Wikipedia Is Far Far Worse Than I'd Thought

Long time readers will know I've got a big problem with Wikipedia and the influence it has on what people think they're thinking.   The problem starts with there being no ultimate quality control of the content found at Wikipedia.  In lieu of a general editorship there is the superstitious belief that having an "open editing" regime in which people contending conflicting ideas will fight it out in editing struggles and war and, magically, the right idea will prevail.  Of course, if you happen to consult an article while it asserts patent nonsense or intentional slander, libel, lies or malicious pranking,  you may never come back and check to see where the battle for that topic comes out in the end.  That is if there is any such thing as a final product at Wikipedia, any final determination as to what is reliable information on that topic.

In a very serious issue raised in  my last post on the topic, I noted how, after I found out about organized efforts to twist Wikipedia entries to suit a specific ideology, the first thing I thought of was that neo-Nazis and their allies were bound to take advantage of that.  And it turns out that they do know about it but nothing is apparently being done about it.
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Snježana Koren, a historian at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, has judged the disputed articles as “biased and malicious, partly even illiterate”. She further added that “These are the types of articles you can find on the pages of fringe organizations and movements, but there should be no place for that on Wikipedia”, expressing doubts on the ability of its authors to distinguish good from evil.

Although the situation was discussed at length on Jimmy Wales’ talk page, there seems to be little progress in remedying it.

Extreme right-wing views can apparently be found even among the Wikimedia Foundation’s own staff. Its Education Program Consultant for the Arab World, Faris El-Gwely, sports a little green userbox with a black and white picture of Adolf Hitler on his user page in the Arabic Wikipedia. The Arabic text next to that image reads, “This user respects Adolf Hitler”.

This user respects Adolf Hitler
(هذا المستخدم يحترم أدولف هتلر).

Alerted to this fact by discussions in the German Wikipedia, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager LiAnna Davis commented there on September 17, 2013: “The comments posted in this discussion have brought this issue to our attention, and we are looking into the situation.” Three weeks later, the Hitler userbox on Faris El-Gwely’s Arabic user page is as proudly displayed as ever.

If anyone does not have an enormous problem with that situation which must be seen as definitively discrediting of any entity which tolerates it,  you are part of the problem.

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I came across Wikipediocracy, on which that piece is found, it has some of the most developed criticism of Wikipedia, its content, its (non)methodology and its establishement, both formal and de facto.   And, due to the gross irresponsibility of its formal establishment - Jimmy Wales et al. sometimes the de facto establishment on any one topic is in the hands of 14-year-olds (of all ages) with absolutely no real credibility to make assertions about it and the ability to mob the topic driving out people with the educational and professional expertise to actually speak authoritatively on the topic.

What makes all of this possible, is the anonymity built into the method by which Wikipedia is generated and "edited". The great lesson that the mess of Wikipedia teaches is that it really matters whether or not someone is willing to put their name, their identity, their credibility and their professional standing on the line by owning up to what they put out there. Another thing is that it is dangerous to not distinguish between sources of information which are backed up by the chance a serious, informed scholar takes when they write publicly and the risk-free act of posting something anonymously. One is serious scholarship with a rational presumption of responsibility, the other is blogging, if not tweeting.

In article after article, with ample citation and documentation, Wikipediocracy shows how dangerous Wikipedia, which is very likely to come up at the top of the page in any web search, potentially is.  It documents how irresponsible it was to come up with its (non)process for the generation and development of Wikipedia is, and, with a decade of experience of what that process produces, how grotesquely irresponsible it is to tolerate its sometimes good, sometimes neutral and often malignant influence on thinking can be.

In every way, the failed Wikipedia experiment exposes the problems of a powerful entity for which no identified people exercise responsibility.   The idea that Wikipedia's processes would come out any other way is pure superstition that some some unseen force apart from actual human intention is produced when an allegedly neutral situation is set up.  Where that force is supposed to come from, fully equipped with infallible or at least reliable judgement, needs to be asked.   It is the same superstition that pretends that an "unseen hand" is produced from a market economy, which posses wisdom and insight and produces the "right result" and the superstition that the truth will arise whenever there is a theoretical possibility of "more speech" answering the evil intentions of massive ideological lies.   The fact is that there is no such benevolent force created as a byproduct of setting up human systems.  The experience of their creation has shown that it is far more likely that bad money will drive out the good, that lies will travel around the world while the truth is getting its shoes on and that a swarming bunch of 14-year-olds will drown out and drive out the most well informed and idealistic of PhDs.

For more on how bad things are,  read about Jimmy Wales' impotent gesture of setting up a "Bright Line" to drive out trolls hired to write Wikipedia entries on behalf of companies and corporations, a rule with no enforcement mechanism but the same kind of "honors system" that so notably has not worked for Wikipedia.   Such a system has allowed  people to "edit" and write their own entries and others, if you could imagine such a thing occurring to people.

That last sentence was sarcasm.  For people who were surprised to discover that possibility.   Jimmy et al, a clue.  Honor only works when the person is honorable. So many aren't.  And, reviewing your behavior, I don't have any confidence that includes you.  Wikipedia and those who could fix it but won't deserve to be thoroughly and universally discredited.  They are among the more irresponsible people in the wreckage of our intellectual life.

Update:  This article about Jimmy Wales' and Wiki's relationship to the Stalinist dictatorship in Kazakhstan is stunning.

Note that this openly states that the National Academy of an authoritarian regime provides a “content and quality review process” in the Kazakh Wikipedia, and that two government ministries are involved in organising the work.

According to an interview given to the Harvard Crimson in October 2012, WikiBilim currently has 25 full-time employees, who have been busy transferring the content of the Kazakh state-published national encyclopedia and other state-published reference works into the Kazakh Wikipedia.

But what about other contributors who may believe in Wales’ vision of anonymous crowdsourcing? Kazakhstan’s government clearly has the technological and financial means to scrutinise volunteers’ contributions to the Kazakh Wikipedia for political correctness, and to identify the authors. What if they cite Western sources describing Nazarbaev as a dictator? Wikipedians have voiced concerns that Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation may be blissfully unaware just how much risk Wikipedia contributors in Kazakhstan who do not toe the party line might be exposed to if they contribute material to Wikipedia that cites foreign sources.

Yet Wales bestowed the "Wikipedian of the Year" on Rauan Kenzhekhanuly, the founder of WikiBilim.  For anyone who wants an idea of how serious he is about his "method".

This alone would discredit most people and organizations and it is only one aspect of the problem with Wikipedia and its establishement.