Interesting bit from LGF on efforts to edit Wikipedia anonymously — and the software developed by a Caltech grad designed to flag those anonymous edits and track them back to high profile IP sources, such as the NYT or al-Jazeera.
See also, from Wired, “See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign”.
One of the struggles open-source reference sources will have to combat are concerted efforts to shade the entried by those who benefit by doing so. In theory, the mechanism for self-correction is the collective expertise of those interested in particular subjects. But it is easy to see that such a check on narrative manipulation is only as good as it is timely — and with a project of Wikipedia’s scope, I imagine that it might be fairly easy to game the system, at least in the very short term.
The narrative / disinformation gains are, therefore, potentially very short lived, but the conventions of reading reference media have taught us to trust the sincerity and rigorous vetting of the source material — leaving us open to brief bursts wherein a viral meme placed strategically and linked immediately could conceivably poison the information pool.
Thankfully, sites like Snopes act as a second-order check on certain such memes, but it seems to me that without a person assigned to police every conceivable entry, disinformation campaigns launched through Wikipedia are likely — and will succeed, in many cases, simply by muddying a given narrative.
A powerful temptation, and one that I’m sure interested parties are already beginning to explore.
(h/t CJ Burch)
Academically, is Wikipedia considered a valid source? I see links to it flung around the Innertubes, but the phenomenon you cite here is why I typically don’t bother looking.
It is not quite an academic source if used alone, but checked against academic sources it often stands up well. It requires external links to primary sources, I believe.
Wikipedia is not a valid source – one big reason is for the one mentioned here. Were I a teacher on any level and a student used Wikipedia as a source, I’d fail them on the spot then have them imprisoned… in GITMO, if possible.
It’s probably best that I’m not a teacher.
An example close to home: SWMNBN was boasting recently that she had cleansed her Wiki entry (I’m sorry, her “libelous and slanderous” Wiki entry.) Her name now redirects to the PW entry.
If even teh loon waffle can purge Wiki, we are all doomed.
The New York Times also OWNS about.com. If they’re screwing with things they DON’T own, I’d avoid the things they do own.
The last two college classes I took required several papers to be written. It was the professor’s policy not to accept Wikipedia as a source for any paper handed in. He did accept it as a source for primary sources (as are often listed toward the end of any good entry). So far as I know, it’s not the official policy of my college, but it is the policy practiced by a good number of professors there.
TW: adopting freedom – Nice to finally see the stories about how that’s happening in Iraq.
Stick to conservapedia.
but it seems to me that without a person assigned to police every conceivable entry
Are there full-time, paid editors on Wikipedia to monitor anything at all, or is it all-volunteer LOONs (League of Obsessed Nit-Pickers)?
I trust Wikipedia on things such as bands I’ve never heard of. Everything else is suspect.
Our neighbor’s kids out here in suburban Jefferson County aren’t allowed to use Wiki as source material for school work, just for this reason. I find it a pretty good starting point for a lot of things, but wouldn’t want to rely on it exclusively.
Starting point, when all else fails.
It’s actually a great reference for technical things like “who makes sidewinder missiles” or “which Pope was burned at the stake in the 1300’s” because it lists primary sources for the factoids. But when it comes to politically sensitive issues it can be easily manipulated by those willing to take the time to do so.
I feel sorry for the asshats who take the time to wreck something on Wikipedia, they have extremely small lives. I’d say overall it’s a good representation of the “town square” mentality.
For pure-quill tech stuff — half-life of cesium isotopes, orbital parameters of the Moon, equations for statistical distributions — Wikipedia isn’t bad. Usually extremely incomplete, but the information provided is a good start.
If the subject permits (let alone requires) opinion or “interpretation”, turn off your sound card before entering — the high whine of axes being ground is harmful to your hearing — and be sure your salt-shaker is full. If the subject is political or economic protective gear may be in order, probably not full MOPP unless it’s part of the current Narrative but fishing waders and a dust mask are recommended. You can’t trust the outgoing links on such subjects, either, for the same reason I (and cynn) don’t link as part of our arguments: the Net of a Thousand Lies Per Millisecond contains “references” that will support any point of view, however outlandish. Use a search engine directly, or better a search aggregator like Dogpile, and begin offering credence somewhere around the middle of the first page.
Regards,
Ric
Even for school, it’s not entirely useless. It can’t be trusted for any subject that requires detailed technical knowledge, e.g. Biochemistry or Latin, or for anything the least bit political. But it’s excellent for 6th-grade Geography, except for a relatively few places like the former Yugoslavia where various ethnic or religious factions are obviously editing each others’ stuff with malice aforethought. But if you want to know how many provinces there are in Bolivia and what they are named, or the capital of Burundi, or the population of Belarus, or what the flag of Burma looks like, it’s as trustworthy as the average written source, which is to say something around 99% trustworthy.
I haven’t had time to put much in the linked site, but there is more to come. As discussed in the Snopes entry I don’t exactly consider them a good check on WP.
As for the IP site, it’s an interesting idea, but anyone who knows what they’re doing can easily cover their tracks using $5/month dial-up connections. I’m sure any government or corporation can afford that; the changes the IP site brings up might just be red herrings designed to distract from their real changes.
On a side note, a while back someone wrote an article at Newsbusters talking about how WP was biased. He linked the names of those he discussed to… their WP entry, thus helping WP rise just a little bit in the search rankings for those names. Doh.
If you want to help WP fall in the search rankings, do your part by dropping any links you have to them. Almost all (note the “almost”) of their links have nofollow tags on them, so it’s not like they’re redistributing their in-bound link juice in a fair way.
WB.com (#15) is right on. It’s just a bit unnerving how quickly Wikipedia is becoming this centralized store of knowledge on a medium that was designed to decentralize knowledge.
On topic, I enjoyed this essay by Jaron Lanier about the negatives of collective intelligence that used Wikipedia as a prime example.
The Wikipedia experiment is dead, but it does not realize it yet.
However, I just used Wiki today to find out if particular chemical substances were hazardous in any way. I figure that those answers were fairly accurate, because they have that NFPA thinger in there.
You have to be careful with that too, dicentra, check out the Aspartame entry some day. Loons.
What does Wikipedia have to say about that evil dihydrogen monoxide?
Did you know the stuff actually dissolves the planet!?
I had an infestation of them once, led by their Queen, Betty Martini. We had to spray and spray and spray… They’re like fleas, only insane.
Oh, and RUMSFELD!!
About the only good thing to come out of Wikipedia is the software. Useful for collaboration, and free.
Carr’s Killing Time is looking ever more prescient.
I like Wikipedia, but that doesn’t mean I’d use it as a source document.
Just a couple of years ago my daughter was researching Ponce de Leon, and she used a Wikipedia article as background information. After returning to the article for more fact(oid)s, we encountered something a lot like this:
Which is something that I hadn’t known about Ponce de Leon.
I’ve long had the idea of a distributed zombie botnet set to edit every Wikipedia entry at once (or as near as possible).
To make one simple and accuratizing change to it: To add “[Citation Needed]” after every sentence that doesn’t already have a footnote citation.
Simply because the current proliferation of such tags is inconsistent and random; we might as well be consistent and admit that it all needs citations if any of it does.
Academically, is Wikipedia considered a valid source?
I don’t let my students cite Wikipedia on any essay. I try to let them generate their own topicsand it’s just impossible to rely on Wikipedia over a broad range of topics.
Besides, I’m old school and like my students to do at least some research that requires walking and turning pages!
TW: months terrible: “March is a muddy month down below. Some folks like it…farmers mostly.”
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i thought aspartame can cause cancer in laboratory animals ‘
aspartame is known to cause cancer in laboratory animals so be careful.’`