What the MSM Gets Wrong About Wikipedia -- and Why
If you follow the news about Wikipedia, even casually, you're probably aware that something is changing. What you probably don't realize is that what you've been led to believe is almost certainly completely wrong.
Maybe you saw some recent headlines ominously talking about editorial controls. Maybe you heard something about editorial boards.
Or maybe you read this story on Time.com: "They recently instituted a major change, imposing a layer of editorial control on entries about living people. In the past, only articles on high-profile subjects like Barack Obama were protected from anonymous revisions. Under the new plan, people can freely alter Wikipedia articles on, say, their local officials or company head -- but those changes will become live only once they've been vetted by a Wikipedia administrator."
That's all very interesting, albeit completely untrue.
Imagine if the stories told instead said things like this:
"In a major shift towards greater openness, Wikipedia is taking the first steps towards doing away with controls that kept certain pages 'protected' or 'locked' for many years. Previously, certain high profile and high risk biographies and other entries were kept locked to prevent vandalism by users who had not registered accounts on the site for a 'waiting period' of 4 days."
"The new feature, long advocated by the site's founder Jimmy Wales, eliminates that restriction by allowing anyone to edit these pages, even without logging in. The secret to being able to do this is that the new feature creates a queue where tens of thousands of longtime users of the site can approve these changes - changes that were previously completely forbidden."
What? Really? The solution to the problem of bad speech is actually more speech? Openness and collaboration actually work?
Nevertheless, it is true. English Wikipedia will soon launch a new feature that will allow you to edit, as an inexperienced user, articles that have previously been locked more-or-less continuously for years.
I believe that the underlying facts about the Wikipedia phenomenon -- that the general public is actually intelligent, interested in sharing knowledge, interested in getting the facts straight -- are so shocking to most old media people that it is literally impossible for them to report on Wikipedia without following a storyline that goes something like this: "Yeah, this was a crazy thing that worked for awhile, but eventually they will see the light and realize that top-down control is the only thing that works."
Will the new, more gentle tool, be more widely used than protection was? I certainly hope so. We are always looking for ways to help responsible people join the Wikipedia movement and contribute constructively, while gently asking those who want to cause trouble to please go somewhere else.
Faced with the choice of preventing you from editing at all, versus allowing you to edit even though you might have bad intentions, we have erred consistently for the latter -- openness. The new tool, by making it a lot easier to keep bad stuff from appearing to the general public, is going to allow for a much more responsible Wikipedia that is, at the same time, a much more open Wikipedia.
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The people who continue to bash Wikipedia just need to give up. I can tell that universally everyone under 30 uses it that's not gonna change.
Dear Jimmy Wales,
Nice of you to write, we and our kids use WiKi, as they call it. And yes- ".... the general public is actually intelligent, interested in sharing knowledge, interested in getting the facts straight...."
Hope you do succeed in keeping "those who want to cause trouble" - away.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jimmy-wales/what-the-msm-gets-wrong-a_b_292809.html
The most telling justification for crowd-sourcing information is to recall the falsehoods told to the American people in times of War. To repeat a well known maxim from Kipling: "The first victim of War is truth." From the Indian Wars, to the Sinking of the Maine, to the Tonkin Gulf incident, to ...(you know where I'm going next right?)
Lol...
We do,we do....
:)
And Kipling seems to have been proven Right, eh....
Authoritarians don't like the Internet, unless they can control it. I know, let's get the MSM to be our only source of information - just like the good old days!
Good point.
Nah, scratch that.
Thought provoking point.
And scary too, if you are correct.
Much of the snark hurled at Wikipedia seems to be rooted in the same need for a delusional sense of absolute security and reliability that resulted in the shredding of the US constitution over the last eight years; the desperate need for an authority to think for us, because finding out for ourselves is too much work and living with uncertainty is too scary. Life is complex. All views are contain slant and errors. The reality of aggregation of interests does result in Wikipedia articles at least as factually accurate on average as what is trotted out as "authoritative" in traditional media sources, and corrections come much more quickly and easily in the former than in the latter. By "aggregation of interests", I mean that those subjects most often accessed and so those of greatest import for the viability of the Wiki concept, tend to be those most often challenged, corrected, improved. The most easily lampooned articles tend to be obscure ones with only a few contributors.
The tempo of criticism for traditional print media steadily increases, partially because the instantaneous and egalitarian nature of the Web is shattering its products' time-honored image as highly ethical and well researched. Its factual errors, slants, omissions and deliberate distortions are often revealed by the Web before the newspapers hit the sidewalks.
OK, so I look up something in Wikipedia that, through either malicious intent or ignorance, is inaccurate, but -- because of the naive notion that "the general public is actually intelligent, interested in sharing knowledge, interested in getting the facts straight" -- I can trust it? Good thing that all the members of the general public who are interested in sharing misinformation are barred from Wikipedia.
I'll take an editorial board any day over "feel good" editing by any Neanderthal who wanders in from the pub. Free wheeling editing by anyone with an axe to grind is a disaster.
Sorry Wiki, you just crossed yourself off the acceptable list.
Just like the proverbial weak link in the chain, "top down" is only as good as what lies at the top. In recent years that has mostly devolved into weakly qualified individuals who have mastered the arts of schmoozing and networking (which are now written into formal promotion criteria in most large organizations).
In my job I am fortunate enough to have been blessed with a solid system of peer review for every piece of work that gets done. This has allowed us to be universally acknowledged for the highest quality in our field. Wikipedias proposal sounds like the logical extension of such a system in the web age.
I love Wikipedia and turn to it frequently for information. In fact, many internet search-engines take me to Wikipedia. Nonetheless, I think Mr. Wales' experiment here will be detrimental to the content, veracity and reputation of Wiki. I have frequently read and flagged articles written by hacks, filled with pejorative or otherwise derogatory and factually incorrect information. In addition, you have the "advertising" articles, written by ghost-writers and chambers-of-commerce. I completely disagree with the removal of editorial oversight.
I can't believe anyone would say that a website that allows ANYONE to edit its content is a good thing. Good for what reason? Certainly not to improve the quality of the information. This is what's wrong with the Internet for information gathering in this first place.
I actually wish there was some levels of editorial control on Wikipedia. I might actually trust it then. Somewhat.
I do not allow my students to cite Wikipedia as a source. If they want, they can visit Wikipedia as a jumpstart to their research, get the sources listed on Wikipedia if there are any, and then go get those sources and actually read them! For that purpose, I guess Wikipedia is somewhat ok.
You sound like a DINOSAUR, and it really sounds like you believe your decision to bar the use of Wikipedia as a source is unique.
Far from it; S E Martin's post reflects intelligence and is far from unique.
I had been using the internet for years and was working as a researcher at UC Berkeley when the guys who founded Google wandered through. I recall proposing to those that would listen that what was needed was a type of ranking of results from search engines that could pick out authoritative sources, such as .gov or .edu sites, so that one could be more confident in the results returned. ...Nobody happened to pick up on this particular idea and it's too bad because having a reliable authority is important.
Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. I use Wikipedia regularly but I seldom trust it completely, depending on the topic. It's always vital to confirm results with other sources if you, in fact, require reliable answers. Meanwhile, traditional encyclopedias are very reliable but also very slow to pick up topics and are also very limited in scope, so there remains a place for both old and new forms of information sharing.
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This doesn't exactly make me feel confident about Wikipedia, when complete novices (some intending to cause malice) are free to change Wikipedia articles as they please.
I love how open-sourcing has turned into crowdsourcing and dropped the hyphen all at once. And I love how the media business just doesn't get it.
They are dinosaurs watching the large asteroids approaching the Earth. The mainstream media, at least print media, are dying and they are too old and lazy to get it and move to a virtual world. It is an age thing, I fear. Although I am 59 I was never geeky in the computer sense but I bought my first computer in the early eighties when they became affordable, I think my first was an Apple II...and have stayed with IT all these years. I saw the potential I guess...or was just lucky. There are far too many people my age who still think this is some kind of magical typewriter that requires no white-out...and little more. They don't get it. They just don't get it. And they will die. Good. Top down information sucked. We were lied to by textbooks, newspapers, teachers, et alia.
I love Wikipedia.
Yes, one still has to check facts and sources after reviewing an article on Wikipedia... just as is true of information received from anywhere else. Wikipedia has still saved me mountains of time. Did I mention that I love Wikipedia?
It's so sad that:
1) People don't realize that Wiki is one of the most creative and useful applications of web technology ever.
2) People complain about the .0001% of the articles that they feel might be inaccurate and ignore the good stuff
3) People forget that it costs nothing and is available to everyone worldwide
4) People who live in poverty can access free supplementary textbook-like information in schools
5) The vandal took the handle, rather the vandal will always take the handle unless it's protected or, at least, people can see that vandals have messed with the handle. That's what's happening.
6) If you hate it, don't use it, and stop complaining. Or dive in, participate, and improve it. It's your choice.
Or maybe academic undie-twisters should just go hide in your old-fashioned libraries and calm down a bit.
If you can make it better with a little effort, do it. It takes much more effort to complain all the time and it does no good whatsoever.
Grumble, grumble, grumble...
So just exactly WHO is the fact checker? This is not likely to make the average person looking for facts about a subject or person more confident that they are getting facts. Our whole country - maybe the world is so fact challenged. So like the MSM we have a he/she said, he/she said. No one around to do the fact checking.............
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