Wikipedia

 The Wikipedia entry for University of Kentucky psychologist and skeptic Robert A. Baker recently (December 2023) restored a section on plagiarism accusations against him, which originated in a 1994 letter to the editor of Skeptical Inquirer from Jody Hey and were compounded by further accusations by Terence Hines and by me the same year. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia entry currently leaves the debate the same way the Skeptical Inquirer did in 1995, giving Baker the final word with a transparently false explanation.  Here's how the Wikipedia entry currently presents the issue: ...

The Smoking Gun has a collection of documents about the government’s case against suicidal government bioweapons researcher Bruce Ivins that is fascinating. Apparently he engaged in an “edit war” on the Wikipedia entry for the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority (which my mother belonged to). He regularly posted negative information there, and became angry when it was deleted. He claimed that KKG had labeled him an “enemy” and issued a “fatwah” against him, and he broke into a KKG sorority house to steal a KKG handbook during his postdoc fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill. The documents also show ties between Ivins and the American Family Affiliation, a conservative Christian group known for threatening boycotts against companies that do things like support gay rights, and with pro-life groups. He was a regular user of pseudonyms and multiple email addresses. The documents show that he was clearly a very disturbed individual. (Previously.) UPDATE (August 9, 2008): Ivins’ coworker Meryl Nass lays out the case for reasonable doubt about Ivins’ involvement at her blog. Hume’s Ghost points out in the comments that the anthrax attacks were used to help justify the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that the anthrax apparently originated there. One of the Glenn Greenwald articles Hume’s Ghost alludes to, about false claims that the anthrax contained bentonite which tied it to Iraq, may be found here. A nice quote from that article: ...

Upon learning that he was about to be the target of a prosecution for the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, U.S. government biodefense researcher Bruce Ivins killed himself on Tuesday with an overdose of Tylenol with codeine. Ivins became a suspect after it was discovered that he had failed to report anthrax contaminations at his lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 2002. In late 2008, he was ordered to stay away from a social worker who had counseled him, Jean Duley, who would have testified against him at his trial. In Duley’s application for a protective order, she said that Ivins had stalked her and threatened to kill her. Ivins worked at the same lab where a prior “person of interest” in the case, Stephen Hatfill, also worked. Hatfill was cleared of involvement with the attacks and won a $5.8 million settlement from the Justice Department after he sued for harassment and privacy act violations. Hatfill also won a $10 million libel judgment against Vanity Fair and Reader’s Digest for an article by Donald Foster which claimed that Hatfill’s writings and travels connected him to the anthrax attacks. Ivins’ attorney claims that he was innocent, but if that were the case, wouldn’t his response have been more like Hatfill’s? Perhaps, perhaps not. Private investigator and former CNN reporter Pat Clawson, who was also a spokesperson for Hatfill, said on Friday that news organizations and the public should be “deeply skeptical” about any notion that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax killer unless and until solid evidence is brought forth.“Everybody is jumping to the conclusion that because this guy committed suicide, he must be the anthrax killer,” Mr. Clawson said. “That is a lousy premise. The pressure of these F.B.I. investigations on individuals is phenomenal, and it is quite likely that this guy cracked under that pressure but had nothing to do with the killings.” ...

Last night I attended an event at which one of the attendees promoted “Zeitgeist: The Movie.” I was prompted to finally watch this piece of pernicious nonsense back in January when a commenter at this blog made reference to it, and I forced myself to sit through the whole thing. The movie is in three segments–the first is on the origins of Christianity, in which it argues that Jesus was a myth derived from Egyptian myth, based on the work of Acharya S. The second is 9/11 conspiracy theory. The third is an argument that the U.S. Federal Reserve is a scam. It’s almost entirely garbage, dependent on crackpot sources. I posted a series of comments about the movie as I watched it, but I’ll summarize those here and add a bit more. The first part argues that Christianity is derived from Egyptian myth, primarily by pointing out parallels between them. The arguments are apparently derived from the self-published “The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold” by Acharya S (Dorothy M. Murdock) and perhaps also from Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ, both works of pseudoscholarship based on the work of other pseudoscholars like 18th century archaeologist Godfrey Higgins, 19th century amateur Egyptologist and poet Gerald Massey, and Alvin Boyd Kuhn, a high school language teacher and promoter of Theosophy) and entirely ignores actual work in Egyptology. For example, the film draws a list of comparisons between Horus and Jesus that is just fabricated–Horus wasn’t born of a virgin, he was the child of Isis and Osiris, though Isis was impregnated by Osiris through some magic after he was dead. There have been parallels drawn between Isis and Mary that are more plausible (especially in iconography), but the movie exaggerates them, too, and fails to note the considerable areas of dissimilarity. A quick look at the Wikipedia entries on Horus and Isis is sufficient to show that the comparison is strained. The significance of a December 25 birthdate is nonexistent–Christianity did acquire attributes of pagan religions later in its history, and it has clearly been a syncretistic religion, but while this is evidence of falsehood in Christian traditions, it is not a clue to its origin. For accurate information about Christianity and the formation of the Christian tradition, virtually any mainstream academic work will be more reliable. There has been a lot discovered since the work of 19th century Theosophists, both in the form of document manuscripts and archaeology, that sheds light on the early history of Christianity. In discussions at the James Randi Educational Foundation Forums, poster GreNME wrote: ...

Thanks to Wikiscanner, here are a few of the anonymous Wikipedia edits made by people at Answers in Genesis: November 18, 2005: Changed a sentence in the entry on “Answers in Genesis” from “…according to Biblical myth, there was no death in the Garden of Eden” to “…according to the Biblical record, there was no death in the Garden of Eden." December 5, 2006: Vandalized the entry on “Football” to add the words “Football sucks”. December 28, 2006: Added an entry for www.articledirect.com to the entry on “Free content.” Does an AiG employee have another business on the side? May 24, 2007: Modifies a sentence in the entry on “Creation Museum” from “This museum portrays the Earth’s history interpreting the genesis literally” (ick!) to “The museum presents the account of man’s origins and early history according to the Book of Genesis." There are several other edits of “Creation Museum” and I didn’t review them all, but most were reasonable improvements to the article, with the occasional biased statement that propounded creationism as true. ...

Virgil Griffith has put together a fascinating data-mining tool that compares anonymous Wikipedia edits to WHOIS records for IP addresses, to allow users to examine edits made by people at particular organizations. The tool can be used to examine edits by people at the NSA (Ft. Meade), the CIA, the Church of Scientology, Bob Jones University, the Environmental Protection Agency, Diebold, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Wal-Mart, Pfizer, Raytheon, The New York Times, Al-Jazeera, the WorldNetDaily, Fox News, the Republican and Democratic Party, the Vatican, among many others. The organizations listed here are all listed on the side of the tool’s main search page, but there are many more in the drop-down list of user-submitted organizations, and you can specify organization names and locations. Wired magazine has assembled a list of some of the more interesting edits, such as someone at Diebold deleting references to security flaws in electronic voting machines and someone at the CIA editing song lyrics from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Griffith, who built Wikiscanner while working at the Santa Fe Institute, begins graduate work in September at Caltech on theoretical neurobiology and artificial life under Christoph Koch and Chris Adami. It’s wonderful when data mining can be used for good purposes. (Hat tip to Scott Peterson on the SKEPTIC list.)

From jwz’s blog: The Art of Wikigroaning The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called “Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we’ll go with “Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah. Yeeaaah, we know, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. (We’re calling it Wikigroaning for a reason.) The next step is to find your own article pair and share it with your friends, who will usually look for their own pairs and you end up spending a good hour or two in a groaning arms race. The game ends after that, usually without any clear winners… but hey, it beats doing work. ...

Richard Bennett has an interesting post about Wikipedia and the decentralization of knowledge collection titled “Teaching the hive mind to discriminate." He argues that while Wikipedia is good at accumulating the knowledge of a large number of individuals, it also collects their “prejudice, mistaken beliefs, wishful thinking, and conformance to tradition.” It is unrealistic to expect that these erroneous beliefs will automatically be weeded out because “expertise is not as widely dispersed as participation”: So the real question about information and group scaling is this: are there procedures for separating good information from false information (”discrimination”) that are effective enough to allow groups to be scaled indefinitely without a loss of information quality? It’s an article of faith in the Wikipedia “community” that such procedures exist, and that they’re essentially self-operative. That’s the mythos of “emergence”, that systems, including human systems, automatically self-organize in such a way as to reward good behavior and information and purge bad information. This seems to be based on the underlying assumption that people being basically good, the good will always prevail in any group.Readers of this blog know that I would argue that many religious and political beliefs are examples that support Bennett’s position. On a related point, Ed Felten has a recent post about how reputation systems on the Internet can be manipulated, referencing a pair of articles at Wired by Annalee Newitz. A common flaw is that the reputations of the raters themselves is either not taken into account or is easily manipulated. If there were a way of reliably weighting expertise of raters within appropriate knowledge domains, that could provide a method of discrimination to sort out the good from the bad information. This is a subject that my planned (but never completed) Ph.D. dissertation in epistemology (on social epistemology, specifically on obtaining knowledge based on the knowledge of others) at the University of Arizona should have touched upon. One philosopher who had touched on this subject at the time I was working on my Ph.D. (back in the early 1990s) was Philip Kitcher, whose book The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (1993, Oxford University Press) contains a chapter titled “The Organization of Cognitive Labor” (originally published as “The Division of Cognitive Labor” in the Journal of Philosophy, 87(1990):5-21). ...

The blogosphere has been making fun of absurdities at Conservapedia, Andrew Schlafly’s attempt to create a conservative-oriented version of Wikipedia. Orac points out that Conservapeia promotes the anti-vaccination Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (Schlafly is their legal counsel). Mark Chu-Carroll points out that even math has a liberal bias, according to Conservapedia. P.Z. Myers looks at some of Conservapedia’s coverage of evolution. Perhaps most entertaining is Jon Swift’s coverage of Conservapedia, which contains links to many of the Science Bloggers’ commentaries. ...

Back in December, I wrote about criticisms of Wikipedia in Communications of the ACM and a study published by Nature which found that Wikipedia’s coverage of scientific subjects was about as accurate as that of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now Britannica has demanded a retraction of the Nature study on the grounds that its “research [is] invalid, its study poorly carried out, and its findings [are] ‘so error-laden that it was completely without merit.’” (Inside quote is from Britannica’s response, outside quote from Seattle Times coverage.) Britannica’s website has a 20-page PDF (7 pages of response, 13 pages of supporting information in two appendixes) that is a response to the Nature study, titled “Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature.” This response states that “Nature’s research was invalid. As we demonstrate below, almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica." The initial criticism of the response is that, while the Nature study headline claimed that “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,” the actual study showed that Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica. The next criticism is that as they reviewed the alleged inaccuracies, they “discovered in Nature’s work a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results.” Nature refused to supply the complete reviewer reports comparing Britannica to Wikipedia articles, so Britannica reviewed the truncated reviewer reports that had been posted to the web, along with the articles which were supplied by Nature. Several of the Britannica articles reviewed were not from the Encyclopedia, but from editions of the Britannica Book of the Year. Britannica notes that “Yearbook authors are often given greater latitude to express personal views than writers of encyclopedia articles.” In one instance, a sentence in an article on Steven Wolfram “in which point of view figured significantly” was counted as an inaccuracy. In one case, an article on ethanol, the source of the article was from the Britannica Student Encyclopedia, “a more basic work for younger readers." A more significant flaw was that in some cases, reviewers criticized articles for omissions when they were only sent excerpts from the articles. The report notes that the reviewer of an article on lipids was sent only a 350-word introduction rather than the full 6,000-word article, which covered the items marked as omissions on the basis of the introduction alone. Similarly, what was delivered to reviewers as articles on kin selection and punctuated equilibrium were actually only sections from a longer article on the theory of evolution, and what was identified as an article on field-effect transistors was a section of the entry on integrated circuits. In another case, an article on aldol reaction was composed of selections taken from two separate Britannica articles, connected together with language apparently authored by Nature’s editors. Another flaw in the Nature study was that Nature did not require reviewers to document their assertions; where they disagreed with articles being reviewed, the reviewers were taken to be authoritative. The Britannica response supplies two examples where the reviewers were incorrect. Finally, Nature failed to distinguish minor from major errors, treating all as equal even though Wikipedia had more significant issues, and counted as omissions cases where Britannica made editorial judgments to cover specific information in either a different way than the reviewer preferred or in other articles in the encyclopedia. I think Britannica makes their case–the study shouldn’t be relied upon as evidence that Wikipedia’s coverage of science is as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica.