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I've suspected for a while that the pharmaceutical companies are manipulating the drug pages on wikipedia. Often I'll come across a claim about a drug and then

I've suspected for a while that the pharmaceutical companies are manipulating the drug pages on wikipedia. Often I'll come across a claim about a drug and then click on the reference, only to find that the reference says something completely different from the wikipedia article. I don't have an example off-hand, but it's something to keep in mind: always check the references rather than blindly accepting what wikipedia says. (Related, wikipedia's policy of only accepting secondary sources is similarly problematic, because often the secondary sources say something completely different from the primary source. I understand the need for the policy -- it makes it more difficult someone from writing an article just to manipulate wikipedia -- but again, it underscores the need not just to check wikipedia's reference, but also to check the primary source).

reaperducer 8y ago
wikipedia's policy of only accepting secondary sources is similarly problematic This is why I stopped contributing. Article about a radio station where I was in management and selected the call letters? I added the meaning of the call letters to a Wikipedia article. Rejected because I'm not a secondary source. Added an article about a dial-up BBS network that did store-and-forward e-mail a decade before the internet went mainstream. I ran one of they key nodes. Rejected because I'm not a computer magazine available in archive.org. Added an article about what was probably the world's first online cartoon series (helped with distribution, since this was pre-internet). Rejected. Same reason. I as a journalist at the scene of an event when it happened and watched it unfold before my eyes. Added some information to that event's entry in Wikipedia. Rejected. The irony is that if there was a copy of the broadcast I did on the event, that would be perfectly OK. But the people who patrol the sources on Wikipedia are under the impression that there was no recorded history before the internet.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  I can see the argument that they want sources people can check and evaluate for themselves. You're a legitimate expert, but anyone with a bit of sense can claim to be an expert and appear just as credible to a layman. Faking a credible secondary source is not impossible, but it is difficult--a "news" site that opened three months ago and only has articles on subjects linked to Wikipedia sources is pretty obviously fake. I wonder if there's some sort of happy medium. Maybe a thing where legit experts can submit credentials to be cleared by the moderators, the way Reddit verifies identities for AMAs. You'd still be expected to source everything you can, but eyewitness details could be sourced to your verified credentials. (Which could then be re-reviewed en masse if you start posting bullshit later on.)
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    An argument that easily breaks an encyclopedia or anything intending to be an authoritative source. Or even a worthy source. It's why you frequently bump into articles that go against memory of anyone living in that phase of history, at the company etc. Or entirely misses out the once famous controversy as evidenced by some 15 year old personal or blogspot site. Yet Wikipedia does it when there's no choice, because all sources are really old books and offline. Case in point. A story cropped up on HN a month or two back about S Wolfram being obsessional about recording something. No surprises there, but I happened to wander to Wikipedia and there is not the briefest mention of his suing + screwing everyone who worked or collaborated with him making Mathematica. Apparently that didn't happen. At all. Sure it wasn't quite SCO vs IBM, but it was well known enough in N England during the 90s that it will forever be my association if someone mentions him, and there was occasional office banter off the back of it. "Wolfram? Who's he suing now, the office cat?" That's because it was in Computer Weekly, PCW, or the hundreds of other paper sources every other issue. On Wikipedia it has been whitewashed from existence, or perhaps never made it in the first place.
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      > That's because it was in Computer Weekly, PCW, or the hundreds of other paper sources every other issue. On Wikipedia it has been whitewashed from existence, or perhaps never made it in the first place. That sounds like it might be an editor failure as much as a policy failure, perhaps? Valuable information that exists only in peoples' heads is a real failure point for Wikipedia, but well-documented info that no one has bothered digging up the sources for is not. Or if you're saying that it was removed by some PR flack, that's also a real problem, but Wikipedia does have mechanisms to deal with it. If you watch an article and can demonstrate that true, relevant, well-sourced facts are being removed, you can get the article protected. It's extra work on your part, and that sucks, but I can't think of a better way to deal with disagreement in a crowdsourced encyclopedia.
- dboreham 8y ago
  Same here. I gave up after having a series of very innocuous simple edits rejected due to "no external source cited". These were things like "the protocol commonly used between carriers for xxxx things is ISO-yyyy". I forget the details, but it was like "ffs, that was a one-line edit that made the page significantly more useful to potential readers, and its a fact not in dispute by anybody".
- ilamont 8y ago
  Rejected because I'm not a computer magazine available in archive.org. The irony here is so many of the citable articles aren't the result of some gumshoe reporter searching for "the truth" by sifting through facts and conducting independent research and interviews. They start with a press release or PR pitch. This is especially true of tech coverage. There was a flurry of articles late last year about astronauts on the space station treating a robot poorly. Guess where that story came from? The IBM Watson communications team! Now that the story has been "reported" on CNET, The Verge, ABC News, etc., it can be now be cited in Wikipedia articles. It's the same with arts coverage (the New York Times supplements on Sunday are particularly obvious), political interviews, business profiles, and reporting about science and medicine. Not all of this news is planted or shaped by PR teams ("you can have access to X as long as you mention Y") but a lot of it is.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Technically, press releases can't be used on WP as reliable sources; they fall afoul of WP:SPS, right?
    - ilamont 8y ago
      That's right. But because the details from the press release or PR pitch is embedded in a news story -- and no reporter or editor would admit that the story was based on a press release or PR pitch -- it's seldom detected. Wikipedia editor sees "ABC News" or "NY Times" as the source, so it gets a pass.
- derefr 8y ago
  Wikipedia doesn’t want to host journalism. It wants to host editorial content. This is an important distinction for technical reasons of editorial process: the content on Wikipedia should always be able to be recreated from the article’s sources. If the article is the canonical place where the assertion can be found, then editors have to tip-toe around editing that piece of content much more carefully, being careful to preserve it as an artifact—which makes some of Wikipedia’s regular editorial approaches (e.g. deleting “niche” articles) untenable. The proper way to contribute primary-source knowledge to Wikipedia is to create a secondary source (like an article on a third-party website) containing quotes of your primary-source statements. Then edit Wikipedia and cite that third-party source. If you think this won’t work: how do you think the Wikipedia articles for companies get updated to reflect news about them? Almost always, the company’s PR team writes an article, puts it on the PR news-wire, and then goes and edits the relevant Wiki article to reflect the new information, citing the PR news-wire article. The key reason this is allowed is that anyone could have made those same edits (and probably would have—the PR team isn’t changing the outcome, just expediting it.) The edits aren’t accepted by an argument to authority of the editor, but by an argument to consensus-acceptance of the secondary source as reflective of reality. By analogy: it’s untenable to put code (e.g. a usage example) in a Git commit message. The commit messages are on a layer above the code; they refer to the code, but they can’t refer to themselves. Nobody can edit the code in somebody else’s commit message to fix it if it’s wrong. It’s much better to have the code committed as code (or docs, tests, etc.) in the repo, because then you can fix it, change it, talk about it, whatever. The code is the primary source; the commits are the secondary sources, citing the primary sources; and the commit messages are an editorial reflection of the secondary sources. (This is especially true in LKML-style commits where submitters squash their commits into patches, dropping their messages; and then maintainers—essentially editors—write the final commit message.) If you want to make a new commit message in the commit log, it has to serve as a description of a new commit, which in turn has to package a change in the code. If you want to make a new paragraph in a Wikipedia post, it has to serve as a description of a citation, which has to package new primary-source information. But solving both problems is easy: your write the code/third-party article, and then commit/cite it.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
- tptacek 8y ago
  That's also exactly why I stopped contributing. But I didn't walk away thinking Wikipedia was dysfunctional, just that I wasn't a good fit for what the project was trying to do.
CM30 8y ago
Wikipedia's credibility/realiable source rules in general are problematic to be honest. Not just for the secondary source thing mentioned, but because Wikipedia's standards for such are disconnected from how things work in the internet era. Their idea about a credible source seems to mostly be 'mainstream media publication with paid staff going by real names/with photos next to their names and a fancy layout'. But many reliable sources now are not like that. The internet has made it so people don't need to go through middlemen to publish any more, and in a lot of cases (especially more niche ones), credible sites can be solo affairs by enthusiasts and professors without much in the way of obvious visual design or 'professionalism'. If Wikipedia was a bit more up to date, they'd recognise that, and base credibility more on the reputation of the source rather than whether their author was paid to create it or if it comes to from CNN or the New York Times. They'd also look at whether other sources recognise it as a source. If half the gaming or film world consider Bob's blog an accurate source, that probably means more than whether Bob is paid $30,000 a year by Empire to write about films. Wiki's model would have been fine in the world of gatekeepers and centralised media, but kinda falls apart in a world where credibility is earned rather than given by random branding prestige.

reaperducer 8y ago

wikipedia's policy of only accepting secondary sources is similarly problematic This is why I stopped contributing. Article about a radio station where I was in management and selected the call letters? I added the meaning of the call letters to a Wikipedia article. Rejected because I'm not a secondary source. Added an article about a dial-up BBS network that did store-and-forward e-mail a decade before the internet went mainstream. I ran one of they key nodes. Rejected because I'm not a computer magazine available in archive.org. Added an article about what was probably the world's first online cartoon series (helped with distribution, since this was pre-internet). Rejected. Same reason. I as a journalist at the scene of an event when it happened and watched it unfold before my eyes. Added some information to that event's entry in Wikipedia. Rejected. The irony is that if there was a copy of the broadcast I did on the event, that would be perfectly OK. But the people who patrol the sources on Wikipedia are under the impression that there was no recorded history before the internet.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago
I can see the argument that they want sources people can check and evaluate for themselves. You're a legitimate expert, but anyone with a bit of sense can claim to be an expert and appear just as credible to a layman. Faking a credible secondary source is not impossible, but it is difficult--a "news" site that opened three months ago and only has articles on subjects linked to Wikipedia sources is pretty obviously fake. I wonder if there's some sort of happy medium. Maybe a thing where legit experts can submit credentials to be cleared by the moderators, the way Reddit verifies identities for AMAs. You'd still be expected to source everything you can, but eyewitness details could be sourced to your verified credentials. (Which could then be re-reviewed en masse if you start posting bullshit later on.)
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  An argument that easily breaks an encyclopedia or anything intending to be an authoritative source. Or even a worthy source. It's why you frequently bump into articles that go against memory of anyone living in that phase of history, at the company etc. Or entirely misses out the once famous controversy as evidenced by some 15 year old personal or blogspot site. Yet Wikipedia does it when there's no choice, because all sources are really old books and offline. Case in point. A story cropped up on HN a month or two back about S Wolfram being obsessional about recording something. No surprises there, but I happened to wander to Wikipedia and there is not the briefest mention of his suing + screwing everyone who worked or collaborated with him making Mathematica. Apparently that didn't happen. At all. Sure it wasn't quite SCO vs IBM, but it was well known enough in N England during the 90s that it will forever be my association if someone mentions him, and there was occasional office banter off the back of it. "Wolfram? Who's he suing now, the office cat?" That's because it was in Computer Weekly, PCW, or the hundreds of other paper sources every other issue. On Wikipedia it has been whitewashed from existence, or perhaps never made it in the first place.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    > That's because it was in Computer Weekly, PCW, or the hundreds of other paper sources every other issue. On Wikipedia it has been whitewashed from existence, or perhaps never made it in the first place. That sounds like it might be an editor failure as much as a policy failure, perhaps? Valuable information that exists only in peoples' heads is a real failure point for Wikipedia, but well-documented info that no one has bothered digging up the sources for is not. Or if you're saying that it was removed by some PR flack, that's also a real problem, but Wikipedia does have mechanisms to deal with it. If you watch an article and can demonstrate that true, relevant, well-sourced facts are being removed, you can get the article protected. It's extra work on your part, and that sucks, but I can't think of a better way to deal with disagreement in a crowdsourced encyclopedia.
dboreham 8y ago
Same here. I gave up after having a series of very innocuous simple edits rejected due to "no external source cited". These were things like "the protocol commonly used between carriers for xxxx things is ISO-yyyy". I forget the details, but it was like "ffs, that was a one-line edit that made the page significantly more useful to potential readers, and its a fact not in dispute by anybody".
ilamont 8y ago
Rejected because I'm not a computer magazine available in archive.org. The irony here is so many of the citable articles aren't the result of some gumshoe reporter searching for "the truth" by sifting through facts and conducting independent research and interviews. They start with a press release or PR pitch. This is especially true of tech coverage. There was a flurry of articles late last year about astronauts on the space station treating a robot poorly. Guess where that story came from? The IBM Watson communications team! Now that the story has been "reported" on CNET, The Verge, ABC News, etc., it can be now be cited in Wikipedia articles. It's the same with arts coverage (the New York Times supplements on Sunday are particularly obvious), political interviews, business profiles, and reporting about science and medicine. Not all of this news is planted or shaped by PR teams ("you can have access to X as long as you mention Y") but a lot of it is.
- tptacek 8y ago
  Technically, press releases can't be used on WP as reliable sources; they fall afoul of WP:SPS, right?
  - ilamont 8y ago
    That's right. But because the details from the press release or PR pitch is embedded in a news story -- and no reporter or editor would admit that the story was based on a press release or PR pitch -- it's seldom detected. Wikipedia editor sees "ABC News" or "NY Times" as the source, so it gets a pass.
derefr 8y ago
Wikipedia doesn’t want to host journalism. It wants to host editorial content. This is an important distinction for technical reasons of editorial process: the content on Wikipedia should always be able to be recreated from the article’s sources. If the article is the canonical place where the assertion can be found, then editors have to tip-toe around editing that piece of content much more carefully, being careful to preserve it as an artifact—which makes some of Wikipedia’s regular editorial approaches (e.g. deleting “niche” articles) untenable. The proper way to contribute primary-source knowledge to Wikipedia is to create a secondary source (like an article on a third-party website) containing quotes of your primary-source statements. Then edit Wikipedia and cite that third-party source. If you think this won’t work: how do you think the Wikipedia articles for companies get updated to reflect news about them? Almost always, the company’s PR team writes an article, puts it on the PR news-wire, and then goes and edits the relevant Wiki article to reflect the new information, citing the PR news-wire article. The key reason this is allowed is that anyone could have made those same edits (and probably would have—the PR team isn’t changing the outcome, just expediting it.) The edits aren’t accepted by an argument to authority of the editor, but by an argument to consensus-acceptance of the secondary source as reflective of reality. By analogy: it’s untenable to put code (e.g. a usage example) in a Git commit message. The commit messages are on a layer above the code; they refer to the code, but they can’t refer to themselves. Nobody can edit the code in somebody else’s commit message to fix it if it’s wrong. It’s much better to have the code committed as code (or docs, tests, etc.) in the repo, because then you can fix it, change it, talk about it, whatever. The code is the primary source; the commits are the secondary sources, citing the primary sources; and the commit messages are an editorial reflection of the secondary sources. (This is especially true in LKML-style commits where submitters squash their commits into patches, dropping their messages; and then maintainers—essentially editors—write the final commit message.) If you want to make a new commit message in the commit log, it has to serve as a description of a new commit, which in turn has to package a change in the code. If you want to make a new paragraph in a Wikipedia post, it has to serve as a description of a citation, which has to package new primary-source information. But solving both problems is easy: your write the code/third-party article, and then commit/cite it.
- reaperducer 8y ago
tptacek 8y ago
That's also exactly why I stopped contributing. But I didn't walk away thinking Wikipedia was dysfunctional, just that I wasn't a good fit for what the project was trying to do.

CM30 8y ago

Wikipedia's credibility/realiable source rules in general are problematic to be honest. Not just for the secondary source thing mentioned, but because Wikipedia's standards for such are disconnected from how things work in the internet era. Their idea about a credible source seems to mostly be 'mainstream media publication with paid staff going by real names/with photos next to their names and a fancy layout'. But many reliable sources now are not like that. The internet has made it so people don't need to go through middlemen to publish any more, and in a lot of cases (especially more niche ones), credible sites can be solo affairs by enthusiasts and professors without much in the way of obvious visual design or 'professionalism'. If Wikipedia was a bit more up to date, they'd recognise that, and base credibility more on the reputation of the source rather than whether their author was paid to create it or if it comes to from CNN or the New York Times. They'd also look at whether other sources recognise it as a source. If half the gaming or film world consider Bob's blog an accurate source, that probably means more than whether Bob is paid $30,000 a year by Empire to write about films. Wiki's model would have been fine in the world of gatekeepers and centralised media, but kinda falls apart in a world where credibility is earned rather than given by random branding prestige.