Cory Doctorow and Wikipedia
Cory Doctorow’s posted an excellent comparison of the distinctions between incorrect (or false) statements in Wikipedia and a Mainstream Media source, the Register. Quotable quote:
“The Reg is the Wikipedia vandal you can’t revert.”
Real takeaway:
“Wikipedia’s transparent approach to the truth lays out all sides of the debate where all can see them and judge for themselves what the fact of the matter is. The Register’s approach hides the negotiation of truth behind invisible, silent edits, and behind the whims of writers who are free to correct, (or not correct) the record as they see fit.”
Some really good thinking in this article (I’m biased, of course, I share Cory’s enthusiasm for Wikipedia, and he’s almost got my name). I’d be interested in hearing Dave’s take on this. OK, maybe not, since Dave’s a touch irrational about Wikipedia. It would be interesting, given how often Cory’s and Dave’s thinking is often almost diametrically opposed, to hear them debate it. OK, maybe not, Cory seems to debate by not letting his analogue speak.
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January 22nd, 2006 at 1:02 pm
“Wikipedia’s transparent approach to the truth lays out all sides of the debate where all can see them and judge for themselves what the fact of the matter is. ”
That’s like saying the value of open-source software is that anyone can read the source code. I did some fact-checking on Wikipedia as part of a conversation around the Ariane Flight 501 failure, and there was essentially no debate. I had to go deep into the page history to figure out how the accurate description got corrupted and replaced by the off-hand popular explanation, obliterating the other. There was no laying out the sides of a debate. I find Wikipedia useful, and I find it neither trustworthy nor accurate nor transparent. And I agree that having the page history (most of the time) can make it possible to trace how something happened and the stages an article went through, but rationale is often weak or missing entirely.
January 23rd, 2006 at 5:36 am
Well, neither Cory nor I are saying that’s the only value in Wikipedia, but I’d agree, that is part of the value of open source software; I think you can look to the debate over voting machine software for some confirmation of that.
I interpreted Cory’s “debate” to mean the interchange of the actual ideas - the back-and-forth between one version of an event or item and another. You’re right in saying that all too often there’s no discussion of the changes that have been made. However when compared to the mainstream media’s idea of transparency, or that of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, Wikipedia is an open book. While the history isn’t always easy to parse, at least you can find it, which is more than one can say about most sources of information. Try finding out what information was excised from a Brittanica entry and I don’t think you’ll have a lot of luck. You’ll find a much richer debate over rationale in Wikipedia entries than in those other sources; at worst Wikipedia has the same level of rationale available as they do while also providing the history of the evolution of the article, at best there’s much more.
All of that said, I agree that the tools for searching the history leave a great deal to be desired. I’d love to see something that would allow you to select a region of text and find all the changes to that area of the article and work backward from there, for example. Somehow I don’t see that happening; indeed I’m not even sure how one would go about it, but something along those lines would be a great boon to the Wikipedia crowd and especially to less experienced readers.
Also, if you look back at my previous posts on the Wikipedia subject, I think you’ll find that I agree with you that Wikipedia is not authoritative and should never be used as a sole source.