Phony Wikipedia Entry Used By Worldwide Press 391
Hugh Pickens writes "A quote attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre was posted on wikipedia shortly after his death in March and later appeared in obituaries in mainstream media. 'One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear,' Jarre was quoted as saying. However, these words were not uttered by the Oscar-winning composer but written by Shane Fitzgerald, a final-year undergraduate student, who said he wanted to show how journalists use the internet as a primary source for their stories. Fitzgerald posted the quote on Wikipedia late at night after news of Jarre's death broke. 'I saw it on breaking news and thought if I was going to do something I should do it quickly. I knew journalists wouldn't be looking at it until the morning,' The quote had no referenced sources and was therefore taken down by moderators of Wikipedia within minutes. However, Fitzgerald put it back up a few more times until it was finally left up on the site for more than 24 hours. While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone's death as a social experiment, he had carefully generated the quote so as not to distort or taint Jarre's life, he said. 'I didn't expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised.'"
Lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia motto (Score:2, Insightful)
"we have a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information."
Current "Journalism" is Mere Quotes (Score:5, Insightful)
As the author noted.
We see it all the time, where no one wants to delve into details & analyze something.
After all, that takes time & "I have to get my Latte @ Starbucks."
I am also struck by the lack of actual questioning of people "journalists" interview. It doesn't happen for the most part. It is mostly "star-struck fan time" when journalists interview the politicians and famous people.
Google (Score:5, Insightful)
This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
This has happened so many times before that it isn't funny. To use one example off the top of my head, there was a debate on the page about Rutgers where someone claimed with no good sourcing that the University had had an opportunity to be in the Ivy League when the league was first formed. Edit-warring over this continued for some time until someone found a recent source that made the claim. Suspicious editors thought something was up and contacted the newspaper in question. It turned out they had gotten the claim from "somewhere on the internet" that is, Wikipedia.
Bottom line. Don't take a fact in Wikipedia unless it is sourced. Even then, check the talk page to make sure there's been no serious recent disagreement about the matter (checking the history helps too). And then, you can only trust claim as much as the source used. And don't trust things you hear in the general media without some fact checking.
Re:Wikipedia motto (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really want to know something, you have to verify it yourself. Don't rely on someone else's interview, go interview the person yourself. Don't rely on someone else's experiment, or someone else's first hand account, if you want to know something, verify it yourself. In many cases this is of course impractical, but at least you should be aware that your knowledge might not be accurate.
Newspapers still have a place, and that is to get the information out quickly. They've never been accurate, but they do a good job letting you know roughly what happened so you can go out and investigate the matter in more detail if you need to.
Re:Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Funniest part is when they argue your site is a better resource than any musty old stack of books because it's *~on the internet~*.
Well played (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not even supposed to cite encyclopedias. (Score:1, Insightful)
:\
And now they'll use this as another way to explain how wikipedia is "inaccurate".
Re:Rat Race (Score:5, Insightful)
That just goes to show how much of a rat race life is. People working as fast as they can to spit out crummy, non referenced work to please the higher-ups.
It's not about working fast, or Wikipedia, or referencing sources. It's about people and companies making a professional living supplying news in a non-professional manner. Some people spend tens of thousands of dollars to go to school to learn how to do research and journalism, and some people actually write their own essays without any help from their friends or families. Those people, unfortunately, have the disadvantage of being honest and intelligent. When it comes down to it anybody can do journalism, but it's only people who can write good resumes that will get the job. It's the same in all industries. The world keeps on turning, however slanted the orbit may be.
Re:Lazy (Score:3, Insightful)
Bloggers just do a much better job of biased journalism than the mainstream press.
Most bloggers only comment on news and sometimes combine multiple news sources. It is very rare that they are the primary source of information.
It's more like "this person said this, but look here where he said the exact opposite" or things of that nature. They usually weren't there in person in either event and had to rely on other media sources for that information.
That's not always true and there are some bloggers that don't just scour Google News to come up with blog topics, but they are very few instances relatively speaking.
Take the wars for example. You may have people blogging about things going on here, or the politics of it or maybe the news reports coming out of the area but you're not going to get a whole lot of people live blogging in the middle of a war zone.
Bloggers need to come off their high horse a bit and try to imagine what the blogosphere would be like if there weren't people willing to put themselves in the thick of things to bring us the news.
Basically I think for the most part the news agencies are good, granted there have been some problems as this article shows. But it's mostly good reporting while blogging is mostly meta-reporting.
And for the record, I've never worked in journalism but I do have a semi successful blog.
Incompetent Crowdsourcing (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that this is the same type of failure as what happened in the mortgage bubble. Realtors and buyers and auditors were not actually determining the real value of the houses they were trading, but were merely checking to see what everyone else thought the value was. Most of the players (at least those with the most control) had an incentive to inflate the value. So the result was a spiral of home prices that rose far beyond the true value.
Now that the market has corrected and prices are closer to the actual value, all parties are crying foul and saying they don't want to have to "mark to market" or face foreclosure or bankruptcy for their inability to correctly determine the true value of their investments.
In the same way, Wikipedia does not check for actual truth of the statements it publishes, just that they are corroborated by some other medium or by some other website. This process is subject to the same manipulation and error that has decimated the global real estate market. In the same way, the consequences of failure are externalized by Wikipedia and not borne by any of its editors, contributors, or sponsors.
Caveat emptor.
Re:Wikipedia motto (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but that is a absurd attitude. The whole idea of progress is that we can actually know that electric light bulbs work and why so we don't have to repeat the entire series of Thomas Edison's trials. OK, Edison was a tinkerer rather than a scientist but that doesn't mean we have to discount his work.
Look it up in Encyclepedia Brittanica and you will find it there. Verified and checked by a lot more than one person. People with a professional regard for what they are doing. Do errors creep in? Sure they do, but they are not only caught they are accidental.
Wikipedia's innaccuracies are intentional, it is part of the design. The general dumbing-down of knowledge and discounting "experts" in a wholesale manner. The idea that all knowledge is an opinion and everyone has an equally valid opinion if they care to express it.
Does that mean that if I believe John F. Kennedy was killed by lizardmen from a far off planet that this is equally valid as people that believe he was killed by the mafia? On Wikipedia you might find either, on alternate days. And I bet I can find more than one source to cite about suit-wearing lizardmen being the real source of all our problems here on Earth. Sorry, the truth is not an opinion. It doesn't work for History and it doesn't work for Science.
Rough quote from Stranger in a Strange Land: "Scientists indeed! Half guess work and half superstition." This is indeed the attitude of far too many today and certainly in the US the education system is doing nothing to combat this problem. This quote is from a book written in 1960 or so and is in defense of the "science" of astrology. Yes, there are plenty of people that believe that astrology is just as relevent as physics.
Wikipedia is a silly idea that is just getting worse all the time. It was obvious it wasn't worth much from its inception to some people but every day that goes by you would think it would be clearer and clearer. Instead we have people defending it and claiming the silly foundation of Wikinonsense is true. Sorry, but science isn't an opinion. History isn't an opinion. There are facts and there are lies people want you to believe. Sorting them out is important, and you will never, ever be able to sort them out using Wikipedia as a reference.
Re:Newspapers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is it's the trivial nonsense people bother about arguing over, not scientific fact which is easier to take for granted.
Re:Lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, let me get this straight: you accuse mainstream journalists of failing to check their facts and a lack of objectivity ... and then you use bloggers as an example of how to correct these problems?
As for the first claim, go on believing that "[b]loggers actually check their facts, or their posters or competition will" if it suits you, but I can pretty much guarantee that you will find more errors of fact per story in just about any political blog than you will find in just about any newspaper, or radio or TV news show. There are simply too many blogs, and too few people with the time and motivation and skills to fact-check, to keep the blogosphere honest. You could put up a blog post claiming that Obama eats live kittens every morning for breakfast, and there would be a substantial number of people who will not only believe you, but would champion you against those who said "Um, no, actually he doesn't" as a Bold Politically Incorrect Speaker Of Truth To Power.
And as for the second, I would argue that the pretense (which is all it can ever be) of journalistic objectivity has done more damage to journalism than its lack ever did. People know perfectly well that reporters -- and, at least as importantly, the people who pay those reporters -- have opinions of their own, and that those opinions will influence news coverage. MSM journalism (newspapers, radio, TV) is actually much more useful when you can discern those opinions within minutes of picking up a paper or tuning into a station instead of trying to read between the lines to puzzle them out.
Re:Wikipedia motto (Score:3, Insightful)
Studies done in regard to this, using random sampling, found Wikipedia to be just as reliable in its facts as Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, we know that Wikipedia contains errors... so why (given the actual evidence), are we so reluctant to accept that the Britannica is also flawed?
Personally I feel that Wikipedia will now continue to go downhill in quality, precisely because of their blind insistence on citations, every time, rather than accepting the word of acknowledged experts. Plus the development of "camps" that gather around certain subjects and "police" them so that they always say what those few people think.
But so far, it has done very well.
Re:Lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Most bloggers only comment on news and sometimes combine multiple news sources. It is very rare that they are the primary source of information.
True enough, but the same is true of a cable news network or a major newspaper. The primary sources are people "on the ground" where something newsworthy happened. Bloggers and the mainstream press distribute this information, they don't (usually) generate it. Mere distribution no longer adds value. Fact checking, comparing sources, and providing context all add value. Bloggers are getting better at all these things.
but you're not going to get a whole lot of people live blogging in the middle of a war zone.
The only good, reliable news coming out of Iraq for the first few years of the war was from Iraqi bloggers. Everyone else was full of crap, with the exception of the US Military briefings, which quite reliably told you what the US Military wanted you to think (newsworthy in its way).
It's not news, it's public humiliation (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right, it's not news, but that doesn't mean it should become accepted. Every time this happens there's a responsibility by the publisher to own up, and to reassess their practices. In effect, this is a type of public humiliation, and it serves the consumers of the content (not just in a "haha! Look at those idiots!" sense, but in the long run).
It's not news but it's a very sad state. I'd rather get my news 30 minutes later, and *fact-checked*, rather than "here's the latest from Twitter"...
Re:Wikipedia motto (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent's post is great, mod it up. My take on this is that, of course wikipedia is a silly idea. If only people could treat it that way. As a silly idea, it's quite a good silly idea. If wikipedia was about having fun with knowledge it would be one hell of a lot more useful than it currently is.
Problem is, of course, the wikinazis. They don't think it's silly. They take it seriously (far too seriously) and fraudulently proclaim it to be something it isn't, and never will be -- a reliable source for information. This fraud, in turn, convinces the weak-minded to conclude it's reliable -- in this case the weak-minded are journalists, but it could be many other professions.
If people stopped taking Wikipedia seriously, then it would be a lot more useful. And a lot more fun too. It might even accidentally become reliable that way too.
Re:High journalistic Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as there have been reporters, there have been people who lied to reporters. Fitzgerald's stunt is just a high-tech version of this. It doesn't mean anything in terms of the quality of reporting today vs. some half-mythical golden age of journalism.
Re:~Innovating (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Jimbo Wales is earning from it nicely the way it is, thank you very much.
Re:Incompetent Crowdsourcing (Score:3, Insightful)
if you pay attention to history you will see that this is not the first time the international banking industry has undermined the security of the people in order to consolodate money and power. and this won't be the last time unless we the people push through a comprehensive reform on the fraudulent concept of a corporation. as it is you and any number of people can, for a tax increase, create an organization that takes the fall for a bad business deal or for dishonest trade practices so nobody has to give back the money they made and nobody goes to jail.
instead we need to make all voting stockholders proportionally responsible for all debts of a folded company, and non voting preferred holders liable only for tort debt and any debt incurred that the officers of the company knew would never be paid back before the company folded.
Re:Making a point by being an asshole (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:~Innovating (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia motto (Score:5, Insightful)
It's when this happens around subjective categories that this become a problem. There's no real way to judge how "neutral" an article is other than asking other people for their opinion, which is never neutral.
I really don't see Wikipedia as one cohesive blob of information. When it comes to exact sciences, it's excellent, and I rely on it heavily. When it comes to technology, it's almost as good, though there are, as you said, camps that could bias a subject overall.
I never use it for politics, current events, or controversial individuals (or any controversial subject, for that matter). You're better off looking elsewhere, or at the very least only taking their articles as jumping-off points.
By the way -- Jane Q. Public, in regards to that other comment thread [slashdot.org] -- you're right, my last comment was more in reaction to the rest of the comments, I usually don't jump to conclusions or make these types of assumptions.
Re:Wikipedia motto (Score:4, Insightful)
If you really want to know something, you have to verify it yourself. Don't rely on someone else's interview, go interview the person yourself. Don't rely on someone else's experiment, or someone else's first hand account, if you want to know something, verify it yourself.
The problem with this principle is that if we followed it consistently, we'd never get anything done. As a scientist, am I supposed to go down the reference tree of every paper I cite and reproduce every result back to Newton? Personally verifying every piece of information we receive would drastically reduce the knowledge we have available to use.
In many cases this is of course impractical, but at least you should be aware that your knowledge might not be accurate.
That's where trust comes in. Sometimes there are formal methods for establishing trustworthy sources (peer review is by no means perfect, but all in all it seems to work pretty well) and sometimes you have to judge informally, by personal acquaintance or reputation. But you have to have some sources you trust, somehow, or you'll be paralyzed.
Re:Newspapers (Score:5, Insightful)
The Guardian has even published a retraction blaming it on the Wikipedia vandalizer
Actually they've worded it quite fairly and I think they're brave to have admitted to falling victim to the hoax.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Something more reliable, like the newspaper? The same newspapers that are apparently referencing wikipedia without checking it? Why would you trust them to find a more accurate source if wikipedia did not exist.
Studies have shown wikipedia to be, in general, nearly as accurate as more established encyclopedias. But that isn't the point.
The point is that by not hiding behind an establishment of respectability, wikipedia shows that trusting any single source for your information is ludicrous. When Britannica is wrong, no one writes an article about it.
Re:Rat Race (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about people and companies making a professional living supplying news in a non-professional manner.... it's only people who can write good resumes that will get the job. It's the same in all industries.
I think you're right about it being a wide-spread problem. It really only took a month in my first job to realize that most people at the company-- and it was a successful company-- weren't any good at their jobs. I was awestruck and wondered, "How can a company of such incompetent people be so successful?" and then I realized it was because our competitors were equally incompetent. It didn't take me much longer of looking around and talking to people to decide that it wasn't limited to my industry. Most people are not good at their jobs.
I think that's why the banking system is in the state it's in. You have a bunch of people running these banks who aren't good at their jobs. They're doing what seems to be working for their colleagues and competitors, but it's the blind leading the blind. No one knows what they're doing.
If that doesn't fill you with dread and terror, realize that it's the same for your doctors, your policemen, and everyone else who your life depends on. They're probably not very good at their jobs and they don't know what they're doing.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not fair to blame Wikipedia for that. Wikipedia offers a "clearing house" for commonly held knowledge, an unfiltered method of exchanging both verified and unverified facts.
If journalists, who are expected to exercise thoroughness, professionalism and proper methods of investigative journalism have become to retarded that they simply quote whatever "research" they first trip over, then that's their fault.
Seriously, we in the west want to get all high horsed about our "free media" and point fingers at places like North Korea where the news is state run. Personally, I say clean up our own back yard before complaining about the mess next door.
Re:Lazy (Score:4, Insightful)
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21956_Reuters_Doctoring_Photos_from_Beirut&only [littlegreenfootballs.com]
This case was widely circulated in the mainstream media and, IIRC, the photographer who cloned in the additional smoke was subsequently fired.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, we in the west want to get all high horsed about our "free media" and point fingers at places like North Korea where the news is state run. Personally, I say clean up our own back yard before complaining about the mess next door.
Exactly. And at the same time, all the newspapers are claiming that the Internet is putting them out of business due to blogs and such, but that "citizen journalism" cannot compete with the quality of traditional journalism due to the costs of putting reporters on the ground in various newsbreaking places around the world.
Then they go and pull a stupid stunt like this.
If that "citizen journalism" that they complain about so much is so bad, why the hell are you using it for your sources?
I don't care whether it's a single source or multiple. It simply says that they don't believe their own propaganda.
What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
The mere fact that supposedly responsible journalists are even citing Wikipedia shows what an intellectual cancer Wikipedia is on the Internet.
It most certainly is not. It's exactly as bad for a journalist to quote wikipedia as it is for a journalist to quote britannica or any other encyclopedia. Journalists are supposed to use primary sources, and they're supposed to check those sources.
Hell, I wasn't allowed to use encyclopedias as a source for my middle school papers, and you're saying the availability of wikipedia and it being "difficult to avoid" is an excuse for journalists? You don't go to a website to get a quote from the guy who just died, you call his estate and get information and statements from them.
Wikipedia is fantastic when used for the purpose of an encyclopedia. In others words, it's a great place to get a general idea about a subject and figure out what aspects you want to look at when you start your research. You don't ever, ever cite one or use information from one directly.
Re:Rat Race (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, somehow, we all know how to do everyone else's job better than they can! What a fucked up world -- should we all just shuffle our jobs around like in the game of Life? (Milton Bradley, not Conway)
Re:Wikipedia motto (Score:4, Insightful)
That's where trust comes in. Sometimes there are formal methods for establishing trustworthy sources (peer review is by no means perfect, but all in all it seems to work pretty well) and sometimes you have to judge informally, by personal acquaintance or reputation.
Some of the greatest discoveries have come when everyone thought something was true, but then one person looked deeper and realized it wasn't. Trust is helpful, but it will also blind you.
Remember the words that became the founding motto of the Royal Society: "on the words of no one."
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rat Race (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if you're looking for a journalist's job, I hope that you could write one hell of a cover letter, at least.
You're right, but I can't help but wonder whether that's unfortunate. Is the most important qualification for a journalist that he can write really clever and impressive journalist-y prose? There's definitely a sort of writing you see these days in newspapers and magazines, and it's really great and pretty and reads like the sort of writing you'd expect to win awards, but it's awful.
Every time I read an article on something I know much about, it's misleading, filled with inaccuracies, buries the main idea, and often enough, completely misses the point. Plus it's hard to read because it's too flowery and self-indulgent.
All of this is just to say, maybe being able to write one hell of a cover letter isn't so much the point. Maybe it's better to find someone who's honest, thorough, and clear.
Perfect example of why wikipedia is not so bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Newspapers (Score:5, Insightful)
Except they skipped the part where they didn't take blame for using Wikipedia as a source in the first damn place, because professional journalists aren't supposed to use Wikipedia as a fucking source in the first fucking place.
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
[blockquote]The moral of the story is that we are supposed to be smart enough to check more than one source when using ANY reference tool unless we are ready to suffer being the fool.[/blockquote]
Which is a damned circular argument given the echo chamber Wikipedia encourages as this story shows. I'll bet it wasn't more than one reporter that used this bogus quote. In fact a search for the phrase, "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack." returns 616 references on Google. Granted, many are repeats of this article which further goes to the fact the Internet is an echo chamber. The point really is that the Internet should never be quoted as definitive in ANY research for news stories because it is too unreliable.
Re:Incompetent Crowdsourcing (Score:5, Insightful)
The real value of a house is what 'everyone else' thinks the value is - there is no 'real' or objective way to determine the value of a house.
Re:~Innovating (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not that they got bogged down under their own weight of users and articles - it's because the lunatics are running the asylum and they got bogged down under the weight of policies, procedures, and consensus.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in a comment thread under a Slashdot article that's about mainstream media doing shoddy reporting, you cast aspersions on a study in a peer-reviewed journal and use a USA Today article to back your claim up?
As an aside about this particular incident, I find it enlightening that despite active attempts by Fitzgerald to keep his bogus quote in the Wikipedia article the longest it managed to stay there was 24 hours. On the other hand the various news articles in non-user-editable media are stuck with it. So Wikipedia does seem to be working quite well here by comparison.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the said thing is, when it gets added back to the article, they'll just cite the mainstream newspapers that copied the phony quote. And then it'll become a part of the ever burgeoning body of Wikipedia's New Truth. Facts? Facts be damned, we don't need those in an encyclopedia.
Re:Perfect example of why wikipedia is not so bad (Score:4, Insightful)
It also clearly demonstrates that mainstream media can't tell the difference between a fact and a revert war.
Re:Perfect example of why wikipedia is not so bad (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not really an important point. The point, regardless of the ease or difficulty of vandalizing Wikipedia, is that major mainstream news outlets no longer do fact-checking when writing articles. Instead, they just re-hash what anyone can read on the Web, whether it's correct or not.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
"the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers." -- These are completely different. What they do is have a bunch of people that sit at desks and write stories that are profitable. These fools can be replaced and they are being replaced.
AFP, AP, Reuters are not the same. They cannot be replaced by blogging armies. If they fail we will be entering a new Dark Ages. We will have no real journalists.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
The stamina of false information, and the circulatory of citation, is what's really the issue. There are a lot of falsities that get passed around as assumed truths. Our system of "knowledge" is really fragile - unless we've witnessed ourselves (and this is true for historical information as much as it is for scientific "knowledge") it's just folklore with institutional power.
In other words, data really is the plural of anecdote.
That was why revisionist history came into existence: to put to the test claims that had gone unchecked for decades.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
This, as mentioned, is a bogus study.
It wasn't a bogus study. It involved a panel of experts, including nobel prize winner Roald Hoffmann; and Michael Gordin, the Princeton expert on Mendeleev. They've published their methodology, so you can review it. Your link, on the other hand, comes from an opinionist in USA Today, who basically makes snarky remarks about the situation without actually analyzing the situation. USA Today, while a fine newspaper by some counts, has by no means established itself as an arbiter of truth and rationality.
You can check the methodology for yourself: go here and click on supplementary information [nature.com] and you will see the whole list of errors they found, both in Wikipedia and Britannica. Whether it turns out Wikipedia or Britannica is more reliable, it is clear Britannica is not the pinnacle of reliability they wish they were. Look at the error list: in nearly every Britannica article they found an error.
Now that you've looked at the evidence itself, what is your opinion? Where were the errors in their methods? Do you find that their conclusions were poorly founded? You have no need to rely on USA Today, you can look for yourself. Which is always much more satisfying, in my opinion.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
LOL @ the wikipedia defender acting like the burden of proof is on someone else.
I could post "2+2=4" to wikipedia and it'd instantly get slapped with [citation needed], but the claim that wikipedia is accurate is to be taken as-is unless there is a "refutation"?
As I said ... LOL.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Mischievous deception of news agencies has a storied history [bostonphoenix.com] which long predates Wikipedia:
So, yes, people can be tricked. But you'll notice most of these types of pranks (including the one on Wikipedia) are inconsequential. You might argue that's because the pranksters are well-meaning, but it does make it uniquely hard to verify the stories, since whether they did or didn't happen has no lasting effect. Did Skaggs actually take out an ad for a doggie brothel he intended to open, or did he actually just take out an ad for a doggie brothel he was pretending to indend to open? Did one person pen a poetic remark about music influencing his life, or was it somebody else? Yes, it would be better to have the absolute truth even on such trivial issues, but this is not necessarily indicative of equally faulty reporting on more weighty matters. (Those kind of lies usually take somebody higher up in the government to start them :)
Re:Wikipedia motto (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry, but science isn't an opinion. History isn't an opinion. There are facts and there are lies people want you to believe. Sorting them out is important, and you will never, ever be able to sort them out using Wikipedia as a reference.
You know what you're right about most of what you say here except for the part where you say "History is not an opinion."
Um, history IS in fact a fucking opinion.
Don't get me wrong. Our scientific understanding of time gives us the ability to say with great certainty that in the past, shit happened. That same understanding also lets us confidently assert that all the other potential vector states in the past collapsed uneventfully, causing all the other potential shit that could have happened to not actually happen.
But history is not the science of what happened. History is telling stories of what shit we think happened, and our belief of what it means to have had that shit happen rather than all the other shit that could have happened but didn't. In this sense, journalism is actually superior to history in that there is an opportunity for journalists to be there when the shit is happening. Ultimately historians are just people who argue about what the journalists wrote after those journalists are dead.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Studies have shown wikipedia to be, in general, nearly as accurate as more established encyclopedias.
But the vandalism! The situation in TFA is not unique.
A journalist writing a story about carrots [wikipedia.org] may at any one time find information that's either not relevant [wikipedia.org] or not entirely truthful [wikipedia.org], or even raise unwarranted fear [wikipedia.org] about the subject.
Journalists citing wikipedia on more controversial topics may at any point in time have read one iteration in an edit-revert war. Which of the two versions is correct?
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Then publish your findings. It's really not that hard, just take some pictures of the engine with the size clearly demarcated, and some scans of the manuals. Then show your references from the museum. Then change it back. Challenge anyone who wants to post the other number to come up with pictures. Reasonable people will probably agree and if not, then other reasonable people will side with you.
That's the cool thing about wiki: if it's something you care about, and if you care about truth being preserved, then the power to enshrine that truth is at your fingertips. In general, an expert with some persistence will beat out a random editor.
So quit bitching and get that number corrected! Do it for the children!
Mainstream "quality"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why surprised? There are no mainstream "quality" paper, nor mainstream real journalism for quite some time now... at least since all mainstream media has come under the control of a handful of corporations not really bothered by information inaccuracy.
Re:Perfect example of why wikipedia is not so bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Everybody misses an important point in that story: the fact the student had to repeatedly introduce the phony quote in the article and barely succeeded in having it live for more than 24 hours demonstrates that wikipedia is pretty good at self-correcting itself !
Yeah, that's great, but it's entirely possible that if this hadn't come to light so soon, somebody would later have "corrected" the Wikipedia article by citing The Guardian. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened.
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they haven't.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that there is the problem. Most of the experts seem to easily give up when faced by the Wikipedia system. Expert: "Um... actually, I'm the most reknowned expert in this author, having published 40 books about him, so I can really state with certainty that his favorite color was in fact blue." Wikipedia-Drone: "Original research! Reverting to 'fuscia'!" Expert: "Wikipedia is worthless. I'm going home."
If the expert has to dedicate hours of his valuable time to correct even the most trivial error, the people who have time to devote their entire day to Wikipedia are going to win every time.
It was rebutted by Britannica long ago (Score:5, Insightful)
1. It was rebutted by Britannica long ago, and the rebuttal is on the very page you linked to. Short version: it turns out that if you review paragraphs taken out of context, make up non-existent Britannica articles, label stuff that's actually correct as Britannica's error, etc, you too can complain that Britannica is incomplete and superficial.
Oh yeah, and let's not distinguish between the occasional typo in Britannica and outright error. Let's pretend that all errors are equal. Then finally we dragged Britannica down at the level of a circle-jerk truth-by-consensus gang.
2. Well, I don't know about their methods, but based on my random excursions to Wikipedia, I'd say probably nobody vandalizes Britannica with whole paragraphs or even articles of 100% bullshit. Just as a random sample, off the top of my head, I learned from Wikipedia such things as that:
- didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes (the article stayed on the German wikipedia for more than a fucking year)
- iron is extracted from monkeys
- one of ancient Rome's bridges was manufactured in Japan
- that primus pilus meant _and_ _didn't_ mean "first spear" at the same time (different articles said polar opposite things about that)
And other such fine bullshit.
Basically when I go to Wikipedia, I have to wonder not only if there's some small omission or typo in the text, but whether the whole fucking article is (currently) a vandalism. I'll continue to have my doubts that that kind of thing happens to Britannica.
And here's a fun parting thought: if a source is so often wrong about the things that I do know about, I'll be paranoid about trusting it about the things that I don't know about.
Re:It was rebutted by Britannica long ago (Score:5, Insightful)
And here's a fun parting thought: if a source is so often wrong about the things that I do know about, I'll be paranoid about trusting it about the things that I don't know about.
YES that is absolutely the great thing about it. Neither Britannica nor Wikipedia is reliable (though you protest, the researchers did divide the errors into serious and non-serious: Britannica had four serious errors, if I remember correctly).
The truth is neither one can be relied on for important knowledge. If it is something that really matters, you better be doing better research. If not, Wikipedia is a decent resource to give you an overview of the subject.
People know Wikipedia is unreliable, which is good because it will force them to go look for something more reliable. For some reason, people tend to accept Britannica as authoritative, which kills any desire to look for something more reliable.
1. It was rebutted by Britannica long ago, and the rebuttal is on the very page you linked to. Short version: it turns out that if you review paragraphs taken out of context, make up non-existent Britannica articles, label stuff that's actually correct as Britannica's error, etc, you too can complain that Britannica is incomplete and superficial.
And Nature responded to this rebuttal. Whoever is right, it doesn't matter: both sides are traditionally respected sources of information. If the Nature article is really that wrong, then it is evidence that we should not trust scientific journals without verification as well. Which is true. Scientific papers not infrequently turn out to be wrong. Peer review only verifies that they pass a certain level of rationality, not that they are correct (to verify that a paper is correct, a peer reviewer would have to repeat the experiment, for example, and very few peer reviewers do that).
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
The wiki might be good for party facts, but not if really need to know something.
To be honest we have better things to do with our time.
Sometimes we do (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Well, some of us are brought in as consultants to bail a bunch of cargo-cultists out of the hole they have dug themselves into. I'm not talking about guessing about whether some completely unrelated job is done right or wrong, but about something which _is_ my job and theirs.
And when I see whole teams, "architect" included, think that it's a clever optimization to use Integer instead of int for your method's arguments, "because for an int Java copies the whole value on the stack, but for an Integer it only copies a pointer to it"... there are very few conclusions I can get to, other than that they're genuinely not qualified for their job.
2. Some things are well documented as anti-patterns, and not just in programming. I don't have to fully understand someone's job to find an exact verbatim example of why that's the wrong thing to do. Written by smarter people than me on the domain.
E.g., I don't have to be an MBA to recognize a corncob manager or a management feud when I see one.
3. Some things are just that obvious.
For example, the most... depressing thing I've seen was a team leader who was just using his Java project to try to prove that Java sucks and VB is much better. Blown deadlines and bugs were actually _good_ for _his_ agenda, because it just allowed him to run to some hapless non-techie manager and make a "see, that's what happens when you use Java!" speech out of it. And once you learned that, it also became more easily understandable why he's changing scope in mid-flight, move the goalposts, and generally doing anything to keep his project from succeeding.
Maybe I'm not fully qualified to do his job, but I don't think he's paid to do _that_. After all, if the company actually wanted that project never finished, they could have just not started it in the first place.
Or when you see whole departments do nothing more than get in the way -- e.g., DBAs who argue that simultaneously (A) it's not their job to tune the database, and (B) you can't get the rights to do that yourself either; apparently they're just there to make sure the databases run, but no more, and they just try to keep you from it, for fear of bringing it down -- it's hard not to get the idea that _someone_ in that organization is doing a crap and anti-productive job. Maybe it's not the DBAs themselves, but whatever dolt defined the IT's job as just making sure that the computers run, but _someone_ out there is definitely not helping get the real job done. The real job is to have a working complete system, and I mean including the software, not to have a computer from which users and developers are kept away from as much as possible.
Re:Obligatory (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, modern journalism is about profit. A headline and a few sound-bites are all that is required to bring people to look at the advertisements on the page around the arcticle, or see the commercial. Some of us, at least, expect more. But we don't get it, and they don't care as long as they get the advertisement revenue. It's all about filling pages with "stuff" to attract some eyeballs.
Re:Lazy (Score:3, Insightful)
Take the wars for example. You may have people blogging about things going on here, or the politics of it or maybe the news reports coming out of the area but you're not going to get a whole lot of people live blogging in the middle of a war zone.
There were a handful of iraqi blogs before and during the most recent invasion that were very illuminating. I've stopped following them as my interests have wandered but I remember one in particular broke a story about serious mistreatment of a civilian (US military threw him and his brother in a canal in the middle of the night and he drowned, brother survived or something like that) and it took roughly a year before the US grudgingly investigated the murder. Everybody has their biases, but I think I'd rather hear from bloggers like that than from "embedded" reporters where the entire idea of "embedding" reporters was to get friendly reporters in situations where they could make reports friendly to the military's PR campaigns.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that Wikipedia does not recognise experts or primary sources. In the eyes of Wikipedia, everyone is the same plankton level contributor who can only be trusted as far as they can google sources.
Therefore, the people who really write Wikipedia are the people who write in "reliable" sources, which seem to include things like newspapers or blogs where the author spent 1 minute researching their subject on Wikipedia itself.
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
Facts be damned, we don't need those in an encyclopedia.
You mean: Facts be damned, we don't need those in the media.
It was the media who kept this statement rather than taking this down. It was the media who took their facts from somewhere that didn't cite a source. It is the media who never cite their own sources - whether they have them or not.
But hey, let's all blame Wikipedia.
With Wikipedia, sources are either cited - or if not, you should know to take it with a pinch of salt. Even if the cited source is wrong (as might happen in the scenario you describe), the point is that that it's attributed to another source. (E.g., if Wikipedia says "X is true [ref]", you read that as shorthand for "ref claims that X is true", and then if you don't trust the ref, that's up to you.)
We ought to be doing that with every other place that presents something without a source (including the media), but for some reason we live in a world where claims from the media, not to mention blog posts and random anonymous comments on Slashdot, are accepted as fact, but when it comes to Wikipedia? Well heaven forbid you trust that - the existence of a single false claim out of millions of articles, for a period of 24 hours, means you can't trust it at all!
(Are people not aware of how many falsehoods are published by the media, and later corrected? Countless times I've seen an obvious blooper on a website, even on places like the BBC. It's later corrected, often after a few hours. Because there's no edit history, all trace of it is lost, but continued editing of articles on media websites is commonplace. Then there's the newspapers where a major story contains an error, which is later apologised for in small column of a later edition...)
If you want to measure the accuracy of Wikipedia, then let's have evidence based on a survey of pages, comparing that to other sources (whether it's the media, or other encyclopedias). Previous such surveys, IIRC, have shown Wikipedia to be almost on par with Britannica (so yeah, not as good, but you get what you pay for, and that hardly makes it unreliable). I fail to see how tabloid-style outrage over single instances trumps that.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Rephrase:
If anyone who knows what they're doing have to waste their time beating their heads against a wall composed of overweight teenagers living in their parents' basements, they're going to give up and go back to the real world every time.
There we go.
The problem with Wikipedia, in a nutshell: clueless morons with no life, no social skills beyond MMORPG-style "how do I game the system to become an admin" playing, and no expertise in anything (least of all writing and grammar) are given the ability not simply to edit, but to ban others from editing.
This is the equivalent of giving someone who's been on cocaine for 20 years a badge, a loaded gun, and telling him to shoot anyone that he thinks might be breaking the law first and ask questions later.
Re:Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
That's nice, but it's missing the whole point.
Well, there appear to be two main points to the article itself: (1) that Wikipedia can be completely inaccurate without further warning; (2) that news media are less accurate than expected because they've taken to deriving their "facts" from any stinking place: for example, Wikipedia.
I blazed through point #1 because I take it for granted, and jumped right to the point that anyone competent to do research in the first place should already be taking point #1 for granted. #2 I didn't address, but you did it, almost:
_That_ is the whole point. If a peer-reviewed journal was as easy to "experiment" on, it anyone with enough time could redefine physics or history in it just because he was bored, then everyone would agree that it's a fucking useless journal.
Which is exactly what happened to all these newspapers around the world when this guy trolled them through Wikipedia. Wikipedia's own structure concedes that it's probably going to have errors; Wikipedia tells people not to use Wikipedia itself as a citation. The news industry, on the other hand, appears to works on the assumption that its published material is right until proven otherwise; they only use the "we're not perfect" line when they've gotten caught with their pants down. Well, this time, they got caught. Not that one would expect the same level of accuracy from the news industry as what is commonly called a "peer-reviewed journal" — but news media is supposed to be internally reviewed before it gets released. It's the news media's reputation that is getting deflated more by the article, not Wikipedia. And I'd tend to say the same about any "peer-reviewed" journal that managed to get caught up in a Wikipedia hoax experiment.
So, yes, how about we apply the same standard to Wikipedia?
Wikipedia already knows approximately what it's nature is. The problem is alleged journalists or alleged academics, who imagine their research talent to be their stock in trade, but then feel it is appropriate to either perform invasive experiments on Wikipedia or borrow facts from it — either of which means the person doing it didn't even do proper research on his target subject/source (Wikipedia), which is grossly incompetent.
Again: what's not OK, isn't just the experiment itself, but the very fact that it's trivial to make such an experiment. Not that just it's hypothetically possible, but that it actually happens again and again.
Yes, it means that some people are assholes. Do you have some safeguards against that?
Within the context of this article, there are broadly two safeguards against that: (1) the lesser safeguard, which is lots of other people around who make the information tend to bias towards fact; and (2) the more important safeguard in this context, which is that anyone who does allegedly "proper" research on a daily basis ought to already know that Wikipedia's been tested on this point repeatedly and therefore knows it's not to be used as a sole source.
All parties involved in the article's incident (other than the Wikipedia editors who reverted the errors) seem to have refused to participate in either safeguard. And that was the thrust of my original reply: That the only people competent to do research by manipulating Wikipedia are those who are competent enough to realize it's already been done. While Wikipedia is not an oracle, it involves real people doing work they believe in, who didn't consent to being lab monkeys taking a similar shock every time some experimenter wants to claim their own credit for seeing how the animal really twitches.
That very need to scream that someone else didn't play by your rules, _that_ is what tells me that it's yet another failed utopianism.
The only failure here is in not realizing that, not only does Wikipedia not claim to have come anywhere close to utopia, but that this fact has been easily shown repeatedly. One doesn't need to do another experiment to discover this; it's open information for anyone who bothers to look first.
Re:It was rebutted by Britannica long ago (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is all anyone should be looking for from any encyclopedia.
Surprised? Yeah right (Score:2, Insightful)
While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone's death as a social experiment, he had carefully generated the quote so as not to distort or taint Jarre's life, he said. 'I didn't expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised.'"
Isn't that the same excuse virus authors use when they get caught? "I didn't expect it to go that far". Whatever issues we have with Wikipedia, I don't think we should excuse this guy's irresponsible behavior any more than we should excuse a virus author's. He did use a famous person's death to conduct a social experiment, and as a result deceived a lot of people. Put the blame where it belongs.