I recently tried to get involved as an editor but gave up. It can take literally hours out of your day going back and forth with some other editor who decides he or she wants to debate you on the world's dumbest, most pedantic thing ever. One time it literally took 3+ hours to make a change of less than a sentence on some stupid article like a particular model of motorcycle and it required escalating it to dispute resolution. Eventually a few more people chimed in and unanimously supported my position but my several hours were lost.
Articles that are in a niche people care (politically charged subjects) about have pretty strong biases that are impossible to remove because it doesn't matter which side follows the rules or the intended spirit of Wikipedia, all that matters is which side has more people and which side is more vocal. When making community decisions, the number of people voting is all that seems to matter, even if they vote with zero explanation or with an explanation that uses the rules incorrectly.
I gave up after probably 60 hours accumulated editing time, most of it spent not editing but dealing with other users and their bullshit.
Important: Wikipedia really has become accepted by the establishment. I have seen decision makers, at the table, with Wikipedia open during tumor board. I have seen staff physicians showing patients information and even reading up on side effects and mechanism of action. I have seen a dean ask a presenter to pull up the wikipedia page on a cutting edge test, in the middle of a discussion about whether to bring in said test.
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Usual, unimportant wikipedia banter: I edit almost exclusively in biological sciences and almost never run into edit wars. The one time I did, I tried to start the article on DigitalOcean, and it quickly boiled over into an extremely dissatisfying experience. It makes the DMV look efficient and cordial.
This seems to be a commonly-aired complaint when these discussions come up.
My guess is that it happens when people dive in to fix something that they "know" is wrong, and feel strongly about - and then get upset when it's reverted because they provided no evidence. No one likes rejection, but some take it far too personally.
If your first foray led to escalating to dispute resolution then maybe you don't have the right temperament. Not everyone is well-suited to being an encyclopedia editor, and there's nothing wrong with that. (Pro tip: Post your suggestions/argument in the "Talk" page first).
While the system is easy enough to use, there are also cultural/social/bureaucratic skills to learn.
BTW: The articles on "politically charged subjects" are the result of years of work and are generally pretty OK, if bland. Undoubtedly you could change them in ways you would find more acceptable, but it's unlikely that those of an opposing viewpoint would agree.
It's a commonly aired complaint because it's true. It's interesting you immediately blame the editor for fixing something "they feel strongly about but have no evidence". What if he did have well-sourced information? Why do you question his temperament? Why should that be a requirement to add information to a site?
There are examples on probably every page of Wikipedia (ie millions of examples) of well-sourced information that is censored. Biased pages are the standard, not the exception. Editors are routinely harassed on both contentious and non-contentious topics, just ask any woman using the system. I was harassed online and offline for well over a year for trying to add completely factual and well-sourced information to the site. I was targeted by one of the site's most famous admins because I dared challenge one of the many ambiguously worded policies on the site.
During that process I learned a lot about Wikipedia's culture and I realized that on Wikipedia "might is right' and only the most aggressive and fanatical editors survive. If you're not prepared to fight then you won't get anywhere. BTW, any Wikipedia editor knows your suggestion to post suggestions to the talk page is completely useless.
Most people simply don't want the hassle, and to be honest, the fact that new editors are scared off so quickly probably does them a favor. Why waste months trying to get factual information onto the site when faced with a bunch of opponents who will use very wiki rule available to deny you, bend the rules when necessary, and will bully and harass you? It's not worth it. But while that may entrench the power of the people who survive, it's no good for the long term future of the project. So please stop trying to blame the newcomers. Blame the toxic culture and the crap software that it is built upon. Maybe then it can perhaps be fixed.
I'm not sure my temperament is wrong for wikipedia, I didn't escalate things out of anger, it was just the provided solution when dealing with editors who aren't following guidelines and refuse to budge. I left ultimately because I'm not going to waste my life playing by the rules of a system that favors the militant vocal minority. I very much agree with the rules and know them and follow them very well, the community is great at getting around them, though.
> My guess is that it happens when people dive in to fix something that they "know" is wrong, and feel strongly about - and then get upset when it's reverted because they provided no evidence.
I think that it is more interesting that the article suggests that this is (at least partially) the result of an increase in paid editing:
"What changed in his absence, Wood says, is that employees of public-relations firms began to understand the value of a Wikipedia page, and tried going in to make edits themselves, with little regard for the site’s standards. The result was that the burden of proof became even heavier on newcomers, and, Wood says, even valid information was getting rejected out of hand by seasoned editors."
This is a false argument because the number of PR edits is so small in comparison to the total number of edits. The culture is toxic, period. See my other post on this thread.
The most enlightening thing in this article is a graph which shows numbers of editors has declined by 25% while articles are more than doubling over past 8 years. There must obviously be breaking point sooner or later where Wikipedia has more garbage then useful bits. My take away is that Wikipedia's model of small tribes of editors is not working and is demonstrably unscalable.
What could be the replacement? How about Stackoverflow style reputations that one must accumulate overtime and then they translate to privileges. The beauty of Stackoverflow is not its content but this community model they have sharpened to almost perfection. It feels far more scalable than Wikipedia's arcane model of emulating print world editorial team and beautifully takes advantage of gamification combining rewards with career profile.
I'm not really sure why you've been downvoted, as this seems like a non-controversial statement. I am working on a crowdsourced content site, a large part of which is a replacement for Wikipedia's biography and news-based pages (see profile for link). We do gamification (badges for adding certain types of content) and we pay our writers in revenue share. That said, in my experience, the issue is not one of personal reputation, but one of creating a system where quality data can be added irrespective of the quality of the person adding it. The focus should always be on the quality of the edit, not the quality of the editor. This may seem counter intuitive, but a well-designed crowdsourced site does not actually need experts in the subjects it is compiling.
I'm surprised at downvotes too. I suspect there are lots of n00b on HN who thinks downvotes is way to express disagreement. I use downvote for not-nice and spammy comments. If I want to express disagreement, I would just put that in reply. But apparently new HN population does things differently.
I believe after several decades of observation of communities like this one, that it is a character flaw of some programmers that because they are good at talking to computers—which are in fact totally objective interpreters of code—that the same attribute applies to their person. However at some point we are all emotional and biased creatures, and the distinction between disagreement and illogical argument or even outright factual innacuracy can at times blur significantly.
What I'm saying is that before you form a knee-jerk rationalization about the reason a downvote happened (because of course I do the same thing), stop and consider that there's at least a 50% chance that your argument is not in fact as airtight as your brain's emotional connection to it, and perhaps you are being downvoted for reasons totally unrelated to what you so hastily ascribe to the anonymous voters.
I'm surprised at that comment because his writings had given me a different impression. PG's view basically means that people with different opinions and minority views would be punished heavily by the community effectively leading to strip them out of all karma. This guideline would encourage people for groupthink and make them hesistant to offer any perspective that might be remotely perceived as controversial. I truly hope pg's above view was transient and has evolved.
Doesn't it, though? I see reasonable but unpopular opinions blasted into background color all the time. I make it a point to upvote these posts, even if I disagree with the original opinion, because of this behavior shaping that takes place on HN these days. And if I didn't know better, I'd say it was a conspiracy. :P
As per the article, the quality of content is moderated by editors who patrol the edits frequently. For example, you can go to a random wikipage and make some insane edit right now and there is a good probability that it would be reverted within few hours. This probability decreases over time when number of articles doubles but editors patrolling them decreases. Eventually you will start seeing lot of low quality edits sipping in and stay there for very long time.
I'm not sure I can define why I still use Wikipedia. The information is not dependable, and I never know when I'm reading nonsense. But I do use it at times.
If I need accurate information from an encylopedia, I now use Britannica.com (Encyopedia Britannica); it's informative, well-regarded, serious, and succinct. Coverage isn't as broad, of course. I'm not sure how the paywall works but a lot of content is free; I don't have a subscription and generally it's not a problem. Highly recommended.
More often than not accuracy is in the eye of the beholder. Only a fraction of the articles in any encyclopedia cannot be disputed. If one relies on only one encyclopedia then one is bound to copy the errors (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Errors_...) or some specific perspective on historic events, personae and even significance of scientific achievements.
A simple example are WP articles about the same topic in different languages, an even more stark contrast is any western encyclopedia compared to one that was created in a socialist country. I still have access to the latter and, especially for historic events, enjoy reading the other side of the story.
What each encyclopedia should do to nurture critical thinking: put "might be wrong" in bold above each article.
And we could get used to not referring to "WP article XYZ", but instead to "WP article XYZ, Version N" because otherwise our references to those articles are absolutely useless for people who want to do serious research.
PS: I think wikimedia is (was?) on the right track by building some kind of "fact engine" where different, even contradicting versions of the same facts could be registered and some algorithm would then determine which would automatically be included in pages as the "most probably correct". (Sorry, I don't have any links to back that up, this is what one of their devs told me about 2 years ago.)
At a certain point we need to give up on the idea we can sustain these public spaces without public support - taxes to an extent, laws of the form of "Net neutrality" (that might be free speech) and well plain old public approbrium
In the Edwardian era in UK, London was dotted with gated enclosures, private gardens solely for the rich - During the Second World War the hates were torn down for their metal content, and almost none were replaced, the community gains had been so great. Taxes to pay for the upkeep of the gardens, laws to ensure they could not be re-incorporated.
Somewhere in this is the solution to what Wikipedia has started.
This probably happens quite a lot. Not every subject in Wikipedia will have a vigilant editor.
There was an article about ships owned by a major commodities trader dumping poison in the ocean, and they got their PR company to edit the article. I'm quite confident this is actually true because someone (inside) alerted me to the guy's name used to edit Wikipedia, and then showed me the PR company's people page.
Hard to see what can be done about this though. If someone is being paid, they have a lot more time to cleverly word their story. In some cases legitimately, in others not.
That's actually a good example of the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia. A pretty terrible opening paragraph, and a jumble of snippets of poorly-integrated information - but organised into sections covering a series of issues, and a lots of links and references that give a very good overview. Compared to a Google search (sans Wikipedia), or britannica.com it's brilliant.
Yes it's a problem, but perhaps less than you might think.
First, in most cases PR spin has a "smell". Spotting that in an article an editor may dig into the edit history - where the story will be pretty clear of which links are removed, wording changed etc.
There are about half the editors that there were a few years back, but many will work on a very wide variety of articles, and in many cases spotting and resolving "spin" issues doesn't require special expertise - and just highlighting that spin is going on can be useful in itself.
Pro-tip: When reading anything on Wikipedia it's often useful to check the associated "Talk" page for any ongoing controversy, and the "History" page to see what the article said 6 months ago.
In essence the controversy was a number of sites working to get some ad dollars. I never bothered to figure out how to fix this, luckily some volunteer did.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Are you trying to say that calling a milk and coffee ice cream drink a MooLatte is not racist and that the product was not quickly withdrawn from the market?
The Wikipedia page for Dairy Queen mentions the MooLatte drink. Previous versions of the page mentioned the controversy about the name. The current version of the page doesn't. Since there are plenty of online sources talking about the name it seems to meet notability requirements, so the fact that the information has been edited out might be evidence of a problem.
While it seems there is little we can do to prevent the influence of money in our politics, truly democratic spaces like Wikipedia remain an important place for knowledge to be shared and verified. If we allow centralized sources of trust to become bought, sold, and politicized, then we risk fracturing into an Internet dark age, where your source of information is a function of your world view. What if instead of one Wikipedia, there was a pseudo version for people who strictly believe in creationism, or a version imposed on residents of Turkey that actively omits and reports to the government any complaints about the prime minister or references to the Armenian Genocide?
Wikipedia is far from truly democratic. It's tightly controlled by a small cabal of volunteers with their own biases and agendas. I'm not sure how someone would solve that, but paid people editing certainly wouldn't help.
Again, no. There is no "established cabal", and the rules are usually pretty clear. Sometimes there is some disagreement, but virtually always you can get consensus. If there's a problem with POV pushing, you can get outside help on the various project boards, ask for arbitration, admin intervention, etc. etc. There are lots of options if you take the time and effort to understand how wikipedia works.
In over 10 years of editing, I've never come across an issue that couldn't be solved by one of the above methods. If you think there is some article that is having a problem, please post it.
This is like saying that because there is the possible to sue over discrimination, discrimination doesn't happen.
Their are cabals that require extreme investments to fight. Most people aren't willing to put in that investment. Much the same that many people who face discrimination don't take it to court because they don't have the resources to throw at it and the expected return is too small.
Just because a system exists to resolve issues doesn't mean that everyone has equal access to the issue resolution.
I didn't say POV pushing and bias doesn't happen. I said that there are tools to deal with it. It does take time to learn how to navigate wikipedia, but it's not beyond the reach of the average person to do so if they have the time and motivation. I would urge more people to spend time editing wikipedia to deal with issues like this.
The average person doesn't have the time and motivation to learn, which is why Wikipedia is bleeding editors at a very fast rate, which just serves to make the problem worse and self-reinforcing.
> What if instead of one Wikipedia, there was a pseudo version for people who strictly believe in creationism
There is something like that: Conservapedia[0]. Reading it is fairly infuriating. Mostly because it is so extremely one sided and trying to argue an agenda in every single article.
Agreed. I think the problems is that he is reading it the wrong way by taking what is written as factual. Clearly it makes more sense if you consider the articles are written in "the onion" style.
> What if instead of one Wikipedia, there was a pseudo version for people who strictly believe in creationism, or a version imposed on residents of Turkey that actively omits and reports to the government any complaints about the prime minister or references to the Armenian Genocide?
It is already true for Wikipedias in different languages, which are maintained almost like separate websites. I didn't check, but I'm sure that Armenian and Turkish wikipedia don't have the same content on the matter.
Nicholas_C was a minute late so I'll respond to yours. Good timing!
With that example in mind, imagine there being no trusted force for everyone, because every other source could be dismissed as "Conservative brain-washing" or "Anarchist propaganda."
We barely trust our governments and our bosses' bosses. Not all of us live where we can trust our news. I know a lot of us on HN are business- and libertarian-minded, but we should recognize that places on the web like Wikipedia are special, and for all of us.
Isn't this the premise of Conservapedia. It doesn't claim to be biased, but to be free of the hegemonic liberal bias of Wikipedia (and academia, business, most forms of religion, etc).
There is no trusted source for everyone. Anyone with a bias they can't get into Wikipedia is free to spread FUD on the egregious nature of its biases and misinformation.
Interesting... It's like the Fox News of Wikipedia. People are going to get information from sources that semi align with their worldview. I really like Wikipedia because it's neutral in tone for the most part.
Can we stop centralized sources of trust to become bought, sold, and politicized? They must be financed by somebody, so they will be bought and sold. They must be organized internally and they must interface externally with other organizations, so they will be politicized.
Trying to stop it upfront is impossible. What we should struggle for is transparency, where we allow the money and the politics to flow but in a agreeable manner.
From the article:
"He pulled up the page’s revision history to identify the offending editor. He saw that the section was co-written in 2006 by two users, Rhys and ChyranandChloe, and that it was updated in 2010. He jumped back over to the textbook and saw that it was published in 2011. It turns out Heilman had it backwards: It was someone on Oxford’s side, perhaps Lloyd, who had taken from Wikipedia. (Lloyd did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)"
"The plagiarism was barely concealed. For reasons that remain unclear, some of the original citations from the Wikipedia page dropped out, and were replaced by pointers to other articles—articles that didn’t appear to support the claims made in the text, according to Heilman. In that sense, the Oxford textbook did not simply contain plagiarized text from Wikipedia; it appeared to make it less reliable."
"Christian Purdy, a spokesperson for Oxford University Press, acknowledged that some text was copied, but says this didn’t qualify as plagiarism. Instead, he called it an “inadvertent omission of an appropriate attribution.”"
I'm not sure this is really much more of a problem than POV pushers in general. Usually it's pretty obvious when someone is pushing their own agenda, and easily solved (assuming people are actually watching the page in question).
If the incumbent editors watching the page are the source of POV, then the mechanism is to prevent the correction of POV rather than to correct POV. There is no mechanism to prevent this.
Yes, there is. You can get uninvolved editors to help by posting on various project boards. You can also get admin intervention, arbitration, etc. There are lots of options if you take the time and effort to look for them.
And as long as the other side has more time (for example, by being better funded so they can contribute more time or by having more people invested in maintain a bias) it makes is near impossible. Technically grandparent is incorrect because they claimed the mechanism doesn't exist, when the real issue is that it is broken.
As someone who works on tasks reported on the Wikipedia conflict of interest noticeboard, I've been dealing with the paid editing problem for some time. Wikipedia is worth some effort to preserve; it is, after all, the highest rated non commercial site.
Most of the conflict of interest cases are simple promotion of a band/company/product/self by one person, usually someone with no other editing interests. Some are detected automatically by programs which check new Wikipedia content against the web for duplicates. Those are checked for notability, and many are deleted because they don't meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion. A few years ago, this was mostly a problem with garage bands; now it's a problem with garage startups. Those are easy to deal with.
Then there are subjects where there's unquestioned notability, and the subject of the article is trying to look good. Those usually involve content that reads like a sales brochure. Sometimes it's well-cited, but to weak sources. A typical example involves a company trying to list every flavor in which their product is available. The usual response to this is to delete promotional language and unnecessary product detail. The result can be a cold but well-cited article about the company's financial history. For individuals, resume inflation can be a problem. The requirement for a reliable source usually deals with that. Wikipedia, remember, is about "verifiability, not truth".
Promotional editing can backfire. Badly. When promotional editing is found, standard procedure is to look in Google for other information about the subject. If this turns up clear negative info, it will probably go in the article and stay there. Criminal convictions, regulatory actions, accident reports, investigative reporting, and criticism by consumer groups reported in the mainstream press tends to displace PR-type material. If the person or company has done something really bad, their article is likely to focus on that. This can result in frantic efforts by a company to make the "bad stuff" go away.
I was involved with the "Banc de Binary" mess, where the company was desperately trying to remove their legal problems. (The SEC and CFTC had booted them out of the US for a long list of blatant securities-law violations. Banc de Binary is not a bank, or a broker; they're an online casino set up to look like a brokerage. They're the "house"; if you win, they lose, and they set the odds.) Banc de Binary at one point offered $10,000 on eLance for someone who could "fix" the article their way. That was noticed and got press coverage. After much discussion on Wikipedia message boards, the article ended up rather negative on the company, all their accounts were blocked, and many people have that article on their watch list in case somebody tries something.
That's unusual; it seldom gets that bad.
That's the blatant stuff. More subtle spin is hard to detect. Minor changes to obscure medical or technical articles to make some product look good are tough to deal with, because they require subject matter expertise. This is a growing problem. But the usual procedures work; if only vendor X is mentioned, a search for a competitor may turn up vendor Y, which can be added to the article.
Articles that are in a niche people care (politically charged subjects) about have pretty strong biases that are impossible to remove because it doesn't matter which side follows the rules or the intended spirit of Wikipedia, all that matters is which side has more people and which side is more vocal. When making community decisions, the number of people voting is all that seems to matter, even if they vote with zero explanation or with an explanation that uses the rules incorrectly.
I gave up after probably 60 hours accumulated editing time, most of it spent not editing but dealing with other users and their bullshit.