False Fact On Wikipedia Proves Itself 513
An anonymous reader writes "Germany has a new minister of economic affairs. Mr. von und zu Guttenberg is descended from an old and noble lineage, so his official name is very long: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. When first there were rumors that he would be appointed to the post, someone changed his Wikipedia entry and added the name 'Wilhelm,' so Wikipedia stated his full name as: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. What resulted from this edit points up a big problem for our information society (in German; Google translation). The German and international press picked up the wrong name from Wikipedia — including well-known newspapers, Internet sites, and TV news such as spiegel.de, Bild, heute.de, TAZ, or Süddeutsche Zeitung. In the meantime, the change on Wikipedia was reverted, with a request for proof of the name. The proof was quickly found. On spiegel.de an article cites Mr. von und zu Guttenberg using his 'full name'; however, while the quote might have been real, the full name seems to have been looked up on Wikipedia while the false edit was in place. So the circle was closed: Wikipedia states a false fact, a reputable media outlet copies the false fact, and this outlet is then used as the source to prove the false fact to Wikipedia."
I can't help but think of this story: (Score:2, Interesting)
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius [wikipedia.org] as well as other Jorge Luis Borges stories.
This is just, umm, fantastic -- in the fantastic sense of the word "fantastic".
And I'm very sorry for the Wikipedia link.
Re:This is a story? (Score:1, Interesting)
I remember reading a Bin Laden page and came across some interesting bits, like his stated reasoning behind 9/11. Since then it's been completely wiped clean and it's now a stale "Bin Laden is a terrorist" article.
From what I've learned, those controversial wiki pages are usually defended by little cabals, and anyone editing outside of the cabal is hit with a ban after a bit of coordination through emailing. The problem isn't necessarily media outlets copying false facts, but groups of people with a biased agenda and admin access.
Re:primary sources discouraged (Score:2, Interesting)
How does one go about verifying that what these primary sources say is true?
Re:This is a story? (Score:1, Interesting)
It also has the use that you think some area is well-described on Wikipedia, so you fact-check it yourself and then cite that specific revision of the page. That is a perfectly good use of Wikipedia in a citation, even in a research paper.
Re:1984? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bottom line: If you want to do real research, you need to go to primary sources. [...] Maybe the problem is that the Wikipedia editors think Der Spiegel is an authoritative source.
For something as simple as the full name of a German public official, Germany's major news weekly really ought to be authoritative. What is a primary source for a person's name, anyway? Their birth cerificate? What would be a scolarly journal on that subject? Should I ask the librarian to subscribe us to Trends in German Public Officials' Names?
Re:Whatever happened to research? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually my wife being in grad school, the prof's will FAIL anyone that has a reference that is online at all. He is tired of the half assing that students are doing lately and requiring that all references be in print form only with full information on how to GET access to that reference.
She's an accounting major though.
Re:1984? (Score:5, Interesting)
I take exception to the idea that only scholarly journals may be primary sources of information
Actually, scholarly journals can be sources of disinformation, too. It's happened before that researchers have gotten something wrong, then were quoted by other researchers in other papers. It has often gone full circle (and I wish I had a citation, but it's been a long time since I read about it).
There have been instances of respected newspapers using The Onion [theonion.com] as sources, not realizing that fine news source is humor. The Onion must hate that, it would be like when you make a joke comment on slashdot and it gets modded as "insightful".
In Wikipedia's defence, I've complained about an edit I made after I became a cyborg [slashdot.org] in its entry about cataract surgery [wikipedia.org]. I added information about the accomodating lens I had implanted in my eye, and it was quickly removed. I added it again and it was removed again. I gave up, and a few months ago I mentioned it here and someone encouraged me to try once more.
The entry finally stayed put, although someone changed the date that the FDA approved it from 2003 to 2004, despite the manufacturer's website says 2003 (I just now changed it to 2003, I wonder if it will stay?). I suspect that a different IOL manufacturer edited my edit out because the device is by far superior to any other IOL.
Kudos to Wikipedia. It is a great resource for satisfying curiosity; when I found I needed cataract surgery it was the first place I went. Same goes for when I had to undergo a vitrectomy [slashdot.org] (I wouldn't wish that procedure on my worst enemy).
It's also great for when you're turning old LPs and cassettes into CDs, [kuro5hin.org] you can copy and paste track titles into your burning software.
My dad gave me great advice when I was a kid: never believe anything you hear (or read) and only half of what you see.
WikiPedia does not strive for the truth (Score:4, Interesting)
It's been pointed out on /. a number of times before, so I'm not going to dig up the link, but WikiPedia explicitly states that their standard of inclusion is not truthfulness but verifiability - and they are acknowledging the difference. Of course it's rather amusing when the truthless but verifyable (i.e. printed elsewhere) fact originated on WikiPedia itself, but it doesn't reflect a weakness in WikiPedia that you may interpret it to; this is the way that WikiPedia is meant to work (presumably for the simple reason that verifyability as defined is objective, whereas the absolute truth is much harder to nail down - who determines it?!).
Re:1984? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:1984? (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean like the actual fucking person the article is about? Oh wait, Wikipedia doesn't consider the actual fucking person to be a "primary source"!
And therein lies Wikipedia's problem.
Quite true.
I'm mentioned in a Wikipedia article. Not by name, but by an old nickname (the same one I use for my username on this site). However, it's spelled incorrectly, mainly because it's quoting another website that also spelled it incorrectly. That website also states a bunch of "facts" that were made up as a joke, and the Wikipedia article repeats those "facts".
I can't correct the original website, but I can correct Wikipedia -- except that I'm not allowed to, because I can't actually provide a link that proves that I really do spell the name the way I do, or that the "facts" were made up. Plus, I think it's even against the rules to edit articles about yourself.
Therefore, both of the people out there who care about the content of this particular article will remain blissfully misinformed.
Re:1984? (Score:3, Interesting)
The only real primary authoratative source for a person's name would be a birth certificate or passport, neither of which are public documents. Beyond that, you have their word, and the word of people who should be in the know. Newspapers who cover that beat should be in the know.
Wikipedia has articles on Slush Puppies [wikipedia.org], obscure 80's videogames [wikipedia.org], and The Star Trek Experience [wikipedia.org]. The standards of research need to vary quite a bit simply because A: many of their topics are obscure or under-researched, B: most fall outside the scope of scholarly journals, and C: attempt to explain pop-culture phenomenon before they have bubbled up through the literature, like Naked Hiking [wikipedia.org]. Their information policy needs to encompass heavily researched topics like Salmonella [wikipedia.org], pop culture icons like Tony the Tiger [wikipedia.org], information compendiums like lists of generic terms based on active trademarks [wikipedia.org], and truly obscure / trivial subjects like the person who visits Poe's grave every year [wikipedia.org].
In short, Wikipedia *is* the internet, or at least a reflection of it. It is a collection of articles written by anybody interested about any subject, and that is what makes it useful. It is in essence a collection of nearly 3 million ever-evolving essays. Reducing that to "authoratative sources only" would destroy its utility and make it, well, like so many other undersized and ignored information aggregators online.
Also, "Encyclopedic grade writing" has always been pretty terrible. My relatives still have some Britannicas from 1986 in her house, and you wouldn't believe the raw obviousness of some of the mistakes in them, even judging by the knowledge of the time. Encyclopedias have always been freshmen essays into complicated subjects they do not know enough about. The advantage of wikipedia, while no more authoratative, is that hundreds of people with direct experience can correct and expand the articles, whereas traditional encyclopedias are written by staff writers with limited knowledge and stay wrong forever.
Re:1984? (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been instances of respected newspapers using The Onion as sources, not realizing that fine news source is humor. The Onion must hate that, it would be like when you make a joke comment on slashdot and it gets modded as "insightful".
But the best humor is humorous because it is insightful and witty. Compare an "all guys getting hit in the groin" show like America's Funniest Home Videos to some really, really good stand-up comedy, or to A Modest Proposal... nothing prevents something from being both insightful and humorous.
Re:This is a story? (Score:3, Interesting)
And yet my local paper (News & Messenger, Prince William VA) has published front-page articles explicitly stating "According to Wikipedia" and directly quoting the wiki article. Clearly the academic bounds on Wiki use have not made their way into the world of journalism.
Re:1984? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wikipedia's only strength is that it's the way of least resistance. It's "slightly" better information than random webpages, but it has both of it's disadvantages :
1. it only provides majority opinion (e.g. total disregard for religious dimensions of both the darfur, kosovo and kashmir conflicts, economic theory (let's not go into exactly what is wrong with economic theory on wikipedia, we all know what the problem is), religious stuff like abortion/euthanasia/islam ordering the killings of gays, non-muslims and women, totally biased information on israel, ...), and silences minorities. The problem is that academics are a tiny majority (and honest academics who only comment on their field of expertise are yet again a subset of them). The people who really know something are very quickly drowned out on any subject the mass-media push an opinion about anything.
2. Amongst it's contributors (and, sadly, admins) are people you really, really, really don't want to be the arbiters of knowledge. Lobbyists, journalists, "activists" and even kids trying to discredit someone's dad have all been known to use wikipedia to great damage. Outright falsifications and lies have been published to great acclaim (e.g. the many Jim Wales sagas), for reasons as idiotic as increasing some idiot's ego.
Wikipedia is like one of those know-it-alls. They can be surprisingly knowledgeable about tiny little subjects, but you really can't tell -at all- when you're being fed total bullshit.
All information from wikipedia should be treated as if it's probably falsified, because a subset of it is. It is not merely wrong or inaccurate, but actually falsified.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a common problem with WP (Score:3, Interesting)
WP, while a useful web site, tends to promote "popular opinion" into "psuedo fact". As long as enough people who edit WP believe something to be true, the entries about that item will promote the popular belief as fact. Eventually, due to WP's popularity, the psuedo fact becomes accepted as an actual fact.
Example: according to linguistics, there are no rules about what words can be added to the English language. Indeed English is the least pure, most widely hybrized language on the planet and new words are added to it daily. For example the verb "slashdotted" :-) or the verb "google" etc.. Nowhere are there any rules saying "these specific things cannot be added to the english language because they don't meet criteria 'x'." According to linguistics, the only rules used to determine if something is actually a word or not are these two:
A: Is the word being used?
B: Is the meaning of the word as used agreed on?
If those two requirements are metthen the word in question is a legitimate word.
The example peevologists hate the most: "virii" (yes, it meets the requirements. Therefore it is a word, despite being desperately hated by peevologists :-) So use it often! ;-)
Instead of following these rules, WP indulges in what linguists call "peevology" which is the process whereby a language myth becomes accepted as "fact" due to aggresive "enforcement" of the myth by people who actually have no idea what they are talking about.
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&client=firefox&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=q9z&q=peeveology+OR+peevology+OR+%22peeve-ology%22&btnG=Search [google.com]
Fortunately even the mainstream peevologists are realizing that language just isn't used the way the 18th century grammarians (who started the whole myth of "standard english) think it ought to be used. In fact it wasn't used that way back then, and never has been from then until now.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9507EFDA113AF93BA2575BC0A9649C8B63 [nytimes.com]
The biggest issue with peevology is that many copy editors have been mis-educated about these very issues and go forth laying waste to perfectly good writing because they (incorrectly) believe said writing is not following "the rules". (the article refers to prescriptivists who have some overlap with peevologists but are generally less harmful, just annoying.)
Examples from the language log http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ [upenn.edu]
"Singular they" is illegal. http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003572.html [158.130.17.5]
"Split infinitives" are not allowed. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=515 [upenn.edu]
"That isn't a Word." http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001652.html [upenn.edu]
David Crystal, in his new book How Language Works, says "Language change is inevitable, continuous, universal and multidirectional. Languages do not get better or worse when they change. They just -- change." http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=How+Language+Works&x=15&y=17 [amazon.com]
Geoffrey K Pullum:
I was walking across campus with a friend and we came upon half a dozen theoretical linguists committing unprovoked physical assault on a defenseless prescriptivist. My friend was shocked. Sh
New meme? (Score:2, Interesting)