Is Wikipedia for Sale?
motherboard.vice.com
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PR also makes it into Wikipedia through sanctioned channels -- namely mass media citations which are considered "reliable sources", even though the content of the citation comes from a press release or helpful PR person.
This brings up an issue related to Wikipedia's policy that requires substantial third-party coverage for new articles. It is a flawed test for the importance of a subject.
Press coverage tends toward the sensational, visual, beautiful, controversial, current, language-specific, and easily explained. If a topic doesn't meet those criteria, it probably won't be covered by the press -- unless the topic in question has some well-connected PR firm or publicist pushing for it.
Another issue with press coverage is "established" media is contracting. There aren't as many editors assigning stories, or reporters crafting unbiased profiles of companies, organizations, topics and people. This has an significant, indirect impact on the types of topics that can be sourced according to Wikipedia's official rules.
1. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57514677-93/corruption-in-w...
I don't think it's best interpreted as a test for the importance of a subject, although I'll admit that some Wikipedians do view it that way, and some policy pages (especially older ones) seem to do so as well. To me the more defensible line is just that it's a test of whether there exist sufficient sources for an article with its information properly cited to be written at all. If there are halfway decent third-party sources, one can be written, of some kind of level of quality, transitively dependent on the quality of those sources. If there are no decent third-party sources at all, then there is no basis for writing an article, since Wikipedia articles are supposed to be verifiable, i.e. everything they claim should be cited to something other than Wikipedia itself (and not the personal knowledge of the Wikipedian who wrote the article, either).
I wrote a longish essay arguing this in some more detail, that the 'verifiability' guideline has basically swallowed the 'notability' guideline in practice. But this leaves a gap of things that are clearly notable, but lack good sources about them. In that case Wikipedia is stuck between not covering a notable subject (bad), or covering it in an article that isn't properly cited (also bad). http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...
The reverse case, where a not-really-notable subject is covered because there are sources, I feel is less bad. If the external world is writing about a subject, then imo it's fine that Wikipedia summarizes what they have said about it. At the very least, many such things (like celebrity missing-child cases and vaporware tech companies and whatnot) are meta-notable for the media attention.
Citation needed.
According to recent traffic reports,[1] some of the most popular biographies of living people recently are as follows:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorde (449,871 views) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai (362,657 views) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus (342,994 views)
Other popular bios include Barack Obama and Ted Cruz. Obviously popularity of these swings heavily toward recent news items in most cases.
Now, I wouldn't argue against the assertion that fans of these celebrities have written in some amazing fluff in these articles. But you'd really claim that these articles have been spun by PR people? Looking at the history and the content, I seriously doubt it.
Now, if you don't care for how Wikipedia's reliance on third party sources bends content... well, there's not much anyone can do to help you. That's a problem of the media environment Wikipedia exists in, and you haven't really proposed a viable alternative to relying on secondary source material. The way we correct for bias in sources is to use more sources, and be selective about ones we use, taking in to account the fact that some are highly unreliable.
In the end, if you have a problem with how Wikipedia relies on certain sources or what it says on certain articles, there's an easy solution: edit the damn thing. I don't particularly care about the Miley Cyrus article, but if I did, I'd be doing something about it. Wikipedia's best defense against fluff, spin, and PR influence is for smart people (like Hacker News denizens) to participate.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
TokenAdult makes a useful post to this thread about some of the problems of editing Wikipedia.
People pushing a POV really want that pov to appear, but other people just don't have the persistence to keep slogging through it.
It it were just that then Wikipedia would be fine. I mean, this is how the trade press has operated since time immemorial. Companies issue press releases, and the trade journals publish stuff.
But Wikipedia has a serious problem with "competing interests". One high-profile occasion was when a Wikipedia admin with much clout was employed by some New Religious Movement and then proceeded to edit in favour of his employer. Another was when a BP representative edited the article on his own company. Also: Gibraltarpedia and Monmouthpedia. On all three occasions a substantial fraction of Wikipedia editors found nothing wrong with this.
Science found out why you can't have this when medical researchers were funded by the tobacco industry and proceeded to publish their findings without being open where they got their money from. Wikipedia needs to wake up, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
A current example is the article on Rupert Sheldrake,[1] which has recently been subjected to vigorous edit-warring, perhaps as part of a publicity campaign by followers of Sheldrake. (I just saw a new book by Sheldrake at a library yesterday, and perhaps that book's publication set the timing for the editing push.) But there are examples like this all over Wikipedia, and, again, I think most casual users of Wikipedia massively underestimate the percentage of articles that are edited mostly in the interest of pushing a point of view for commercial or ideological reasons.
The article kindly submitted here says, "Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but only a carefully vetted few are promoted to admin status on the site." And that is laughable. Describing the current group of Wikipedia as "a carefully vetted few" does violence to the English language. Nothing has ever been careful about the process for checking the background of administrator candidates or choosing which candidates become administrators. There are some very, very, very good administrators on Wikipedia (just as there are many very helpful everyday volunteer editors), but there are other administrators who are power trips to maintain conduct contrary to Wikipedia policies for building a good, free online encyclopedia. The Vice article submitted here does, at least, link to an Atlantic article[2] reporting that Wikipedia's rate of bringing new administrators on board is slowing. At least some of the administrators have been caught taking payoffs for editing articles to publicize the persons making the payoffs, so it will take more than just the current administrators being more alert to fix this problem on Wikipedia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-char...
Do I want to continue listening to this chatter? Hell Yes. Nothing else comes even close in terms accessibility.
Will I stake my life on the information taken from wikipedia? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even cite it as a reference anywhere.
Much of the internal conflict within wiki exist because the power rests with the bureaucrats but they often lack the domain expertise to appreciate much less write the material people come to the site for. So whenever there's contention over content, it quickly turns into contention over people, and it's not hard to figure out who wins in such a conflict.
- provide content until an admin revert said content without explanation.
- try to engage discussion with said admin and get referred to a wp policy that actually states this admin was wrong.
- point the admin to his error and engage in wikipedia conflict resolution.
- said admin sneakily changes said policy to confirm his views, and unleash a small army of followers to intervene to support him in conflict resolution and revert my edits. get banned
- circumvent ban to protest, get banned for circumventing the ban. repeat until other admins take notices and discuss my case in secret channels.
- find out that this has happened before quite a few times, escalate to head of wikipedia. get dismissed.
- do as others did before, replace a specific high profile page with your story, revert the replace. now your story is there in wikipedia history for future investigators to find.
- never contribute anything to wikipedia ever again, use wikipedia as a better than google search engine for official websites until duckduckgo.
Wiki-lawyering (citing policies in purposefully cryptic and usually erroneous ways) is rampant, and all these problems exists because admins aren't appointed due to domain expertise (or any sort of expertise for that matter) but being in the good graces of other admins. This conflicts with most wiki content editors, who are often domain experts rather than bureaucrats/politicians. I ended up being banned for doing a reasonably popular reddit AMA about all this, and apparently violating the rule to never talk about wiki administrating outside of wiki.
In sum, the system only works because talented and intelligent people want to create encyclopedic material, and there generally aren't enough admins to stymy this.
You can find plenty of wikidrama at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Agent00f and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
I now run my own niche wiki, and it's shocking the number of people that come across it and say
"Oh man, I tried to contribute to wikipedia and ended up having all my stuff reverted and I got yelled and I kicked out. I'm never touching wikis again."
I personally think Wikipedia is giving open wikis a bad name, and I go out of my way to tell people my wiki is nothing like wikipedia in that regard.
translation: be a dick
> - find out that this has happened before quite a few times, escalate to head of wikipedia. get dismissed.
be a dick
> - do as others did before, replace a specific high profile page with your story, revert the replace. now your story is there in wikipedia history for future investigators to find.
be a massive dick
> - never contribute anything to wikipedia ever again, use wikipedia as a better than google search engine for official websites until duckduckgo.
be 5 years old
though in a dickish format, to be sure.
How can actions be sneaky when the history tab is just right there. If the policy got changed without discussion, revert it and open up a new subject on the talk page. If no one comments in a few days, then reach out to people through rfc or the village.
This is true for most community projects. Send a push request to the kernel and get denied by a gatekeeper? Talk to the community. Got a policy issue with debian? Talk to the community. Wikipedia is a community project, plain and simple. You got to interact with the community if you want to fix something.
> circumvent ban to protest, get banned for circumventing the ban.
Well yes. you do indeed get banned for circumventing a ban. If I get banned on HN, any circumvention of the ban will result in me get more banned. Same goes for any community, website with logins, and any social groups for that matter.
Wikipedia has a system for lifting bans. If that doesn't work, send a email to the foundation. If that too doesn't work, then ... blog about it. at some point, either the community agree with you or it don't.
Yup. I read a dicsussion recently around an article about Piers Anthony's obsession with pedophilia in his fiction, and a number of people were surprised none of the controversy around e.g. his scenes with 5 year olds havign sex with adults was mantioned on Wikipedia. It's buried behind a couple of layers of Talk pages of course, likewise the whitewashing of Eric Raymond's.
Wikipedia is easy for obsessive rule-lawyers to show the information they want to show.
Checking the wikipedia talk page of Piers Anthony, not a single editor is brining a source to the discussion. A google search gave a hasty reference in a respectable article (http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/amazon-defends-pulls-self-pub...), a newspaper columnists article (http://litreactor.com/columns/themes-of-pedophilia-in-the-wo...), and a bunch unverifiable blog posts.
So... its a fair chance to include such statement if someone used those sources to support such edit. Without any sources however, any such edit should not be on wikipedia. If you want to complain about whitewashing, please leave out discussions where a bunch of opinionated people are simply voicing their opinions but can't be bothered to do a simple google search.
However, the admin process is not exactly an easy one ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RFA_Guide). Added that administrators are viewed under harsher light regarding civility (they can and do get banned for actions that non-admins don't), and the refresh rate of new administrators is indeed slow.
> At least some of the administrators have been caught taking payoffs for editing articles to publicize the persons making the payoffs.
Did those administrators retain their administrator status? If so, then the community is working as intended. Just because HN successfully ban people for spamming on hacker news, it doesn't make HN a failed community. Why would wikipedia have failed because they too managed to ban people acting in contrast to the project?
I can understand why people are reluctant to run for adminship.
There are admittedly areas where that isn't true, articles with many readers but relatively little editor interest. Some tourist destinations are like that: lots of people may google for them, but there often isn't very much to write about them in good, cited sources. So they get relatively little legitimate editing, and lots of travel spam. I personally make it a point to systematically go through the pages on Greek islands and island villages once a year or so to clear out the hotel/car-rental/etc. spam.
It's pretty clear from this story and from things like the Morning277 sockpuppet investigation[1] that the manual style of investigation to so time consuming and slow that it limits the ability of Wikipedia to fix problems like this. While tools like CheckUser[2] help, it seems likely that a lot more of the "legwork" associated with the investigation could also be automated.
At the core, much of the work is network analysis, and that is something computers are better at than humans.
[1] http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/wikipedia-sockpuppet-inves...
One related piece of infrastructure is the automated tagging of edits. There are already several tags automatically applied to edits with a suspected conflict of interest regarding linking or autobiographies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Tags).
So in other words, deliberate falsehoods or manipulation by PR people or paid agents that hide their affiliation with a company is already a ToU violation.
It's plausible enough that efforts by Wiki PR and similar firms are growing, but the article didn't offer any evidence or attribute claims like "In a few years, a significant percentage of Wikipedia’s content could be spam." Given that Wiki PR seems to have had little success getting articles reinstated, it may be that the problem will be held at bay now that Wikipedia contributors have been alerted.
That's exactly my point. From the article, we don't know if there are enough companies doing this to pose a serious threat to Wikipedia, yet it suggests there is.
PR people could publicly register themselves as such and, in exchange for extra scrutiny, have a chance to prove themselves as ethical and willing to follow the rules. These people would then build a reputation as very valuable "white hats", willing to help people and companies with their Wikipedia page without compromising the integrity of the encyclopedia.
They wouldn't be able to guarantee "we'll make sure you look good on Wikipedia", but then nobody can really guarantee that anyway. Instead, they could offer to ensure the page is as unbiased as possible, help protect it from vandalism, and generally improve its quality and detail.
This could lead to a large and very motivated base of editors with a significant personal and financial incentive to do the right thing (or lose their white hat status) and sabotage the financial incentives that currently motivate the black hat firms.
It's running on some pages on English Wikipedia. I'd love to see it rolled out to a lot more pages. On some language versions of Wikipedia, it's running on all pages: Polish, for instance.