The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia, Chronicle of Higher Education Options

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The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia

Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

By Timothy Messer-Kruse • For the past 10 years I've immersed myself in the details of one of the most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot and trial of 1886. Along the way I've written two books and a couple of articles about the …

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I have quoted some of this fantastic article in condensed form for those without access to The Chronicle, tying to stay within the bounds of "fair use". I hope this will whet your appetite enough to purchase the article if you are a conscientious critic of Wikipedia:

... I have not resolved all the mysteries that surround the [Haymarket] bombing, but I have dug deeply enough to be sure that the claim that the trial was bereft of evidence is flatly wrong.... So I removed the line about there being "no evidence" and provided a full explanation.... Within minutes my changes were reversed. The explanation: "You must provide reliable sources for your assertions to make changes along these lines to the article."

That was curious, as I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress.... Wikipedia requires its contributors to rely on secondary sources, or, as my critic informed me, "published books."...

So I waited two years, until my book on the trial was published. "Now, at last, I have a proper Wikipedia leg to stand on," I thought as I opened the page and found at least a dozen statements that were factual errors, including some that contradicted their own cited sources....

My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.'..."

I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to continue to shout that the sky was blue.

This is what happens when crowdsourcing is used as a model for writing an encyclopedia. A commitment to excellence in referencing is abandoned in favor of a slavish adherence to a rule-based writing model that promotes manipulation of the text by amateurs and interlopers. This produces a reference which can easily be at huge variance with the best available scholarship on a topic.

[dogbiscuit]

This is what happens when crowdsourcing is used as a model for writing an encyclopedia. A commitment to excellence in referencing is abandoned in favor of a slavish adherence to a rule-based writing model that promotes manipulation of the text by amateurs and interlopers. This produces a reference which can easily be at huge variance with the best available scholarship on a topic.

It is always worth reminding ourselves of that.

Wikipedia is (now) based on the premise that "anyone can edit" in the sense that even if you don't know what you are talking about you can make a positive contribution, there is no skill. As soon as anyone suggests otherwise, the WikiMagic is lost, so there are more and more ludicrous policy decisions made to justify that it is actually a disadvantage to be competent. If you have knowledge, and even can demonstrate that the contents of the articles are wrong, Wikipedians would rather stick with a flawed article than admit that someone who understands the subject might be able to contribute. Mediocrity raised to a high art.