Wikipedia hoaxster found, but a solution for Wikipedia is still lacking 12/11/2005 6:45:42 PM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher The man behind the defamation of John Seigenthaler has been identified, and as it turns out, it was a hoax. Brian Chase, a Nashville-area man, has admitted to adding false information to the long-time civil rights advocate's Wikipedia entry, claiming that he did it to get a rise out of a friend. Chase says that he thought Wikipedia was a "gag site," although it is unclear how someone with the know-how to make an anonymous edit on a large information site stocked with articles would somehow mistake it for a gag. Nevertheless, Chase is sticking to his story, and while Seigenthaler has forgiven him, his employer has yet to reinstate Chase after his resignation. He had resigned voluntarily out of disgrace. Nearly two weeks ago Seigenthaler kicked off yet another round of Wikipedia debate when we wrote an op-ed decrying the service's potential for abuse. Wikipedia backers have championed the "democratic" nature of Wikipedia, often claiming that errors are fixed "within minutes." Yet, Seigenthaler's 132-day-old false entry casts doubt on those claims. Today some take solace in the fact that the modifications were made in jest and not out of maliciousness, but the motivations don't address the problem of bad information in an information resource. And this is a critical problem. Last week Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, announced that they would no longer let anonymous individuals create new entries, although anonymous folks could still edit existing entries. In the case of John Seigenthaler, however, this would have made little difference. The fact of the matter is that as long as Wikipedia allows contributions from unknown people, Wikipedia cannot claim to be an accurate resource because a good faith effort to police content isn't the same thing as editorial oversight. The implication that everyone comes to Wikipedia with the same (neutral and honest) agenda cannot be sustained by the evidence in question. No, we can only talk about trends and tendencies. The problem has not gone unnoticed in academic circles. Educators struggle with how best to handle the online resource, being on the one hand reticent to accept it on account of its problematic nature, and on the other hand, wanting to embrace it because of its ubiquity and cost to the student (that is, it's free). Proponents of Wikipedia often argue that existing resources themselves are also flawed, and are no better than Wikipedia. This argument is weak, however, because it is tantamount to suggesting that because there are problems with some resources, we should embrace all resources uncritically. This is an absurd argument. Wikipedia is fantastic, and many people benefit from it on a daily basis. It is not, however, a truly reliable resource. First, there's a chicken-and-the-egg problem in the form of assessing the quality of information. Oftentimes, you need to be rather grounded in a topic before you can see that an entry contains good or bad information. A resource that requires constant expert assessment to determine the validity of content isn't exactly a reliable resource. Second, there's not normally anything at stake for the thousands and thousands of people contributing content. While it is fashionable to bash the Encyclopedia Britannica as being general and facile, the fact of the matter is that its articles are commissioned, peer-reviewed, and subject to peer change. At the heart of the system lies the reputation of writers, researchers, fact checkers, and the brand itself. To put Wikipedia in with Britannica is to approach the two far too broadly. Once we grant this, and stop the pretensions of Wikipedia being an academic-level resource, we can appreciate it for what it is: a vast collection of views and, just as important, links to more information. Wikipedia has become a guide to some of the best information on the web, collated by subject. It's like the directory approach to information first made popular with Yahoo, but taken to the next level. Wikipedia is a fantastic resource, but you cannot ask a hammer to screw in a nail. Wikipedia should never be used an an authoritative resource without extensive corroboration-something made rather difficult by the fact that many Wikipedia articles lack clear and full citations. But let's face it: corroboration is something that should be second nature to students working on research papers, but sadly it is not. In the absence of more finely tuned research skills (which one always attempts to teach), you always have to separate the wheat from the chaff. The idea that this happens automagically because of anonymous, democratic access is flawed, and is ultimately a red herring. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051211-5739.html ~~~ And further... Citizendium: building a better Wikipedia By Nate Anderson Sunday, February 25, 2007 Gentle expert guidance When you're a cofounder of Wikipedia, what do you do for an encore? If you're Larry Sanger, the answer is simple: you build another Wikipedia. A better one. This is Sanger's dream as he ramps up the Citizendium project, an ambitious undertaking that aims to reform the "immature" Wikipedia community and create a different sort of place, one where real-world accomplishments are rewarded and experts have a special role to play. Citizendium has as its goal nothing less than the creation of a comprehensive and dependable encyclopedia, the sort of place where readers can put their trust in approved articles and children can browse without stumbling upon, for instance, "Hybristophilia." "Wikipedia has accomplished great things, but the world can do even better," Sanger said when he launched the pilot version of the "Citizen's Compendium" (the genesis of the name "Citizendium") on October 17, 2006. With experts leading the way, the new site would "improve upon Wikipedia's extremely useful, but often uneven work. The result will be not only enormous and free, but reliable." Sanger, who says that he "literally quiver[s] with excitement" when he thinks about the possibilities of open and collaborative content, wants to make it quite clear that he is not denigrating the wisdom of the unwashed masses. Citizendium will not be a dictatorship of experts but will create a space for "gentle expert guidance" that Wikipedia does not. Sanger summed up his approach in an October speech at SDForum in San Jose, arguing the thesis that "experts can play special roles in Web 2.0 projects without 'breaking' such projects." So can Citizendium do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica? At the moment, only eight Citizendium articles are listed as "approved" by editors. One is on Barbara McClintock; another covers "wheat." Clearly, work remains. I talked with Sanger recently about his vision for the Citizendium. Despite a head cold, he was courteous, articulate, and utterly convinced that "gentle expert guidance" could create an encyclopedia capable of whipping Wikipedia in a bar fight (not that the more mature Citizendium community would ever engage in something as juvenile as a bar fight). But where had the idea for Citizendium come from the first place, and why was a Wikipedia cofounder so down on that project's prospects? As Sanger tells it, the turning point came when he received a phone call from a man accused of murder. "Serious and endemic problems" The caller was John Seigenthaler, a journalist and former Robert Kennedy aide who had recently complained about a libelous Wikipedia entry accusing him of murder. The claim was false, of course, but it had survived on Wikipedia for more than 100 days. The material was traced back to one Brian Chase of Nashville, who had added it as a "gag." Seigenthaler was not amused and began calling around to find out exactly how such an accusation had been published for so long on such a prominent website. One of the people he reached was Larry Sanger. Sanger was laid off from Wikipedia back in 2002, and soon stopped all active involvement with the project. He returned to teaching philosophy and playing the fiddle, and he dabbled with ideas for future open content projects, including one that approximated the Citizendium. And then John Seigenthaler called him, looking for answers. "When Seigenthaler called, I was already resigned to the necessity of making a competitor to Wikipedia," Sanger says. "The effect of Seigenthaler's call was to make me feel to some extent personally responsible for the injustice that Wikipedia was causing, which made my motivation only stronger. When after six to nine months I saw that Wikipedia wasn't going to make any significant changes, it became clear that it was on me to organize a better alternative, if I could." In September 2006, Sanger issued his manifesto, a document called "Toward a Compendium of Knowledge." In it, he laid out the "serious and endemic problems" that he saw in the Wikipedia model: a.. The community does not enforce its own rules effectively or consistently b.. Widespread anonymity has a problem-it's attractive to people who want to cause trouble, undermine the project, or simply troll c.. The community has developed an insularity that makes it difficult for people who are not already part of the community to get on board d.. The "arguably dysfunctional community" is not attractive to traditional experts such as academics Sanger had hoped that Wikipedia would clean up its act, and he was all but certain that the encyclopedia would eventually put an expert review system in place. After Seigenthaler's call, Sanger found the Wikipedia community's response "completely unacceptable" and concluded that they were no longer able to change in important ways. Sanger took a risk in the fall of last year. He left his job at the Digital Universe Foundation, where he had been working on other open content projects, and launched Citizendium as a pilot project. By the end of January 2007, the project had signed up more than 500 individually-screened people to work as authors and editors, and then opened its doors to public participation (though it's still officially in the pilot phase, anyone can now sign up for an account and start writing). The theory of "gentle expert guidance" faced its first major test.
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