Wikipedia: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again! I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.
Who watches Wikipedia to make sure that it is a democratic information source, not a fascist dictatorship of politicized paranoiacs? You will never really know the answer to that question until you "bump into a sensitive point" in the Wikipedia system of control. This story illustrates the problem:
As I'm writing this column for the Financial Post, I am simultaneously editing a page on Wikipedia. I am confident that just about everything I write for my column will be available for you to read. I am equally confident that you will be able to read just about nothing that I write for the page on Wikipedia.Go to the source and read the rest of this fascinating detective story. It is not an isolated circumstance.
The Wikipedia page is entitled Naomi Oreskes, after a professor of history and science studies at the University of California San Diego, but the page offers only sketchy details about Oreskes. The page is mostly devoted to a notorious 2004 paper that she wrote, and that Science journal published, called "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change." This paper analyzed articles in peer-reviewed journals to see if any disagreed with the alarming positions on global warming taken by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position," Oreskes concluded....
...When Oreskes's paper came out, it was immediately challenged by science writers and scientists alike, one of them being Benny Peiser, a prominent U.K. scientist and publisher of CCNet, an electronic newsletter to which I and thousands of others subscribe. CCNet daily circulates articles disputing the conventional wisdom on climate change. No publication better informs readers about climate-change controversies, and no person is better placed to judge informed dissent on climate change than Benny Peiser.
For this reason, when visiting Oreskes's page on Wikipedia several weeks ago, I was surprised to read not only that Oreskes had been vindicated but that Peiser had been discredited. More than that, the page portrayed Peiser himself as having grudgingly conceded Oreskes's correctness.
Upon checking with Peiser, I found he had done no such thing. The Wikipedia page had misunderstood or distorted his comments. I then exercised the right to edit Wikipedia that we all have, corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.
Peiser wrote back saying he couldn't see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. Had I neglected to save them after editing them, I wondered. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again! I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made. NationalPost
If you want to understand what has happened to the university and the public information space, why the news media of 2008 may resemble the Ministry of Truth in 1984 more than you are willing to accept, you need to look at Wikipedia and understand how the good intentions of Wiki can be twisted to autocratic ends by ideologically driven--though deeply disturbed--individuals.
You do not have to go to China or back in time to the old USSR to find 1984-style information control.
H/T Jennifer Marohasy
While I've been writing this column, the Naomi Oreskes page has changed 10 times. Since I first tried to correct the distortions on the page, it has changed 28 times. If you have read a climate change article on Wikipedia -- or on any controversial subject that may have its own Kim Dabelstein Petersen -- beware. Wikipedia is in the hands of the zealots. SourceUpdate: Kim Dabelstein Petersen apparently edits several pages on climate change at Wikipedia. All of them are apparently administered with the same degree of mindless tyranical despotism as the Naomi Oreskes page. These are the guardians of public information. If you think I am going too far, then all you have to do is go to the sites and change them. Go ahead. Just do it. I dare you.
;-)
Labels: Climate Grifters, leftist decay, Wikipedia
posted by al fin at 6:09 am
15 Comments:
I've made multiple changes to Wikipedia articles that are not political or serious (usually those relating to RPGing) to add some bit of information or reference an allusion to something else in broader culture. I was surprised by the same thing Solomon was surpised by recently, when I tried to do this for one of character bios in a Final Fantasy game that had a blatant negative slant. Ignore the dorkiness factor for a second and realize that this was for the character in a fictional videogame. If there are guardians for something that innocuous... (It might be some egotistical nut who has the entire html-ish Wiki programming saved somewhere, and simply 'edits' it back to his default whenever anyone makes even a minor change--not that that'd be much more reassuring).
The real trick to getting things to stick in Wikipedia is to get yourself active in the community of moderators.
It may take a couple of months, but once you've gotten there, you get moderator priveleges. And with //that// comes the ability to get things to stick.
Elsewise, you're always going to be beaten by bots with RSS.
Oh, and audacious -- you don't even need what you're talking about. There's a feature in Wikipedia called "revert". You can restore pages to their state before someone else edited them, as a built-in feature.
Conrad,
Oh, thanks for the heads-up. I've never bothered to make an account. So is that a moderator feature, too? Then someone can essentially close down an entry? I shouldn't bug you with all these questions, I'll just go figure it out.
Even less controversial areas get overwritten by some people who feel that they want to own the pages. I tried to add new pages on purchasing power parity estimates for countries with new information for a year not yet covered by the existing page. All of my pages were over-written by a couple of guys who felt that they preferred their sources and their presentation. So even adding a link to a new wiki page got quashed.
Only the certain really obscure pages with little traffic and no constituencies are really freely editable
Here is a wiki page on some of their lame edit wars (very likely incomplete)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars#Numbers_and_statistics
Thanks for the comments, guys. Wiki pedia is a universe unto itself. Think of all the local warlords and petty dictators, constantly and jealously surveying their micro kingdoms.
The little weasels who use their ideology as a guide to truth are a blight on the intellectual universe. Interesting how many different topics can excite such jealous oversight and petty tyranny.
The one thing they can't ever do is eliminate the edit histories. You can get some real insight by comparing different versions of the same article.
But, it's exactly things like this that lead one to conclude that while Wikipedia is a damned good starting point, one must //never// take it as a credible source.
People, learn to use the discussion page. It's true; if you make massive edits with no track record, you don't understand wiki's policies and you give no comments in the discussion page then you are very likely to be reverted. This is a good thing.
Okay, jamougha--what you seem to be saying is that wiki has its own inner circle, and if anyone is not motivated enough to worm his way into that circle, he deserves to be erased from the record of the "Ministry of Truth."
Interesting. That type of elitist contempt tends to breed something else entirely.
Al -- I have to say that I think you're taking it a bit too far. What jamougha was saying was that for any given site, there is a discussion page (which, by the way, you don't even need to register for in order to edit/add to), and that it is considered Wikipedia-etiquette to discuss your changes //on// that page.
And frankly, I have to agree with that. If you're going to change a citation in an article, you might as well give a heads up to the people working on the article. Maybe they have better data, maybe they don't -- but as any researcher or journalist knows, when you make a change to the main report, you ought to document it.
Just a thought.
Fine, Conrad. Here is how you can prove your point to the satisfaction of everyone here:
Go to the Wikipedia Naomi Oreskes page and change it to better portray the reality of the Peiser-Oreskes controversy. Make your changes stick.
If you can do that, I will certainly admit that I went too far.
Conrad, you may want to read the linked article in the main page. The author of that article did all the things you recommend--and ran into the brick wall of fascist censorship.
As others in comments here have pointed out, the problem goes a bit deeper than that.
Al -- I took the liberty of reading the article in full, and also the discussion page(s) of the reversion history for the Wikipedia article itself, and of course the Wikipedia article itself. I also did a little further digging and checked on this controversy on another location ("Global Warming Controversy")
I came to the following conclusions:
1) The Oreskes article makes no mention of Peiser at all.
2) Peiser's publication was refused on grounds of credibility of source, not on credibility of work done. (Despite Kim's insistence otherwise, the Talk list made it clear his status as a sociologist made him qualified to discuss a social group's behavior).
3) In "Global Warming Controversy", Peiser's refutation is cited along with the publicly released e-mail correspondence where he retracts part of his statement about the consensus. It is a faithful citation; while he acknowledges that the "overwhelming majority" of scientists follow the consensus, the consensus is by no means absolute.
4) The journalist was treated as no different from any other editor. This is the opposite of elitism.
5) Much of the difficulty the journalist faced was in his inability to provide citation for his claim about Peisner's non-recantation of claims.
6) Much of the 'talk' page indicated that our journalist also failed to discuss his edits before or even after making them. This touches on my previous point about being active in the talk page.
So, yes. You went a bit too far.
Are you truly defending the use of automatic "reversion" bots that mindlessly reset articles without human intervention?
The Peiser-Oreskes controversy has a long history that a few minutes of cursory oversight will fail to provide adequate background for analysis.
As someone who has followed the controversy for years, I can tell you that the stubborn resistance of updating and modification by the pocket fuhrer Kim Pedersen can only perpetuate a sad state of ignorance on the issue.
You have stated your case as well as it could possibly be stated, for someone unfamiliar with the topic of the Wiki article.
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“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” _George Orwell
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