Posted on 05/28/2007 7:34:48 PM PDT by Philo1962
Wikipedia is a wildly popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit – and in some cases, sabotage with misinformation and libelous or politically slanted content.
Its co-founder, Jimmy Wales, has explicitly stated that he doesn't make any distinction between the contributions of an Ivy League professor and a bright 16-year-old, as long as the 16-year-old is doing good work.
Whenever a student in the English-speaking world hears the name of an American politician for the first time, he or she is likely to run a Google search on the name. The first, second or third Internet page produced by such a search is often the Wikipedia biography about the public figure.
Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the Internet, with over 2 million page views per day. Because Wikipedia articles are mirrored on other sites such as Answer.com, the number of daily hits on articles written by Wikipedia editors is about 2.6 million per day.
Editing decisions are made not by a team of experts in a given subject, but by a consensus of whoever shows up to edit the article. Many have written about the failures inherent in this system.
Knowledge vs. Agenda
Some of the most pithy critiques are from Ikkyu2, a board-certified neurologist and clinical epilepsy specialist whose peer-reviewable work on Wikipedia's "Epilepsy" article kept getting messed up by others who, to put it kindly, did not share his level of expertise.
There have also been several publicized examples of staff members for Democrats in Congress, such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Tom Harkin, Sen. Joe Biden and Rep. Marty Meehan, "airbrushing" or spiffing up their bosses' Wikipedia articles.
Wikipedia traced Capitol Hill IP addresses contributing to their site and found the source of the airbrushing, as well as vandalism of articles about Republicans including Rick Santorum and George W. Bush. Staff members of a few Republicans, including Sen. Norm Coleman, have also done some airbrushing.
Accusations of libel have also peppered Wikipedia's recent history. A former staffer for Robert F. Kennedy, John Siegenthaler Sr., attacked Wikipedia in print for "false and malicious" content when he learned that for 132 days in 2005, his biography said "he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby."
Pro golfer Fuzzy Zoeller sued a Miami firm, alleging that libelous statements about him that appeared in his Wikipedia biography were posted from a computer at that firm. The statements claimed that he had abused drugs and alcohol, and committed domestic battery.
"Courts have clearly said you have to go after the source of the information," said Zoeller's attorney, Scott Sheftall. "The Zoeller family wants to take a stand to put a stop to this. Otherwise, we're all just victims of the Internet vandals out there. They ought not to be able to act with impunity."
Who's Minding the Store?
Wikipedia's Site management simply doesn't have the manpower to supervise 1 million editors. But perhaps the worst failings of Wikipedia arise not from its Capitol Hill visitors, its libel-mongering vandals or its editorial policies, but from the people who have risen to positions that grant the power to interpret and enforce those policies.
A scandal involving academic fraud recently brought unwanted notoriety. A 24-year-old community college dropout from Kentucky passed himself off for years as "Essjay," a lecturing professor with a doctorate in divinity, supporting his claims with quotations from "Catholicism for Dummies."
This case has been presented by most of the mainstream media as if it is somehow unique. It is neither unique nor surprising, given the leadership at Wikipedia.
"Essjay" was serving on the 13-member Arbitration Committee, which serves as a kind of Wikipedian Supreme Court. Its senior member, 60-year-old Fred Bauder, describes himself as a "retired lawyer" living in Colorado, but the truth is that in 1997 he was officially censured for inappropriate activities.
[NOTE: Bauder was disbarred for soliciting a prostitute.]
Aside from Bauder, the average age of an Arbitration Committee member is around 22. The committee, and the 1,000 or so administrators who enforce their rulings, appear to include a disproportionate number of high school and college students.
As a result of Wikipedia's open-door policy, hordes of political partisans have flocked to the site from such liberal Web sites as MoveOn.org and Daily Kos, and made it their "turf."
The Left Takes Over
Newcomers who try to put Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" into practice on sensitive political subjects are often shouted down, or baited into committing rules infractions that lead to a lifetime ban.
Wikipedia members from Democratic Underground and MoveOn.org have the power, the numbers and the seniority. They can win any argument about content, either through mob tactics or a well-placed block by a friendly administrator. The rules and policies form an online minefield, and they derive immense satisfaction from baiting newbies into that minefield.
Editors are recruited from Democratic Underground. The author of the recruiting drive, Ben Burch, is the Webmaster of a site whose motto is "Fighting the Rise of the New Fascism."
Articles about politically delicate subjects such as the war in Iraq, the dismissal of seven U.S. attorneys, and Republican politicians and conservative organizations have been turned into hatchet jobs.
Take the case of Republican Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico. Several years ago her husband, Jay Hone, was accused of molesting a teenage boy. Until March 5, the accusation was blared loudly in a boldfaced headline in Rep. Wilson's Wikipedia biography: "Husband Jay Hone's hidden file on alleged sexual harassment of male minor."
But the fact that Hone was thoroughly investigated and cleared of any wrongdoing didn't make it into the article at all. The biography has now been amended to remove any reference to the charge.
Then there's Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo. Until March 4, his Wikipedia biography strongly hinted that Tancredo's congressional office falsely reported a bomb threat during a visit to South Florida, which was scheduled to include a gathering at a local restaurant: "While it was first reported by South Florida media that the congressman had received a bomb threat, Miami Police detectives stated they were not treating it as such, and the [restaurant] denied any such report."
Eventually it was revealed that the bomb threat was actually reported by the restaurant's manager, and it was removed from the article.
Early in 2006, Rep. Lee Terry of Nebraska was another Republican lawmaker whose Wikipedia biography was vandalized. Terry was falsely accused of domestic violence.
The problems at Wikipedia are many-layered, and yet it thrives as the most popular reference source on the Internet.
Most people accept information that is at their fingertips and don't take the time to check original sources. Thus the information superhighway offers everyone access to the same often inaccurate and biased information.
The sponsors of Wikipedia should responsibly warn the public that its content is subject to corruption and inaccuracy. As any source of information is nowadays.
Ping. If you want off my ping list, just freepmail me.
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If Wikipedia did not exist, much of the same incorrect data would still be on the net but without the corrective methods available at Wikipedia.
Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
Exquisitely drafted left-wing propaganda is still left-wing propaganda. They have no business passing themselves off as a "neutral point of view" encyclopedia.
Ping. You look like you might be interested in this.
Corrective methods????? Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha!!~!!!!!~
We have a local blogger who likes to talk about “fixing” the wiki entries of people he’s attacking.
How much are you involved in Wikipedia? There are all kinds of corrective mechanisms.
The bottom line is that anyone can edit many of the articles but that unsourced material is easily corrected. Sourced material (like a article that correctly quotes the NY Times when the NY Times got it wrong) is easily correctable to provide other sources.
Now if all the major media sources report something incorrect that is hard to correct but is also beyond the scope of what Wikipedia can reasonably be expected to accomplish.
That said, Wikipedia is most useful for the sources rather than for the user generated content.
It's not true about newspapers, it's not true about Al Gore's internet.
I edit Wikipedia
I memorized Holy Grail really well
I can recite it right now and have you R-O-T-F-L-O-L
Nature (magazine) recently conducted a sudy and found wiki was only slightly less accurate than Brittanica. Many articles were more accurate. It has almost 1.5 million articles to Britannicas 80,000. A lot especially current culture Britannica doesn't even cover. It can also be edited in real time.
Bryan, I’m not interested in your feud with Wikipedia, please remove me from your pinglist.
It’s not like Wikipedia has a strong gateway editorial board that can ensure a neutral point of view.
Wait, the NYT has that, and they’re probably further left than Wikipedia.
Anybody dumb enough to believe anything on Wikipedia deserves what they get.
It is nobody's job to waste their time refuting lies and biased opinions, just as fast as the liars can write them. For one thing, liars typically have a lot more time on their hands.
Once a subject has turned political, one should not feel compelled to participate in Wikipedia or its corrective mechanisms. News and history become truth-by-popular-opinion, and by focused efforts at fraud.
Still, it is possibly a better resource for information than anything written by newspapers and today's college professors.
The Discussion page for each article is always worth checking out. Look on the top of the page for the tab. You can also look at the edits and who made them.
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