Wikipedia-raising more questions than answers

[southsider2k5]

From today's Trib

 

If your mother says she loves you, check it out" stands as one of the most treasured journalistic maxims, a reminder that no assertion, no matter how likely it seems, should be taken at face value.

 

Now, thanks to a volunteer online encyclopedia, we can add another: "If Wikipedia says John Seigenthaler plotted to kill the Kennedys, check it out."

 

Wikipedia, the free digital reference book that has grown enormously in size and stature this year, was dealt a public-relations setback recently when Seigenthaler, a prominent Nashville newspaper editor in the Civil Rights era, told of a bogus Wikipedia biographical entry on him that seemed to have been crafted by an aspiring Oliver Stone screenwriter.

 

Or it could have been Buck Owens or Billy Crudup. For a couple of weeks after Seigenthaler's USA Today article explaining the situation, we didn't know, because one of the treasured values in the Wikipedia community is anonymity, or the possibility of anonymity, and the author of the Seigenthaler entry had held onto his.

 

On Monday, though, after being nearly tracked down from his computer's Internet Protocol ad-dress by a Wikipedia critic, confessing to Seigenthaler and then being exposed in The New York Times, the prankster was revealed as a Nashville man trying to tweak a member of a prominent city family to amuse a co-worker.

 

It shouldn't work like that.

 

Wikipedia, if it wants to achieve the "better-than-Britannica accuracy" that guru Jimmy Wales says he strives for, needs to become as good as the old-school reference tomes at making its authors stand behind their work.

 

This, I realize, puts me in the camp of the fusties, librarians and the like who prefer to steer people to sources that are trustworthy rather than quick-and-easy or, in the case of Wikipedia, trendy.

 

But I'm not one of the Wikipedia bashers, either. It's a good, often great, first reference, an amazing feat of predominantly quality work and a refutation to those who would argue that you can't coax good work out of people without paying them.

 

I'm impressed, too, by Wales' candor when he says, in an interview, "People definitely should not be using Wikipedia as a primary source. The real story there is, Why were they ever?"

 

But no matter whether it strives to be the last word on a subject or the first, authorial responsibility is the right and obvious place for Wikipedia to be.

 

"Anonymity should not be permitted in a work that purports to provide factual information,' says James Rettig, university librarian at the University of Richmond and the editor of "Distinguished Classics of Reference Publishing."

 

"Wikipedia's very good when it's good," Rettig says. "It's useless when it's not."

 

The Seigenthaler incident was the most prominent in the U.S., but hardly the first; in another high-profile case, the encyclopedia called Norway's prime minister a convicted pedophile before the lie was removed after about a day.

 

Fantastical falsehoods

 

Much lower in profile, librarian Gary Price, the editor of ResourceShelf.com and news editor for SearchEngineWatch.com, says he did his own test this past summer, inserting fantastical falsehoods into the entry about him.

 

"I said I was a roadie for Warrant and Megadeth and AC/DC in the '80s," he says. "I said, in addition to librarian, in my spare time, I'm also a stuntman," and he linked to an Internet Movie Database article on an actual stuntman named Gary Price.

 

"I wanted to see how long it would take for a little-known person like me to have that information removed," he says. "Kudos to Wikipedia: It took six to eight weeks."

 

Seigenthaler's entry was up for months, time for it to spread via the search engines (which tend to rank Wikipedia entries highly in their results), to make it into high-school and college papers, to be repeated in other online reference works that use Wikipedia material but aren't as good about updating.

 

In light of all this, the University of Richmond's Rettig was thinking about how Wikipedia might reform itself, and "it struck me as a no-brainer that you just cease the ability for people to edit it anonymously."

 

Rule change

 

But all Wikipedia did was tweak its rules. In the future, to create an entry you'll have to register with the site first, although you'll still be able to do that without giving your real name. Plus, you'll still be able to edit entries -- the source of most of the encyclopedia's info-vandalism -- without registering.

 

The encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.org) has built a base of more than 830,000 English-language entries (plus more than 1 million in its next nine most popular languages) by allowing users to create entries and to edit other ones as they see fit. People who are expert in certain areas, whether amateur or professional, keep watch on the entries in those areas and are notified when changes are made.

 

Although a prominent Wikipedia critic (at www.wikipedia-watch.org) calls the phenomenon a "hive mind," this self-policing model, not unlike eBay's, usually knocks down bad information quickly.

 

In terms of "vandalism," malicious changes made to entries, there can be as many as one a minute, Wales says, and once or twice a week, Wikipedia has to ban somebody from editing because his or her work is consistently or deliberately bad.

 

Those, he says, are generally easy to catch. "The tougher part is somebody comes in, and they're doing kind of good edits and kind of bad. If they seem reformable, we talk to them and encourage them to do better."

 

To Wales, whose title is chairman of the Wikipedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, all this sudden negative attention seems out of balance after a year of mostly positive press highlighted by Wikipedia's first-rate work in constantly updating and broadening background materials on such news events as the Asian tsunami, the London subway bombings and Hurricane Katrina.

 

"It's unfortunate that there's been this big media storm over one entry on the site, and that's not to say it's the only bad entry on the site," he says. "The big picture is this is a non-profit, charitable, humanitarian, volunteer effort to create and give away an encyclopedia to every person on the planet.

 

`A big mistake'

 

"And if people come away from this thinking that Wikipedia's some kind of crazed forum for trolls, that's unfortunate. At the same time we're fully prepared to accept criticism, and this was a big mistake."

 

But Wales, who got rich as a Chicago futures trader and for-profit Internet entrepreneur, insists that anonymity should not be the issue.

 

"It's difficult to not allow anonymity," he says. "The default setting of everything on the Internet is that people are anonymous."

 

Many Wikipedians do share their identities, he says, but to insist on universal author identification would require "onerous" procedures, and even then you wouldn't know for sure if they were telling the truth.

 

Which raises the question: If they're not, or might not be, telling the truth about who they are, should they be trusted to tell the truth about anybody or anything else?

 

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[DonkeyKongerko]

I think a big reason that article wasn't noticed was because of the relative obscurity of that man's name. If those changes had been made to one of the Kennedy or conspiracy articles, they probably would have been reverted in an hour or two at most.

 

Here's another article on Wikipedia with some comparisons to Britannica.