Wikipedia As a "War Zone," Rather Than a Collaboration 194
horselight writes "A new study by sociologists studying social networking has determined that Wikipedia is not an intellectual project based on mutual collaboration, but a war zone. The study finds that although the content does end up being accurate as a rule, it's anything but neutral or unbiased. The study includes extensive data on access and editing patterns of users related to major events, such as the death of Michael Jackson and the edit storms that ensued." The article explains that the research (here's the paper at PLoS One) looked in particular at controversial entries, not ones about obscure duck-hunting equipment or long-settled standards.
why i no longer contribute (Score:4, Interesting)
That's excellent! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Whua! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes and no. I've been involved in a POV dispute on an article because a friend of mine died under titillating circumstances, and another friend of mine is being coatracked over it. (Yes, these are real Wikipedia terms.) The death has been all over the news, mostly in very gossipy articles that quote a lot of third parties but don't do any fact-checking. And so of course a lot of people who want to pee on a famous person's wikipedia biography immediately dogpiled on it and started making gossipy edits.
This isn't the first time it's happened, and the person in question has had people cancel speaking invitations on him after he and his assistants have been out of pocket on airplane tickets. So there's a really serious side to this edit warring—even though it's celebrity gossips doing it, real people get hurt in the process.
Wales is the root of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Everyone has their own political opinions, as does Jimmy Wales. He used to run a mailing list devoted to Ayn Rand. Speaking of Wikipedia and conservative economist Friedrich Hayek, Wales has said "Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. One can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek." Thus, his opinions on politics, and what used to be called political economy, have bearing on Wikipedia's structure.
Of course, a project which gets large enough can't be run as an absolute dictatorship, or it falls apart (or everyone moved on to a split). The official Wikipedia explanation page for the 2005 Elections [wikipedia.org] is laughable. First of all, if you read the mailing lists and Wikipedia posts, Jimbo didn't even want a binding election, he wanted to appoint everyone himself. There was such resistance to this he backed off. Then fanatical Point of View pusher JayJG ran in the 2005 election for the Arbitration Committee. By any measure, he lost the election, partly due to such an overwhelming number of no votes, because so many people thought he lacked fair-mindedness and balance. So Jimbo ignored the election votes and appointed JayJG to the Arbitration Committee. Because they were ideological allies. This is all glossed over in the official entry on the elections above.
Nowadays, it probably seems silly to have been so involved in it, but when Larry Sanger's Wikipedia came out (another person thrown under the bus by Jimbo, once Sanger's Wikipedia idea started taking off, Wales took over and tried to write Sanger out of history) it had a lot of potential. So much of what happened is despite Wales, not because of him. I think it could have been even better, but it was not meant to be, not in this iteration of the wiki encyclopedia idea any how.
Speaking of neutral point of view, the recognized systemic bias [wikipedia.org] etc., let's take a look at the opening two paragraphs of the Abu Nidal [wikipedia.org] biography and see if sounds encyclopedic or not:
"Abu Nidal...born Sabri Khalil al-Banna...was the founder of Fatah–The Revolutionary Council. At the height of his power in the 1970s and 1980s, Abu Nidal, or "father of [the] struggle," was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian political leaders. He told Der Spiegel in a rare interview in 1985: 'I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing ... nightmares.' Part of the secular Palestinian rejectionist front, so called because they reject proposals for a peaceful settlement with Israel, the ANO was formed after a split in 1974 between Abu Nidal and Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)...Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal's biographer, wrote of the attacks that their 'random cruelty marked them as typical Abu Nidal operations.'"
I doubt even Haaretz would publish something like this. Yet it's an encyclopedia entry on Wikipedia. Whether you like Nidal or not, this is not neutral and encyclopedic writing. If you don't think this is biased or unencyclopedic enough, it gets worse as the article goes on. And there are worse examples, this one just comes to my mind. If your answer is "It's Wikipedia, just change it yourself", you've missed the point of this post. Go to Wikipedia Review [wikipediareview.com] to really get an answer to that question.
Re:commercial vs volunteer free (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why the greatest innovation of Wikipedia is not that it's so comprehensive or that it's free or that anyone can edit it.
The greatest innovation of Wikipedia is the "Talk" tab, where disagreements over the content of an entry is hashed out.
One of the worst aspects of the old Encyclopedia Britannica with which I grew up was that articles were presented as the last word on a topic, even though there was almost certainly similar disagreement over many entries.
Whatever you might think of Howard Zinn, he gave us one very important thing to think about: That facts may be facts, but they can look very different depending on whether you're the hammer or the nail.
On the other hand (I'm arguing with myself here), the Talk pages are also filled with propagandizing, bullying, efforts at obfuscation and outright lying. There is definitely an element of devaluation of expertise and an overall "Fox News-ing" of facts.
Takeaway is, as many have said, make Wikipedia (or Britannica) the starting point if you want to learn something, not the end. And blogs should never be taken as authoritative.
Re:It's a start (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia is a starting point for research. It isn't the final word on anything.
I would hope that most people would understand that simple fact, but the sheer number of people that try to cite Wikipedia as a reference demonstrates that said hope is misplaced.
Wikipedia is crack for a Cliff Clavin-esque [wikipedia.org] information junkie like me, but I would never stake my reputation on anything I read there unless I had at least 3 independent sources confirming it, although I admit, the articles concerning math and science I generally accept as truth (whereas the articles concerning celebrities or infamous historical figures I generally do not) because I figure if I have a hard time making it through a given article that the citation's are going to be ancient Egyptian to me. The simple English Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] is obviously better in that regard, but it's too simple. Consider their article for Chaos theory [wikipedia.org]...barely a stub.
Still, I'm glad I live in a time with access to such a vast repository of human knowledge, even with the bias issues. I'm old enough to remember what this was like [shoeboxblog.com]...
Re:Whua! (Score:2, Interesting)
And exactly how is this is a bad thing? I Wikipedia supposed to be a tabloid? Is Wikipedia supposed to provide 0-day news? No.
Re:why i no longer contribute (Score:4, Interesting)
Cutoff for top 1%: about $380,000 [wsj.com].
Average salary of PhD in molecular biology: $76,000 [simplyhired.com].
Scientists are not, generally, 1%ers.
Re:Whua! (Score:5, Interesting)
mostly in very gossipy articles that quote a lot of third parties but don't do any fact-checking
Wikipedia has a lot of problems, which is why I mostly stopped contributing years ago. But all the problems basically stem directly from their list of "policies" that were erected around the time that a horde of fairly obvious disinformation agents managed to wrest control away from Jimmy Wales. The new Wikipedia "democracy" now ensures that the government with the largest propaganda budget will always be able to control the tone and narrative of any controversial articles.
One of the worst of these policies is the idea that mainsteam media news sources should be given special status. This was obviously intentionally designed to steer the revolutionary capability of truly grass-roots, crowd-sourced intelligence back into the fold of the controlled narrative. And, unfortunately, one of the most blatant abuses of this policy is the way Wikipedia is used as a vehicle to slander controversial public figures.
Gossip is one thing; and perhaps the world is not much worse off when Wikipedia is used to spread tabloid trash. But the world absolutely is worse off when Wikipedia is used as a conduit to smear everyone from political prisoners to rogue investors who make enemies of the increasingly encroaching police state apparatus.
Re:Whua! (Score:4, Interesting)
Read any US school textbook on topics like Pearl Harbor, and the circumstances around dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Now read any Japanese school textbook on the same topics.
Compare and contrast.
It's not just Wikipedia.