of relief i suddenly feel like i'm not the only one.
all kinds of unsubstantiated crap and impotent accusations masquerade as "encyclopedia truth" when it comes down to current movers and shakers.
the glorious volunteer army should beware lest they become the new Ministry of Truth.
In some respects, what you're pointing toward is what the Citizendium already does. We're a new project, but I think in the next few years you're going to see a lot more of us and a lot more considering the merits of our sort of project.
I'm working on a new online service that tries to address some of the issues you bring up in this post. Its not a wikipedia replacement, but instead a search/tagging/feed aggregation service that incorporates rating/ranking of information that may reside anyware. I'm curious if you have some specific suggestions as to how to address the issue of increasing the accuracy of information. The obvious tools such as voting on information, weighting votes based on the reputation of the voter, using implicit and explicit ranking mechanisms have been considered. I find that so called authoritative information sources such as NYT or various professional organizations have as much groupthink, bias, and downright error as the crowd sourced information, so there isn't an easy answer.
Domains such as science that have records of eventually getting close to the truth do so via testing theory with experimentation. This process is hard to duplicate in an online service. The question I'm asking myself is can one somehow link the practice of testing a hypothesis, providing evidence, and duplicating results to an online service?
-logan
www.henriquez.net
But the entire "encyclopedia" idea falls down when you realize that it is based upon user submissions, and users may be complete...well, idiots, etc. ;-) I am sure that there ARE high-quality areas (as I noted), but that there are also low-quality/compromised-quality areas, and it is unclear to the casual user how this all sorts itself out.