Yeah, I've been following this story too. The same Associated Press article appeared on CNN.com. They also had a video clip of an interview by CNN with the victim of the prank, journalist John Seigenthaler, as well as with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. (Unfortunately the link I saved to the video is no longer valid.) In the wake of this to-do Wikipedia is "tightening the rules" for contributors, according to articles by CNN and Wired News.
New York Times reporter Katharine Q. Seelye has been covering the debacle as well (I won't post links to NYT because they require paid subscription). Here are excerpts from her "Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar" (December 4, 2005):
quote:
Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries.
Mistakes are expected to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users.
The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.
It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.
Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?
And beyond reliability, there is the question of accountability. Mr. Seigenthaler, after discovering that he had been defamed, found that his "biographer" was anonymous. He learned that the writer was a customer of BellSouth Internet, but that federal privacy laws shield the identity of Internet customers, even if they disseminate defamatory material. And the laws protect online corporations from libel suits. ... Still, [Wales] said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site's strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems.
In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.
The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.
All of this struck close to home for librarians and researchers. On an electronic mailing list for them, J. Stephen Bolhafner, a news researcher at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote, "The best defense of the Wikipedia, frankly, is to point out how much bad information is available from supposedly reliable sources." ... "Instead of figuring out how to 'fix' Wikipedia - something that cannot be done to our satisfaction," wrote Derek Willis, a research database manager at The Washington Post, who was speaking for himself and not The Post, "we should focus our energies on educating the Wikipedia users among our colleagues."
Some cyberexperts said Wikipedia already had a good system of checks and balances. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford and an expert in the laws of cyberspace, said that contrary to popular belief, true defamation was easily pursued through the courts because almost everything on the Internet was traceable and subpoenas were not that hard to obtain. (For real anonymity, he advised, use a pay phone.)
"People will be defamed," he said. "But that's the way free speech is. Think about the gossip world. It spreads. There's no way to correct it, period. Wikipedia is not immune from that kind of maliciousness, but it is, relative to other features of life, more easily corrected." ... Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
You might also check out a rather mean-spirited Wikipedia-bashing internet site called Wikipedia Watch.
Here on AnswerPool, Wikipedia articles are cited by many members, including me. This has repeatedly drawn fire and generated debate about the reliability of information. DG, in particular, is always quick to post a disclaimer that the articles can be edited by anyone and are susceptible to vandals, pranksters, and propagandists. See, for example, this AP thread.
Yet I have not found a single instance of misinformation in my perusing of Wikipedia. Topics on simple facts of science, history, etc., are generally informative with good depth and breadth. Contentious social issues -- where you'd surely expect rampant mischief -- seem to get fair and balanced treatment (no reference to Fox News implied ). With the exception of peer-reviewed scholarly journals, practically any source of information on any subject can be slanted by the author, deliberately or inadvertently, or simply be mistaken in facts. But for quick-and-easy info, Wikipedia is hard to beat.
I repeat the challenge made previously: Show me an article from Wikipedia -- on any subject -- that has a substantive error of fact or that seriously misleads the reader. It's harder than you may think.
Posts: 1905 | Location: U.S. | Registered: 06-03-02
An article that I should have copied, but didn't, was one I complained to Wikipedia about. I don't remember the exact wording, but the entry on Sen. Ted Kennedy essentially called him a "communist" and a danger to the US. Wiki changed it within a day of my comlaining, but the article had stood that way for several months.
Posts: 16639 | Location: Lincoln Place, Granite City, IL, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
An error in Wikipedia. (No explanation is necessary.) (Bold mine - DG)
The ball point pen was invented in 1938 by the Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro, who noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He tried using the same ink in a fountain pen but found that it would not flow into the nib, as it was too viscous.
Working with his brother Georg, a chemist, Laszlo Biro developed a new tip consisting of a ball that was free to turn in a socket, and as it turned it would pick up ink from a cartridge and then roll to deposit it on the paper.
An earlier patent on the same basic idea, dated 1888, was unused and expired.
Posts: 16639 | Location: Lincoln Place, Granite City, IL, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
"The modern ball-point pen was invented in about 1935, although the earliest patent was issued in 1888. The first successful ball point pen was sold in large quantities in 1945. You can be certain that anything signed with a ball-point pen before 1935 is definately [sic] a forgery."
From ringpen.com (simply a commercial product site)
"The principle of the ball point pen actually dates from the late 19th Century when patents were taken out by John Loud in 1888 for a product to mark leather and in 1916 by Van Vechten Riesberg. However neither of these Patents were exploited commercially.
The modern version of ball point pen was invented by Josef (Lazlo) and Georg Biro."
Posts: 7619 | Location: in the backwoods of North Carolina | Registered: 06-07-02
If someone invented something, they invented it, whether or not they "exploited it commercially." If I wrote the Bible out in longhand and sold copies, would that make me the author? After all, the original authors did not exploit it commercially. Presumably, had Van Vechten Riesberg keep his patent active, the Biro brothers would have had to wait a year before "inventing" the pen.
Posts: 16639 | Location: Lincoln Place, Granite City, IL, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
Yes -- and I confess I never thought of looking for such self-aggrandizing material in Wikipedia!
DG -- when you say "bold mine" are you referring just to the emphpasis on the text, or to the textual content itself? Did Wikipedia mention the 1888 patent? If so, I think we're quibbling semantic minutiae. If not, well, it's still a small point (forgive the pun ) but a noteworthy lapse for dedicated fact-checkers such as ourselves.
I don't claim Wikipedia is infallible. Just that there is no shame in quoting it as a generally reliable source of information.
Posts: 1905 | Location: U.S. | Registered: 06-03-02
I have found it very useful for many subjects. Just as with any research, I am an educated person and understand that if one source says "Batman killed Kennedy" that I better back check it. I find it tremendously helpful that almost any term used is linked to further information on that item. On many subjects there are multiple articles, the articles are sourced, the sources can be checked and it seems to be a source that will continue to become more and more useful. It has been a good starting point for me to dig into many new subjects.
If someone is doing serious research then any good student would check a few sources. My source as a high school student was my parents paper copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica... it was dated 1951. I think that it's a great leap forward that collective pool of information can benefit everyone, free and around the world. As with anything, I think the people complaining could better use their energy by contributing to fixing the problems. Quibbling over the entry on a ball point pen... come on. And the fact that they fixed the Kennedy entry in a day... that is a great success story in my opinion.
All information on the internet and perhaps everywhere is suspect. I see that Wikipedia has it's share of vandals... that certainly shouldn't surprise anyone who was around to see some of the jokers at Jeeves over the years. With any good idea, some people are going to find a way to mess with it.
Posts: 3039 | Location: USA | Registered: 06-04-02
Professor, everything after my "Bold mine" insert was from Wikipedia. I bolded the part that showed that someone obviously invented the ball point pen before the Biro brothers. It is not so much the factual error, but the fact that the error was contradicted a few lines later in the same article that is important. A lack of logic in one place implies a lack of it in others. In the AP link above, provided by Professor, I pointed out that Wikipedia had incorrect information about Teddy Roosevelt. In this thread, I mention the entry on Ted Kennedy. Yes, it was good that the entry was corrected so quickly after I brought it to their attention, but the previous editing on the article was several months earlier, which means that the comments about Kennedy stood unchallenged for at least that long. (It once took me the better part of a year to get the Internet Movie Datrabase (imdb.com) to correct a very obvious error. I use imdb as a source because it has infomation unavaiable on any other site, and the few factual errors that I have found are miniscule compared to the millions of facts it contains, and I check other sources if what I am looking for in imdb.com comes from the reader-supplied information.) I like facts. I like the facts I read to be actual facts. What some obviously see as quibbling is merely an attempt to get the facts straight. My computer knowledge is so limited that my only contribution to the problem of erroneous information on information sites must be limited to finding errors and correcting them. That may not fix the problem, but it surely is fixing some of the symptoms. In September, I said that I often use Wikipedia as a start for research. I still do. But, while I may have once used it as proof of a fact, I no longer do. I think Wikipedia is a great tool. I think Encyclopædia Britannica is a great tool. (I own both the 11th edition* and a 1991 copy of the 15th edition.) But, like all tools, knowing how to use them is very important.
*The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia is actually the 11th Edition of the EB, renamed to address Britannica's trademark concerns. However, as of July 2005, Project Gutenberg only holds an electronic version of Volume 1 and the first portion of Volume 2. Distributed Proofreaders is currently working on producing a complete electronic edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which will be available from Project Gutenberg when finished.
Posts: 16639 | Location: Lincoln Place, Granite City, IL, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
Nature study covered side-by-side comparison of scientific topics
Thursday, December 15, 2005; Posted: 10:28 a.m. EST (15:28 GMT)
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that relies on volunteers to pen nearly 4 million articles, is about as accurate in covering scientific topics as Encyclopedia Britannica, the journal Nature wrote in an online article published Wednesday.
The finding, based on a side-by-side comparison of articles covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum, comes as Wikipedia faces criticism over the accuracy of some of its entries. - CNN.com -------- My surprise in all this is not so much that Wikipedia is so accurate but that EB is not.
Posts: 16639 | Location: Lincoln Place, Granite City, IL, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
As a kind of epilogue, an article on ZDNet Tech News, Tracking down the Wikipedia prankster, quotes Daniel Brandt, who located the perpetrator just before he confessed, and who also maintains Wikepedia Watch (link provided in earlier post), making these comments about improving security at the on-line encyclopedia:
quote:
No. 1, I would eliminate all edits that are not logged in. No. 2, next to the log-in name, I would have the IP address displayed on all the edits, no exceptions. No. 3, to get an account, which means to get a log-in name, they have to give a valid e-mail address. So then you would have three things, the login name, an IP address and a valid e-mail address, that make you less anonymous.
Then I would go and take all the biographical articles on living persons and take them out of the publicly editable Wikipedia and put them in a sandbox that's only open to registered users. That keeps out all spiders and scrapers. And then you work on all these biographies and get them up to snuff and then put them back in the main Wikipedia for public access but lock them so they cannot be edited. If you need to add more information, you go through the process again.
At least he's offereing constructive suggestions.
Posts: 1905 | Location: U.S. | Registered: 06-03-02
I can't wait to complete production my own Wikipedia biograpy - sort of a Mother Theresa/Michelangelo/DaVinci/Jefferson/Edison/Dick Butkus/Bill Gates combination.
Posts: 7619 | Location: in the backwoods of North Carolina | Registered: 06-07-02
It's astounding that Wales would have the chutzpah to alter his bio in the midst of an ongoing heated public discourse about the integrity of Wikipedia. Is he nuts?
Posts: 1905 | Location: U.S. | Registered: 06-03-02
Then the trusty editors at Wikipedia got together and compiled a list of over 1,000 edits made by Internet addresses allocated to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The IP address subsequently was blocked and unblocked. "
Seems our representatives have nothing better to do than to call each other names and rewrite history on the web. I feel kind of bad for the guys who created the Wikipedia. They were probably thinking more of a global info sharing source rather than a bathroom wall.
Posts: 1196 | Location: A danger to this country and the free world | Registered: 03-18-04
The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.
"A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence," Mr. Wales said. "But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community." ... Mr. Wales calls vandalism to the encyclopedia "a minimal problem, a dull roar in the background." Yet early this year, amid heightened publicity about false information on the site, the community decided to introduce semi-protection of some articles. The four-day waiting period [articles open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days] is meant to function something like the one imposed on gun buyers. ... Yet Wikipedians say that in general the accuracy of an article grows organically. At first, said Wayne Saewyc, a Wikipedia volunteer in Vancouver, British Columbia, "everything is edited mercilessly by idiots who do stupid and weird things to it." But as the article grows, and citations slowly accumulate, Mr. Saewyc said, the article becomes increasingly accurate.
It'll be intersting to see where things stand in another decade or so...
Posts: 1905 | Location: U.S. | Registered: 06-03-02
). With the exception of peer-reviewed scholarly journals, practically any source of information on any subject can be slanted by the author, deliberately or inadvertently, or simply be mistaken in facts. But for quick-and-easy info, Wikipedia is hard to beat.
) but a noteworthy lapse for dedicated fact-checkers such as ourselves.
