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Wikipedia Criticised by Its Co-founder
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Jan 03, 2005 09:43 AM
from the turning-in-on-itself dept.
from the turning-in-on-itself dept.
wikinerd writes "Wikipedia is under criticism by its co-founder Larry Sanger who has left the project. He warns of a possible future fork due to Wikipedia's Anti-Elitism and he presents his view on Wikipedia's (lack of) reliability. New wikis on various subjects have already emerged, with some of them being complete forks of Wikipedia. Critical articles on Wikipedia are also being published by other sources."
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Wikipedia Criticised by Its Co-founder
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Wikipedia informs me and scares me. (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.ioerror.us/ | Last Journal: Sunday May 22 2005, @06:28AM)
Re:Wikipedia informs me and scares me. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.glassuser.net/ | Last Journal: Monday May 09 2005, @08:47AM)
That's about where I am on it. I used to actively contribute, write (small, out of the way) articles, but I got tired of my work being molested for someone's agenda, and threatened for not pandering to the trolls.
Re:My experience on Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My experience on Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
Since you asked, here is a little reference regarding Seymour Hersh, the dude who saw all the unreleased videos the US government has at present regarding Abu Ghraib (the quote below stolen via google from dailykos et al):
---
This is a summary of Hersh speaking at the ACLU 2004 America At A Crossroads conference according to EdCone.com (via Oliver Willis). I verified by watching the video myself (it starts at 1:07, the "worse stuff" part starts at 1:30).
There's more bad stuff in here, read Ed Cone's summary.
I'll try transcribing some of the more important bits.
[my transcription from 1:31 - 1:32]
The actual speech here [realimpact.net]
Re:My experience on Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
You see you got hung up on the "rape" part exclusively and the article's title was "Rape and SEXUAL TORTURE". Whether rape occurred at Abu Ghraib is open to debate, you dismiss it out of hand though you don't know. What would it take to prove to you rape happened at Abu Ghraib? Well video tapes but video tapes aren't proof either, they tend to just look like porn and its not likely someone would be stupid enough to actually rape someone in front of a camera anyway. Is anecdotal evidence good enough, well that is mostly what you have that Saddam used rape as tool, and that is mostly what you have that it occurred at Abu Ghraib. As in most cases of political propaganda you have anecdotal evidence that you choose to believe(against Saddam) and anecdotal evidence you choose to disregard(against Abu Ghraib) because you predetermined which you wanted to believe.
The rape issue aside, there is a mountain of photo and video evidence of sexual abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, but you seem to be trying to brush it under the rug because it doesn't conform to what you want to believe.
If you weren't pushing a political agenda here you should have probably added the link to Saddam's use of torture, and not tried to purge the Abu Ghraib link. Abu Ghraib is an undeniable instance of sexual torture, occuring in a U.S. military prison, with indisputable graphic evidence on a scale which is rare. You choose to try to make Abu Ghraib go away because it doesn't conform to what you thought the U.S. stands for. Well the U.S. unfortunately has fallen pretty far from the lofty ideal you seem to think it adheres to. You trying to pretend otherwise isn't going to change it. If you feel bad about it you should hold the Bush administration and the Army responsible for failing to insure humane treatment of prisoners of war.
As for state sponsorship of all this, well that is a tough one. Unfortunately the organization that conducted the investigation was the same organization that perpetrated the offense, the Army. It is an unspoken truth about most militaries that, if they can they will blame everthing on the little fish, the enlisted men, and protect their officer corp and chain of command. It appears they may have done just that at Abu Ghraib so far. Its pretty much undeniable military intelligence officers and the CIA were endorsing the "softening up" that was occuring at Abu Ghraib, though maybe the people doing it got carried away. There have been far to many leaks of of information showing that officers and the civilian leadership in the Bush administration has been sanctioning degrees of torture as a matter of policy. Unfortunately when you santion a little torture you run a pretty high risk of it becoming rampant and abusive as it did at Abu Ghraib. This is a place the U.S. just simply should have never gone. It should have strictly adhered to the Geneva conventions in treatment of all prisoners instead of finding legal justifications in the White House for why people in these wars aren't worthy of this most basic humane treatment. You strictly adhere to the Geneva conventions, if for no other reason, than to help insure your soldiers will get the same humane treatment if they are taken prisoner. It is no assurance of that treatment but at this point the U.S. has no ground to stand on in demanding humane treatment of its POW's because it has chosen to unilaterally withdraw from the Geneva conventions using legalistic hair splitting.
Re:My experience on Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't think you actually know the full extent of the abuse there to make such a bold and absolute statement. The photo's that were publicly released didn't include the most graphic ones which apparently sickened most of the people that saw them behind closed doors.
I'm thinking maybe you would like to do a stint as a prisoner in a place like Abu Graib and maybe you wouldn't be so willing to downplay what happened there.
You also sound a lot like you work in the Bush administration. They try to split hairs on what constitutes torture too which is why all this ugliness happened in the first place. There is no sharp division between abuse and torture, its just gradations. I imagine you are more likely if to call it torture if you are on the receiving end and less likely if you are administering it(personally or by supporting a government which does it).
Are you saying including the link on Saddam was objective and not hyperbole? On this particular topic I think we have established that a moderator is most likely going to include links that cites torture by people he disapproves of and suppress ones that hit to close to home.
Unfortunately state sanctioned rape and torture is pretty much inevitably be the subject of innuendo, objectivity and hyperbole because it usually comes down to one persons word against anothers. What makes Abu Ghraib unique is they were stupid enough to produce reams of indisputable evidence which is why it IS such a good case study on the topic.
Re:My experience on Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
Excepting we know they exist and they are worse than the ones that were publicly released which were REALLY bad, so only someone in a severe state of denail would call them irrelevent. Like I said many Japanese are in the same state of denial about Nanking more than 60 years later.
As a reminder you said:
"Except that there was no sexual torture at that prison"
That was an absolute statement which you simply can't support and the weight of the evidence leans against you. You have zero evidence that there was no sexual torture, in fact that is an unprovable statement. Sexual torture happens in nearly every prison whether it be inmate on inmate or guard on inmate.
So I'm at a loss how you think you can get away with saying absolutely it didn't happen when you have no evidence to support that, and you have to deny a large body of photographic evidence showing severe abuse, and we know there is more evidence that has been concealed showing even worse abuse, and a there is a presumption that if they did stuff that awful on camera that they may well have done things far worse off camera.
"The link to Abu Ghraib was *subjective*. It was *biased*. It was *inappropriate* for an encyclopedia."
And so was the link to Saddam and Nanking. They are all subjective charges. Unfortunately EVERY link on this subject is going to be subjective and inflammatory. It is the nature of the subject. I guess you can either deny it exists because it is never absolutely provable, or you can include links to instances with some substantiation and Abu Graib is hands down the best documented case there is. Most torturers are smarter than American torturers because the usually strive to not leave an evidence trail, its a reason electic shock, drowning and rubber hoses are popular, no marks to take pictures of later.
Bottom line is you either include all the links or none of them. The people who were fighting over this at Wikipedia were just trying to replace ones that that offended their political view with ones that were inline with what they want to believe. The original poster was acting like he was being objective and fair when he obviously wasn't, he was replacing an anti American link with a pro American propaganda link.
Re:My experience on Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://members.tripod.com/~afeldspar/index.html)
If I, rd_syringe, do not personally believe that something is true, no reference to it should be made.
This is clearly the case in the "Fisher Price" incident. This is a well-known criticism of Windows XP. The "hardcore guy" you are criticizing did the correct thing by citing the references and showing that yes, this is a criticism that's out there. You did the wrong thing by declaring 'Well, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia unless it's the majority view!' Is that what you think Wikipedia's purpose and policy is, to report only the "majority" view and pretend those other 'minority' views don't exist?
On the issue of the "Rape" article, you fail to mention several things.
One is that when you claimed that the wording only applied to "countries where torture is tolerated or accepted as part of the normal behaviour of police or security", the wording was changed to eliminate that artificial restriction on discussion of the subject. (It wouldn't make sense to create separate sections for "Rape and sexual torture in countries that tolerate it" and "Rape and sexual torture in countries that don't officially tolerate it", since they'd say pretty much the same thing.) Funny that you mention that "based strictly on the wording of the section, the link didn't apply," but fail to mention how that technicality disappeared.
Another is that you're bringing in your misconception again that the majority view (your view) is the truth and there's no need to discuss any others. First you say "there were no cases of rape involved" at Abu Ghraib. Then you mention "except that one prisoner is claiming it without proof." If you had joined Wikipedia earlier, instead of just joining around the same time that you started repeatedly removing the link to "Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse", I wouldn't have been surprised to see you editing out any reference to coercive interrogation techniques being used there because, hey, it's only one person claiming it without proof! Then it's only two people claiming it without proof, only five people claiming it with a photo of Lynndie England smirking at hooded naked prisoners simulating fellatio as proof...
Thirdly, you offer up as your proof that you were the thoughtful considerate party in the right, and that it was the other side, the "hardcore guy", who was "politically motivated", who "snuck in" his restoration of the link you removed ("snuck in"? are you suggesting I had a webcam on you and was carefully watching and waiting until you were looking the other way?) the fact that you offered The Rape of Nanjing as an alternate. Which you are claiming now is "more pertinent to that section than either of the links we had" and "just a given".
You fail to mention that it was explained to you why that was not a suitable alternative: the Rape of Nanjing was a famous military atrocity where there is no question that rapes were committed, as well as murders, as well as wholesale destruction. However, the entire reason that the Rape article has a section on Rape and Sexual Torture is to discuss rape when it occurs not as an act of self-gratification committed at another's expense (as it usually does), but as a method of torture to advance policy. No historical evidence has ever suggested that the Japanese commanders said to the soldiers who did the raping, "Hey, we're gonna want to get information out of those civilians later, so why don't you torture them by raping a bunch?" There's no suggestion that it was anything other than "They're the enemy anyways; whatever you feel like doing to them, go ahead and do it." To quote someone whose name I can't recall, "based strictly on the wording of the section, the link didn't apply."They need expert Guest Editors (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.recordstorereview.com/)
Re:They need expert Guest Editors (Score:5, Interesting)
"Wikipedia has the right basic structure but they need..."
Like the original article and most posts here everyone says Wikipedia has "the right basic structure" but we need to change it in a really fundamental way so it completely stops being what it is. Wikipedia is inherently "Antielitism" and it should stay that way. If you want it to be written and edited by vetted experts in their field, tell you what, READ AN ENCYCLOPEDIA, instead of trying to make Wikipedia something its not. Wikipedia is a people's encyclopedia written by people, with all the brilliance and flaws you find in people. It is a creation of the collective web consciousness of all the people that choose to contribute to it and fight over it.
As soon as you put a bunch of "expert" editors in charge of it chances are the only people who are going to contribute to it, or at least get their contributions included, are the "expert" editors. Amazingly enough they probably all have agendas too and a bunch of them are going to troll if anyone challenges their "expert" opinions.
Knowledge is unfortunately subjective, in most arenas there is no absolute truth. There are nuggets of pretty much absolute truth embedded in it like when an historical event occured, but all the interesting stuff around the edges is not so cut and dried. Wikipedia is a collection of views of what is true which tend to be be different which each set of beholder's eyes. It is interesting precisely because it is a collection of eclectic views by ordinary people. Wikipedia is one collective view of truth, so is Britannica, so is Encarta, so is most of the propaganda nation states put out as their history and news. If you are a good researcher, tell you what, read them all and form your own opinion on what is "right". One thing don't do, don't try to homogenize all information sources so they tell the same story, and all of the alternative views are silenced.
If you want a wikipedia with "expert" editors please fork it and see if you can make it fly. Not sure you will because there is already Encarta and Britannica in that niche. JUST LEAVE WIKIPEDIA ALONE.
Re:Wikipedia informs me and scares me. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://dotfuturemanifesto.blogspot.com/)
No data sources are reliable. The Encyclopeadia Britanica which keeps being referred to as some sort of gold standard of accuracy was started as a triumphalist celebration of the British Empire.
But even unreliable data can point to data that is more reliable. Police investigations do not begin with firm facts, they begin with a set of evidence which may or may not be contaminated in various ways. The same is actually the case in physics research, there are very few experiments that work really well and repeatedly when they are first done.
In the last election we discovered that the mainstream media are terrebly sloppy and unreliable. The media gave far more attention to the smear boat liars for Bush and TANG memos provided by a highly dubious source than they did to actual policies.
The problem with openness is that it only takes a small proportion of jerks to screw everything up. I don't think anyone would seriously consider running the Linux kernel on wiki lines.
Fortunately there is a very simple way out of the current situation and one that will inevitably be put into practice. Just as slashdot has a reputation mechanism and can be surfed at +1 (mostly good stuff) or -1 (mostly trolls) the same sort of mechanism will eventually be put in place on wikipedia or a branch thereof.
The creative commons license even makes it easy for people to do this, the troll version of wiki is simply the last input to the editor queue.
A deeper problem though is the one that all these knowledge engineering projects suffer from at some point, not everything is physics, in most fields there is no absolute knowledge of the form that fits into a rigid taxonomic structure. There is no definitive opinion of the literary merits of Burroughs or Dickens.
The revert wars are in part reflecting genuine differences of opinion. A bunch of loonies who think they have found absolute truth and attempt to construct a rigid ideology arround it are not going to tolerate dissenting views. And bunches of loonies with a rigid ideology are not going to tollerate any form of epistomological relativism.
Re:Wikipedia informs me and scares me. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Thank you for so neatly summing up the problem in what appears to be one of the first posts. I've read several articles over the last while on wiki that contained a paragraph or two in them that I just simply cringed at because the author didn't really know what the heck they were talking about.
I seem to remember a story not long back
in which the former head of Encyclopedia Brittanica criticized it for that very reason.
It is in danger of becoming just another set of web pages which may or may not be opinion. The fact that its co-founder is pointing this out as well says a lot.
Re:Wikipedia informs me and scares me. (Score:5, Insightful)
In general the "threat of revert wars" you speak of seems more like FUD to me. People always say, "Anyone can edit? That will never work." Yet so far it's been working amazingly well. Sure there are trolls and, perhaps more importantly, changes made in good faith that are of poor quality or plainly wrong. The fact that anyone can edit helps, since you can go in and correct those mistakes.
Don't take a vague threat of a revert war as an excuse. You may need to explain on an article's Talk page why you made certain corrections, but that's a Good Thing. Anti-elitism is something to be embraced: it means not blindly following someone because they have the right credentials as an authority. It's usually good to have those credentials, but it's better to demonstrate that you know what you're doing than to simply assert it. If you really know your stuff, you should be able to explain your position clearly and I shouldn't have to take your word for it.
Ideally, this also means that editors cannot abuse trust based on a history of useful contributions. Here on
Overall, open rational dialog is a successful approach. Sure, there will be trolls who try to abuse this, but you already know how to deal with them from your experience here on Slashdot.
Re:Wikipedia informs me and scares me. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.traxel.com/)
I'm curious what is really wrong about the Fox News piece. There are a couple of other replies asking the same question that appear to indicate a bias against Fox News, and I want to make clear that I'm not railing against Fox. I host a highly politically charged mailing list with extremists and moderates from the full spectrum. While there is strong disagreement on whether Fox News presents the views of the majority of the US, those from both the left and the right concur that, overall, it is presented with a neo-conservative perspective. Likewise, members of the list from both the left and right concur that The New York Times presents things from a liberal perspective. I hasten to add that the fact that those people concur does not make the content of the allegations fact, but it does make the allegations themselves worthy of inclusion in a proper analysis of current events.
If the Fox News piece were reflective of some bias in Wikipedia, I would not expect to see reports of left bias allegations in the article on The New York Times - but, indeed, the entry for The New York Times [wikipedia.org] includes a similar section on allegations of bias.
This strikes me as being about stating the facts. There are allegations of bias, and it's not Wikipedia's job to decide that those allegations are correct (and state them as fact) or that they are incorrect (and not state them). The role of an encyclopedia, at least in the context of current events, and where made possible by the technological capabilities of Wikipedia, is to state the facts, and make clear when those facts are allegations (IE: the allegation itself is a fact, the truth of the content of the allegation may be questionable).
Re:Wikipedia informs me and scares me. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday March 11 2007, @09:01PM)
Another poster argued that the Fox News "allegations of bias" section is unfair because no similar section can be put on CNN's article. This simply shows that *there is less controversy over bias on CNN* which is undoubtedly true. CNN is generally percieved as no more or less biased than the general American media; whose percieved bias is already documented [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia. All Wikipedia can do is be a record of what is generally percieved; it cannot aspire to some higher standard of "genuine truth". Indeed, the nature of "genuine truth" is a philosophical question which can be debated at length. Despite this lack of "genuine truth", Wikipedia (including this "Fox News" article) is still an amazingly valuable resource.
Sanger's an epistomologist? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.linkedin.com/in/apsmith)
The first encyclopedists [utm.edu] had at least ulterior motives. Anybody have any other ideas what this is really all about? Then there's always the parallels to the world of Asimov's Foundation series, which started off as an Encyclopedia project!
Ulterior motives (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.linux.org.uk/diary)
Flaming Wikipedia for inaccuracy is missing the two most important single points about Wikipedia that no other encyclopedia has.
#1 You can reuse, reference and reprocess the content. If you want trusted articles then set up a scheme where experts in the field can GPG sign versions of the article that they believe to be correct.
#2 Unlike every other encyclopedia you can take Wikipedia content under license and "fix it", where fixing means adjusting to your own world view. If you happen to think the Encyclopedia Britannica has its head up its backside you can't fix it. Wikipedia you can. Thats both powerful and dangerous as you can easily imagine groups with an agenda doing things like issuing 'evolution free' wikipedia variants to schools.
What matters for Wikipedia isn't IMHO whether Sanger has an axe to grind but who is going to build the tools to take this kind of distributed public knowledgebase further.
Re:Ulterior motives (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, and this potential is what makes the project interesting.
However, fixing things requires mindshare and timeshare. If everyone who points out the systematic failings in the current Wikipedia is either, at best, ignored as some poor luddite from the depths of the 20th century (when people exchanged knowledge on bits of dead trees, poor fools) or, at worst, shouted down, nothing will get get fixed because the consensus view (at least among the majority of current contributors) that nothing needs to be fixed will never be overturned.
The two most talked about articles lately regarding the Wikipedia are from a) an ex-editor of EB and b) a co-founder of Wikipedia. Both articles were thoughtful essays from experts that addressed and analysed, albeit from different directions, the same underlying problem: Wikipedia has a credibility and a reliability shortfall. I think it's unfair to dismiss this point of view as simply "flaming Wikipedia for innaccuracy."
In particular, given Sanger explicitly discussed the licensing of Wikipedia and how it allowed for a fork, he can hardly be accused of "missing the two most important single points about Wikipedia that no other encyclopedia has."
Alas, just because the licensing can allow Wikipedia to be fixed, doesn't mean that it will, or that, in the interim, Wikipedia deserves a free pass.
if you sat twenty scientists in a room and gave them one article an academic fight would break out with many subjects.
That's a straw man. It's all a matter of degree. Ask twenty physicists about an article regarding some fine point of string theory, you're going to get 20 answers, because string theory's new and shiny and no-one understands it properly and the maths and the empirical evidence are still coming up to speed. But ask them to comment on, say, an article on Maxwell's Laws and you're going to get a high, if not unanimous, degree of concordance.
Absolute nonbias is probably impossible, true. But that still doesn't mean everything is on a level playing field. Between bias and non-bias is a continuum, and even if the limits are asymptotically unreachable, it's neither ridiculous or a fools errand to demand articles from the non-biased end of the spectrum.
Remember UseNet FAQs? An awesome collection of knowledge, also theoretically forkable and open to all, but practically, very pro-expert.
Until the Wikipedia develops a mechanism for promoting expert viewpoint above that of others, it's credibility and reliability problems will remain, and it will never fulfil its potential.
Let's not forget... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe a completely free online encyclopedia is just impossible. There are hundreds if not thousands of revisions done on Wikipedia each day and to have a team sit there to review each update and research it would be monotonous without a paid team of researchers.
As well, having a team of professionals review their particular field on the online encyclopedia surely will not come free. Perhaps Wikipedia has hit a stopping point, if not slowing point?
Live by traffic, die by bottleneck (Score:4, Informative)
For any project that seeks to be an encyclopedia of everything, there are but two roads: leave the door open to all, like Wikipedia, or keep the writing closed, and hire researchers to build the articles from the inside. The trouble is, the more knowledge you want to include, and the faster you want it, the more researchers you'll need to hire. That costs a lot of money, and unless you hire a true army of people to do the job, it's going to be a few years before you begin to see any progress. And the progress doesn't get faster.
No, for all the inaccuracies, arguments, and varied forms of pettiness, the raging river of activity has to remain and grow for Wikipedia to survive... and to have any form of accuracy. Consider that one person creates an article. It is only a stub, but it all information in it is correct. Someone edits it, and adds something, but some part of that is incorrect. Someone else edits again, correcting that, and adding something else that's incorrect. Someone else adds something else, and misses the mistake. Another person comes along, and fixes the mistake. The stub is shaping up, and the article gets more attention for some reason. A few people edit the budding article one way and then another. They get into an argument, and the argument becomes a fight. The truth lies somewhere between their positions, but that's forgotten. Maybe there's a reversion war. One of them gets pissed off and leaves. The other one feels he's won the day, and lingers for a little bit, then leaves. Then somebody else comes in and fixes the article.
The end result is the article becomes acceptably accurate. And it has the hands of many different people, and the subtle truths that they bring. A single researcher brings only his own hand and the truth he knows.
Great example of some of the strengths of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea [wikipedia.org]
Re:Let's not forget... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday April 03 2006, @07:23PM)
Wikipedia has exactly one problem, neatly broken into two (related) main subproblems:
It allows stateless-user modification. This allows untrusted users to completely trash perfectly good entries, and it doesn't allow for the creation of "untrusted" users.
A very, very simple fix for this exists - Force users to register (they don't need to provide any IRL info, as I'll explain in a moment), and implement a Slashdot-like karma and moderation (and metamoderation, if necessary) system.
Limit all users to only creating new entries, and to editing their own entries and those at least one karma-class below themselves (with the highest karma-classes kept in check by a few absolutely-trusted WikiGods (most likely the physical maintainers of the site). Additionally, to address your point about having expert review of topics, allow users to grant other users permission to edit their own created topics.
Thus, a new user will have basically no power, other than to contribute new material. This stops people from making accounts just to trash legit entries. If a new user makes a slew of new entries consisting entirely of mindless drivel, they'll never gain any karma, thus can't cause any real damage. At the same time, this allows the creation of local experts, those who have proven themselves worthy of editing certain topics by higher-karma but less-expert users (if so desired by both) based on personal permission-granting.
I suppose this also sounds a bit like E2's approach, but without the annoying minimum number of nodes per level (the biggest reason I stopped contributing to E2 - A user would do better to write large amounts of barely tolerable crap than to write a small number of well-researched, well-written nodes; Personally, I wrote a dozen or so rather good entries and (two crap ones, I'll admit it), including seven "Cool"s, and never got past level 1) and with the addition of actual editing of entries rather than only creating or appending new ones.