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Wikipedia's open-source label conundrum
December 9, 2005 -
Is Wikipedia safe from libel liability?
December 7, 2005 -
How much do you trust Wikipedia?
December 6, 2005 -
Growing pains for Wikipedia
December 5, 2005
(continued from previous page)
Say a little more.
The whole model is basically flawed. I think Wikipedia is valuable on certain respects on technical articles where the facts tend to get resolved on the basis of ones and zeroes or if something is true or not. But when you get into stuff like biographies and particularly biographies of living people, the quality is much more iffy, the potential for libel is much greater and the controls just are not appropriate.
You've said Wikipedia's influence is unearned. What do you mean?
The media has been hyping Wikipedia for almost a year now and their traffic has doubled every few months. A lot of surfers think that Wikipedia is really great because it works on stuff where you can't find readily available information anywhere else. If you put search terms in Google and it says there's 550,000 results and most of page one and page two are spam sites, you can see where Wikipedia is attractive. And it has a very good reputation.
But the thing is, when you look at the structure it is so easy for Wikipedia to get into trouble on this stuff. The internal architecture of how they develop articles is flawed. Even if the article is in good shape, there is no guarantee that between now when it's in good shape and five minutes later when you check it that someone hasn't come in and vandalized it. It's an invitation for disaster, and the Seigenthaler situation was bound to happen sooner or later.
You've said that the new changes to Wikipedia's authoring rules will actually result in more problems rather than less. Can you elaborate?
The problem is that anyone who registers and logs in enjoys a very special privilege on Wikipedia, which is that their IP address is hidden and in the history section for articles, you just see a login name and a time stamp. The problem with that is that there is no way for ordinary mortals to associate the login name with an IP address. You have to use a very special tool, called CheckUser, which is only in use by half a dozen top administrators. And even then, the logs that are used to compile the information are only kept for one to four weeks, from what I can tell.
So even if you're one of the privileged six, or Jimmy Wales himself, if too much time has passed, you have lost that information because the logs have been deleted. And so it's going to make the situation worse. In Seigenthaler's case, if Brian Chase had spent the extra 20 seconds registering, they wouldn't have had any record at all of his IP address. And even though Jimmy would have been eager to accommodate someone like Seigenthaler just to protect Wikipedia, he would not be in a position to because they don't keep logs that long.
So if it was up to you, what would be the proper way for Wikipedia to handle authorship and editing?
No. 1, I would eliminate all edits that are not logged in. No. 2, next to the log-in name, I would have the IP address displayed on all the edits, no exceptions. No. 3, to get an account, which means to get a log-in name, they have to give a valid e-mail address. So then you would have three things, the login name, an IP address and a valid e-mail address, that make you less anonymous.
Then I would go and take all the biographical articles on living persons and take them out of the publicly editable Wikipedia and put them in a sandbox that's only open to registered users. That keeps out all spiders and scrapers. And then you work on all these biographies and get them up to snuff and then put them back in the main Wikipedia for public access but lock them so they cannot be edited. If you need to add more information, you go through the process again.
Right.
I know that's a drastic change in ideology because Wikipedia's ideology says that the more tweaks you get from the masses, the better and better the article gets and that quantity leads to improved quality irrevocably. Their position is that the Seigenthaler thing just slipped through the crack. Well, I don't buy that because they don't know how many other Seigenthaler situations are lurking out there.
You've said that Wikipedia is a potential menace for anyone who values privacy. But what about Google, and the rest of the Web and the tools you used to track down Rush Delivery?
I'm talking specifically about how Wikipedia's criteria for whether someone merits a biography has an extremely low standard. For example, there's a page on Brian Chase, and I don't feel comfortable about that. Right now, newspapers should print his name because it's topical. But a few months from now, his name will sort of disappear from the Internet because newspapers don't rate that high on the search engines, and it's only up in Google news for a month. But Wikipedia articles rank very, very highly on all search engines and Brian Chase will shoot right up to the top with the Wikipedia.
And when this poor guy is trying to send out his resume, and he never gets called back from interviews, how do you know that the people aren't Googling him when they get his resume and saying, 'Well, he did this thing.' The permanence becomes invasion of privacy even more so than getting your name in the newspaper.
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1. Registering people with a valid email address. What exactly is a valid email address? Anyone can register with Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail and not prove their identity, or at least it is very easy to provide false information. Making people register with an email address would not make it easier to find the identity of editors. Unless Daniel is seriously considering making people provide proof of identity on these mail services (which, knowing his concerns about privacy I fear is doubtful), I don't see how this solves anything.
2. Associating IP addresses with usernames. This is an interesting idea, but again, fundamentally flawed. There are literally hundreds of open proxies on the Internet, with no records being kept of who used the service - in effect making the editor untracable if they so decided to use the proxy. We have had problems with proxies used by large ISPs, such as AOL. Wikipedia have had considerable problems with them, in relation to vandalism. Jimbo Wales has actually contacted several of the larger ISPs, and they were less than helpful in providing assistance.
I would also point out to Daniel that while he says that if Brian Chase had registered a username he never would have been found, the fact remains that it was only by a sheer stroke of luck that his identity was determined. Companies do not normally host their web servers from home-user broadband accounts, and regardless it was only through Brian's honesty that he came forward and confessed to Mr Seigenthaler.
3. Taking out all the biographies on living people is a less than helpful suggestion. This would mean that we would need to remove the biography on Mark Latham (a significant figure in Australian politics), John Howard (the Prime Minister of Australia), George W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, etc. The wiki process works well because you can change articles directly, besides which, having the article in a sandbox merely moves slanderous material to a different spot: the sandbox.
I am well aware that Daniel dislikes the biographies as they currently stands because he would like his own deleted permanently from Wikipedia. Daniel believes that we are violating his privacy. I personally feel that he is hypocritical as just the other day, he added my real name and general location to his hitlist of Wikipedia editors he does not like. He was also tricked into adding false details about a Wikipedia administrator (see <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Daniel_Brandt#Daniel_Brandt_hoaxed" target="_newWindow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Daniel_Brandt#Daniel_Brandt_hoaxed</a> for more details) - this has since been removed. Please do not get me wrong: I do not believe we have the right to slander anyone - in fact this is against our site policy of neutrality - and when we see this we will remove the material, and if necessary removed it from the edit history.
4. Wikipedia keeps the IP addresses associated with users for a period of one month. If Daniel feels that we should keep them longer, then I suppose we could arrange to keep them longer. However, given that he dislikes such private information kept for long periods of time, I find this strange. I recall that it was Daniel who forced the CIA to stop storing cookies so that people couldn't be tracked. I was under the impression that he was concerned about privacy.
5. On the whole Brian Chase business: I feel bad for the man that he no longer has a job. However, I would like to point out a few things:
a. Brian was deliberately tracked down by Daniel. Wikipedia administrators did not do this, we would have allowed Mr Seigenthaler Sr to have asked for the records from the ISP through normal legal channels. While this may have been difficult, it is not impossible. I personally cannot condone vigilantism, which I feel this amounts to.
b. Brian's name hit the papers. If someone typed his name into Google, then it most likely would have appeared somewhere near the top of the list in old archived blogs or news site articles. His notoriety was not the fault of Wikipedia, though we very much regret that the whole business happened. To say that we are keeping a permanent record and this will permanently damage Brian is somewhat absurd. After his name is forgotten, I hardly think that an interviewer will go to Wikipedia and type in Brian's name to see if we have any information on him. I also somehow doubt they will type his name into Google to do a background check...
c. Lastly, I feel that Daniel is being somewhat premature about Brian anyway. We currently are discussing whether to have his article deleted via the Articles for Deletion process. Most people currently believe he is not notable enough to be kept. It is quite possible that by the time anyone reads this comment that his article will be deleted.
Regards,
Ta bu shi da yu
Wikipedia administrator
I seem to recall that during the last election there was a lot of trouble with people modifying articles on various political topics, too.
If your answer is "it will be self correcting" then I call your bluff. Some groups will continue to do this sort of thing forever.
If your answer is "we will ban them" then one of the fundamental premises of Wikipedia (that anyone can modify it) is false.
And how can I use something like wikipedia as a source if by tomorrow all the data I used from it is gone or completely modified?
No - because he's a vandal and they want to make his life a living - if you go and look, I think the quote is still there, and probably will remain there.
If Wikipedia were an "encyclopedia", it wouldn't have entries on ordinary citizens who've ticked off Wikipedia admins.
Quick: how many articles can be found in Britannica on non-notable persons who've publicly embarrassed Britannica and/or its editors? And what do those articles say? Are they NPOV?
Less than a month ago I read an article in an HR magazine about how recruiters now regard a basic Google search as a standard tool to gather information on candidates. The increasing role of Google in hiring has also been brought up recently as a threat to discourage college students from using Facebook and similar networking systems.
The problem is not so much lack of quality control on Wikipedia: there's a lack of quality control plaguing the media in general. It's almost impossible for private citizens to get corrections from the press - and reporters themselves don't even understand the big deal since they see their medium as ephemeral. Moreover, increasing pressure on the media to woo back their readers has led to a quest after sensational stories. And when those stories don't exist, the media just makes the story up by creatively editing clips with new questions. One news outlet will copy content from another, and the falsehood spreads. Even if there is a correction, there's nothing to stop the original bad article from coming up first on Google.
In the Wikipedia case, a private citizen's privacy was invaded, and there's no taking it back. He WILL be Googled by other people and this information will be online forever. This is a situation that will affect more and more people, and anger will mount as their public participation, even unwanted public participation in the form of being "outed", will be used to screen them out of job interviews.
I'm a fan of Wikipedia's and I think their stance is generally right in dealing with this case, but pretending that a private citizen won't be harmed by his sudden Google presence is *crazy*. It makes Wikipedia look sly and disingenious to pretend this isn't a problem.
unstable compilation of opinions with not very much verification.
As such, Wikipedia is interesting but not definitive in any way. It
may be a point to begin research, but for any serious research, It
certainly is nowhere near adequate. Accuracy in any Wiipedia
article is too much of an accident. True, many articles are
accurate.... right now. But you cannot tell which ones, nor can
you tell which ones will be accurate tomorrow.
So, for those who are enamoured of Wikipedia, it's all yours. Do
with it as you will. Just don't ever quote it to me as proof of
anything.
Yeah, uh huh. Just don't put a joke on their either.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/13408982.htm" target="_newWindow">http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/13408982.htm</a>
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=525" target="_newWindow">http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=525</a>
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-12-14-nature-wiki_x.htm" target="_newWindow">http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-12-14-nature-wiki_x.htm</a>
some of the serious limitations in regard to the veracity behind
its articles. In fact, it is important to recognize the diverse
categories that are open for manipulation by complete
strangers, who could be pranksters or what would be much
worse, pseudo-experts. Biographies are obviously among the
more sensitive category. However, having been a frequent user
of this free encyclopedia (and other similar services) I firmly
believe that W. needs to institute a hierachy of review boards for
all and any item/category published in order to regain and
solidify their credibilty. These review boards could be structured
around volunteers that have been "accredited" by peers in their
respective fields. Besides, each author must be a registered user
who has a verifyable and verified address and a personal profile
on record that would entitle them to publish their contribution.
Everything less than these minimum standards will make the
good intentions of the founders of W. useless for anybody who
seeks factual information.
Rudolf Hecken
Reviewers rather pointed out bad structure and uneven writing in articles rather than inaccuracies.
It is, however, possible that articles on political, religious and societal topics are not up to the same level of quality. Nature interviewed people who said that it was difficult to work on scientific articles on issues where many non-scientists have opinionated views, such as global warming.
In any case, this study calls into question the various blanket condemnations of Wikipedia one hear in the press here and there. (Incidentally, the non-specialized press is a horrible source for scientific facts; yet, many people apparently get their informations from it.)
in until the next edition.
No one knows what Wikipedia will say about any subject
six moinths from now. Old error may get changes. New errors will
be entered. Old biases may be eliminated, and new biases may be
introduced. One never can tell. And therein lies the fallacy of the
Wikipedia concept.
persons post. If he really didn't want to be known he could have
easily spoofed his IP address or used any of the various online
services that do it for you for free.
So the fact that you tracked down this dud was PURE LUCK!
Track down somebody with a spoofed IP address and lets see
how far you get!
Second. Who the HELL are YOU to think you can just track
somebody down and then continue to press a subject that's
really none of your business.
Wikipedia as a service is responsible for it's articles, not you
acting as an evangelist. So your act has basically trashed the
ideas' behind animosity which in turn forced this kid to give up
his beliefs in turn of proving your own.
Once again, you just got plain lucky when you tracked this
person down. Wikipedia as a service to the WWW is obviously
flawed and probably shouldn't be matched against the wit's of
Google.
There services are not that similar at ALL. So a comparison is not
valid in this case. Google has proven itself through time and trial
to be of a superior service for what it attends to.
~Justin
"We still didn't know Brian's name at that point, but the very next day some guy named Brian Chase walks into Seigenthaler's offices at Vanderbilt University and delivers the confessional letter."
In other words, Brian Chase "unmasked" himself, and now we're left with a big profile on the paranoid "watchdog" guy.
Yay journalism.
the editorial process, which is fundamental to the development of
knowledge in a peer reviewed world of scholarship.
But I guess for "the internet," it's fine :)
TBSDY
As for editing the revisions in the database: this is not a regular practice. Again, it is done to remove defamatory material. And again I ask whether you believe that we should not do this?
TBSDY
when I do research I use more than one source. everyone should do the same.
facts and some opinions like Wikipedia. There are just too many
reputable sources available to bother with Wikipedia. And still,
verify, verify, verify..................
-Jonathan
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://philoneist.com" target="_newWindow">http://philoneist.com</a>
Making someone's IP / email address is as bad as posting someone's name, address, and phone number on the Internet publicly so everyone can know / get harrassed, etc.
It's basically a matter of PRIVACY! Anyways, who gave this guy the right to go snooping into someone's IP Address without thier permission?
Do you want ME to call your house and read your bank account, or credit card information back to you over the phone? I wouldn't think so.
"...sending a phony e-mail, I mean an e-mail under a phony name, phony account..."
that is called SPAMMING... and if you did it from certain service providers, it is against usage agreements... and even ILLEGAL in certain states!
Maybe someone with time on their hands could investigate this guy and find out how to make his life a hassle as he has done others.