Alex Beam of the Boston Globe writes:
The proverbial bottom line is that the theoretical underpinning of Wikipedia, the fashionable notion of "crowdsourcing," or "the wisdom of crowds," is nonsense. There is no wisdom in crowds. The crowd drinks Coke. The crowd elects George Bush or — God forbid — John Kerry. The crowd accepts authority unquestioningly, especially when it's dressed up as a "cool" new information source. So who would you rather have write your encyclopedia entries? Bertrand Russell, T.H. Huxley, and Benedetto Croce, who wrote for the Britannica? Or ... EssJay?However, the real interesting thing about this article is not that Mr. Beam's article contained garbage, because we're quite used to that, but rather that he wasn't able to get it removed until he called Larry Lessig. Jimbo's backchannels don't scale; there needs to be a better process for removing obvious crap from articles than waiting for someone to get so frustrated as to track down one of Jimbo's friends.
Just how wise are crowds, anyway?
ReplyDeleteIt depends on the culture of the crowd. When you have a culture whereby Essjay can rise to the top of the leadership, having written exactly one article, then you don't have a very wise crowd. When you have a culture where the roads to power revolve around irc and social climbing, instead of encyclopedic merit, then you exclude wisdom by design.
One wonders why Mr. Beam didn't just fix it himself. Well, not really - editing WP is not that easy for outsiders; and editing the article in a way which would have stuck would require learning a lot about WPs tribal customs.
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't have been that hard for him to have edited the page to delete the offending paragraph, with an edit summary of "that's not true", but someone imght revert it. An edit summary of "removed false, unsourced, derogatory material per WP:BLP" would have stuck, but how long does it take for a new editor to learn to do that, when they didn't reallly want to be an editor in the first place?
I can't believe a coherent email to info-en-q@wikimedia.org -- three clicks from the Main Page, via the Contact Us link and the "what is your problem" wizard -- would simply be ignored. Which suggests he never sent one.
ReplyDelete