Parallel Wikipedia

Maybe they will eventually create an entirely self consistent and utterly parallel universe. They called themselves the reality based community, maybe they just were not talking about our reality.

The whole thing would have never happened if they had just read Hume: http://www.philosophersnet.com/cafe/archive_article.php?id=120&name=interrogations

On January 18, 2007, I read a Wikipedia article, and noted that an article mentioning “Dave Stewart” linked to a comic book artist of that name, rather than the former Eurythmic of the same name, whom the article should have properly been referring to.

Not wanting to try to figure out how to fix it myself, I put a note on the “discussion” page saying that the wrong Dave Stewart was being referenced, and could someone who knows how please fix it.

This post reminded me of it, since it was the last time I’d used Wikipedia, and I went to check. 11 weeks later, and the page hasn’t been changed yet.

It’s not even political — just an honest mistake made by whomever wrote the article. But there it sits. I think we’re reaching the point where the number of articles on Wikipedia is expanding faster than the world of editors, and more and more stuff is just getting forgotten, or ignored, or whatever.

They called themselves the reality based community, maybe they just were not talking about our reality.

Actually, you have this backwards. The term “reality-based community” comes from an unnamed Bush aide quoted by Ron Suskind in an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Progressives seized on the term “reality-based community” precisely because the Bush White House was, bizarrely, using it as a pejorative.

(via Wikipedia, fwiw, which is apparently not much)

Rich B.:

… and more and more stuff is just getting forgotten, or ignored, or whatever.

Aye, and the best part is, many people don’t seem to be bothered by that. After all, why bother with these low-level gruntwork of cleaning up stuff, when it’s more exciting to take part in all the Epic Battles between Inclusionists, Deletionists, Mergists, Eventualists, etc.? (No, I don’t know what an “Eventualist” is, and I don’t want to know.)

“And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

To be fair, though, it was actually Mr. Bush’s father who discovered this parallel reality: “America has a new credibility. What we say goes.”

The website Conservapedia.com has a long list of 41 allegations of bias and factual errors at Wikipedia.

But I think the most impressive thing about Conservapedia is that it is an intricately self-referential network of over 6,300 educational, clean, and concise entries which serve as unintentional meta-commentary on the bias and factual errors at Conservapedia.

Truly an achievement. Unintentional, but an acievement nonetheless.

Truly an achievement. Unintentional, but an acievement nonetheless.

But not as impressive as misspelling a word spelled correctly earlier in the same line.

JP’s Law: Their Is Always One More Typo.

From the ‘about Conservapedia’ section:

We do not allow liberal censorship of conservative facts

At least we now know where we stand.

Compare the article on cryptozoology with the baraminology article for a smidge of enlightenment.

If you type in Dave Stewart into Wiki you’re taken to a disambiguation page with 6 different Dave Stewerts. Wiki wins again!!!

Not really. Though Randians might deny it ( because they hate their ideas being described in traditional philosophical terms) “objectivism” is actually epistemologically foundationalist.

Off the topic, and please forgive my ignorance, but is “whinge” by any chance the British equivalent of “whine,” as we goobers in the U.S. spell it? (Akin to programme/program, etc.) Is it pronounced the same way? I spend entirely too much time visiting Brit-oriented websites, and of all the spelling oddities, this is the one that feels the most like rubbing my head and patting my belly … thanks!

Acht. I see I was perhaps unfair. The cleaned up (and entirely unfunny) article is “Judicial activism.” The original, funny, article was “Judicial Activism.” The latter now redirects to the former, but you can see the edit history and get to the original article if you so chose. Of course, in the edit history there is ample evidence to decide whether, in fact, the original article was “parody.”

“Wikipedia currently claims 1.7 million pages in English. And Bozell calls a a list of 41 problems “long”?”

It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that among those “problems” are such things as not always using American spelling on an avowedly global site. Liberal bias!

On the Left Behind thing, can we not take some comfort that the awful Left Behind: Tribulation Force game tanked, its specially created publisher lost $27m and is on the verge of bankruptcy?

katherine/#29:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/

Seth, perhaps it’s an attack of Americanus Ignoramus, but what is The Register? (http://www.theregister.co.uk/).

The homepage looks like an IT rag.

#25:

As you should easily be able to find out from non-Wikipedia sources, “whinge” is a rough synonym of “whine” and the “j” is pronounced.

When someone stitches together Britannica “articles” from fragments of different articles, fragments a children’s version of Britannica, and even some original material, it’s simply dishonest. And responding to this kind of accusation with “Orlowski has an axe to grind” is just plain Bad Form.

If the charge is that Orlowski was lying, then I’d like to know about that.

John, but my point is that the amount of work and the politics means anyone involved heavily is likely going to be “obvious partisans”. There just isn’t the incentive for anyone else. Not that it’s utterly impossible, but it’s a very contentious topic.

Now, contrary to some caricatures, Wikipedia’s accuracy problems are not at the cartoon level of
Conservapedia. Wikipedia tends to select to the level at around the popular press. It’s more like if you took a bunch of science articles written by journalists, it’d probably be very easy to do the same sort of study and proclaim that a decent newspaper is almost as accurate as Britannica.

I’m not convinced you’re correct about Wikipedia of 2003 – the difference is that by matching length, that has the effect of selecting well-developed Wikipedia articles. There were certainly a much smaller number of well-developed Wikipedia articles in 2003 – but if a sampling system was applied which only let pass well-developed articles, then that difference wouldn’t matter.

I probably should disclaim/disclose I’ve been a Wikipedia critic, especially in the matter of how it handles biographies of living people.

Hmm, you sure sound like you have an axe to grind :-).

Regarding: “The other main point is that Britannica disputed lots of points where the reviewers (doing the job blind by the way) said they were in error. But, as Nature pointed out, Wikipedia could have done the same thing. There was no attempt by Britannica to show that the reviewers were harder on its articles than on Wikipedia’s”

As I said : The methodology was virtually guaranteed to yield the result “Wikipedia almost as a good as Britannica”, because every quibble and dispute was counted as an error against both. So there was a huge mass of, basically, nitpicking, that then turned into a claim of Wikipedia’s relative accuracy.

It’s not a good reply to say they could equally nitpick both Wikipedia and Britannica – that’s in fact the restatement of my point. When someone comes up with a bunch of quibbles, which is virtually certain to happen for *both*, this will then be scored as *equal* *accuracy* – in effect, masking serious errors under an avalanche of trivia.

Here, simple example: Say a Wikipedia article has 2 real errors and 8 quibbles, while a Britannica article has 1 real error and 8 quibbles. The reviewers were equally hard on them. But there’s a big difference between reporting an error rate of “2 to 1” versus “10 to 9”. And Nature’s methodology was going to drive the headline soundbite toward the latter sort of number.

Nature selected what came up on a search of the Brittanica website, which is certainly a defensible procedure if you’re comparing online encyclopedias

Eh, but it still doesn’t explain why Nature had to paste stuff together and present the stuff as a single “article” in one case, as Orlowski reports. Why?

= = =

But again, what especially irks me now is that even after the “Essjay” scandal, there are still Wikipedia fundamentalists who are defending Essjay’s lies left and right, saying that his lies are “reasonable” and all that.

And the Three Big Lies of Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is -not- a soapbox. Indeed, those Inclusionists, Deletionists, Mergists and whoever, they were totally _not_ using Wikipedia to pimp their views on How Things Ought To Be.

Wikipedia is -not- an indiscriminate collection of information. Now, guess who decides what information is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia. Answer: “current consensus”. Isn’t that great? And the “current consensus” is being dominated more and more by Simpsons fans, webcomics fans, and other similar characters. You can guess where all that’s heading.

Wikipedia is -not- a bureaucracy. Hell yeah. Slow-acting and sometimes non-acting administrators who refuse to find out any cases presented to them unless it’s shoved right into their face, and try to find every excuse to do nothing; and when they do act, they brainlessly enforce rules based on what they don’t find out. Oh, and there are those big fat _backlogs_ too! If that’s not a bureaucracy, I don’t know what is.

John: The example I gave was to show how a big accuracy discrepancy could be converted into a headline of nearly-as-good. Note also in #45, you yourself wrote “The other main point is that Brittanica disputed lots of points where the reviewers … said they were in error.”

Look, I think I’ve offered as much as can reasonably be done for this level of discussion. I can’t review the entire dataset, and even if I could, anything I said would be dismissed as a partisan critique. I think I’ve raised legitimate methodological issues that are apparent in an initial inspection of the data.

The analogy to global warming/Lancet/evolution denialism is rather the reverse, since Wikipedia generates a lot of rhetoric about how ordinary people can triumph over the ivory-tower intellectuals.

[Further disclosure – Orlowski has quoted me a few times in his stories]

John Quiggin:

I don’t see any policy “changes”. At most there’s a proposal to verify credentials — I understand it was tabled at the beginning of March, and it’s now April. With so much apologetic rhetoric around, I highly doubt the proposal will even begin to fly. And remember, “Essjay” wasn’t promoted to the Arbitration Committee by normal procedure in the first place: what’s the use of changing policy, given that Jimbo promoted “Essjay” by overriding policy in the first place?

Also, let’s not forget that the enforcement of existing policies is already a total mess — wheel wars, backlogs, all that.

And you really can’t beat this for sheer apologetic bull:

“The ethos of Wikipedia is that anyone can contribute, regardless of status, argues Dr Platt. What’s relevant is their knowledge as judged by other readers, not whether they are professors or not – and the fact the student [“Essjay”] was exposed shows it works.”

Man… isn’t it great? If “Essjay” was exposed, the process obviously works; if “Essjay” wasn’t exposed, nobody’ll know about it and there’ll be nothing to complain about, so the process definitely works too! And of course, it took only 9 months to expose “Essjay” surely inspires great confidence in the Wikipedia process…

= = =

As I said, I don’t like Conservapedia either. I might get behind Citizendium or Wikinfo (or even Encyclopaedia Britannica, if I’m that desperate).

Sorry, I’m just an occasional lurker, but I can’t help express my utter amazement at the sentence: “As I said, I don’t like Conservapedia either. “

Carry on.

I wonder what porgy tirebiter means by this statement.

It’s like hearing someone criticizing (reasonably and fairly, perhaps) design flaws in, say, Boeing 747, and finishing it by saying: “but I don’t like Yugo either.” I think that’s what tirebiter meant.

The remarkable thing about Conservapedia is that, for a certain range of content, it cannot be determined whether an editor was sincere or trolling. The proper response is not, Wow, someone actually thinks this, but, Wow, enough people think enough sufficiently weird things that we cannot tell whether someone actually thinks this.