Lies, Damned Lies and Wikipedia?

There are just some things you don’t give much thought to: politicians being devious, Microsoft making money faster than it can count it… that sort of thing. Oh, yes, and the integrity of information from Wikipedia.

Now I hadn’t given much thought to this. I’ve used Wikipedia regularly to find information on anything from the Weak Equivalence Principle to the Numa Numa song. I’ve always assumed that it was pretty good and accurate. Then recently I came across a couple of articles in The Register (see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/24/wikipedia_letters/ for a good jumping off point). Suddenly, I had a horrible feeling that my information about O-Zone might be totally incorrect and that that fat American kid had actually written the damned thing. With a sinking feeling, I started to investigate further…

The basis on which Wikipedia works (as far as I understand it) is that it is “self healing”. If someone, from the goodness of their heart, decides to enlighten the world and help the progress of humanity by writing an entry on the Numa Numa song, then that’s great. If then some dastardly lip-sync artist comes along and claims that he has written it, then there’s nothing to stop him changing the entry to that effect. The Wikipedia creed is that the rest of the world will recognise the crime and some other kindly spirited soul, interested in truth, light and the progress of humanity, will correct the error. Happiness and light resume.

Except that it may not work like that. A particular entry causing grief was an entry on the Data General Aviion computer (see http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2005/09/more-wikipedia-weakness.html for the scoop on this). The main problem with this article was that it was sufficiently out of the way that it didn’t get corrected in a timely manner: the incorrect information was out there for far too long. However, it was eventually corrected. But there are many articles where the content of the page may be amended by someone who isn’t an expert and simply doesn’t know what he or she is talking about or, even worse, has an agenda.

I’m not an expert on the ins-and-outs or the politics of Wikipedia editing, but I certainly believe that there are people out there who repeatedly insert their own point of view into a Wikipedia article, irrespective of how often it is deleted, and will continue to do so until they drop dead. The question is - how often does this occur?

I decided to do a simple test. I looked up two subjects that interested me and of which I knew something. The first was the ‘electron’. Look up ‘electron’ in Wikipedia and you’ll get a concise, decently written article that covers the subject up to quantum electrodynamics. So no problem there. Or is there? Try looking at the history – it’s quite illuminating. There are a couple of attempts to edit the article by typing in rubbish; and there’s the odd defacement and book-plugging which were quickly and rightly deleted by the main editor. Further down, there are serious and determined attempts to insert links to some, shall we say, ‘unorthodox’ electron theories. These were again repeatedly booted out by the editor – and put back in by the authors. I tracked the links from this on the surface well written paper (typeset in TeX with lots of serious looking equations and with no obvious green ink) to a web site that appears to be interested in alternatives to the theory of relativity.

You may have your own views on the utility of attempting to disprove a theory that has withstood every – repeat, EVERY - experimental test for the last hundred years or so and is the foundation of some of the most accurate predictions in physics. But links to such a website clearly don’t belong in a factual article in an encyclopaedia that aims to present ‘neutral’ facts.  Incidentally, I tried quite hard to find out a bit more about the authors of this paper, but didn’t really have much success. I even  tried searching for the authors on the science pre-print server, www.arxiv.org, with no luck.

But you can never really tell with the internet. One character I came across some time ago, certifiable by all normal criteria, was a certain Dr Abian who held that that TIME IS MASS (or was it MASS IS TIME? I forget) and that WE MUST BLOW UP THE MOON. The capitals are essential, by the way. The only problem was that Dr. Abian was actually a respected professor of mathematics in his spare time.

Anyway, the end result of this has been that the dedicated maintainer of the humble ‘electron’ page on Wikipedia has done – and continues to do – an excellent, but probably thankless, job of keeping the thing on the straight and narrow. So full marks to the Wikipedia idea here: it’s working.

My second test was a little more disturbing. I did a search for Dachau – a Nazi concentration camp. No problem there – the Wikipedia article was all pretty factual and accurate as far as I could make out. I then followed a link to a rather more controversial page on the so-called Dachau Massacre, where it seems that some US troops may have got out hand and distributed summary justice to some SS guards. But now if you follow a little innocuous link at the bottom of the page (‘The Dachau Massacre as viewed by revisionists’) , you find yourself in the middle of a rather strange website (hosted somewhere in eastern Europe, I think) with articles like ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’ and links to the deeply unpleasant holocaust denial site, The Institute for Historical Review.

Clearly there’s a small problem of free speech here. Even flat earthers are entitled to have their say. But, for some reason, I do care deeply about publicising those who wish deny the fact that six million human beings were systematically and deliberately murdered. And that is what Wikipedia is doing simply by, in my view, publishing a link to a rant (and that’s what it is) giving an ‘alternative’ point of view with no comment or context.

It’s interesting, by the way to read the revisionist article in conjunction with the report from Colonel Sparks who liberated Dachau (http://www.45thinfantrydivision.com/index14.htm). It’s a wonderful read. But if you do read Col. Sparks’ report, you find that some of the assertions in the main Wikipedia entry are simply incorrect. The main article states that “The soldiers involved in shooting the POWs were court-martialed”. No they weren’t. Col. Sparks was presented for court-martial – but for basically telling a (US) general what he thought of his parentage. At the point of a gun. Which the good Colonel was pointing at the said General at the time. As I say, read Col. Sparks’ account.

At this point I began to question things. If the article didn’t actually square with the account of the man who was there, what else was it missing? So, I did a bit of investigation about the editor and found that he had something of a Wikipedia ‘history’. That’s a big plus about Wikipedia – if you go around causing trouble, you leave a trail. This particular editor seems to be a Polish student who has an interest in World War Two massacres. No problem with that. However, he has been criticised by fellow Wikipedians for being a bit cavalier with the facts. But in this I am not an expert. I have no idea who is right or wrong. All I can say is that after reading Col. Sparks’ account I had a rather different view of the ‘massacre’. Still, I can’t fault the editor for giving me a link to the raw information.

Here we get to the core of the problem with Wikipedia. It falls into the western liberal trap of asserting that every point of view is equally valid and, further, that the democratic will of the majority shall determine what is to be defined as true. You don’t get this with a real encyclopaedia, such as Britannica  or Encarta. Sure, there are problems there as well. As Pilate said: “What is truth?” But at least with a real encyclopaedia, the editorial board is composed of researchers and academics who have respect for scholarship and truth – and are paid to police the contents. There is no such board with Wikipedia and if one had existed, the revisionist link might have been placed in some sort of context, instead of being thrown in as of equal weight to the authoritative and compelling testimony of Col. Sparks.

In the first example I looked at (the electron), the editor (that is, the principle maintainer) had decided that unorthodox theories were going to be excluded in spite of determined efforts to get them in. In second, the editor published a link to a basically neo-Nazi website without comment. It’s my belief that, for a reputable encyclopaedia, the first approach is correct. You can always find these other links if you want – try Google.

I really hope Wikipedia works out. But I have to say that I’m pessimistic in the long run. Human society being what it is, there are always going to be more fools and wreckers out there than idealists who will keep Wikipedia articles straight. Who will maintain the electron page when the current editor (a graduate student) moves on? As to the other problem – ‘all viewpoints are valid’ – I simply don’t agree.

In one sense it doesn’t matter. As someone said, the truth is out there; and it doesn’t make any difference what the authors of an unorthodox electron theory claim. Experiment will settle the matter. But in another way, it does matter – a lot. If Wikipedia gains common acceptance as being the closest thing to truth that there is (because it’s ‘self healing’ and no-one questions it) but is, in fact, lowest common denominator urban myth, then we really are in trouble.

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