Balance"

"Balance"

Respectful of Otters has an interesting bit on "the faux 'journalistic objectivity' achieved by presenting every story as if it had two equal sides".

Holocaust deniers intentionally blur the distinction between the First Amendment right to speak freely, without government restraint, and the right to publicity, an audience, and scholarly consideration. Unfortunately, both in the media and in academia, far too many people have been taken in by these tactics. However repellent the ideas of Holocaust deniers, they argue, it would stifle intellectual freedom and journalistic objectivity to... well, apparently, to insist that the truth be presented as the truth.

It seems to me that Wikipedia's philosophical agonizing about the neutral point of view comes closer to tackling this than any other discussion I have seen. (Perhaps a similar or better theory is developed in journalism classrooms or newsrooms, but we don't see the discussion and rarely see good results.)

posted Sun 3 Apr 2005 in /software/wikipedia | link

More on Wikipedia accuracy

Wikipedia is clearly not perfectly accurate; in some areas it is noticeably incomplete, inaccurate, or biased. I wouldn't want someone to rely solely on Wikipedia in making an important decision. I wouldn't want someone to rely on any single source on the net to make a truly important decision.

On the other hand, as background material, as an overview or summary of the subject, as entertainment, to merely remind you of the meaning of a word or location of a country, I think it's harmless.

In the future I think it is likely to continue to improve. I think there is strong self-regulation to make sure that good content is not lost or corrupted once it's added, and so the fraction of good bits will increase. Any one page at any one moment may be incorrect, but the probability will decrease over time. Critical reading, and applying Wikipedia-specific skills such as scrutinizing the history and cross-referencing can reduce the danger of false information.

As an example of this filtering in action, the Australian Gannet page was originally created as an attack on Wikipedia, but now it has useful content.

Wikipedia is both a product and a process. Even if the product is not yet perfect, the process ensures that at the end of every day, the encyclopedia is higher quality than it was at the beginning of the day. That doesn't ensure we will eventually attain perfection (if such a thing is even possible), but it's something to believe in.[...]

It should be noted that the three other leading online encyclopedias have disclaimers and provide no warranty as to their accuracy - Britannica, Encarta and Bartleby. Sometimes the staff of those encyclopedias forget this fact.

posted Sun 24 Oct 2004 in /software/wikipedia | link

John Lott 0, Wikipedia 1

Tim Lambert writes on the resistance of Wikipedia to intentional attack, a topic I wrote about earlier.

John Lott has been anonymously editing a wikipedia article about his work, to remove information he felt is inaccurate. One of the sections that Lott dislikes discusses Lott's habit "pseudospoofing": — posting glowing reviews of Lott's own work under pseudonyms such as Mary Rosh.

Wikpedia vandalism experiment

Chris perpetrated what I'd call a grey-hat hack against Wikipedia — inserting some incorrect information to see what would happen. Rusty calls it vandalism. The specific change was an assertion that there is a colony of Australian Gannets at ANU, and they eat pizza. I removed it. (Sorry, Chris.) It was slightly funny, which is why I left it there for a week after I originally saw it.

So Chris proved that incorrect information can persist in Wikipedia for a matter of a few weeks, even when the page is reviewed by some people. OK, so you can't believe everything you read on the Internet — that's hardly news.

I'm sure there are errors in Wikipedia. There are probably errors in non-free encyclopedias too, though perhaps proportionally less. On the other hand, traditional encyclopedias move much more slowly and can't cover current events to the same extent. If they tried to do that, their error rate might increase.

I suspect the influx of accurate content willl dilute the errors over time. Errors are removed in a kind of stochastic process — any particular error may persist for days or months, but eventually they go. Accurate content increases monotonically — it's easy to detect and revert vandalistic deletion. (This is a key advantage of Wikipedia over the web as a whole: if a page has just one error or inaccuracy you don't need to write a whole new page.) So I expect the fraction of errors to slowly decrease.

If you want reliable information then cross-checking Wikipedia with a traditional encyclopedia and other materials will probably give better results than any source alone.

I don't think marking articles as "reviewed" or "draft" would really fix it. A critical reader can get a much better sense of reliability from cross-referencing, looking at the article history and Talk page, etc. (Anyhow, how can you trust the "reviewed" tag?) As Douglas Adams pointed out, humans are cunningly designed to do trust calculations in firmware.

Authority of wikipedia

There has been some discussion in response to a newspaper article claiming that Wikipedia is Not Trustworthy because it is not written by Authorities and Anyone Can Change Anything.

The librarian quoted in the article has apparently later said that her words were misconstrued. And so they should be: it's more useful to teach children to read and research critically than to just teach them to find authoritative heavy books.

One of several ironic aspects is that newspapers may be considered more authoritative than wikipedia, but they're not necessarily a more reliable source. Newspapers are never reprinted to correct errors; are largely supported by commercial advertising; publish only a small fraction of letters received; publish opinion pieces on the same page as fact pieces; and are directed by the interests of a high-concentrated circle of owners. (They might print retractions or corrections, but what fraction of people who read a leader will read the retraction on page 5 three days or three weeks later?) None of these mean that you should not read newspapers, but like the Internet they should be read discerningly and critically.

Bertrand Russell got this just about right a good fraction of a century ago:

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

Douglas Adams (of beloved memory) was even more on the mark:

Because the Internet is so new we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can't easily answer back — like newspapers, television or granite. Hence 'carved in stone.' What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the internet on trust — of course you can't, it's just people talking — but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV — a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us'.