A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-10-31/Opinion

by akolbe • 5 years ago

219 148 5 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

akolbe18• 5 years ago

It should be noted that in the Discovery Channel broadcast, the picture of the Florida Nathaniel White was shown only very briefly—long enough to recognize the man if you knew him well, but probably not long enough to memorize his face if you didn't. So in a sense the Wikipedia page was possibly more harmful to him than the original TV content, bearing in mind that thousands of people looked Nathaniel White up on Wikipedia each time the program aired. Overall, more than 125,000 people viewed the Wikipedia article while it showed the wrong image. The spikes correspond to days when the program aired:

https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&pl...

akolbe18• 5 years ago

During the past few days, the Google Knowledge Graph panel shown in searches for Nathanial White serial killer seems to have been cleaned up. While a week ago it showed multiple instances of the wrong picture, today it only shows a single picture of the actual perpetrator being arrested. The same is not true for image searches, however, which continue to be completely dominated by pictures of the Florida man who's completely innocent of these crimes.

daanlo• 5 years ago

I am sure that the wikipedia entry was very harmful. E.g. I regularly google the name of people that I will have a meeting with (as preparation) or trying to find the linkedin profile. I am sure many HR departments do this as well.

In this case it would have been something like: 1) google name 2) oh. The applicant has the same name as a serial killer 3) click on wikipedia article 4) OMG 5) the applicant being significantly less likely to receive an offer

capableweb2• 5 years ago

In this case it would have been something like: 1) google name 2) oh. The applicant has the same name as a serial killer 3) click on wikipedia article 4) OMG 5) the applicant being significantly less likely to receive an offer

I'd follow the same process if it was a high-value hire. But in this process, if I'd discover that it seems to be a serial killer, I think I would at least reach out and ask if this is the same person, even if the pictures seems to match. Seems unlikely that a known serial killer would apply to any jobs I usually offer, so making sure it's the same person is surely something you'd do first.

fortran773• 5 years ago

Exactly. This is already a serious problem without Wikipedia giving wrong information a stamp of credibility.

There's a man with the exact same name as mine (not a common one) and the exact same age who is a disbarred attorney in Arizona. More than once I've been asked by a prospective client if I ever was an attorney even though it's not on my C.V. (I would love to find a way to put these wanna-be Sherlock Holmeses who don't know how to google in their places!)

Imagine if I had a Wikipedia page and the names got conflated. I'd never be able to unwind that.

jefftk• 5 years ago

While in the TV broadcast the picture was shown only briefly, it sounds like they also published an article online, which was the Wikipedia editor's source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

maxerickson• 5 years ago

It seems an appropriate remedy for Discovery would include frequent airing of programming making it clear what the killer looked like, and perhaps covering similar media mistakes (with an eye towards showing the correct individuals over and over, never showing the misidentified people).

Playing it a lot would make it more likely that the people that saw the misinformation would see the correction.

bsenftner• 5 years ago

The validity of the web is a joke.

vadfa• 5 years ago

Interesting, I did not know Wikimedia was politically aligned. If there's an organisation that I wouldn't like to be politically aligned, it would be an encyclopedia. But hey, here we are; enjoy the ride.

maweki2• 5 years ago

There is no objective truth. Especially not for every author and every topic. Even when trying to represent controversy, the problem of false balance is quite real.

Maybe we differ on the definition of "political alignment", but there is no way that an entity has no angle.

yesenadam• 5 years ago

(Sorry to slightly derail the topic, but I think this is an important point.)

There is no objective truth.

And yet you say that like you think it's the (objective) truth. Or is that just your opinion, or just true for you, etc? I don't think it makes any sense to deny objective truth—it's self-contradictory. When you hear "There is no objective truth", ask "Is that true?". (At least you immediately backpedalled with "Especially for..")

I take your point I think—e.g. more than once on HN I've criticized the idea some people have of starting a facts-only objective 'unbiased' news service as totally implausible and naïve. But to deny that anything is or can be true seems rather to throw the baby out with bathwater.

mschuster912• 5 years ago

If there's an organisation that I wouldn't like to be politically aligned, it would be an encyclopedia. But hey, here we are; enjoy the ride.

You forget that Wikipedia is already biased and has been for years despite many complaints (some of which have been featured on HN over the time):

- the utter majority of its authors in the English and German are young white males, which has led to numerous cases of "toxic culture"/"hostility to newcomers" issues as well as complaints of bias in deletion requests such as for female authors vs male authors.

- the entire Balkan region is, and I say this as a half-Croat, a shitshow everywhere. Nationalists of all kinds, from the individual ethnicities to "Grand Yugoslavia" Titoists, continue past wars in the online world, with both sides resorting to whitewashing of atrocities (Ustasa on the Croatian Nationalist side, Srebrenica on the Serbian side), fake news and other propaganda.

An organization such as Wikipedia can only thrive wenn all people of this world are represented by it, and yes, that includes taking a stance on societal structural discrimination.

elliekelly3• 5 years ago

Wikipedia needs to implement editor rotation the way CPAs are only permitted to audit a public company so many times before another firm must take over the audit. It keeps things from getting too cozy. Reddit should probably implement the same policy with mods for the larger subs.

jfax• 5 years ago

The idea of a Free encyclopedia and knowledge for all humanity is a political aim in itself.

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

I think you are responding to this passage from the article?

The Wikimedia Foundation has in the recent past cited the fate of George Floyd and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests as its inspiration for the Knowledge Equity Fund, a $4.5 million fund set up last year to support racial equity initiatives outside the Wikimedia movement. It has declared "We stand for racial justice"…

Taking a step back, I wonder what things count as a "political alignment". Like, in general. Is, say, being "against murder" a poltical alignment? Or being for "being kind to people"? Probably not.

So, back to this passage, what aspects strike you as a "political alignment", and why? Is being against racism a "political alignment", or perhaps it becomes so when expressed with the term "racial justice"?

Are all "moral values" also "political alignments", are these things the same or different? I think they are not quite the same, although probably have overlap. And people can and do certainly disagree on moral values too. But I don't think we would suggest people, including people working on an encyclopedia, either can or should be without "moral values". Where is the boundary at which it becomes a "political alignment"?

One obvious one to me, and what I first think of when I hear "political alignment", is supporting a particular political party or candidate or other electoral cause. I don't think wikipedia does that, and generally I don't think it should.

(Although even here... supporting or opposing the literal 1930s German Nazi Party, in the 1930s, would I suppose, actually indeed be a "political alignment", but... now that makes me think I wouldn't always want to put "political alignment" off the table either. It may be impossible to act morally in the world without some political alignment... but I still don't want wikipedia supporting particular US parties or candidates -- mainly because it would put into question the fairness or truth-goals of it's articles. I'm honestly not sure where the line is.)

veltas3• 5 years ago

Yes, I have found that being "against murder" is political and a matter of political alignment. Especially since the definition of what is murder, or who is protected by murder laws, and the punishments for murder are all controversial. For example, if you believe that fetuses are living humans then you would tend to argue that arguing against abortion was arguing against murder. Where you stand on the death penalty could make you believe the state murders, or the state does not seriously punish murderers.

Similarly, whether or not you think specific instances of deaths at the hands of police are murder is political. For example, the nature of acceptable violence in self-defense is controversial (in the US particularly), and the acceptable nature of force used by police is controversial too.

And the brand of "Black Lives Matter" does not exist in a vacuum, it been used over a number of years, by many different people, and has become associated (whether these are 'core tenets' or potentially misattributed) with a number of controversial stances, for example anarchist principles, support of disorder, vandalism, violence, revolution, etc. This might be surprising to some, but it is familiar to others. If someone criticizes or dislikes the movement with that context, then are they necessarily dismissive of police brutality against blacks, do they feel blacks don't deserve the same safety as others?

5560675260• 5 years ago

I am unclear on where a line should be drawn (or would at least have to do a lot of introspection to figure it out). But any push for equity? From my perspective it's very much outside of scope of "being kind to people" and in the political/controversial territory. Putting any narrowing term before "justice" is a political move and explicitly not "against racism".

Ekaros3• 5 years ago

How isn't Wikipedia considered a publisher? I can understand that Twitter or Facebook or Youtube not be one. But Wikipedia? It is clearly publishing. And there are community editors. It is not social media.

capableweb2• 5 years ago

It's mentioned in the very top of the article, in the green box:

In its order granting the Wikimedia Foundation's motion to dismiss, the court affirmed that "interactive computer service providers" such as the Foundation generally cannot be held liable for third-party content like Wikipedia articles and photographs. ... the plaintiff argued that the Foundation should be treated like a traditional offline publisher and held responsible as though it were vetting all posts made to the sites it hosts, despite the fact that it does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects. The court rejected this argument because it directly conflicts with Section 230 ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

Wikipedia (nor Twitter, Facebook or YouTube) reviews content _before_ it's made available online, they only review content afterwards. That being one of the major differences between providing 3rd party content and "publishing".

akolbe18• 5 years ago

Wouldn't it be more correct to say that they (I mean the Wikimedia Foundation in this case, as the operator of the Wikipedia platform) don't review content at all?

makomk• 5 years ago

Section 230 is extremely broad and powerful. The whole point of it is to allow websites full immunity from legal action over the content of their website regardless of how much editorial control they exercise over it, so long as they're not the ones writing the actual words or posting the actual pictures. They can use their power to shape what is and isn't allowed to be said into a chosen narrative and still be immune from legal action over that narrative. It's just that any criticism of this is outside the realm of mainstream discourse, seemingly because one of the major ways in which websites have used that responsibility-free narrative shaping power recently is against Donald Trump and so questioning Section 230 is associated with Trump support.

akolbe18• 5 years ago

Actually, Democrats have criticised Section 230 as well. They complain that websites use Section 230 as a shield in order not to do any moderation of hate speech and the like at all. Nancy Pelosi e.g. has called Section 230 a “gift” to tech companies “that could be removed.” See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/technology/section-230-ha...

blululu• 5 years ago

Calls to end section 230 have come from across the isle. Note that without section 230 Twitter could have been sued for allowing Trump to post some of the things he wrote over the past 5 years. I recall a New York Times oped from last summer that advocated for such a policy. The trouble is government regulations of speech generally have serious implications, and every attempt to limit free speech struggles to replace it with anything better. Chesterton’s fence comes to mind here. The motivation for section 230 is to let the Internet operate as a publishing medium for small voices. Free speech isn’t always pretty. A more general curtailment of the law would have chilling effects that would likely hit small/medium businesses more than Facebook or Twitter which already have content moderation policies.

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

akolbe18• 5 years ago

It's because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

In this case, the Wikimedia Foundation (which owns Wikipedia) is the "provider ... of an interactive computer service".

The "information content provider" is the individual user of Wikipedia who writes or edits an article—usually doing so under a pseudonym. (They're all unpaid volunteers—anyone can click "Edit" at any time and add something to a Wikipedia article.)

For better and worse, this is the legal situation in the US.

Ekaros3• 5 years ago

One makes wonder. If someone was to make a meta publisher of other publishers, even anonymous ones they could monetize content that is libellous? And they couldn't be punished for the act?

elliekelly3• 5 years ago

In theory Mr. White could sue the individual wikipedia contributor rather than wikipedia themselves. I tend to agree with GP, though. There is a fundamental difference between a “content provider” who is attributing content to themselves (as on social media platforms) vs a content provider whose content is attributed to the interactive computer service.

Surely if @Jack sent a defamatory tweet both he and Twitter could be held responsible. He’s both a user and an agent of Twitter. I think Wikipedia contributors are both users and agents in the same way.

mjw1007• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Biographies_of_... describes the process changes WP are making in response.

That seems to amount to adding the following paragraph to their policies:

« Any police photograph used to imply that the person depicted was charged with or convicted of a specific crime must be sourced to a top-quality reliable source with a widely acknowledged reputation for fact-checking and accuracy that links the relevant image to the specific incident or crime in question. »

That seems like an improvement to me, though it would be nice to also see an announcement that the Wikimedia Foundation are going to use some of their large piles of cash to pay someone to check that all their existing articles follow the new rule.

akolbe18• 5 years ago

Yes, that would be good, but knowing the Wikimedia Foundation I am quite certain that it will not happen. And volunteers won't do it either.

mabbo• 5 years ago

I feel like Wikipedia could take some small steps to make amends to Mr White.

Now that all of this has happened, it feels like he is now a minor pubic figure worthy of his own wiki page. Something like "Nathaniel White (not serial killer)" with an article describing the mistake. Ask a newspaper to do a small article about it, interviewing him, and taking a really nice photo of him- which can go on the wiki page.

Yes, it would probably be the exact kind of page that Wikipedia would take down saying this person isn't important enough. But they can choose when and how those rules apply. Give him five years with it up, protected from take down.

It doesn't make up for the problem, but it is something they can do, at no cost to anyone, and it would make a difference. A small amount of compassion can matter.

akolbe18• 5 years ago

I get where you're coming from. As of now the only press article about this is this little piece in the Tallahassee Democrat that may have led to the Wikipedia image being removed:

https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-r...

Nobody else has written about it.

I suspect though Mr. White might possibly prefer to go back to his private life and never hear about Wikipedia again.

If Wikipedia ever covers this, it had perhaps best be in an article about Wikipedia controversies (which could be linked from the Nathaniel White article).

mojomark• 5 years ago

Nobody else has written about it.
I suspect though Mr. White might possibly prefer to go back to his private life and never hear about Wikipedia again.

Except that the image was used in a Discovery channel doc on the killer - which isn't an easily fixable Wiki. No idea if Discovery Channel nixed this episode, or clawed back any distributions of this content from consumers. The focus of the article was on Wikipedia errors, which is undoubtedly to blame for the onset of the issue (albeit now "corrected" with a.link to the Tallahassee article - further subtly perpetuating), but the primary issue of perpetuation appears to be the fault of Discovery Channel's journalistic negligence.

1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8358280/

CRConrad6• 5 years ago

If Wikipedia ever covers this, it had perhaps best be in an article about Wikipedia controversies

Well, judging from TFA and a The Register link posted in this discussion, I think I know of someone who knows how to write such articles... ;-)

ignoramous• 5 years ago

Ask a newspaper to do a small article about it, interviewing him

Per general notability guidelines, a brief article isn't likely to help a case for a separate wiki page [0]. Per low-key, may be there's a case to be made [1], though there's also concerns around advocacy [2].

and taking a really nice photo of him- which can go on the wiki page.

To get a photo on wikimedia you own, upload it any where (preferably flickr / straight up on commons.wikimedia) and release it under a wikimedia-compatible license [Ex A]

It doesn't make up for the problem, but it is something they can do, at no cost to anyone, and it would make a difference.

Wikipedia has its warts, and the community is pretty open about what it means to have an article on there and why it may not be the best thing for anyone that's famous [3]. Wikipedia favours verifiability over truth [4], and is not bothered with incorrect information [5], because someone somewhere ought to eventually correct it [6].

(And of course, I am wiki-lawyering at this point [7])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:GNG

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LOWKEY

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SOAPBOX

[Ex A] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bradfitz-sunglasses....

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:FAMOUS

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VNT

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IMPERFECT

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LAWYER

tylermenezes• 5 years ago

I think it'd be more likely to be "The Nathaniel White Incident" vs a biography but yeah I broadly agree.

visarga3• 5 years ago

because someone somewhere ought to eventually correct it

After what they did to this man, they should be that someone. Never had a lower opinion on Wikipedia than today.

skhr0680• 5 years ago

People need to stop blindly trusting Wikipedia. I have seen sourced facts that failed a sniff test, and checking the source the article contradicted the source it linked to, and that’s only the times I noticed. Couple that with the amount of other sites and media that copy off Wikipedia (citogenesis) and BS spreads like wildfire.

“Why do you still use Wikipedia?” because the good parts are a great human achievement and even the OK parts can be adequate as a broad outline of a topic.

“Why don’t you just fix it?” I try, but it’s hard when I have a busy day and my edit will be reverted within minutes by a full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.

akolbe18• 5 years ago

Absolutely right. What doesn't help here is when the Wikimedia PR machine minimizes and whitewashes problems, as it did in the Wikimedia blog post about this incident, making everyone think that Wikipedia is of uniformly stellar quality, better than Britannica and all the rest of it ... When the reality is that Wikipedia quality can and does vary tremendously from one article to the next, even from one paragraph to the next, and reader caution is always indicated. (For six or seven years, this specific article contained two different birth dates—one in the infobox, one in the lead paragraph. Nobody noticed or cared. Then someone picked up on the discrepancy and made both dates the same—wrong.)

caseysoftware• 5 years ago

Wikipedia is steadily trending towards Gell Man Amnesia at scale for any remotely contentious topic.

notriddle• 5 years ago

Considering how Wikipedia considers newspapers to be reliable sources, this should be expected.

blondin• 5 years ago

this is concerning.

i can't say we can predict where all this is going or what will come out of this case. but wikipedia seems to have too much power over what constitute the "truth".

i recently read a book on cognitive science that has most of their sources from wikipedia.

rtpg2• 5 years ago

I mean your criticism in the abstract applies to basically any source. The argument is very general and applies to everything out there!

Hell, for contentious articles given you have antagonistic co-authors it’s more likely to be fact checked than in the Wapo “2 Pinocchios” echo chamber.

Words are written by people…

DenverCoder992• 5 years ago

It's not just that Wikipedia is vulnerable to human error just like anything else, it seems to be driven by activists. Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's co-founders, has been trying to warn people that his own creation has been bastardized.

I still use Wikipedia for pure STEM subjects, but beyond that, I wouldn't trust it.

akolbe18• 5 years ago

The way Wikipedia generates its content though is susceptible to particular problems that traditional sources did not have. Multiple people—all differing in age (from 7 to 100+), educational status and subject matter knowledge—all editing the same article, often without reading all the parts of it that the others have written.

The amount of scrutiny individual Wikipedia articles receive differs vastly–the article on a top politician or a top science topic like a major planet will have hundreds of eagle-eyed watchers, while more obscure articles like the one discussed here may not be watched at all, and then anything goes. (This article for example had two different birth dates for six years, and then someone made them consistent—both wrong!)

Here are some more examples of the sorts of errors that are specific to a crowd-sourced work like Wikipedia:

https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...

Few if any of these—like intentional hoaxes and undetected vandalism or a completely ignorant writer merely pretending to know a topic, by copying another text and then changing the name of one chemical substance in it to make it sound like the text was written about this substance—could or would have occurred in the traditional process of writing a reference work.

Traditional works have different problems, of course—instant obsolescence being one of them—and even the biggest ones have a far smaller scope than Wikipedia. But readers should bear in mind just how the Wikipedia sausage is made. Many seem to somehow believe that the Wikipedia process is, in terms of the results it produces, just like an orderly process with a professional writer and editors and fact checkers that try to verify everything before publication. That is not how crowdsourcing works.

Retric• 5 years ago

Wikipedia avoids original research which in practice severely limits it’s accuracy. At best it’s an imperfect copy of whatever the original source was before adding its own slant and errors.

WhyNotHugo• 5 years ago

“Why do you still use Wikipedia?”

It has mistakes, just like any other human-made source of knowledge too.

it's not like we have a god-given encyclopedia which is known to be completely right. I can use Google, DDG, or the library instead of wikipedia, and there's also chances that the sources there are mistaken or outdated too.

superdisk• 5 years ago

full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.

So absolutely true. These people are insufferable. Any time I've made a non-trivial edit to Wikipedia I usually end up clashing with these people. It really sucks because a lot of the time, they don't argue in good faith, and throw every rule in the book at you to get their way, while hiding behind a facade of impartial rule-abiding.

So frustrating, and has drastically lowered my confidence in Wikipedia.

Also, it's fun to note the "lords" of various general topics. Find an article about a person in the right-wing political sphere and you're very likely to find the same small set of "Wikipedian" toadies ruling over it with an iron fist. I'm sure the same goes for many other topics that aren't about politics.

irrational• 5 years ago

This has been my experience also. These people get a mediocum of power and let it go to their heads.

ratww• 5 years ago

It’s not even just controversial topics or politics: people try to control the pettiest things. I used to be active there, and it was a struggle to add “timelines” of band members to some old rock acts even though it was already in place in most of the site, because a classic-rock fan disliked them. There is also one specific user who gets to pick who is metal and who isn’t, and reverts addition to lists for bands who aren’t “metal enough” for him like Rammstein or Nu-Metal.

Even with sources and pushback from other moderators, it’s hard to compete with people with an agenda and a lot of time.

twofornone• 5 years ago

Also, it's fun to note the "lords" of various general topics. Find an article about a person in the right-wing political sphere and you're very likely to find the same small set of "Wikipedian" toadies ruling over it with an iron fist. I'm sure the same goes for many other topics that aren't about politics.

These people are effectively activists who use wikipedia's reputation for objectivity to disguise what amounts to propaganda. The network of bullies lean almost exclusively in one political direction and any remotely political article will be immediately swarmed if edited with wrongthink - regardless of how well it is sourced. It's not just dishonest, it's dangerous that people are coming to wikipedia, reading articles with subtle but overwhelming bias, and leaving with the impression that they read something objective. Just check the talk page for anything adjacent to politics - you will inevitably see rabidly left leaning full time editors piling onto any remotely right of center edits.

lutoma• 5 years ago

It's particularly bad in the German Wikipedia. Compared to the situation there the English language version is downright welcoming.

rootusrootus2• 5 years ago

Even for things you'd think were uncontroversial, they are insufferable. A number of years ago I tried to fix some really obvious errors in the article that described the small(ish) company I worked for. I sourced my changes, generally with links to the authoritative source, and still most of them got reverted. By someone who had no actual connection to the company, even.

I still browse wikipedia on occasion, due to ease of finding things, but I read everything with a very critical eye and keep in mind that I'm only getting one carefully curated version of reality. And it may be false even so.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

“Why don’t you just fix it?” I try, but it’s hard when I have a busy day and my edit will be reverted within minutes by a full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.

Reddit has fallen to this same problem with subreddit moderators. A subreddit moderator can remove posts and comments they don't want anyone to see.

A lot of the popular subreddits and many of the more obscure subreddits are moderator-crafted echo chambers. Some moderators have unbelievable amounts of free time to observe the subreddit and surgically remove discussions they disagree with.

Worse, it's all invisible. These subreddits become an extension of what the moderators want without the moderators having to show their actions at all. When you visit a subreddit, you could be reading a carefully constructed echo chamber of a single moderator and have no idea.

I think the Reddit situation would be very different if it had a "showdead" style option that let readers see removed comments.

brightball2• 5 years ago

Yep. There’s clearly a reward structure being created to silence contrary information.

dylan6042• 5 years ago

a "showdead" style option that let readers see removed comments.

If it had this option, why even allow the moderation at all?

pydry• 5 years ago

Reddit has fallen to this same problem with subreddit moderators. A subreddit moderator can remove posts and comments they don't want anyone to see. A lot of the popular subreddits and many of the more obscure subreddits are moderator-crafted echo chambers.

Coz it's cheaper to pay moderators with a power trip than with money.

I've yet to see a viable solution to this economic dilemma.

* Decentralized moderation tends to end up meaning no moderation coz normal users are not really motivated to clean up spam, etc.

* Free centralized moderation like reddit does inevitably means the space becomes a fiefdom from people who have their own reasons for doing grunt work for free (e.g. pushing their agenda, marketing, etc).

* Paid moderation isn't usually something people are willing to pay for.

yreg• 5 years ago

I am a mod on a subreddit that has public mod logs. There is a bot with mod permissions that logs every action any moderator takes including saving the content of erased posts and makes it publicly available.

I think more subreddits should use a tool like this.

shadowgovt3• 5 years ago

As a general rule of thumb, this is a truth worth remembering about online fora in general:

In general, the voices with the most power aren't the most correct; they're the boxes with the most time (leisure or paid) to dedicate to being online.

hutrdvnj• 5 years ago

You can subscribe reddit subs with RSS and fetch aggressively, this way you will see all comments and posts before the mods had time to delete them.

JCharante• 5 years ago

In this regard Reddit is no different than traditional forums where a mod would ban you for liking the wrong flavor of ice cream. And why should it be? If you want your non-crappy version of a subreddit, then go create it. The truth is that people who want to volunteer their time to mod a subreddit are mainly doing it to power trip, with some rare exceptions.

path411• 5 years ago

Problem is moderators can straight up ban you from posting anymore comments in a sub, and most do if they delete one of your comments. Try to talk about politics in any political tangent subreddit long enough and you will eventually get the boot because no sane person lines up with 100% perfect match to a certain political viewpoint

CRConrad6• 5 years ago

At least Wikipedia has its edit history. Or is that also editable by "Wikipedia Gods" nowadays?

brightball2• 5 years ago

Completely agree with this. Some of the locked topics are the worst too. They end up locked because people are fighting to include more information that’s not being allowed. It’s a huge problem.

jerry1979• 5 years ago

Would you happen to know if anyone is cataloging these false facts?

aww_dang• 5 years ago

At this point I rarely consider directly editing an article. If it seems that the edit would be palatable to the prevailing dogma I suggest it on the talk page. This allows whichever editor to claim it as their own and phrase it accordingly.

yakubin• 5 years ago

Wikipedia pages are also subject to PR fights and lobbying: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22653716>

unreal37• 5 years ago

Google trusts Wikipedia. And that's sort of the problem with this case. Google was showing this guys picture on the search results page in an infobox as a serial killer.

jimmont• 5 years ago

People need to stop blindly trusting. ~ I simply dropped the last word. Just a thought.

FourthProtocol• 5 years ago

I've had a few experiences with Wikipedia that left me with a sour taste. I can't remember details but there was a pretty big error on the Lancia page that I fixed, which somebody at Wikipedia changed back. This wasn't the first time but it was so long ago I can't remember what else I corrected.

Upshot was reverting to my old Microsoft Encarta disks, until I discovered Britannica. €100 a year and I have it all, and it's all from an organization that stakes its reputation on accuracy.

Even more useful now that my boy benefits.

leephillips2• 5 years ago

This is the reason that Wikipedia turned out to be the exact type of failure that it was widely predicted to become. The crowd-sourcing concept leads to a diffusion of responsibility. A similar effect leads to thoughtless mob action in real crowds.

howenterprisey• 5 years ago

my edit will be reverted within minutes

Post a link. I'm doing some research on this. Ideally we'd get rid of the ability to revert people most of the time, and only let people improve the edit by adding sources and such.

andrew_• 5 years ago

Yet here we have a case where a very real black life was severely harmed, with Wikipedia playing a secondary, but still highly significant part in the sorry tale. The Wikimedia blog post contains no acknowledgement of this fact. Instead it is jubilant – jubilant that the Wikimedia Foundation was absolved of all responsibility for the fact that Mr. White was for over two years misrepresented as a serial killer on its flagship site, the result of a pseudonymous Wikimedian trusting a source that proved unreliable.

Personally, this is the excerpt that really hit home. The same kind of criticism has been levied on popular-activism in the past. I would have liked to see a more benevolent response from an organization which purports to be so.

visarga3• 5 years ago

Wikipedia is quite open about other people's mistakes. But when it's their mistake, it's another matter.

cm2187• 5 years ago

The worst culprit in this game I think is google news. They often add an image to a news topic, however this image is automaticaly picked from one of the news website, and the algorithm seems to frequently pick a random picture on the website, unrelated to the story. This leads to headlines like "serial killer arrested", illustrated by the smily portrait of a celebrity.

I don't know if section 230 would protect google there.

akolbe18• 5 years ago

Google was sued too. I understand Section 230 protected it as well.

ViViDboarder2• 5 years ago

That’s interesting. The timeline here doesn’t dictate someone publishing the photo to Google. I expect Google crawled out and that they decided to use it in search results and decided to collocate it with articles.

Google search isn’t really a publishing platform, but they do have lots of money and lawyers, which counts for something, I guess.

veeti• 5 years ago

"Ask HN: Google is confusing me with others in a harmful way – what can I do?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28216733

fortran773• 5 years ago

I feel very bad for this guy, and someone needs to dig deep into their pocket to make this man whole again.

jmclnx• 5 years ago

I fully agree, I tried to find out if he got any relief, but nothing was found, so I assume everyone dropped it.

In this day and age, any false accusation can ruin your life, especially if posted on popular sites. In the old days, you could move to started over if need be, not today. So Discovery and Wikipedia needs to make things right for him.

akolbe18• 5 years ago

The Discovery case is still ongoing (and they're not protected by Section 230). What you can do is try to help raise awareness. It is a scandal to my mind that the only media report about this case is this article in a local paper published last year: https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-r...

fortran773• 5 years ago

Well, legal rulings aside, it's clear that Black Lives _don't_ matter to the Wikimedia foundation, who has the power and resources to try to make this man whole, even though they have no legal liability.

I'm glad I've never donated to this organization, and now I certainly never will.

lbacaj• 5 years ago

Man, we’ve built an internet where you literally can’t trust anything.

pas2• 5 years ago

Or, we have built an Internet where fake/true things are eventually uncovered.

Do we have a baseline for how trustworthy print/TV media was before?

tehjoker• 5 years ago

Most people that have knowledge of a news story are often incredulous reading one due to incorrect framing or outright mistakes.

More insidiously, the news is also molded by a set of institutional incentives that often results in a highly distorted picture of the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M

visarga3• 5 years ago

Price of free speech on internet - we're swimming in lies and ideology.

austincheney• 5 years ago

The image was inserted into the Wikipedia article by User:Vwanweb on 28 May 2018, incorrectly identified as originating from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. It was removed from the article on 4 September 2020 – an edit attributed by Wikipedia only to an American IP address, rather than a registered Wikipedia user account.

Notably, this lawsuit was filed months after Wikipedia editors proactively corrected the error at issue in September 2020.

WTF, really? His photo was on there for more than 2 years (28 months). The damage is done. To somehow claim the lawsuit is super extra invalid because it came a couple months later does nothing but make me really hate lawyers.

rkk32• 5 years ago

Confused since the only piece about damages to the victim are for the person the Discovery Channel erroneously identified as a serial killer.

It doesn't mention Nathaniel White of Florida suing or implying damage was done by Wikipedia, or the damages/harm to the other Nathaniel White who is suing Wikipedia.

akolbe18• 5 years ago

It's the same man. Wikipedia (or rather the Wikimedia Foundation which operates Wikipedia) was added to the Discovery suit later on.

rkk32• 5 years ago

Thanks, you're right, wording confused me, I thought there were 3 Nathaniel whites.

annoyingnoob• 5 years ago

These are important conversations to have. I don't think we've found the right balance point yet.

shp0ngle• 5 years ago

Well. Colbert made fun of Wikipedia publishing nonsense… in 2006.

15 years ago.

This is not a new criticism.

akolbe18• 5 years ago

15 years ago Wikipedia didn't supply the info in Google's (and other search engines') Knowledge Graph panels, and didn't tell Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and other voice assistants what to say in response to queries. Wikipedia's and Wikidata's dominance in this respect is only like to become stronger for the foreseeable future.

1cvmask• 5 years ago

There are so many “fake entry” editors on Wikipedia especially on national security matters like the infamous Phillip Cross.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808516

aezell• 5 years ago

It's easy to conflate Wikipedia and Wikimedia but they are very different things, both in practice and in legal definitions. Lots of comments here are saying that Wikipedia should do something about this. That's equivalent to saying that you should get thousands of random Internet people to agree to something. There is no organization known as Wikipedia that you can appeal to.

So, then they say, "Wikimedia should do something." Wikimedia has very limited control over the content that exists on Wikipedia and this ruling relies on and validates that position.

I'm not arguing that this is ideal or preferable. I'm saying that the lines between these two words are important and yet sometimes difficult to define. The crux is that Wikipedia is wholly separate from Wikimedia in all the ways that matter in a case like this.

filmgirlcw• 5 years ago

I have such an intense love/hate relationship with Wikipedia. On the one hand, I'm so thankful that a resource exists to give me instant access to lots of mundane shit -- on the other hand, the internal politics, the so-called professional Wikipedian class (in truth, largely un(der)employed obsessives who have genuinely nothing better to do than fight over mundane bureaucratic issues) make it a resource that both cannot be relied upon and that is largely impossible to correct. It is both such a scourge and yet such an important resource.

For most things of any import (aside from areas like geography or fundamental parts of science, which are usually trustworthy), I rely on the sources cited by Wikipedia to try to suss out actual information, rather than Wikipedia itself, but that often takes a lot of time and doesn't change the fact that Wikipedia, for better or worse, is the central general knowledge repository of our time.

The adage that teachers still teach, "don't cite Wikipedia" -- has some merit, sure, but also has increasingly become a joke because actual edited encyclopedias (which yes, had their own issues, but also had standards and oversight that needed to be answered to) have basically become extinct -- so what are people supposed to use?

I genuinely long for the days of stuff like the Encarta CD-ROMs, or even expensive encyclopedia sets -- not because I think those resources could keep up with the breadth of knowledge that Wikipedia obviously has, but because whatever biases they may have aside (and every source or text has a bias -- which makes Wikipedia's NPOV mandate all the more ironic), they were edited and staffed by professionals.

I'm constantly bombarded by pleas for money from Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation, despite that fact that the Wikimedia Foundation has revenues of something like $150 million a year, and where most of the budget goes to pay for staff (hosting is only $2.5 million), not anyone who actually contributes to the content. The whole appeal of Wikipedia is supposed to be that anyone can edit it, but that isn't actually true (the gatekeepers make even correcting typos a chore) and the lack of commitment to verifiability, especially when it comes to living people, makes the whole thing utterly depressing.

ryani• 5 years ago

The adage that teachers still teach, "don't cite Wikipedia" -- [...] what are people supposed to use?

Wikipedia cites sources. Go to those sources, find the ones that best line up with the data you need, and cite them directly.

Treat Wikipedia like an aggregator -- you wouldn't cite an HN post, you'd cite the link it pointed at.

ncmncm• 5 years ago

My greatest achievement on Wikipedia was fixing the page on Herostratus, to cite him as being accused of torching the Temple of Artemis, rather than baldly stating he actually did it.

The article itself says he confessed under torture to having torched it so his name would remembered forever. But that doesn't even make sense on its own terms: If he wanted to be remembered for having torched it, why did they need torture to find out? In any case, confession under torture comes nowhere close to establishing a fact, not that that has often stopped somebody who wanted a body to string up, and didn't much care whose.

I would have many other great achievements, but they get reverted by self-important gatekeepers.

CRConrad6• 5 years ago

Really? If so, then TIL.

short122• 5 years ago

I don't even use Wikipedia anymore. It's always the top link but it doesn't provide the info I care about. It's always a lengthy dense and dryly written article of who gives a shit

CRConrad6• 5 years ago

WMF Legal Director Jacob Rogers

But will he sell me a saucepan, or a cook's knife...?

https://www.wmf.com/en/

CRConrad6• 5 years ago

Earlier similar case with Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622100

A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life

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