You only need to read a few climate entries on Wikipedia to know this Spiked Online article rings true
We have watched how people like Wikipedia climate fiddler William Connolley rides shotgun on just about any climate related article on that website. As of a year ago Mr. Connolley has edited 5428 Wikipedia articles, almost all on climate and his zealotry earned him a suspension and banning for certain types of articles. So, this Spiked-Online article, aptly titled, isn’t much of a surprise to WUWT readers.
Wikipedia: where truth dies online
Run by cliquish, censorious editors and open to pranks and vandalism, Wikipedia is worthless and damaging. 29 April 2014
A man knocks at your door. You answer and he tells you he is an encyclopaedia salesman.
‘I have the largest and most comprehensive encyclopaedia the world has ever seen’, he says.
‘Tell me about it!’
‘It has more editors and more entries than any other encyclopaedia ever. Most of the contributors are anonymous and no entry is ever finished. It is constantly changing. Any entry may be different each time you go back to it. Celebrities and companies pay PR agencies to edit entries. Controversial topics are often the subject of edit wars that can go on for years and involve scores of editors. Pranksters and jokers may change entries and insert bogus facts. Whole entries about events that never happened may be created. Other entries will disappear without notice. Experts may be banned from editing subjects that they are leading authorities on, because they are cited as primary sources. University academics and teachers warn their students to exercise extreme caution when using it. Nothing in it can be relied on. You will never know whether anything you read in it is true or not. Are you interested?’
‘I’ll think about it’, you say, and close the door.
News that civil servants in Whitehall hacked the Wikipedia entry for the Hillsborough disaster and inserted gratuitous insults about the men and women who died in the worst football-ground disaster in British history was greeted with predictable anger last week. This anger was directed at the anonymous vandals who posted the edits, rather than the organisation and website that facilitated the defamation. But, it must be said, Wikipedia is not blameless in this. It allows misinformation to flourish and provides it with a cloak of respectability. It is under-resourced and is unable to police itself adequately.
Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger but was predated by an earlier Wales/Sanger project, Nupedia, also a free online encyclopaedia, but one that was written and peer-reviewed by experts. In its three-year life, Nupedia only produced 25 articles, with a further 74 in progress when it was shut down. The lesson learned from the Nupedia experiment was that this protracted process with meagre output would never produce a comprehensive and up-to-date online encyclopaedia. The experts and peer reviews would have to go.
…
Wikipedia has been a massive success but has always had immense flaws, the greatest one being that nothing it publishes can be trusted. This, you might think, is a pretty big flaw. There are over 21million editors with varying degrees of competence and honesty. Rogue editors abound and do not restrict themselves to supposedly controversial topics, as the recently discovered Hillsborough example demonstrates.
Read the entire article: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/wikipedia-where-truth-dies-online/#.U1-aSqLqizd
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Snap! Me too.
And today, for some reason, I was looking up Plantagenet and Tudor kings of England.
Of course you shouldn’t trust it for anything approaching controversial, especially climate stuff after that person. But it’s still a good place to start for many topics, or to remind myself about things I already do know.
There is not, and never will be, anywhere, ever, one reliable source of truth, accuracy and honesty. You have to do some thinking for yourself.
Wikipedia is crowd-sourced reality. Convenient but not reliable.
Wikipedia’s reliability is inversely related to the politicization of the subjected of interest. For non-controversial issues it is pretty useful.
What Wikipedia ought to do is stop allowing easy re-edits, but instead allow dissenting opinions/comments to be appended or linked. Where there is controversy, Wikipedia should not try to present an orthodoxy.
I had an issue with the Wiki entry on Rammel’s pneumatic railway line in Crystal Palace Park SE London UK. For those that might not know after Joseph Paxton’s Great Crystal Palace that was built basically for British industry to show of its wares in Hyde Park in 1851. Any how once the exhibition was over the Crystal Palace was relocated to SE London . About ten years late an Engineer from the Isle of Thanet in Kent a formed a company that proposed using the power of the vacuum as a means of propulsion . There were terrible problems with traffic in London-the horse and cart type then but proposals to use Brunel’s recently built Thames tunnel at Rotherhithe as a model for further tunnels came to no avail as steam and coal propulsion was disastrous in long tunnels. So Rammel came up with a tunnel built in Crystal Palace park circa 1860ish which ran for 600 yards up a hill. A large pump would create a vacuum in which a standard carriage with a leather skirt would literally be sucked up the hill and then gravity would bring it back down again.
This venture must have cost a small fortune for the investment company who later went on to provide the same propulsion principles for mail tunnels in London, Anyhow Rammels tunnel mysteriously closed soon after opening and was never used again, In the fire that destroyed the Crustal Palace in 1936 the plans showing where the tunnel was located was lost and the same for the duplicate plans stored in the British Museum they too a victim of a flood I believe, during the blitz. The tunnel was forgotten about until a BBC television local news programme call Nationwide ran a story in 1978 that a local woman walking her dog in a dilapidated park followed her dog and found an entrance into a tunnel where decomposed bodies in Victorian garb were said to be in a railway carriage, Anyhow this started a great mystery but no one new exactly where the tunnel was until circa 1991 when it was found during a very dry summer when a chap called (don’t laugh because he was a local lad from Deptford) The Marquis Du St Pont Empire, Anyhow using the police helicopter when it went out he took aerial shots and in that dry summer was able to see the outline of the tunnel . It was partially excavated showing the roof , which I witnessed about a year later.
Okay back to Wiki: When I searched Wiki for this story I found their entry clearly stated that although this Marquis chap had searched the tunnel was never found. So I as an actual witness not to just the local news paper articles, the park exhibition and looking down to the roof that was exposed in the excavation, put in an entry with my name and email and that was there for a short time until by chance I revisited some months later and noticed it had been removed. I entered again and several times more as each time someone at Wiki took it upon themselves to remove my entry. Myself and some other chaps who were interested in the tunnel story also noticed what had happened and with me we bitterly complained to Wiki in the end I gave up as Wiki seems to have its agenda and that is that
http://www.crystalpalacefoundation.org.uk/shop/transport/rammel-s-pneumatic-railway-2
Wikipedia is just reliable enough to be not worth burning to the ground. I find it useful for explaining, for example, a term that a text book author was too lazy explain properly. It is also good for topics that are too banal to have large numbers of clueless fan-boys joining in the fun.
However my own technical field (nothing to do with climate, more formal math) is rife with popular misconceptions to the point where the articles are so misguided you can’t actually even call them wrong. There is no hope of anyone correcting them because there will be a hundred times as many people restoring some variant of the original nonsense.
I do link to Wikipedia, from time to time, but I always (almost) have referred to it as Wackapedia. I think it’s reliable for world record facts, similar to the Guinness Book. If you want to find the tallest tree or mountain in PA or the Long Jump records, it’s usually reliable, (I hope)…
“trolling certain articles and changing them, as soon as someone posted anything. It was on what is now called a “controversial subject.” He was making sure that only one side of the controversy was being depicted.”
Are you talking about Wikipedia or the public school system?
Will Durant allegedly said “Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”
That kind of sums up how I feel about Wikipedia. It’s there but it is always subject to change without notice. I trust it about as much as I trust anything on the Internet. They couldn’t put it on the Internet if it wasn’t true, could they?
PS: I’m a French model. Bon jour!
Wikipedia has been a massive success but has always had immense flaws, the greatest one being that nothing it publishes can be trusted.
“Nothing it publishes can be trusted”, but that doesn’t mean that everything it publishes is wrong.
The problem is that for the average Wikipedia reader it is not readily apparent which parts of Wikipedia are correct at the time they are reading it.
Nor is it always readily apparent which part is reflecting accurate, factual data and which part are reflecting opinion/bias.
Caution regarding the usage of Wikipedia is well founded.
At Wikipedia, I correct grammatical errors & rephrase sentences where necessary in subjects that interest me. Contentious subjects that Connolley might see as his vigilante duty to amend, are just not on my reading list. I go to other reliable sources & meanwhile, I hope for the day that the magic stool of retribution wings its way up the pusillanimous rectum of said silly Billy. Punish him in the orifice from whence he speaks. Damn hippy.
Wikipedia is absolutely AWESOME!
Yeah, zealot editors appear here and there. However, the footnotes at the bottoms of pages are there for a reason. Most of us have the capacity to weigh evidence and decide how much weight we want to put on a source that appears biased.
In defense of Wikipedia’s overall process, it is more credible than the IPCC’s overall process because you can follow the edits and rewrites in real time on Wikipedia. The IPCC process is closed to real time ‘in process’ monitoring.
On a parallel thought about trusting Wikipedia or anything . . . .
I reminded of what an old mentor of mine used to say when I was at university some handful of decades ago. The mentor said, “If you are not your own intellectual defender, then you are not intellectually independent”.
On yet another parallel thought . . . ..
Intellectually Speaking => Verify first, then conditionally concur (or not) with quid pro quos, caveats, provisos and exceptions . . . . but never trust.
John
I always viewed Wikipedia as the consensus of the internet. And we know how dangerous that can be.
It is good for things like historical dates, physical constants and the such. But, in the end, Wikipedia can only be viewed as the opinion of the last person shouting the loudest and longest.
“Mr. Connolley has edited 5428 Wikipedia articles, almost all on climate and his zealotry earned him a suspension and banning for certain types of articles.”
Mr. Connolley is not so much shouting his opinion as having a temper tantrum and hissy fit.
Ya get what you pay for….
Science on Wikipedia is focussed on “consensus science”. But in climate it gets worse, because I am certain the editors are themselves the people writing and peer editing the climate journals.
A long time ago, I saw a paper being written apparently only to stop an edit by skeptics. In other words, if the “consensus” or “peer reviewed” science didn’t not support what they wanted it to say, the editors would just rewrite it.
In contrast, around 2007 I tried to include a section on “the pause”. However, although I could show that the data showed a pause (skeptic science) and there were numerous newspaper articles to support its existence … the fact that the (skeptic science) data showed a pause, it was determined this was not “science” because the (consensus) scientists had not put it in any of their papers.
In other words, the truth was whatever they wanted it to be, and the mere facts were not enough to counter them.
My last straw with Wiki was this winter when the polar vortex became a public issue. The article was hijacked by global warming cultists using news papers and magazines as references. I promptly edited the entry with real citations and added caveats to anything that was cultist hysteria. The article was reverted back to the garbage version and locked later that afternoon. I then promptly wrote to Wiki to let them know that they had lost me as a donor and explained that the people they were letting hijack the climate articles would never have the financial means to make donations as most were residing in their mom’s basements with minimum wage jobs.
@JohnWho says:
The problem is that for the average Wikipedia reader it is not readily apparent which parts of Wikipedia are correct at the time they are reading it.
Circular argument. If the average reader knew which parts of Wikipedia are not correct, the average reader would not have a need to use Wikipedia to begin with.
If you look at the entry for Leathernecks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leatherneck there is no mention of the wars with Muslim pirates and the need to protect marines from decapitation by their curved swords. They want to pretend that the US has not been at war with Islam since its founding, and not because we started it.
“Wikipedia tends to be quite good for obscure, non-controversial subjects”
Exactly. I’ve been reading a lot on oil and gas of late, and I’ve found it’s reliable for matter-of-fact entries. Want to know the properties of ethane? How many rockets Hamas launched into Israel every month of 2006? Formula relating horsepower to torque? Wikipedia is the way to go.
But then you have the pseudo-academic stuff. Peak oil is just ridiculous – at various points it suggests it happened in 2005, or 2006 or 2009.
Sometimes I’ve considered editing the peak oil article. But then I think, if it’s this way it must be because some people want it like this – people who probably have more free time and computer skills than I do. People who strongly believe in peak oil and see the Wikipedia article on the subject as their little kingdom. So I could add a sentence pointing out Hubert expected production to peak in 2000 at 35 million bpd, while today it’s 2014 and we’re at 80 million bpd; or I could say he estimated recoverable US oil at 150-200 billion barrels and we’re already at 210 billion extracted.
But these things would get deleted, or I would get dragged into an edit war. It’s a waste of time.
PS: that’s about the English-language version. The Spanish one is still rambling about the hyperinflation in Zimbabwe – which just happened to end five years ago.
Like any source of information on topics that I know nothing about, wiki seems great. Sadly on topics that I do know a little bit about, wiki is uniformly biased and just plain awful, without exception.
So for everything that I don’t know anything about, Wiki has been a great contrarian indicator, priceless actually.
Wikipedia is pretty good for many topics unless they are political
or controversial. I don’t trust it as the final source on anything but
it is often a good source of information. Someone who is well rounded
and understands science and economics can also tell in many cases
where some things in Wikipedia should not be trusted.
TJA says:
[Wikipedia] want to pretend that the US has not been at war with Islam since its founding, and not because we started it.
Yes. Winston Churchill wrote in his book, The River War:
Islam delenda est.
Mike says:
April 29, 2014 at 12:07 pm
So what this is telling me is that Wikipedia seems to emply the same methodology of authoring as did The Bible.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++==
Showing your bias there sunshine. How about you fact check before posting dumbass one liners like that.
I am an old car enthusiast. I have owned a number of vintage Lotus and MG sports cars i’m a bit vintage myself: I owned many of these cars when they were new. I’ve made a point over the years of collecting every bit of information I could about the cars I’ve owned, sales literature, magazine articles, even talking to factory employees on more than one occasion, so I know a little bit about my passion. The information on Wikipeadia about “my cars” is all pretty much incorrect, and clearly written by someone who knows very little. If Wikipeadia can’t get this simple topic right, how can it possibly be correct about serious topics like climate?
I find it entertaining, following links to see where they go, but don’t find it very accurate. I often will read two or three related entries and will find contradictory facts. I’ve seen articles that are purposefully wrong, even ridiculous, and others that are simply incomprehensible.
I won’t let my kids use it for school unless it’s to find sources.
I think folks here are right in that it’s a decent source for such things as match, chemistry and information on obscure subjects, but that anything remotely disputed or controversial , beware.
“Wikipedia has been a massive success but has always had immense flaws, the greatest one being that nothing it publishes can be trusted.”
Nothing, whatsoever? If I found flaws in posts on WUWT should I then conclude that I should trust nothing on the site?
Here was me thinking that WUWT encouraged critical thinking.