The “William Connolley effect” gets quantified, apparently anything that is not “consensus science” is considered sabotage.
When researching acid rain, evolution, and climate change — cast a critical eye on source material
From the CARY INSTITUTE OF ECOSYSTEM STUDIES
(Millbrook, NY) Wikipedia reigns. It’s the world’s most popular online encyclopedia, the sixth most visited website in America, and a research source most U.S. students rely on. But, according to a paper published today in the journal PLOS ONE, Wikipedia entries on politically controversial scientific topics can be unreliable due to information sabotage.
Co-author Dr. Gene E. Likens is President Emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Likens co-discovered acid rain in North America, and counts among his accolades a National Medal of Science, a Tyler Prize, and elected membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2003, he has monitored Wikipedia’s acid rain entry.
Likens explains, “In the scientific community, acid rain is not a controversial topic. Its mechanics have been well understood for decades. Yet, despite having ‘semi-protected’ status to prevent anonymous changes, Wikipedia’s acid rain entry receives near-daily edits, some of which result in egregious errors and a distortion of consensus science.”
In an effort to see how Wikipedia’s acid rain entry compared to other scientific topics, Likens partnered with Dr. Adam M. Wilson, a geographer at the University of Buffalo. Together, they analyzed Wikipedia edit histories for three politically controversial scientific topics (acid rain, evolution, and global warming), and four non-controversial scientific topics (the standard model in physics, heliocentrism, general relativity, and continental drift).
Using nearly a decade of data, Likens and Wilson teased out daily edit rates, the mean size of edits (words added, deleted, or edited), and the mean number of page views per day. While the edit rate of the acid rain article was less than the edit rate of the evolution and global warming articles, it was significantly higher than the non-controversial topics. Across the board, politically controversial scientific topics were edited more heavily and viewed more often.
“Wikipedia’s global warming entry sees 2-3 edits a day, with more than 100 words altered, while the standard model in physics has around 10 words changed every few weeks, ” Wilson notes. “The high rate of change observed in politically controversial scientific topics makes it difficult for experts to monitor their accuracy and contribute time-consuming corrections.”
Likens adds, “As society turns to Wikipedia for answers, students, educators, and citizens should understand its limitations when researching scientific topics that are politically charged. On entries subject to edit-wars, like acid rain, evolution, and global change, one can obtain – within seconds – diametrically different information on the same topic.”
The author’s note that as Wikipedia matures, there is evidence that the breadth of its scientific content is increasingly based on source material from established scientific journals. They also note that Wikipedia employs algorithms to help identify and correct blatantly malicious edits, such as profanity. But in their view, it remains to be seen how Wikipedia will manage the dynamic, changing content that typifies politically-charged science topics.
To help readers critically evaluate Wikipedia content, Likens and Wilson suggest identifying entries that are known to have significant controversy or edit wars. They also recommend quantifying the reputation of individual editors. In the meantime, users are urged to cast a critical eye on Wikipedia source material, which is found at the bottom of each entry.
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I studied Geology in the 90’s and Economics over the past few years, both thankfully at an Australian University that still holds high the basic tenets of scientific endeavour.
At no stage was reference to ANYTHING like Wikipedia acceptable.
This is why.
What’s that saying? “When I want to make up something, I write it on Wikipedia.” Haha
I treat Wikipedia kinda like the History Channel, back when they showed stuff other than Ice Road Morons, and their ilk. Generally the article you’re viewing may be true, but the details are often wrong.
I’m reminded of a particular HC program where one “expert” said that a 688 Attack Sub weighed 6900 pounds. Sure, he mis-spoke, but no one during the interview, or in the editing room, noticed anything wrong with an attack sub that weighed little more than a pickup truck.
now I am curious and don’t trust wikipedia to check it lol
what is displacement (not weight) supposed to be, maybe 6900 tons ?
I don’t know what it is, but it’s certainly not 6900 pounds. And yes, the “expert” said weight, not displacement. Gotta love experts.
“usually the displacement is the weight of the boat and the weight of everything in the boat while you are sailing. This includes people, food, beer, rig, etc.”
http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthread.php?62485-Displacement-vs-Weight
Pretty close to the same thing especially for a submarine.
I encourage people to never use Wikipedia as a primary source. I also encourage them to put the a “No Wikipedia” logo on their blogs. You can find the “No Wikipedia” logo in various sizes here…
https://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/no-wikipedia/
+ 100
you often can learn a lot from the talk/edit pages and sometimes its more informative than the article itself.
There’s nothing fundamentally new about this problem; way back in the “late print era” a physicist by the name of Harvey Einbinder wrote a book and several articles pointing out primarily political influences on the content of the Encyclopedia Britannica. After reading his “Politics and the new Britannica”, The Nation 220:11:342-4 (1975) I tried following up on one of the problems with the Britannica editorial policy he described; The main article on Czechoslovakia in the Britannica 3 current in the mid seventies was written by a professor at a university in Brno, and a person reading it would find no hint that the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968 had ever happened.
And that is why Wikipedia is nearly as reliable as Britannica. No encyclopedia should be employed as a primary source.
And no single source should be counted on to be reliable. There’s a joke in the library profession to the effect that a reference librarian answers a question by citing two reliable sources that disagree, and then helps the client understand why they disagree.
The last time that I looked up a climate related issue on wikipedia, I discovered that a graph was presented showing rising insurance payout costs for weather related events.
To the mind of an uninformed or ideologically motivated person, that graph may look like proof of a violent shift in the world’s climate.
However to a non-ideologically motivated person with three or more connected neurons it should immediately raise the questions – Is this graph adjusted for inflation/GDP? Does this graph reflect the increase in insured value of property? What do graphs for insurance payouts for non-weather related events look like? etc etc.
Obviously, presenting such a graph without mentioning these issues is sheer sleight of hand. Or perhaps sheer stupidity. Later I discovered that Pielke Jr had had his trousers shredded by the warmist/leftist attack dogs for attempting to draw attention to the more obvious and sensible interpretation of such graphs.
Consequently my faith in wikipedia on climate issue is now zero.
I wasn’t born yesterday and I know bullcrap when I see it.
Let’s see if I understand your rationale. There are almost 5 million articles on Wikipedia and you think almost every one of them is completely worthless because you found one item, interestingly, a factual one, but one that could lead to an incorrect inference. Therefore everything else is wrong. Do you apply this syllogism to any other source of information?
Nope, I did not say that every article is worthless. I did clearly state that my faith “on climate issues” has been harmed. I use wikipedia all the time for a variety of purposes. I have no complaint about the otherwise generally fair and unbiased description of topics and current debates in many areas of science. But, the experience described above and several others have lead me to conclude that it can in certain politically sensitive areas be hijacked and used as a tool for the dissemination of one exclusive agenda.
Even when that purpose is achieved by presenting misleading information.
So, Frog, you think everything that TheotherPhil says is untrue? He’s said millions of things and you base your assessment on one comment? Do you every apply your syllogisms to yourself?
Fair enough, I read the “faith in Wikipedia” sentence to quickly and missed the climate issue reference. I agree that all articles in Wikipedia on climate issues ought to be viewed very skeptically. But I think that rule applies to articles in the New York Times, CNN, and even in refereed journals. Wikipedia articles are worse than some and better than others.
They are all effectively worthless because the website is completely unreliable. Wikipedia is broken by design and nothing more than “truth” based on who edits last.
Yep, they consider editing REAL FACTS and SCIENCE into these entries to be sabotage. Connelly specifically was sitting on the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period entries, which he wanted to say that human activities caused these climate changes. Any intrusion of real world facts or alternative, more likely explanations were immediately reversed by him. Trolls sit on every subject related to this political agenda-based climate change scam.
Standard model in physics is a very controversial subject.
Which shows that even the critics of Wikipedia are dogmatic and narrow-minded when it comes to the textbooks they believe. I never use Wikipedia, it’s a bad joke for neurotics.
I find Wikipedia indispensably useful when trying to research and explain the differences between, say, Supergirl, Power Girl, and Super Girl; and discussing why any version of the former appearing on CBS this coming season will be unlikely to appear on CW’s “Arrow” even though Power Girl and GREEN Arrow *have* appeared together in other media.
I think. I could be remembering wrong. I’ll have to check. As I say, Wikipedia, the “go to” source for such questions.
You can find a list of episodes for all the Leave it to Beaver shows.
Other than that, Wikipedia is a left-wing biased majority-rules database.
— Why would anyone waste their time there?
Many years ago I volunteered to share my 40 years of experience as an audiophile to correct ridiculous statements made about audiophiles there … and had my very reasonable, logical words deleted before the day was over.
If Wikipedia is really the favorite website for students, our economy is doomed !
Richard Greene “Why would anyone waste their time there?”
Why would anyone try to explain? Those that do, do; those that don’t, don’t. I use it quite a lot. It is particularly effective in mathematics and electronics; fields that don’t have much controversy. It is a bit less useful for history and pretty much useless for climate science.
“Many years ago I volunteered to share my 40 years of experience as an audiophile to correct ridiculous statements made about audiophiles there … and had my very reasonable, logical words deleted before the day was over.”
I’ve had similar experiences. Personal experiences don’t count unless you (1) write up a blog page and then (2) cite the blog page. Maybe then it will “stick”.
Otherwise, write your blog page and let people come to it, which they will if they are seriously searching for the kind of information you have.
I had to check Wiki to see what audiophile means.
Wankerpedia is useless for serious research. You may realize it’s been warped in matters of climate science and a few other areas, but you never know which additional subjects may have been tampered with. Try to find the communist roots of the Jamestown Colony. “Let those who do not work not eat” has gone down the memory hole. People who lie about one thing will lie about others. The delusion lies in the very nature of the wiki concept.
Great idea, but not going to work for a particularly amoral age.
A year or so ago a Wikipedia search of Arrhenius would have brought up his greenhouse effect predictions, along with some more of his more outlandish ones such as farming in Siberia, crops in the Arctic, ect, but now those mysteriously are missing.
“ect”
You should see a doctor about that. 😉
Why?
You have to be careful of even basic information in Wikipedia, although I agree that most of it is correct. Many years ago, I noticed the article on Heapsort had been vandalized by changing an algorithm that worked to one that worked only about 99.999% of the time.
It can be hard to find the truth about a controversial subject, but it is easy to find a view that is wrong by checking the history of changes. The side that tries to pretend there is no serious controversy is almost always wrong on the facts as well.
“Wikipedia’s global warming entry sees 2-3 edits a day, with more than 100 words altered”
Sounds like “settled science” to me.
Do they burn books in Millbrooke also? Shameful
Millbrook
Gene E. Likens is the same acid-rain-is-killing-us doctor who accuses acid rain of making rivers and streams more… alkaline : http://www.caryinstitute.org/newsroom/eastern-us-water-supplies-threatened-legacy-acid-rain
You can’t make this kind of stuff up. With a professionnal alarmist, head he wins, tail you lose.
While Connelley was editor / moderator on Wikipedia / global warming he had a relentless attack on Roger Pielke Sr’s page which was in fact benign. An editing war took [place] for years over the term “nuanced” as used in the phrase “…Pielke holds a nuanced view on climate change…” this went on and on and on and on with changes made/ deleted and made/deleted etc. etc. Connelley was unprofessional and professionally disfigured people trying to make edits typically in the form of character assassinations
Call me naïve. I expected that with electronic storage prices falling, scanners, OCR, and an abundance of cheap,otherwise unemployed labor, that old articles would rapidly be added to the on-line, ixquickable archives. But, instead a lot of material,especially “controversial” material disappears.
As someone who got banned from Wikipedia over trying to keep Scienceapologist there in check (and saw first hand in how politics and science don’t mix at all), I will attest that Wikipedia is a medium used to push agendas.
It’s not just in Climatology, it’s other fields that can’t prove with hard evidence A/B/C that allows a lot of wiggle room for “facts” (with me it was about Scienceapologist trying to remove the Intrinsic Redshift article). Climatology is one of those fields with too much wiggle room, but being protected by special interests so their articles are write protected even.
It’s a war of ideas there, and one side wants to simply censor data, not share and fact check, instead. -_-