Wikipedia Entry Turned Into Actual Encyclopedia 96
Posted
by
timothy
from the now-how-much-would-you-pay? dept.
from the now-how-much-would-you-pay? dept.
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."
More Pictures at BookTwo (Score:5, Interesting)
Time Magazine reports ...
It was BookTwo that originated this story [booktwo.org] because that's written by the guy who put the book together [shorttermmemoryloss.com] (which was picked up by a blog [tumblr.com] which was picked up by The Awl [theawl.com] which was picked up by Time's NewsFeed [time.com]). Of course, we are talking about Time [theonion.com] here. I found the images [flickr.com] of what's actually inside very interesting but I would bet that the guy who used some simple code to create the Creative Commons work is probably the only person to tender cash for a physical copy.
Here's another complete rewrite reducing the whole article to:
But you know what's really interesting? When Bridle compiled this used their lexer to transform the XML, he kept the IP address in the upper right of each edit. So the above edit's IP address is forever in print: 68.162.123.240 Of course if you had used a username to make an edit, that was put in place of the IP address.
This whole thing reminds me of the time lapse video done of the Virginia Tech shootings [youtube.com]. Creative stuff you can do with Wikipedia.
Re:they say history is written by the winners (Score:3, Interesting)
On historical matters, it also shows that maybe we CAN'T know the whole story because, even in today's world, facts can be dubious things.
A shame it was such a contentious issue. (Score:5, Interesting)
Even at this late stage, there are
1) People who still claim there were WMDs.
2) People who say there were WMD's but don't actually believe it anymore.
3) People who say we genuinely thought there WMD's and there was never any reason not to think so.
4) People who say we genuinely thought there WMD's but we were misled by bad intelligence.
5) People who say we genuinely thought there might be WMD's, but if we were wrong, we didn't really care.
6) People who say we never actually thought there were WMD's, but they made a good excuse to invade.
7) People who now say there were no WMD's, but pretend that they knew this all along.
8) People who claim that there never were WMD's, but no one would listen to them.
At any one time, any one of these subsects could be winning the ongoing flame war.
I can't help but think this exercise might have been more meaningful, had it been conducted over a page with less competing factions.
Re:A shame it was such a contentious issue. (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is, Iraq really did have WMDs at one point. This is a verifiable, widely known fact. The use of them is documented. However, they bought them from the US who was willing to sell chemical weapons to the lesser of two evils in order to create a bullwork against Iran, after our Iranian puppet fell in revolution. 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.
This is all just fallout from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. The British encouraged Arab nationalism against the Turks, since Istanbul was allied with the Germans. Then the Brits took over administration of the region, and in World War II, the Germans backed the Baathists against the British. Then the Americans took their turn, and now we have this crap. Its all just failed attempts at managing an empire without the benefit of a heavy boot.
Re:Cathedral vs. Bazaar (Score:5, Interesting)
Historians are not content to assume that every document from a verifiable is the "truth".
However the people who read history books, by and large, tend to assume that what they read is true. Or, at least, based on facts. It's an interesting mental trap: I know fact X about history because I read it in a respectable history book. But was that fact based on a highly reliable source, multiple reliable sources, hearsay, speculation? As the end-reader it's hard to know. It's even somewhat difficult for the historian to really verify something, if that's what he's trying to do. If enough people after the fact begin asserting a certain narrative about what happened or what it meant then this can "drown out" contrary accounts, especially if it is not due to a centrally directed conspiracy.
What the historian eventually writes down as his best estimate of the truth is going to be presumed to be correct by his readership, absent someone discovering something that makes it obviously untrue. Even in such a case many will continue to cling to the correctness of the account they read first, denying evidence that now proves it incorrect. This happens all the time.
Re:A shame it was such a contentious issue. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to see a compendium of the PR fallout. For example, remember all the anti-France hatred, because they dared to question our information? Remember "Freedom Fries" and "Freedom Toast"? I actually saw "Freedom Ticklers" in a gas station vending machine a couple of years ago. I'd like to see a record of how much anti-world sentiment was generated against countries that questioned us, and how much of that sentiment still exists.
I wonder how many people there are who now believe that Iraq had no WMD, but still have a distrust of France because they voted against us.
Re:A shame it was such a contentious issue. (Score:3, Interesting)
It was obvious, even at that time, that Saddam was playing a shell game in order to create the perception of strength for both his country's civilians and his neighbours. By maintaining the illusion of strength, the Iraqi population was less likely to revolt and he would make Syria and Iran less likely to consider invading. He also had to maintain the illusion to prevent Kuwait from resuming their directional drilling scheme which sparked the whole 1990 Gulf War.
The fact is that the first Gulf War left Iraq hugely weakened and Saddam did not want to look weak.
It was clear from a very early time in the second Gulf War that Saddam did not have even half as much resources as he had at the start of the first Gulf War. The UN sanctions did work: He was not able to rebuild the military technology he had before.
Not that he had much military tech before - his efforts to clone and mass produce replenishments to his US-supplied chemical weapons was largely a bust. Allied forces in both wars suffered more health complications from the anti nerve-agent and other anti chemical and biological agents than they did from anything Saddam threw at them.
Re:A shame it was such a contentious issue. (Score:3, Interesting)
in order to create the perception of strength for both his country's civilians and his neighbours.
I've heard that said endlessly at this point and I still don't buy it all. It doesn't make sense at all. Never has. Not one bit. Had he not played his game, inspectors would have come, verified, left, and that would have been the end of it.
Unless you're position is that the only reason his neighbors hadn't invaded and the population hadn't revolted is they feared use of biological weapons by Saddam. I've never heard that suggested before. Is that your position?
The reality is, the people were completely terrified on Saddam. The number of people killed in the Iraq war is a drop in the bucked compared to the deaths inflicted by Saddam every year. He was a modern day Stalin. And that's not counting the roaming terror squads who would randomly pick someone up. Frequently they were murdered. Torture was always used - typically involving meat hooks. Mass rape occurred every day. The chance of civil revolt was zero. For it to be non-zero means the population would have revolted and overthrown the government at the start of of the invasion. The population was frozen in terror. There was zero chance of revolt. US had actually hoped it would happen during the days of the invasion. It never did.
Re:they say history is written by the winners (Score:1, Interesting)
This always reminds me of an article I read on ancient Rome. Back then they had a problem with graffiti, people would write and draw all kinds of nasty things about the politics of the day onto the side of buildings. The solution was to simply whitewash over it. Fast forward to the present, archeologist's are pealing back those layers of whitewash to get to the graffiti underneath. It's providing historians with very interesting insights. I wonder if 2000 years from now we will see historians poring over our troll threads to better understand us.