Wiki Frickin' Pedia

[filkertom]

Between working on the album and finishing up a couple of commissioned songs, and just being in a generally decent mood, I haven't much felt like Snarling lately. Although there have been a few news stories that will crank me up to full blast in a day or three, I promise.

However, there's one thing I couldn't let go, on general principles. This whole Wikipedia thing. Just read the news story, and think about it for two seconds.

Firstly, I am struck by utter lack of contrition on the guy's part. As is so common these days, he's not apologizing because he was wrong, he's apologizing because he got caught. He tried to do something at least cruel and at most illegal -- accuse someone of being involved in a Presidential assassination -- and he got his ass handed to him.

Secondly, I am struck by the utter lameness of his excuses. It was done as a joke. He didn't know Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool. Does he actually think he doesn't sound like an idiot?

Here's what it comes down to: You don't joke about shit like this. Hell, you remember the last time I played a joke on you. And that was calculated for you to Get It pretty quickly.

We all depend on the truth. I'd say "Look where lying has got us" with assorted links, but you know what I'd link to, and that's not the point of this Snarling. The point is, it is in everyone's best interest to work with Truth. Facts. Accuracy. Verification.

The more specific point of the Wikipedia mess goes back to an oft-quoted passage by Sissela Bok from Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life:

A society, then, whose members were unable to distinguish truthful messages from deceptive ones, would collapse. But even before such a general collapse, individual choice and survival would be imperilled. The search for food and shelter could depend on no expectations from others. A warning that a well was poisoned or a plea for help in an accident would come to be ignored unless independent confirmation could be found.

It's not a stretch at all to think of Wikipedia as a communal well of knowledge, a neutral ground in which the point is to be truthful... and a false or misleading posting there can poison the trustworthiness of the whole thing.

Our current emotional environment -- social, political, religious, what have you -- is unfortunately based on winning rather than getting along. Scoring points, however ephemeral, rather than getting to the truth. Maintaining a status quo rather than finding solutions. And, although I probably sound tremendously naive saying this, I really do fear for the future of the human race. We can do and be so, so much... but only if we don't delude ourselves into doing and being less.

And the first step is to learn how to tell the fucking truth.

Comments

[umbran.livejournal.com]

You're correct about truth, and how little folks respect it. I doubt that this is a new phenomenon, though.

On the other hand, this does go a long way to show one very important point - Wikipedia is not reliable. Anyone using a source that can be edited by anyone at any time as a "serious reference tool" is asking for trouble.

Wikipedia makes a nice first skim to get a few basic ideas for casual use. But if you aren't double checking it, you aren't being "serious" in you reference.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

... and, honestly, that would make it different from any other reference because...? :) I've found it to be very reliable... but I do check on it precisely because of that. The idea is for the community at large to check in as we go.

And, no, the lack of respect for truth is unfortunately an old, old thing. And its repercussions are evident throughout history, time and again.

[sophia9847.livejournal.com]

and, honestly, that would make it different from any other reference because...?

*puts librarian hat on*

Because it is not (necessarily) created by subject matter experts, or reviewed/fact checked by editors before publication. Those are two safeguards of "traditional" reference sources that prevent the vast majority of inaccuracies, though i am not so naive as to say any source is completely without inaccuracy or bias. I agree with you, on the whole wikis are reasonably accurate, and for most "casual", non-scholarly research interests they may even be sufficient, if accuracy is less important than speed. (I hope the ALA doesn't hear me say that...)

The thing that's different about Wikis is that there is no safety net aside from other posters. if you have an ethical, well-informed population who are committed to building a mutually useful resource on a given topic, then the system works well, and gets good information published much more rapidly than the peer review system allows. However, when you get schmucks like the genius who decided to do this, it becomes a case of GIGO.

*librarian hat off*

And now, since it's my day off, I'm going to go surf around Wikipedia for a bit. :-)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely correct, of course, and I thought about the rather vast board of experts many encyclopedias get... but, again, the entire point of Wikipedia was doing an end-run around those experts, and getting The People involved, many of whom actually know a heck of a lot about a heck of a lot. Which does not absolve them from the responsibility of and to truth.

I think of Wikipedia as a very promising system subject to glitches in the early stages, of which this is one. There will be fine-tunings to the system; some of them will even work. ;)

[umbran.livejournal.com]

...the entire point of Wikipedia was doing an end-run around those experts, and getting The People involved, many of whom actually know a heck of a lot about a heck of a lot. Which does not absolve them from the responsibility of and to truth.

I dunno if that's the entire point. The experts used by standard encyclopedias are generally comeptent and in the know on their fields. There is little need to do an end run around them. There is certainly a desire to not pay for the information, however.

And then, sir, you get what you pay for. :)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying your wrong, but I think that a desire to cover more than what would show up in a commercial encyclopedia had a fair amount to do with it. By their nature, commercial encyclos have limited space and generalized scope. And, honestly, with most software encyclopedias selling for less than fifty bucks for the super mondo amazo edition, and for $10-20 in editions only one or two years old -- usually with online updates -- nobody except public libraries has to spend $750 for the Britannica Dead Tree Edition anymore.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying your wrong, but I think that a desire to cover more than what would show up in a commercial encyclopedia had a fair amount to do with it. By their nature, commercial encyclos have limited space and generalized scope.

Well, you have to compare apples to apples. If they don't contain equivalent content, don't compare Wikipedia to 2-year-old software encyclopedias. Instead, compare Wikipedia to the collection of references you'd have to gather to cover the same ground. Now how much would you pay? :)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure of what you're saying here. To compare a different flavor of apples, should we not use Firefox or Linux because they're free?

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Use for what purpose?

If I were a maker of... critical medical database software, for example, I'd be very leery of investing in Firefox-specific code for my UI.

And Linux is an odd beast - it is free to the end user, but there's a largish group of people who do, effectively, get paid to develop and debug the thing. Their involvement is a de facto portion of the description of their paid jobs, and if they don't do well at it, someone who does do well will replace them.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

If I were a maker of... critical medical database software, for example, I'd be very leery of investing in Firefox-specific code for my UI.

So would I. That's comparing apples to socket wrenches, though.

And your point with Linux is well-taken, but the Wiki community does, in fact, work the same way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism).

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

"an oft-quoted passage by Sissela Bok"

And we in Canada are currently afflicted with another federal election campaign. Each of these features an increase in what is enchantingly called 'hyperbole', along with increasing disengagement, disaffection, and lack of belief on the part of the captive audience. I believe there may have been a time when being proved a liar was somewhat damning for a politician...hmmmm.

(I realize this isn't exactly news, but is a prominent example of the effect of giving up on truth.)

[colinlamb.livejournal.com]

Not defending what the guy is doing, but Wikipedia is not seen by the outside world as a major or reliable information source. I for one almost never go to it, since I don't know how fr I can trust its informations just based on theway it gathers information. I'm certain that there is a significant portion of the people out there who have never even heard of wikipedia.
According to a few of the news stories I perused, the guy who teh joke was on had nothing to do with the guy whoes information was corrupted. To me that does not seem like a cruel joke played onthat man and his family. The guy might honestly never figured that anyone involved would ever see the information on wikipedia. A stupid joke, I'll give you. Intentionally cruel, I don't think so.
If we insisted in truth on everything in the wikipedia, then we would not have had the whole Elemenstors/wizbits thing, which was pretty funny and creative.
I guess it comes down to the fact that I don't see wikipedia as a serious source for information unless it can be backed up by at least two other sources onteh web. Of course I take this view with almost everything I read on the web.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

A wise view to take. Again, I'm not saying anything against verification; it's necessary. My problem is with the asshats who post false information with malice aforethought. Get your own damn web page if you want to do that -- it's not like it's expensive these days or anything. But Wikipedia, for all of its faults, is a public resource, and they really are trying to make it useful and factual, and we don't need asshats peeing in the pool.

[realtegan.livejournal.com]

I use Wikipedia as a good source of quick background on something I know nothing about. If someone mentions a reference that I'm expected to get, I'll hit Wikipedia and check for an entry. Most of the time there's enough there to give me a general idea of the subject, in a format slightly easier to skim than a Google search.

If I want to do real research, though, Wikipedia is just a starting point. It's never the final say, but it often has great links to much more informative sites, so it's a good place to start.

And, like you say, nothing on the web should be assumed to be 100% correct, it always needs backup. But I think Wikipedia is a pretty useful tool, all told.

[sophia9847.livejournal.com]

nothing on the web should be assumed to be 100% correct, it always needs backup.

*wild applause*

now, can you go tell that to the hordes of dingbat Comp 1 freshmen who ask me if IMDB is a valid source for their critical analyses of _Frankenstein_?

[realtegan.livejournal.com]

I would tell them that the IMDB is *a* valid source, but it needs back-up from a couple of other sources. Heck, if I were teaching right now, I'd probably insist on at least two "paper" sources for every internet source my students wanted to use.

I recall a number of classes where I had to have cites from three different types of sources. I recall them being the hardest to write, but the most rewarding. While the 'net can help a lot with research, it can't replace it.

I was just thinking... those two "paper" sources I mention... those can easily be found via the 'net now. I feel like a little old lady when I say that back in my day, we had to look 'em up in the card catalog, and the database of magazine articles was a new and wonderous thing that even the librarians hadn't quite figured out yet. I could do the exact same research that it took me hours to do back then in a few minutes now, including the finding of the physical book to check the references. Truly we live in an amazing time.

[sophia9847.livejournal.com]

And I think that is where teachers (as well as us librarians) need to do better educating. For those of you who haven't been on a college campus in a few years, the scholarly journal article as a print-only item has gone the way of the dodo. We still have subscriptions to popular magazines, newspapers, and a hundred or so scholarly things that the professors like to come in and browse. However, the rest have been replaced by full-text databases of scholarly articles from said journals, which are accessed on the campus computers (and some with a VPN connection from home).

Your average student may not fully get the difference between these resources which are valid scholarly sources, and "the internet", which usually isn't in and of itself. It comes down to educating people about what makes a source "reputable". The disticntions are clear-cut in print (I don't think anyone would try to cite the National Enquirer on a term paper), but the online media are still evolving, as is our understanding and use of them.

And then there's THIS....

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20051212

Not to mention THIS....

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/12/12/happy.news.ap/index.html

Re: Not to mention THIS....

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

That's not news, it's digital Zoloft™!

[ldwheeler.livejournal.com]

What appears to be more or less new, within our lifetimes (I'm 36) is an unseating of truth as the foundation of decision-making. To a sizable slice of the population, whether one knows what one's talking about takes second place to whether one holds the "correct" ideology. And so we get, for example, the current administration's attitude toward scientific research, military intelligence, etc. -- "don't bother us with the facts." It's like a fun-house world in which people actually accuse facts of being biased.

(That's among the reasons that I base political decisions such as for whom to vote NOT on whether a candidate agrees with me on issues A, B, X, DD, etc. or even holds my general ideology -- but rather, on whether he or she is inclined to make decisions based on a sane and rational regard for accurate and truthful information or, conversely, is inclined to run off half-cocked based on one's uninformed preconceptions.)

R.E. Wikipedia: I tend to use it as a gateway more than anything else. If I know little about a topic, I'll first give its Wikipedia page a scan to get a quick refresher course, from which I'll glean an idea of other sources I can access for further and/or more specialized information. While I would never cite it as a scholarly source or such, I do find it a valuable tool for getting research kick-started.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

There's not very much difference between Wikipedia as a reference source and the general Web as revealed by the search engine of your choice. In either case, you get quick, cheap access to a wealth of information, but in either case pretty much anybody could have put that information up there. A lot of that information will be good, but some of it will be posted by people who don't actually know quite as much as they think they do about the subject, and some of it will be posted by people who care more about promoting their agenda than about describing reality. Information from either source must be filtered through a general sense of how the world works and checked by following cross references and comparing alternate sources before it can be considered a reliable basis for anything important. Unfortunately, people are lazy, and when they're just forming an opinion about some issue that they encounter casually, as opposed to something they're going to commit a big chunk of time or money to, they're seldom going to bother with checking. And it's very easy to read something on a random web site today, and a month from now remember what you read as being "what you've always known".

I really worry about how our society is coming to depend on casual use of the Web for all knowledge. An unreliable quick reference certainly has its uses in society, but we need a global antidote to the "I saw it on the Internet, it must be true" mindset.

This doesn't even get into the even greater danger of relying on the Web for all knowledge, which is the ease with which vitally important information which was available on the Web yesterday may not be available there tomorrow. When we rely on the Web for our history, we're at great risk of forgetting things we need to remember.

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia is something new, like the internet is something new. We're still getting used to it. Dissing Wikipedia for not being totally accurate or not having a team of dedicated fact checkers is like demeaning a newborn for not dancing like Fred Astair. Near as I can see Wikipedia never promised to be the end-all and entirety of knowledge, it's just a place for people to post info on subjects they are knowledgable. There have been many subjects I've found on Wikipedia that I've never found in a library (look up "Ramen" both places, see where you get info and where you don't). I'm surprised something like this "joke" hasn't heppened earlier, but I'm not surprised by how quickly it was discovered and rectified. When a dead tree reference makes a mistake or falsehood, it's there in print for as long as the book is in one piece. With wikipedia the corrections are quick, and the guilty are themselves given entries in various Halls of Shame. Watch, I'll bet there will soon be an entry for this guy, detailing how he tried to pass off lies as truth then claimed it was just a joke (with a picture and video clip, too ;-)

Also, Wikipedia is more "alive" than your usual reference material. Many a historian has bemoaned the fact that nothing kills history more than a review committee. Sure, you could look up important dates in Ben Franklin's life in a standard, well-reviewed traditional history text, but would that tell you anything about him as a person? That he was sexually active and quite the joker? That the only reason he didn't write the declaration of independence or constitution was that they were afriad he would slip a joke in there? (a point he eventually had to agree with) How how about Mozart? Reading "traditional" history texts you'd think he was a brooding, emotionless genius, when the truth is these texts usually ignored numerous commentaries about his personal behavior, which is much more like his portrayal in "Amadeus" as a frivolous, juvenile genius. Knowing about these personalities gives you a much better understanding of the people and why they did what they did. In these types of cases wikipedia's strength is that it can be expanded, where in traditional reviewed texts they are always constricted.

And as for people who think "I saw it on the net, it must be true" you find them everywhere. How many times have you heard "Bush said it, so it must be true" or "Pat Robertson said it, so its God's will" of "There's a war on Christmas! Bill O'Rielly said so"? At least now we have the technology so when some idiot says "They found WMDs in Iraq" we can reply, "Give me a few minutes and I can show you how totally wrong you are, with pictures and videos no less."

I'll give Wikipedia a few more years before I pass judgement. It needs time to develop before we can judge if it's a good research tool or a fluffy "Knowledge Lite" kind of thing.

[delayra.livejournal.com]

I've used Wikipedia all of once for more than entertainment

To get the proper spelling of "tuque" by looking up Bob and Doug Mackenzie

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

These days I find it hard to trust any information I get from any source I don't personally know. I'll take it under advisement, but I don't believe it, because someone else on some other site I haven't been to is bound to have some other information that contradicts it. On the Kennedy thing, I have been told by an allegedly non-fictional tv documentary that the trajectory of one of the bullets is completely irreconcilable with the single gunman theory. I've also been told by an allegedly informative source that nobody doubts the single gunman theory any more. Who's right? I don't know. One item of information cancels out the other, and I don't get to see the working out.