UPDATE: The error has now been completely eliminated from the article. Details below.
Guest post by James Padgett
As many readers are aware, the culture surrounding the climate change topic area of Wikipedia has been a microcosm of climate science for nearly a full decade.
This is not a compliment.
When you read the Climategate emails and see discussions of finding people to investigate and discredit your ideological opponents – that is Wikipedia. When you read about the IPCC’s usage of the WWF and students in composing their Climate Bible (KJV) – that is Wikipedia. When you read about “climate scientists” conspiring to get other scientists fired for challenging the orthodoxy – that is Wikipedia.
In short, Wikipedia does not care about truth, and certainly not doubts, it cares about message.
And that’s what this article is about, how the truth, when made plainly clear, is suppressed in favor of misinformation that is on message.
Early last month I was browsing the Wikipedia article on the Soon-Baliunas controversy. The “mainstream” view on the topic is that the paper was so horrible that several editors resigned from Climate Research in protest. Those following the Climategate emails know that there was a strong and shady behind-the-scenes effort to both discredit the paper and show journals what happens to their reputations and hairlines when you dare to publish research contradictory to the “settled science.”
Part of this public relations process, of which Wikipedia is an integral component, involves rewriting facts, refocusing views and never ever giving in to rationality or reality.
How was this done in the Soon-Baliunas article? I don’t have the time or inclination to point out all the bias and opinion-herding in the article, but I’ll show you the sentence that initially caught my eye back in early December:
“The Soon and Baliunas paper had been sent to four reviewers during publication, all of whom recommended rejecting it.” (1)
Now isn’t that interesting? Why would they publish the paper if all of the reviewers recommended rejecting it? It certainly would be quite the scandal if that villainous Chris de Freitas pushed to publish it under such conditions.
A little digging shows that Wikipedia used to have the correct sentence – that none of the reviewers recommended rejecting it. In fact, an anonymous user tried to revert the article back to this correct version. The response was typical – change it back and then have one of the administrator gatekeepers, “MastCell,” protect the article from anonymous users. After all, the only people who could ever be correct are the Champions of the Earth.
But that wasn’t the end of it. That wouldn’t be a good demonstration of the obstinacy of the keeper of climate truth.
The few non-anonymous users who cared about the article being accurate pointed this out. Pages and pages of argument resulted, with the typical gatekeepers like Dave Souza and Stephan Schulz relying on a single source to make their claim, while ignoring numerous other sources, not to mention common sense, which contradicted their assertion regarding the reviewers.
What was their source?
An article in the Guardian by Fred Pearce.
What sources contradicted this?
Chris de Freitas himself publically showed this email (also here from Climategate), which would support my view – and he privately made it crystal clear to me that everyone recommended publication.
Of course, de Freitas would be biased….
But Clare Goodess, of the ever-reputable University of East Anglia, an editor who resigned over the incident, ambiguously intoned in a manner subject to much interpretation:
“The publisher eventually asked to see the documentation associated with the review of the paper – which had apparently gone to four reviewers none of whom had recommended rejection. Otto Kinne concluded that the review process had been properly conducted.” (2)
So instead of relying on common sense, original documents, and the statement, at the time, of an involved scientist certainly not supportive of the Soon-Baliunas paper, weight was given to Fred Pearce’s article which was written seven years after the fact.
Naturally, I was curious as to where Mr. Pearce received his information. He was friendly and helpful, despite his busy schedule with the holidays and Durban, and attempted to find the original source for the claim in his article. Unfortunately, he could not find the original source in his records. He does agree that the statement was, in his words, “almost certainly wrong” and theorizes that he may have misread Clare Goodess’ statement on the matter.
So that should settle it right? This article itself could be a “reliable source” to remove the error from Wikipedia. After all, Real Climate is quoted extensively throughout the climate change articles. Perhaps, but not when you have obsessive-compulsive activists who care more about their cause than their integrity.
However, this incident does bring some other questions to mind.
Andrew Montford, author of the Hockey Stick Illusion, was inquiring with Pearce about his source as well and was curious if Michael Mann had been the one to mislead Pearce. This is an interesting theory, and I had been wondering if this was the case myself both due to Mann’s behavior regarding this incident, his well-known inclination towards manipulating journalists, as well as the original wording in Pearce’s article, which was:
“But many on the 10-man editorial board agreed with Mann. They concluded that their colleague de Freitas had ignored the anonymous advice of four reviewers to reject the paper.”
There is no way to know for certain; it certainly isn’t clear. All I know is that Mann and his friends, and this is the short list, when confronted with a paper that challenged their own work, threatened to boycott the journal, tried to get the editor fired, tried to get the authors fired, and was even so juvenile as to file a complaint against the New Zealand Herald for not letting him publish his attacks against de Freitas.
Obviously, he is the quintessential climate scientist of our day – and I hope one day that Wikipedia gives him due credit as such.
Cheers,
James Padgett
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UPDATE: Following a conversation on Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales’ talk page the error has been removed despite initial resistance from those who perpetrated the misinformation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Activism_at_Wikipedia.3F
Also, I’d like to thank Nona, who tried to correct the error earlier as an anonymous user.
Thank you for this excellent article!
Wikipedia is generally reliable only for completely uncontroversial topics, like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_archiving (not a random example; see below)
For anything controversial, Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable, and for anything with a noticeable left/right ideological identification, Wikipedia is simply a leftist propaganda outlet. Read how Climate Movement activists rewrote over 5000 Wikipedia articles into AGW propaganda, censoring them to prevent any but their own point of view from being represented, to the applause of Wikipedia czar Jimbo Wales.
Changing topics, to Web Archiving… I wrote the first version of that last sentence a couple of years ago, and since then two of the five links have gone dead. That was no problem, though, since I had saved both articles at webcitation.org. When I discovered that the original links didn’t work, I simply searched my email archives for the two dead URLs, and found the links to the archived copies.
I very strongly recommend that everyone here get in the habit of archiving “the good stuff” (and the bad & ugly stuff!) via WebCitation.org or a similar service. Put the webcitation “bookmarklet” on your bookmarks toolbar to make this effortless, and to automatically send notifications to your email address whenever you archive a page (so you can find it years later, when you need it).
Two somewhat similar sites which add the ability to highlight and link directly to a phrase on the archived page are AwesomeHighlighter.com and CiteBite.com. Both work fine on simple web pages, but with so many web sites doing increasingly bizarre Javascript tricks, they don’t always work right, but sometimes one works when the other does not.
These sites are great insurance in case the original pages disappear or change, but for the really important stuff, you might want to use two different tools, if you’re a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy, since any of these web archiving sites could go away at any time.
I use webcitation, awesomehighlighter & citebite. Similar sites that I’ve not used include http://rooh.it (or roohit.com) and http://BackupURL.com
Example:
http://www.webcitation.org/64aTu3QvI
…is the Aviso graph illustrating that the first 8 years of data from Envisat shows global mean sea level rising at less than 0.5 mm/year, so when they “correct” it, we’ll still have the old graph for comparison purposes.
One problem: these sites seem to only support http & https protocols. I’m still looking for a similar site that supports ftp, for archiving (for example) the raw data that corresponds to that Envisat graph:
ftp://ftp.aviso.oceanobs.com/pub/oceano/AVISO/indicators/msl/MSL_Serie_EN_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.txt
Does anyone know of a (preferably free) web archiving site which handles FTP pages?
This is a true skeptic site and all research (appears to me) is treated with respectful skepticism. Meaning, primarily, that the burden of proof lies with the ones promoting the group of related hypotheses comprising CAGW. Wikipedia – not so big on the concept of proof v. acceptance and often missing inconvenient facts where a popular contemporary belief appears to be embraced if not conspicuously promoted.
NovaReason says:
January 10, 2012 at 2:07 am
All of the points raised here are examples of why I only trust Wikipedia on totally non-controversial subjects, and even then, for nothing more than a starting point of research.
Sounds logical NR until you recognize that every subject may be controversial to someone and in the type of environment set up at Wikipedia, probably is.
Wikipedia may be the largest, most extensive source of incorrect information on the planet.
Ah, what a can of worms you open by putting the words “truth” and “Wikipedia” in the same sentence! Their other article (on ‘Truth’ rather than ‘The Truth’, and marginally more informative in that it is not ‘a humorous essay’) reveals that they appear to take the consensus view: that truth is ‘whatever is agreed upon … by some specified group’, namely, themselves, presumably as instructed by whoever shouts at them loudest.
Slightly more encouraging is the statement a little further down that page which reveals that about two-thirds of ‘professional philosophers and others’ (in which category my own modest Philosophy degree places me, FWIW) accept, or lean towards, correspondence theories (essentially, that a statement is true if it is an accurate description of some situation) or deflationary theories (to state that ‘xxx’ is true is no different from stating ‘xxx’ – a more linguistic view). Correspondence theories are, for obvious reasons, the first choice of a typical scientist, who is more interested in accurately describing some aspect of the world than in the Gordian knot of linguistic structure; the nuances of the linguistics are generally analysed (at considerable length, in my experience!) by us philosophers and students of language. I think it’s telling that consensus theories don’t carry much weight with philosophers, since all they can achieve is a statement that such-and-such a group of people have agreed on some story … pretty much true of Wikipedia, of course, particularly on any political topic or one on which much money rides.
It’s an old truism that ‘a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on’ but now, in a world where the lie can be disseminated by a high-powered, instant-access propaganda megaphone like Wikipedia, that lie can be universally believed before truth even realises that there’s someone at the door. Sadly, we humans are all too disposed to believe anything halfway plausible, particularly if it’s being shouted at them from all sides like the AGW fairy story. Francis Bacon had it spot on long ago, when he wrote,
Rogelio Escobar says:
January 10, 2012 at 4:15 am
……………………….
Quite a plausible conclusion.
As regards Wiki, everyone knows that it is unreliable. May be a useful starting place but for serious research nothing more than that.
Actually, the present government in Washington is the largest source of incorrect information on the planet.
I have been encouraging people to put this “No Wikipedia” logo in their web pages, blog sidebars, etc.
You can get this image in various sizes to suit your needs here…
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/no-wikipedia/
Hey how about all of you with your “compliment” correction statements [SNIP: Language. -REP] off.
If you want non-controversial technical information, such as the purpose of rifling the barrel of a gun, then Wikipedia can be quite good. On the other hand, as regards controversial subjects such as personal profiles or recent history then Wikipedia can be quite bad.
Wikipedia is controlled and unfortunately has its own agenda and biases. Nowhere is this more profound than in the field of Global Warming
William Connolley, who was a major proponent of the ‘consensus’ view, was granted a senior editorial and administrative role at Wikipedia which allowed him to delete over 500 articles and bar more than 2000 Wikipedia contributors whom he didn’t agree with.
As an experiment, ‘Philosophical Investigations’ attempted to post a sceptical view regarding Climate Change, it was removed in about one minute! See their report here:
http://www.philosophical-investigations.org/Wikipedia_on_Climate_Change
The response from Jimmy Wales to this incident was “There exists a long line of people who, when their extreme agenda is not published, accuse the community of bias”. Remember this next time you see him appealing for donations.
Wikipedia is not neutral, it is dangerous propaganda delivered by anonymous non-entities,. It’s a great shame that it has been corrupted in this way.
“The sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds”
William Shakespeare.
Yeah, “Author of 50,000 Wikipedia articles and edits”! or some such. That’s not a contribution, that’s a braindump, from the wrong orifice.
I came up with a calculation, in order to roughly evaluate the accuracy of a given Wikipedia article. I take the number of paragraphs of the article, divided by the number of paragraphs in the “talk” page. Higher numbers means (to me) a more reliable article.
I just tested my theory with 2 different articles: the one about our planet Earth: scores 2.34. Not bad. Then I tried with the “Soon-Baliunas controversy” – I got a score of 0.17 lol
I think my calculation works perfectly!
Is it just me or are there an unusual number of grammar and spelling Nazis on this thread?
Good work James though, I doubt there are any here that use Wiki for any but the most mundane of subjects.
The real problem in this arena is the number of people who do not have jobs they care about, or more concerning are essentially paid to spread an agenda online. This gives them plenty of free time to monitor a message on wikipedia or elsewhere.
You can’t fight these people with cold reality and an anonymous voice because they have more standing and prestige at Wikipedia, they worked to get that precisely for fights like this.
In fighting the propaganda machine at Wikipedia on this subject (or any) you have two options. You can discredit Wikipedia (which this article does a fair job of), or you can join the wiki process much as those propaganda artists have done and begin to drown out their nonsense.
You have to realize you’re not fighting rational people who contribute randomly to wikipedia during lunch hours. You’re fighting people with PR jobs and little else to do during the day other than patrol the web for anything off-message.
In short, Wikipedia would be fine if you could ban everyone who works in public relations from ever contributing.
Ben Kellett (3:36 and 5:17):
I see you have picked up the “8 of the last 10 years” talking point. Since you have repeated it twice, it seems someone should explain to you why it has nothing to do with trend and why it makes you appear foolish (probably why no one else responded to you, but I will give it a shot).
If you have a cyclical process, all of the values around the peak will be high. So values FOLLOWING the peak remain relatively high. The trend (approaching the peak or departing the peak) is not determined by the magnitude of the values. Since 1998 was the peak, it is not surprising that values after the peak remain high.
And that assumes the 8 of 10 recond values, without addressing that only 1 of 4 major global temperature indexes presents that record. That would be the data set maintained by James Hanson, of “coal trains are death trains” fame. No possible bias there…
Jimmy Wales is always pleading for funds. Perhaps if enough of us refuse, explaining our reasons, some pressure might result?
That’s not their only activist agenda. I once tried to correct an entry listing famous homosexuals in history. I tried to point out that, while it is true Benvenuto Cellini was convicted of sodomy, it had been with a female partner. He had a long and sordid history of affairs with female partners, and the admissions in his autobiography lead me to believe he was hiding nothing. Given his frank disclosure about his behavior, admitting a homosexual love affair would be innocuous in comparison. The edit was rejected.
The homely little ads asking for donations often reinforce the idea of bias. One showed a young woman – maybe 25-30 yrs old at the outside with the note that she had edited some 5000 articles or so (exact number I can’t remember) – sheesh! The Wiki idea was on the face of it, an inspired idea, but any open repository for information and ideas is, almost by definition going to be commandeered and subverted by activists and ideologues. I was pleased and not surprised they were starving for cash but now note they have almost reached their fundiing goal. Useful idiots are too populous to let a diseased institution die. After climategate 1, I noticed a blitz on the streets by young student types begging for cash for greenpeace, wwf, and the like. Alas, useful idiots are useful precisely because they don’t read things like climategate – they read reports on it by such as the team. Even the internet has been thoroughly polluted by the same crowd. Try to find technical, mineralogical information on asbestos, for example and you have to jack around with wording to try to clear the millions of pieces on lung cancer out of the way. I’m afraid that ultimately as it gets worse, we are going to have to have a second internet, paid for by subscription, to get rid of at least 50% of agenda driven dross. The internet is not free if you are wasting valuable time getting information.
Wiki needs money. I could send them several tons of fresh carbon credits from the Chicago Carbon xchange.
Wikipedia should simply abandon controversy. If you have a page where two or more people disagree on the content, then simply publish two different pages. If you have two different people expressing their view of the subject, then what is “correct” won’t come from a talk page or admin rights, it will come from the sunshine of exposure on who is putting forward the best referenced case available. If you have dueling pages, then collective intelligence will wash away lies. It will do this because it will suddenly become PAINFULLY obvious who has the more biased references/sources.
They wont do this, because doing so would basically be an admission that significant error exists in their pages.
In my continuing education, I’ve been warned many times that citing Wiki-anything is not accepted. However, I am permitted to cite other credible on-line resources. I don’t know if this view of Wiki extends to all Universities but it is a big tabu with my current university and my previous. It raises the question why would anyone contribute financially to an on-line resource that is so unreliable they can’t use it?
Ben Kellett says:
January 10, 2012 at 3:36 am
“… I don’t know how many times I have read the claim that “warming as ceased” during the last decade. I find this quite incredible when we we have actually seen 8 out of 10 of the warmist years on record in the last decade. Ok, so this might have nothing to do with human actvity but the fact remains that over tha period in question, taken as a whole 1980 -2011, warming continues apace – human induced or otherwise.”
————————————————-
Ben, in a world where the temperatures have been increasing for the past 150 years (such as our world), the last 10 years should always be the warmest on record. Even if the increase has stopped, which appears to be the case for the decade 2000-2010, most of the individual years of that decade should naturally be at or near the highest years on record.
Add to that the fact that the increase over the past 150 years cannot reliably be attributed to humans, that the increase in the past 50 years has been attributed entirely to humans by some (which negates any natural warming), that the accuracy of the temperatures records has been called into question, that tree-ring proxies are likely poor estimators of past climate, that extreme weather is now being attributed to climate change as is ocean acidification, sea level rise, etc – I think you should rethink why the last 8 of 10 years being the warmest is so incredible.
Told you before (years ago): friends don’t let friends read Wikipedia.
roobarb says:
January 10, 2012 at 7:57 am
Nah. The funding pleas are not because wikipedia needs money (as it already receives millions from leftist front groups), they’re to give it an air of legitimacy. You see, if 95% of your funding comes from organizations with obvious political goals you look a bit tainted, it’s much better to spread it out a bit.
It is very clear that Wikipedia is unreliable, but it is given so much Google-juice because of its millions of links (mostly internal) that it is important that it is refuted.
Expect the Soon-Baliunas article to be protected as thousands try to correct a statement and Wikipedia goes into full paranoid conspiracy mode.
About 15 years ago I interviewed a young lady for a management position for an environmental clean up function which was to assist the community in alleviating water pollution. Her resume indicated that she had a PHD from an accredited university in “Environmental Sciences”. However, upon questioning it turned out that she had no chemistry, physics, statistical methodology, or anything else one might associate with environmental sciences. Her curriculum consisted of courses in tree planting, horseback riding, and other “environmental appreciation” types of activities.
I believe our educational institutions have deteriorated even further in the last 15 years so that anyone with the time and money may now have any type of degree bestowed upon them irrespective of their level of intelligence or work product. This would include “peer reviewers” of scientific papers. Follow the money/politics of any situation and you will find the answer.