Who really runs Wikipedia?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/economist-explains-who-really-runs-wikipedia?fsrc=neurogami

by jamesbritt • 13 years ago

53 54 13 years ago

economist.com

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

I no longer donate to Wikimedia until they find a way to end all kinds of sociopatic bullshit surrounding it.

jeffdavis• 13 years ago

I think you are setting the bar too high. Nothing is perfect, but Wikipedia is great.

If you have some better idea how these things should be handled, then please explain.

rsync2• 13 years ago

This is mildly off-topic, but since we're talking about the little hitlers that dominate wikipedia content, here goes...

I (John Kozubik / rsync.net) will donate USD 10,000 to wikipedia if they change their official stance to inclusionism, and adopt a "all well formed articles belong" stance.

Yes, most of what is in deletionpedia is garbage. Yes, it deserved to be deleted. But somewhere in there are thousands of articles that people spent hours on, in good faith, zapped away due to "notability". If it's well formed, it gets in.

ttrreeww4• 13 years ago

PR firms LOVE Wikipedia...

HarryHirsch4• 13 years ago

They do because that website hasn't got the faintest grasp of what "Conflict of Interest" means. One or two years ago there was this thing that Wikipedia calls an RfC on conflicts of interest, and you had to scroll down half of a huge page before someone would even properly define it. That person was someone with an IP address. Wish I could find that one.

nmridul• 13 years ago

The basic idea is that Wikipedia articles evolve over time. If one checks today, many articles don't even exist and others are in their preliminary stages (stubs). That doesn't mean Wikipedia as a whole is bad. There are thousands of articles that are mature enough and provide valuable information.

If you had the perfect definition for "conflict of interest", you could have well edited the article and added your definition. Its always better to light the lamp than blame darkness.

tptacek7• 13 years ago

This comment reeks of enmity. Google "WP:COI", which was the standard in place when I was editing back in ~2007. The notion that "that website" hasn't the "faintest grasp" of what conflict of interest means beggars belief.

Instead, what's happened is this: WP is entirely built out of volunteer contributions, volunteers are often interested in specific topics close to their daily lives, and contributions from subject matter experts --- that is, the best contributions --- tend to be freighted with COI issues. So resolving how the project is meant to handle COI without shutting off their best contributions is difficult and can involve lots of rules-lawyering.

Again, these kinds of arguments always seem to take for granted that we are talking about perhaps one of the most successful group projects in the history of the Internet; Wikipedia is, of course, an achievement on par with many of the best of the last 20 years. But now that we have it, and the novelty is all gone, all we can do to engage with what WP is doing is snark at it.

lkrubner• 13 years ago

I recall taking a class on journalism and we argued about whether or not true objectivity could ever exist. Some people pointed out that it was possible to write an article that consisted only of factual statements, and therefore such an article proved that objectivity was possible.

There were several counter-arguments: what about the factual statements that were not included? You could factually say "The nation of x invaded the nation of y and slaughtered 10,000 innocents." That makes the nation of x sound pretty bad. It might also be factually true that the nation of y had invaded the nation of x the previous month, but if you leave that out, is your article still objective? It only consists of factual statements, but those factual statements paint a misleading portrait.

I recall the professor of that class insisted that most of the bias he saw in newspapers happened at the level of deciding what subjects to cover. During his career he had seen the following scenario: a newspaper might run an objective article about corruption in Egypt, and an objective article about the brutality of the Iranian government, but then the paper would perhaps never run an article that objectively covered the treatment of some people under Israeli rule. Each article was objective, but the overall coverage was biased.

And so too, with Wikipeida. 85% of the editors are male. Does that have an impact one what decisions get made? This opening is interesting:

"LATE last month Amanda Filipacchi, an American writer, discovered that the editors of Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopaedia, were re-categorising female American authors from "American Novelists" to to "American Women Novelists". No corresponding "American Men Novelists" subject area existed at that time. "

Even if each article tries to acheive Neutral Point Of View, there can still be bias merely in the way things get categorized.

nwzpaperman2• 13 years ago

Messaging is never neutral and I don't trust people that deny having a position on meaningful subjects. What's more important for news and journalism going forward is that writers are transparent about their perspective and let the reader evaluate the merits of the information the journalist shares.

Those values are what are built into nwzPaper at least.

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

> You could factually say "The nation of x invaded the nation of y and slaughtered 10,000 innocents."

Probably not. "Innocents" is not a factual description, nor is "slaughtered", and "invaded" is dubious. More importantly, even to the extent that that statement could be rephrased into a series of fact claims, that doesn't make it objective. Fact claims aren't inherently objective, as belief in a fact claim is generally based on subjective interpretation of evidence for that claim.

Striving to eliminate as much as possible the reporter's subjectivity results in what we see frequently in the media today: "He said, she said" journalism where the reported facts consist merely of reports that varying parties made various claims.

glenra• 13 years ago

> Striving to eliminate as much as possible the reporter's subjectivity results in what we see frequently in the media today: "He said, she said" journalism where the reported facts consist merely of reports that varying parties made various claims.

Wikipedia does that too to some degree. The goal for claims in a wikipedia article is that they be verifiable, not that they be true. The definition of a "verifiable" claim is that somebody made that claim in a "reliable source". So people wanting to push a point of view will pad out the article with references to other people expressing that view. Pointing out that the view is wrong and explaining why tends to be discarded as "original research".

In instances when the conventional wisdom is wrong but widely reported, wikipedia will tend to report that conventional wisdom.

The good news is that often when this happens, you can find what contrary points of view are being suppressed by skimming the associated talk page. It's usually worth doing that on controversial and/or current topics.

jfb• 13 years ago

The NPOV and sourcing rules are what they are (quixotic, doomed to fail), but one thing that I think doesn't get enough attention is the violence they do to style. Wikipedia can at best read like the output of a really good text summarization algorithm; usually it's even worse. I love reading Wikipedia, and I love it even more when I come across gems like "the midget commits bowel movements" [1] that gets edited down from the delightfully insane to the beigest beige.

I am aware that looking for reading pleasure in Wikipedia is a fool's errand, and I'm not suggesting that anything change; but the relationship between the Wikipedia house style and their rules about "objectivity" is perhaps under-appreciated.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trapped_in_the_Clo...

specialist• 13 years ago

the output of a really good text summarization algorithm

Yes. And I value this aspect very much.

Often as not, I prefer the wikipedia page description over a (open source) project's self-description.

tnuc• 13 years ago

I always though Wikipedia was run by lobbyists and publicists who have their clients best interests at heart.

ttrreeww4• 13 years ago

Big pharma has massive influence on a whole lot of Wikipedia articles, it is quite disgusting to be honest.

np422• 13 years ago

I would like to know more, could please explain further and give some examples?

tptacek7• 13 years ago

Because...?

footoverhand• 13 years ago

If one wants to know the official narrative of the US government or the EU, you only need to glance into a recent history book distributed in schools, or Wikipedia.

CleanedStar2• 13 years ago

Of course I agree, but there's an extra reason why this is the case on Wikipedia. Let's take a look at "History of Iraq" on Wikipedia back in 2002 -

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Iraq...

"Once known as Mesopotamia, Iraq was the site of flourishing ancient civilizations, including the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Parthian cultures. Muslims conquered Iraq in the seventh century A.D. In the eighth century, the Abassid caliphate established its capital at Baghdad, which became a frontier outpost on the Ottoman Empire."

Now let's look at the US State Department profile of Iraq it had from 2001 to 2003 -

http://www.state.gov/outofdate/bgn/iraq/24819.htm

Yes, the history of Iraq on Wikipedia was literally written by the US State Department. As have the histories of most of the world's countries.

thomasz• 13 years ago

Isn't it possible that the state department plagiarised Wikipedia?

rory096• 13 years ago

Given that works of the US government are automatically in the public domain, it's not surprising that its publications had useful source material for very general summaries, for the English Wikipedia anyway. But article introductions are a pretty specific case, and there are few reasons to change them often. I don't think they're good proof of bias in the details of articles.

cafard• 13 years ago

The last sentence is very strange--what would you do with as an answer in a high school history test?

Tichy• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the early worries, wikis can never work yadda yadda yadda. In fact there may be countless changes, but if people care about a subject they will monitor it and notice even the tiny changes.

CleanedStar2• 13 years ago

Well start with Wikipedia's head, Wales. Where does he come from, how does he think? We know he ran an Ayn Rand mailing list before becoming involved with Wikipedia, but how does his personal, political thinking influence Wikipedia? Well he himself has said that conservative Friedrich Hayek's work "is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". While he is not always blatant and draconian in politically influencing Wikipedia, this has cropped up again and again.

For example this Arbitration Committee spoken of - in mid-2005 Wales appoints an editor so biased against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that Wikipedia Review has a whole forum on this editor - JayJG ( http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showforum=46 ). People find him incredibly biased and the vote of all Wikipedia in early 2006 for ArbCom members kicks him out. But Wales is not happy with this and decides to stuff ArbCom, like FDR threatened to stuff the Supreme Court. So Wales creates a new ArbCom seat. Does he appoint the Wikipedia-wide next highest voted neutral editor to ArbCom? No, he reappoints this Arab and Muslim hating editor JayJG.

You can find many examples of this sort of thing. With Wikipedia, the rot starts at the top. One day, a rival wiki encyclopedia will come into play and trounce Wikipedia (or at least be an alternative to it).

adventured3• 13 years ago

Jimmy Wales doesn't run Wikipedia and is not the head of Wikipedia. He is a figurehead. There's a very dramatic difference between the concepts.

That fact makes your entire rant pointless.

toyg2• 13 years ago

A figurehead who can create new seats on committees and arbitrarily appoint people to them doesn't seem a "figurehead" to me, unless you're insinuating that he's merely doing someone else's dirty work.

adventured3• 13 years ago

I wonder if Wikipedia will suffer from some of the same problems the open directory (DMOZ) did when it began to stagnate. Ops became openly hostile and started promoting or punishing various people / causes / businesses depending on their personal alignment.

teeja• 13 years ago

The answer is short: the policies are in charge.

Follow a few discussions and the (crowdsourced) rules are continually umpiring them. Do all editors follow them, no. But when other (more experienced) editors come along - eventually - the hammer falls. You'll see an admin in the fray now and then, but rarely.

nwzpaperman2• 13 years ago

The days of people being lazy information consumers are long past. If something is important, it's incumbent upon you to pursue understanding of said something. Wikipedia has been a very useful platform, but it is no more secure in its future than horseshoe manufacturers were a century ago.

People and society need information and if someone or whatever outlet supplies good information, people will use it. If the person or whatever outlet start putting out bad information, the audience will leave for better information sources.

malkarouri• 13 years ago

One point that I had from experience is that Wikipedia tends to entrench the bias of its editors, through seemingly sensible policies. A specific example happened to me while contributing to the Arab spring pages (while the Arab spring was ongoing). It was claimed that the Tunisian revolution was the first by an Arab country. I disagreed because Sudan had a couple, which I know of because I am Sudanese. Sensibly, the admins requested citation needed and no original research. Given that the statement in question was mentioned in the NYT and the British Guardian. I had to contact the journals, and the Guardian actually published a correction, before the issue was settled. For other issues involving Sudan I was generally not so lucky. Wikipedia reflects the US understanding of Sudan, with a European slant, much more than it reflects the situation in Sudan.

My lesson: we must try to understand the New York Times effect on man..

Ras_• 13 years ago

Don't forget that even though en.wikipedia is the most important, each language version is independent. Some of those have distinct characteristics.

Many things are carried off from the largest one, but for example governance can include unique features (e.g. Arbitration Committee, which is rare). Each have their own established practices in deletions. For example En.wikipedia has merit-based deletion, where you suggest support or delete with an argument and it hopefully leads to a consensus. In fi.wikipedia only the numbers in a community-wide vote matter. There are also some optional quality assurance methods (Flagged revisions).

For example De.wikipedia has a very developed, almost professional Wikimedia foundation chapter behind them. They run several development projects and global services on behalf of the whole community. Flagged revisions was piloted there. They also have a distinct look due to strict guidelines on image use. Unlike most, they don't allow fair use pictures.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flagged_Revisions http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Arbitration_Committee

Tektok @ Economist: "Wikipedia is run by those who have the most time to waste and energy to outlast others." Unfortunately this is not far from the truth.

Who really runs Wikipedia?

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