An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia

by smacktoward • 8 years ago

41 29 8 years ago

newyorker.com

Swizec• 8 years ago

I’m dying to know, were they able to use this New Yorker article as a secondary source and fix the Wikipedia entry?

OscarCunningham2• 8 years ago

It appears so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain

Roth described in a 2012 piece for The New Yorker how his novel was inspired by an event in the life of his friend Melvin Tumin, a "professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years". Tumin was subject to a "witch hunt" but was ultimately found blameless in a matter involving use of allegedly racial language concerning two African American students.

...

In the reviews of the book in both the daily and the Sunday New York Times in 2000, Kakutani and Lorrie Moore suggested that the central character of Coleman Silk might have been inspired by Anatole Broyard, a well-known New York literary editor of the Times. Other writers in the academic and mainstream press made the same suggestion. After Broyard's death in 1990, it had been revealed that he racially passed during his many years employed as a critic at The New York Times. He was of Louisiana Creole ancestry. However, Roth himself has stated that he had not known of Broyard's ancestry when he started writing the book and only learned of it months later.

JorgeGT• 8 years ago

Which proves that despite the naysayers it's actually easy to fix mistakes in Wikipedia: you just need to become a quintessential American novelist and then have the New Yorker publish your letters to that effect.

chris_wot• 8 years ago

That's kind of hilarious, given that it's not a secondary source but a primary source because it was written by Roth.

It really is absurd.

magpi3• 8 years ago

I wonder if a blog entry by Roth would have sufficed as a secondary source. It probably would have. They need something to point to after all. It can't just anecdotally be noted that a wikipedia editor received an email from the author.

One solution could be to give people forums on Wikipedia to state their perspectives, which would then become source material for articles. Assuming there is some way to verify their identities, this could be a way for famous people to participate in their wikipedia entries without editing the entries themselves.

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

It can't just anecdotally be noted that a wikipedia editor received an email from the author.

For a work of fiction, it absolutely should. Who knows more about a character in a fictional story than the person who made up the character?

Should we purge everything from the record that Douglas Adams ever said about Arthur Dent?

If Wikipedia was around in the 1500's, the entry on Shakespeare would be almost entirely based on the published criticism of Christopher Marlowe, and not on what Shakespeare, himself, said about his works. And the world would be much poorer for it.

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

Things like this are the reason I stopped contributing to Wikipedia. People with no knowledge or expertise are able to change facts at will, maliciously or otherwise.

Someone once compared looking things up on Wikipedia to asking a question of ten random strangers at a bus stop. I think it's gotten much worse since then.

smsm42• 8 years ago

People with knowledge or expertise are able to change them too. It's a collaborative effort. It's not perfect. Rehashing this fact of imperfection again and again is mostly useless activity. But considering how much information there is in Wikipedia, and how good it is in general - and excepting publicized outliers and targeted sabotage efforts, it's pretty good - I think you could do much worse than asking these particular strangers.

Of course, I understand that each time you need to find out some piece of information, you conduct your own thorough and independent research. If you need to know about the life of Richard III of England, or when Joseph Tito was born, or how many noun cases there are in Finnish, or what was the Cranbrook Colony - you go to the nearest University library, find and read all the books on the subject that are there, then proceed to update with more up-to-date research papers on the subject and conclude it with personally verifying the facts with leading living authorities on the subject (which stand by being called on by you and supply with the data you need). Other people don't have time for this, so they use Wikipedia for the same, and are OK with a tiny risk of getting one of the facts wrong in tiny number of cases. I don't think it's so terrible.

ajross2• 8 years ago

Things like this are the reason I stopped contributing to Wikipedia. People with no knowledge or expertise are able to change facts at will, maliciously or otherwise.

Have you stopped reading Wikipedia though? That seems like the real test. Who cares if you "contribute"? Is it your go-to source for random research or is it not? It is for me. If it's not for you, then what is?

"Things like this" are just evidence that encyclopedias are not reliable sources for items[1] involving controversy or interpretation. They never have been and they never will be. That's what analysis is for. The job of the encyclopedia, if it's done right, is just to document the existence of an argument and the lack of consensus (and in the modern world link to the relevant conflicting sources). And... it seems like Wikipedia did its job here?

[1] Like the apparrently apocryphal inspiration for The Human Stain -- honestly this seems like a genuine item of controversy here. Artists are not, in general, considered authoritative sources for their own works and for good reason. History is filled with great works where the author lied about them a little.

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

Have you stopped reading Wikipedia though?

Almost entirely, yes. The only thing I use it for now is looking up wether certain celebrities are alive or dead.

Who cares if you "contribute"?

Wikipedia should care when anyone with above average knowledge of a certain field is turned away. The result is people filling those gaps with less-accurate information.

My point is that if I've given up contributing to Wikipedia, then it's not a stretch to think that people even better/smarter than me have, as well. Wikipedia's arrogance and other flaws are making it a repository of mediocre information, not the best available information. Which brings us back to the bus stop analogy.

Artists are not, in general, considered authoritative sources for their own works and for good reason

You should tell that to whomever it is that organizes the hundreds of thousands of guest lectures from artists that are held around the world each year.

skookumchuck• 8 years ago

A large fraction of accepted knowledge about history and events is simply false. Just read a newspaper account about an event you have personal knowledge about. Sloppiness, inaccuracy, omission of crucial facts, bias, fabrications, etc., are commonplace.

It's why historians continuously churn out new books on the same topics. How many biographies of Abe Lincoln are there? I get 10,000+ hits on "Lincoln Biography" on Amazon :-)

maboo• 8 years ago

This is why Everipedia has "Verified Accounts" - so that Roth can have his say on the wiki page, and people know it's coming from him...

One of, like, 100 Wikipedia problems that Everipedia solves, simply by mimicking other, more modern websites like instagram/twitter.

forapurpose2• 8 years ago

Everipedia seems far less reliable than even Wikipedia (which I don't trust). Based on what I read on their website, it's a mix of fake information and paid-for propaganda. Some excerpts from their website (EDIT: from last December, maybe the text has changed since then):

* Header for their footnotes sections: All information for ... [this topics's] wiki comes from the below links. Any source is valid, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Pictures, videos, biodata, and files relating to Everipedia are also acceptable encyclopedic sources.

* Celebrities have verified accounts. Not only does this allow them to have conversations with their fans on their own page, but they can also contribute information to their own pages... without having to rely on secondary sources! [Yes, they really used an exclamation point!]

* The Premium Service they offer to the subjects of pages (e.g., to celebrities and companies, not to users): Features Offered / - Verified Page and Account / - In-house Editors write the content / - No ads / - 24/7 Prioritized customer support / - Social Media Promotion / - Link to Website of Your Choice

neilk2• 8 years ago

Wikipedia is not the sum of all knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. Many people seem confused about what that means.

Primary source: I say $foo! (blog, YouTube, opinion piece)

Secondary source: neilk said $foo. (The New Yorker)

Tertiary source: Reliable, fact-checked publications, such as The New Yorker, have said that neilk said $foo. (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia is a tertiary source. At best WP represents the range of viewpoints that learned people have. If many published articles in reputable outlets give credence to something false, and there's no good refutation in print, there's not much that Wikipedians can do.

Roth always had an option, one that he seems unaware of. There is an exception for primary sources for exactly this sort of thing.[1]. All he had to do was publish a blog post or a tweet or have his publishers do so for him.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...

scrollaway• 8 years ago

Wikipedia probably falls more in the secondary source category.

In fact, I'm quite certain it does. If you think about the numbers between the amount of information and citations on wikipedia, vs. the amount of information that is on "reliable, fact-checked publications", it becomes obvious that there is an immense amount of first-party information and citations.

sjwright• 8 years ago

The vast majority of citations are secondary sources.

neilk2• 8 years ago

Citation needed.

ubernostrum3• 8 years ago

Wikipedia is not the sum of all knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. Many people seem confused about what that means.

Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia we find:

Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic covered encyclopedically in one article.

beefsack• 8 years ago

That's not a useful comparison, "sum of all knowledge" isn't the same as "summary".

tomtimtall• 8 years ago

People, the author included seem to think it’s wrong in some way that the author is not just assumed to be an absolute authority on his work, though I think it’s quite appropriate and that this example illustrates exactly why you would want the author to provide his oppinion and statements in a manor that is referencable.

If he had been allowed to simple change the page at will, then he could at any time in the futur decide to change the statement after the fact of what the inspiration was, as it stands now even if he change me his mind the New Yorker story can be referenced as a fact that he at that time made these claims.

JdeBP2• 8 years ago

Of the several prior discussions, the one at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4678352 is definitely worth reading.

An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

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