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Growing pains for Wikipedia
Cnet ^ | 12/05/2005 | Daniel Terdiman

Posted on 12/05/2005 4:53:16 AM PST by Panerai

For Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, last week was a tough one. And he's going to change the ground rules for the popular anyone-can-contribute encyclopedia because of it.

First, in a Nov. 29 op-ed piece in USA Today, a former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy lambasted the free online reference work for an article that suggested he may have been involved in the assassinations of both Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy.

Then, on Dec. 1, a new flurry of attention came when former MTV VJ and podcasting pioneer Adam Curry was accused of anonymously editing out references to other people's seminal podcasting work in an article about the hot new digital medium.

To critics of Wikipedia--which, in a spin on the open-source model, lets anyone create and edit entries--the news was further proof that the service has no accountability and no place in the world of serious information gathering.

"Wales, in a recent C-SPAN interview...insisted that his Web site is accountable and that his community of thousands of volunteer editors...corrects mistakes within minutes," former Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler wrote in USA Today. "My experience refutes that...For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin."

Wales has dealt with criticism for years, and he's sensitive to it. He knows that many people worry that Wikipedia's self-policing process can't possibly keep up with the massive number of new articles that crop up on the site, and the edits that appear in existing entries. The cybertome, after all, is home to millions of articles--nearly 850,000 in English alone, with many other entries in dozens of additional languages. In October, the English-language site hosted 1,515 new articles per day.

(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: seigenthaler; web; wikipedia
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To: Taliesan
...mentally triangulate the truth...

damn, thats good.
21 posted on 12/05/2005 7:19:49 AM PST by frankenMonkey (Name one civil liberty that was not paid for in blood)
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To: Doctor Stochastic
Wikipedia is what happens without tightly controlled peer review.

As has been mentioned, this guy could have been part of the peer review instead of complaining.

22 posted on 12/05/2005 8:02:47 AM PST by antiRepublicrat
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To: Taliesan
I think Wikipedia is about as trustworthy as the average NYT news story or the average comment on Freerepublic. Which simply means that you understand when you read it that you are reading an introduction or one take

The average Wiki entry has several authors, several takes. If you don't like that POV, make your own edits.

In that, I find it a lot more reliable than the NYT. I can always read the editorial discussions if something looks fishy, and see how that POV was arrived at.

23 posted on 12/05/2005 8:04:47 AM PST by antiRepublicrat
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To: youngtechster

> Wikipedia, for the articles I've needed it for, has been absolutely un-biased and extremely informative.

You can't beat Wiki for quick common knowledge--bio info, movies, geography, etc., but if you're looking for expertise or interpretation, be sure that the author cites his references.


24 posted on 12/05/2005 8:11:28 AM PST by cloud8
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To: antiRepublicrat

Exactly.

Those trying to change entries are a bit like those who vote over and over in a poll in order to change the outcome.

One thing that might help (maybe they do this) is to keep track of changes and who made them.


25 posted on 12/05/2005 8:13:19 AM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch ist der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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To: Doctor Stochastic

Wikipedia is like "the information age" meets "The Satanic Verses". In the Salman Rushdie book, "satanic verses" were extra verses that were maliciously added to the existing text of the Koran over the course of hundreds of years by people who translated/copied it by hand.

With Wikipedia anybody can twist, distort, embellish and/or completely fabricate whatever they wish. And once made, that entry will, in some form or another, bounce around cyberspace forever. "History" in the "information age" is becoming more and more meaningless.

I don't know if, a hundred years from now, "history" will have any credibility at all.


26 posted on 12/05/2005 8:27:48 AM PST by Lancey Howard
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To: Taliesan; Panerai
Which simply means that you understand when you read it that you are reading an introduction or one take on the issue and the writer is a human being with a viewpoint.

I don't understand the whole point of communication, then. When I discuss anything with anyone, I don't define anything in that human conversation as "the truth."

I don't give Dan Rather, Rush Limbaugh or GW credit for speaking "truth." Every writer is biased, and from several sources you can get a confidence factor in some overlapping agreement.

If I have not read the changelog or been involved in the "conversation" that made the article, then on the face, Wikipedia is just one source just like a peer edited NYT article is just one source.

27 posted on 12/05/2005 8:27:56 AM PST by sam_paine (X .................................)
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To: Lancey Howard
I don't know if, a hundred years from now, "history" will have any credibility at all.

Or maybe it will be completely credible.


28 posted on 12/05/2005 8:41:08 AM PST by sam_paine (X .................................)
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To: sam_paine

Thanks for that link.

Having been a member of the Science Fiction Book Club in the '60s, and having grown up on Tom Swift and then Robert Heinlein, I love that stuff. By the way, it has always occurred to me that if you had a giant (and very sophisticated) mirror properly positioned on a distant star (or even a series of mirrors here and there) then you could, using an equally sophisticated telescope, pick up the reflections of light that eminated at any time during the past and "see" any historic event that happened on earth's surface (as long as there wasn't too much of a cloud cover).

It's like when we look up at the sky and see a distant galaxy - - we are actually seeing that distant galaxy as it was hundreds or thousands (or millions) of years ago. Well, a distant mirror could reflect back to us images of our earth as it was hundreds or thousands (or millions) of years ago.

At least, that's what I figured when I was a kid.


29 posted on 12/05/2005 9:04:39 AM PST by Lancey Howard
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To: Lancey Howard
if you had a giant mirror

Hell, if you had a time machine!

30 posted on 12/05/2005 9:10:28 AM PST by sam_paine (X .................................)
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To: Lancey Howard
With Wikipedia anybody can twist, distort, embellish and/or completely fabricate whatever they wish. And once made, that entry will, in some form or another, bounce around cyberspace forever. "History" in the "information age" is becoming more and more meaningless.

I don't know if, a hundred years from now, "history" will have any credibility at all.

Nonsense. Whatever credibility history ever had it retains. You think biased data somehow got edited out of the process in 4th cent BC Athens, or 10th cent AD Constantinople, or 19th cent Paris? A hundred years from now it will be MUCH EASIER to write the history of our era than ever before. Why? It's all being preserved.

The historian has always had to cope with multiple sources of info with multiple biases. In fact, that is a historian's dream! The only bad thing for history is when the data is DESTROYED.

It really is only the liberal mind that frets that people can't sort out data on their own. An "editor" is nothing more than a middleman, like an insurance agent or a stock broker. A middleman is only needed because of a technological deficiency, and the middleman always goes away when the technology arrives to eliminate the gap between the consumer of the data and the producer. The "editor" does not help the historian. The "editor" just lays one more layer of bias on top of primary sources.

Absolutely nothing has changed in the information age except the volume of the info being produced, and its endurability. The digital revolution will produce much more accurate history, just like, in the long run, the blogosphere will purify, not foul, the information available to the public. The only difference between the old editorial process and the new is that the new takes place in public.

Let not your heart be troubled.

31 posted on 12/05/2005 9:52:24 AM PST by Taliesan (The power of the State to do good is the power of the State to do evil.)
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To: Taliesan

Thanks for the response!


32 posted on 12/05/2005 3:47:49 PM PST by Lancey Howard
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To: antiRepublicrat
If you don't like that POV, make your own edits.

And then have them reverted within minutes.
33 posted on 12/05/2005 4:45:22 PM PST by Arkinsaw
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