Quotulatiousness

May 22, 2024

The new queen of the AWFLs

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the rise of new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher:

Banner for Christopher Rufo’s article on Katherine Maher at City Journal.
https://christopherrufo.com/p/katherine-mahers-color-revolution

The polite world was fascinated last month when long-time NPR editor Uri Berliner confessed to the Stalinist suicide pact the public broadcaster, like all public broadcasters, seems to be on. Formerly it was a place of differing views, he claimed, but now it has sold as truth some genuine falsehoods like, for instance, the Russia hoax, after which it covered up the Hunter Biden laptop. And let’s not forget our censor-like behaviour regarding Covid and the vaccine. NPR bleated that they were still diverse in political opinion, but researchers found that all 87 reporters at NPR were Democrats. Berliner was immediately put on leave and a few days later resigned, no doubt under pressure.

Even more interesting was the reveal of the genesis of NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, a 41-year-old with a distinctly odd CV. Maher had put in stints at a CIA cutout, the National Democratic Institute, and trotted onto the World Bank, UNICEF, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Technology and Democracy, the Digital Public Library of America, and finally the famous disinfo site Wikipedia. That same week, Tunisia accused her of working for the CIA during the so-called Arab Spring. And, of course, she is a WEF young global leader.

She was marched out for a talk at the Carnegie Endowment where she was prayerfully interviewed and spouted mediatized language so anodyne, so meaningless, yet so filled with nods to her base the AWFULS (affluent white female urban liberals) one was amazed that she was able to get away with it. There was no acknowledgement that the criticism by this award-winning reporter/editor/producer, who had spent his life at NPR had any merit whatsoever, and in fact that he was wrong on every count. That this was a flagrant lie didn’t even ruffle her artfully disarranged short blonde hair.

Christopher Rufo did an intensive investigation of her career in City Journal. It is an instructive read and illustrative of a lot of peculiar yet stellar careers of American women. Working for Big Daddy is apparently something these ghastly creatures value. I strongly suggest reading Rufo’s piece linked here. It’s a riot of spooky confluences.

Intelligence has been embedded in media forever and a day. During my time at Time Magazine in London, the bureau chief, deputy bureau chief and no doubt the “war and diplomacy” correspondent all filed to Langley and each of them cruised social London ceaselessly for information. Tucker Carlson asserted on his interview with Aaron Rogers this week that intelligence operatives were laced through DC media and in fact, Mr. Watergate, Bob Woodward himself, had been naval intelligence a scant year before he cropped up at the Washington Post as “an intrepid fighter for the truth and freedom no matter where it led”. Watergate, of course, was yet another operation to bring down another inconvenient President; at this juncture, unless you are being puppeted by the CIA, you don’t get to stay in power. Refuse and bang bang or end up in court on insultingly stupid charges. As Carlson pointed out, all congressmen and senators are terrified by the security state, even and especially the ones on the intelligence committee who are supposed to be controlling them. They can install child porn on your laptop and you don’t even know it’s there until you are raided, said Carlson. The security state is that unethical, that power mad.

Now, it’s global. And feminine. Where is Norman Mailer when you need him?

December 17, 2023

Justapedia, the latest “new Wikipedia“

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Quillette, Shuichi Tezuka introduces the latest challenger to the ever-more-biased free online encyclopedia Wikipedia:

In the aftermath of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter late last year, the journalist Jon Levine asked him: “I wonder how much Wikipedia would cost?” Musk had recently complained that Wikipedia has a “non-trivial left-wing bias”, and a few months earlier, had commented that “Wikipedia is losing its objectivity.” But regardless of whether Musk would have liked to purchase the site, there never was any real possibility of that happening, as stated by Wikipedia’s symbolic leader Jimmy Wales: “Wikipedia is not for sale”.

Following this exchange, there were several discussions on Twitter (as it was called at the time) about whether Musk might create his own alternative to Wikipedia. In the end Musk did not make such an attempt, but approximately eight months later, someone else did.

This new online encyclopedia, known as Justapedia, is the latest in a long series of attempts by various individuals to create a competitor to Wikipedia. So far all previous attempts have either been unsuccessful, or morphed into something so unlike Wikipedia that they could no longer be considered a competitor. However, one thing working in Justapedia’s favor is that the need for such a competitor is stronger now than it has been in past years, due to several recent controversies revolving around the manipulation and/or politicization of Wikipedia, along with a widespread perception that Wikipedia has not done enough to prevent this type of problem.

Justapedia was recently publicized by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia alongside Wales, during an interview with Russell Brand and in a subsequent blog post. This article will present a more detailed examination of Justapedia’s background, including some of the recent controversies that demonstrate why it is needed, as well as the poor record of success other Wikipedia alternatives have had up to this point. Will Justapedia succeed where most other Wikipedia competitors have failed?

July 14, 2023

QotD: Resolving “disagreements” on Wikipedia

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I keep telling anybody who’ll listen, anytime the subject comes up: Always go to the Wikipedia talk page when you do your “researching” on Wikipedia! Take what you read in the main article with a huge grain of salt if you find a big back-and-forth melee going on in the talk page, for you can take it to the bank that if there’s a disagreement going on between conservative and liberal editors, it will be “resolved” by way of the liberal editors locking the article down after they’ve made sure to get the last word in. Which means what you’ve just read is mostly nothing but pure bovine product. If you’re gleaning this information for any kind of actual purpose, it goes without saying that this is something you should know. Information is meaningless without the “meta data”; without context.

And if there isn’t anything going on back there at all, you should probably still take the main article with a grain of salt because you might be reading a bunch of “everybody knows” gibberish without too much thought behind it.

M.K. Freeberg, “Latest Wikipedia Talk Page Mess: Socialism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2012-12-01.

April 23, 2023

From the Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte recounts the decline and fall of the greatest of the print encyclopedias:

I remembered all this while reading Simon Garfield’s wonderful new book, All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia. It’s an entertaining history of efforts to capture all that we know between covers, starting two thousand years ago with Pliny the Elder.

The star of Garfield’s show, naturally, is Encyclopedia Britannica, which dominated the field through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the time of its fifteenth edition in 1989, the continuously revised Britannica was comprehensive, reliable, scholarly, and readable, with 43 million words and 25,000 illustrations on a half million topics published over 32,640 pages in thirty-two beautifully designed Morocco-leather-bound volumes. It was the greatest encyclopedia ever published and probably the greatest reference tool to that time. It was sold door-to-door in the US by a sales force of 5,000.

Just as the glorious fifteenth edition was going to press, Bill Gates tried to buy Encyclopedia Britannica. Not a set — the whole company. He didn’t want to go into the reference book business. He believed that the availability of a CD-ROM encyclopedia would encourage people to adopt Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The Britannica people told Gates to get stuffed. They were revolted by the thought of their masterpiece reduced to an inexpensive plastic bolt-on to a larger piece of software for gimmicky home computers.

Like the executives at Blockbuster, the executives at Britannica eventually recognized the threat of digital technology but couldn’t see their way to abandoning their old business model and their old production standards and the reliable profits that came with large sets of big books. CD-ROMs seemed to them like a child’s toy.

Even as more of life moved online and the company’s prospects for growth dwindled, the Britannica executives could still not get their heads around abandoning the past and favoring a digital marketplace. They figured that their time-honored strategy of guilting parents into buying a shelf of books in service of their kids’ education would survive the digital challenge, not recognizing that parents would soon be assuaging their guilt by buying personal computers for their kids.

By the time Britannica brought out an overly expensive and not-very-good CD-ROM version of its encyclopedia in 1994, Gates had launched Encarta based on the much inferior Funk & Wagnalls. It might not have been the equal of the printed Britannica, but with its ease of use and storage, its much lower price point, and its many photos and videos of the Apollo moon landing and spuming whales, Encarta made a splash. It was selling a million copies a year in its third year of production — a number that no previous encyclopedia had come close to matching.

As it turned out, Britannica‘s last profitable year was 1990 when it sold 117,000 bound sets for $650 million and a profit of $40 million. With the launch of Encarta, its annual sales were reduced to 50,000 sets and it was laying off masses of employees.

Encarta‘s own life was relatively short. It closed in 2009, at which point it was selling for a mere $22.95. The world now belonged to Wikipedia.

April 14, 2023

The trust deficit is getting worse every day

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia provides more evidence that the scarcest thing in the world today is getting ever more scarce:

Here are some news stories from recent days. Can you tell me what they have in common?

  • Scammers clone a teenage girl’s voice with AI — then use it to call her mother and demand a $1 million ransom.
  • Millions of people see a photo of Pope Francis wearing a goofy white Balenciaga puffer jacket, and think it’s real. But after the image goes viral, news media report that it was created by a construction worker in Chicago with deepfake technology.
  • Twitter changes requirements for verification checks. What was once a sign that you could trust somebody’s identity gets turned into a status symbol, sold to anybody willing to pay for it. Within hours, the platform is flooded with bogus checked accounts.
  • Officials go on TV and tell people they can trust the banking system—but depositors don’t believe them. High profile bank failures from Silicon Valley to Switzerland have them spooked. Over the course of just a few days, depositors move $100 billion from their accounts.
  • ChatGPT falsely accuses a professor of sexual harassment — and cites an article that doesn’t exist as its source. Adding to the fiasco, AI claims the abuse happened on a trip to Alaska, but the professor has never traveled to that state with students.
  • The Department of Justice launches an investigation into China’s use of TikTok to spy on users. Another popular Chinese app allegedly can bypass users’ security to “monitor activities on other apps, check notifications, read private messages and change settings.”
  • The FBI tells travelers to avoid public phone charging stations at airports, hotels and other locations. “Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices,” they warn.

The missing ingredient in each of these stories is trust.

Everybody is trying to kill it — criminals, technocrats, politicians, you name it. Not long ago, Disney was the only company selling a Fantasyland, but now that’s the ambition of every tech empire.

The trust crisis could hardly be more intense.

But it’s hidden from view because there’s so much information out there. We are living in a culture of abundance, especially in the digital world. So it’s hard to believe than anything in the information economy is scarce.

Whatever you want, you can get — and usually for free. You can have free news, free music, free videos, free everything. But you get what you pay for, as the saying goes. And it was never truer than right now — when all this free stuff is starting to collapse in a fog of fakery and phoniness.

    Tell me what source you trust, and I’ll tell you why you’re a fool. As B.B. King once said: “Nobody loves me but my mother — and she could be jivin’ too.”

Years ago, technology made things more trustworthy. You could believe something because it was validated by photos, videos, recordings, databases and other trusted sources of information.

Seeing was believing — but not anymore. Until very recently, if you doubted something, you could look it up in an encyclopedia or other book. But even these get changed retroactively nowadays.

For example, people who consult Wikipedia to understand the economy might be surprised to learn that the platform’s write-up on “recession” kept changing in recent months — as political operatives and spinmeisters fought over the very meaning of the word. It got so bad that the site was forced to block edits on the entry.

There’s an ominous recurring theme here: The very technologies we use to determine what’s trustworthy are the ones most under attack.

Trust used to be a given in most western countries … it was a key part of what made us all WEIRD. Mass immigration from non-WEIRD countries dented it, but conscious perversion of trust relationships by government, media, public health, and education authorities has caused far more — and longer lasting — damage to our culture. Trust used to be given freely, but now must be earned. And that’s difficult for organizations that have proven repeatedly that they can’t be trusted.

October 1, 2022

Johann Hari’s unlikely career resurrection

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I have to admit that Johann Hari was pretty much just a British media personality I had a vague awareness of, but I hadn’t paid much attention to him (his Wikipedia sockpuppeting came to my attention in 2011, and I quoted from an article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2019). As this post by Ben at Ben’s Comedy News outlines, I’d largely missed the rest of his fall and rise:

Nowadays, Johann Hari is known as a pop psychology expert. He does TED talks and writes books with simplistic messages like:

  • your smartphone is ruining your attention span! (Stolen Focus)
  • you should cure your depression by throwing away your medication and joining a book club! (Lost Connections)
  • the war on drugs is bad! (Chasing the Scream)

His books get positive blurbs from distinguished thinkers, such as the comedian and twink admirer Stephen Fry, the listicle entrepreneur Arianna Huffington, the feminist and sex offender’s wife Hillary Clinton, the comedian and fake revolutionary Russell Brand, and the TV doctor Doctor Rangan Chatterjee.

But when you look at how actual experts assess his work, it’s not so positive. The neuroscientist Dean Burnett responded to an extract of Lost Connections in his Guardian column, under the title Is everything Johann Hari knows about depression wrong? Burnett points out that:

    despite Hari’s prose suggesting he’s uncovered numerous revelations, pretty much everything he “reveals” is well known already

Hari, in pursuit of an anti-anti-depressant narrative, makes the claim that you can be diagnosed with depression and put on medication immediately after a traumatic event like losing a child, which Burnett (who teaches psychiatry) describes as:

    at best a staggering exaggeration, at worst an active fabrication to support a narrative.

But this article isn’t about what Johann Hari has been doing recently. It’s about what Hari was up to before he reinvented himself as some kind of expert, back when he was a journalist who ended up being disgraced.

It’s about how Hari has somehow rounded allegations of serious fabrication down to a record of minor plagiarism. It’s about how in trying to attack his critics, he seems to have inadvertently revealed his penchant for little brother incest fantasies with a troubling racial dimension. It’s about how I tried to fix the record on Wikipedia, and ran into trouble as Wikipedia’s policies collided with the sorry state of British journalism.

Back in 2010, Johann Hari was a star newspaper columnist (if you’re a millennial that means he wrote hot takes that got lots of clicks; if you’re Gen Z, think of him as a viral TikTok star but with words on paper).

In 2011 he was disgraced and kicked out of the profession.

Now if you look at the articles that were written about his comeback, like this New Statesman piece or this Guardian piece you’d conclude that he was disgraced for two things:

    plagiarism – specifically, taking quotes from text someone had written in a book or article, and pretending that the person had said it directly to him

    abuse of Wikipedia – in particular, using a fake identity to edit the pages of professional rivals with false allegations

I followed the whole Hari affair pretty closely at the time (I didn’t like him because he had been a cheerleader for the Iraq War, so I enjoyed watching his career go down in flames).

When his latest book came out a month ago, I looked at his Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia saves the history of all the different versions of each page, so here is a link to what I saw when I did that.

And here’s part of the summary and the table of contents:

The whole article struck me as weird because it didn’t mention two things I clearly remembered:

  1. Hari got in trouble, not just for minor plagiarism, but for allegedly making things up completely.
  2. Even more memorably, the fake identity he used to edit Wikipedia, “David Rose”, was also used to author an incest kink porn story with a hilarious title.

You can see why Hari (and whatever reputation management consultants he has working for him) would want to focus on the “plagiarism” angle. It’s not good to pass off a quote you got from someone’s book as something they told you directly, but it’s not as serious as completely inventing something. I suppose technically it’s plagiarism because you’re pretending you elicited the quote in an interview and you’re not citing the original book; but it’s a lot better than the typical case of plagiarism that involves passing off someone else’s work as your own. Hari’s defence is that he was “cutting corners” because he was under so much pressure due to his meteoric success at young age, etc. etc.

August 31, 2020

“The ‘Scots’ that wis uised in this airticle wis written bi a body that’s mither tongue isna Scots. Please impruive this airticle gin ye can.”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Natalie Solent has some sympathy for the recently revealed teen who is the main “author” of the Scots version of Wikipedia:

If you are wondering how a nineteen year old managed to be responsible for creating or editing tens of thousands of articles, the answer is simple:

    He wrote: “I was only a 12-year-old kid when I started, and sometimes when you start something young, you can’t see that the habit you’ve developed is unhealthy and unhelpful as you get older.”

Naming no names except my own, that sounds like a few of us here. Ten edits a day, most days, for two and a half thousand days. The work of half his life. The thing that made him special. And now they revile him for it. Believe me, I am not laughing when I call this a sad story.

Believe me, too, when I say I do not want to mock Scots. The Samizdata “Languages” category includes many other posts by me about endangered tongues. I want them to survive and grow. A world where everyone spoke only one language would be a grey place, and one more likely to fall to tyranny. For many a soul living under oppression their knowledge of something other than the majority language has been the one window to freer times or places that the censors could not brick up. Less portentously, I like the vigorous style of Scots. The fact that it is mostly mutually intelligible with English English has been the source of endless arguments about whether it is a dialect of English or a language in its own right. It is a pity that this question has been politicised. My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that although Scots was a separate language in the Middle Ages, enough linguistic convergence has occurred to say that nowadays it is a dialect of English. There is nothing wrong with that. It would be equally valid to say Standard English and Scots are both dialects on the continuum of English (and that the group as a whole is called “English” is just a matter of historically familiar terminology, not an attribution of superiority. Brits should remember that if numbers of speakers were the criterion that decided the name of this language we would be speaking American.)

It is a sad reflection on the state of Scots that nobody stopped “AmaryllisGardner” for five years. Scarcely anyone seems to have questioned him. I cannot help thinking this fiasco would never have happened if linguists and the penumbra of people who are “into” languages had not been so down on prescriptivism. After all, if there truly is no correct or incorrect way to use language, our laddie’s version of Scots has as much claim to be right as the one they speak in Glasgow.

August 27, 2020

Scots wa huh?

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

An amusing story in The Register from Kieren McCarthy:

In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language.

The user is not only a prolific contributor, they are an administrator of sco.wikipedia.org, having created, modified or guided the vast majority of its pages in more than 200,000 edits. The result is tens of thousands of articles in English with occasional, and often ridiculous, letter changes – such as replacing a “y” with “ee.”

That’s right, someone doing a bad impression of a Scottish accent and then writing it down phonetically is the chief maintainer of the online encyclopedia’s Scots edition. And although this has been carrying on for the best part of a decade, the world was mostly oblivious to it all – until today, when one Redditor finally had enough of reading terrible Scots and decided to look behind the curtain.

“People embroiled in linguistic debates about Scots often use it as evidence that Scots isn’t a language, and if it was an accurate representation, they’d probably be right,” noted the Reddit sleuth, Ultach. “It uses almost no Scots vocabulary, what little it does use is usually incorrect, and the grammar always conforms to standard English, not Scots.”

While very nearly all Scottish people speak English, the Scots language was apparently still spoken, read, or otherwise understood by nearly 30 per cent of Scotland’s population according to those responding to a 2011 census. The language got a memorable boost, too, when Scots-writing novelist Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting became a silver-screen sensation.

October 10, 2016

QotD: Wikipedia-shaming

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Did you know it is 2015 and people will still criticize you for getting facts off of Wikipedia?

I’m not even talking about controversial conclusions, like “on balance, the research about gun control shows…”. I’m talking about simple facts.

A: “China is bigger than the United States”

B: “Where’d you hear that one, Wikipedia?”

A: “…yes?”

B: “You expect me to believe something you literally just took off a Wikipedia article?”

Yes. Yes I do. I could go find the CIA World Factbook or whatever, but it will say the same thing as Wikipedia, because Wikipedia is pretty much always right. When you challenge Wikipedia on basic facts, all you do is force people to use inconvenient sources to back up the things Wikipedia says, costing people time for no reason and making them hate you. There may have been a time when Wikipedia was famously inaccurate. Or maybe there wasn’t. I don’t know. Wikipedia doesn’t have an article on it, so it would take time and energy to find out. The point is, now it’s 2015, and the matter has been settled.

How accurate is Wikipedia?:

    Several studies have been done to assess the reliability of Wikipedia. An early study in the journal Nature said that in 2005, Wikipedia’s scientific articles came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of “serious errors”. The study by Nature was disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica, and later Nature replied to this refutation with both a formal response and a point-by-point rebuttal of Britannica‘s main objections. Between 2008 and 2012, articles in medical and scientific fields such as pathology, toxicology, oncology, pharmaceuticals, and psychiatry comparing Wikipedia to professional and peer-reviewed sources found that Wikipedia’s depth and coverage were of a high standard.

I know this because I got it from Wikipedia’s Reliability Of Wikipedia article. Go ahead, challenge me, I dare you.

Scott Alexander, “These Are A Few (More) Of My (Least) Favourite Things”, Slate Star Codex, 2015-01-21.

July 9, 2015

QotD: People trust Wikipedia “Because An Argument Is Better Than A Lecture”

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That’s because, as I’ve been trying to scream at you people for the past three years, the corporate mass-media news industry sucks. More specifically, the once proud fourth branch of our government has been reduced to screaming-head opinionators formulating commentary on the basis of politicized ratings. In other words, Wikipedia and the news are in two different businesses: one is about facts and the other is about shock and spin. Argue with me all you like, you know it’s true.

But perhaps even more importantly, the general public trusts crowd-sourced Wikipedia articles more than the news because an argument is always more trust-worthy than a lecture. That’s the real difference. If you want to know how good a teacher in a school is, you gather up the best student, the worst student, the principal and the teacher and then analyze what they all say together. You don’t ask the school’s PR director. Wikipedia, even when it comes to contested or hotly-debated articles, does this extremely well, even concerning itself. The linked article above discussed a number of articles about how reliable Wikipedia is, some of which disagreed with others, and all were found on the Wikipedia page for itself.

    Regardless the disputes over individual studies and their methodologies, how I found them is almost as telling as their results. I came across them because Wikipedia provided external references, allowing me to corroborate the information. This is one of the site’s great merits: the aggregation of multiple sources, correctly linked, to build a more complete picture. As the results of the Yougov poll perhaps suggest, this surely seems more reliable than getting the coverage of an event from one newspaper.

The truest answer to a question can rarely be told by a single source, which is what makes the sources section of a Wikipedia page so valuable. What is the corollary in a news broadcast? Perhaps a single expert? Maybe once in a while they’ll have two sides of a debate spend five minutes with one another? They’re not even close. The argument itself can be instructive, but that argument never happens on most news shows.

This doesn’t mean you blindly read Wiki articles without questioning them. But a properly sourced article is simply more trustworthy than a talking head telling you how to think.

Timothy Geigner, “Why Do People Trust Wikipedia? Because An Argument Is Better Than A Lecture”, Techdirt, 2014-08-18.

November 18, 2014

The Wikipedia editors circle the wagons

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:50

Virginia Postrel talks about the greatest danger to the long-term health of Wikipedia — the diminishing central group of editors who do the most to keep it going:

Few of the tens of millions of readers who rely on Wikipedia give much thought to where its content comes from or why the site, which is crowdsourced and open (at least in theory) for anyone to edit, doesn’t degenerate into gibberish and graffiti. Like Google or running water, it is simply there. Yet its very existence is something of a miracle. Despite its ocean of content, this vital piece of informational infrastructure is the work of a surprisingly small community of volunteers. Only about 3,000 editors contribute more than 100 changes a month to the English-language Wikipedia, down from a high of more than 4,700 in early 2007. Without any central direction or outside recognition, these dedicated amateurs create, refine, and maintain millions of content pages.

But they don’t really do it for you. Wikipedia “is operated by and for the benefit of the editors,” writes Richard Jensen, one of their number, in a 2012 article in the Journal of Military History. (Jensen, a retired history professor, is a credentialed scholar, which makes him unusual among Wikipedia’s editors.) Unlike open-source software contributions, working on Wikipedia provides few career advantages. It’s a hobby, offering a combination of intrinsic and social rewards. People edit Wikipedia because they enjoy it.

And that is both the genius and the vulnerability of the organization. Wikipedia’s continued improvement — indeed, its continued existence — depends on this self-selected group of obsessives and the organizational culture they’ve developed over time. But the open structure that enabled the creation of so many entries on so many topics also attracts a never-ending stream of attacks from outright vandals and other bad actors. Forced to defend the site’s integrity, incumbent editors become skeptical, even hostile, toward the newcomers who could ensure its future. If Wikipedia eventually fades away, the reasons will lie in a culture that worked brilliantly until it devolved from dynamism to sclerosis.

April 29, 2014

Wikipedia is great … except when it’s not

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Nigel Scott discusses some of the more notable problems with Wikipedia:

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.

I use Wikipedia all the time … but I rarely depend on it for primary information, and never for topics that are in the news at the time. Even then, I sometimes encounter data that is clearly wrong — from the trivial (minor errors in dates that are clearly typos) to more serious (actually false or misleading information). I have edited articles on Wikipedia a few times, but not for several years. For more dedicated Wikipedians, however, there are other dangers:

The standard of debate around controversial Wikipedia pages often degenerates into playground squabbling, in spite of rules that are intended to foster consideration and the principle of good faith between Wikipedia editors. Established editors who know the ropes find it easy to goad and ban newcomers with differing views. Thus, gamesmanship trumps knowledge.

The self-selection of Wikipedia’s editors can produce a strongly misaligned editorial group around a certain page. It can lead to conflicts among the group members, continuous edit wars, and can require disciplinary measures and formal supervision, with mixed success. Once a dispute has got out of hand, appeals to senior and more established administrators are often followed by rulings that favour the controlling clique.

Wikipedia is particularly unsuited to covering ongoing criminal cases, especially when a clique of editors who have already made their mind up about the case secures early control of the page. The ‘Murder of Meredith Kercher’ entry is indicative of this. The page has been under the control of editors convinced of the guilt of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito almost continuously since 2007. The page has now been edited over 8,000 times by over 1,000 people. Its bias became so obvious that eventually a petition to Jimmy Wales was launched. Once alerted, Wales took a personal interest and arranged for new contributors to assist in editing the page. He commented: ‘I just read the entire article from top to bottom, and I have concerns that most serious criticism of the trial from reliable sources has been excluded or presented in a negative fashion.’ A few days later, he followed up: ‘I am concerned that, since I raised the issue, even I have been attacked as being something like a “conspiracy theorist”.’

December 6, 2013

Mismeasuring inequality

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:20

Tim Worstall on a Wall Street Journal article which asks “how do we measure inequality”. Tim says “not that way, idiots” (although I might have imagined the “idiots” part):

The title of the piece is “How do you measure ‘inequality’?” to which a very good response is “Not that way”. For although all the numbers there are exact and accurate (well, as much as any economic statistic is such) the whole statement is entirely misleading. For the numbers that are being used for the USA are calculated on an entirely different basis to the way that the numbers for the other countries are. So much so that in this instance we have Wikipedia being more accurate than either the WSJ or the CIA itself. Which, while amusing, isn’t quite the world I think we’d all like to have.

Here’s what the problem is. Conceptually we can measure inequality in a number of different ways and this particular one, the Gini, looks at the spread of incomes across the society. OK, no need for the details of how we calculate it except for one. We again, conceptually, have two different incomes that can be measured.

So, the guy pulling down $1 million a year dealing bonds on Wall Street. Does he really have an income of $1 million a year? Or is it more true to say that he gets $600,000 a year after the Feds, NY State and NYC have all dipped their hands into his paycheck? And the guy at the other end, making $15,000 a year as a greeter at WalMart. Is he really making $15,000? Or should we add in the EITC, the State EITC (if there is one), Section 8 housing vouchers, Medicaid and all the rest to what he’s earning? He might be consuming as if he’s getting $25 k a year, even though his market income is only $15k.

What we actually do is we calculate both of these. The first is called the Gini at market incomes, the second the Gini after taxes and benefits. There’s nothing either right or wrong about either measure: they just are what they are. However, we do have to be clear about which we are using in any circumstance and similarly, very clear about not comparing inequality in one country by one measure with inequality in another by the other measure. Yet, sadly, that is exactly what is being done here.

May 3, 2013

Wikipedia forced to re-examine categorization

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In the New York Review of Books, James Gleick recounts the tale of Wikipedia’s “American women novelists” category:

There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female were being systematically removed from the category “American novelists” and assigned to the category “American women novelists.” Amanda Filipacchi, whom I will call an American novelist despite her having been born in Paris, set off a furor with an opinion piece on the New York Times website last week. Browsing on Wikipedia, she had suddenly noticed that women were vanishing from “American novelists” — starting, it seemed, in alphabetical order.

[. . .]

At Wikipedia, all hell broke loose. (Let’s pause here to flag the phrase, “at Wikipedia.” Wikipedia is a notional place only. It is not situated in a sleek California corporate campus, like Google in Mountain View or Apple in Cupertino, but instead distributed across cyberspace.)

These kinds of debates are usually bruited and argued on Wikipedia’s “Talk” pages, which are set aside for discussion by editors. After the Filipacchi article, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s cofounder, created a new entry on his personal Talk page under the bold-face heading, “WTF?” Wales does not give orders or directly cause things to happen. He is more of a noninterventionist god. He is often referred to simply as Founder (capital F) or Jimbo. Anyway, he wrote:

    My first instinct is that surely these stories are wrong in some important way. Can someone update me on where I can read the community conversation about this? Did it happen? How did it happen?

Heated argument broke out on a page set aside for discussion of changes to Wikipedia categories. Categories are a big deal. They are an important way to group articles; some people use them to navigate or browse. Categories provide structure for a web of knowledge — not a tree, because a category can have multiple parents, as well as multiple children. Wikipedia lists 4,325 Container categories, from “Accordionists by nationality” to “Zoos in the United States.” There are Disambiguation categories, Eponymous categories — named, for example, after railway lines like Norway’s Flåm Line, or after robots (there are two: Optimus Prime and R2-D2) — and at least 11,000 Hidden categories, meant for administration and therefore invisible to readers. A typical hidden category is “Wikipedia:Categories for discussion,” containing thousands of pages of logged discussions about the suitabilities of various categories. Meta enough for you?

April 8, 2013

French intelligence agency discovers the power of the “Streisand Effect”

Filed under: Europe, France, Government, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

The French Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (DCRI) didn’t appreciate that Wikipedia had an article on one of their installations (link is to the English version of the page in question), so they asked to have it removed. However, because they wouldn’t specify what information in the article was sensitive (even though it was largely based on a French TV broadcast), the Wikipedia editors turned down the request. The DCRI then channelled their inner thug:

Wikipedia refused to delete it, and then things took a nasty turn, as a press release from the Wikimedia Foundation explains:

    Unhappy with the Foundation’s answer, the DCRI summoned a Wikipedia volunteer in their offices on April 4th. This volunteer, which was one of those having access to the tools that allow the deletion of pages, was forced to delete the article while in the DCRI offices, on the understanding that he would have been held in custody and prosecuted if he did not comply. Under pressure, he had no other choice than to delete the article, despite explaining to the DCRI this is not how Wikipedia works.

As the Wikimedia Foundation goes on to note:

    This volunteer had no link with that article, having never edited it and not even knowing of its existence before entering the DCRI offices. He was chosen and summoned because he was easily identifiable, given his regular promotional actions of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in France.

This is very similar to the situation discussed last week, where Benjamin Mako Hill seems to have been targeted because he, too, was easily identifiable. As we noted then, putting pressure on Wikipedia volunteers in this way is extremely problematic, since it naturally discourages others from helping out.

How did the DCRI learn about the Streisand Effect?

… the deleted article is, of course, back on line, in French and a dozen other languages. Moreover, the DCRI’s ham-fisted attempt to censor an extremely obscure Wikipedia page that hardly anyone ever visited, has achieved exactly the opposite effect: in the last few days, the page has been viewed over 45,000 times.

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