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From the Los Angeles Times

Why Wiki Can Drive You Wacky

When free-form information gets it wrong, watch out.

By Bernard Haisch

BERNARD HAISCH is president of the Digital Universe Foundation, which is working on a free expert-directed online encyclopedia.

July 24, 2006

'YOU DO NOT get to choose whether or not an article on you appears in Wikipedia, and you have no veto power over its contents. The article can cast you as a genius or an imbecile, a respected scientist or a crackpot…. a vandal could replace a page, any page, with total gibberish. The page on Einstein might have a statement inserted to the effect that he was a Nazi collaborator, or that his theories have been totally discredited, or that he was a silicon-based life form from Proxima Centauri…. Wikipedia does not operate by your rules but by its own conventions; I suggest you learn to accept it…. I can assure you resistance is futile."

This was the lecture I received from anonymous Wikipedia "editor" KSmrq while I was in the midst of trying to bring some semblance of accuracy and neutrality to the "Bernard Haisch" article that another "editor" had posted a few days previously. I put "editor" in quotes because anyone can be a self-appointed editor. KSmrq's user page says: "Although I do have personal history, interests, education and professional experience, I feel no compulsion to share them with the world on this page." Now that inspires trust and confidence!

All it takes is a click of the mouse on the "edit this page" box and you too can add or subtract anything you want from virtually any article (a handful are blocked, e.g. George W. Bush), identity and relevant knowledge optional. Congratulations. You are now a Wikipedian.

But wait. If the article happens to be about you or your work, you are supposed to refrain from clicking on "edit this page." Instead, if there are problems, you should click on the discussion page and politely argue your case there, in the hope that some other self-appointed editor will consider the merits of your case and fix things for you.

The belief among Wikipedians is that somehow, through a process of group trial and error, something credible will emerge by and by.

This is not always so, as a widely reported 2005 case showed. John Seigenthaler Sr., founder of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University and a former assistant to Robert F. Kennedy, discovered in September 2005, via a tip from a friend, that for the previous four months his Wikipedia entry had included this statement, inserted by an anonymous editor: "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven."

An Op-Ed article that Seigenthaler published in USA Today detailed his frustrating and failed attempts to track down the source of this statement. The perpetrator eventually came forward with an apology and an explanation that it had been a joke gone bad.

Some might view this as an example of the worst that could happen and proof that the system did eventually root out the misinformation.

I disagree. Something as blatantly wrong as this will be fixed sooner or later. What is more insidious are the negative slants and biased cherry picking of facts that can paint a quite inaccurate portrait of something or someone. This is as hard to fix as a flat tire in a blizzard. And if it does get fixed, it could change again five minutes hence.

Unfortunately, telling yourself that it really doesn't matter what Wikipedia says is not a realistic option anymore. Wikipedia is growing rapidly in its number of articles and users, and for many people Wikipedia will be the first and only source they'll see.

Of course, Wikipedia will have its facts straight when it comes to the Pythagorean theorem or the periodic table. But that does not translate into accuracy and unbiased articles on more subjective or controversial topics, especially people.

To be sure, the rules — which amazingly are also freely editable — state that there are policies, such as a "Neutral Point of View" that "editors" should follow. Some do and some don't, but most of them are quick to edit your edits if you dare to correct facts or misinterpretations about yourself. Wikipedia editors are judge, jury and prosecutor.

What brought about my Wikipedia battle? As part of my mainstream career in astrophysics, I did NASA-sponsored research and served for 10 years as one of the scientific editors of the leading journal in that field, the Astrophysical Journal. But simultaneously I edited the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which attempts to provide a scientific forum for critical discussion of unorthodox topics, such as parapsychology and analysis of UFO reports, some of which had mundane explanations. I did this as an unpaid public service.

I discovered in June that a Wikipedia editor had written an article on me that concentrated almost solely on the latter topics while virtually ignoring the 100-plus scientific papers I had published. It was a draining editing battle to try to coax the article into something halfway reasonable, which was helped by the decision of the "editor" to drop out of Wikipedia. But the article could again be rewritten by another anonymous editor. Of course, you too might decide to edit my article. Please refrain.

As for me, Oscar Wilde once said: "The only thing worse than being talked about … is not being talked about." It's a small consolation.

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Posted by Ian Woloschin (Member # 3709) on 07-25-2006, 06:02 PM:
 
I find that for straight factual information (such as an explanation of how radar works), Wikipieda is top notch, and while it may not be as detailed or informative as a textbook, for a free service on the internet, it's pretty damn good.

For anything not strictly factual, such as say, the ineptness of George W. Bush as president of the USA (or the amazingness of G.W.B., it goes either way), forget it, you're just going to get bogged down in the garbage that crazies on either side post.

Stick to the factual information and you're all set. Go for something that's subjective, forget it.
 

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Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 07-25-2006, 07:31 PM:
 
What Ian said. Wikipedia can be a useful reference source for factual information. But as a source of information on controversial people or topics, I would take it with a huge grain of salt, if at all.

I've never contributed anything to Wikipedia. I'm not smart enough.
 

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Posted by Wayne Keyser (Member # 2420) on 07-25-2006, 08:23 PM:
 
Wikipedia has many flaws (as pointed out ably above) but, also, many positive factors.

To use it responsibly, the researcher has to abandon any reliance on "authority" as far as the editing of the material goes, but really that is true for any source, from Wikipedia to Nazi propaganda to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

How many times have you read "scholarly" articles on (for instance) great films (not to mention "popular" articles) and found that some or many facts simply parrot incorrect information that "everybody knows", or set forth facts that are either a matter of opinion or that have been superseded by later discoveries, or poiunts of view that depend very much on the author's personal perspective or on the outworn "academic party line" of ten or twenty years ago?

Wikipedia's strengths include a wonderful breadth of information, hardly available anywhere else, but it must be used cautiously.
 

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Posted by Dustin Mitchell (Member # 372) on 07-26-2006, 12:40 AM:
 
I find Wiki as a great starting point for research. Using information from Wiki I can go to more 'authoratative' sources and find what I'm looking for faster. I guess to sum it up Wiki help me 'find out what I'm trying to find out', if that makes any sense at all.
 

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 07-26-2006, 01:51 AM:
 
I don't necessarily agree with the position that Wikipedia can generally be trusted to get facts right, but that coverage of emphases and viewpoints are usually less reliable.

As far as getting facts right is concerned, I think it's generally the case that the better known and more mainstream a topic is, the more likely the 'Wiki principle' (i.e. that a critical mass of knowledge among the user base will spontaneously debug an article) is to work. However, for more obscure topics for which far fewer people have the necessary subject knowledge and expertise, this is less likely to be the case.

As an experiment I recently wrote this entry, which is related to a topic of some of my own research. I deliberately introduced one out-and-out factual error and one questionable assertion (i.e. an interpretation of fact). I tried to make both these glitches the sort of thing which might creep into an article as the result of someone with very limited pre-existing specialist knowledge, supplemented with information gleaned from a Google search, writing it.

I then circulated the link to a load of friends and colleagues and asked if they could spot the bugs. I emailed the link to around 20-25 people, some of whom had some relevant subject knowledge, others not. Only one was able to spot the factual error (there is a clue to it elsewhere in the text), and no-one got the questionable assertion.

That article has been up for over a month now, and no-one has corrected it. On the other hand, I suspect that if I'd got the name of Britney Spears's boyfriend wrong, or mis-stated the year in which Manchester United first won the F.A. Cup, that would have been amended within hours if not minutes (not least because Spears and MUFC probably pay a PR agency quite a lot of money to keep an eye on those entries).

quote: Wayne Keyser

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How many times have you read "scholarly" articles on (for instance) great films (not to mention "popular" articles) and found that some or many facts simply parrot incorrect information that "everybody knows", or set forth facts that are either a matter of opinion or that have been superseded by later discoveries, or poiunts of view that depend very much on the author's personal perspective or on the outworn "academic party line" of ten or twenty years ago?

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A book or journal article published in the '30s will have been overtaken by new research since, but it still stands as a record of what the state of the art was at the time, which can be very useful for historians ... Given that the Wikipedia model is based on constantly modifying an existing text, it's much more difficult to trace how thinking about a given subject grew and developed.

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