11 ms·

When the SOPA/PIPA protests happened in 2012, I was really surprised to learn that students were upset since all they used as a resource was Wikipedia. I mean

by swang 11y ago

When the SOPA/PIPA protests happened in 2012, I was really surprised to learn that students were upset since all they used as a resource was Wikipedia. I mean for the most part I agree with the quoted articles in that Wikipedia is hard to "verify" other than what you believe sounds true. And sometimes this happens. 1) Someone write something on Wikipedia 2) Person changes it 3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia. 5) Repeat It is a bit scary how much our source of information is just this one site source without decent "fact" checking other than turf war related reasons. Here is one: I am pretty certain that Alicia Keys was born in 1980 and not 1981 as her Wikipedia article says. I have no way to prove this based on Wikipedia standards and if you look on "the Internet" you sometimes see 1980 and sometimes see 1981. The editors who turfed her page at the time sided with the 1981 timeline. And how did they "prove" it was 1981? They showed links to some music related websites with articles about her saying she was born in that year. Completely ignoring alternative sources that said she was born in 1981. I mean there are certain explanations on why this happened: 1) A major publication cited her DOB as 1981, others followed suit. 2) Alicia keys' handlers want her to be a year younger than she is, so she told her PR people to make sure everyone says she was born a year younger. 3) Someone misheard she was born in 1981, wrote that down on Wikipedia, then everyone else just used Wikipedia as a reference. The problem I'm trying to get at is, Wikipedia is so popular its hard to figure out if people are just lazy and using it as a source, which perpetuates this cycle of "Fact F on Article A is true because of source S, Source S it turns out, used article A to look up Fact F and reprinted it without really fact checking F. So yeah, popular, but hard to determine how accurate. /rant.

varjag 11y ago
> 1) Someone write something on Wikipedia 2) Person changes it 3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia. 5) Repeat As illustrated in this useful infographic: https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
- cooper12 11y ago
  There's a short list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_... See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting
- lordnacho 11y ago
  http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-a-raccoon-became-an-aardvark http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-a-raccoon-became-...
drinchev 11y ago
If you are talking about the "news"-articles, you are right. With the same arguments I could argue that >almost every< historical fact/source is somehow modified, according to political/moral/memory problems. Just to mention the total media collapse these days, where Russia & "The West" have so different facts put out in the wild, that you actually can't find what happened, by only reading and selecting a source. What's interesting is that both media don't provide any evidence of what actually happened, they just spread out opinions by other people, which are in most cases subjective. What Wikipedia did ( and is doing very good ), though is that it gathered multiple knowledge bases under one roof - very general, sometimes, but accurate enough. For example, I've graduated law and could claim that what I can find as articles on that topic is very basic, but true. Also I'm professionally working as a web-dev and still can claim that most articles I find are precisely moderated and reflect the science-books. It's so funny I always like to "Let's check wikipedia" and people usually reply "That's not an accurate source of information", which IMHO is wrong. Wikipedia is still the most accurate (general) knowledge base to me.
- whyever 11y ago
  I remember that when Wikipedia was new, people were more willing to trust something that a random guy said on his website or in some book rather than what was written on Wikipedia. I never understood that. Wikipedia at least has more eyeballs.
  - talmand 11y ago
    I feel somewhat the opposite. The problem, as I see it, is the more people involved the more difficult it is to refute. It's the idea that the more people say it the more true it becomes. Never mind the blatant disregard for hard facts with articles based on subjective opinions in certain topics, Wikipedia is not an objective source of information to me. Sure, I use it occasionally for generic stuff but I also pay attention to the listed sources. I read them for myself not trusting the people that created the article on Wikipedia.
    - whyever 11y ago
mikekchar 11y ago
Now try to follow the same thought process for other sources of information. Ever see a citation in a newspaper? How do you check the facts on the evening news? What is the sequence of events leading to something being reported (and believed by the vast majority of people reading it)? 1) Reporter discovers something (how???) 2) Reporter submits it 3) Some editor approves/rejects it (how/why???) 4) A very good looking person presents it to you on TV along with audio and visual designed to make it look plausible. If it turns out to be untrue, is it reported? What if you discover that it is untrue yourself? How do you correct it? So yeah, even more popular that wikipedia, but hard to determine how accurate.
kefka 11y ago
If you care, you can pull birth certificate. That will have birth date, mother, father, and other relevant information. But who cares?
- jordigh 11y ago
  > If you care, you can pull birth certificate. Can you? These things aren't exactly public record, are they?
  - kefka 11y ago
    At least for Ohio and Indiana, they want to know who you are (the requester), who you want to know, why you want to know, and money. Genealogy is a perfectly good answer.
jordigh 11y ago
It's really hard to argue against consensus reality. If enough people are all convinced that Alicia Keys is born in 1981, they will all keep repeating it until it's true. My own pet battle in this war for truth is that "open source" was coined as a synonym for "free software" in 1998 and nobody called free software "open source" before then. There are so many people who argue so vehemently that "open source" was a term that people used naturally for software before 1998, and this gets repeated so often as to become consensus reality.
- scholia 11y ago
  It's worse that that: telling people the facts doesn't necessarily change their minds, often it just hardens their existing beliefs. See, for example, The Backfire Effect http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/ http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/ In cases where people have very strong beliefs, they would rather abandon reality than change them. It's quite common in tech, but is it worth worrying about? US society survives despite all the birthers, con-trail conspiracists, creationists, anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers, people who think the moon landings were staged in Arizona, and so on. In that context, I think Wikipedia is doing pretty well....
  - jordigh 11y ago
    It's so scary when I think about myself and how often do I do that. I want my beliefs to reflect reality, but how well can I do it? How is anyone aware of this bias not afraid that they believe nothing but lies?
    - scholia 11y ago
      Do most people care that much about particular beliefs? Most of us recognize that the world changes, and more information becomes available, and we update our brains on an hourly basis. It's only really a problem for "single-issue fanatics" or extremists or whatever: those people who stake so much of their intellectual, emotional and sometimes financial capital on a particular point of view that they have to defend it regardless of the facts. Creationists, for example.
JdeBP 11y ago
The more interesting one was Paloma Faith, whose incorrect age had been widely reported by some reputable U.K. national newspapers. In 2012 Wikipedia editors turned up early and local news coverage that gave her correct age, two years before the U.K. national news eventually reported that she had been lying about her age. They haggled over whether the national newspapers outweighed the local/early news and the information put out by the school that she had attended, for the better part of a year, getting sidetracked several times along the way. I documented another case that wasn't biographical: * http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/legacy-encoding-has-no-definition.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/le...

by swang 11y ago

varjag 11y ago

> 1) Someone write something on Wikipedia 2) Person changes it 3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia. 5) Repeat As illustrated in this useful infographic: https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/

cooper12 11y ago
There's a short list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_... See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting
lordnacho 11y ago
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-a-raccoon-became-an-aardvark http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-a-raccoon-became-...

drinchev 11y ago

If you are talking about the "news"-articles, you are right. With the same arguments I could argue that >almost every< historical fact/source is somehow modified, according to political/moral/memory problems. Just to mention the total media collapse these days, where Russia & "The West" have so different facts put out in the wild, that you actually can't find what happened, by only reading and selecting a source. What's interesting is that both media don't provide any evidence of what actually happened, they just spread out opinions by other people, which are in most cases subjective. What Wikipedia did ( and is doing very good ), though is that it gathered multiple knowledge bases under one roof - very general, sometimes, but accurate enough. For example, I've graduated law and could claim that what I can find as articles on that topic is very basic, but true. Also I'm professionally working as a web-dev and still can claim that most articles I find are precisely moderated and reflect the science-books. It's so funny I always like to "Let's check wikipedia" and people usually reply "That's not an accurate source of information", which IMHO is wrong. Wikipedia is still the most accurate (general) knowledge base to me.

whyever 11y ago
I remember that when Wikipedia was new, people were more willing to trust something that a random guy said on his website or in some book rather than what was written on Wikipedia. I never understood that. Wikipedia at least has more eyeballs.
- talmand 11y ago
  I feel somewhat the opposite. The problem, as I see it, is the more people involved the more difficult it is to refute. It's the idea that the more people say it the more true it becomes. Never mind the blatant disregard for hard facts with articles based on subjective opinions in certain topics, Wikipedia is not an objective source of information to me. Sure, I use it occasionally for generic stuff but I also pay attention to the listed sources. I read them for myself not trusting the people that created the article on Wikipedia.
  - whyever 11y ago

mikekchar 11y ago

Now try to follow the same thought process for other sources of information. Ever see a citation in a newspaper? How do you check the facts on the evening news? What is the sequence of events leading to something being reported (and believed by the vast majority of people reading it)? 1) Reporter discovers something (how???) 2) Reporter submits it 3) Some editor approves/rejects it (how/why???) 4) A very good looking person presents it to you on TV along with audio and visual designed to make it look plausible. If it turns out to be untrue, is it reported? What if you discover that it is untrue yourself? How do you correct it? So yeah, even more popular that wikipedia, but hard to determine how accurate.

kefka 11y ago

If you care, you can pull birth certificate. That will have birth date, mother, father, and other relevant information. But who cares?

jordigh 11y ago
> If you care, you can pull birth certificate. Can you? These things aren't exactly public record, are they?
- kefka 11y ago
  At least for Ohio and Indiana, they want to know who you are (the requester), who you want to know, why you want to know, and money. Genealogy is a perfectly good answer.

jordigh 11y ago

It's really hard to argue against consensus reality. If enough people are all convinced that Alicia Keys is born in 1981, they will all keep repeating it until it's true. My own pet battle in this war for truth is that "open source" was coined as a synonym for "free software" in 1998 and nobody called free software "open source" before then. There are so many people who argue so vehemently that "open source" was a term that people used naturally for software before 1998, and this gets repeated so often as to become consensus reality.

scholia 11y ago
It's worse that that: telling people the facts doesn't necessarily change their minds, often it just hardens their existing beliefs. See, for example, The Backfire Effect http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/ http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/ In cases where people have very strong beliefs, they would rather abandon reality than change them. It's quite common in tech, but is it worth worrying about? US society survives despite all the birthers, con-trail conspiracists, creationists, anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers, people who think the moon landings were staged in Arizona, and so on. In that context, I think Wikipedia is doing pretty well....
- jordigh 11y ago
  It's so scary when I think about myself and how often do I do that. I want my beliefs to reflect reality, but how well can I do it? How is anyone aware of this bias not afraid that they believe nothing but lies?
  - scholia 11y ago
    Do most people care that much about particular beliefs? Most of us recognize that the world changes, and more information becomes available, and we update our brains on an hourly basis. It's only really a problem for "single-issue fanatics" or extremists or whatever: those people who stake so much of their intellectual, emotional and sometimes financial capital on a particular point of view that they have to defend it regardless of the facts. Creationists, for example.

JdeBP 11y ago

The more interesting one was Paloma Faith, whose incorrect age had been widely reported by some reputable U.K. national newspapers. In 2012 Wikipedia editors turned up early and local news coverage that gave her correct age, two years before the U.K. national news eventually reported that she had been lying about her age. They haggled over whether the national newspapers outweighed the local/early news and the information put out by the school that she had attended, for the better part of a year, getting sidetracked several times along the way. I documented another case that wasn't biographical: * http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/legacy-encoding-has-no-definition.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/le...