TechStuff TechStuff Classic: Tackles Wikipedia

dot com. It's tech Stuff tackles Wikipedia, and the reason it was controversial is that, well, Wikipedia was not considered a reliable resource for us to use when we were researching materials for uh, for podcasts, or for articles, because mostly we were writing articles back then. This episode originally published on April twenty nine, two thirteen. Let's listen in. It's a matter of some debate among lots and lots of people online, and there are good points and bad points.

We're going to cover them all. We are, of course talking about Wikipedia, and you guys who are long time listeners of tech Stuff might remember that Chris and I did an episode about wikis and we touched upon Wikipedia

a little bit. But that was many years ago. Other stuff has happened, as things are wont to do on the course of time, and we decided we wanted to really look at what made Wikipedia what it was and what it is and how has it changed over the time that it's existed, and and some of the reasons why Wikipedia is a very useful tool and some reasons why people either maybe maybe not dismiss it, but but

but in some ways that it could perhaps be improved. Yeah, and and reasons why some people, uh suggest extreme caution before relying too heavily upon it. Um. And and before we get really into this at all, you know, I used to write for How Stuff Works dot home a lot. I occasionally still do, but I mostly do podcasts now and things like that. Blogs are about about the writing level juncture, right, But but I used to write these

these a long articles. And one of the policies and How Stuff Works is that you do not use Wikipedia as a source ever. Yeah. And uh, I used to be an editor before I was a podcaster in social media person And yes, that was one of the things that we very firmly enforced, right, are still do. And really the reason for that has nothing to do with whether or not the infant well, it has something to do with whether or not the information you find on

Wikipedia is reliable. But more importantly, Wikipedia is a dynamic thing, right. It can be written and edited by anybody at any time. And so when you sit there and cite something from Wikipedia, and maybe the next time someone visits that particular entry, the the information has changed, and it may be that the information now is more accurate than it was, or

maybe less accurate. At any rate, the things that make Wikipedia a useful tool in day to day I need to get this information are the same things that make it a dangerous tool if you are writing in any sort of academic or professional capacity. Facy. Yeah, thank you editor for giving me the word that I don't have. But but really, before we get into all the pros and cons that I've already just touched on, uh, let's talk about the history. So before there was a Wikipedia,

back when there was just barely a web. Yeah, yeah, it was more more local networks of computers and some of them could you know, key into other local networks. Yeah, we we did have an internet, uh, and the web was a thing, but it was very young. But back in so you know, the web essentially is introduced right three, So web has not been around for very long. Rick

Gates comes up with this idea. He says, Uh, you know what would be really super awesome if if we were to build an encyclopedia that lived on the Internet, and if you made that encyclopedia something that anyone could contribute to, so that way you could tap into the world's knowledge and people who are really just experts in whatever field that they're in, they can go in and share that knowledge. Right, and and then you have the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right, except it's really the

Hitchhiker's Guide to Earth. Uh. So would be more than mostly harmless Earth in a small amount of the surrounding galaxy. Sure, yeah, But essentially the sum total of what human knowledge is could go on the Internet and be in a database that you could search, and it would be the world's most complete encyclopedia. Uh. A fellow by the name of R. L. Samuel came up with an idea to call it Interpedia, and it was kind of this interesting point of discussion,

but it never went beyond that. It was just one of those Hey, any cool if Yeah, exactly. Maybe if someone who has more time and resources could do this, it would be awesome. Uh. And then in a very important development happened. And I was amazed that it happened this early, because this was the development of the wiki platform, and the fact that it happened in ninety four amazes me because I was largely unaware of wikis until Wikipedia

came along. Yeah as well. So, I mean I had been on the web since the early nineties, but I just didn't know about wikis for many years, I mean almost a decade. Uh. And it was and when I finally did start to learn about wikis, they were strange and unusual to me because it was a different experience than your average website. Right. Yeah, Usually most websites and most books are based on this idea that there is one expert who is who is this terrific expert and

is talking to you about this thing. Yeah, and that's and that's where it starts and stops. You know, no one's arguing with them, particularly, right. There might be some form of comment ability on a site where people can contribute into the discussion, but in general, the content of the site itself is created by a person or an organization, but no one else. It's not like, you know, Bob can just log in and put in Bob's section, and then Joe over here logs in and puts in Joe's section.

It's Bob and Joe can't do anything because they can just go and view the site. Well, the wiki was based on a completely different idea and it was designed by a guy named Ward Cunningham, and his first one was First Software Developers. Yeah, yeah, he was. He worked for a software consulting company that he was a partner in.

It was Cunningham and Cunningham also known as C two dot com, and he was developing this, uh this platform for Portland pattern Repository and he called it wiki wiki web right, based on the Hawaiian word wiki or wiki wiki, which means um, quick quick, Yeah. There's a the wiki wiki Shuttle in Honolulu, which is an airport shuttle. I've been on the shuttle and I remember my wife being really amused every time she saw the wiki wiki shuttle.

She just loved wiki wiki. Obviously I've married the right woman. So uh so, Ward Cunningham comes up with this idea for the wiki, and essentially what a wiki is is it's a website that has collaborative editing tools built into the site itself, so you you navigate to the site through a browser, and within the browser you can make changes to the site collaboratively. So depending upon the level of administrative power you have, you can you can edit things,

you can add things, you can delete things. And it's since it's all within the web browser, you're using a basic markup language or maybe some sort of rich text editor, and it will let people collaborate on projects even if they had different machines. Right, So, if Lauren's using a Mac and I'm using a PC, not only do we hate each other, but often we can't work on the

same thing because our platforms are so different. But this is web based, so all we have to do is use whichever browsers web browser we both commune, and then we navigate there and we can make these changes and build our collaborative I hate you website together and other people can join in and explain why they hate everybody too. And I don't know why I'm so negative today, but apparently that's how this is going to work. I think. So Cunningham develops this wiki technology, which is what makes

Wikipedia possible. But we're not at Wikipedia yet now, right, because yeah, well go ahead, Oh, I was just gonna say that's when we start talking about Jimmy Wales, who is kind of the face of Wikipedia, right right, Yeah, I was gonna say that. At the same time around

was when Jimmy Wales had dropped out of college. He he had started um started a couple months are for a finance PhD from Indiana University and wound up instead of doing that going to Chicago to be a futures an options trader and supposedly, much like Elon Musk who we have previously profile, wild Jimmy Wales noticed that, you know, Netscape went public and and what quadrupled in value overnight.

Netscape did well, yes, they did good um and and took note of that and said, hey, this internet thing that I've been kind of playing around with for a few years, I think that this could be a thing. Yeah, this this might go places. And of course remember this is all before the dot com bubble burst too, so back then it was all opportunity and wild West and no one was really sure and bright shining dreams. Yeah

it was. It was interesting. Uh, you know, the the roads weren't paved with gold, but they were paved with stock options. Jimmy Wales has this thought while he's working for a well, he's part owner of a company called bomus dot com, which is a search engine. Yeah, and he owned that with two other joint owners, Tim Shell and Michael Davis. Comes up with his version, his idea for a free, collaborative encyclopedia, and he taps a guy named Larry Sanger to be the project lead for this

new encyclopedia. Now he knew Saner from mailing lists, because this isn't that long after the fact that people were just using things like Usenet and mailing lists instead of the web and uh, and so he got in touch with Saner and and convinced Anger to head up a project, this this collaborative encyclopedia, which at that point did not have a name, right right, Yeah, And you know that

they've been thinking. I've read about open source software and and how open source culture could also be a thing and and and a beautiful thing and so yeah, and that was kind of when you look back at Timber's Lee, who's the guy who essentially created what we know of as the Web. That was sort of his approach to He thought that open was the right way to go, that the open collaborative way would mean that the Internet becomes the world's tool, not any one a company or

government's tool. And so, uh, this was sort of the idea of of let's make an encyclopedia that follows those same kind of philosophies. Yeah, and so, so Wales and Saner and a few others start to form a project that they call New Pdia in U P E. D I A. And this was a peer reviewed encyclopedia that

they were going to put online. And you know, because they wanted that they wanted that expert opinion to come in, and they wanted everything to be as factual and reliable as possible, exactly in fact, Singer that was he was passionate about this. He said that, you know, you could create an online encyclopedia where everyone just contributes, but if you wanted to be a reliable resource, you need that

peer review step in there. So and it turned it turned out to be extremely slow to to get people to submit anything at all, because it was it was intimidating and be to to you know, find the correct expert to to look it over. And also, yeah, the review process was a Singer would describe later laborious um, so two thousand is when NEWPDIA starts, and it starts in the middle of two thousand or so. And uh, they have an advisory board of a sort of a

peer review board made up of PhD volunteers. So these are people who are not even being paid. They're volunteering their expertise to review papers to make sure that they are they're ready for publications. So this is like if you were to submit a paper to an academic journal or a scientific journal. You know, it's something that it's not just automatically going to get published. It has to be reviewed and pass review. There might be a lengthy

revision process before we'll ever be published. So there were seven steps in this review process for Newpedia and they did. They didn't think that that it would work. I read somewhere that that Wales really thought that, you know, it had been conversations with people on the internet and had realized that if it's something that they feel passionate about, that they're usually really willing to engage in that conversation and to help. Yeah, so the idea was that you know,

you get people who are really smart. A lot of really smart people enjoy spreading knowledge, not that we wouldn't know anything about. Wanting to show off knowledge. Yeah, I mean I'm not really smart, but I still like to do it. So, I mean that's why I played trivia is really just to show off how smart I am. But I know that compared to these people, I was and still am stupid. But anyway, so, or at least

okay different anyway, thank you. Everyone's special and nobody is. Um. So yeah, the seventh step process to publish to review before you would publish an article. It turned out that this was a bit of a bottleneck um And the very first Newpedia article that was ever published was written by Kristoff Hust and it was about a tonality and it was published in the summer of two thousands, so it was early two thousand when they started working on

new Pedia. At that time, the entire submission and review process was all through mailing lists. It was. There wasn't a web based version yet, and so the first article publishes in the summer of two thousand. It was either June or July. According to Sanger, who wrote about this I found it on slash Dot. He wrote a two part piece that was essentially about the whole beginning of Wikipedia, which started with this new PDIA thing. Well, in January two, Sanger and Wales meet up with a guy named Ben

Covitz at the infamous taco stand meeting. Taco stand meeting. Yeah, they were in California and they were at a taco stand.

They started talking and COVID's told Wales and Sanger about Cunningham's wiki Wiki web platform, and they thought about this as being a tool that would allow for collaborative work and make it much easier to get articles and and Saner was still thinking about this pure review process right right, But they were thinking that in order to get more submissions, in order to make it a little bit less intim dating for people to you know, to to submit an

article to this crazy peer review thing, yeah, to say like, don't worry so much about the quality, just submit stuff. Because it turned out that, uh, you know that one of the things they were worried about was that they needed to have content. And part of the philosophy was that if we can fix content, if the content is not perfect, we can still edit it once we get it. But if we never get any content, there's no encyclopedia.

Right Because I think at the time they had they had maybe twenty articles, I mean something, you know, a very low number. Yeah, it wasn't it was. It was twenty five articles by the winter of two thousand one. So summer two thousand their first article publishes. More than a year later, they have twenty articles on new Pedia, which is more articles than I write in a year, but I mean it was fewer than what I wrote in a year. In a year, I would write around

a hundred articles. So it's it's it's kind of you know, but that's that shows you there was this bottleneck process, and and you find out that a volunteer might love their field of expertise, but they're still a volunteer, so there's still they're still limited by the fact that they have to do other things, most of them, unless they're independently wealthy, they have other responsibilities they have to attend to.

But while they were thinking about this, they decided to launch a wiki for Newpedia, and they launched that wiki on January two thousand one. So Newpedia is still a thing, but they launch a wiki for it with the idea of making it this faster way to contribute articles. And I think it actually goes live on January. If any of you know about Wikipedia Day and are going like that wasn't on the tenth, well that's the here's why the wiki goes live on the tenth. The advisory board says,

I don't want anything to do with that. Like, essentially, what happened was the peer review board looked at the wiki and said, look, we have these other backlog of articles that we're still reviewing. We cannot deal with this nonsense. So what upen was the Newpedia wiki split from Newpedia and became its own thing, and on January fifteenth, that

became Wikipedia. So Wikipedia began as a branch of Newpedia where it was all going to be peer reviewed, but then became its own thing where the peer review kind of went away. The idea was that the community would review, and so it wouldn't be peer reviewed in the sense

of an official board of experts. It would be the community of Wikipedia collectively would be able to review and edit the content that was being uploaded, and and that that kind of spread of the workload was really important, because they had a hundred and fifty entries by the end of February. Yeah, it was, and it went really pretty crazy. The according to Singer. He said, by the end of January two thousand one there were six hundred

articles on Wikipedia. But that Singer, and that was from memory, So you gotta keep in mind, this is Anger writing in two thousand five about what happened in two thousand one. So Sander says that by the end of two thousand one there were six d articles, and by March or by the end of January two thoe there six d articles by March, by April and by May. So not only were more articles coming online, but it was the growth rate was increasing over time, not exponentially, but pretty

pretty regularly. So it was very quickly becoming popular. And uh. And April two thousand one, that's when Jimmy Wales decided to to to post a thing where he to find that the Wikipedia voice was to be one of neutral point of view or m p o V and uh. Sancer actually objected to this as well, not that he objected to the idea of neutrality, Sard that was important.

He objected to the phrase point of view because he said that it still means that the article has a point of view, and it shouldn't Sander in some of his points, I was reading in this if I saw and slash doot, I was thinking, this is getting to be a little bit about semantics, weird and pedantic a little bit. I respect a lot of what he was saying, but it's something and I think that that. You know, pedantic has its place on the Internet, absolutely, but does

whenever I'm in a comment, it's my first weapon of choice. Um. Anyway, So by the winter of two thousand one, that's when only articles had published on Newpedia, and the approval process moves so slowly that even when the tools to review and approve articles moved from email to web based clients, it just wasn't doing very well. And because it was such a slow process, more and more of the people involved in it began to neglect it and drop off of it. And Wikipedia, but at that same time, was

getting more and more popular. So yeah, so Sanger's responsibilities were starting to shift more towards Wikipedia than new Pedia, simply because that's where all the action was. So by two thousand one and into two thousand two, new Pedia activity had slow dramatically and uh and also the the bubble. By then, the dot com bubble had burst, which really kind of wiped out a lot of the folks who were contributing in some way, so that kind of also

made the funding kind of dry up for new Pedia. Wikipedia, by the way, was existing at that time and still is to this day on donations. Um. So the new pet was trying really hard to redefine the rules that were needed to review submissions so that they could streamline the process. But by that time it was it was too little, too late. Uh and and it gets really sad in another year. But when I get there, I'll

mention it. So um. Even at this early stage of Wikipedia, Sanger was really saying, let's pay attention to what experts have to say. Let's give them special attention and respect, and make sure that their voices are the ones we pay the most attention to. Not that we won't accept submissions from the general public, but that we should pay more attention to things that are coming from people who

are recognized. Because again, this is this is Sanger saying that in order to be a credible resource for people, you have to have some form of review or or you know, you have to have some way of of saying the information here is from right right, the same way that scientific journals won't just you know, accept accept research that has not been checked over by a peer of view system. At least it's ideally an ideally right if you ever hear In fact, this is just a

little side note. Uh, this is important if you're reading something on Wikipedia and you look at the references. It's something that Lauren and I do a lot. Uh. It's important also to pay attention to what the references are because there are scientific quote unquote scientific papers out there that are actually logs that aren't scientific papers. So then you will quote unquote have a paper published in a scientific journal, but it's not a peer reviewed scientific journal. Correct. Yeah.

I see this with a lot of free energy papers, where energy is one of those things where like well it was published in sessions, like yeah, I check that out. That's that guy's personal blog. He called it the Journal of Nuclear Physics, but it's just live journal. Yeah. Yeah, we we just did an episode about about nuclear power, not fusion power, and yeah there was cold fusion and cold fusion and there was a lot of that that

that's stuck in my head. Yes, exactly. If you do research on cold fusion, you'll find quote unquote papers, but they are posted on online resources. That turn out to be not an actual scientific journal. That doesn't necessarily mean that the research is unreliable. It just means that you don't have that peer review to really be sure that

it's past muster. And also, before I was an editor here, I was actually an editor for a medical research journal about rheumatism, and so so I am intimately and acquainted

with the peer review process. Yeah. Uh, well, moving on talking about the difference between Wikipedia and peer review, Saner actually talked about how he had suggested a rule called ignore all rules, and in his two thousand five recounting of the beginning of Wikipedia, he said that the Wikipedia community might be surprised to hear that he was the one who who suggested that, because you know, again Sander was the one who was all about peer review, and

here he is saying ignore all rules, and his his philosophy was that again, they wanted to get as much content on Wikipedia as possible, and if the rules intimidated someone so that they did not feel like they were qualified or capable of posting, he wanted to take that barrier away. But he thought of that as a temporary measure, something to to get Wikipedia going, to get the ball rolling and then nodded something that would wind up being one of the continuing five pillars, not a central central

tenant of the entire of the entire side. Yeah, so ignoral rules. He kind of later on said that I I kind of regret saying that now because he felt that that was one of the past Yeah, of of him. There's a little bit of a falling out, you know, there's Yeah, Saner Singer definitely, Uh, if you read his stuff, you see and I mean there's there's there's a lot

of rancor on both parts. Uh. Sander has a lot to say about the direction that Wikipedia took and uh, and it's pretty clear that he feels that it's not ideal. I mean, he doesn't outright come out and say that this is uh, it's it's useless or anything like that, but he has a lot of criticisms. Meanwhile, the Wikipedia community, in turn, has a lot of criticisms that they direct

to Singer, and they both sides have relevant points. So even though I'm talking a lot about Singer, it's mainly because that's that's the account I went with UH for history years. Yeah, it's not that it's not that I necessarily sided with sayer. I'm not that far to that extreme. Uh. Anyway, a lot of the the policies of Wikipedia actually came

out of the community. It became sort of communal decisions of how the site should work, which was kind of interesting because they had originally thought of it being sort of again an extension of new Pedia, but this became more of the open, communal approach to the Internet, which again is more of the Tim Burners Lee approach, which

makes it a lot harder to direct. You know, you can't you know, when you've got a group of fifty people who have all decided they want to go left, it's really hard to make them go right, you know, when you're one guy. Yeah, yeah, and you know, and there's there's voting systems in place, there's you know, even back in those days, there were a lot of a lot of ways for people to communicate with each other.

These ideas that they had for the community. They had decided that that Wikipedia content would always remain free for others to read and edit, meaning that there would never be a point where there'd be a paywall or subscription for Wikipedia. And uh, they also, you know, we're putting in those policies that allow people to publish rough drafts or rough ideas that could be polished over time, either

by themselves or by other people. And then Google started to include Wikipedia and its search results for different topics, which meant that there was suddenly a huge rush of people. Yeah, and and Sanger noticed like, as more people were coming to visit Wikipedia more than we're getting involved as editors and contributors. So that meant that even that as the Wikipedia traffic was increasing, so was the content. You were suddenly seeing even faster growth as far as how much

information was being contained within Wikipedia. Um and the summer of uh, well, one of the before I get to the summer two thousand one one thing Singer did note was that even in those early days that he was starting to notice that people who were difficult and who were persistent, uh, we're sometimes irritating very valuable members of

the Wikipedia community. And the valuable members were like, I don't need this, never mind, I'm a volunteer see and they just left and then U. So that meant that you started to have more of the persistent difficult type

and fewer of the valuable expert types. And Singer saw that as another kind of downfall of Wikipedia, and there there was there wasn't really any way to counteract that without essentially violating kind of those philosophies that Wikipedia was founded upon, right and you know, you know, one of those philosophies is definitely that the editors and contributors should be polite to each other, which happens sometimes, but yeah, exactly,

you know it's human error. Ye, I mean the vast majority and I think I think the vast majority of people who are regular contributor to Wikipedia are in general very courteous. But all it takes are a few trolls to really stir things up and U and trolls who are particularly effective can cause huge amounts of frustration in a community. Um and in fact, that's that's why they do it. You know, it's right, with a little effort, they make a big impact. And uh boy, we did

a whole episode on how trolls work. It was a great one. You guys should go back and listen to that one. But in summer of two thousand one, someone ended up using the editing tools to vandalize the front page of Wikipedia because that was one of the ones you could edit back in those days and uh, and so they vandalized it, and then someone tried to archive the vandalized page. So Sander when end deleted the archive.

So then they kind of reposted the archives somewhere else and Saner when and deleted that, and this became a big kerfuffle between Sander and the community. The community, not the entire community, but there were sections of the community that said, you are overstepping your balance, right, this is not yours to do this with your using power powers.

And yeah, the fact that you have the ability to do that doesn't mean that you are that you should do that, Like, you are capable of doing that, but you should not do it and uh, and Singer was like, this is kind of silly. The whole point of this is that we don't want the vandalized version of Wikipedia to be a representation of Wikipedia. We don't want that to come up in search because it hurts the community. I don't see where the problem is. And others were saying,

no, no no, no, that's beside the point. It doesn't matter what the content is is the matter. The matter is that you've deleted it. You've overstep If you start deleting, then where does it end right, you've bypassed the whole process, and by bypassing it, you've rendered the process meaningless. And it went from kerfuffle to shenanigans well in UH in two thousand two, February two thousand two, Singer is laid off of Wikipedia. At that point, the dot com bubble

bursting had really started to take its effect. New PD essentially was petering out at that point and UH and at first Singer was had his had his salary reduced a couple of times I think, and then he was laid off. He continued to work in a volunteer capacity for a little while. Also in February two thousand two, the Spanish language version of Wikipedia forked off of the

main version and became Encyclopedia Libre. And the reason for the split was that the the people working on the Spanish side were worried that there was going to be problems with censorship, I think, things like Saner deleting stuff.

And also there was worry that Wikipedia would soon start to institute advertising on its site to monetize Wikipedia, and that there was a worry there that by monetizing Wikipedia, you would compromise the site's integrity, which is something that Saner was saying didn't exist because of the lack of peer review. So it's kind of this interesting like you're you're going to ruin the integrity of the site and

saying there's like what integrity. Uh. So that was an interesting discussion, and in August of two thousand two, Jimmy Wales said that Wikipedia would never run ads on its site, and in fact, that's also when Wikipedia dot com became Wikipedia dot org as sort of an an example of this is this is who we are. We are not

We're not a not a company, We're an organization. Uh. In December of that year, in two thousand two, they launched wictionary, which is kind of funny because there was a whole page on Wikipedia about how Wikipedia is not a dictionary, so they did dictionary. Now, Lauren, let me ask you this, do you think now I can understand the value of an open source, crowdsourced encyclopedia because there

are huge disciplines of knowledge out there. There are people who are experts in it, there are people who have experience with it, their researchers who really know what they're doing when they're looking into that sort of stuff. And the more minds you bring into an encyclopedia, the better chance you have of getting a fuller picture of whatever it is. Right, do you see the same thing being

valuable in the dictionary? Well, okay, The thing about dictionaries I think now that you ask me, is that, um, you know, there are these really terrific, very thorough sources like the Oxford English. It's probably the pinnacle of English dictionaries. If if I'm allowed to make that kind of qualitative statement right now, American heritage myself. But you know, well I said that about you, John, I support my I support my country. Why do you hate America? Lauren? What

do you hate America? Well? Because, okay, so so you know they're they're there are these large resource dictionaries that have a terrific wealth of historical information behind them. Um, however, they are a little bit slow on the uptake of

new words. I say, so, you would see the value of dictionary being something that could incorporate words that are entering the lexicon that would maybe take five to ten years to start at at the at the fastest speed possible, five to ten years to be incorporated into a dictionary

classic dictionary. Right, And also you know to to do it in a way that is that is, you know, a not branded because because as as much as I as much as I do love very specific dictionaries, there their brands, their companies, they're they're out there to make a profit, um at the end of the day. And so so having an open source one is a really terrific idea, and having one that's perhaps better policed than for example, urban dictionary, I think, I think it's a

good a good thing to do. Okay, although to be fair, it's still community police. Well it is, but I would say that the quality of policing on dictionary versus urban dictionary is um, that's fair. That's fair. I can I can agree to that because I don't know of any policing that happens on urbans. I don't think that that's a thing. So June two thousand three, Whales announces the Wikimedia Foundation, which is a nonpro fit that administrates Wikipedia.

And in September two thousand three, Nupedia's servers crash and it never comes back. Yeah, it just shuts down. You know, the computer failed. So we're just gonna believe it. I don't think it ever really got more than those articles. That was I think that was about it kind of the peak. Yeah wow, yeah, so nupedia was a failed experiment. Wikipedia, the what was originally going to just be a little offshoot of nupedia, was already a rousing success. Yeah. Yeah.

There were many other non English sites that were that were launching around that time. I think that not all of them had officially split off yet, but there were There were at least seventeen different languages being worked on within Wikipedia. Hey guys, um, we're gonna come right back to this classic episode of tech stuff about Wikipedia. But first I gotta follow this link because I'm learning all about gophers. I'll be right back all right, now back

to Wikipedia. Okay, so we just talked about two thousand three. Do you have anything between two thousand three and two thousand five, because otherwise I'm just going to skip around ahead. Um. I believe that in two thousand four Wikia was founded, which is which is the for profit kind of branch of Wikipedia that that maintains a whole bunch of of entertainment mostly related wikis. Um. I think I think that

the the Wikipedia is among them stuff like that. Okay, and you know those are the wikis that I've recently become more and more familiar with, because you know, pretty much any kind of entertainment thing out there has its own wiki, to the point where I'm like, I can't believe this has a wiki. I can't believe tech stuff doesn't anyway, But but yeah, so yeah, so in these these are ads supported. Um, however, they're still community run and uh you know, yeah right right, so so similar.

But again this is following mora along the wiki lines

of philosophy rather than the Wikipedia one. Because again, one of the things Sanger also said in his in his talks or in his writings was that, um, you know, he saw that the wicked philosophy was kind of counter to that of an encyclopedia, like the two did not did not move, you know, I didn't mention a very very seamless way, and that that that was a concern to him, but that he felt that because Wikipedia was specifically supposed to be an encyclopedia, it helped guide the policies, uh,

for better or for worse. So it's the community on Wikipedia is not exactly the same as what you would find on your average wiki because the process is slightly different because it has a very specific purpose to be

an encyclopedia. Well. Uh. In two thousand five, Wired published a report that said that that Jimmy Wales had done something that's generally frowned upon within the Wikipedia community, and that is to edit your own page eighteen times apparently, and supposedly the edits that were made um or removing things like, uh, like Sanger's involvement in the early genesis of Wikipedia. Yeah, essentially, there was there was a charge that Wales had removed the sentence that had referred to

Sander as a co founder of Wikipedia. Um. And then there were other things as well. That's that Wales said was it was just an attempt to remove some inaccuracies. It wasn't. He wasn't trying to watching anything or cleaning it out according to why he was saying. Anyway, it still defends this, by the way, right in general, that that's considered bad form on Wikipedia. It's not. It's not

explicitly against the rules. If you're not you're generally, I mean you're you're generally if if you find it an accuracy about something that concerns you due to and they have an acrony important and all um. Uh, it is the conflict of interest a bit of it that that, Yeah, that you're supposed to submit it to an editor who can then make a non conflict of interest meant call about whether or not that it needs to be made.

That's interesting that particular sequence is going to play an important part towards the end of this timeline conversation, definitely, because it turns out some people have taken advantage of that particular approach to the point where they have been able to insertain misleading information or at least leaving out important truths in the process of quote unquote correcting or adding to an article. But we'll get to that in a moment. Yeah. So Wales ends up and getting some

heat for this. Uh, even though to this day he says that it wasn't it was not a big deal. It's not that he doesn't even say he didn't do anything wrong. He's like, I don't understand what the big deal is here? Was fixing errors. He's He's like, yeah, I did it. There was nothing wrong with what I did,

so calm down. But then you know, other people would say, well, if you had just gone through the regular channels, then it would have been Another story, UH, May of two thousand five was when we had uh an anonymous user who was later identified but I'm not going to say the name here, but he posted comments in an article about Segon Dollar, John Seingon Dollar, saying that he was a suspect in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy. Segon Dollar as a journalist and was a friend to

Robert Kennedy actually one of his palmers. So Segon Dollar said that this amounted to Internet character assassination. The comments were a hoax. It was supposed to be a joke, although I don't know who would find this particularly Yeah, but the hoax it was made in May, but it wasn't discovered until September of two thousand five, and then the mainstream media caught hold of the story and began

to cover it. And this ended up being a big black eye on Wikipedia because everyone ran with the story saying, how can you trust a resource that anyone can go into and change in, vandalist or create a hoax like this joke? Yeah, insert completely false information or delete something so that whatever is left is not an accurate portrayal of the actual subject. Crow the entire side is useless. Yeah, you know what's fitialist media is kind of right, right.

It definitely escalated to from hey, sometimes you can't trust what's on Wikipedia to Wikipedia is bad because people are evil and they will mislead you. Uh. And by the way, I don't really think either extreme is healthy. While I often will dismiss Wikipedia in any sort of academic approach, I am not one to say that fits all. There's some things about Wikipedia that I find genuinely amusing, and there's some things I find genuinely helpful. But but yeah,

I would never go so far on either side. Get to know. So April two thousand six, we have another scandal guy from Glasgow whose name I will not be able to say, Alan mickel Wraith, mickil Wraith. It's gonna be mckil writh in front of me. That sounds. That sounds it's got to be Mickilraith m c I l w R A I t H mckilraith. So he created a Wikipedia entry about himself that betrayed him as a

decorated army officer, something that he was not. And again the mainstream media picked up on this and said, like, here's a guy who was promoting himself, uh, created a false identity for himself and uh, and this shows that you can't trust what's on Wikipedia. Yeah. Meanwhile, all this bad press was not particularly affecting the growth of Wikipedia. By by mid two thousand six, I think that they

had five million articles. Yeah, this is they went from uh they had one million in English, but probably five million I think total total. Yeah. So right, right, there's a little bit of debate about well, yeah, because I got confused. I saw at one point, like in two thousand four, they hit one million articles, and then I read later like a two thousand and six they hit one million articles again, and then I realized, oh wait, the first one two thousand four was one million articles

total across all languages. Two thousand six was one million in English. But it was that the growth was incredible. Uh. And in two thousand seven we have another scandal. This is when it was discovered that a Wikipedia editor who was using a handle called s J E. S. S J A Y was discovered to have also created a false identity. In this case, s J had been uh posing as someone who held a PhD uh in uh

in theology. I assume because he was saying that he was a tenured professor with an expertise in Kennon law, and in reality he was a twenty four year old guy who had been to several colleges in Kentucky. Did not all the less of an expert, perhaps, but objectively speaking, he was saying that he had created this identity in order to give himself a buffer so that people who disagreed with him would not be able to attack him personally. So,

in other words, he was just creating a handle. It's just a little bit more more involved than just a handle. But here's the problem. He was also using his fake credentials to back up his arguments whenever he was making edits. Yeah, that's that's that, that's going beyond. He's saying, like, because of my expertise in this field, I know that this particular thing should be worded this way rather than that way.

And he didn't hold those credentials. So the New Yorker writes about Wikipedia, and they write about s J before finding out that s J is not who he claims to be. Then the information breaks that s J is actually someone else, and the New Yorker ends up writing a pretty strongly worded response to that, and again mainstream

media blows up, and online it blows up. The community begins to sift through all the edits that s J made on Wikipedia, particularly in the places where he was using his false credentials to bolster his arguments, because now the community has the responsibility to fix this or if if in fact needs to be fixed, they have to address it so that they can again show that Wikipedia is something you can rely upon at least, or that it's at least useful and not just shouldn't just be

raised to the ground. Yeah, it's not just a database of information you cannot really be sure is accurate or not. Uh, it was, you know, it was fighting a powerful perception problem, right right right? That was also, did did you? That was also the year two thousand and seven that Virgil

griff Griffith released wicket Scanner. I don't know about this one, okay, so so so wicket Scanner was this, you know, terrific little program that he wrote that whenever an unregistered anonymous user edits a Wikipedia entry, the site logs the user's IP address and and this can come in terrifically handy because you know, it's not not all the problems are with people pretending to be who they aren't when an anonymous user can log in and talk about anything that

they want to, you know, for the kind of things that we're coming out of this wicker scanner business were the facts like people from Apple I p addresses had been editing Microsoft pages on Wikipedia and vice versa, which is another reason why we find Wikipedia. It's it's one of those reasons why it's hard to trust stuff because sometimes people with an agenda will go in and adjust a uh AN entry either to make one party and it look better than it than it would otherwise have

looked or look worse, depending upon the person's agenda. Sure, yeah, yeah member, you know. And and Democratic Party member's IP address was traced to edits about Rush Limbaugh that we're extremely unflattering. Yeah, this is this is happened any election year. This stuff runs rampant to the point where sometimes Wikipedia will lock down a particular page about a subject in order to avoid the crazy number of edits that different sides of a debate will will put onto a page

in order to support their side. I mean, think about it. This is kind of crazy, right. It's like if I if I have a disagreement with Lauren about a particular subject, and then I go to Wikipedia and edit a page so it supports my argument, and then I cite Wikipedia as a support for my argument. That's it's pretty insidious. That's dirty pool, That's what that is. And I don't want to say that all anonymous Wikipedia editors are are

bad or doing nefarious things at all. For example, a couple of the other things came out of this is that they found out that am someone from the CIA contributed a really long entry about lightsaber combat um some someone from DARPA had written fairly extensively about Schila booth. I mean, you know, it's it's just stuff. You know, it's not always bad, right, Yeah, But and we don't mean to suggest that it's always bad or that this happens all the time. It's the fact that it happens

that's the problem. And you don't, you know, unless you are actually adept at looking at the edits page and understanding what that means, you may not be aware of something that's going on that's not quite right. And so, uh, while while the odds of that actually happening on any given page on any given day maybe low because you're talking about lots and lots of people using this resource and lots of opportunities to fiddle with it, it does happen.

That's that's why you're like, you know, the odds are with you that you're going to be fine whenever you

use Wikipedia. There are like eight thousand regular contributors and seventy seven thousand regular editors on Wikipedia as so, and after that whole uh, the whole problem with Segenthaler where the the quote unquote the joke about him being a suspect in the assassination of the Kennedy's uh, Wales had instituted a new policy saying that unregistered users can no longer post new articles at all, because that was he wanted to head off that problem, and then by registering

he hoped that that would create more accountability. Now, of course, the s j issue showed that there were other problems, and Wales came down pretty hard on that to Once all the facts came out in two thousand nine, the Arbitration Committee had to restrict access to its site from the Church of Scientology IP addresses and also banned several anti Scientologist editors because the two sides were both manipulating the same articles to either post scientology and a positive

or a negative light. Obviously when that was around when uh Anonymous I believe was really involved in in their crash campaign, so that the thing that was coming up into question was the neutral point of view here and both sides were trying to use Wikipedia to bolster their

own arguments. Uh, and whether you side with one or the other or it was clear that both sides had agendas and uh, you know, some of those people may have been trying very hard to create an objective post, but there were a lot of people who really weren't. And that's where the banning and the and IP address blocking came in. And that same year, Wikipedia became licensed under Creative Commons right yeah, yeah, UM, which which basically just means that it's it's licensed under their um share

and share like yeah. So in other words, you don't have to worry about uh getting chased down by lawyers when you're reusing this material and another and you cannot, like a person who contributes to Wikipedia cannot claim that work to be their own at all. They have they have essentially signed off right right, you know, it's the content UM is still technically owned by the contributors, but it is freely reproducible and distributable. Yeah, and when anyone

can go in and edit it. Actually, that was one of those things that people worried about early on in Wikipedia's have Wait a minute, I'm an awesome writer. I write awesome things. My awes credit for my awesome thing or or I even if I don't get credit, I certainly shouldn't be subjected to seeing other plebeians coming in and editing my awesome prose where I wrote this amazing piece on Optimist Prime and his importance to Western culture.

And some idiot came in and said that he turned into this model of of of a Semitruck when clearly it was this other model of Yeah, that's that was like an actual argument that happened on Wikipedia, early, early, early, early on. But people have to let go because that's kind of the way Wikipedia works. And as a writer, I can completely understand what the people who get really

antsy about that. Although I would often turn my writing assignments into Chris and then never see them again until they were published on the page, and I was all right with it. Uh, you learned to let go here and how stuff. I learned to leg go, and I learned that this way, I don't have to look at those red marks all over my paper, because Chris just fixed it himself. It was awesome. It made me feel like I was a better writer than I actually was.

All Right, we've got a little bit more to talk about with Wikipedia, but before we dive into the next link, let's take another quick break in two thousand and twelve. Do you have anything between Actually, we're going to wrap up the timeline pretty soon. The two thousand and twelve The big story I have was, of course, that Wikipedia took place in the blackout day on Janua and Pipa. Yeah, Pippa. Sorry, it's fine, you haven't. You haven't been through the whole

ordeal of talking about Sopa and Pippa. I called it Pipa for about three weeks until everyone else in technology just consistently called it Pippa and a. Final I've been wrong this whole time, But yeah, Sopa and Pippa. Those were, of course, the online Piracy Acts that were in consideration in Congress in the United States, and several sites ended

up doing blackouts to protest this proposed legislation. UH to bring more attention to it and say these the way these these laws or these these potential laws are worded, they could seriously harm the operation of the Internet and and cause trouble to lots of people and lots of organizations,

and they should not be turned into law. Uh. And then in two thousand thirteen, oh but but before before we leave too important cultural note, that is the year that Encyclopedia Britannica ceased publishing on paper after two hundred and forty four years of doing so, you know, there's also kind of interesting there was I remember, and I didn't write this down in my my research because it didn't actually it didn't occur to me while I was

researching it. But I remember specifically, there was a time when Wikipedia was starting to consider looking for experts to send in articles, just like the old New Pedia days. They were they were actually thinking about going to experts to get expert subject matter experts to write information for Wikipedia. At the same time, Britannica was looking at the possibility

of crowdsourcing articles. So it looked like for a moment that these two models were about the flip flop that didn't actually happen that way, But I remember hearing about that or my brain just invented one of the two. Also interesting cultural point. In between two thousand eight and two thousand twelve, this kind of dead space that that we have created, first of on our timeline here, um, the Wikimedia Foundation total assets went from five point six

million to about forty nine point three million. And again it's existing on donations donations only, and and so, and that's that's fabulous for the concept of shared knowledge, I think, right, and also really interesting to see what kind of I mean to know exactly what they mean when they when they have those giant banners every year to beg for money, right, Yeah, when you see Jimmy Wells face on their saying on every page, yeah, give money so that this can continue

to exist. I mean, and not that you shouldn't donate. I just you know, I just think that it's it's an interestingly, it's it's a really cool number. Yeah, And I think it's it's it's cool that he took that approach. I mean, it definitely gives them the benefit of saying, look, we're not beholden to any organization or company. We are accepting the nation crowd crowd source and this is this is really meant to be a tool to enrich the

human race. Really, it's it's meant to really make things better for everybody, and it's not meant to be the platform for one company to say, hey, by our stuff and some of that other guy's stuff. One two their teams speaking about companies. So that's this year. Earlier this year, a story broke that British Petroleum or BP, I should say BP is better now. The Brits hate it when I say British Petroleum because they said, look, you don't

bring us into this fault. The story was that BP had edited its own Wikipedia page, maybe rewriting up to the content in order to make the environmental impact at the oil spell yeah, the deep water horizon and the Gulf, to make that seem less bad. Maybe it's kind of hard to word this properly, but essentially that they have sort of whitewashed the disaster and the follow up to it. Uh. And here here I'm quoting this directly from c NET,

which reported on this. BP is not directly editing its page, but instead has apparently inserted a BP representative into the editing community who provides Wikipedia editors with text. The text is then copied as is onto the page by Wikipedia editors, while readers are none the wiser that sections pretending to be unbiased information are in fact vetted by higher ups

at BP before hitting the page. BP's image clean up cleverly skirts Wikipedia's editorial rules, wherein Wikipedia editors are using text that VP posts on Wikipedia itself as the course, although the text is not published on BP's website. This way, the significant involvement of BP in its own entry is completely hidden from Wikipedia readers. While Wikipedia editors, as usual argue and attack each other over editorial policy, while BPS

favorable pr editing continues. Right and uh, alright, so so there there's really one person who was submitting these changes, someone by the name of Arturo silver Silva. Pardon me, um. He was from the corporate Communications department in Houston and um and he was actually going through the correct channels to submit these changes. He he suggested the changes to editors. He identified himself as a BP employee to those editors. So essentially what was happening was that he was playing

by the rules. Uh, it was technically in good faith, aside from the part that that you know, it was still whitewashing, whitewashing the whole situation. Right, So so these are like when we were talking about earlier about how you know, Jimmy Whale had edited his own his own article and that he should have gone through the proper channels. These are those channels that we were talking about. This is what the VP person was doing, but it was still putting in possibly you know, you might say biased

information is clearly clearly biased. It's from the company that the page is about, so you can't you know, there's no way it could be unbiased. If I write my own Wikipedia page, that's going to be biased. Even if I think I'm being objective, I'm still going to talk about how freaking awesome I am. You know, so right, But you know, I don't know, like like at that point, I would personally, and this is speaking as an editor, so I might be a little bit upity about it.

I would blame the editors at that because because if they're not if they're not going like, yeah, this is maybe not the right source to trust. This information from UM and this is going beyond a a factual a clearly factual change, they're not showing good editorial judgment, correct yeah,

I agree with that. And uh and so you know, Jimmy Wales actually came down again and said that while BP is saying essentially that they totally played by the rules, he said, that's not what the rules are there to protect. The rules are there to protect against the kind of

stuff that this this company is pulling. It's just this company is pulling the tricks within the context of the rules, which either means that the rules themselves are faulty or the people who are who are in charge, like the editors, like you were saying, Lauren, are faulty. At any rate, this is something that if you know, I don't want to put words into wales his mouth, but I assume from what he has said he would not want this

to have happened. Um. So, anyway, all of that being said, there's an awful lot of information on Wikipedia, and a lot of that over two million articles in two languages in fact, and then there's stuff on there that's incredibly useful. I mean I I use Wikipedia casually all the time, probably every day. It is incredibly useful. Um. But because of what we've about, that's why a lot of teachers

and and publications like how stuff works. Say you cannot use Wikipedia as a source, and it's because of the reasons we've listed. It's not that it's a bad thing. I actually think that Wikipedia is an amazing idea and it's actually phenomenal to me that's worked as well as it has right, right, you know, considering that that certain certain portions the Internet can definitely be a wretched hive

of scammon villainy. Right If you look at YouTube comments and then you think, this is the same this is the same world that we live in where we can go to Wikipedia and read an article about something, you know, something really technically advanced, and get a really good understanding of it. Uh, and it's this is a collaborative effort on the part of possibly hundreds of people. And then you go to YouTube and you read the comments and you think, how is this the same world? How what happened? Uh?

So you know it's amazing. But there are also some things that you can poke some fun at, like, uh, there was a I wish I could remember what which web comic this was, and listeners, if you happen to know what I'm referring to, if you've been reading web comics forever, and the strikes a chord. Let me know.

But I remember reading a web comic ages ago where was a whole series about Wikipedia, and one of the things they pointed out, very snarkily, was if you were to assume that the the the entries that have the most words are the most important to the human race, then Optimist Prime would be way more important than Neighbraham Lincoln. I feel like those Penny Arcade Somebody, somebody, please please write in and tell me that. I can tell you

it was not Penny Arcade. Well, I mean, Penny Arcade very well may have made that same joke, but I don't read Penning Penny Arcade, so I know it wasn't Penning Arcade. All right, Well that's fair, I'm not I'm not criticizing. Look, I don't read any web comics anymore. I just don't have the time. But I used to read a lot of them. I recall. I recall seeing that that as well. At any rate, whoever created it, somebody somebody writing and tell us, because it's gonna bug otherwise.

I used to You know what's worse, I used to have these pinned up in my cubicle. They're not up there anymore, but I used to Ye, I can't even remember, but I used to have them. There's a whole bunch of them. Um. But anyway, that's one of those things. That's one of those things that you could joke about, is that that seemingly irrelevant things would get a huge

amount of attention because they were. They were interesting that you know, especially stuffing geek culture that people are really really passionately uh interested in, like you know, which again shows you why they're these wikis now that exist all around these properties, right right, and that's a perfect format for that kind of level of minutia of interstory detail.

I mean, it's ridiculous when I can look up a comic book character and see every single iteration of that comic book character, and then I look up and someone who was fundamentally important in some huge moment in history and they have a fraction of That's not that you not that you couldn't cover the important contributions of that person in that amount of space. You might be able to, but it just gives you this weird feeling like if I were to put these in scales as this one

so heavy. Any but yeah, and you know, Wikipedia is as as of January, fifth most popular website in the world, behind only Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook, and in fact ahead of Amazon, Apple, and eBay. So I yeah, I mean they're doing and again there's a lot of valuable stuff on there. So I know that we definitely kind of criticize Wikipedia quite a bit in this this podcast. But keep in mind we're talking about specifically in the

use for things like academic like academic research. And I do want to say what we do, what Jonathan and I both do, I think, is um, we'll did we say this already? We we we we go to Wikipedia and we go straight to the resource section. You look at the references and you take a look to take a look and see like because there you can learn more about you know, go to the the places where the people who have written the article on Wikipedia where they

got their information from. Because I mean, that also allows you to remove the interpreter as well, right, because anytime you're reading an article on Wikipedia, you're reading an interpretation of someone else's stuff. Because you know, that's another thing we didn't mention on Wikipedia. You do not publish primary information. You don't publish information for the first time, specifically against

the rules. Yeah, you have to. You have to. If you're going to present a fact that someone could look up and verify or reject, you have to be able to cite it. And that wraps up another classic episode of tech Stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future tech Stuff topics, no matter what it may be, if it's a company or a technology, a trend in tech, maybe it's a great innovator you would like to have sort of a biography of that person,

let me know. You can reach out to me on Twitter or on Facebook. We use the handled text stuff hs W A both and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.