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
JohnWho says:
April 29, 2014 at 1:38 pm
…….
“Nothing it publishes can be trusted”, but that doesn’t mean that everything it publishes is wrong.
precisely. the problem lies in the average person being able to distinguish what can be taken as fact and what needs some serious skepticism. There in lies the real danger: The presumption of accuracy by those least able to discern it. The average person EXPECTS accuracy. So they take it on face value, trust it, parrot it and even link it…. and humanity spirals down another level.
I agree with Bill: “Wikipedia is pretty good for many topics unless they are political
or controversial.” All the computer science stuff on WP that I’ve checked out is solid, and quite good, in fact. For example, skiplists.
Genghis says:
April 29, 2014 at 2:18 pm
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.
this should be speaking to you. Loudly…..
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
If Wikipedia was printed on paper….I wouldn’t wipe my arse with it.
Like many of you, I suspect, I have a “library” at home with most of the textbooks I bought and more or less used at University, still sitting in dusty repose. Every once in a while I get one down to look up something or refresh what I believed I used to know about something. Most of my books are science textbooks, some pretty arcane (I still don’t know what the heck “transfinite arithmetic” is, even tho the book title screams it at me every time I go by, but I digress). I find Wikipedia to be no better nor worse than many of the textbooks in many topics. We’ve frequently assumed those $100 textbooks were sainted before release, but as one gets to know the content, truth slips a bit frequently.
Recently I’ve added a few new textbooks on meteorology and atmospheric thermodynamics to help me get the big picture on a lot of these discussions, and an interesting thing pops out of them: global warming/climate change is as entrenched in glossy coated stock as it is in pixels – truth is as scarce in tome as it is in conversation.
Wikipedia in many ways is no worse than traditional authority sources. As we’ve seen from “peer review”, vetted textbooks are not necessarily any better.
“Wikipedia is pretty good for many topics unless they are political
or controversial.”
Nope, unless you consider how Gracie Allen felt about Mary Livingstone to be controversial:
“her close friend Gracie Allen”
vs.
“[George Burns] and his wife and performing partner Gracie Allen loved Jack Benny, but merely tolerated Mary, whom they disliked”
I agree with the comments here that Wikipedia is a useful starting point for research into a subject 99% of the time. The trick is to completely ignore the articles and jump straight to the footnotes. There’s generally a number of credible, if occasionally one-sided, sources sited.
A local politician in England was arrested the other day for quoting that passage by Churchill in a speech. According to Fox News, “Paul Weston, the chairman of the Liberty GB party, is facing the potential of two years in prison for breaching a dispersal notice delivered to him as he gave a speech with a megaphone in front of Winchester Guildhall in Hampshire.
The paper quoted a spokesman from his political party as saying Weston was addressing passers-by and quoted an excerpt about Islam from Churchill’s “The River of War,” which was written in 1899, when he was 25, during his time in Sudan.”
I’d have linked to a CNN report too, but they don’t seem to have any record of this event. Google had 58K hits, in everything from “sheikyermami.com” to the Beeb. But it never happened for CNN. Funny that.
“I would say yes if you can prove their citations are intentionally in error..but would not go as far to attack and belittle people…if it is wrong you can fix it.”
And then they’ll fix it back. 🙂
those rotten litttle [snips]….. Man must be some form of compulsive disorder to correct one theory with another. Some people believe it all to be factual I guess instead of anaylyzing many theories they just want the one that supports the agenda they represent would be my guess.
“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.”
Take nothing someone says at a blog at face value. Check it out yourself. That’s critical thinking. On a great many things Wikipedia is accurate with and a valuable resource. If you extrapolate that into thinking that every article can be trusted to be accurate you’re setting yourself up.
Trustworthy means that you don’t need to verify the facts. Wikipedia is not trustworthy. Not a bad first stop to figure out where to look though.
Wikipedia is simply pushing self interest. They lose fewer rational donors than they would activists if they allowed facts into issues dominated by activists not truth seekers. They would be punished by an AstroTurf campaign if they allowed skeptics to post and eventually end up the same as that Clippers guy.
I think that the whole problem with Wikipedia is with the over romanticised notion of NPOV, when there is no such thing. We knew this was a problem back in the days of Ward Cunningham’s original wiki c2.com and its spinoff, Richard Drake’s, why wiki I propose an alternative:
Stated Points of View
================
In which two or more sides of a debate are given freedom to present their case separately with the caveat that they state their axiomatic assumptions. Free editing of each point of view is allowed, but objections and edits to the arguments of POV-A may only be raised by people holding the same axiomatic assumptions. Other points of view, including criticism of POV-A, are to be presented on the pages of POV-B, along with the assumptions stated for the differing point of view.
Advantages are that more people are able to contribute more material, and more points of view, and more data can be harvested than with NPOV. Experts may contribute according to their point of view without being overwritten by non-experts who disagree with them.
Example: the wikipedia pages on the mental health condition “Dissociative Identity Disorder” are primarily dealing with the debate as to whether or not the condition exists. Those who do not believe it exists cite papers by those who do not believe it exists and those that do believe it exists cite their sources. NPOV enforces a stalemate position in the debate, leaving the site devoid of actual content material on the subject itself. Those who do have real content to contribute on the actual topic itself are closed out by the debate. What is lost is the possibility of harnessing the encyclopaedic knowledge of the variety of subtopics that could be written about by those who would write stating that they know it exists, have lived with the condition, and know how to successfully treat the condition. This knowledge is censored by those who have limited knowledge of the topic but remain editorially to keep the debate, and only the debate front and centre. The net result being that, if you actually want information on the topic in hand, wikipedia is of very little use to anyone researching the topic.
Paul Coppin says: April 29, 2014 at 3:30 pm “I still don’t know what the heck “transfinite arithmetic” is, even tho the book title screams it at me every time I go by, but I digress.”
No, tell me it ain’t so! Alexander Smbat Abian’s 1956 The Theory of Sets and Transfinite Arithmetic? John Baez addresses Abian’s crackpot index as I recall.
Wikipedia necessarily has flaws like any other relatively free and open system such as democracy or capitalism. But democracy and capitalism are better than the alternatives. So is Wikipedia. The key is to understand the flaws.
@Patrick B
“In my experience, Wikipedia ranges from good to extraordinarily good on most technical topics and topics not involved in the culture/PC wars.”
Agreed. I find Wikipedia good enough on technical and chemical and engineering matters, plus the Engineering Toolbox which is amazing. It is obvious after reading a short time that the matters of climate and social science impact and non-Western cultural perspectives (noble savage gardens of Eden) are topics of ‘importance’ to some like-minded crowd who bother to insert themselves into each conversation often with extreme prejudice which is what Steve suffered (thanks for the long note, Steve).
It is another proof that the world is run by those who show up. Showing up at WUWT makes the world a better-resourced place. Carry on, everyone.
And they never edit which I choose to write.
Sure. I have personal experience with this.
I have tried on several occasions to provide background data and correct errors on articles in my field (I am an academic) only to see some “captaincrunch123” angrily torpedo the changes without more justification than “it’s just your word”,… which is a bizarre charge when you are, for instance, simply correcting the date of a reference.
“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.”
***********
If you find flaws on WUWT you are free to comment about them here and offer sources for your position. What you can’t do is broom the comments you disagree with — which is standard practice on Wikipedia’s climate change-related topics.
Using Wiki is just like any other form of research – just because something is written down doesn’t mean that it is true. The whole point of research is to use multiple sources and form a view based on your own judgement.
It is immensely useful, as others have pointed out for non-controversial subjects. I use it all the time for things like episode guides for TV shows, lists of books by authors, quick fact checks (like “what is the atomic weight of X?”) etc. Mind you, on the atomic weight question, if it was for a scientific paper I would verify elsewhere as well. But for general purposes, it is a wonderful resource, easy to find, and free. It is also a starting point for finding primary sources, albeit a far from comprehensive one.
It is useless for politics or politically charged subjects like science controversies. It may also be less than reliable for things like specialist hobbies (such as old cars, mentioned above), not least because these are areas where people have strong opinions. So, if I want a list of films by Hitchcock, there is a pretty good chance that the Wiki list will be correct. If I want to know how good they were, not so much.
The problem is not that some things in Wiki are wrong, or at least debatable. That goes for a lot of stuff in books and journals as well. The problem is that people ought to be learning at school what research is, and how to critically use resources, including Wiki.
I use wiki a LOT ….but primarily to scavenge for useful references.
Wikipedia suffers from what I call the “Encyclopedia Syndrome.”
It infests all encyclopedias, all on line “help” programs, all automated telephone system menus, and so on.
It works like this.
You walk into “ANY” library (LOC etc), and you go to the “reference” section, where encyclopedias and other esteemed “reference” works are (OED) etc. are kept.
You reach up on the shelf and you grab “ANY” volume of “ANY” reference work, and you take it to a table, and sit down, and open it “ANYWHERE.”
So you start reading “WHEREVER” you are; and you can read for hours, and learn all kinds of wonderful stuff about things you didn’t even know existed..
……””””” BUT !!! “””””….. I f you go back to the reference section, and pull the specific volume, that “SHOULD” contain material on the subject you are interested in; maybe alphabetically or Dewey systematized, or whatever, and take that to your table and look through alphabetically or whatever; you will “NOT” find anything at all that is directed to answering what you wanted to know.
The on line help menu, will have “NOTHING” about your specific problem, and the phone answering menu, will have “NOTHING” related to your reason for calling.
“No, tell me it ain’t so! Alexander Smbat Abian’s 1956 The Theory of Sets and Transfinite Arithmetic? John Baez addresses Abian’s crackpot index as I recall.”
@ur momisugly John Huffman – Yeah, that’s the one. Mine is 1965… maybe a little dyslectic there? 🙂 (understandable after spending a few minutes looking at that book). Anyway, it had a lot to do with why I cuddled up to chaos theory and went into biology, lol. The only Baez I remember from back then was Joan… 🙂
We all seem to have a problem with believing something told to us by someone we know, or are acquainted with; but we are quite willing to believe something written by someone else totally unknown to us.
I know a school teacher, for many, many years who is constantly asking me stuff.
But she simply will not believe ANYTHING I tell her.
Last night, she asked me about growing potatoes in a 5 gallon bucket. I described to her exactly how I grew a barrel full of potatoes from one plant, when I was a kid.
She showed me a U-toob video of some guy wrestling with trying to explain the system , with the buckets. I explained how I did it ,as a kid.
She will follow the advice of the Toobie, and ignore my advice. For that, she can buy, and waste her own buckets.
Even on the subjects you might assume were the most uncontroversial it is well worth checking the “talk” page. There are often vicious edit wars and personal battles going on under the most apparently benign surface.
Several years ago my grandson was researching peanut butter for a school assignment and he included a line from Wikipedia that said something like “peanut butter is a favorite food of homosexuals.” By the time I checked it the next day the line had been deleted, but it was there when he was doing his assignment.