I saw this coming a mile away.
On Wednesday August 20th, Dr. Roy Spencer noted how John Cook’s well debunked 97% ‘consensus’ claim, based of statistical sleight of hand and pal review, was used as an example of propaganda techniques
Wikipedia Page on Propaganda Techniques Uses 97% Meme
Roy opined:
I wonder how long the example will stay there, without William Connolly to play gatekeeper. I also see “Hope and Change” is given as an example. Hmmm…sounds vaguely familiar.
Like a moth to a flame, William M. Connolley showed up in comments, and accused Dr. Spencer of adding the 97% example himself:
You’re fast. That example was added only a few days ago. Its almost like you did it, or someone did it and then told you. No? Seems like a pretty bizarre coincidence otherwise.
Having boobed the date, he later had to retract that statement:
> only a few days ago
A month and a few days. So, not so fast.
Connolley is equally fast it seems, because he immediately went into Orwellian 1984 Winston Smith mode and re-wrote the entry, simply because he himself believes in the 97% consensus meme. Roy writes today:
Censorship Alive and Well at Wikipedia
That didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after I noted the use of the “97% of scientists agree” meme as an example of “propaganda techniques” on Wikipedia, the example has disappeared.
And who did the change? Well you know who:
07:29, 21 August 2014 William M. Connolley (talk | contribs) . . (16,792 bytes) (-53) . . (Undid revision 617361920 by 130.22.49.227 (talk) better to use a non-controversial example)
In science, citations are done on published works knowing that good or bad, they’ll be there in 10-20 years for the most part, except in cases where the work is so bad, it has to be retracted, such as the Lewandowsky-Cook Recursive Fury paper.
Wikipedia, being at the mercy of thousands of Winston Smiths in the form of the banned and maligned William Connolley, is like a shape-shifting information portal at the will of the controlling Wikipedians. It might be good enough for a passing blog reference, but there’s no guarantee it will have the same meaning as a citation tomorrow or even an hour from now. With such shape shifting references at the mercy of often politically motivated editors, it certainly isn’t good enough for scientific publication citation.
Maybe that’s why there has been a movement at colleges to ban Wikipedia as a source, even going so far recently as to remove it from college dorm WiFi connections.
Zealots and activists like Connolley should never be trusted as editors, (his track record speaks for itself) and Wikipedia edit wars were even the subject of a study. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is not very good at self-policing such editing zealotry, and this is why Wikipedia will eventually fall by the wayside as a serious reference source.
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dccowboy ” As far as I can tell, propaganda, by its very nature, is controversial.”
It’s probably best to use historical examples to avoid controversy. Conflicts that no one really care about any more. It’s much easier to be objective then. For example the way a faction within the Russian labor party at one meeting managed to get a majority and immediately named themselves the majority faction, the Bolsheviks, might fit in as an example of a bandwagon. It certainly worked.
Edward Richardson says:
August 21, 2014 at 8:26 am
…
Care to comment on this Wikipedia entry?
..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ball
Are you suggesting it is a good reference for man-made global warming?
Jimmy Wales was asking me for money the other day. I said I would send some cash if he could make the place more honest and less tribal. He said no way. Perhaps tribal is part of the business plan, well Billy C behaves like it is.
Wikipedia can be used to get the references as a search start but Google does it better.
Forget politics, history or science; even pop culture is covered less well than sites that specialise.
Wikipedia cannot be used to learn about non-controversial subjects.
Either you know they are non-controversial and therefore know more about the subject than Wikipedia.
Or you don’t know they are non-controversial and can’t trust a thing you read on Wikipedia about it..
Wikipedia is as dead as Microsoft Encarta. Its day has passed.
Tim Ball says:
I don’t agree with the argument that using wikipedia for ‘non-controversial’ issues is safe. You only think it is safe because you are not that familiar with the subject, or the motive and character of the author(s).
I completely agree! Every time I look up in Wikipedia something I really know well, as non-controversial as it could be (for example, concerning Russian grammar, translation, Siberian geography, biographies of people I personally knew, or rather elementary theory of music), I notice bias, omissions, errors, limited and ideologically controlled choice of sources, general unreliability. Why shouldn’t I suspect, on the basis of these observations, that Wikipedia is unreliable when I look up things I don’t know yet?
Wikipedia reflects the prevailing character of our society: it is fundamentally dishonest, and Willam Connoley is the most reprobate example of this dishonesty.
I use wikipedia as a reference when I think my audience trusts it implicitly. It’s very satisfying to use a wikipedia reference to hoist a believer on his own petard,
Google “Anthony Watts” and your first entry is a Wikipedia link ? In short don’t trust the Google search engine, as it is run by alarmists. Ask.com and Bing.com actually returned the WUWT home page as the first link (at least it did for me).
@Sun Spot – Bing gives his site as the first hit, Wiki as the second.
I use the Wiki mostly for filmology – it’s very useful when watching some obscure movie on the tv, to see who is playing whom, and what the plot line is if you missed the start. It’s also very useful on obscure historical figures, like Chinese or Roman Emperors or little known writers.
I’d never use for information on any subject of the least controversial nature. Any of us who know a subject in detail can fault the entries on that topic. Learning many years ago that living people were often unable to correct entries on themselves, however demonstrably faulty, was an early eye-opener about the attitude of editors and owners of this dangerous juggernaut.
Wikipedia is a good source for non-political topics. For political topics it is useless. Sadly, with each passing year the list of “non-political” topics gets shorter.
Wikipedia is particularly untrustworthy for biogs of skeptics. But it is not only the political subject that the Left have tampered with. The aim of the hard Left is to destroy all forms of education. To this end, even the CreepyMedia articles on mathematical subjects have often been subtly tampered with to mislead those who use them.
I do not use CreepyMedia for any purpose whatsoever, and I strongly advise others to avoid it altogether. It is of no value, and is actively harmful.
I edit over there, so let me say a few things about Wikipedia.
It is not authoritative.
It is not a democracy.
It is not open to original research.
It is not subject to the Eurpoean “right to be forgotten.”
Anything asserted but not sourced is open for deletion.
Anyone can edit any page, except pages that are locked.
Anyone can use anything posted, for any purpose, as long as original sources are credited.
When an article is posted or edited, a notice goes to everyone who has asked to follow that page, and they might weigh in on the subject.
Some editors are more equal than others.
It’s a good place to start, as long as you remember where it’s coming from. Same with the BBC — Verify.
Mosher is perfectly correct on the issue of how to use Wikipedia. There have been at least two studies on the reliability of Wikipedia and the results were that for “neutral” topics it has about the same (slightly greater) error rate as Encyclopedia Britannica. For debated issues, the information online is at the mercy of the most recent “editor,” and that includes a diversity of topics, many far removed from climate. However, even printed literature contains such hazards. The biases simply shift at much slower rates, which often leaves entire generations with biased ideas. If you doubt this, research the history of literary criticism of – say – Rudyard Kipling. Many topics cannot support a “neutral discussion,” if only because the opposing views take an “if you are not with me, you are against me” stance. Nothing less than abject surrender is satisfactory to either side and until they retire or die, very little progress in understanding will occur.
DuckDuckGo (duckduckgo.com) is an excellent search engine that does not track your searches like Google, etc. And yes, ‘Anthony Watts’ can be found along with his rugby player namesake.
However, even printed literature contains such hazards. The biases simply shift at much slower rates, which often leaves entire generations with biased ideas.
An enlightening aspect of Wikipedia, very non-1984-ish, is the “View History” tab in which is (theoretically at least) possible to compare the total edits between any two version. Coupled with the “Talk” tab, there can be some understanding of the issues involved. The View History is not perfect and not easy to search. But it is a foundational strength of the technology that deserves preservation and improvement.
Always have a laugh when people link to Wikipedia and SkS when discussing climate change. Wikipedia is an “ok” starting point, but you do need to do some more indepth research to get to the truth. But IMO, you won’t find that truth online, too easy to manipulate.
Once you have an open edit you destroy the trustworthiness. Get a subject you are well versed in and hear how the media reports on it and what appears in the multi media genre. No I didn’t mention politics for good reason!!!
I don’t have a W-anything, in my favorites list, and I’m not about to type a W-anything on the line.
But it frustrates the heck out of me, when I use my search engine to find something, and I click on what purports to be the home page of some establishment, that I am looking for, only to be shunted to wiki. And usually, I am shunted to a reference to something that was not even the subject of my search. So search engines are partly to blame for the wiki menace.
Sure. The quality of information in Wikipedia is atrocious, not so much for its degree of accuracy but for its arbitrariness. One entry could be acceptable while the next one could be a complete delusional fabrication.
Those of us in the academia who have tried to correct the most blatant errors (for instance, fixing an incorrect reference) have been repeatedly torpedoed by “captaincrunch27” and similar aptly named data sheriffs.
However, it must also be said that there is a civil war going on in Wikipedia and some entries eventually show a degree of maturity rare on any reference text and that the aforementioned captaincrunch27’s do not remotely have.
At least three climatologists have already commented here, saying don’t trust Wikipedia. That tells you something.
Tim Ball says:
Questioning everything is the hallmark of science, but must be the hallmark of everything in today’s world. We might wish it was otherwise, but people like Connolley make it a harsh reality.
Exactly. I’ve often commented that I’ll go to Wikipedia for cosmology and quantum physics. Anything in between, I don’t trust them.
Too much ownership at wikipedia. The irony is that the editors who claim ownership are using this very argument to revert everyone else’s changes.
When I do an internet search with intent to find significantly corroborated info then I do a search using several different engines to get lists of sources. Out of curiosity I will also occasionally see what Wikipedia says.
It takes patience to get a balanced and corroborated view of the validity of info. Perhaps Wikipedia is for the impatient who will take quickly obtained info at face value.
NOTE: WC has yet to receive relevance on any of my corroborated info screenings.
John
I use Wiki often; for area’s of biological and chemical sciences that I am unfamiliar with it is a very useful resource, especially since more and more original references and reviews are being used in its pages.
Compare the character assassinations in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ball
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Watts_%28blogger%29
with, for example, the sycophantic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann
[As of right now. It could all change at any time of coourse]
This is comforting, in 2013 Wiki was accessed 5 billion times by medical doctors and students for information.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/wikipedia-s-medical-errors-and-one-doctor-s-fight-to-correct-them-1.2743268?cmp=rss
Poking at William Connolley is the modern day equivalent of ‘Ferret Legging’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret-legging
Only masochists should attempt it. Weasel boy Connolley enjoys gnawing on the ‘tool’ of anyone who disagrees with him.