[lbo-talk] SDS and wikis

[Lance Murdoch]

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 08:20:57 -0500, Max B. Sawicky <sawicky at verizon.net> wrote:
> with no disparagement of your article, which I have
> yet to read, what is it that precludes someone who
> has no idea what they are talking about from
> contributing to a wiki.  I say this because I
> noticed an article on a left wiki about taxes
> that was just full of crap.

Well, this is something there is a lot of discussion of in places like
Wikipedia.

One of the arguments has a corollary with other collaborative projects
such as Linux and other open source software development with the idea
that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".  In other words,
with enough people reading an article, factual errors will be phased
out.  I would have to agree with a comment made often on Wikipedia
that the system works surprisingly well for such an anarchic
free-for-all.  For example, on the day when the number of genes in
humans was recently lower from a 30k-35k to 20k-25k estimate, I went
to change it on Wikipedia and saw it had already been changed within
hours of the announcement.
You can probably test this yourself by going to a popular Wikipedia
article such as George W. Bush and posting some factual error. 
Whether it stayed or not would depend on how outlandish and subtle it
is.  "George W. Bush is seven feet tall" would probably go within the
week.  A made up fact like "George W. Bush is a vegan" would probably
be removed although more subtle stuff like "George W. Bush was briefly
a vegan at Yale" might possibly stay.  Someone purposefully seeking to
introduce subtle, false information would probably succeed.  The Bush
page is a good barometer though because not only is it popular, it is
a contentious page, so people are more apt to revert something
entered.  Although I managed to get into an edit war with a
Renaissance buff on something as obscure as Wikipedia's Giordano Bruno
page.

Wikipedia is often compared to Encyclopedia Brittanica.  In fact,
Wikipedia is making EB look like a dinosaur and an ex-EB
editor-in-chief recently wrote an article decrying Wikipedia.  He
wanted to see how Wikipedia dealt with Alexander Hamilton and said the
article was a "high school student C+ paper", and showed how the
article had actually gotten worse with subsequent edits, with correct
information replaced with incorrect information.

I in turn look for the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on Robespierre:

"Like thousands of other young Frenchmen, he had read the works of
Rousseau and taken them as gospel. Just at the very time in life when
this illusion had not been destroyed by the realities of life, and
without the experience which might have taught the futility of idle
dreams and theories, he was elected to the states-general."

Since the 1911 EB is public domain nowadays, it was imported into
Wikipedia.  I deleted much of the above and marked it "point-of-view".
 A look through the 1911 EB shows in hindsight how much of the 1911
encyclopedia was crap from people who had no idea what they were
talking about - ( http://www.1911encyclopedia.org ), and I'm sure in
another century we can say the same about the current 2004 edition of
EB.  Compare the EB article on phrenology with the Wikipedia one.

Wikipedia has a lot of "History of [Country]" articles - History of
Nicaragua, History of Italy, History of Kyrgyzstan.  If you look
around, you realize this all came originally from US State Department
brief sheets before people started modifying them.  In fact, so much
information from on high comes to us like this.  I prefer the bottom
up method.  I don't consider Wikipedia to be as bottom up as I'd like
either, but at least I can have some say.