Wikipedia's zealots: "Upon checking with Peiser, I found he had done no such thing. The Wikipedia page had misunderstood or distorted his comments. I then exercised the right to edit Wikipedia that we all have, corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.
Peiser wrote back saying he couldn't see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. Had I neglected to save them after editing them, I wondered. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again! I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made."
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Wikipedia Sucks: Citizen Editors Fail to Actually, You Know... Edit
An editor should be without bias when presented with factual information... even if the factual information runs against his or her religious ideas. Alternate viewpoints are the basis of learning. Single viewpoints are the dictum of dictators and fascists... Yeah, fascists. It will be most important for us to be able to use a source like Wikipedia to find all viewpoints... and when one area is distorted, the trust can be lost forever and all that is published is suspect as possibly being an opinion or a distortion or even a lie. That is the way it is... with people and publications.
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4 comments:
The editing (or more specifically the social network of people changing and then having their changes undone) is a fascinating and to some well-known issue.
You can read the discussion pages or history logs of some entries. It's quite the battle.
Or you can read this website - take with a grain of salt, but it does put Wikipedia into a bit more perspective: wikitruth.info.
It's also interesting to see the ratio of people submitting changes vs. people patrolling changes. The latter is a pretty small group, and some have questioned whether this is censorship of some kind - censorship in the age of social networking, not censorship how we used to know it from governments in history.
Jan,
Yes. I used to love Wikipedia, but found that for some things it was more opinion than fact finding. I love using my brain to sort through information and dig a little. When that info is tainted by prejudice, s
"spun" by demagoguery, or omitted by a fundamentalist fear, it becomes suspect across all channels.
As I tell my children... it takes years to build trust and only a moment to destroy it.
Personally I am offended when someone tells me I shouldn't be allowed to read a dissenting or alternate view because they are protecting me from lack of ability on myself to make an appropriate opinion.
How are things in Seattle? I am coming up for a Seminar in August. Cheers
Indeed, I much rather get different view points and then use my own judgement to decide who to believe, rather than having other decide for me. At my age I don't need to be parented anymore :-)
Things are well in Seattle. Incidentally I will be in Phoenix next week on the way up to a workshop at Antelope Canyon.
I'll keep an eye on your August date. If calendars work out, and there are open seats, I might join in.
the comment about their being more critics than contributors is right on and points to w/pedia as being a magnet for borderline personalities and schizoid types.
I was fooling with it in my spare time and made a number of contributions. Most survived rather well because the subject matter was a bit out of the mainstream and the nuts took a while finding out about it.
This was a hobby and not an obsession and I let go of it when a psychotic editor styled user: pigswithwings trashed one of my articles because of copyright violations. Acutally, the material cited were from a published book to which I hold the copyright. while pigswithwings had been banned from wikipedia for a year at one time because of repeated psycho attacks, the administrators decided to humor him on this. They wanted to sign a waiver that would give wikipedia a releast to, among other things, use my copyrighted material for commercial purposes. This is fairly stupid since citing published books is supposed to be one of thei requirements an authors are not forbidden to cite their own material if published by someone else.
Another nut on wikipedia, now taking a vacation is Asams10 "I Am Asamuel." He would get into edit wars with other people and throw the f-word at them with regularity. He was blocked a few times but never for as long as pigsinshit. The administrators seemed to bend over backwards (forwards in the case of pigs) to keep anybody from upsetting asams
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