The last part of that is certainly not the case. Gregory Kohs has in fact compiled a list of counter-examples among US Senator BLPs. (There is some extra commentary about this spreadsheet which I won't link to because I'm not sure whether or not the site it's on is currently an OMG BADSITE or not.)
But most of that vandalism I can deal with, as a reader. It certainly must suck for the subject of the article, but that's a debate for another blog post. The stuff which really ticks me off as a reader, and really makes Wikipedia article on these sorts of subjects almost useless, is what's not there.
Well, it didn't take me too long (*) to find a good example of what I'm talking about, in the Obama–Ayers controversy article. I checked a few interesting looking history entries and found this one, "rv section to 13:29, 30 August 2008 version -- too many BLP vio / NPOV edits to properly process - discuss on talk page and propose slowly please". The diff is confusing, and there seem to be multiple edits involved, but my beef is this. According to ABC News:
Ayers admitted planting bombs at a number of government installations in the 1960s as part of protests against the Vietnam War, but he was never convicted for any crime related to these activities and no one was hurt in the incidents. In a New York Times article that, coincidentally, happened to be published Sept. 11, 2001, Ayers said "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."
and
Obama insists that he barely knows Ayers or his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who is now a professor at Northwestern University's School of Law . Dohrn was also a member of the Weather Underground, and was once on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List for inciting to riot. The couple live in Chicago and have long been politically active there.
Whereas, according to Wikipedia:
Ayers and Dohrn are fixtures of their Chicago neighborhood, "embraced, by and large, in the liberal circles dominating Hyde Park politics", according to Ben Smith, a writer for The Politico. Ayers has been described as "very respected and prominent in Chicago [with] a national reputation as an educator." But they have not been embraced everywhere due to their past leadership of the Weather Underground, a 1960s radical organization that placed bombs at a number of government institutions, causing damage, but no deaths or injuries.
Both factual? Probably. I haven't delved into the references enough to say for sure, but c'mon, the Wikipedia article is exceptionally kind with its "they have not been embraced everywhere" and no mention at all of the fact that "Ayers admitted planting bombs", that he said "I don't regret setting bombs", and that Dohrn "was once on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List for inciting to riot." It's great that Wikipedia mentions the quote from Ben Smith, and in fact I'd consider the article biased if it didn't include something like that, but for this article to not even mention those three facts I listed above is incredibly biased.
Maybe it's just fear over BLP issues causing this excessive kindness. But you know what, if Wikipedia can't write a nonbiased article concerning living people due to BLP concerns, it shouldn't write one at all.
(*) Well, not to long for the sake of finding something to blog about. It took too long for me to want to do this every time I read a Wikipedia article on a controversial topic.
P.S. Before you accuse me of being biased on this, please know that my initial reaction to hearing Palin say that Obama "pals around with terrorists" was, and I quote: “Unless she has some serious evidence to back up this claim, Palin is being outrageously unethical here.” (see my shared Google Reader notes) And, frankly, I still do think she was being untruthful and unethical with that statement. But I read the Wikipedia article and came out with the impression that Ayers was merely someone who got mixed up with the wrong group in his youth.
I just checked my Google Web History. I first searched Google on "ayers wikipedia". Then, when I saw the results, since I didn't know the first name of Ayers, I changed the search to "ayers wikipedia obama". At the time, I believe [[Obama-Ayers controvery]] was the first hit for that search. In any case, that's the link I clicked on. In hindsight, I should have gone to the [[Bill Ayers]] page, which is more thorough (though I cannot vouch for its factualness or lack of bias). Still, I stand by my poor assessment of [[Obama-Ayers controvery]]. Sure, it didn't have to include everything about Ayers, but the paragraph I read on him was downright biased.
4 comments:
Anthony, it may be worth mentioning the summary stats from the Senatorial vandalism study:
In all, the median duration of a damaged edit was 6 minutes, but the mean duration was 1,440 minutes (exactly 24 hours). The 100 articles about the 100 Senators were viewed approximately 12.8 million times in the fourth quarter of 2007. Over 378,000 of those views could be considered "damaged", yielding a 2.96% rate of damaged views. There were about 13.2 million article-minutes during the quarter, and over 901,000 of those article-minutes were in a damaged state -- 6.80%.
In other words, taking the average Senator article as a unit, on average, it is wrong about 1.63 hours per day.
When you consider the plausible-sounding multi-day defamation on NJ senator Bob Menendez, that his divorce was due to his "cheating" or "infidelity", you begin to realize that things are not all peaches and cream on Wikipedia. "Many eyes" most certainly do not make for a reputable editorial system. Case in point, about 90,000 pairs of eyes saw the John McCain page that said he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, you know, in the State of Florida, and not one of them fixed it.
I guess I'll admit that whenever powerful entities have an interest in making a wikipedia article read a certain way (as with articles about politicians), wikipedia may not be able to stand in their way -- at least, not 100% of the time. Caveat emptor -- but that's always true for information that people have an interest in skewing, on wikipedia or off.
Thanks Greg. I would have linked to your summary but I'd rather not risk getting blacklisted.
Ben, you're definitely right that bias is a problem with all sources, but the problem with it in Wikipedia is 1) the authors are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous (because who's going to go through the entire edit history figuring out who said what); and 2) since Wikipedia articles are collaborations of multiple individuals with widely varying viewpoints, you can't get a good sense from reading the article as to what their biases are.
On the latter point, I've found myself often treating Wikipedia articles like I do regular sources, and I just stop reading when I come across something ridiculously biased. But now that I think about it, that practice doesn't really make sense for Wikipedia, while it clearly would make sense for a traditional source.
I used to buy in rather heavily to the promise of an NPOV version of each article which can somehow eliminate bias. Of course, that was back before the three revert rule went into place. Maybe that was the turning point. Wikipedia embraced the "anyone" in "anyone can edit" instead of "can edit". The notion of consensus went firmly out the window that day.
This is the kind of issue on which you're going to find the article "biased" if it doesn't agree with your views.
Dude, the article says he led an organisation that planted bombs. That implies he was involved. Its worse problem is that it is so chatty.
And the whole thing is a complete beat-up. Joschka Fischer was a street fighter and rioter who became a government minister. Ayers is a respectable member of his community. I mean, dude, get over it. Obama knows a guy who once planted bombs; McCain once murdered civilians with bombs. Yawn, yawn.
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