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.'"
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our revisionist-history overlords!
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
[citation needed]
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
[citation needed]
[1]
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:Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)
I had this exact problem.
It was a trivial fact, a submarine was listed as having four times the horsepower it really contained, since there were four engines some fuzzy math took place and this submarine just under four times more powerful than it's direct successor.
The problem was the fact stood for years, I worked at a museum which actually had one of these submarines, Among my sources were A, the number written on the engines, and B, Dead tree books and manuals clearly stating the engine size.
My vandalism was taken down because this fact stood so long it couldn't be false, I said it wasn't cited, how can you prove me wrong, He quickly found citation, hundreds of sites got their stats info from wikipedia, and as we all know "The Internet" is a more trustworthy souce than a real navy manual any day of the week.
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!
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.
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: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:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Um... I have several years of experience speaking the English language and I can state with certainty those words aren't spelled that way.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
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: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: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)
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:4, Informative)
From the wikipedia article:
A study in 2005 suggested that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[1] However, the accuracy and validity of Gile's work has been disputed by both Britannica Encyclopedia[2] and Nicholas Carr.[3]
Honestly the whole Wikipedia article is very informative. It has many citations to backup what they say. Wikipedia can be wrong, so can encyclopedia Britannica. But Wikipedia either cites better and more often than Britannica or it is just as useless. Trusting one source is silly... If you CHECK the citations then Wikipedia is an amazing tool.
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.
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: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)
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: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: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.
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:5, Informative)
Disclaimer - I work for Dow Jones. Not as a journalist, but with the journalists.
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: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 :)
Offtopic? (Score:3, Funny)
Fine then, let's try this:
In Soviet Russia, Wikipedia rewrites you!
Re:Offtopic? (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, [citation needs you!]
First Post (Score:4, Funny)
"First Post"
-Maurice Jarre
Lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (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 instan
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).
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:Lazy (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
No, you've entirely missed my point. My point is that bloggers do a far more entertaining job of non-objective journalism than the MSM, and the MSM's level of fact checking (*and* hard-hitting investigative journalism) has recently fallen to to level of bloggers - or below!
If the MS wants to survive, it needs to do what blggers are bad at. There's no longer any value in mere distribution, and the first-hand reporting of news will predominately be live-blogging by random people who happen to be on the scene, before much longer. In theory, the MSM could be adding reliable fact checking, and neutral-POV context, to this raw reportage.
In practice they simply aren't - they're merely culling the raw data down to whatever supports their idiological position, and running with it unchecked. And blogs are far better at that!
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.
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.
Re:Current "Journalism" is Mere Quotes (Score:5, Informative)
It is mostly "star-struck fan time" when journalists interview the politicians and famous people.
It might actually be worse than that. Lots of journalists know that if they ask real questions and press for real answers, the person they're interviewing won't like it, and will stop submitting to the interview. The journalist will get a reputation for being difficult, and other people won't give them interviews either.
So they might not be that they're star struck, but instead kissing ass to get access. And then there's laziness. It's hard to do a good job.
Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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~*.
Re:Google (Score:4, Informative)
Don't laugh - because this happened to me. I edited a series of Wikipedia articles with close to a grands worth of topic specific reference works at my elbow...
Every single edit was reverted because "your facts do not match what was found with a Google search".
Re:Google (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
(*some restrictions apply, see site for details)
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: (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
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:Google (Score:4, Informative)
use your shit to debunk other (actually factual) shit in Wikipedia because another "not-Wikipedia" site says Wikipedia is wrong.
Actually, you don't have to go that far.
What I've learned on Wikipedia is this: False is more important than true.
Put doubt on something written in an article, and the guy who wrote it will be asked for sources, not you. The article will be marked as "needs citation", and in some cases will be deleted simply because you claimed it's all wrong, with no evidence, and nobody else bothered enough to provide said evidence.
If you add something, you'll be asked for proof, and all kinds of proof will not count. Essentially, even if you are the primary source, you'll not count unless you've got it written up on some other website that you can point to. Heck, if you're a second-rate actor and your Wikipedia article suddenly claims you're dead, starting an edit-war with the hoaxer is your best bet in getting that removed. (Wikipedia has a special contact address if you are the subject of an article - according to my own personal experience, the reaction time of that address is about two weeks.)
So in summary: Vandalism is easier than adding something truthful but imperfectly documented. And then people are surprised there's so much crap on Wikipedia.
deathbed confessional (Score:3, Funny)
Newspapers (Score:5, Informative)
Both the Guardian & the Independent has this quote in their obits.
So did BBC Music Magazine.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22maurice+jarre%22++%22music+was+my+life [google.com]
The Guardian has even published a retraction blaming it on the Wikipedia vandalizer - poor Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/mar/31/maurice-jarre-obituary [guardian.co.uk]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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.
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: (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: (Score:3, Informative)
I hear the African elephant population has tripled in the last six months.
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Even then, check the talk page to make sure there's been no serious recent disagreement about the matter (checking the history helps too).
It would be really nice if wikipedia made such historical inquries easy, like a javascript interface where you could highlight a portion of the article and have it return a list of edits to that pertain to that part of the article.
mainstream quality papers (Score:5, Funny)
I understand those words individually, but when you put them together like that they don't make sense.
Re:mainstream quality papers (Score:5, Funny)
hirarious (Score:4, Funny)
I've pretty much given up on articles without citations. I don't find them particularly interesting any more because they beg too many questions in the light of skepticism. Perhaps the eventual fallout of this sort of thing will be that others have the same attitude :) Also a very good reason to cite Wikipedia with a permalink (which the cite link will do for you) as it will let people at least know WHY you said something TOTALLY WRONG.
High journalistic Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
On the Diane Rehm Show on NPR, the topic today was the demise of newspapers and what could be done about it; suggestions included government bailouts and subsidies or reorganization as not-for-profit organizations. The "politically correct" argument was that they wanted to preserve the newspaper business model per se, but preserve "journalism" and all those high standards and ethics it embodied as opposed to the unprofessional world of bloggers and news aggregators who could (obviously) not hold themselves to high standards.
Perhaps the journalists could be Jarre'd back to reality?
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.
Well played (Score:5, Insightful)
seems reliable to me... (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
~Innovating (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is Wikipedia no longer innovating?
The basic premise of the project evolved rapidly as the encyclopedia was developed in the early years- creating rules, policies and a vibrant and effective community; and now is a massive and globe-changing entity. However, to remain relevant, the site and the ideas that drive it must continue to evolve. To me, as a slightly disinterested outside observer, it seems that Wikipedia hasn't changed what they do or how they do it now for several years.
There is *so much* they could do to make explicit and transparent the edits, the timeliness of added information, and many other things - to handle issues like this - but they are not. Why?
Re:~Innovating (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Jimbo Wales is earning from it nicely the way it is, thank you very much.
Re:~Innovating (Score:5, Insightful)
I can appreciate the desire to prove (Score:3, Interesting)
sudo journalism (Score:5, Funny)
Option not available. Please try another option.
Check facts (Y/N):> N
Publish article (Y/N):> Y
"sudo" journalism? (Score:3)
LIVE History in Wikipedia (Score:4, Interesting)
This is something I've wanted since Wikipedia became big. I'd like to have a slider bar that allows me to highlight (say, in red) everything that's been changed within the last 7 days. And everything (say, in yellow) everything that's been changed within the last month.
That way, when I'm looking at an article on Albert Einstein I'll know when there is something strangely recent put in there. Also, when I'm looking at the swine flu article, I'll be able to set the slider bars for 12 hours/3 days and see what's new.
Yes, yes, it'll be a few more database hits, but think if everything you could do with this. And not just as a viewer, but as an editor.
Now, someone with way more time on their hands than me, please Make It So.
Perfect example of why wikipedia is not so bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Unscientific, unethical, illegal, and already done (Score:5, Informative)
It's amazing the kind of people who wouldn't want someone to spray-paint their car over and over to see how long it takes to clean it off, but will do it to other people because it's "just the computer". I wonder what future journalists and sociologists think their jobs are going to be based on 10 years from now. (P.S.: If someone wants this for Wikipedia or somewhere else for some bizarre reason - feel free to copy/modify it as long as you give the same rights to others for the copy/derivatives.)
Missing the point (Score:5, Interesting)
That's nice, but it's missing the whole point.
Yes, it's happened before. Yes, it'll happen again. No, it's not a nice thing to do. But it will happen again anyway.
And _that_ is the problem. Something that is so easily vandalized, isn't that great a source of information.
If you will, I'll draw your attention to your own point:
_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. So, yes, how about we apply the same standard to Wikipedia?
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? Because otherwise it's the same failing of techno-utopianism as of any other utopianism. If to work it would need everyone to play nice, stick to the rules, and know their own limits -- i.e., if to work it needs humans as a whole to change -- then that's the failure of any utopianism. Communism too would have worked perfectly, for example, if it weren't for those pesky humans who insist on being what they are instead of the new breed that Marx, Engels and Lenin envisioned.
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.
Hand's up who is actually surprised ??? (Score:5, Interesting)
If they get the main thrust of the issue it's a good day.
Sure, the political reporters know about politics, and the sports reporters know about sport, but once someone has to write up a story outside his normal scope, it's as bad as any school child's homework essay.
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: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: (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
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: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:Wikipedia motto (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but that is a absurd attitude.
Only because you didn't understand my 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.
If you want to have first-hand information about all those tests that didn't work, then yes you will do well to repeat them all. Most of us don't actually need that detail of information; most people are happy to flip a switch and have it work. And there is something that I have verified personally: 99% of the time when I buy a light bulb from the store, and plug it in, light comes out. Light bulbs work. I have verified that. If I want to know how they work, I will need to dig deeper.
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.
You may be unaware of this study, which suggests that Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica have similar error rates. You may not like the conclusion, so feel free to do your own study.
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 now we get to my real point: everyone knows that wikipedia is unreliable. It is a feature. The only thing it is good for is as a starting place for research, a starting place for knowledge. And it does a very good job of that. Encyclopedia Britannica does an ok job at it too, but often people expect it to be more than a starting point, they expect it to be definitive. Which it is not.
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.
Good thing no one expects that of Wikipedia. As a starting point for research, it is unsurpassed.
Re:Wikipedia motto (Score:5, Interesting)
Long proven to be a skewed small-scale study carried out by biased researchers.
Proven where? What part of the results were skewed? Why do you believe the researchers were biased? A number of people were involved, including Roald Hoffmann and Michael Gordin. Are you saying they were biased as well?
They've published a list of the errors they found, so if you disagree you can go over the list and verify. Also of note is that there was an error in nearly every Britannica article they checked.
Let's not mention this study again, other than to ridicule it.
Why? It seems to be good research. Here is Nature's rebuttal to Britannica's arguments [nature.com]. Also, there you will find Britannica's argument itself. Read it, I think you will agree that the study seems to have been performed well.
Encyclopedias are only as useful as WP (Score:4, Informative)
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.
I imagine Britannica isn't written this way, but many topical encyclopedias are farmed out to people with little or no expertise in the area of the entry they are writing. As a grad student, I have received several e-mails requesting interested students to write the entry for a particular topic in the "Encyclopedia of Coptic Literature" or something equally obscure. I know my classmates (and students in general), and I would not confidently rely upon an encyclopedia article they have written in almost all cases. The opportunity to write an article is advertised with the statement "get a publication on your CV."
Even with better encyclopedias, expert writers can still misrepresent things. There's an entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica, a very well-known and highly-regarded work, that essentially misstates facts about an Israeli intellectual property court case. Luckily, I had dug deep enough to figure this out, but it just goes to show you that you cannot rely on the accuracy of encyclopedia articles - even highly regarded ones. Oh, and it is unlikely errors like that will be corrected. If they are, it will be when a new edition is put out... in who knows how many years?
Encyclopedias are fine for well-known facts that you just don't happen to know, to get a basic overview of something, and for the bibliography at the end of the entry. Incidentally, those happen to be the exact same things that Wikipedia is useful for. Anything more serious than that, and you should be doing real research, not relying upon Wikipedia or an encyclopedia.
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: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:Wikipedia motto (Score:5, Interesting)
A week or so ago, I was in a cafe, and a ~40 year old teacher was explaining loudly to her companions how the internet is changing the way we know things (and how she was uncomfortable with it).
These days every high school or college student knows about Wikipedia, and they all know it is unreliable. It is only one step from realizing that one source is unreliable to realizing that many things are unreliable, and Wikipedia is opening the door for many people to this line of thought. This is a good thing.
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: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: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)
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:Rat Race (Score:5, Funny)
You don't even have to know that AIG isn't a bank!
Re:Rat Race (Score:5, Interesting)
Bringing in new blood, bright young minds and college grads is the right idea, but have them work with the old guard for a while before they can change everything that kept the company running before they arrived with their new ideas and magic wands.
The main problem with business is "maximising profits and lowering costs".
Profits should be ploughed back into a company, not spread out to people who did little to deserve them. Costs should be high, especially for purchasing. The more you spend (generally) the better the products you're receiving, and the better the product you send out.
Too many bean counters, unanimously untrusted, universally disrespected bosses and management that are only in place long enough to empty the profit pot and move on to another position of extreme power and no fallout for their mistakes.
Everyone knows this, don't they?
If you know who Scott Adams is, you should.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because Wikipedia isn't vulnerable. It was corrected. It is the "mainstream media" that's broken. They use anything they find on the Internet and pass it off as fact. That's what the experiment was about, and it was something that really hasn't been done before.