Google 2001

Try 2001googling “Al Qaida”

2,150 hits. The top 5 are two military websites and 3 web directory sites. The Hindustan Times has a newspaper article about them.

Nice. But I’m wondering why they don’t render the links as links to the Wayback Machine as of 2001.

Oh! Thanks Bubba. I missed that.

the first result for “stock market bubble” links to http://www.trueconspiracies.com...

i guess they got that one right.

What jumps out at me is that none of the top hits for any of those are Wikipedia.

Well, the index is from somewhere between 5-16 days after Wikipedia was launched (15th Jan, and I found somedates in the index for 20th Jan 2001).

It was dominated by computer nerds at the beginning so naming it in camel case was a fairly natural choice, as it spread to less insular parts of the internet it switched. The more obscure parts (like MediaWiki) remain in camel case, it is mostly only the front facing parts that have changed over time to more normal capitalization.

This looks like a timely entry China To Pop Real Estate Bubble With Public Housing’.

er, past

And there’s the wonderful world of internet commerce: I wonder how this plucky innovator did?

What jumps out at me is that none of the top hits for any of those are Wikipedia.

At the risk of derailing the thread, I wonder what Seth Finkelstein thinks of Google?

Sigh … so much for my nonexistent career as an academic … or even being known.

You may enjoy starting at:

Finkelstein, Seth
“Google, Links, and Popularity versus Authority”

Which is a chapter in the book:

“The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age”

Seth,

I read the Google piece. And I admit, I did not come away with clear sense of your views. Your main points seem to be that (a) algorithms that rank sites by some measure of poularity can reinforce existing biases and risk being taken as assessments of value or truth, which they aren’t, but (b) when Google departs from the algorithmic approach to make judgements of value, e.g. by suppressing sites deemed illegal, this is dangerously authoritarian, if not outright censorship. It also seems that Google, like Wikipedia, both unfairly privileges the mainstream and unreasonably elevates the fringe. (Both could be true, at the expense of the “loyal opposition” — credible minority views.)

More generally, to a naive observer (e.g. me) Google and Wikipedia look to have similar strengths and weaknesses as sources of information, so I was curious if your criticisms of the one would carry over to the other.

“There’s no Wikipedia page for “Seth Finkelstein”, tho he’s cited all over the place”

That’s a good thing!

I’m on Wikipedia, get me out of here

[Thread drift, but what the heck …]

It was a long, tedious, policy battle within the Wikipedia system. The whole topic – “Biographies Of Living Persons (WP:BLP)” is the key jargon – is still a highly contentious area and an ongoing controversy. Just today a long-time Wikipedia policy critic released some data on a study of vandalism to various biographies:

Wikipedia Vandal Study – US Senate

Wikipedia Vandal Study – US Senate

Thanks!

lp: To give a general overview, over the years I’ve become interested in issues of how information is propagated in practice, though from a bit more techie perspective than typical in academia (my day-job is as a professional programmer). I’ve found many writers on this topic tend to fetishize algorithms, while I have a deeper understanding, and try to explore more detailed meaning. Some of what I write is just about getting humanities types to understand that subject in more detail (of course they’ll say humans create algorithms, etc – that’s the first level. I’m trying to go further, to get to the implications of some level of specifics too). Google’s algorithms are complicated, but as you note, a big part of my writing is against the tendency to confuse popularity with authority. The centralization also gives Google a scary amount of power to effectively marginalize sites – this is not unknown, it’s the same power that large media companies have, but that’s a point in itself.

Wikipedia has another structural popularity versus accuracy problem, and I discuss that. Though much of my critique of Wikipedia separately focuses on the exploitative social process which drives it, and the way that’s then used to sell cult manipulation as a public policy benefit (see, cultists don’t have to be paid, and don’t have unions, aspects super-attractive to businesses and politicians).

I’m often noticeably disheartened, since while being a Guardian columns, author of a few academic book chapters, and other achievements, lifts me to a minimal respectability, it’s clear I’m not and almost certainly never will be at the pundit levels where what I write is going to have much effect (granted, it’s unclear if what most anyone writes has much effect at all – but again, I do have a day-job, so that affects the question as to whether it’s worth doing that writing).

Also on the Wiki and Google link. Often times when there’s a controversy as to the content of a particular page, various editors will trot out the number of google hits that a particular phrasing has. This comes up whenever there is some naming issues (the famous Gdansk/Danzig thing) or controversy over whether something was a “massacre” or an “incident”and so on. So obviously there’s a two way feedback between Wiki and Google.

I’m not convinced by Seth’s arguments, exactly, but I do think the entire area (trust metrics, search weighting, etc.) is interesting and not as yet very well understood.

35-

Yes, Seth’s stuff on Wikipedia, etc., is useful & interesting whether or not you share his very critical views. (I don’t, not yet anyway.) One thing that’s puzzling me, though, is what is being posed as the alternative. The default option is Credentialed Experts just like in the Good Old Days (Lee Siegel, Andrew Keen, etc.) but I’m pretty sure Seth isn’t saying that. So…?

The default option is Credentialed Experts just like in the Good Old Days (Lee Siegel, Andrew Keen, etc.) but I’m pretty sure Seth isn’t saying that.

I thought he was. The technology makes access to the experts easier, but unfortunately at the same time a bunch of jabbering amateurs at Wikipedia have developed an atomic bomb made from GoogleJuice that crowds out expertise.

Wikipedia is something of a moving target as regards expertise. The rules on reliable sources (and, conversely on the treatement of fringe views) are being interpreted and applied much more strictly than in the past.

On scientific issues, where it’s reasonably clear who the real experts are, Wikipedia usually gives more weight to the experts and less to fringe groups with an axe to grind than the traditional media. On some issues, like global warming, the difference is startling – the mainstream media have more or less uniformly taken the view that what matters here is political balance, not scientific accuracy. The failure to recognise this is one (of many reasons) to dismiss people like Keen and Siegel, for whom “experts” means “established insiders”.

Seth’s concerns are more serious, I think, but there’s a tendency to be locked in to positions that were more valid a few years ago than now.

I’d be interested in a study that compared Wikipedia articles to:
(a) The top non-WP Google hit
(b) A sampling of conventional media reports on the same topic.

I don’t know exactly what the criteria would be.

Following that, there are X assertions of truth per page…when compared with the alternative hit you should be able to find more or less truth and accuracy (or trivia).

unless you can point to a serious harm done by Wikipedia

That it fills people’s heads with confused, badly written, error-ridden, often malicious and muck-racking crap?

Getting experts to participate isn’t necessarily a good thing, no. Especially not if the means of doing so is to post inaccurate, untruthful or malicious material which experts then feel an urge or even obligation to correct, and which turns out to be a waste of time when their contributions just end up getting ignored, or butchered, by wikipedians anyway. Essentially a form of blackmail which also seems likely to be socially inefficient.

Malicious = eg. every single biographical article has a section called ‘criticism’ which is essentially a repository for all the muck which anyone with an opposing political agenda wishes to fling at the subject of the article. I do not think you will find the equivalent of this in any traditional encyclopaedia and no I do not think this represents ‘progress’.

every single biographical article has a section called ‘criticism’ which is essentially a repository for all the muck which anyone with an opposing political agenda wishes to fling at the subject

No. No it doesn’t.

As an experiment, I just looked up the Wikipediia pages of the following people:
Bill Thompson, the NYC Comptroller.
Nelson Algren, my favorite novelist.
Margaret Fox, the 19th century spiritualist.
Robert Crumb, the cartoonist.
Milton Babbitt, the composer.
Raul Prebisch, the Argentine economist.
Tom Golisano, the Rochester businessman and patron of the NY Independence Party.
(I also looked up Mary West-Eberhard, the biologist, but she doesn’t have an entry.)

Not one of them contained any such section, anything that could be construed as “muck”, or any criticism at all. None — despite the fact that two are political figures and several are/were involved in serious controversies.

So Wikipedia looks a bit more reliable than pseudonymous blog commenters, at least.

I look up stuff on Wikipedia all the time and have yet to come across stuff that’s error-ridden or malicious.

I’ve found those, but most of what I look up on Wikipedia isn’t politically-charged or theoretical, so it’s a valuable tool for me. I think Seth’s on the money with his criticisms, but I figger I disagree with the amount of times those criticisms apply and until we can develop some picture of the grains of salt required per Wikipedia paragraph I’m going to be cavalier about it and Seth’s going to be angry about it. Or maybe that’s a stupid way to put it: the variability of the quality is such that no skepticism metric is possible.

The stuff about the senators I was excited to look at. People who rely on Wikipedia for guidance on political affairs should, I think, be wary.

Well, I didn’t say that actually, but if it helps you to feel insulted and aggrieved, don’t let me stop you!

Hey, calm down! I understand that we could go on and on about the question of Skeletor’s head for days but there’s no need for bitterness.

Seth, looking at Google, the hit for “reverse engineering” that immediately follows Wikipedia goes to WhatIs, which has a short article written by Arleigh Crawford, who appears to be a software developer. He points to Chilling Effects (good, but scarcely an unbiased source) and then to (you guessed it) Wikipedia. So, it doesn’t appear in this instance that if Google demoted Wikipedia, much would change.

http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci507015,00.html

“It’s not a good thing that the way Wikipedia is structured requires experts to waste their valuable time fighting off trolls and ideologues”

Yeah, but come on, some of us do it for fun too. I got a fairly large watchlist and most of my edits these days just involve reverting some vandalisms of both the trivial and non-trivial kind, while waiting for my stat program to finish running or when I feel like procrastinating. I make more serious contributions to those areas where I feel a bit like an expert but most of that is also in the “intellectual goofing off” category, like blogging about economics, or reading blogs about economics or solving math puzzles or reading up on papers out of my area simply because they look interesting.

You make it sound like these unfortunate experts have somehow been chained to their computers like galley slaves in the glorious Wiki fight against trolls and vandals (and sure, it’d be nice if there was less of that, but hey, that’s the internets) but most of us do it because it’s a better way to procrastinate than Minesweeper. That and the whole “Someone on the internet is WRONG!” thing is a powerful motivator.

Aw, who doesn’t love Cory Doctorow? I bet you’re against puppies and sunshine too.