12 ms·

A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life

219 points by akolbe 5y ago

bsenftner 5y ago
The validity of the web is a joke.
CRConrad 5y ago
> WMF Legal Director Jacob Rogers But will he sell me a saucepan, or a cook's knife...? https://www.wmf.com/en/ https://www.wmf.com/en/
CRConrad 5y ago
Earlier similar case with Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622100
akolbe 5y ago
It should be noted that in the Discovery Channel broadcast, the picture of the Florida Nathaniel White was shown only very briefly—long enough to recognize the man if you knew him well, but probably not long enough to memorize his face if you didn't. So in a sense the Wikipedia page was possibly more harmful to him than the original TV content, bearing in mind that thousands of people looked Nathaniel White up on Wikipedia each time the program aired. Overall, more than 125,000 people viewed the Wikipedia article while it showed the wrong image. The spikes correspond to days when the program aired: https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2018-05-28&end=2020-09-04&pages=Nathaniel_White https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&pl...
- akolbe 5y ago
  During the past few days, the Google Knowledge Graph panel shown in searches for Nathanial White serial killer seems to have been cleaned up. While a week ago it showed multiple instances of the wrong picture, today it only shows a single picture of the actual perpetrator being arrested. The same is not true for image searches, however, which continue to be completely dominated by pictures of the Florida man who's completely innocent of these crimes.
- daanlo 5y ago
  I am sure that the wikipedia entry was very harmful. E.g. I regularly google the name of people that I will have a meeting with (as preparation) or trying to find the linkedin profile. I am sure many HR departments do this as well. In this case it would have been something like: 1) google name 2) oh. The applicant has the same name as a serial killer 3) click on wikipedia article 4) OMG 5) the applicant being significantly less likely to receive an offer
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > In this case it would have been something like: 1) google name 2) oh. The applicant has the same name as a serial killer 3) click on wikipedia article 4) OMG 5) the applicant being significantly less likely to receive an offer I'd follow the same process if it was a high-value hire. But in this process, if I'd discover that it seems to be a serial killer, I think I would at least reach out and ask if this is the same person, even if the pictures seems to match. Seems unlikely that a known serial killer would apply to any jobs I usually offer, so making sure it's the same person is surely something you'd do first.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      Your plan would be to call up someone to ask whether or not they are a serial killer? Or do you mean to check their references? Because that could do even more damage to this person’s reputation. Imagine calling up this guy’s top references, asking them all if the dude they know is a serial killer. They go and look up the wiki article, and now may or may not have a giant question mark in their head as well.
      - em-bee 5y ago
        i would ask for a formal background check to verify what he says
        dylan604 5y ago
        on an applicant? really? if you were headhunting and this person really fit the bill for a key role, maybe.
- jefftk 5y ago
  While in the TV broadcast the picture was shown only briefly, it sounds like they also published an article online, which was the Wikipedia editor's source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-10-31/Opinion#Image_sourcing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
- maxerickson 5y ago
  It seems an appropriate remedy for Discovery would include frequent airing of programming making it clear what the killer looked like, and perhaps covering similar media mistakes (with an eye towards showing the correct individuals over and over, never showing the misidentified people). Playing it a lot would make it more likely that the people that saw the misinformation would see the correction.
vadfa 5y ago
Interesting, I did not know Wikimedia was politically aligned. If there's an organisation that I wouldn't like to be politically aligned, it would be an encyclopedia. But hey, here we are; enjoy the ride.
- maweki 5y ago
  There is no objective truth. Especially not for every author and every topic. Even when trying to represent controversy, the problem of false balance is quite real. Maybe we differ on the definition of "political alignment", but there is no way that an entity has no angle.
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    (Sorry to slightly derail the topic, but I think this is an important point.) > There is no objective truth. And yet you say that like you think it's the (objective) truth. Or is that just your opinion, or just true for you, etc? I don't think it makes any sense to deny objective truth—it's self-contradictory. When you hear "There is no objective truth", ask "Is that true?". (At least you immediately backpedalled with "Especially for..") I take your point I think—e.g. more than once on HN I've criticized the idea some people have of starting a facts-only objective 'unbiased' news service as totally implausible and naïve. But to deny that anything is or can be true seems rather to throw the baby out with bathwater.
    - maweki 5y ago
      > But to deny that anything is or can be true Where exactly did I deny that? I was merely noting that the an impartial encyclopedia (which is there to document everything in existence) is impossible, as there are indeed issues of controversy in existence. Even in trying to represent the controversy, as opposed to one of the myriad points of views, is a stance in itself and subject to false balance, selection bias, and I guess a few other fallacies. We're not talking about a collection of mathematical formulas here.
      - 5y ago
Ekaros 5y ago
How isn't Wikipedia considered a publisher? I can understand that Twitter or Facebook or Youtube not be one. But Wikipedia? It is clearly publishing. And there are community editors. It is not social media.
- capableweb 5y ago
  It's mentioned in the very top of the article, in the green box: > In its order granting the Wikimedia Foundation's motion to dismiss, the court affirmed that "interactive computer service providers" such as the Foundation generally cannot be held liable for third-party content like Wikipedia articles and photographs. ... the plaintiff argued that the Foundation should be treated like a traditional offline publisher and held responsible as though it were vetting all posts made to the sites it hosts, despite the fact that it does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects. The court rejected this argument because it directly conflicts with Section 230 ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 Wikipedia (nor Twitter, Facebook or YouTube) reviews content _before_ it's made available online, they only review content afterwards. That being one of the major differences between providing 3rd party content and "publishing".
  - akolbe 5y ago
    Wouldn't it be more correct to say that they (I mean the Wikimedia Foundation in this case, as the operator of the Wikipedia platform) don't review content at all?
- makomk 5y ago
  Section 230 is extremely broad and powerful. The whole point of it is to allow websites full immunity from legal action over the content of their website regardless of how much editorial control they exercise over it, so long as they're not the ones writing the actual words or posting the actual pictures. They can use their power to shape what is and isn't allowed to be said into a chosen narrative and still be immune from legal action over that narrative. It's just that any criticism of this is outside the realm of mainstream discourse, seemingly because one of the major ways in which websites have used that responsibility-free narrative shaping power recently is against Donald Trump and so questioning Section 230 is associated with Trump support.
mjw1007 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Biographies_of_living_persons#BLPs_and_image_sourcing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Biographies_of_... describes the process changes WP are making in response. That seems to amount to adding the following paragraph to their policies: « Any police photograph used to imply that the person depicted was charged with or convicted of a specific crime must be sourced to a top-quality reliable source with a widely acknowledged reputation for fact-checking and accuracy that links the relevant image to the specific incident or crime in question. » That seems like an improvement to me, though it would be nice to also see an announcement that the Wikimedia Foundation are going to use some of their large piles of cash to pay someone to check that all their existing articles follow the new rule.
- akolbe 5y ago
  Yes, that would be good, but knowing the Wikimedia Foundation I am quite certain that it will not happen. And volunteers won't do it either.
mabbo 5y ago
I feel like Wikipedia could take some small steps to make amends to Mr White. Now that all of this has happened, it feels like he is now a minor pubic figure worthy of his own wiki page. Something like "Nathaniel White (not serial killer)" with an article describing the mistake. Ask a newspaper to do a small article about it, interviewing him, and taking a really nice photo of him- which can go on the wiki page. Yes, it would probably be the exact kind of page that Wikipedia would take down saying this person isn't important enough. But they can choose when and how those rules apply. Give him five years with it up, protected from take down. It doesn't make up for the problem, but it is something they can do, at no cost to anyone, and it would make a difference. A small amount of compassion can matter.
- akolbe 5y ago
  I get where you're coming from. As of now the only press article about this is this little piece in the Tallahassee Democrat that may have led to the Wikipedia image being removed: https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-robocop-killer-national-tv-sues-discovery-channel-defamation/3442125001/ https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-r... Nobody else has written about it. I suspect though Mr. White might possibly prefer to go back to his private life and never hear about Wikipedia again. If Wikipedia ever covers this, it had perhaps best be in an article about Wikipedia controversies (which could be linked from the Nathaniel White article).
  - mojomark 5y ago
    > Nobody else has written about it. > I suspect though Mr. White might possibly prefer to go back to his private life and never hear about Wikipedia again. Except that the image was used in a Discovery channel doc on the killer - which isn't an easily fixable Wiki. No idea if Discovery Channel nixed this episode, or clawed back any distributions of this content from consumers. The focus of the article was on Wikipedia errors, which is undoubtedly to blame for the onset of the issue (albeit now "corrected" with a.link to the Tallahassee article - further subtly perpetuating), but the primary issue of perpetuation appears to be the fault of Discovery Channel's journalistic negligence. 1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8358280/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8358280/
skhr0680 5y ago
People need to stop blindly trusting Wikipedia. I have seen sourced facts that failed a sniff test, and checking the source the article contradicted the source it linked to, and that’s only the times I noticed. Couple that with the amount of other sites and media that copy off Wikipedia (citogenesis) and BS spreads like wildfire. “Why do you still use Wikipedia?” because the good parts are a great human achievement and even the OK parts can be adequate as a broad outline of a topic. “Why don’t you just fix it?” I try, but it’s hard when I have a busy day and my edit will be reverted within minutes by a full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.
- brightball 5y ago
  Completely agree with this. Some of the locked topics are the worst too. They end up locked because people are fighting to include more information that’s not being allowed. It’s a huge problem.
- jerry1979 5y ago
  Would you happen to know if anyone is cataloging these false facts?
- howenterprisey 5y ago
  >my edit will be reverted within minutes Post a link. I'm doing some research on this. Ideally we'd get rid of the ability to revert people most of the time, and only let people improve the edit by adding sources and such.
- akolbe 5y ago
  Absolutely right. What doesn't help here is when the Wikimedia PR machine minimizes and whitewashes problems, as it did in the Wikimedia blog post about this incident, making everyone think that Wikipedia is of uniformly stellar quality, better than Britannica and all the rest of it ... When the reality is that Wikipedia quality can and does vary tremendously from one article to the next, even from one paragraph to the next, and reader caution is always indicated. (For six or seven years, this specific article contained two different birth dates—one in the infobox, one in the lead paragraph. Nobody noticed or cared. Then someone picked up on the discrepancy and made both dates the same—wrong.)
andrew_ 5y ago
> Yet here we have a case where a very real black life was severely harmed, with Wikipedia playing a secondary, but still highly significant part in the sorry tale. The Wikimedia blog post contains no acknowledgement of this fact. Instead it is jubilant – jubilant that the Wikimedia Foundation was absolved of all responsibility for the fact that Mr. White was for over two years misrepresented as a serial killer on its flagship site, the result of a pseudonymous Wikimedian trusting a source that proved unreliable. Personally, this is the excerpt that really hit home. The same kind of criticism has been levied on popular-activism in the past. I would have liked to see a more benevolent response from an organization which purports to be so.
- visarga 5y ago
  Wikipedia is quite open about other people's mistakes. But when it's their mistake, it's another matter.
cm2187 5y ago
The worst culprit in this game I think is google news. They often add an image to a news topic, however this image is automaticaly picked from one of the news website, and the algorithm seems to frequently pick a random picture on the website, unrelated to the story. This leads to headlines like "serial killer arrested", illustrated by the smily portrait of a celebrity. I don't know if section 230 would protect google there.
- akolbe 5y ago
  Google was sued too. I understand Section 230 protected it as well.
  - ViViDboarder 5y ago
    That’s interesting. The timeline here doesn’t dictate someone publishing the photo to Google. I expect Google crawled out and that they decided to use it in search results and decided to collocate it with articles. Google search isn’t really a publishing platform, but they do have lots of money and lawyers, which counts for something, I guess.
    - akolbe 5y ago
      Well, no one needs to publish the photo to Google. They just crawl the sites and display what they find on their search results pages. It's a little different with the Knowledge Graph panel shown in the top right corner of the Google search results page. Right now, that again shows the colour photo of the Florida White who had nothing to do with this. There's three pictures of him, and one of the actual perpetrator. https://www.google.com/search?q="nathaniel+white"+"serial+killer" https://www.google.com/search?q="nathaniel+white"+"serial+ki...
      - akolbe 5y ago
        Google surely know about this—they were, after all, a party to the suit—but apparently are unable, or can't be bothered, to get it sorted.
fortran77 5y ago
I feel very bad for this guy, and someone needs to dig deep into their pocket to make this man whole again.
- jmclnx 5y ago
  I fully agree, I tried to find out if he got any relief, but nothing was found, so I assume everyone dropped it. In this day and age, any false accusation can ruin your life, especially if posted on popular sites. In the old days, you could move to started over if need be, not today. So Discovery and Wikipedia needs to make things right for him.
  - akolbe 5y ago
    The Discovery case is still ongoing (and they're not protected by Section 230). What you can do is try to help raise awareness. It is a scandal to my mind that the only media report about this case is this article in a local paper published last year: https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-robocop-killer-national-tv-sues-discovery-channel-defamation/3442125001/ https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-r...
fortran77 5y ago
Well, legal rulings aside, it's clear that Black Lives _don't_ matter to the Wikimedia foundation, who has the power and resources to try to make this man whole, even though they have no legal liability. I'm glad I've never donated to this organization, and now I certainly never will.
lbacaj 5y ago
Man, we’ve built an internet where you literally can’t trust anything.
- pas 5y ago
  Or, we have built an Internet where fake/true things are eventually uncovered. Do we have a baseline for how trustworthy print/TV media was before?
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    Most people that have knowledge of a news story are often incredulous reading one due to incorrect framing or outright mistakes. More insidiously, the news is also molded by a set of institutional incentives that often results in a highly distorted picture of the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      >> Or, we have built an Internet where fake/true things are eventually uncovered. >> Do we have a baseline for how trustworthy print/TV media was before? > Most people that have knowledge of a news story are often incredulous reading one due to incorrect framing or outright mistakes. Which makes it even worse for Wikipedia that this kind of sources is explicitly the only kind it allows.
      - pas 5y ago
        Wikipedia allows reframing. It uses sources for their "fact finding" function not for their "narrative setting".
- visarga 5y ago
  Price of free speech on internet - we're swimming in lies and ideology.
austincheney 5y ago
> The image was inserted into the Wikipedia article by User:Vwanweb on 28 May 2018, incorrectly identified as originating from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. It was removed from the article on 4 September 2020 – an edit attributed by Wikipedia only to an American IP address, rather than a registered Wikipedia user account. Notably, this lawsuit was filed months after Wikipedia editors proactively corrected the error at issue in September 2020. WTF, really? His photo was on there for more than 2 years (28 months). The damage is done. To somehow claim the lawsuit is super extra invalid because it came a couple months later does nothing but make me really hate lawyers.
rkk3 5y ago
Confused since the only piece about damages to the victim are for the person the Discovery Channel erroneously identified as a serial killer. It doesn't mention Nathaniel White of Florida suing or implying damage was done by Wikipedia, or the damages/harm to the other Nathaniel White who is suing Wikipedia.
- akolbe 5y ago
  It's the same man. Wikipedia (or rather the Wikimedia Foundation which operates Wikipedia) was added to the Discovery suit later on.
  - rkk3 5y ago
    Thanks, you're right, wording confused me, I thought there were 3 Nathaniel whites.
annoyingnoob 5y ago
These are important conversations to have. I don't think we've found the right balance point yet.
shp0ngle 5y ago
Well. Colbert made fun of Wikipedia publishing nonsense… in 2006. 15 years ago. This is not a new criticism.
- akolbe 5y ago
  15 years ago Wikipedia didn't supply the info in Google's (and other search engines') Knowledge Graph panels, and didn't tell Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and other voice assistants what to say in response to queries. Wikipedia's and Wikidata's dominance in this respect is only like to become stronger for the foreseeable future.
1cvmask 5y ago
There are so many “fake entry” editors on Wikipedia especially on national security matters like the infamous Phillip Cross. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808516
aezell 5y ago
It's easy to conflate Wikipedia and Wikimedia but they are very different things, both in practice and in legal definitions. Lots of comments here are saying that Wikipedia should do something about this. That's equivalent to saying that you should get thousands of random Internet people to agree to something. There is no organization known as Wikipedia that you can appeal to. So, then they say, "Wikimedia should do something." Wikimedia has very limited control over the content that exists on Wikipedia and this ruling relies on and validates that position. I'm not arguing that this is ideal or preferable. I'm saying that the lines between these two words are important and yet sometimes difficult to define. The crux is that Wikipedia is wholly separate from Wikimedia in all the ways that matter in a case like this.
filmgirlcw 5y ago
I have such an intense love/hate relationship with Wikipedia. On the one hand, I'm so thankful that a resource exists to give me instant access to lots of mundane shit -- on the other hand, the internal politics, the so-called professional Wikipedian class (in truth, largely un(der)employed obsessives who have genuinely nothing better to do than fight over mundane bureaucratic issues) make it a resource that both cannot be relied upon and that is largely impossible to correct. It is both such a scourge and yet such an important resource. For most things of any import (aside from areas like geography or fundamental parts of science, which are usually trustworthy), I rely on the sources cited by Wikipedia to try to suss out actual information, rather than Wikipedia itself, but that often takes a lot of time and doesn't change the fact that Wikipedia, for better or worse, is the central general knowledge repository of our time. The adage that teachers still teach, "don't cite Wikipedia" -- has some merit, sure, but also has increasingly become a joke because actual edited encyclopedias (which yes, had their own issues, but also had standards and oversight that needed to be answered to) have basically become extinct -- so what are people supposed to use? I genuinely long for the days of stuff like the Encarta CD-ROMs, or even expensive encyclopedia sets -- not because I think those resources could keep up with the breadth of knowledge that Wikipedia obviously has, but because whatever biases they may have aside (and every source or text has a bias -- which makes Wikipedia's NPOV mandate all the more ironic), they were edited and staffed by professionals. I'm constantly bombarded by pleas for money from Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation, despite that fact that the Wikimedia Foundation has revenues of something like $150 million a year, and where most of the budget goes to pay for staff (hosting is only $2.5 million), not anyone who actually contributes to the content. The whole appeal of Wikipedia is supposed to be that anyone can edit it, but that isn't actually true (the gatekeepers make even correcting typos a chore) and the lack of commitment to verifiability, especially when it comes to living people, makes the whole thing utterly depressing.
- ryani 5y ago
  > The adage that teachers still teach, "don't cite Wikipedia" -- [...] what are people supposed to use? Wikipedia cites sources. Go to those sources, find the ones that best line up with the data you need, and cite them directly. Treat Wikipedia like an aggregator -- you wouldn't cite an HN post, you'd cite the link it pointed at.
bob229 5y ago
Wikipedia is an intellectual cancer. In the past I have created fake facts about 90s band the charlatans and they have been repeated by news outlets like the BBC. Never read wikinonsense and never read the news
ncmncm 5y ago
My greatest achievement on Wikipedia was fixing the page on Herostratus, to cite him as being accused of torching the Temple of Artemis, rather than baldly stating he actually did it. The article itself says he confessed under torture to having torched it so his name would remembered forever. But that doesn't even make sense on its own terms: If he wanted to be remembered for having torched it, why did they need torture to find out? In any case, confession under torture comes nowhere close to establishing a fact, not that that has often stopped somebody who wanted a body to string up, and didn't much care whose. I would have many other great achievements, but they get reverted by self-important gatekeepers.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Really? If so, then TIL.
short12 5y ago
I don't even use Wikipedia anymore. It's always the top link but it doesn't provide the info I care about. It's always a lengthy dense and dryly written article of who gives a shit

219 points by akolbe 5y ago

The validity of the web is a joke.

> WMF Legal Director Jacob Rogers But will he sell me a saucepan, or a cook's knife...? https://www.wmf.com/en/ https://www.wmf.com/en/

CRConrad 5y ago

Earlier similar case with Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622100

akolbe 5y ago

It should be noted that in the Discovery Channel broadcast, the picture of the Florida Nathaniel White was shown only very briefly—long enough to recognize the man if you knew him well, but probably not long enough to memorize his face if you didn't. So in a sense the Wikipedia page was possibly more harmful to him than the original TV content, bearing in mind that thousands of people looked Nathaniel White up on Wikipedia each time the program aired. Overall, more than 125,000 people viewed the Wikipedia article while it showed the wrong image. The spikes correspond to days when the program aired: https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2018-05-28&end=2020-09-04&pages=Nathaniel_White https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&pl...

akolbe 5y ago
During the past few days, the Google Knowledge Graph panel shown in searches for Nathanial White serial killer seems to have been cleaned up. While a week ago it showed multiple instances of the wrong picture, today it only shows a single picture of the actual perpetrator being arrested. The same is not true for image searches, however, which continue to be completely dominated by pictures of the Florida man who's completely innocent of these crimes.
daanlo 5y ago
I am sure that the wikipedia entry was very harmful. E.g. I regularly google the name of people that I will have a meeting with (as preparation) or trying to find the linkedin profile. I am sure many HR departments do this as well. In this case it would have been something like: 1) google name 2) oh. The applicant has the same name as a serial killer 3) click on wikipedia article 4) OMG 5) the applicant being significantly less likely to receive an offer
- capableweb 5y ago
  > In this case it would have been something like: 1) google name 2) oh. The applicant has the same name as a serial killer 3) click on wikipedia article 4) OMG 5) the applicant being significantly less likely to receive an offer I'd follow the same process if it was a high-value hire. But in this process, if I'd discover that it seems to be a serial killer, I think I would at least reach out and ask if this is the same person, even if the pictures seems to match. Seems unlikely that a known serial killer would apply to any jobs I usually offer, so making sure it's the same person is surely something you'd do first.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    Your plan would be to call up someone to ask whether or not they are a serial killer? Or do you mean to check their references? Because that could do even more damage to this person’s reputation. Imagine calling up this guy’s top references, asking them all if the dude they know is a serial killer. They go and look up the wiki article, and now may or may not have a giant question mark in their head as well.
    - em-bee 5y ago
      i would ask for a formal background check to verify what he says
      - dylan604 5y ago
        on an applicant? really? if you were headhunting and this person really fit the bill for a key role, maybe.
jefftk 5y ago
While in the TV broadcast the picture was shown only briefly, it sounds like they also published an article online, which was the Wikipedia editor's source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-10-31/Opinion#Image_sourcing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
maxerickson 5y ago
It seems an appropriate remedy for Discovery would include frequent airing of programming making it clear what the killer looked like, and perhaps covering similar media mistakes (with an eye towards showing the correct individuals over and over, never showing the misidentified people). Playing it a lot would make it more likely that the people that saw the misinformation would see the correction.

vadfa 5y ago

Interesting, I did not know Wikimedia was politically aligned. If there's an organisation that I wouldn't like to be politically aligned, it would be an encyclopedia. But hey, here we are; enjoy the ride.

maweki 5y ago
There is no objective truth. Especially not for every author and every topic. Even when trying to represent controversy, the problem of false balance is quite real. Maybe we differ on the definition of "political alignment", but there is no way that an entity has no angle.
- yesenadam 5y ago
  (Sorry to slightly derail the topic, but I think this is an important point.) > There is no objective truth. And yet you say that like you think it's the (objective) truth. Or is that just your opinion, or just true for you, etc? I don't think it makes any sense to deny objective truth—it's self-contradictory. When you hear "There is no objective truth", ask "Is that true?". (At least you immediately backpedalled with "Especially for..") I take your point I think—e.g. more than once on HN I've criticized the idea some people have of starting a facts-only objective 'unbiased' news service as totally implausible and naïve. But to deny that anything is or can be true seems rather to throw the baby out with bathwater.
  - maweki 5y ago
    > But to deny that anything is or can be true Where exactly did I deny that? I was merely noting that the an impartial encyclopedia (which is there to document everything in existence) is impossible, as there are indeed issues of controversy in existence. Even in trying to represent the controversy, as opposed to one of the myriad points of views, is a stance in itself and subject to false balance, selection bias, and I guess a few other fallacies. We're not talking about a collection of mathematical formulas here.
    - 5y ago

Ekaros 5y ago

How isn't Wikipedia considered a publisher? I can understand that Twitter or Facebook or Youtube not be one. But Wikipedia? It is clearly publishing. And there are community editors. It is not social media.

capableweb 5y ago
It's mentioned in the very top of the article, in the green box: > In its order granting the Wikimedia Foundation's motion to dismiss, the court affirmed that "interactive computer service providers" such as the Foundation generally cannot be held liable for third-party content like Wikipedia articles and photographs. ... the plaintiff argued that the Foundation should be treated like a traditional offline publisher and held responsible as though it were vetting all posts made to the sites it hosts, despite the fact that it does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects. The court rejected this argument because it directly conflicts with Section 230 ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 Wikipedia (nor Twitter, Facebook or YouTube) reviews content _before_ it's made available online, they only review content afterwards. That being one of the major differences between providing 3rd party content and "publishing".
- akolbe 5y ago
  Wouldn't it be more correct to say that they (I mean the Wikimedia Foundation in this case, as the operator of the Wikipedia platform) don't review content at all?
makomk 5y ago
Section 230 is extremely broad and powerful. The whole point of it is to allow websites full immunity from legal action over the content of their website regardless of how much editorial control they exercise over it, so long as they're not the ones writing the actual words or posting the actual pictures. They can use their power to shape what is and isn't allowed to be said into a chosen narrative and still be immune from legal action over that narrative. It's just that any criticism of this is outside the realm of mainstream discourse, seemingly because one of the major ways in which websites have used that responsibility-free narrative shaping power recently is against Donald Trump and so questioning Section 230 is associated with Trump support.

mjw1007 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Biographies_of_living_persons#BLPs_and_image_sourcing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Biographies_of_... describes the process changes WP are making in response. That seems to amount to adding the following paragraph to their policies: « Any police photograph used to imply that the person depicted was charged with or convicted of a specific crime must be sourced to a top-quality reliable source with a widely acknowledged reputation for fact-checking and accuracy that links the relevant image to the specific incident or crime in question. » That seems like an improvement to me, though it would be nice to also see an announcement that the Wikimedia Foundation are going to use some of their large piles of cash to pay someone to check that all their existing articles follow the new rule.

akolbe 5y ago
Yes, that would be good, but knowing the Wikimedia Foundation I am quite certain that it will not happen. And volunteers won't do it either.

mabbo 5y ago

I feel like Wikipedia could take some small steps to make amends to Mr White. Now that all of this has happened, it feels like he is now a minor pubic figure worthy of his own wiki page. Something like "Nathaniel White (not serial killer)" with an article describing the mistake. Ask a newspaper to do a small article about it, interviewing him, and taking a really nice photo of him- which can go on the wiki page. Yes, it would probably be the exact kind of page that Wikipedia would take down saying this person isn't important enough. But they can choose when and how those rules apply. Give him five years with it up, protected from take down. It doesn't make up for the problem, but it is something they can do, at no cost to anyone, and it would make a difference. A small amount of compassion can matter.

akolbe 5y ago
I get where you're coming from. As of now the only press article about this is this little piece in the Tallahassee Democrat that may have led to the Wikipedia image being removed: https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-robocop-killer-national-tv-sues-discovery-channel-defamation/3442125001/ https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-r... Nobody else has written about it. I suspect though Mr. White might possibly prefer to go back to his private life and never hear about Wikipedia again. If Wikipedia ever covers this, it had perhaps best be in an article about Wikipedia controversies (which could be linked from the Nathaniel White article).
- mojomark 5y ago
  > Nobody else has written about it. > I suspect though Mr. White might possibly prefer to go back to his private life and never hear about Wikipedia again. Except that the image was used in a Discovery channel doc on the killer - which isn't an easily fixable Wiki. No idea if Discovery Channel nixed this episode, or clawed back any distributions of this content from consumers. The focus of the article was on Wikipedia errors, which is undoubtedly to blame for the onset of the issue (albeit now "corrected" with a.link to the Tallahassee article - further subtly perpetuating), but the primary issue of perpetuation appears to be the fault of Discovery Channel's journalistic negligence. 1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8358280/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8358280/

skhr0680 5y ago

People need to stop blindly trusting Wikipedia. I have seen sourced facts that failed a sniff test, and checking the source the article contradicted the source it linked to, and that’s only the times I noticed. Couple that with the amount of other sites and media that copy off Wikipedia (citogenesis) and BS spreads like wildfire. “Why do you still use Wikipedia?” because the good parts are a great human achievement and even the OK parts can be adequate as a broad outline of a topic. “Why don’t you just fix it?” I try, but it’s hard when I have a busy day and my edit will be reverted within minutes by a full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.

brightball 5y ago
Completely agree with this. Some of the locked topics are the worst too. They end up locked because people are fighting to include more information that’s not being allowed. It’s a huge problem.
jerry1979 5y ago
Would you happen to know if anyone is cataloging these false facts?
howenterprisey 5y ago
>my edit will be reverted within minutes Post a link. I'm doing some research on this. Ideally we'd get rid of the ability to revert people most of the time, and only let people improve the edit by adding sources and such.
akolbe 5y ago
Absolutely right. What doesn't help here is when the Wikimedia PR machine minimizes and whitewashes problems, as it did in the Wikimedia blog post about this incident, making everyone think that Wikipedia is of uniformly stellar quality, better than Britannica and all the rest of it ... When the reality is that Wikipedia quality can and does vary tremendously from one article to the next, even from one paragraph to the next, and reader caution is always indicated. (For six or seven years, this specific article contained two different birth dates—one in the infobox, one in the lead paragraph. Nobody noticed or cared. Then someone picked up on the discrepancy and made both dates the same—wrong.)

andrew_ 5y ago

> Yet here we have a case where a very real black life was severely harmed, with Wikipedia playing a secondary, but still highly significant part in the sorry tale. The Wikimedia blog post contains no acknowledgement of this fact. Instead it is jubilant – jubilant that the Wikimedia Foundation was absolved of all responsibility for the fact that Mr. White was for over two years misrepresented as a serial killer on its flagship site, the result of a pseudonymous Wikimedian trusting a source that proved unreliable. Personally, this is the excerpt that really hit home. The same kind of criticism has been levied on popular-activism in the past. I would have liked to see a more benevolent response from an organization which purports to be so.

visarga 5y ago
Wikipedia is quite open about other people's mistakes. But when it's their mistake, it's another matter.

cm2187 5y ago

The worst culprit in this game I think is google news. They often add an image to a news topic, however this image is automaticaly picked from one of the news website, and the algorithm seems to frequently pick a random picture on the website, unrelated to the story. This leads to headlines like "serial killer arrested", illustrated by the smily portrait of a celebrity. I don't know if section 230 would protect google there.

akolbe 5y ago
Google was sued too. I understand Section 230 protected it as well.
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  That’s interesting. The timeline here doesn’t dictate someone publishing the photo to Google. I expect Google crawled out and that they decided to use it in search results and decided to collocate it with articles. Google search isn’t really a publishing platform, but they do have lots of money and lawyers, which counts for something, I guess.
  - akolbe 5y ago
    Well, no one needs to publish the photo to Google. They just crawl the sites and display what they find on their search results pages. It's a little different with the Knowledge Graph panel shown in the top right corner of the Google search results page. Right now, that again shows the colour photo of the Florida White who had nothing to do with this. There's three pictures of him, and one of the actual perpetrator. https://www.google.com/search?q="nathaniel+white"+"serial+killer" https://www.google.com/search?q="nathaniel+white"+"serial+ki...
    - akolbe 5y ago
      Google surely know about this—they were, after all, a party to the suit—but apparently are unable, or can't be bothered, to get it sorted.

fortran77 5y ago

I feel very bad for this guy, and someone needs to dig deep into their pocket to make this man whole again.

jmclnx 5y ago
I fully agree, I tried to find out if he got any relief, but nothing was found, so I assume everyone dropped it. In this day and age, any false accusation can ruin your life, especially if posted on popular sites. In the old days, you could move to started over if need be, not today. So Discovery and Wikipedia needs to make things right for him.
- akolbe 5y ago
  The Discovery case is still ongoing (and they're not protected by Section 230). What you can do is try to help raise awareness. It is a scandal to my mind that the only media report about this case is this article in a local paper published last year: https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-robocop-killer-national-tv-sues-discovery-channel-defamation/3442125001/ https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-r...

fortran77 5y ago

Well, legal rulings aside, it's clear that Black Lives _don't_ matter to the Wikimedia foundation, who has the power and resources to try to make this man whole, even though they have no legal liability. I'm glad I've never donated to this organization, and now I certainly never will.

lbacaj 5y ago

Man, we’ve built an internet where you literally can’t trust anything.

pas 5y ago
Or, we have built an Internet where fake/true things are eventually uncovered. Do we have a baseline for how trustworthy print/TV media was before?
- tehjoker 5y ago
  Most people that have knowledge of a news story are often incredulous reading one due to incorrect framing or outright mistakes. More insidiously, the news is also molded by a set of institutional incentives that often results in a highly distorted picture of the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    >> Or, we have built an Internet where fake/true things are eventually uncovered. >> Do we have a baseline for how trustworthy print/TV media was before? > Most people that have knowledge of a news story are often incredulous reading one due to incorrect framing or outright mistakes. Which makes it even worse for Wikipedia that this kind of sources is explicitly the only kind it allows.
    - pas 5y ago
      Wikipedia allows reframing. It uses sources for their "fact finding" function not for their "narrative setting".
visarga 5y ago
Price of free speech on internet - we're swimming in lies and ideology.

austincheney 5y ago

> The image was inserted into the Wikipedia article by User:Vwanweb on 28 May 2018, incorrectly identified as originating from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. It was removed from the article on 4 September 2020 – an edit attributed by Wikipedia only to an American IP address, rather than a registered Wikipedia user account. Notably, this lawsuit was filed months after Wikipedia editors proactively corrected the error at issue in September 2020. WTF, really? His photo was on there for more than 2 years (28 months). The damage is done. To somehow claim the lawsuit is super extra invalid because it came a couple months later does nothing but make me really hate lawyers.

rkk3 5y ago

Confused since the only piece about damages to the victim are for the person the Discovery Channel erroneously identified as a serial killer. It doesn't mention Nathaniel White of Florida suing or implying damage was done by Wikipedia, or the damages/harm to the other Nathaniel White who is suing Wikipedia.

akolbe 5y ago
It's the same man. Wikipedia (or rather the Wikimedia Foundation which operates Wikipedia) was added to the Discovery suit later on.
- rkk3 5y ago
  Thanks, you're right, wording confused me, I thought there were 3 Nathaniel whites.

annoyingnoob 5y ago

These are important conversations to have. I don't think we've found the right balance point yet.

shp0ngle 5y ago

Well. Colbert made fun of Wikipedia publishing nonsense… in 2006. 15 years ago. This is not a new criticism.

akolbe 5y ago
15 years ago Wikipedia didn't supply the info in Google's (and other search engines') Knowledge Graph panels, and didn't tell Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and other voice assistants what to say in response to queries. Wikipedia's and Wikidata's dominance in this respect is only like to become stronger for the foreseeable future.

1cvmask 5y ago

There are so many “fake entry” editors on Wikipedia especially on national security matters like the infamous Phillip Cross. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808516

aezell 5y ago

It's easy to conflate Wikipedia and Wikimedia but they are very different things, both in practice and in legal definitions. Lots of comments here are saying that Wikipedia should do something about this. That's equivalent to saying that you should get thousands of random Internet people to agree to something. There is no organization known as Wikipedia that you can appeal to. So, then they say, "Wikimedia should do something." Wikimedia has very limited control over the content that exists on Wikipedia and this ruling relies on and validates that position. I'm not arguing that this is ideal or preferable. I'm saying that the lines between these two words are important and yet sometimes difficult to define. The crux is that Wikipedia is wholly separate from Wikimedia in all the ways that matter in a case like this.

filmgirlcw 5y ago

I have such an intense love/hate relationship with Wikipedia. On the one hand, I'm so thankful that a resource exists to give me instant access to lots of mundane shit -- on the other hand, the internal politics, the so-called professional Wikipedian class (in truth, largely un(der)employed obsessives who have genuinely nothing better to do than fight over mundane bureaucratic issues) make it a resource that both cannot be relied upon and that is largely impossible to correct. It is both such a scourge and yet such an important resource. For most things of any import (aside from areas like geography or fundamental parts of science, which are usually trustworthy), I rely on the sources cited by Wikipedia to try to suss out actual information, rather than Wikipedia itself, but that often takes a lot of time and doesn't change the fact that Wikipedia, for better or worse, is the central general knowledge repository of our time. The adage that teachers still teach, "don't cite Wikipedia" -- has some merit, sure, but also has increasingly become a joke because actual edited encyclopedias (which yes, had their own issues, but also had standards and oversight that needed to be answered to) have basically become extinct -- so what are people supposed to use? I genuinely long for the days of stuff like the Encarta CD-ROMs, or even expensive encyclopedia sets -- not because I think those resources could keep up with the breadth of knowledge that Wikipedia obviously has, but because whatever biases they may have aside (and every source or text has a bias -- which makes Wikipedia's NPOV mandate all the more ironic), they were edited and staffed by professionals. I'm constantly bombarded by pleas for money from Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation, despite that fact that the Wikimedia Foundation has revenues of something like $150 million a year, and where most of the budget goes to pay for staff (hosting is only $2.5 million), not anyone who actually contributes to the content. The whole appeal of Wikipedia is supposed to be that anyone can edit it, but that isn't actually true (the gatekeepers make even correcting typos a chore) and the lack of commitment to verifiability, especially when it comes to living people, makes the whole thing utterly depressing.

ryani 5y ago
> The adage that teachers still teach, "don't cite Wikipedia" -- [...] what are people supposed to use? Wikipedia cites sources. Go to those sources, find the ones that best line up with the data you need, and cite them directly. Treat Wikipedia like an aggregator -- you wouldn't cite an HN post, you'd cite the link it pointed at.

bob229 5y ago

Wikipedia is an intellectual cancer. In the past I have created fake facts about 90s band the charlatans and they have been repeated by news outlets like the BBC. Never read wikinonsense and never read the news

ncmncm 5y ago

My greatest achievement on Wikipedia was fixing the page on Herostratus, to cite him as being accused of torching the Temple of Artemis, rather than baldly stating he actually did it. The article itself says he confessed under torture to having torched it so his name would remembered forever. But that doesn't even make sense on its own terms: If he wanted to be remembered for having torched it, why did they need torture to find out? In any case, confession under torture comes nowhere close to establishing a fact, not that that has often stopped somebody who wanted a body to string up, and didn't much care whose. I would have many other great achievements, but they get reverted by self-important gatekeepers.

CRConrad 5y ago
Really? If so, then TIL.

short12 5y ago

I don't even use Wikipedia anymore. It's always the top link but it doesn't provide the info I care about. It's always a lengthy dense and dryly written article of who gives a shit