|
The name of the charity and its registration number if known |
Wikimedia |
|
Nature of complaint |
Serious misrepresentation in its application to UKCC (letters 26 July and 26 September 2011). |
|
Concern |
Serious non-compliance in a charity which, left unchecked, could damage public trust and confidence in the Charity Commission as an effective regulator |
|
Who is involved. |
Wikimedia |
|
Action taken by the charity because of what has happened |
Complaint and emails ignored. I was banned from their site after persistent questions. |
|
Publicity |
Not so far. |
|
Documentary evidence in support of your concerns |
See document attached. |
|
Details of attempts you have made to get the charity to address your concerns |
Posts on the charity website, ignored, followed by a 'block'; posts to their mailing list, ignored. |
|
Your name, postal and email addresses and telephone number. |
<redacted> |
|
Connection (if any) to the charity |
None. |
|
Previous correspondence with UKCC |
Freedom of Information access request |
WIKIMEDIA
COMMISSION
EDWARD BUCKNER
Summary
In this document, I question the accuracy of a submission
recently made by Wikimedia
· In the section " Neutrality, Verifiability and "No original research", I argue that the core policies dating almost from the beginning of Wikipedia have been entirely ineffective in ensuring a neutral, encyclopedic point of view. I cite two important examples of control failure.
· In the section "Controls over malicious biographies" I question WMUK's suggestion that defamatory or malicious material cannot now be added to the biography of a living person (BLP) without either very reliable sourcing or being rapidly removed. I give a number of examples of recent BLP abuse, and I discuss its root cause, that only changes to an article are examined, and cursorily at that, rather than the whole article being regularly reviewed for error.
· In Conflict of interest, I comment on the Bell Pottinger affair, where a journalist discovered a PR agency adding biased and misleading information to Wikipedia. This problem was not picked up by Wikipedia itself.
· In Notability policy, I discuss how Wikipedia gives extensive coverage of the non-notable ('My Little Pony'), at the expense of the encyclopedic and educational. I suggest that the underlying problem is the demographic of Wikipedia (young males with expertise in computers).
· In Recent changes patrol I further discuss, with examples, the problem that Wikipedia reviewers give cursory attention only to changes to articles, rather than the whole article.
· In Studies on quality I show how the evidence of Wikipedia quality studies is biased and misleading. Biased, because it does not mention any of the negative studies, and misleading, because one of the studies demonstrated a serious problem with Wikipedia quality, which the submission did not even mention.
· In Checkuser I question the effectiveness of Wikipedia's system of detecting 'sockpuppets'.
· In Other, I question the figures about the number of users, and the number of administrators, mentioned in the submission. These figures are blatantly incorrect.
The misrepresentation is serious. If failure to comply is left unaddressed, the issue could damage public trust and confidence in the Charity Commission as an effective regulator.
Background
As an educator[1] I have been concerned for some time about the quality and accuracy of the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. Nearly every Google search on a subject returns the Wikipedia article in or near top place, and it is often the first place that the general public go to for information. It is therefore in the public interest that there are strong controls over the quality and accuracy of Wikipedia articles. However, Wikipedia's 'crowdsourcing' model, which allows anyone to edit, means that such controls are inherently difficult to apply.
Wikimedia
· that the accuracy of information has improved very considerably in the 10 years of Wikipedia’s existence (13.1.1, 13.1.3)
· that a range of measures introduced since around 2005 have made it easier to remove vandalism, and the continual process of improvement of articles has removed or improved much inaccurate material (13.1.1)[3].
· that defamatory or malicious material added to biographies of living persons (BLPs) cannot now be added to the biography of a living person without either very reliable sourcing or being rapidly removed (13.1.14).
The submission also includes (section 13.3) a list of 'comprehensive controls' over accuracy and quality that supposedly underpin these improvements.
These claims are grossly misleading and overstated, and are almost entirely unsupported by the evidence provided in the paper, as follows.
Neutrality, Verifiability and
"No original research"
The Submission begins (section 13.3.1) by mentioning the core policies of Neutrality, Verifiability and No Original Research.
These were introduced early in Wikipedia's history. The first was 'Neutral Point of View' (NPOV), completed in December 2001 by one of the two co-founders of Wikipedia, Dr Larry Sanger, based on an earlier version written in November 2000 for the Wikipedia's predecessor Nupedia. Dr Sanger famously left Wikipedia in 2002 after disagreements over experts not being involved in the project, and is still one of Wikipedia's severest critics. He has published many papers about the problems inherent in the crowdsourcing model, including "The fate of expertise after Wikipedia", published in the philosophy journal Episteme in 2009.
The NPOV policy failed because of the difficulty of defining what a 'viewpoint' means. That the earth is round is as much of a viewpoint as the view that it is flat. Consequently, a further policy 'Verifiability' was drafted in August 2003 by Martin Harper. This essentially dictated that Wikipedia accept the 'viewpoint' of the academic and scientific establishment, requiring that all claims must be supported by so-called 'reliable sources', and that all potentially dubious claims must be cited or 'supported' by such sources. A third policy 'No Original Research', which is essentially an extension of verifiability, was added shortly afterwards in December 2003. This policy distinguished between primary, secondary and tertiary sources, and discouraged the use of primary sources.
Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and to avoid novel interpretations of primary sources, though primary sources are permitted if used carefully.
These policies were widely seen as a failure. This was due to misunderstanding or ignorance of the policies, and more generally due to the lack of will to challenge often powerful crank groups, cults, political activists etc. For example, Plane (esotericism), an article about the occult, was begun in October 2004 and reached approximately its present form in September 2005. It is in blatant violation of the neutrality policies, and was flagged in August 2009 as requiring citation and as containing original research. More than two years later the flags remain.
This is just one example - nearly 8,000 pages are flagged with the 'original research' template. This also illustrates a common problem with Wikipedia, that even when errors are identified, it is easier to spot a problem than to fix it. Wikipedia editors rarely possess the skill or knowledge to do this. When there is a really serious dispute, it will often be resolved by a “consensus” of editors, namely a clear majority of those who happen to turn up and contribute. These editors may be ill-informed or biased, and may include sockpuppets or friends solicited by e-mail, so the “consensus” is worthless.
I will give two further examples of how the neutrality policies have failed.
Case study 1: Jagged 85
The first is the case of an editor called 'Jagged 85'.
Jagged 85 began editing Wikipedia on
However, it was discovered much later that Jagged 85 had been systematically falsifying material in Wikipedia ever since he joined. His edits had a clear and consistent anti-Western agenda, systematically distorting source material in a way that untruthfully promoted Islamic (and also other non-Western) intellectual achievements, usually by claiming that a scientific development or invention or discovery was made or anticipated by some non-Western philosopher or scientist. This was noted in a Spectator article in October 2009 by science historian James Hannan, who argued that a campaign was being waged in Wikipedia to persuade us that Islam’s role in the rise of modern science was a more significant than previously realised by orthodox historians.
The issue was taken in April 2010 to a Wikipedia request for comment page, when the scale of the falsification became evident. The editor had contributed to 8,115 pages, making 63,298 edits, nearly all of which were biased or falsified. Jagged 85 had easily circumvented the requirement for citations. Investigation revealed either blatant misrepresentation of the source, or a selective interpretation that went far beyond the meaning of the source. He also made frequent use of scholarly works not available on the internet, probably relying on the fact that most of Wikipedia's editors are amateurs who have no access to a university library.
Even the Good Article "Astronomy in medieval Islam" mentioned above was later found to have misused sources, and most of it pared down to a tiny stub on 28 April 2011 ("This article has been shortened from a longer article which misused sources. Details of the earlier versions may be found in the page's history. Please help us to rebuild the article properly."). This clearly suggests that ordinary Wikipedians, who awarded 'barnstars' to the author of the original article, were unable to detect the failure of the Wikipedia policies on neutrality and verifiability and reliable sourcing.
Typical of Jagged 85's technique is this edit where he claims that "Avicenna developed an early theory of impetus, which he referred to as being proportional to weight times velocity, which was similar to the modern theory of momentum" citing Aydin Sayili (1987), "Ibn Sīnā and Buridan on the Motion of the Projectile", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 500. Yet the source attributes the theory to the fourteenth-century French philosopher Buridan, not Avicenna.
The problem still affects Wikipedia, as the cleanup page shows. Investigators have checked and, where necessary, removed edits from the pages where he was most active, but many affected pages remain. Yet Jagged 85 continues to edit Wikipedia, although he avoids medieval history and Islamic history articles. Ironically, he was even asked to help with the 2011 Wikipedia fund-raising campaign as a 'story teller', recounting his work on, and contributions to Wikipedia.
Of course, this case was identified, and may eventually be resolved. But the point is that this was not down to the neutrality policies themselves, as they are so easily circumvented. In order for these policies to work, editors with the ability to make judgments about the quality of sources are needed, and they are in short supply. One of them (user Syncategoremata) left in July 2010, shortly after the investigation began. More of them are leaving, particularly in the wake of the bitter internal battle between the so-called 'content contributors', who are not officially recognised as a body within Wikipedia, and the 'administrators' who are the police of Wikipedia, and who are generally unskilled and lack the ability to make expert judgments. The dispute was even escalated to the Arbitration Committee, but even this body is not qualified to resolve technical issues of content and sourcing.
Case study 2: Haiduc
Although the Jagged 85 problem is likely to be resolved, there are others which have not, including the contributions of user Haiduc. Haiduc is a Romanian word for 'rebel'. Haiduc's real identity is unknown: like many editors, particularly those who promote idiosyncratic or eccentric 'points of view', he has remained anonymous. His editing was exclusively focused on what he called 'Pederasty', meaning a sexual relationship between an older man and an adolescent boy, usually in puberty. He claimed to be writing a book on pederasty in which he promoted the view that heterosexuality was regarded as 'normal' only in relatively modern times, resulting from Christian propaganda and moralising, that pederasty was the form that homosexuality took in pre-Christian culture, and was widely regarded as 'normal' in pre-Christian times. The view is derivative of a theory promoted by gay activist and NAMBLA apologist William Percy III that has limited acceptance within the academic community, and is frequently used as an apologetic for pedophilia or 'man-boy love'.
Haiduc promoted his view across many articles in Wikipedia, most of which remain in their original form. See, for example, Pederasty in ancient Greece, Athenian pederasty, Cretan pederasty etc. His views aroused support from the many pedophile activists who were then editing Wikipedia, and provoked strong reactions from others in the community. One pedophile activist[4] remarked that "those who compose articles for the resource are a natural target for the sex-abuse kooks who see pedophiles under every rock and bush".
The issue was eventually resolved by automatically banning anyone who argued for or advocated pedophilia on Wikipedia. Most of the activists were banned in 2007 or early 2008, following an initiative by the Arbitration Committee. Haiduc, who argued he was not advocating pedophilia, but 'pederasty', was not banned until February 2010. Little or no effort was expended in clearing up or correcting the many articles he wrote. Nor was the ban the result of the enforcement of the neutrality policies, on account of the expert judgment required to enforce them. To an inexpert observer Haiduc's citations always seemed to support his claims, although they were of questionable relevance, and Haiduc himself had a level of education and ability that was difficult for the average Wikipedia editor to challenge.
Conclusion
I have given two examples of significant known problems with the neutrality. There are others we know about which we must omit here for sake of brevity, and there are almost certainly many others which we do not know about at all.
Controls over malicious biographies
In section 13.1.2 it says “Accuracy is especially vital in the
biographies of living persons, which Wikipedia could be said to have been slow
to recognise before the John Seigenthaler incident in [May] 2005”, which
strongly implies that Wikipedia recognised that accuracy is important after 2005.
Yet in section 13.1.2 it mentions Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian who was
wrongfully detained in February 2007 after Canadian authorities referred
to an inaccurate version of his biography on Wikipedia that described him a
terrorist. Clearly the problems had not been addressed by 2007, nearly
two years after Seigenthaler. It misleadingly adds (13.1.4) that Akcam’s
biography is now indefinitely "semi-protected" so that only
established registered users can edit it. However, this is true of only a
small number of BLPs, with the majority remaining unprotected and open to
abusive and malicious editing from ordinary IP addresses, and in any case
malicious editing can still occur from registered accounts. Note that anyone
can create an account within seconds on Wikipedia, and there are few
checks on the use of multiple accounts, i.e. the same user registering dozens,
possibly even hundreds of ‘sockpuppet’ accounts. (For controls over such 'sockpuppet'
accounts, see the checkuser section below.)
Finally, it states that WMUK believe that such [defamatory or malicious]
material cannot now be added to the biography of a living person without either
very reliable sourcing or being rapidly removed (13.1.14). This is
grossly inaccurate. Malicious editing to BLPs occurs all the time, and there
are many known instances of recent abuse. For example,
The article MILF[5] had a picture of Pamela
Anderson added in December
2010, with the caption "Pamela Anderson in 2003, sometimes labelled
as MILF by gossip websites", which was not removed until six months
later despite at least two of the site’s administrators and a member of their
arbitration committee editing the page, during that period. Note that one of
them was adding categories in order to embarrass an American politician (Rick
Santorum) by increasing the Google rating of a supposed neologism.
On
On
After removing the content a couple more times, (once with the edit
summary "remove lies") the account was blocked for edit warring. At
no time did the blocking admin perform a basic check to see if the information
was indeed false, and so the admin restored the libel. The problem was only
spotted when the admin read the thread about the test on the Wikipedia watchdog
site Wikipedia Review. This suggests a systemic failure of control over
unsourced and libellous information added to biographies. The editor claimed he
added libellous content to a further 50 BLPs, all of which remained unreverted
and showed up in Google searches.
A ‘biography’ of teacher Brian Read was created in December 2010,
possibly by his students. It contained completely false and libellous
information. It was brought to light in a Wikipedia Review thread on
Glenn Beck is an American conservative radio host and political
commentator whose followers love to fill the article of anyone mentioned by
Beck with out-of-context quotes and Beck's accusations. Single-purpose accounts
work in teams together with established Beck-promoting accounts, and various
one-off accounts and IP addresses.
The article on Tahir Abbas (deleted as recently as
For those two years, the article has been the top search result for
anyone Googling his name, with the smear representing more than 25% of the
entire article content. The article was not deleted without bitter internal
wrangling at Wikipedia. It is suspected that the Wikipedia editors
concerned, who were registered under anonymous user names, were academics who
had sided with the Head of Department and against Abbas, and were bringing a
bitter academic dispute to Wikipedia, trying to end Abbas’s career.
In 2009, an anonymous account edited the Wikipedia entry of the art
dealer Philip Mould, questioning the importance of “discoveries” and suggesting
other dealers had made far more important finds, and claiming that Mould was
cheating on his wife. Although unsourced, the information was not removed by
other editors editing the relevant section. Then, in October 2009, the same
person sent a “press release” to national newspapers, falsely claiming Mould
was having an affair with Charlotte Barton, a 42-year-old artist.
Although these were complete fabrications Mould could not remove the
entries, because the slanderous allegations were now in the tabloid press, and
Wikipedia could now substantiate the same unsourced allegations with 'reliable
sources' (all national newspapers, even
tabloids, being reliable sources for every article in them). Mould was forced into an 'edit war' with Wikipedian
administrators who were determined to defend the source. At one point,
Mould was disallowed from removing the allegations because he had a ‘conflict
of interest’, being the subject of the article. This was even when the
article read 'The couple separated in May 2009, after Mould started an affair
with notorious marriage wrecker Charlotte "Charlie" Barton,
although an administrator did allow a change from 'notorious marriage wrecker'
to 'artist'. The allegation stayed there for a year and a half, until May
2011 when a senior administrator removed it, commenting "Section removed.
There is evidence of a deliberate plot to defame the subject of this article.
For those investigating this misuse of Wikipedia, the content formerly
here can be found in the page history".". (The poison-pen attack, and
Wikipedia’s role in it, was eventually reported in the Daily Telegraph.)
In December 2011, Rita M Gross, a noted feminist scholar, noticed that
someone had added incorrect and improperly sourced information about her
traffic citations to her biography some time prior (it turned out that the
anonymous edits had been made by someone using her own university’s computer
system). When she deleted the libellous information, in line with Wikipedia
policy, the libel was several times restored by experienced Wikipedians, and
she was warned on her user talk page for editing with a conflict of interest.
Malicious edits to Clare Brown’s article (sister of Gordon Brown), by PR
agency Bell Pottinger, are covered in the section ‘Conflict of Interest’.
Breaking news: as this document was being finalised (January 2012), the
Wikipedia administration, including Jimmy Wales himself, have been removing
unsourced allegations about the academic Fabio Barraclough. This included a claim, added nearly three
years ago, that he was a spy and money launderer. The claim was even featured on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on
Conclusion
Problems with living person biographies are persistent and have not, as WMUK suggest, been cleared up in the wake of the Seigenthaler incident of 2005. The problem is not just crude vandalism, but rather malicious and agenda-driven editing from within Wikipedia, and a failure to recognise such editing.
The extract from the solicitor's email dated 26 July 2011 says (4.7.4) "Conflicts of Interests behavioural guidelines" which set out generally accepted standards that editors should follow, when addressing an incompatibility between the aim of the Wikimedia projects and the aims of an individual editor.
These guidelines are widely ignored. There is a natural conflict of interest in Wikipedia, given that no qualifications or credentials or personal identification are required to edit (or even become an administrator), and given that Google gives priority to any subject mentioned in Wikipedia. Few people edit Wikipedia for the altruistic dissemination of knowledge, and their reason is more likely to be one of the following reasons: (1) promoting positive information, and suppressing negative information about companies or individuals, often by paid editors or employees of the subject; (2) legitimising or normalising deviancy such as pedophilia or bestiality; (3) publishing information about celebrities, games or shows of which they are fans; (4) promoting quack cures, bogus medicine or psychotherapy; (5) legitimising and promoting the activities of cults; (6) supporting and promoting political interest groups, often on the fringe; (7) publishing theories or systems that have been rejected by the academic establishment; (8) writing about themselves, friends or family in order to see their names come first on a Google search.
Thus any restaurant, high school band, obscure author, or crackpot theory automatically gets visibility and publicity by being on Wikipedia[7].
This is too detailed and wide a subject to be treated in any
comprehensive way. Here are some examples. Many members of the Wikipedia administration
have articles about themselves, their friends or family. Bogus and 'new age'
cures are widely promoted on the encyclopedia, see for example the article on Ken Wilber, a new age
'philosopher' who gets comprehensive coverage on Wikipedia, despite there being
no academic recognition of his work.
There is a whole category
devoted to his supporters.
Nor are there are any effective controls on paid editing. The most
well-known incident is the Bell Pottinger affair, uncovered as recently as
December 2011. Bell Pottinger is one of
The agency claimed that it has all sorts of 'dark arts', which could not
be included in a presentation because it would have been 'embarrassing' if
revealed. This included creating fake blogs which appeared to be independent,
but which were in reality biased, and would rank high in Google searches.
Another 'dark art' was the team of Wikipedia sockpuppets, who removed damaging
allegations about Bell Pottinger clients. For example, edits made by the
account Biggleswiki included removal of a reference to the university
drugs conviction of a businessman who was a client of Bell Pottinger, editing
of material relating to the arrest of a man accused of commercial bribery,
editing of the entries for prostate cancer expert Professor Roger Kirby and his
firm, The Prostate Centre, both of whom are clients of Bell Pottinger, and
editing of the articles of both Chime Communications - parent company of Bell
Pottinger – and Naked Eye Research after the former company bought 55% of the
latter.
One of the targets of 'Biggleswiki' was Clare Brown, Gordon Brown's
sister. Brown is a campaigner against the destruction of rainforests in the
Malaysian state of
The failure of Wikipedia’s system to pick up this abuse is all the more
surprising given the unsophisticated approach used by the agency. When I
consulted other paid editors, they told me that "Bell Pottinger don't know
the rules of the game". First, they edited through their usual
office system. These tend to have fixed IP addresses, so that several accounts
have the same or similar addresses.
Thus, alternative accounts can be easily spotted by the Wikipedia checkuser
system. Also, once the IP address is known, this can be used to identify the
firm itself. Second, the socks consistently worked on client articles, so that
the conflict of interest is more likely to be spotted. "Don't spend all
your time on this sort of work. If half your time is writing apparently good
stuff about
As implied by the remarks above, more sophisticated paid editors are
operating undiscovered on the project. One even blogs about his work.
Their techniques include the ones mentioned above, the use of ‘hot spots’ (wifi
networks) to conceal IP addresses, or the use of IP proxies. Other ways
of evading detection are the use of ‘dynamic IPs', as provided by ISPs like
btinternet. Dynamic IPs change daily or hourly, and make abusive editing almost
impossible to detect. Wikipedia uses programs to detect the identity of
the internet browser, but these are easily bypassed.
A basic control on abusive accounts would be a requirement of personal
identification to the Wikimedia Foundation through a separate and independent
office or service. However, this has always been unacceptable to the Wikipedian
community, who prefer – for whatever reason – the freedom to use anonymous and
multiple accounts.
Breaking news:
Conclusion
Conflict of interest policies on Wikipedia are widely ignored and abused. Conflict of interest is inherent in the way Wikipedia is set up, namely as a volunteer organisation which anyone can join under an anonymous and virtually undetectable account. A recent and well-known abuse by a PR firm (Bell Pottinger) was never picked up by Wikipedia's controls, despite the firm's crude and unsophisticated technique.
Section 13.3.3 of the submission says that "Another important method of controlling content is the Notability policy, with its many sub-policies for particular areas. This defines which subjects are appropriate for their own article and which are not, with sub-pages giving more detailed guidelines for areas such as academics, politicians, athletes, companies, films, books and even numbers".
This is the policy, but like the other policies on content,
it is almost completely ineffective.
Most of the content on Wikipedia is biased towards banal and trivial
subjects, without any encyclopedic or educational value. The ephemeral List of
My Little Pony characters is as large as 180k. By contrast, the article on William of Ockham,
the fourteenth century logician after whom 'Ockham's Razor' is named, and who
is one of the five greatest philosophers
Similarly the writer Ayn Rand, who received no formal training in philosophy and received only one (disparaging) mention in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, received extensive coverage in Wikipedia, whereas the philosopher and expert on Bertrand Russell, Mark Sainsbury, who is one of England's greatest living philosophers, receives a poor one-paragraph article that has been flagged as having 'BLP concerns' for two years. Likewise, the proportion of British university professors who are included is quite low, whereas the great majority of professional footballers, even in the lower divisions, are included.
This is probably explained by the demography of Wikipedia. Wikipedia and its administration is dominated by young computer-literate males, whose interests reflect the interests of that group as a whole, namely computer games, video games, Japanese animation, usually pornography. There are serious doubts about the ability of a group with this profile to produce genuinely neutral, balanced encyclopedic coverage appropriate to a project that aims to bring 'the sum of all human knowledge to every person on the planet'.
Conclusion
Wikipedia notability policies have failed to correct the bias towards the trivial and non-encyclopedic. This is inherent in the demographic of Wikipedia.
Section 13.1.10 of the submission alludes to the problem of 'recent changes'.
It seems Wikipedia corrects the vast majority of errors within minutes, but if they're not spotted within the first day the chances of them being corrected dwindle, as you're then relying on someone to spot the mistake while reading the article rather than reviewing the edits.”
This is certainly true, but the submission does not dwell on the serious consequences of this. In May 2005, someone claimed that Belgian businessman Georges Jacobs (born in the late 1940s) was a commander of the Waffen SS's 28th SS Volunteer Grenadier Division Wallonien (presumably disbanded in 1945). The claim was removed only recently (August 2010), and so had been there over 5 years without any patroller noticing.
On 26
April 2009, an account called ‘Ivanelo’ added some material to the
Wikipedia article on ‘Climate of Antarctica’, including the claim that “Since
mid 1960s, all major studies detect cooling over the most of
The submission to UKCC completely ignores, and thus misrepresents, this control failure. The only effective control would be a regular review of all articles (of which there are 3 million) to ensure accuracy and objectivity. However, this would be impossible owing to the severe shortage of expert editors who would be able to make such judgments.
Note also the comments above on recent BLP abuse.
Conclusion
The 'recent change' method of patrolling Wikipedia is fundamentally flawed, as it is unable to detect the 'layering' and 'laundering' of biased or incorrect information.
The submission to cites a number of studies that are supposed to confirm Wikipedia's quality controls. The studies are either misrepresented, or flawed, or of restricted scope. Moreover, the citations are selective and biased in that they omit (or misrepresent) studies that highlight serious problems with quality. It even omits one of the most important recent studies, which has provoked a storm of controversy. In a series of papers, Harvard research follow Andreea Gorbatai has been exploring whether the collective methods of production used in Wikipedia are effective at creating social utility. In a paper first presented in 2010[9], she demonstrated that such collective production fails to respond to social need despite being designated as high value, and despite high 'demand'[10] for such products.
A follow-up to her study by the Wikipedia community concluded that the reward system on Wikipedia was perverse, with greater recognition being given to editors producing large numbers of low importance articles than to editors producing small numbers of high importance articles[11]. The follow-up study claimed there was a fundamental problem with the way that Wikipedia 'rewards' its contributors.
The results are evident in the prevalence of [mushrooms and hurricanes].
The Nature study (cited in 13.1.8) has often been represented as a scientific study, though it was not peer-reviewed. There is no mention in the submission of the well-known flaws in the study, such as the small sample size, the poor way the comparison articles were chosen and constructed, and the failure to quantify the degree of errors or the quality of writing. The most significant problem, as Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger[12] points out, is "that the comparison articles were all chosen from scientific topics. Wikipedia can be expected to excel in scientific and technical topics, simply because there is relatively little disagreement about the facts in these disciplines … One has to wonder what the results would have been if Nature had chosen 1,000 Britannica articles randomly, and then matched Wikipedia articles up with those." Generally, non-scientific subjects are handled poorly in Wikipedia[13]. See e.g. the excruciatingly written article Civilisation, which still contains the sentence "The Inca civilization of the Andes did not use writing at all, yet it still functioned jolly well as a society", or practically any article on Philosophy[14], including the awful flagship article itself, which has been the subject of constant edit warring and fluctuation for the last 10 years, and which has barely improved since the original version in 2001.
The study by Magnus (cited in 13.1.9) is misleadingly represented. Magnus is an associate professor of philosophy who inserted humorous, absurd and blatantly incorrect 'fibs' into Wikipedia articles towards the end of 2007. 18 of these fibs, including the claim that G.E. Moore's influence outside philosophy includes a reference to him in the signature line of the musical Oliver, and that after retiring, Gilbert Ryle bought a small farm and tinkered with automated processes to care for livestock, "although they never proved to be commercially viable" were never reverted[15]. A smaller number were reverted, largely due to the facts that (a) Magnus was editing from an 'IP' address, which are closely scrutinised (b) he made different edits from the same address, making it easy for vandal fighters to 'follow the trail' and revert all the edits, (c) he did not provide fake citations to support the claim – as we observed above, citations are rarely checked to ensure that they support sources, thus allowing Jagged 85 to edit for four years with nearly 64,000 edits before being found out.
In a number of cases, erroneous information on Wikipedia leaks out into the web or even published sources, and turns into citable information that can then be recycled as verifiable back to Wikipedia. In February 2011 a Wikipedia editor spotted the following strange edit made in November 2002, referring to a scientist’s claim that the Van Allen belt is the result of volcanic activity. This is nonsense. The editor Googled for this and got plenty of hits, and it nearly went unchallenged. However, suspecting that the age of the Wikipedia entry had caused this claim to become accepted fact, he emailed the scientist, who confirmed it was nonsense, and the edit was finally reverted, nearly 10 years later.
In another example of recycling misinformation, when an editor corrected the absurd claim that Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi was the first to discover the derivative of cubic polynomials, he was immediately challenged by another Wikipedia editor, who says that the claim is supported by the Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. However, the Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt had itself mistakenly used Wikipedia as a source.
Yet another example was the case of art dealer Philip Mould (see above), where a malicious editor contacted the tabloid press with a fake story, then used the story as a 'reliable source' to insert malicious falsehoods about Mould.
Conclusion
The submission is biased in that it does not mention negative studies of Wikipedia quality, and it blatantly misrepresents one of the positive studies.
Section 13.3.8 of the submission says ""There is also “CheckUser” software that enables a small number of selected and vetted volunteers to establish, in many cases, whether two editors are from the same ISP [sic[16]], and often where that ISP is located. This information is mostly used to detect blocked editors who try to return under a different account name. "
Checkuser is almost entirely ineffective for any editor who is determined to circumvent it. It uses internet 'IP' addresses to identify users, however many users have 'dynamic' or 'floating' IP addresses (including most of btinternet customers).
There are many, many devices that allow for easy IP switching, such as Linux based routers, tethered smart phones, 3G to wifi local hotspots. There are many classes of device that allow you to change your IP immediately. By combining these and using different browsers or use a plug-in that allows for browser string spoofing, there is literally no way for the checkuser tools to find you[17].
Other claims in the submission are 13.3.6, that "each registered editor (currently about 144,000 of these are active each month) has a “watchlist” of articles that they have previously edited or elected to watch (and not removed from their list)", and 13.3.7 that "There are currently over 1,500 administrators on the English Wikipedia.".
Both these statistics are misleading, if not completely inaccurate. The page for active editors for November 2011 shows only 34,516 such editors for en.wikipedia (where an 'active editor' is defined as one who has contributed more than 5 times in one month). The number of very active Wikipedians (defined as Wikipedians who contributed 100 times or more in a month) is only about 3,400. This seems insufficient to keep an eye on the estimated 600,000 biographies of living persons, even if there were a way to co-ordinate them to do this[18]. It is unlikely that a significant number of these will keep BLPs on their watchlist. The only effective control on BLPs, as we have mentioned above, would be compulsory registration for that category, or editing under real names, or any other control to ensure that editors of malicious or defamatory BLPs were directly accountable for their work. In 2010, people were told that they were going to introduce pre-screening ('flagging') of edits, but that proposal was rejected.
The figure of 1,500 administrators is also grossly misleading. The page here, which is a list of all active[19] administrators, shows that there are fewer than 700 active administrators. Nor does the submission mention the well-known (to Wikipedians) problem that many administrators are leaving the project, without being replaced.
[1] I used to teach philosophy
at
[2] Hereafter 'the
submission'. The submission was sent via
WMUK solicitor’s e-mail of
[3] Vandalism is defined as "any addition, removal, or change of content in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia".
[4] Corax, since banned.
[5] See the article itself for an explanation of this offensive and abusive term.
[6] Wikipedia Review is a watchdog of Wikipedia which has publicised many quality problems with Wikipedia. It is regularly read (and acted upon) by the senior members of the Wikipedia administration, but has no official status on Wikipedia. On the contrary many members of the review have been punished for posting there, and the Review is generally hated by the administration of Wikipedia.
[7] Even the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is not above this – as is well-known in Wikipedia circles, he created an article Mzoli's, an unnotable shop in Gugulethu Cape Town.
[8] The introduction gives d.o.b. as 1288, but he is categorised under 1285 births.
[9] "Failures of Social
Production: Evidence from Wikipedia." Paper presented at the Sunbelt
Social Networks Conference, Sunbelt Series,
[10] As measured by Wikipedia page views.
[11] "Part of the problem
is over concentration on certain topics. 10% of the
[12] Who Says we Know, On the New Politics of Knowledge by Larry Sanger, The Edge 2007.
[13] There is too much to
mention here, but see e.g. Intellectual history
(“The concept of the intellectual is relatively recent”) almost entirely
written by one
person. Or how about the really awful History of Europe, an
important subject and deserving of thoughtful treatment, but contains such gems
as “During this time many Lords and Nobles ruled the church. The Monks of Cluny
worked hard to establish a church where there were no Lords or Nobles ruling
it. They succeeded.”. (Version of
[14] Version of November 2011. There are serious problems with the ‘most important philosophy articles’ in Wikipedia. Nine of these articles are of ‘C’ class. The article on Metaphysics is a mess, containing gems like “Nihilism represents and [sic] extremely negative view of being”. The article ‘History of Philosophy’, which is not even ‘C’ class, is just plain weird (“an historical perspective … emphasizes the existence of a long period of transition between the teologically [sic] driven centuries (running up the XIII or XIV Centuries) and the rationalists-empiricists debates”; “early and late Renaissance philosophers were a more heterogeneous population, including rhetors, magicians and astrologues, early empirical scientist, poets, philologists”).
[15] Except by the hoaxster himself.
[16] 'IP' is clearly meant.
[17] Information was provided
by an experienced sockpuppeteer,
[18] Which there isn’t, of course.
[19] 'Active' means having made 30 or more edits during the last two months.