Wikipedia Entry Turned Into Actual Encyclopedia 96
Ponca City, We love you writes "If journalism is the first rough draft of history, what does that make Wikipedia? Time Magazine reports that technology writer James Bridle has created a 12-volume compendium of every edit made to the Wikipedia entry for the Iraq War between December 2004 and November 2009. 'It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes "Saddam Hussein was a dickhead.,"' writes Bridle. 'This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.' The books presumably only exist in one copy, so they are not for sale."
Ah yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Never let facts get in the way of a poorly constructed opinion.
Of course, it's hard to tell what the facts are when your opinion is constructed of information told by people who refuse to divulge the facts...or something.
they say history is written by the winners (Score:4, Insightful)
now, with the internet, we get to see all of the opinions forming: the opinions that won out, the opinions that lost out, and of course, the trolls
internet: what is history without trolls?
Re:Cathedral vs. Bazaar (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you may need to spend more time reading history books. Historians are not content to assume that every document from a verifiable is the "truth".
If you scan through any history textbook, you will always find a debate on the accuracy of all of their sources, as well as discussions on the motivations of the author, and the weaknesses in their account.
Only very poor historians ever assume a documented "fact" is the absolute truth.
Bad summary (Score:5, Insightful)
This wins the award for the day for being the post where the title disagrees most with the article content. Yay!
Re:Is this something actually useful? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does it need a commentary to be useful? There is plenty of value in seeing the timeline and content of edits as they progress, being able to see what entries survived and remain and which have been done away with. It can give us insights into the process, the type of people that actually take the time to work on a wiki, the value of knowing multiple edits came from a single IP range. Some people like to say Wikipedia is a democracy, but there are people whose sole purpose is to raise the level of quality, that, tempered with the large amount of information coming from all over the globe (the internet is a relatively border-less society) can teach us a whole lot. Now, this is just one article, but I imagine for scientific value many articles of a varying nature would have to be looked at.
!encyclopedia (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a big book at 12 volumes, but it's not an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is "training in a circle [etymonline.com]", the "full circle" of knowledge of the world. "Iraq War Jr" is not a full circle; even "everything about its Wikipedia entry" is merely a small point of knowledge in a full education.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Indeed, it's more like a cylinder, since its circle is stacked atop the previous circle of revisions. It's an encylindropedia.
Re:A shame it was such a contentious issue. (Score:3, Insightful)
And even all that ignores the fact that WMDs were found. The were basically remnants of their previous stockpiles. Of course they were invaded because of supposed, massive levels of new production. It didn't matter that none was actually found as Saddam was more than happy to play the cat-n-mouse/shell game with inspectors which played right into intelligence reports. Reports, which seemingly, indirectly, verified Saddam has biological weapons to hide, much of which was on the basis of Saddam's cat-n-mouse/shell game.
The morale of the story? When your country is on the brink of invasion, don't play games which create the illusion you have what they are looking for, when people are looking to avoid the invasion in the first place.
Re:More Pictures at BookTwo (Score:1, Insightful)
As the saying goes, history is written by the winners.
Well, the v1.0 for sure is, provided winners were more literate then losers, which wasn't always the case. We might say more accurately that history is written by many, but only the history written or authorized by the winners is allowed to be read, at least as long as the victory stands, that is. Once victors' luck is up, their history is thrown away and new winners write not only new chapters, but rewrite old ones too, creating version v1.1, which then becomes new canon.
However, once the importance of history for present politics fades away, historians often seek and find clues of what was left out of official versions or outright fabricated. In the end all known independent and relevant sources are cross referenced and compared with other material evidence and then history v.2.0 is compiled. Unfortunately, due to parallels, analogies and symbolism of even ancient history for present time, as well as some nations' very long lived heritage, we don't get that much v2.0 and later updates history - because very little history is non-consequential today and it is thus held hostage by politics. It is also main reason why none ever learns anything from history, or why learning history never helped anyone - because we can't allow people to get inappropriate ideas from studying unadulterated history! If history is the teacher of life, it is important to those in power (i.e. winners) to ensure that it teaches "proper moral values" - which are already taught elsewhere and generally known. That's how you get history by Wig, history by Marxists, history by nationalists, history by any ideology, especially those who even doesn't recognize themselves as one, "normalists" or "mainstreamists".
Re:More Pictures at BookTwo (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm quite sure Wikipedia will give a skewed image of the past compared to what people actually thought.
As opposed to the totally inclusive image of history given by book publishers/editors/collectors though the ages?
Re:A shame it was such a contentious issue. (Score:3, Insightful)
I make no claim to have any knowledge of whether or not Iraq had any WMDs at the time of the invasion, and frankly its almost sort of irrelevant at this point.
I find this conclusion distressing.
You do realize that history tends to repeat itself unless we learn from it the first time around?
Iraq's lack of WMDs at the time of the invasion will be relevant for as long as the USA has a military.
Re:A shame it was such a contentious issue. (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed - that's what the "never had any WMD" crowd misses completely. I used to frame it to my anti-war friends in a scenario than ran like this:
Negotiations with the man have completely failed.
What would you have the cops do?
Almost invariably the response was - "rush the motherf____r" or "have a sniper take the shot". If I added "and the guy is on parole after a previous armed robbery" the responses became even more vehement.
But when I'd point out that this was exactly the situation in Iraq - you could almost see the blinders coming down. Instantly the dogma make out, "Saddam doesn't have any WMD, never did", etc..
Re:A shame it was such a contentious issue. (Score:3, Insightful)
He can be seen inside pointing what looks like a gun of some sort out his windows at the neighbors
But that's the thing, after the invasion of Kuwait, the US went in front of the UN and said that they had satellite pictures clearly showing that Saddam Hussein was amassing troops and tanks in the desert near the border of Saudi Arabia, so as to prepare to invade Saudi Arabia. It turns out that the satellite pictures didn't show any of those troops. And former Secretary of State Powell did say a few years later in the most unambiguous terms that the the satellite imagery at the time were a complete fabrication and a complete lie.
So if your friends are dubious of your analogy, they certainly should be. This is not the case of large governmental organizations making possible misinterpretations/honest mistakes from time to time in the heat of the moment. And yes, I am sure that those cases of misinterpretation still do happen from time to time (that's simply life). But it's the case of not be able to take supposed "very clear" evidence at face value, because we know that when it comes to entering a war (or entering a conflict if you prefer that watered down term), our government has lied to us in the past, and will certainly lie to us in the future as well. So then, it becomes very difficult for us as mere citizens to distinguish when our government is telling us the truth, simply making an honest mistake, or completely lying to us.