How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark

Relevant Colbert Word of the Day: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/z1aahs/the-word---wiki...

IIRC, one of the first public Wikipedia "scandals" involved a guy who was irate because his Wikipedia entry was wrong and he was told he wasn't allowed to edit it. Cue much hemming and hawing.

Only the "wrong" was that it included "director" among a long list of accomplishments, on account of he had directed a film. The guy's beef was that he didn't like the film and didn't want to be noted for it, and he demanded sole authority over his own historical record.

Sometimes there are good reasons to not let people edit their own articles. Sometimes there aren't. But you need some sort of coherent policy.

> and an editor with knowledge in that topic area removed that edit before publication.

A study in Nature actually found comparable error rates in both Britannica and Wikipedia.

Naturally, there's additional context in the Wikipedia article, "Reliability of Wikipedia:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

I don't necessarily agree with bediger4000 that all errors have become transparent. Some lay dormant for years without notice. I am sympathetic to his general point though, because I do think we were putting a dangerous amount of faith in "authoritative references" before Wikipedia. We shouldn't just question Wikipedia, we should scrutinize all sources of authority.

It's important to recognize that reliability of information isn't a binary, it is on a scale. And the best way to move up that scale is to rely on a variety of authoritative references for any given claim.

The biggest reason I find Wikipedia reliable (on those occasions when I do) is because the sources for any given article are fairly transparent. If I find a dubious claim, I can immediately dig deeper by scrutinizing the cited expertise. Many times I don't need sources. Many times when I need more certainty, I scroll to the bottom and find no reassurance (or references to printed publications that require more legwork to verify). But Wikipedia at least allows me some foothold to calibrate my trust in a given article, because editors are encouraged to "show their work."

Britannica doesn't allow me to continue my research, or verify their conclusions. I have no idea what their editors are relying on. That's not to say I "assume false," but there are limits. I trust them proportionately to their track record, which is good, but not impeccable. They're never going to be as reliable as the sum of their hidden references would have been.

The flaw isn't so much that they trust those sources, because then which sources can they trust at all? The problem is that they treat all sources equally, and that once a few non-reputable sources cite something as fact, it will be hard to remove the entry from Wikipedia even if a few other, more reputable sources, gainsay the same. The 'rules' of Wikipedia are such that if you can get some consensus, even if that consensus is among a minority of disreputable sources, then you have a claim to the truth even if the entire world outside that consensus loudly proclaims the opposite.

And, if some idiot Wikipedia admin (but perhaps I'm repeating myself here) decides to stake his reputation on this falsehood, you are fucked. The falsehood may as well be written in stone at that point, as far as Wikipedia is concerned (cf Jimmy Wales birthday).

I was once asked in a deposition if, in my opinion, was Wikipedia an authoritative source. Which I replied, "No, it is not." When asked how I came to that conclusion, I cited the 'birthday incident' and how Wikipedia rigidly held on to a non-fact as fact given its process. This really annoyed the opposing counsel who had submitted a number of Wikipedia pages as exhibits in support of their case.

I could not imagine that someone who was being paid top dollar for their services wouldn't do their own research. Wikipedia is a great place to get pointers to where people have found things but other than that, one really has to be careful acting on or drawing conclusions from the information it contains on any given day.