Here's an interesting article about Individual Thought, Hive-minds and Web 2.0.

— William Davies • We-think, I-think … and Groupthink

Good article.



Not only that, the stuff they plagiarize might be massively wrong, because no knowledgable people checked or edited it.

Welcome to the New Dark Ages of Total Knowledge.

Most of us on Wikipedia have had the experience of finding something on Wikipedia that is flatly wrong, and gone searching on the web for a cite which has the correct value, only to find that the first two pages of hits are from sources like Answers.com which trace back ultimately to.... Wikipedia!

And the even weirder things happens when you change the thing back. After the usual fight with editors (some of which quote the secondary cites right back at you) you can watch the process fix itself slowly on the Web-of-Lies, sort of like collapsing some kind of wavefunction where you find yourself living in the center of an alternate universe. And you made it happen. Herr Schroedinger would be so proud of you!

Did you ever read a Stephen King story called The Wordprocessor of the Gods? Well, that's sometimes what it's like. I once found a plant in my back yard that had twice as many thingies on it as Wikipedia said it should. All the plants I checked did. There were a lot of these, and nobody had counted. So I posted on the TALK page about the plant, and was lucky enough to find the article was "owned" by some botanist, who went out and checked himself, and said: "Golly". Because this contradicts the original source, and of course, everything you find on Google, which originates from WP.....

So HE had to find an older source which gave the corrent count, and took a photo and we changed the thing. Or otherwise, I'd STILL be looking at a wiki which was wrong and contradicted a plant I was holding in my own hand, the observation of which by me was "original research."

Anyway, once we changed it, I had the Word-Processor-of-the-Gods feeling to see the corrected botanical figure propagate itself across pages and pages of google hits, in reverse. Spooky.

I ran into something similar.

There was an article that referenced a video, but the bibliographic reference had the wrong description, including a wrong description of what was in the video.

I obtained the actual video and watched it several times. At first I thought there must be two radically different videos of the same name, as the one I had bore little relationship to the one described on Wikipedia.

I pointed out all the errors on the talk page, and damned if the editors didn't dismiss my observations as unreliable or unsourced, even though my source was the actual video.

A similar error found its way into a related BLP, and again the editors resisted correcting the errors and omissions, preferring to rely on an amateurish review of a video (including an erratic and unjournalistic excerpt) rather than examine the video itself to obtain an accurately quoted excerpt.

Yes. All this gets down the some really gritty questions in epistemology. How do we know a thing is true? Wikipedia, as discussed, pretends not to care. A lie, for then they demand "reliable" sources, which if you read the fine print, means sources likely to print that which is TRUE. So they do care, but dare not speak plainly.

One of the problems with BLP is just this: the subject is the ultimate authority about his/her own life, and WP really hates authority when it comes to knowledge. Especially when claimed by one "expert". So BLP gives living people terrible problems. The NY Times might spell your name wrong and get your job title wrong, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it when it hits WP. Jimbo has no such problems about his own bio, because he calls up some flying monkey and presto, it is fixed. The rest of us simply have to marvel at the perversity of a system which refuses to recognize the input of the GUY WHO OUGHT TO KNOW IF ANYBODY DOES. WP wants their info on dead trees. If it's not there, they refuse to "see" it.

It is a classic case of defining a rule to solve a problem and then giving more credence to the rule than the original problem. Like that nasty-ism "Verifiability over truth" - I don't believe that whoever coined that, meant that, but it has become ingrained. The whole NOR was about stopping daftness, not experts, not things that can easily be resolved with common sense. And holding up dodgy secondary sources against primary sources, fine if there is a genuine interpretation at stake, but "he said, she said" is properly resolved by a primary source, not Chinese whispers.

What is worse, you can point out the obvious deficiencies, like "Hey, newspapers make mistakes all the time." and "Haven't you heard about press releases and press agencies? Multiple publishings do not mean multiple checked sources." and it does not trouble the policy owners one bit. (Why is that?)

The idea of an "encyclopedia" that has no knowledgable people actually checking its contents are reliable just sounds so ridiculous that you'd think the public would just laugh at the idea. So, why aren't they?

If there was a perfect negotiation strategy with no pride or positions to defend, and people were honest in only adding "true facts"* then in principle it would be possible, as every element of the story has lots of eyes and at some point is able to say, that is ok, and that is wrong, but we need to negotiate on this as my position is different from the previous editor. So the original sell, of the thousands of eyeballs sounds reasonable and plausible. The assumption is that everyone knows a little something - which most everyone could identify with, and which of course is why you have urban legends, where the Wikipedia system has already been well-proven.

However, firstly, many eyeballs are now "offside" as they may see errors but the pain of correcting them is now so high, with entrenched know-it-alls - who don't; secondly, it is clear that the negotiation and dispute resolution strategies are broken, allowing for bald-faced liars or the deluded or the simply mistaken to win a content dispute.


*One of my favourite Wikicisms.

That pretty much sums up my experience.

Even when articles treat controversial topics (as in the case of David Berlinski, where one might expect editorial disagreements on how to craft the story), bibliographic references to the primary source material should at least be included in the article, with accurate bibliographic citations and accurate and objective descriptions of what the reference contains. Library science isn't that inaccessible an art, is it?

To my mind, omitting a citation of a primary bibliographic item while featuring a chopped up excerpt from an amateurish and unjournalistic review of the primary source simply doesn't rise to encyclopedic standards, full stop.

There may well be a place for tabloid yellow journalism in our broader popular culture. But to my mind, a reputable encyclopedia is simply not the place for that kind of unscholarly material.

And therefore...

If you click on the link over to the left, to my now-blanked and deleted WP User Page, you will find this long-suppressed set of objectives...


Since joining WR, I've been working the secondary and tertiary objectives, with lamentably unsatisfactory progress.

Ultimately it boils down to the excruciatingly slow pace of individual human learning and organizational learning of aggregated (or aggravated) communities.

The best practices for encouraging and fostering individual and group learning are still not apparent to me, at least with respect to the self-selected population which dominates Wikipedia.

My own theory is that it would cause them all to be thrown into the pit of existential epistemological anxiety once more, just when they'd thought that they'd found The Answer, from On High. Had been assured of it. Socially reinforced about it. So NOW you're asking True Believers to voluntarily put themselves into the uncomfortable Sstate of Doubt again. Nobody likes that.

Alas, we live in an uncertain world. There is no revelation from the Almighty (and if you think there is, let's see your evidence). The problem of knowledge doesn't just go away in the process of writing an encyclopedia, just because Somebody TOLD you it had, by use of their patented Method. Why would you think that the ago-old problem of scholars had been solved by some 35 year-old guy in 2001 saying, "Uh, okay, let's try it."

The best approach to this problem so far invented by human beings, is called the University. Jimbo did not make academics obsolete by constructing the rules for Wikipedia. Nor did he figure out how to mine the products of academics by using nonacademics (see journalism). That's insufferable arrogance, and it's even more amazing coming from somebody who managed to take an undergrad degree and even earn a master's. One wonders if he was paying attention at all to the infrastructure along the way. It's very odd.

You see that: "The [rule of the moment] might be wrong, but if you take it away, what rule would we use?" Erm, try logic and reasoned discussion.

Sure, but there we re-invent the wheel to some extent--- and why do that? What we want is University/Academia, upgraded to version Web 2.0. We do NOT want "Web 2.0 Tries to Reinvent Culture of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, by Bottom-up Evolution." Been there. Done that. Doesn't have to be done again.

This all reminds me so much of the internet bubble of the late 1990's. All those companies who thought they could re-invent the world of commerce. As I said someplace else, it lasted about as long as the old world of commerce took to hire a bunch of HTML coders. Which was shockingly long (LOL), but finally came like DOOM.

Web 2.0, the fully two-way interactive version, is a repeat of the same-old. Right now, it looks like the kids and geeks and hoi polloi are going to rule the knowledge world. This phase will last as long as it takes the old farts who actually run everything, and actually are the narrow experts, to figure out that they need a stable of kids and geeks and ordinary folks, to help link and interface it all. Which is not a bad thing!

I'm an inclusionist (with a vengeance), and I think the whole thing works better when EVERYBODY is linked, and we have found them an appropriate "constructive" job (N.B., some "construction" requires careful demolition, but that's another matter-- it's not the same thing as random vandalism). We saw versions of that going at least as far back as how the UK fought WW II. Everybody did something, and it was awesome. Think Marc Stiegler's Earthweb. That's not Wikipedia (yet), but you can see the glimerings of it between Wikipedia, Citizendium, and the rest of the Web, including the USPTO and the academic library sites like Pubmed and arXiv.org. It will all sort it self out eventually. Be calm.

I always remember being highly amused by some .COM columnist in the Independent, when they used to have an IT section. This column mainly consisted of telling people how .COM companies were brilliant because you just did it, and were agile because they didn't need to worry about accountants, management and all that crap, one man and a lame dog was all you needed to make your first billion. How many simply burned through their funds and died, or discovered that you needed a warehousing management system to manage the sale of goods, and that needed people, and they needed managing - and all the skills that they simply did not have and had been so rude about? They needed the basic, common skills.

In fact that columnist could have been a Wikipedian.

Bump …

Jon