Guest post: "Wikipedia and Ethics in Online Journalism"

This is the first guest post in the approx. 16 month history of "I'm from Missouri," with over 500 articles -- many of them substantial (and some not) -- already posted. It came in an email. I am posting it here with permission:
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Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Wikipedia and Ethics in Online Journalism

Wikipedia is classified as a "tertiary source" for the purposes finding information to support a student's investigative report on a subject. That is, a student cannot cite a Wikipedia article as a source for information in a student paper.

Last week, I learned firsthand why the content of Wikipedia articles are considered unreliable.

Elsewhere, I wrote an essay on my experience trying to correct an erroneous article in Wikipedia. It was a dispiriting nightmare.

The editors on Wikipedia are anonymous and largely untrained in journalism. The concept of ethics in journalism isn't even on their radar screen. One of them told me that truth is not even an objective of Wikipedia. Rather the criterion is whether a piece of (mis)information came from a "reliable source."

And therein lies the problem. The New York Times, for example, runs stories on lots of controversial subjects. The Times will quote the views of partisans, typically providing counterbalancing views to help the reader understand how to assess the claims of competing factions in a controversy.

But it's easy to mistake a report in the Times delineating the claims of a partisan from an affirmation that the claim is valid or factually correct. And mistakes like that evidently abound in Wikipedia, since the main criterion is whether there is a reliable source which published the claim. In other words, if the New York Times reports a quote from Bush, that would justify (in the minds of some Wikipedians) that what Bush is quoted as saying is an independently verified fact.

Wikipedia is a rule-driven system, so participating in Wikipedia is a lot like playing chess. Every move can be challenged if the challenger can cite a rule that the move violates. That makes every participant both a player and a self-appointed referee. As a result, some Wikipedians become very adept at gaming the system. They don't participate with an ethic of crafting accurate articles in a responsible manner, but with the personal goal of winning the match. Of course the outcome of any rule-driven game is arbitrary. It just depends on which player is better at citing the rules. When this practice is combined with the tendency to cherry-pick which reported claims found in the legitimate press to elevate to the unwarranted status of facthood, one finds a miasma of half-truths, misinformation, unwarranted inferences, and political spin-doctoring masquerading as verified fact.

Most of the time, this isn't a big issue. But it matters when false and defamatory material finds its way into the Wikipedia biography of a living person. Wikipedia is supposed to have extra filters in place when inserting content into a biographical article. But my experience reveals that the chess game just turns into a frustrating stalemate, with no reliable method for resolving the case and getting to the ground truth. Wikipedia is not designed to get to the ground truth, especially since there is also a rule forbidding original research. Not surprisingly, there isn't much source material on a lot of living persons. If one's name is mentioned in a New York Times article, and some Wikipedia editor misinterprets the article, there isn't much hope for fixing it. Once a bureaucracy makes a mistake, it generally cannot be fixed. And Wikipedia is a rigidly rule-driven bureaucracy without sufficient responsible supervision to ensure that the chess games produces anything of lasting value to the general public (such as accurate stories that one can rely on).

No wonder teachers don't allow their students to cite Wikipedia as a reliable source.

But Wikipedia does provide an interesting example of a good idea gone awry.

And it provides a good example of how a rule-driven system becomes profoundly dysfunctional.

I emailed back the following response:
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Not only are some of the Wikipedia rules bad (e.g., the general rule against citing blogs), but the Wikipedia administrators grostesquely distort the rules and apply them in a discriminatory manner.

On the Wikipedia biography of Cheri Yecke, the Wickedpedian administrators blocked all rebuttals of criticisms of her.

I suggested a simple way of resolving Wikipedia disputes on controversial items -- just insert a brief statement of the item along with (1) a note that the item is disputed and (2) links to external websites where the item is discussed or debated. This would avoid cluttering up Wikipedia with long discussions or debates of controversial items. This suggestion was ignored.

The Wikipedia administrators -- as well as the administrators of other online encyclopedias -- do not realize that an online encyclopedia does not need to look like a printed encyclopedia. An online encyclopedia can contain a lot more controversial items than a printed encyclopedia because an online encyclopedia can provide instant links to external sites where the controversial items are
discussed or debated.

My blog has dozens of articles about Wikipedia and Internet censorship. These articles may be found under the post labels in the sidebar.

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