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Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from how Stuff,

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Speaker 1: What's dot com either everyone, and welcome to tex Stuff.

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Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren Vocoma. And today we

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Speaker 1: wanted to talk a bit about a subject that's kind

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Speaker 1: of a sore subject among among writers, teachers, teachers especially,

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Speaker 1: I would say, yeah, sometimes librarians, uh, anyone involved in

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Speaker 1: heavy research. Yeah. And and it's a matter of some

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Speaker 1: debate among lots and lots of people online, and there

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Speaker 1: are good points and bad points. We're going to cover

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Speaker 1: them all. We are, of course talking about Wikipedia. And

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Speaker 1: you guys who are longtime listeners of tech stuff might

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Speaker 1: remember that Chris and I did an episode about wikis

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Speaker 1: and we touched upon Wikipedia a little bit. But that

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Speaker 1: was many years ago. Other stuff has happened, as things

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Speaker 1: are wont to do on the course of time, and

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Speaker 1: we decided we wanted to really look at what made

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Speaker 1: Wikipedia what it was and what it is, and how

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Speaker 1: has it changed over the time that it's existed, and

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Speaker 1: and some of the reasons why Wikipedia is a very

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Speaker 1: useful tool and some reasons why people either maybe maybe

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Speaker 1: not dismiss it, but but but in some ways that

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Speaker 1: it could perhaps be improved. Yeah, and and reasons why

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Speaker 1: some people, uh suggest extreme caution before relying too heavily

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Speaker 1: upon it. Um and and before we get really into

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Speaker 1: this at all, you know, I used to write for

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Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot Com a lot. I occasionally still do,

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Speaker 1: but I mostly do podcasts now and things like that.

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Speaker 1: Blogs are about about the writing level juncture, right, But

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Speaker 1: but I used to write these these a long articles.

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Speaker 1: And one of the policies and How Stuff Works, UH,

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Speaker 1: is that you do not use Wikipedia as a source.

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Speaker 1: And uh, I used to be an editor before I

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Speaker 1: was a podcaster in social media person. And yes, that

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Speaker 1: was one of the things that we very firmly enforced

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Speaker 1: are still do. And and really the reason for that

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Speaker 1: has nothing to do with whether or not the infant well,

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Speaker 1: it has something to do with whether or not the

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Speaker 1: information you find on Wikipedia is reliable. But more importantly,

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Speaker 1: Wikipedia is a dynamic thing, right. It can be written

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Speaker 1: and edited by anybody at any time. And so when

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Speaker 1: you sit there and cite something from Wikipedia, it maybe

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Speaker 1: the next time someone visits that particular entry, the the

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Speaker 1: information has changed, and it may be that the information

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Speaker 1: now is more accurate than it was, or maybe less

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Speaker 1: accurate at any rate. The things that make Wikipedia a

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Speaker 1: useful tool in day to day I need to get

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Speaker 1: this information are the same things that make it a

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Speaker 1: dangerous tool if you are writing in any sort of

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Speaker 1: academic or professional capacity. Apacity. Yeah, thank you editor for

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Speaker 1: giving me the word that I don't have. But but really,

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Speaker 1: before we get into all the pros and cons that

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Speaker 1: I've already just touched on, uh, let's talk about the history.

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Speaker 1: So before there was a Wikipedia, back when there was

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Speaker 1: just barely a web. Yeah, yeah, it was more more

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Speaker 1: local networks of computers and some of them could you know,

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Speaker 1: key into other local networks. Yeah, we we did have

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Speaker 1: an internet. Uh, and the web was a thing, but

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Speaker 1: it was very young. But back in so you know,

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Speaker 1: the web essentially is introduced, right, so web has not

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Speaker 1: been around for very long. Rick Gates comes up with

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Speaker 1: this idea. He says, Uh, you know what would be

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Speaker 1: really super awesome if if we were to build an

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Speaker 1: encyclopedia that lived on the Internet, and if you made

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Speaker 1: that encyclopedia something that anyone could contribute to, so that

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Speaker 1: way you could tap into the world's knowledge and people

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Speaker 1: who are really experts in whatever field that they're in

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Speaker 1: they can go in and share that knowledge, right, and

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Speaker 1: and then you have the hitcharch Guide to the Galaxy, right,

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Speaker 1: except it's really the Hitchicker's Guide to Earth. Uh. So

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Speaker 1: it would be more than mostly harmless Earth in a

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Speaker 1: small amount of the surrounding galaxy. Sure. Yeah, But essentially

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Speaker 1: the sum total of what human knowledge is could go

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Speaker 1: on the Internet and be in a database that you

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Speaker 1: could search, and it would be the world's most complete encyclopedia. Uh.

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Speaker 1: A fellow by the name of R. L. Samuel came

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Speaker 1: up with an idea to call it Interpedia, and it

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Speaker 1: was kind of this interesting point of discussion, but it

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Speaker 1: never went beyond that. It was just one of those Hey,

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Speaker 1: any cool, Yeah exactly. Maybe if someone who has more

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Speaker 1: time and resources could do this, it would be awesome. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And then in a very important development happened. And I

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Speaker 1: was amazed that it happened this early because this was

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Speaker 1: the development of the Wicki platform, and the fact that

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Speaker 1: it happened in ninety four amazes me because I was

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Speaker 1: largely unaware of wikis until Wikipedia came along. Yeah as well, So,

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Speaker 1: I mean I had been on the web since the

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Speaker 1: early nineties, but I just didn't know about wikis for

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Speaker 1: many years, I mean almost a decade. Uh, and it

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Speaker 1: was and when I finally did start to learn about wikis,

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Speaker 1: they were strange and unusual to me because it was

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Speaker 1: a different experience than your average website. Right. Yeah, Usually

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Speaker 1: most websites and most books are based on this idea

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Speaker 1: that there is one expert who is who is this

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Speaker 1: terrific expert and is talking to you about this thing. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and that's and that's where it starts and stops. You know,

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Speaker 1: no one's arguing with them, particularly, right. There might be

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Speaker 1: some form of comment ability on a site where people

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Speaker 1: can contribute into the discussion, but in general, the content

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Speaker 1: of the site itself is created by a person or

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Speaker 1: an organization, but no one else. It's not like, you know,

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Speaker 1: Bob can just log in and put in Bob's section,

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Speaker 1: and then Joe over here logs in and puts in

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Speaker 1: Joe's section. It's Bob and Joe can't do anything because

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Speaker 1: they can just go and view the site. Well, the

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Speaker 1: wiki was based on a completely different idea, and it

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Speaker 1: was designed by a guy named Ward Cunningham and his

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Speaker 1: first one was First Software Developers. Yeah, yeah, he was.

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Speaker 1: He worked for a software consulting company that he was

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Speaker 1: a partner in. It was Cunningham and Cunningham also known

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Speaker 1: as C two dot com, and he was developing this,

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Speaker 1: uh this platform for Portland Pattern Repository and he called

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Speaker 1: it wiki wiki web right, based on the Hawaiian word

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Speaker 1: wiki or wiki wiki, which means um, quick quick, Yeah.

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Speaker 1: There's a the wiki wiki Shuttle in Honolulu, which is

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Speaker 1: an airport shuttle. I've been on the shuttle and I

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Speaker 1: remember my wife being really amused every time she saw

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Speaker 1: the wiki wiki shuttle. She just loved wiki wiki. Obviously

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Speaker 1: I've married the right woman. So, uh so, Ward Cunningham

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Speaker 1: comes up with this idea for the wiki and essentially

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Speaker 1: what a wiki is is it's a website that has

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Speaker 1: collaborative editing tools built into the side itself. So you

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Speaker 1: you navigate to the site through a browser, and within

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Speaker 1: the browser you can make changes to the site collaboratively.

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Speaker 1: So depending upon the level of administrative power you have,

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Speaker 1: you can you can edit things, you can add things,

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Speaker 1: you can delete things. And it's since it's all within

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Speaker 1: the web browser, you're using a basic markup language or

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Speaker 1: maybe some sort of rich text editor, and it'll let

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Speaker 1: people collaborate on projects, even if they had different machines. Right,

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Speaker 1: So if Lauren's using a Mac and I'm using a PC,

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Speaker 1: not only do we hate each other, but often we

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Speaker 1: can't work on the same thing because our platforms are

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Speaker 1: so different. But this is web based, so all we

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Speaker 1: have to do is use whichever browsers and then we

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Speaker 1: navigate there and we can make these changes and build

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Speaker 1: our collaborative I hate you website together and other people

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Speaker 1: can join in and explain why they hate everybody too.

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Speaker 1: And I don't know why I'm so negative today, but

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Speaker 1: apparently that's how this is gonna work. I think Cunningham

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Speaker 1: develops this wiki technology, which is what makes Wikipedia possible.

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Speaker 1: But we're not at Wikipedia yet now, right, because yeah,

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Speaker 1: well go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, that's

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Speaker 1: when we start talking about Jimmy Wales, who is kind

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Speaker 1: of the face of Wikipedia, right right, Yeah, I was

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Speaker 1: gonna say that. At the same time around was when

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Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales had dropped out of college. He he had

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Speaker 1: started um started a couple months or for a finance

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Speaker 1: PhD from Indiana University and wound up instead of doing that,

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Speaker 1: going to Chicago to be a futures an options trader

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Speaker 1: and supposedly much like Elon Musk, who we have previously profiled,

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Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales noticed that, you know, Netscape went public and

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Speaker 1: and what quadrupled in value overnight? Netscape did well, yes,

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Speaker 1: they did good. Um, and and took note of that

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Speaker 1: and said, hey, this internet thing that I've been kind

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Speaker 1: of playing around with for a few years, I think

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Speaker 1: that this could be a thing. Yeah, this this might

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Speaker 1: go places. And of course from this is all before

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Speaker 1: the dot com bubble burst too, so back then it

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Speaker 1: was all opportunity and wild west and no one was

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Speaker 1: really sure and bright shining dreams. Yeah it was. It

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Speaker 1: was interesting. Uh. You know, the the roads weren't paved

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Speaker 1: with gold, but they were paved with stock options. Uh.

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Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales has this thought while he's working for a well,

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Speaker 1: he's part owner of a company called Bomus dot com,

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Speaker 1: which is a search engine. Yeah, and he owned that

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Speaker 1: with two other joint owners, Tim Shell and Michael Davis.

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Speaker 1: Comes up with his version, his idea for a free

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Speaker 1: collaborative encyclopedia, and he taps a guy named Larry Sanger

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Speaker 1: to be the project lead for this new encyclopedia. Now

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Speaker 1: he knew Sanger from mailing lists, because this isn't that

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Speaker 1: long after the fact that people were just using things

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Speaker 1: like Usenet and mailing lists instead of the Web. And

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Speaker 1: uh so he got in touch with saner and and

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Speaker 1: convinced Singer to head up a project, this this collaborative encyclopedia,

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Speaker 1: which at that point did not have a name, right right, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and you know that they've been thinking, I've read about

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Speaker 1: open source software and and how open source culture could

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Speaker 1: also be a thing and and and a beautiful thing

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Speaker 1: and so and yeah, and that was kind of when

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Speaker 1: you look back at Tim berners Lee, who's the guy

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Speaker 1: who essentially created what we know of as the Web.

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Speaker 1: That was sort of his approach to He thought that

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Speaker 1: open was the right way to go, that the open

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Speaker 1: collaborative way would mean that the Internet becomes the world's tool,

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Speaker 1: not any one company or government's tool. And so, uh

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Speaker 1: this was sort of the idea of of let's make

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Speaker 1: an encyclopedia that follows those same kind of philosophies. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and so, so Wales and Sanger and a few others

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Speaker 1: start to form a project that they call new PDA

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Speaker 1: in U p E. D I A. And this is

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Speaker 1: a peer reviewed encyclopedia that they were going to put online.

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Speaker 1: And you know, because they wanted that they wanted that

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Speaker 1: expert opinion to come in, and they wanted everything to

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Speaker 1: be as as factual and reliable as possible. Exactly in

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Speaker 1: fact Singer that was he was passionate about this. He

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Speaker 1: said that, you know, you could create an online encyclopedia

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Speaker 1: where everyone just contributes, but if you wanted to be

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Speaker 1: a reliable resource, you need that peer review step in there.

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Speaker 1: So and it turned it turned out to be extremely

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Speaker 1: slow to to a get people to submit anything at all,

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Speaker 1: because it was it was intimidating and and be to

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Speaker 1: to you know, find the correct expert to to look

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Speaker 1: it over. And also, yeah, the review process was, as

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Speaker 1: Singer would describe later, laborious. Um so two thousand is

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Speaker 1: when nupedia starts, and it starts in the middle of

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Speaker 1: two thousand or so, and uh, they had an advisory

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Speaker 1: board of a sort of a peer review board made

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Speaker 1: up of PhD volunteers. So these are people who are

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Speaker 1: not even being paid, theirvolunteering their expertise to review papers

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Speaker 1: to make sure that they are they're ready for publications.

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Speaker 1: So this is like if you were to submit a

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Speaker 1: paper to an academic journal or a scientific journal. You know,

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Speaker 1: it's something that it's not just automatically going to get published.

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Speaker 1: It has to be reviewed and pass review. There might

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Speaker 1: be a lengthy revision process before we'll ever be published.

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Speaker 1: So there were seven steps in this review process for

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Speaker 1: new Pedia, and they did. They didn't think that that

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Speaker 1: it would work. I read somewhere that that Wales really

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Speaker 1: thought that, you know, it had been in conversations with

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Speaker 1: people on the internet and had realized that if it's

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Speaker 1: something that they feel passionate about, that they're usually really

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Speaker 1: willing to engage in that conversation and to help. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So the idea was that, you know, you get people

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Speaker 1: who are really smart. A lot of really smart people

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Speaker 1: enjoy spreading knowledge. Not that we would know anything about

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Speaker 1: wanting to show off knowledge. Yeah, I mean, I'm not

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Speaker 1: really smart, but I still like to do it. So,

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Speaker 1: I mean that's why I played trivia is really just

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Speaker 1: to show off how smart I am. But I know

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Speaker 1: that ppared to these people, I was and still am stupid.

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Speaker 1: But anyway, so or at least okay, anyway, thank you,

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Speaker 1: Everyone's special and nobody is um. So yeah, the seventh

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Speaker 1: an article. It turned out that this was a bit

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Speaker 1: of a bottleneck um and the very first Newpedia article

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Speaker 1: that was ever published was written by Kristoff Hust and

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Speaker 1: it was about a tonality and it was published in

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Speaker 1: the summer of two thousands, so it was early two

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Speaker 1: thousand when they started working on new Pedia. At that time,

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Speaker 1: the entire submission and review process was all through mailing lists.

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Speaker 1: It was. There wasn't a web based version yet, and

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Speaker 1: so the fairst article publishes in the summer of two thousand,

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Speaker 1: it was either June or July. According to Sanger, who

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Speaker 1: wrote about this I found it on slash Dot. He

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Speaker 1: wrote a two part piece that was essentially about the

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Speaker 1: whole beginning of Wikipedia, which started with this new Pedia thing. Well,

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Speaker 1: in January two Sanger and Wales meet up with a

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Speaker 1: guy named Ben COVID's at the infamous Taco stand meeting.

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Speaker 1: Taco stand meeting. Yeah, they were in California and they

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Speaker 1: were at a taco stand. They started talking and COVID's

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Speaker 1: told Whales and Sanger about Cunningham's wiki Wiki web platform

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Speaker 1: and they thought about this as being a tool that

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Speaker 1: would allow for collaborative work and make it much easier

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Speaker 1: to get articles. And and Sandor was still thinking about

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Speaker 1: this peer review process, right, right, But they were thinking

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Speaker 1: that in order to get more submissions, in order to

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Speaker 1: make it a little bit less intimidating for people to,

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Speaker 1: you know, to to submit an article to this crazy

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Speaker 1: peer review thing, yeah, to say, like, don't worry so

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Speaker 1: much about the quality, just submit stuff. Because it turned

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Speaker 1: out that, uh, you know that one of the things

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Speaker 1: they were worried about was that they needed to have content.

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Speaker 1: And part of the philosophy was that if we can

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Speaker 1: fix content, if the content it's not perfect, we can

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Speaker 1: still edit it once we get it. But if we

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Speaker 1: never get any content, there's no encyclopedia, right, because I

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Speaker 1: think at the time they had they had maybe twenty articles,

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Speaker 1: I mean something, you know, a very low number. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it wasn't it was. It was twenty five articles by

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Speaker 1: the winter of two thousand one. So summer two thousand

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Speaker 1: their first article publishes. More than a year later, they

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Speaker 1: have twenty articles on new media, which is more articles

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Speaker 1: than I write in a year. But I mean, there

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Speaker 1: was fewer than what I wrote in a year. In

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Speaker 1: a year, I would write around a hundred articles. So

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Speaker 1: it's it's it's kind of you know, but that's that

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Speaker 1: shows you there was this bottleneck process and and you know,

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Speaker 1: you find out that a volunteer might love their field

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Speaker 1: of expertise, but they're still a volunteer, so there's still

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Speaker 1: they're still limited by the fact that they have to

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Speaker 1: do other things, most of them, unless they're independently wealthy,

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Speaker 1: they have other responsibilities they have to attend to. But

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Speaker 1: while they were thinking about this, they decided to launch

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Speaker 1: a wiki for Newpedia. And they launched that wiki on

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Speaker 1: January two thousand one. So newpedia is still a thing,

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Speaker 1: but they launch a wiki for it with the idea

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Speaker 1: of making it this faster way to contribute articles. And

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Speaker 1: I think it actually goes live on January. If any

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Speaker 1: of you know about Wikipedia Day and are going like

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Speaker 1: that wasn't on the tenth, well that's the here's why

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Speaker 1: the wiki goes live on the tenth. The advisory board says,

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Speaker 1: I don't want anything to do with that. Like essentially

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Speaker 1: what happened was the peer review board looked at the

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Speaker 1: wiki and said, look, we have these other backlog of

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Speaker 1: articles that we're still reviewing. We cannot deal with this nonsense.

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Speaker 1: So what happened was the new Pedia Wiki split from

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Speaker 1: Newpedia and became its own thing, and on January fifteenth,

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Speaker 1: that became Wikipedia. So Wikipedia began as a branch of

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Speaker 1: new Pedia where it was all going to be puer reviewed,

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Speaker 1: but then became its own thing where the peer review

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Speaker 1: kind of went away. The idea was that the community

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Speaker 1: would review, and so it wouldn't be peer reviewed in

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Speaker 1: the sense of an official board of experts. It would

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Speaker 1: be the community of Wikipedia collectively would be able to

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Speaker 1: review and edit the content that was being uploaded. And

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Speaker 1: and that that kind of spread of the workload was

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Speaker 1: really important, because they had a hundred and fifty entries

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Speaker 1: by the end of February. Yeah, it was, and it

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Speaker 1: went really pretty crazy. The according to Sanger, he said

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Speaker 1: by the end of January two thousand one, there were

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Speaker 1: six hundred articles on Wikipedia. But that's Singer this and

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Speaker 1: that was from memory, So you gotta keep in mind

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Speaker 1: this is Saner writing in two thousand five about what

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Speaker 1: happened in two thousand one. So Sanger says that by

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Speaker 1: the end of two thousand one there were six hundred articles,

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Speaker 1: and by March or by end of January two there

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Speaker 1: was six hundred articles by marchd by April and by Madred.

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Speaker 1: So not only were more articles coming online, but it

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Speaker 1: would growth rate was increasing over time, not exponentially, but

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Speaker 1: pretty pretty regularly. So it was very quickly becoming popular.

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Speaker 1: And uh uh. And April two thousand one, that's when

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Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales decided to to to post a thing where

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Speaker 1: he defined that the Wikipedia voice was to be one

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Speaker 1: of neutral point of view or n p o V

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Speaker 1: and uh. Sancer actually objected to this as well. Not

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Speaker 1: that he objected to the idea of neutrality, he thought

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Speaker 1: that was important. He objected to the phrase point of

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Speaker 1: view because he said that it still means that the

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Speaker 1: article has a point of view, and it shouldn't Sander

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Speaker 1: in some of his points. I was reading in this

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Speaker 1: stuff I saw and slash dot, I was thinking, this

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Speaker 1: is getting to be a little bit about semantics. Weird,

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Speaker 1: and yeah, a little bit. I respect a lot of

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Speaker 1: what he was saying, but I think it's something and

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Speaker 1: I think that that you know, pedantic has its place

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Speaker 1: on the Internet, absolutely does. Whenever I'm in a comment, uh,

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Speaker 1: it's my first weapon of choice. Um. Anyway, So by

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Speaker 1: the winter of two thousand one, that's when only articles

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Speaker 1: had published on Newpedia, and the approval process moves so

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Speaker 1: slowly that even when the tools to review and approve

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Speaker 1: articles moved from email to web based clients, it just

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Speaker 1: wasn't doing very well. And because it was such a

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Speaker 1: slow process, more and more of the people involved in

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Speaker 1: it began to neglect it and drop off of it.

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Speaker 1: And Wikipedia, but at that same time, was getting more

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Speaker 1: and more popular. So yeah, so Sander's responsibilities were starting

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Speaker 1: to shift more towards Wikipedia than Newpedia, simply because that's

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Speaker 1: where all the action was. So by two thousand one

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Speaker 1: and into two thousand two, Newpedia activity had slowed dramatically

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Speaker 1: and uh and also the the bubble. By then, the

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Speaker 1: dot com bubble had burst, which really kind of wiped

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Speaker 1: out a lot of the folks who were contributing in

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Speaker 1: some way. So that kind of all uh made the

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Speaker 1: funding kind of dry up for Newpedia. Wikipedia, by the way,

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Speaker 1: was existing at that time and still is to this

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Speaker 1: day on donations. UM. So the Newpedia was trying really

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Speaker 1: hard to redefine the rules that were needed to review

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Speaker 1: submissions so that they could streamline the process. But by

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Speaker 1: that time it was it was too little, too late.

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Speaker 1: Uh and and it gets really sad in another year.

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Speaker 1: But when I get there, I'll mention it. So um.

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Speaker 1: Even at this early stage of Wikipedia, Sanger was really saying,

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Speaker 1: let's pay attention to what experts have to say. Let's

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Speaker 1: give them special attention and respect, and make sure that

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Speaker 1: their voices are the ones we pay the most attention to.

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Speaker 1: Not that we won't accept submissions from the general public,

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Speaker 1: but that we should pay more attention to things that

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Speaker 1: are coming from people who are recognized. Because again, this

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Speaker 1: is this is Sander saying that in order to be

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Speaker 1: a credible resource for people, you have to have some

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Speaker 1: form of review or or you know, you have to

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Speaker 1: have some way of of saying the information here is

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Speaker 1: from right right, the same way that scientific journals won't

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Speaker 1: just you know, accept accept research that has not been

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Speaker 1: checked over by a peer review system because least it's

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Speaker 1: ideally ideally if you ever hear. In fact, this is

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Speaker 1: just a little side note. Uh, this is important if

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Speaker 1: you're reading something on Wikipedia and you look at the references.

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Speaker 1: It's something that Lauren and I do a lot. Uh,

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Speaker 1: It's important also to pay to what the references are

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Speaker 1: because there are scientific quote unquote scientific papers out there

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Speaker 1: that are actually blogs that aren't scientific papers. So then

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Speaker 1: you will quote unquote have a paper published in a

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Speaker 1: scientific journal, but it's not a peer reviewed scientific journal. Correct.

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Speaker 1: I see this with a lot of free energy papers,

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Speaker 1: where free energy is one of those things where like,

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Speaker 1: well it was published in such and such, like, yeah,

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Speaker 1: I check that out. That's that guy's personal blog. He

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Speaker 1: called it the Journal of Nuclear Physics, but it's just

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Speaker 1: live journal. Yeah. Yeah, we we just did an episode

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Speaker 1: about about nuclear power, not fusion power, and yeah there

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Speaker 1: was cold fusion and cold fusion and there was a

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Speaker 1: lot of that, so that that that's stuck in my head. Yes, exactly.

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Speaker 1: If you do research on cold fusion, you'll find quote

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Speaker 1: unquote papers, but they are posted on online resources that

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Speaker 1: turn out to be not an actual scientific journal. That

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Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily mean that the research is unreliable. It just

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Speaker 1: means that you don't have that peer review to really

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Speaker 1: be sure that it's past muster. And and also before

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Speaker 1: I was an editor here, I was actually an editor

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Speaker 1: for a medical research journal UM about rheumatism, and so

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Speaker 1: so I am intimately acquainted with the peer review process. Yeah. Uh, well,

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Speaker 1: moving on talking about the difference between Wikipedia and peer

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Speaker 1: review Sanger actually talked about how he had suggested a

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Speaker 1: rule called ignore all rules, and in his two five

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Speaker 1: recounting of the beginning of Wikipedia, he said that the

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Speaker 1: Wikipedia community might be surprised to hear that he was

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Speaker 1: the one who's who suggested that, because you know, against

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Speaker 1: Sanger was the one who was all about pure review,

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Speaker 1: and here he is saying ignore all rules. And his

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Speaker 1: his philosophy was that again, they wanted to get as

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Speaker 1: much content on Wikipedia as possible, and if the rules

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Speaker 1: intimidated someone so that they did not feel like they

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Speaker 1: were qualified or capable of posting, he wanted to take

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Speaker 1: that barrier away. But he thought of that as a

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Speaker 1: temporary measure, something to to get Wikipedia going, to get

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Speaker 1: the ball rolling, and then nodded something that would wind

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Speaker 1: up being one of the continuing five pillars, not a

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Speaker 1: central central tenant of the entire of the entire size. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so ignoral rules. He kind of later on said that

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Speaker 1: I I kind of regret saying that now because he

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Speaker 1: felt that that was one of the past yeah, of

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Speaker 1: of him there was a little bit of a falling out,

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Speaker 1: you know. There's Yeah, Sander Singer definitely, Uh. If you

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Speaker 1: read his stuff, you see and I mean there's there's

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Speaker 1: there's a lot of rancor on both parts, right. Uh.

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Speaker 1: Sander has a lot to say about the direction that

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Speaker 1: Wikipedia took and uh, and it it's pretty clear that

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Speaker 1: he feels that it's not ideal. I mean, he doesn't

430
00:24:18,720 --> 00:24:21,040
Speaker 1: outright come out and say that this is uh, it's

431
00:24:21,080 --> 00:24:22,960
Speaker 1: it's useless or anything like that, but he has a

432
00:24:23,000 --> 00:24:27,240
Speaker 1: lot of criticisms. Meanwhile, the Wikipedia community, in turn, has

433
00:24:27,280 --> 00:24:30,240
Speaker 1: a lot of criticisms that they direct to Singer, and

434
00:24:30,280 --> 00:24:33,840
Speaker 1: they both sides have relevant points. So even though I'm

435
00:24:33,840 --> 00:24:36,520
Speaker 1: talking a lot about Singer, it's mainly because that's that's

436
00:24:36,560 --> 00:24:41,160
Speaker 1: the account I went with, uh for the history. Yeah,

437
00:24:41,200 --> 00:24:44,399
Speaker 1: it's not that It's not that I necessarily side with Singer.

438
00:24:44,440 --> 00:24:49,639
Speaker 1: I'm not that far to that extreme. Uh. Anyway, a

439
00:24:49,680 --> 00:24:54,320
Speaker 1: lot of the the policies of Wikipedia actually came out

440
00:24:54,359 --> 00:24:57,439
Speaker 1: of the community. It became sort of communal decisions of

441
00:24:57,440 --> 00:24:59,879
Speaker 1: how the site should work, which was kind of interesting

442
00:25:00,000 --> 00:25:02,159
Speaker 1: because they had originally thought of it being sort of

443
00:25:02,160 --> 00:25:05,000
Speaker 1: again an extension of New Pedia but this became more

444
00:25:05,160 --> 00:25:08,440
Speaker 1: of the open communal approach to the Internet, which again

445
00:25:08,560 --> 00:25:11,120
Speaker 1: is more of the Tim Burners Lee approach, which makes

446
00:25:11,119 --> 00:25:13,520
Speaker 1: it a lot harder to direct. You know, you can't

447
00:25:13,880 --> 00:25:16,359
Speaker 1: you know, when you've got a group of fifty people

448
00:25:16,800 --> 00:25:19,200
Speaker 1: who have all decided they want to go left, it's

449
00:25:19,200 --> 00:25:21,399
Speaker 1: really hard to make them go right, you know, when

450
00:25:21,440 --> 00:25:23,600
Speaker 1: you're one guy. Yeah, yeah, And you know, and there's

451
00:25:23,600 --> 00:25:26,400
Speaker 1: there's voting systems in place, there's you know, even back

452
00:25:26,400 --> 00:25:28,840
Speaker 1: in those days, there were a lot of a lot

453
00:25:28,880 --> 00:25:31,400
Speaker 1: of ways for people to communicate with each other. These

454
00:25:31,440 --> 00:25:35,239
Speaker 1: ideas that they had for the community. Uh, they had

455
00:25:35,280 --> 00:25:39,159
Speaker 1: decided that that Wikipedia content would always remain free for

456
00:25:39,240 --> 00:25:42,520
Speaker 1: others to read and edit, uh, meaning that there would

457
00:25:42,560 --> 00:25:44,399
Speaker 1: never be a point where there'd be a paywall or

458
00:25:44,440 --> 00:25:49,160
Speaker 1: subscription for Wikipedia. And uh they also, you know, we're

459
00:25:49,200 --> 00:25:51,720
Speaker 1: putting in those policies that allow people to publish rough

460
00:25:51,840 --> 00:25:55,280
Speaker 1: drafts or rough ideas that could be polished over time,

461
00:25:55,280 --> 00:25:59,119
Speaker 1: either by themselves or by other people. And then Google

462
00:25:59,240 --> 00:26:03,800
Speaker 1: started to include Wikipedia and its search results for different topics,

463
00:26:04,040 --> 00:26:06,760
Speaker 1: which meant that there was suddenly a huge rush of

464
00:26:06,960 --> 00:26:11,280
Speaker 1: news people. Yeah, and and Sanger noticed like as more

465
00:26:11,359 --> 00:26:14,160
Speaker 1: people were coming to visit Wikipedia more than we're getting

466
00:26:14,200 --> 00:26:19,080
Speaker 1: involved as editors and contributors. So that meant that even

467
00:26:19,119 --> 00:26:22,680
Speaker 1: that as the Wikipedia traffic was increasing, so was the content.

468
00:26:23,119 --> 00:26:26,360
Speaker 1: You were suddenly seeing even faster growth as far as

469
00:26:26,600 --> 00:26:31,199
Speaker 1: how much information was being contained within Wikipedia. Um and

470
00:26:31,280 --> 00:26:35,760
Speaker 1: the summer of uh, well, one of the before I

471
00:26:35,760 --> 00:26:37,560
Speaker 1: get to the summer two thousand one one thing Sander

472
00:26:37,560 --> 00:26:40,399
Speaker 1: didn't note was that even in those early days that

473
00:26:40,520 --> 00:26:44,560
Speaker 1: he was starting to notice that people who were difficult

474
00:26:44,960 --> 00:26:50,160
Speaker 1: and who were persistent, Uh, we're sometimes irritating very valuable

475
00:26:50,200 --> 00:26:53,440
Speaker 1: members of the Wikipedia community. And the valuable members were like,

476
00:26:54,440 --> 00:26:57,639
Speaker 1: I don't need this, never mind, I'm a volunteer sia,

477
00:26:57,960 --> 00:27:01,320
Speaker 1: and they just left. And then uh, so that meant

478
00:27:01,359 --> 00:27:04,040
Speaker 1: that you started to have more of the persistent, difficult

479
00:27:04,040 --> 00:27:08,240
Speaker 1: type and fewer of the valuable expert types. Uh. And

480
00:27:08,320 --> 00:27:11,679
Speaker 1: Sender saw that as another kind of downfall of Wikipedia,

481
00:27:11,760 --> 00:27:14,439
Speaker 1: and there there was there wasn't really any way to

482
00:27:14,560 --> 00:27:19,919
Speaker 1: counteract that without essentially violating kind of those philosophies that

483
00:27:19,920 --> 00:27:23,159
Speaker 1: Wikipedia was founded upon, right, and you know, one of

484
00:27:23,200 --> 00:27:27,399
Speaker 1: those philosophies is definitely that the editors and contributors should

485
00:27:27,400 --> 00:27:31,920
Speaker 1: be polite to each other, which happens sometimes, but yeah, exactly,

486
00:27:31,920 --> 00:27:35,399
Speaker 1: you know, it's human error. Yeah, I mean the vast

487
00:27:35,400 --> 00:27:38,040
Speaker 1: majority I think. I think the vast majority of people

488
00:27:38,040 --> 00:27:44,840
Speaker 1: who are regular contributors to Wikipedia are in general very courteous.

489
00:27:45,480 --> 00:27:48,399
Speaker 1: But all it takes are a few trolls to really

490
00:27:48,480 --> 00:27:51,800
Speaker 1: stir things up. And uh and trolls who are particularly

491
00:27:52,040 --> 00:27:56,720
Speaker 1: effective can cause huge amounts of frustration in a community.

492
00:27:57,240 --> 00:28:00,440
Speaker 1: Um and in fact, that's that's why they do it right.

493
00:28:01,000 --> 00:28:03,560
Speaker 1: With a little effort, they make a big impact. And

494
00:28:03,720 --> 00:28:06,960
Speaker 1: uh boy, we did a whole episode on how trolls work.

495
00:28:07,000 --> 00:28:08,239
Speaker 1: It was a great one. You guys should go back

496
00:28:08,280 --> 00:28:10,440
Speaker 1: and listen to that one. But in summer of two

497
00:28:10,440 --> 00:28:14,000
Speaker 1: thousand one, someone ended up using the editing tools to

498
00:28:14,080 --> 00:28:16,840
Speaker 1: vandalize the front page of Wikipedia, because that was one

499
00:28:16,840 --> 00:28:18,800
Speaker 1: of the ones you could edit back in those days.

500
00:28:19,359 --> 00:28:21,920
Speaker 1: And uh, and so they vandalized it, and then someone

501
00:28:21,960 --> 00:28:25,679
Speaker 1: tried to archive the vandalized page, so Singer when end

502
00:28:25,880 --> 00:28:28,600
Speaker 1: deleted the archive. So then they kind of reposted the

503
00:28:28,640 --> 00:28:30,800
Speaker 1: archives somewhere else and Singer went in and deleted that,

504
00:28:31,280 --> 00:28:35,640
Speaker 1: and this became a big kerfuffle between Singer and the community.

505
00:28:35,720 --> 00:28:38,440
Speaker 1: The community not the entire community. But there were sections

506
00:28:38,440 --> 00:28:41,520
Speaker 1: of the community that said, you are overstepping your balance, right,

507
00:28:41,520 --> 00:28:45,680
Speaker 1: this is not yours to do this with your abusing powers. Yeah,

508
00:28:45,800 --> 00:28:47,920
Speaker 1: the fact that you have the ability to do that

509
00:28:47,960 --> 00:28:50,520
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that you are that you should do that.

510
00:28:51,040 --> 00:28:53,520
Speaker 1: Like you, you are capable of doing that, but you

511
00:28:53,520 --> 00:28:56,959
Speaker 1: should not do it and uh and Singer was like,

512
00:28:57,000 --> 00:28:58,840
Speaker 1: this is kind of silly. The whole point of this

513
00:28:58,920 --> 00:29:01,760
Speaker 1: is that we don't want the vandalized version of Wikipedia

514
00:29:01,840 --> 00:29:04,600
Speaker 1: to be a representation of Wikipedia. We don't want that

515
00:29:04,640 --> 00:29:07,800
Speaker 1: to come up in search because it hurts the community.

516
00:29:07,600 --> 00:29:10,400
Speaker 1: I don't see where the problem is. And others were saying, no,

517
00:29:10,400 --> 00:29:12,400
Speaker 1: no, no no, that's beside the point. It doesn't matter what

518
00:29:12,440 --> 00:29:14,480
Speaker 1: the content is. It is the matter. The matter is

519
00:29:14,480 --> 00:29:17,440
Speaker 1: that you've deleted it. You've overset. If you start deleting,

520
00:29:17,440 --> 00:29:20,560
Speaker 1: then where does it end. Right, You've bypassed the whole process,

521
00:29:20,600 --> 00:29:23,840
Speaker 1: and by bypassing it, you've rendered the process meaningless. And

522
00:29:24,400 --> 00:29:29,160
Speaker 1: it went from kerfuffle to shenanigans. Well in uh in

523
00:29:29,800 --> 00:29:32,960
Speaker 1: two thousand two. February two thousand two, Singer is laid

524
00:29:32,960 --> 00:29:36,520
Speaker 1: off of Wikipedia. At that point, the dot com bubble

525
00:29:36,560 --> 00:29:40,760
Speaker 1: bursting had really started to take its effect. Newpedia essentially

526
00:29:40,880 --> 00:29:44,840
Speaker 1: was petering out at that point, and uh and at

527
00:29:44,880 --> 00:29:48,680
Speaker 1: first Singer was had his had his salary reduced a

528
00:29:48,680 --> 00:29:51,400
Speaker 1: couple of times I think, and then he was laid off.

529
00:29:51,440 --> 00:29:53,640
Speaker 1: He continued to work in a volunteer capacity for a

530
00:29:53,680 --> 00:29:56,560
Speaker 1: little while. Also in February two thousand two, the Spanish

531
00:29:56,680 --> 00:30:01,040
Speaker 1: language version of Wikipedia forked off of the main version

532
00:30:01,080 --> 00:30:05,680
Speaker 1: and became Encyclopedia Libre. And the reason for the split

533
00:30:06,560 --> 00:30:10,280
Speaker 1: was that the the people working on the Spanish side

534
00:30:10,280 --> 00:30:14,400
Speaker 1: were worried that there was going to be problems with censorship,

535
00:30:14,960 --> 00:30:19,320
Speaker 1: I think, things like Saner deleting stuff. And also there

536
00:30:19,360 --> 00:30:23,280
Speaker 1: was worry that Wikipedia would soon start to institute advertising

537
00:30:23,360 --> 00:30:27,080
Speaker 1: on its site to monetize Wikipedia, and that there was

538
00:30:27,080 --> 00:30:30,400
Speaker 1: a worry there that by monetizing Wikipedia, you would compromise

539
00:30:30,440 --> 00:30:33,400
Speaker 1: the site's integrity, which is something that Saner was saying

540
00:30:33,480 --> 00:30:36,960
Speaker 1: didn't exist because of the lack of peer review. So

541
00:30:37,040 --> 00:30:38,760
Speaker 1: it's kind of this interesting like you're you're you're going

542
00:30:38,840 --> 00:30:40,480
Speaker 1: to ruin the integrity of the site, and Sanders like

543
00:30:40,480 --> 00:30:45,720
Speaker 1: what integrity? Uh So that was an interesting discussion, and

544
00:30:45,720 --> 00:30:49,120
Speaker 1: in August of two thousand two, Jimmy Wales said that

545
00:30:49,160 --> 00:30:53,520
Speaker 1: Wikipedia would never run ads on its site, and in fact,

546
00:30:53,600 --> 00:30:57,760
Speaker 1: that's also when Wikipedia dot com became Wikipedia dot org

547
00:30:58,320 --> 00:31:01,720
Speaker 1: as sort of an an example of this is this

548
00:31:01,760 --> 00:31:03,520
Speaker 1: is who we are. We are not We're not a

549
00:31:03,680 --> 00:31:07,880
Speaker 1: we're not a company, We're an organization. Uh. In December

550
00:31:07,920 --> 00:31:11,440
Speaker 1: of that year, in two thousand two, they launched wctionary,

551
00:31:11,480 --> 00:31:13,400
Speaker 1: which is kind of funny because there was a whole

552
00:31:13,400 --> 00:31:16,880
Speaker 1: page on Wikipedia about how Wikipedia is not a diction dictionary,

553
00:31:17,160 --> 00:31:19,840
Speaker 1: so they did dictionary. Now, Lauren, let me ask you this.

554
00:31:20,880 --> 00:31:23,720
Speaker 1: Do you think now I can understand the value of

555
00:31:23,760 --> 00:31:31,800
Speaker 1: an open source, crowdsourced encyclopedia because there are huge disciplines

556
00:31:31,840 --> 00:31:34,400
Speaker 1: of knowledge out there. There are people who are experts,

557
00:31:34,400 --> 00:31:36,920
Speaker 1: and there are people who have experience with it, their

558
00:31:37,120 --> 00:31:39,320
Speaker 1: researchers who really know what they're doing when they're looking

559
00:31:39,320 --> 00:31:42,600
Speaker 1: into that sort of stuff. And the more minds you

560
00:31:42,680 --> 00:31:46,560
Speaker 1: bring into an encyclopedia, the better chance you have of

561
00:31:46,600 --> 00:31:51,360
Speaker 1: getting a fuller picture of whatever it is. Right, do

562
00:31:51,440 --> 00:31:54,480
Speaker 1: you see the same thing being valuable in the dictionary? Well, okay,

563
00:31:54,520 --> 00:31:57,360
Speaker 1: the thing about dictionaries I think now that you ask me,

564
00:31:57,480 --> 00:32:00,360
Speaker 1: is that, um, you know, there are these really terrific,

565
00:32:00,480 --> 00:32:04,320
Speaker 1: very thorough sources like the Oxford English. It's probably the

566
00:32:04,360 --> 00:32:07,040
Speaker 1: pinnacle of English dictionaries. If if I'm allowed to make

567
00:32:07,080 --> 00:32:10,200
Speaker 1: that kind of qualitative statement right now, American heritage myself.

568
00:32:10,240 --> 00:32:13,800
Speaker 1: But you know, well I said that about you, John,

569
00:32:13,840 --> 00:32:15,760
Speaker 1: I support my I support my country. Why do you

570
00:32:15,800 --> 00:32:19,040
Speaker 1: hate America? Lauren? What do you hate America? But well,

571
00:32:19,080 --> 00:32:21,320
Speaker 1: because okay, so so they're they're the there are these

572
00:32:21,400 --> 00:32:25,760
Speaker 1: large resource dictionaries that have a terrific wealth of historical

573
00:32:25,840 --> 00:32:28,920
Speaker 1: information behind them. Um, however, they are a little bit

574
00:32:29,000 --> 00:32:31,640
Speaker 1: slow on the uptake of new words, I see. So

575
00:32:31,720 --> 00:32:34,080
Speaker 1: you would see the value of dictionary being something that

576
00:32:34,120 --> 00:32:38,800
Speaker 1: could incorporate words that are entering the lexicon that would

577
00:32:38,880 --> 00:32:42,240
Speaker 1: maybe take five to ten years to start at at

578
00:32:42,280 --> 00:32:45,320
Speaker 1: the at the fastest speed possible, five to ten years

579
00:32:45,320 --> 00:32:48,760
Speaker 1: to be incorporated into a dictionary classic dictionary. Right And

580
00:32:48,800 --> 00:32:50,600
Speaker 1: also you know, to to do it in a way

581
00:32:50,640 --> 00:32:53,160
Speaker 1: that is that is, you know, a not branded because

582
00:32:53,560 --> 00:32:55,520
Speaker 1: because as as as much as I as much as

583
00:32:55,560 --> 00:32:59,280
Speaker 1: I do love very specific dictionaries, they're their brands, their companies.

584
00:32:59,320 --> 00:33:01,680
Speaker 1: They're they're out there to make a profit. Um at

585
00:33:01,720 --> 00:33:03,320
Speaker 1: the end of the day, and so so having an

586
00:33:03,440 --> 00:33:05,840
Speaker 1: open source one is a really terrific idea, and having

587
00:33:05,880 --> 00:33:09,640
Speaker 1: one that's perhaps better policed than, for example, Urban Dictionary.

588
00:33:10,000 --> 00:33:12,600
Speaker 1: I think I think it's a good a good thing

589
00:33:12,640 --> 00:33:18,800
Speaker 1: to do. Okay, although to be fair, it's still community police.

590
00:33:19,520 --> 00:33:22,360
Speaker 1: Well it is, but I would say that the quality

591
00:33:22,480 --> 00:33:28,160
Speaker 1: of policing on Wictionary versus Urban Dictionary is um, that's fair.

592
00:33:28,240 --> 00:33:30,840
Speaker 1: That's fair. I I can I can agree to that

593
00:33:30,960 --> 00:33:33,280
Speaker 1: because I don't know if any policing that happens on urbans,

594
00:33:33,360 --> 00:33:36,040
Speaker 1: I don't think that that's a thing. So June two

595
00:33:36,080 --> 00:33:39,360
Speaker 1: thousand three, Whales announces the Wikimedia Foundation, which is a

596
00:33:39,400 --> 00:33:43,640
Speaker 1: nonprofit that administrates Wikipedia, And in September two thousand three,

597
00:33:43,880 --> 00:33:47,880
Speaker 1: Nupedia's servers crash and it never comes back. Yeah, it

598
00:33:47,920 --> 00:33:51,760
Speaker 1: just shuts down. The computer failed. So we're just gonna

599
00:33:52,000 --> 00:33:53,880
Speaker 1: believe it. I don't think it ever really got more

600
00:33:53,880 --> 00:33:57,120
Speaker 1: than those articles. That was I think that was about it,

601
00:33:57,280 --> 00:34:00,680
Speaker 1: kind of the peak. Yeah. Wow, So new Pedia was

602
00:34:00,720 --> 00:34:03,720
Speaker 1: a failed experiment. Wikipedia, the what was originally going to

603
00:34:03,800 --> 00:34:06,440
Speaker 1: just be a little offshoot of Newpedia was already a

604
00:34:06,560 --> 00:34:09,920
Speaker 1: rousing success. Yeah. Yeah. There were many other non English

605
00:34:09,960 --> 00:34:11,960
Speaker 1: sites that were that were launching around that time, I

606
00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:14,399
Speaker 1: think that not all of them had officially split off yet,

607
00:34:15,000 --> 00:34:18,360
Speaker 1: but there were there were at least seventeen different languages

608
00:34:18,400 --> 00:34:20,839
Speaker 1: being worked on within Wikipedia. Well, We've got a lot

609
00:34:20,880 --> 00:34:23,400
Speaker 1: more to talk about with Wikipedia, but before we do,

610
00:34:23,640 --> 00:34:26,920
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright,

611
00:34:26,960 --> 00:34:29,319
Speaker 1: now back to Wikipedia. Okay, So we just talked about

612
00:34:29,360 --> 00:34:31,400
Speaker 1: two thousand three. Do you have anything between two thousand

613
00:34:31,400 --> 00:34:33,040
Speaker 1: three and two thousand five, because otherwise I'm just going

614
00:34:33,080 --> 00:34:35,399
Speaker 1: to skip around ahead. Um. I believe that in two

615
00:34:35,400 --> 00:34:38,640
Speaker 1: thousand four, Wikia was founded, which is which is the

616
00:34:38,760 --> 00:34:42,600
Speaker 1: for profit uh kind of branch of Wikipedia that um,

617
00:34:42,760 --> 00:34:47,400
Speaker 1: that maintains a whole bunch of of entertainment mostly related wikis. Um.

618
00:34:47,440 --> 00:34:50,040
Speaker 1: I think I think that the the Wikipedia is among

619
00:34:50,080 --> 00:34:53,400
Speaker 1: them stuff like that. Okay, And you know, those are

620
00:34:53,400 --> 00:34:56,160
Speaker 1: the wikis that I've recently become more and more familiar with,

621
00:34:56,239 --> 00:35:00,239
Speaker 1: because you know, pretty much any kind of entertainment thing

622
00:35:00,320 --> 00:35:02,560
Speaker 1: out there has its own wiki, to the point where

623
00:35:02,560 --> 00:35:05,520
Speaker 1: I'm like, I can't believe this has a wiki. I

624
00:35:05,560 --> 00:35:10,920
Speaker 1: can't believe tech stuff doesn't anyway, But so so in

625
00:35:11,040 --> 00:35:14,200
Speaker 1: these these are ads supported, um, however, they're still community

626
00:35:14,280 --> 00:35:18,600
Speaker 1: run and uh, you know, yeah, right right, so so similar.

627
00:35:18,920 --> 00:35:21,440
Speaker 1: But again this is following moral on the Wiki lines

628
00:35:21,520 --> 00:35:25,120
Speaker 1: of philosophy rather than the Wikipedia one. Because again, one

629
00:35:25,160 --> 00:35:27,920
Speaker 1: of the things Stanger also said in his in his

630
00:35:28,000 --> 00:35:31,360
Speaker 1: talks or in his writings was that, um, you know,

631
00:35:31,440 --> 00:35:34,879
Speaker 1: he he saw that the Wicki philosophy was kind of

632
00:35:36,400 --> 00:35:39,080
Speaker 1: counter to that of an encyclopedia, like the two did

633
00:35:39,160 --> 00:35:41,680
Speaker 1: not did not move, you know, I didn't mention a

634
00:35:41,800 --> 00:35:45,480
Speaker 1: very very seamless way, and that uh, that that was

635
00:35:45,520 --> 00:35:47,800
Speaker 1: a concern to him, but that he felt that because

636
00:35:47,840 --> 00:35:52,080
Speaker 1: Wikipedia was specifically supposed to be an encyclopedia, it helped

637
00:35:52,200 --> 00:35:56,560
Speaker 1: guide the policies, uh, for better or for worse. So

638
00:35:56,719 --> 00:36:00,879
Speaker 1: it's the community on Wikipedia is not exactly the same

639
00:36:00,920 --> 00:36:04,400
Speaker 1: as what you would find on your average wiki because

640
00:36:04,440 --> 00:36:07,640
Speaker 1: the process is slightly different because it has a very

641
00:36:07,680 --> 00:36:12,000
Speaker 1: specific purpose to be an encyclopedia. Well. Uh. In two

642
00:36:12,040 --> 00:36:16,400
Speaker 1: thousand five, Wired published a report that said that Jimmy

643
00:36:16,440 --> 00:36:19,680
Speaker 1: Wales had done something that's generally frowned upon within the

644
00:36:19,680 --> 00:36:22,720
Speaker 1: Wikipedia community, and that is to edit your own page

645
00:36:23,040 --> 00:36:27,200
Speaker 1: eighteen times. Apparently, and supposedly the edits that were made,

646
00:36:27,320 --> 00:36:33,560
Speaker 1: um were removing things like, uh, like Sander's involvement in

647
00:36:33,600 --> 00:36:38,000
Speaker 1: the early genesis of Wikipedia. Yeah, essentially, there was there

648
00:36:38,080 --> 00:36:40,960
Speaker 1: was a charge that Wales had removed a sentence that

649
00:36:41,040 --> 00:36:45,440
Speaker 1: had referred to Sander as a co founder of Wikipedia. Um.

650
00:36:45,560 --> 00:36:48,000
Speaker 1: And then there were other things as well. That's that

651
00:36:48,280 --> 00:36:51,520
Speaker 1: Wales said was it was just an attempt to remove

652
00:36:51,640 --> 00:36:55,280
Speaker 1: some inaccuracies. It wasn't. He wasn't trying to white washing

653
00:36:55,280 --> 00:36:57,600
Speaker 1: anything or cleaning it out according to what he was

654
00:36:57,640 --> 00:36:59,920
Speaker 1: saying anyway, but still defends this, by the way, right

655
00:37:00,080 --> 00:37:04,440
Speaker 1: in general, that that's considered bad form on Wikipedia. It's not.

656
00:37:04,520 --> 00:37:09,200
Speaker 1: It's not explicitly against the rules. If you're not, you're

657
00:37:09,239 --> 00:37:11,319
Speaker 1: generally I mean you're you're generally if if you find

658
00:37:11,360 --> 00:37:15,120
Speaker 1: it an accuracy about something that concerns you due to

659
00:37:15,520 --> 00:37:18,560
Speaker 1: an end they have an acrony important and all. Um Uh.

660
00:37:18,600 --> 00:37:21,920
Speaker 1: It is the conflict of interest a bit of it

661
00:37:22,080 --> 00:37:23,920
Speaker 1: that that, Yeah, that you're supposed to submit it to

662
00:37:23,960 --> 00:37:26,640
Speaker 1: an editor who can then make a non conflict of

663
00:37:26,719 --> 00:37:29,279
Speaker 1: interest judgment call about whether or not that it needs

664
00:37:29,280 --> 00:37:32,440
Speaker 1: to be made. That's interesting that particular sequence is going

665
00:37:32,480 --> 00:37:35,080
Speaker 1: to play an important part towards the end of this

666
00:37:35,239 --> 00:37:38,480
Speaker 1: timeline conversation, definitely, because it turns out some people have

667
00:37:38,560 --> 00:37:42,920
Speaker 1: taken advantage of that particular approach to the point where

668
00:37:42,960 --> 00:37:45,880
Speaker 1: they have been able to inserta misleading information or at

669
00:37:45,960 --> 00:37:52,080
Speaker 1: least leaving out important truths in the process of quote

670
00:37:52,120 --> 00:37:55,960
Speaker 1: unquote correcting or adding to an article. But we'll get

671
00:37:55,960 --> 00:37:59,279
Speaker 1: to that in a moment. Yeah, so Wales ends up

672
00:37:59,600 --> 00:38:03,560
Speaker 1: getting heat for this. Uh, even though to this day

673
00:38:03,600 --> 00:38:05,920
Speaker 1: he says that it wasn't it was not a big deal.

674
00:38:05,960 --> 00:38:08,080
Speaker 1: It's not that he doesn't even say he didn't do

675
00:38:08,120 --> 00:38:10,919
Speaker 1: anything wrong. He's like, I don't understand what the big

676
00:38:10,920 --> 00:38:14,200
Speaker 1: deal is here was fixing errors? He's He's like, yeah,

677
00:38:14,200 --> 00:38:15,759
Speaker 1: I did it. There was nothing wrong with what I did,

678
00:38:15,960 --> 00:38:18,239
Speaker 1: So calm down. But then, you know, other people would say, well,

679
00:38:18,280 --> 00:38:21,200
Speaker 1: if you had just gone through the regular channels, then

680
00:38:21,280 --> 00:38:24,359
Speaker 1: it would have been another story. Uh. May of two

681
00:38:24,360 --> 00:38:28,719
Speaker 1: thousand five was when we had uh an anonymous user

682
00:38:28,760 --> 00:38:30,759
Speaker 1: who was later identified but I'm not going to say

683
00:38:30,800 --> 00:38:33,680
Speaker 1: the name here, but he posted comments in an article

684
00:38:33,760 --> 00:38:38,920
Speaker 1: about Segon Dollar, John Seon Dollar, saying that he was

685
00:38:39,040 --> 00:38:42,720
Speaker 1: a suspect and the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy.

686
00:38:43,520 --> 00:38:46,719
Speaker 1: Segon Dollar as a journalist and was a friend to

687
00:38:46,840 --> 00:38:50,560
Speaker 1: Robert Kennedy actually one of his palm bearers. So Segon

688
00:38:50,640 --> 00:38:56,800
Speaker 1: Dollar said that this amounted to Internet character assassination. The

689
00:38:57,239 --> 00:39:01,040
Speaker 1: comments were a hoax. It was supposed to be a joke,

690
00:39:01,120 --> 00:39:04,520
Speaker 1: although I don't know who would find this particularly Yeah,

691
00:39:04,560 --> 00:39:06,960
Speaker 1: but the hoax. It was made in May, but it

692
00:39:07,000 --> 00:39:10,919
Speaker 1: wasn't discovered until September of two thousand five, and then

693
00:39:11,320 --> 00:39:14,360
Speaker 1: the mainstream media caught hold of the story and began

694
00:39:14,400 --> 00:39:18,520
Speaker 1: to cover it. And this ended up being a big

695
00:39:18,600 --> 00:39:22,000
Speaker 1: black eye on Wikipedia because everyone ran with the story saying,

696
00:39:22,239 --> 00:39:25,080
Speaker 1: how can you trust a resource that anyone can go

697
00:39:25,160 --> 00:39:28,960
Speaker 1: into and change and vandalize or create a hoax like this,

698
00:39:29,080 --> 00:39:33,320
Speaker 1: create a joke, Yeah, insert completely false information, or delete

699
00:39:33,360 --> 00:39:37,320
Speaker 1: something so that whatever is left is not an accurate

700
00:39:37,360 --> 00:39:42,600
Speaker 1: portrayal of the actual subject. Crow the entire side is useless. Yeah,

701
00:39:42,880 --> 00:39:45,600
Speaker 1: you know what, the facialist media is kind of right, right.

702
00:39:45,600 --> 00:39:49,160
Speaker 1: It definitely escalated to from hey, sometimes you can't trust

703
00:39:49,160 --> 00:39:53,000
Speaker 1: what's on Wikipedia to Wikipedia is bad because people are

704
00:39:53,120 --> 00:39:57,160
Speaker 1: evil and they will mislead you. Uh. And and by

705
00:39:57,200 --> 00:40:01,040
Speaker 1: the way, I don't really think either extreme is healthy.

706
00:40:01,560 --> 00:40:05,120
Speaker 1: While I often will dismiss Wikipedia in any sort of

707
00:40:05,160 --> 00:40:10,239
Speaker 1: academic approach. I am not one to say that it's all.

708
00:40:11,160 --> 00:40:14,040
Speaker 1: There's some things about Wikipedia that I find genuinely amusing,

709
00:40:14,120 --> 00:40:17,879
Speaker 1: and there's some things I find genuinely helpful. But but yeah,

710
00:40:17,920 --> 00:40:22,080
Speaker 1: I would never go so far on either side. It's

711
00:40:22,080 --> 00:40:25,279
Speaker 1: good to know. So April two thousand six, we have

712
00:40:25,320 --> 00:40:31,480
Speaker 1: another scandal. A guy from Glasgow whose name I will

713
00:40:31,520 --> 00:40:35,479
Speaker 1: not be able to say, Alan mickel Wraith, mickil Wraith.

714
00:40:35,920 --> 00:40:37,920
Speaker 1: It's gonna be mckil wrath. Have it in front of me.

715
00:40:37,960 --> 00:40:41,080
Speaker 1: That's it's got to be mickil rayth m c I

716
00:40:41,320 --> 00:40:45,759
Speaker 1: l w R a I t H mckill wraith. So

717
00:40:46,000 --> 00:40:50,640
Speaker 1: he created a Wikipedia entry about himself that betrayed him

718
00:40:50,680 --> 00:40:53,640
Speaker 1: as a decorated army officer, something that he was not.

719
00:40:54,760 --> 00:41:00,680
Speaker 1: And again the mainstream media picked up on this and said, like,

720
00:41:00,760 --> 00:41:04,200
Speaker 1: here's a guy who was promoting himself. Uh, created a

721
00:41:04,239 --> 00:41:07,640
Speaker 1: false identity for himself and uh, and this shows that

722
00:41:07,719 --> 00:41:10,800
Speaker 1: you can't trust what's on Wikipedia. Yeah. Meanwhile, all this

723
00:41:10,920 --> 00:41:15,719
Speaker 1: bad press was not particularly affecting the growth of Wikipedia.

724
00:41:15,840 --> 00:41:17,920
Speaker 1: By by mid two thousand six, I think that they

725
00:41:17,960 --> 00:41:21,839
Speaker 1: had five million articles. Yeah, this is they went from

726
00:41:22,320 --> 00:41:25,239
Speaker 1: uh they had one million in English. But probably five

727
00:41:25,239 --> 00:41:28,160
Speaker 1: million I think total total. Yeah, so right, right, yeah,

728
00:41:28,160 --> 00:41:30,359
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of debate about well yeah, because

729
00:41:30,360 --> 00:41:32,040
Speaker 1: I got confused. I saw at one point, like in

730
00:41:32,080 --> 00:41:34,080
Speaker 1: two thousand four they hit one million articles, and then

731
00:41:34,080 --> 00:41:35,560
Speaker 1: I read later like in two thousand and six they

732
00:41:35,640 --> 00:41:38,840
Speaker 1: hit one million articles again, and then I realized, oh wait,

733
00:41:38,960 --> 00:41:41,440
Speaker 1: the first one two thousand four was one million articles

734
00:41:41,480 --> 00:41:44,720
Speaker 1: total across all languages. Two thousand six was one million

735
00:41:44,760 --> 00:41:48,719
Speaker 1: in English. But it was the growth was incredible. Uh.

736
00:41:48,760 --> 00:41:52,719
Speaker 1: And in two thousand seven we have another scandal. This

737
00:41:52,880 --> 00:41:56,200
Speaker 1: is when it was discovered that a Wikipedia editor who

738
00:41:56,280 --> 00:41:59,600
Speaker 1: was using a handle called s J E S. S

739
00:41:59,719 --> 00:42:03,759
Speaker 1: J A Y was discovered to have also created a

740
00:42:03,800 --> 00:42:07,920
Speaker 1: false identity. In this case, s J had been uh

741
00:42:08,280 --> 00:42:14,440
Speaker 1: posing as someone who held a PhD uh in uh

742
00:42:14,480 --> 00:42:17,200
Speaker 1: in theology, I assume, because he was saying that he

743
00:42:17,280 --> 00:42:21,080
Speaker 1: was a tenured professor with an expertise in Kennon law,

744
00:42:21,760 --> 00:42:23,759
Speaker 1: and in reality he was a twenty four year old

745
00:42:23,800 --> 00:42:28,399
Speaker 1: guy who had been to several colleges in Kentucky. An

746
00:42:28,400 --> 00:42:32,080
Speaker 1: expert perhaps, but objectively speaking, he was saying that he

747
00:42:32,120 --> 00:42:34,480
Speaker 1: had created this identity in order to give himself a

748
00:42:34,480 --> 00:42:37,759
Speaker 1: buffer so that people who disagreed with him would not

749
00:42:37,800 --> 00:42:40,600
Speaker 1: be able to attack him personally. So, in other words,

750
00:42:40,640 --> 00:42:42,560
Speaker 1: he was just creating a handle. It's just a little

751
00:42:42,560 --> 00:42:45,680
Speaker 1: bit more, uh more involved than just a handle. But

752
00:42:46,200 --> 00:42:50,000
Speaker 1: here's the problem. He was also using his fake credentials

753
00:42:50,160 --> 00:42:54,399
Speaker 1: to back up his arguments whenever he was making edits. Yeah,

754
00:42:54,480 --> 00:42:57,439
Speaker 1: that's that's that, that's going beyond. He's saying, like, because

755
00:42:57,480 --> 00:43:00,040
Speaker 1: of my expertise in this field, I know that this

756
00:43:00,160 --> 00:43:03,120
Speaker 1: particular thing should be worded this way rather than that way.

757
00:43:03,280 --> 00:43:06,600
Speaker 1: And he didn't hold those credentials. So the New Yorker

758
00:43:06,680 --> 00:43:10,360
Speaker 1: writes about Wikipedia, and they write about s J before

759
00:43:11,080 --> 00:43:14,800
Speaker 1: finding out that s J is not who he claims

760
00:43:14,840 --> 00:43:18,719
Speaker 1: to be. Then the information breaks that s J is

761
00:43:18,719 --> 00:43:22,720
Speaker 1: actually someone else, and the New Yorker ends up writing

762
00:43:22,719 --> 00:43:27,960
Speaker 1: a pretty strongly worded response to that, and again mainstream

763
00:43:27,960 --> 00:43:31,680
Speaker 1: media blows up, and online it blows up. The community

764
00:43:31,800 --> 00:43:34,560
Speaker 1: begins to sift through all the edits that s J

765
00:43:34,840 --> 00:43:38,000
Speaker 1: made on Wikipedia, particularly in the places where he was

766
00:43:38,080 --> 00:43:42,640
Speaker 1: using his false credentials to bolster his arguments, because now

767
00:43:42,680 --> 00:43:46,000
Speaker 1: the community has the responsibility to fix this, or if

768
00:43:46,080 --> 00:43:47,680
Speaker 1: if in fact needs to be fixed, they have to

769
00:43:47,719 --> 00:43:51,160
Speaker 1: address it. So that they can again show that Wikipedia

770
00:43:51,320 --> 00:43:53,880
Speaker 1: is something you can rely upon at least or that

771
00:43:53,880 --> 00:43:57,320
Speaker 1: it's at least useful and not just be raised to

772
00:43:57,320 --> 00:44:00,000
Speaker 1: the ground. Yeah, it's not just a database of information

773
00:44:00,040 --> 00:44:04,080
Speaker 1: you cannot really be sure is accurate or not. Uh,

774
00:44:04,320 --> 00:44:08,440
Speaker 1: it was, you know, it was fighting a powerful perception problem,

775
00:44:08,680 --> 00:44:12,239
Speaker 1: right right right? That was also, did did you? Uh?

776
00:44:12,600 --> 00:44:14,040
Speaker 1: That was also the year two thousand and seven that

777
00:44:14,120 --> 00:44:17,600
Speaker 1: Virgil griff Griffith released wicket Scanner. I don't know about

778
00:44:17,600 --> 00:44:20,359
Speaker 1: this one, okay, so so so Wicker Scanner Um was

779
00:44:20,560 --> 00:44:23,440
Speaker 1: this you know, terrific little program that he wrote that

780
00:44:23,960 --> 00:44:28,560
Speaker 1: whenever an unregistered anonymous user edits Wikipedia entry, the site

781
00:44:28,640 --> 00:44:32,520
Speaker 1: logs the user's IP address, and and this can come

782
00:44:32,560 --> 00:44:35,680
Speaker 1: in terrifically handy because you know, it's not not all

783
00:44:35,719 --> 00:44:37,920
Speaker 1: the problems are with people pretending to be who they aren't.

784
00:44:38,680 --> 00:44:41,080
Speaker 1: When an anonymous user can log in and talk about

785
00:44:41,120 --> 00:44:44,719
Speaker 1: anything that they want to, you know, for the kind

786
00:44:44,719 --> 00:44:46,560
Speaker 1: of things that we're coming out of this Wicker Scanner

787
00:44:46,600 --> 00:44:50,800
Speaker 1: business were facts like people from Apple I p addresses

788
00:44:50,880 --> 00:44:55,279
Speaker 1: had been editing Microsoft pages on Wikipedia and vice versa,

789
00:44:55,880 --> 00:44:59,440
Speaker 1: which is another reason why we find Wikipedia. It's it's

790
00:44:59,440 --> 00:45:01,600
Speaker 1: one of those reas. Why it's hard to trust stuff

791
00:45:01,600 --> 00:45:05,160
Speaker 1: because sometimes people with an agenda will go in and

792
00:45:05,280 --> 00:45:10,280
Speaker 1: adjust a uh AN entry, either to make one party

793
00:45:10,400 --> 00:45:13,680
Speaker 1: and it look better than than it would otherwise have

794
00:45:13,800 --> 00:45:17,759
Speaker 1: looked or look worse, depending upon the person's agenda. Sure, yeah, yeah,

795
00:45:17,760 --> 00:45:21,560
Speaker 1: I member, you know, and and Democratic Party member's IP

796
00:45:21,719 --> 00:45:24,799
Speaker 1: address was traced to edits about Rush Limbaugh that we're

797
00:45:24,880 --> 00:45:29,759
Speaker 1: extremely unflattering. Yeah, this is This has happened any election year.

798
00:45:29,880 --> 00:45:33,400
Speaker 1: This stuff runs rampant, to the point where sometimes Wikipedia

799
00:45:33,440 --> 00:45:37,799
Speaker 1: will lock down a particular page about a subject in

800
00:45:37,880 --> 00:45:41,680
Speaker 1: order to avoid the crazy number of edits that different

801
00:45:41,760 --> 00:45:44,560
Speaker 1: sides of a debate will will put onto a page

802
00:45:44,560 --> 00:45:46,879
Speaker 1: in order to support their side. I mean, then think

803
00:45:46,920 --> 00:45:48,879
Speaker 1: about it. This is kind of crazy, right. It's like

804
00:45:49,200 --> 00:45:52,040
Speaker 1: if I if I have a disagreement with Lauren about

805
00:45:52,080 --> 00:45:55,040
Speaker 1: a particular subject, and then I go to Wikipedia and

806
00:45:55,160 --> 00:45:57,080
Speaker 1: edit a page so it supports my argument, and then

807
00:45:57,120 --> 00:46:01,240
Speaker 1: I cite Wikipedia as a support for my argument. That's

808
00:46:01,560 --> 00:46:04,359
Speaker 1: it's pretty insidious. That's dirty pool, that's what that is.

809
00:46:04,960 --> 00:46:07,360
Speaker 1: And I don't want to say that all anonymous Wikipedia

810
00:46:07,440 --> 00:46:10,080
Speaker 1: editors are are bad or doing nefarious thing, not at all.

811
00:46:10,160 --> 00:46:12,560
Speaker 1: For example, A couple of the other things came out

812
00:46:12,600 --> 00:46:14,040
Speaker 1: of this is that they found out that a UM

813
00:46:14,360 --> 00:46:17,720
Speaker 1: someone from the CIA contributed a really long entry about

814
00:46:17,840 --> 00:46:23,040
Speaker 1: lightsaber combat, UM someone from DARPA had written fairly extensively

815
00:46:23,040 --> 00:46:25,600
Speaker 1: about Schila booth. I mean, you know, it's it's just stuff.

816
00:46:25,640 --> 00:46:28,200
Speaker 1: You know, it's not always bad, right, Yeah, But and

817
00:46:28,280 --> 00:46:30,600
Speaker 1: we don't mean to suggest that it's always bad or

818
00:46:30,640 --> 00:46:33,120
Speaker 1: that this happens all the time. It's the fact that

819
00:46:33,280 --> 00:46:36,400
Speaker 1: it happens that's the problem. And you don't, you know,

820
00:46:36,480 --> 00:46:40,399
Speaker 1: unless you are actually adept at looking at the edits

821
00:46:40,440 --> 00:46:43,279
Speaker 1: page and understanding what that means, you may not be

822
00:46:43,320 --> 00:46:46,759
Speaker 1: aware of something that's going on that's not quite right.

823
00:46:47,200 --> 00:46:50,400
Speaker 1: And so uh. While while the odds of that actually

824
00:46:50,719 --> 00:46:54,240
Speaker 1: happening on any given page on any given day maybe low,

825
00:46:54,800 --> 00:46:57,279
Speaker 1: because you're talking about lots and lots of people using

826
00:46:57,280 --> 00:47:00,680
Speaker 1: this resource and lots of opportunities to fiddle with it,

827
00:47:00,680 --> 00:47:03,360
Speaker 1: it does happen. That's that's why you're like, you know,

828
00:47:03,400 --> 00:47:04,920
Speaker 1: the answ are with you that you're going to be

829
00:47:04,960 --> 00:47:08,120
Speaker 1: fine whenever you use Wikipedia, but they're still there are

830
00:47:08,160 --> 00:47:12,319
Speaker 1: like thousand regular contributors and seventy seven thousand regular editors

831
00:47:12,360 --> 00:47:16,600
Speaker 1: on Wikipedia as so, and after that whole UH, that

832
00:47:16,680 --> 00:47:20,920
Speaker 1: whole problem with Seagan Dollar where the the quote unquote

833
00:47:20,960 --> 00:47:24,200
Speaker 1: the joke about him being a suspect in the assassination

834
00:47:24,320 --> 00:47:27,840
Speaker 1: of the Kennedy's UH, Wales had instituted a new policy

835
00:47:27,880 --> 00:47:31,040
Speaker 1: saying that unregistered users can no longer post new articles

836
00:47:31,080 --> 00:47:34,600
Speaker 1: at all, because that was that he wanted to head

837
00:47:34,640 --> 00:47:37,000
Speaker 1: off that problem, and then by registering he hoped that

838
00:47:37,000 --> 00:47:40,480
Speaker 1: that would UH create more accountability. Now, of course the

839
00:47:40,680 --> 00:47:43,839
Speaker 1: s J issue showed that there were other problems, and

840
00:47:43,840 --> 00:47:46,160
Speaker 1: Wales came down pretty hard on that to Once all

841
00:47:46,160 --> 00:47:49,520
Speaker 1: the facts came out in two thousand nine, the Arbitration

842
00:47:49,520 --> 00:47:52,840
Speaker 1: Committee had to restrict access to its site from the

843
00:47:52,920 --> 00:47:57,960
Speaker 1: Church of Scientology I p addresses and also banned several

844
00:47:58,120 --> 00:48:03,440
Speaker 1: anti Scientologists edits because the two sides were both manipulating

845
00:48:03,480 --> 00:48:06,840
Speaker 1: the same articles to either post Scientology and a positive

846
00:48:06,920 --> 00:48:11,040
Speaker 1: or a negative light. Obviously when that that was around

847
00:48:11,040 --> 00:48:14,480
Speaker 1: when UH Anonymous I believe was really involved in in

848
00:48:14,520 --> 00:48:17,479
Speaker 1: their crash campaign, so that the thing that was coming

849
00:48:17,520 --> 00:48:19,600
Speaker 1: up into question was the neutral point of view here,

850
00:48:19,680 --> 00:48:23,200
Speaker 1: and both sides were trying to use Wikipedia to bolster

851
00:48:23,320 --> 00:48:27,160
Speaker 1: their own arguments. Uh, and whether you side with one

852
00:48:27,239 --> 00:48:29,040
Speaker 1: or the other, it was clear that both sides had

853
00:48:29,080 --> 00:48:32,680
Speaker 1: agendas and uh, you know, some of those people may

854
00:48:32,680 --> 00:48:35,800
Speaker 1: have been trying very hard to create an objective post,

855
00:48:36,160 --> 00:48:37,880
Speaker 1: but there were a lot of people who really weren't.

856
00:48:38,840 --> 00:48:41,560
Speaker 1: And that's where the banning and the and the IP

857
00:48:41,680 --> 00:48:45,040
Speaker 1: address blocking came in. And that same year, Wikipedia became

858
00:48:45,160 --> 00:48:49,720
Speaker 1: licensed under a Creative Commons right yeah, yeah, UM, which

859
00:48:49,760 --> 00:48:52,640
Speaker 1: which basically just means that it's it's licensed under their

860
00:48:52,800 --> 00:48:56,560
Speaker 1: UM share and share like yeah. So in other words,

861
00:48:56,600 --> 00:49:01,360
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about, uh, get ing chased

862
00:49:01,440 --> 00:49:04,760
Speaker 1: down by lawyers when you're reusing this material and another

863
00:49:04,800 --> 00:49:07,400
Speaker 1: and you cannot, like a person who contributes to Wikipedia

864
00:49:07,640 --> 00:49:10,440
Speaker 1: cannot claim that work to be their own at all.

865
00:49:10,480 --> 00:49:13,680
Speaker 1: They have they have essentially signed off right right, you know,

866
00:49:13,880 --> 00:49:17,799
Speaker 1: it's the content UM is still technically owned by the contributors,

867
00:49:17,920 --> 00:49:21,160
Speaker 1: but it is freely reproducible and distributable. Yeah, and when

868
00:49:21,160 --> 00:49:22,960
Speaker 1: anyone can go in and edit it. Actually, that was

869
00:49:23,000 --> 00:49:24,719
Speaker 1: one of those things that people worried about early on

870
00:49:24,719 --> 00:49:27,200
Speaker 1: in Wikipedia said, wait a minute, I'm an awesome writer.

871
00:49:27,840 --> 00:49:30,960
Speaker 1: I write awesome things. My officer of credit for my

872
00:49:31,000 --> 00:49:33,760
Speaker 1: awesome things or or I even if I don't get credit,

873
00:49:33,840 --> 00:49:37,200
Speaker 1: I certainly shouldn't be subjected to seeing other plebeians coming

874
00:49:37,239 --> 00:49:41,080
Speaker 1: in and editing my awesome prose where I wrote this

875
00:49:41,200 --> 00:49:45,840
Speaker 1: amazing piece on Optimus Prime and his importance to Western culture,

876
00:49:46,160 --> 00:49:48,879
Speaker 1: and some idiot came in and said that he turned

877
00:49:48,880 --> 00:49:52,120
Speaker 1: into this model of of a of a Semitruck, when

878
00:49:52,160 --> 00:49:55,640
Speaker 1: clearly it was this other model of Yeah, that's that.

879
00:49:55,640 --> 00:49:59,000
Speaker 1: That was like an actual argument that happened on Wikipedia, early, early, early,

880
00:49:59,080 --> 00:50:02,280
Speaker 1: early on. Um. But people have to let go because

881
00:50:02,400 --> 00:50:05,520
Speaker 1: that's kind of the way Wikipedia works. And as a writer,

882
00:50:05,640 --> 00:50:07,719
Speaker 1: I can completely understand what the people who get really

883
00:50:07,719 --> 00:50:10,879
Speaker 1: antsy about that. Although I would often turn my writing

884
00:50:10,880 --> 00:50:14,120
Speaker 1: assignments into Chris and then never see them again until

885
00:50:14,200 --> 00:50:15,719
Speaker 1: they were published on the page, and I was all

886
00:50:15,800 --> 00:50:18,880
Speaker 1: right with it. Uh, you learned to let go here

887
00:50:18,880 --> 00:50:20,839
Speaker 1: and how I learned to let go? And I learned

888
00:50:20,880 --> 00:50:22,399
Speaker 1: that this way, I don't have to look at those

889
00:50:22,400 --> 00:50:24,880
Speaker 1: red marks all over my paper because Chris just fixed

890
00:50:24,880 --> 00:50:27,279
Speaker 1: it himself. It was awesome. It made me feel like

891
00:50:27,280 --> 00:50:29,680
Speaker 1: I was a better writer than I actually was. Uh.

892
00:50:29,719 --> 00:50:32,120
Speaker 1: In two thousand and twelve, do you have anything between

893
00:50:33,320 --> 00:50:36,200
Speaker 1: actually we're going to wrap up the timeline pretty soon.

894
00:50:36,200 --> 00:50:38,440
Speaker 1: The two thousand and twelve the big story I have was,

895
00:50:38,560 --> 00:50:42,000
Speaker 1: of course that Wikipedia took place in the blackout day

896
00:50:42,080 --> 00:50:48,520
Speaker 1: on January And yeah, Pippa, Sorry, it's fine, you haven't.

897
00:50:48,719 --> 00:50:51,839
Speaker 1: You haven't been through the whole ordeal of talking about

898
00:50:51,840 --> 00:50:54,239
Speaker 1: Sopa and Pippa. I called it Pipa for about three

899
00:50:54,239 --> 00:50:58,600
Speaker 1: weeks until everyone else in technology just consistently called it Pippa.

900
00:50:58,600 --> 00:51:01,040
Speaker 1: And it's alright, final, I'm been wrong this whole time.

901
00:51:01,680 --> 00:51:03,960
Speaker 1: But yeah, Sopa and Pippa. Those were, of course the

902
00:51:04,080 --> 00:51:08,320
Speaker 1: online Piracy Acts that were in consideration in Congress in

903
00:51:08,360 --> 00:51:11,920
Speaker 1: the United States, and several sites ended up doing blackouts

904
00:51:11,960 --> 00:51:16,360
Speaker 1: to protest this proposed legislation, UH, to bring more attention

905
00:51:16,400 --> 00:51:19,480
Speaker 1: to it, and say, these the way these these laws,

906
00:51:19,600 --> 00:51:22,799
Speaker 1: or these these potential laws are worded, they could seriously

907
00:51:22,960 --> 00:51:26,560
Speaker 1: harm the operation of the Internet and and cause trouble

908
00:51:26,680 --> 00:51:29,640
Speaker 1: to lots of people and lots of organizations, and they

909
00:51:29,640 --> 00:51:33,040
Speaker 1: should not be turned into law. UH. And then in

910
00:51:33,080 --> 00:51:35,600
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen, Oh but but before before we leave,

911
00:51:35,640 --> 00:51:39,400
Speaker 1: two important cultural note. That is the year that Encyclopedia

912
00:51:39,440 --> 00:51:43,200
Speaker 1: Britannica ceased publishing on paper after two hundred and forty

913
00:51:43,239 --> 00:51:45,520
Speaker 1: four years of doing so. You know, it's also kind

914
00:51:45,520 --> 00:51:48,640
Speaker 1: of interesting. There was I remember, and I didn't write

915
00:51:48,680 --> 00:51:50,880
Speaker 1: this down in my my research because it didn't actually

916
00:51:50,920 --> 00:51:52,640
Speaker 1: it didn't occur to me while I was researching it.

917
00:51:52,680 --> 00:51:56,239
Speaker 1: But I remember specifically there was a time when Wikipedia

918
00:51:56,320 --> 00:52:02,560
Speaker 1: was starting to consider looking for experts to send in articles,

919
00:52:02,600 --> 00:52:04,680
Speaker 1: just like the old New PDIA days. They were they

920
00:52:04,719 --> 00:52:07,880
Speaker 1: were actually thinking about going to experts to get expert

921
00:52:07,960 --> 00:52:11,319
Speaker 1: subject matter experts to write information for Wikipedia. At the

922
00:52:11,400 --> 00:52:16,320
Speaker 1: same time, Britannica was looking at the possibility of crowdsourcing articles.

923
00:52:16,320 --> 00:52:18,000
Speaker 1: So it looked like for a moment that these two

924
00:52:18,040 --> 00:52:21,520
Speaker 1: models were about the flip flop that didn't actually happen

925
00:52:21,600 --> 00:52:25,000
Speaker 1: that way, but I remember hearing about that or my

926
00:52:25,080 --> 00:52:28,400
Speaker 1: brain just inventedive one of the two. Also interesting cultural

927
00:52:28,440 --> 00:52:30,840
Speaker 1: point in between two thousand eight and two thousand twelve,

928
00:52:30,880 --> 00:52:33,120
Speaker 1: this kind of dead space that that we have created,

929
00:52:33,160 --> 00:52:36,160
Speaker 1: first of on our timeline here, um, the Wikimedia Foundation

930
00:52:36,200 --> 00:52:39,200
Speaker 1: total assets went from five point six million to about

931
00:52:39,280 --> 00:52:42,319
Speaker 1: forty nine point three million. And again it's existing on

932
00:52:42,640 --> 00:52:45,480
Speaker 1: donations and donations only and and so, and that's that's

933
00:52:45,960 --> 00:52:49,799
Speaker 1: fabulous for the concept of shared knowledge, I think. Right,

934
00:52:49,880 --> 00:52:51,960
Speaker 1: that also really interesting to see what kind of I

935
00:52:51,960 --> 00:52:54,080
Speaker 1: mean to know exactly what they mean when they when

936
00:52:54,120 --> 00:52:57,560
Speaker 1: they have those giant banners every year to beg for money, right, Yeah,

937
00:52:57,600 --> 00:53:01,000
Speaker 1: when you see Jimmy Wells face on their saying every page, yeah,

938
00:53:01,280 --> 00:53:04,080
Speaker 1: give money so that this can continue to exist. I mean,

939
00:53:04,280 --> 00:53:06,319
Speaker 1: and not that you shouldn't donate. I just you know,

940
00:53:06,360 --> 00:53:09,359
Speaker 1: I just think that it's it's an interestingly, it's it's

941
00:53:09,360 --> 00:53:11,960
Speaker 1: a really cool number. Yeah, And I think it's it's

942
00:53:12,080 --> 00:53:14,279
Speaker 1: it's cool that they took that approach. I mean, it

943
00:53:14,320 --> 00:53:17,560
Speaker 1: definitely gives them the benefit of saying, look, we're not

944
00:53:17,640 --> 00:53:21,359
Speaker 1: beholden to any organization or company. We are accepting their

945
00:53:21,440 --> 00:53:24,680
Speaker 1: nation crowd crowd source, and this this is really meant

946
00:53:24,760 --> 00:53:29,839
Speaker 1: to be a tool to enrich the human race. Really,

947
00:53:29,880 --> 00:53:33,640
Speaker 1: it's it's meant to really make things better for everybody.

948
00:53:33,680 --> 00:53:37,200
Speaker 1: And it's not meant to be the platform for one

949
00:53:37,280 --> 00:53:40,080
Speaker 1: company to say, hey, by our stuff instead of that

950
00:53:40,120 --> 00:53:43,840
Speaker 1: other guy's stuff. One two the teams speaking about companies.

951
00:53:44,520 --> 00:53:48,200
Speaker 1: So that's this year. Earlier this year a story broke

952
00:53:48,840 --> 00:53:53,239
Speaker 1: that British Petroleum or BP, I should say BP. The

953
00:53:53,600 --> 00:53:56,919
Speaker 1: Brits hate it when I say British Petroleum, because they said, look,

954
00:53:56,920 --> 00:54:00,920
Speaker 1: you don't bring us into this fault. The story was

955
00:54:00,920 --> 00:54:04,760
Speaker 1: that BP had edited its own Wikipedia page. Uh, maybe

956
00:54:04,920 --> 00:54:08,759
Speaker 1: rewriting up to the content in order to make the

957
00:54:08,960 --> 00:54:13,439
Speaker 1: environmental impact at the oil spell Yeah, the deep water

958
00:54:13,520 --> 00:54:18,480
Speaker 1: horizon and the Gulf to make that seem less bad.

959
00:54:19,239 --> 00:54:22,920
Speaker 1: Maybe it's kind of hard to word this properly, but

960
00:54:23,360 --> 00:54:27,920
Speaker 1: essentially that they had sort of whitewashed the disaster and

961
00:54:27,960 --> 00:54:31,879
Speaker 1: the follow up to it. Uh. And here here I'm

962
00:54:31,960 --> 00:54:35,279
Speaker 1: quoting this directly from c NET, which reported on this.

963
00:54:36,120 --> 00:54:39,200
Speaker 1: BP is not directly editing its page, but instead has

964
00:54:39,239 --> 00:54:44,160
Speaker 1: apparently inserted a BP representative into the editing community who

965
00:54:44,160 --> 00:54:48,640
Speaker 1: provides Wikipedia editors with text. The text is then copied

966
00:54:48,760 --> 00:54:52,800
Speaker 1: as is onto the page by Wikipedia editors, while readers

967
00:54:52,800 --> 00:54:56,600
Speaker 1: are none the wiser that sections pretending to be unbiased

968
00:54:56,600 --> 00:55:00,320
Speaker 1: information are in fact vetted by higher ups at EP

969
00:55:00,719 --> 00:55:05,360
Speaker 1: before hitting the page. BP's image clean up cleverly skirts

970
00:55:05,360 --> 00:55:10,160
Speaker 1: Wikipedia's editorial rules, wherein Wikipedia editors are using text that

971
00:55:10,280 --> 00:55:13,960
Speaker 1: VP posts on Wikipedia itself as the source, although the

972
00:55:14,000 --> 00:55:17,799
Speaker 1: text is not published on BP's website. This way, the

973
00:55:17,840 --> 00:55:21,360
Speaker 1: significant involvement of BP in its own entry is completely

974
00:55:21,440 --> 00:55:25,640
Speaker 1: hidden from Wikipedia readers, while Wikipedia editors, as usual argue

975
00:55:25,640 --> 00:55:29,160
Speaker 1: and attack each other over editorial policy, while BPS favorable

976
00:55:29,160 --> 00:55:34,000
Speaker 1: pr editing continues, right and uh, alright, so so there

977
00:55:34,080 --> 00:55:37,400
Speaker 1: there's really one person who was submitting these changes. Uh,

978
00:55:37,560 --> 00:55:41,200
Speaker 1: someone by the name of Arturo silver Silva pardon me, um.

979
00:55:41,280 --> 00:55:44,719
Speaker 1: He was from the corporate communications department in Houston and um,

980
00:55:44,760 --> 00:55:47,799
Speaker 1: and he was actually going through the correct channels to

981
00:55:48,040 --> 00:55:51,800
Speaker 1: submit these changes. He he suggested the changes to editors.

982
00:55:52,000 --> 00:55:55,200
Speaker 1: He identified himself as a BP employee to those editors.

983
00:55:55,320 --> 00:55:58,320
Speaker 1: So essentially what was happening was that he was playing

984
00:55:58,360 --> 00:56:02,280
Speaker 1: by the rules. It was technically in good faith, aside

985
00:56:02,280 --> 00:56:05,640
Speaker 1: from the part that that you know, it was still whitewashing,

986
00:56:05,760 --> 00:56:08,839
Speaker 1: whitewashing the whole, the whole situation. Right. So so these

987
00:56:08,880 --> 00:56:11,200
Speaker 1: are like when we were talking about earlier about how

988
00:56:11,680 --> 00:56:15,160
Speaker 1: you know, Jimmy Wales had edited his own, uh, his

989
00:56:15,239 --> 00:56:17,640
Speaker 1: own article, and that he should have gone through the

990
00:56:17,640 --> 00:56:20,640
Speaker 1: proper channels. These are those channels that we were talking about.

991
00:56:21,000 --> 00:56:23,600
Speaker 1: This is what the VP person was doing, but it

992
00:56:23,719 --> 00:56:27,279
Speaker 1: was still putting in possibly you know, you might say

993
00:56:27,320 --> 00:56:31,440
Speaker 1: biased information is clearly clearly biased. It's from the company

994
00:56:31,480 --> 00:56:34,600
Speaker 1: that the page is about, So you can't you know,

995
00:56:34,640 --> 00:56:37,000
Speaker 1: there's no way it could be unbiased. If I write

996
00:56:37,040 --> 00:56:39,560
Speaker 1: my own Wikipedia page, that's going to be biased. Even

997
00:56:39,560 --> 00:56:41,600
Speaker 1: if I think I'm being objective, I'm still going to

998
00:56:41,640 --> 00:56:44,480
Speaker 1: talk about how freaking awesome I am. You know, so right,

999
00:56:44,600 --> 00:56:46,279
Speaker 1: But you know, I don't know, like like at that point,

1000
00:56:46,320 --> 00:56:48,360
Speaker 1: I would personally, and this is speaking as an editor,

1001
00:56:48,400 --> 00:56:50,520
Speaker 1: so I might be a little bit upity about it.

1002
00:56:50,560 --> 00:56:53,120
Speaker 1: I would blame the editors at that because because if

1003
00:56:53,160 --> 00:56:55,200
Speaker 1: they're not if they're not going like, yeah, this is

1004
00:56:55,280 --> 00:56:57,879
Speaker 1: maybe not the right source to trust this information from

1005
00:56:58,040 --> 00:57:02,160
Speaker 1: UM and this is going beyond a factual a clearly

1006
00:57:02,239 --> 00:57:05,800
Speaker 1: factual change. They're not showing good editorial judgment. Correct, Yeah,

1007
00:57:06,000 --> 00:57:09,560
Speaker 1: I I agree with that. And uh and so you know,

1008
00:57:09,800 --> 00:57:13,040
Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales actually came down again and said that that

1009
00:57:13,239 --> 00:57:16,280
Speaker 1: while BP is saying essentially that they totally played by

1010
00:57:16,280 --> 00:57:18,320
Speaker 1: the rules, he said, that's not what the rules are

1011
00:57:18,320 --> 00:57:21,400
Speaker 1: there to protect. The rules are there to protect against

1012
00:57:21,440 --> 00:57:23,760
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff that this this company is pulling.

1013
00:57:23,760 --> 00:57:26,840
Speaker 1: It's just this company is pulling the tricks within the

1014
00:57:26,840 --> 00:57:30,200
Speaker 1: context of the rules, which either means that the rules

1015
00:57:30,240 --> 00:57:33,400
Speaker 1: themselves are faulty or the people who are who are

1016
00:57:33,480 --> 00:57:35,520
Speaker 1: in charge, like the editors like you were saying, Lauren,

1017
00:57:35,720 --> 00:57:38,840
Speaker 1: are faulty at any rate. This is something that if

1018
00:57:38,880 --> 00:57:40,520
Speaker 1: I you know, I don't want to put words into

1019
00:57:40,520 --> 00:57:43,280
Speaker 1: wales His mouth, but I assume from what he has

1020
00:57:43,320 --> 00:57:48,360
Speaker 1: said he would not want this to have happened. Um So, anyway,

1021
00:57:48,480 --> 00:57:51,000
Speaker 1: all of that being said, there's an awful lot of

1022
00:57:51,080 --> 00:57:54,680
Speaker 1: information on Wikipedia, and a lot of that over two

1023
00:57:54,760 --> 00:57:59,360
Speaker 1: million articles in two languages in fact, and that there's

1024
00:57:59,360 --> 00:58:02,680
Speaker 1: stuff on there. It's incredibly useful. I mean I I

1025
00:58:02,760 --> 00:58:08,280
Speaker 1: use Wikipedia casually all the time, probably every day. It

1026
00:58:08,480 --> 00:58:13,320
Speaker 1: is incredibly useful. Um But because of what we've talked about,

1027
00:58:13,400 --> 00:58:17,200
Speaker 1: that's why a lot of teachers and and publications like

1028
00:58:17,320 --> 00:58:20,760
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works say you cannot use Wikipedia as a source.

1029
00:58:21,000 --> 00:58:23,680
Speaker 1: And it's because of the reasons we've listed. It's not

1030
00:58:23,800 --> 00:58:27,240
Speaker 1: that it's a bad thing. I actually think that Wikipedia

1031
00:58:27,320 --> 00:58:30,240
Speaker 1: is an amazing idea and it's it's actually phn novel

1032
00:58:30,320 --> 00:58:32,920
Speaker 1: to me that's worked as well as it has, right, right,

1033
00:58:32,960 --> 00:58:35,600
Speaker 1: you know, considering that that certain certain portions the Internet

1034
00:58:35,600 --> 00:58:37,640
Speaker 1: can definitely be a wretched have of scummon villainy, right,

1035
00:58:37,880 --> 00:58:40,000
Speaker 1: if you look at YouTube comments and then you think,

1036
00:58:40,920 --> 00:58:43,360
Speaker 1: this is the same This is the same world that

1037
00:58:43,440 --> 00:58:45,920
Speaker 1: we live in where we can go to Wikipedia and

1038
00:58:45,960 --> 00:58:50,320
Speaker 1: read an article about something, you know, something really technically advanced,

1039
00:58:50,360 --> 00:58:52,880
Speaker 1: and get a really good understanding of it. Uh, and

1040
00:58:52,920 --> 00:58:55,680
Speaker 1: it's this is a collaborative effort on the part of

1041
00:58:55,840 --> 00:58:59,080
Speaker 1: possibly hundreds of people. And then you go to YouTube

1042
00:58:59,080 --> 00:59:00,520
Speaker 1: and you read the comments and you think, how is

1043
00:59:00,520 --> 00:59:05,320
Speaker 1: this the same world? How what happened? Uh? So you know,

1044
00:59:05,400 --> 00:59:07,720
Speaker 1: it's amazing. But there are also some things that you

1045
00:59:07,720 --> 00:59:10,080
Speaker 1: can poke some fun at, like, uh, there was a

1046
00:59:10,640 --> 00:59:12,960
Speaker 1: I wish I could remember which web comic this was,

1047
00:59:13,000 --> 00:59:15,480
Speaker 1: and listeners, if you happen to know what I'm referring to,

1048
00:59:15,560 --> 00:59:18,000
Speaker 1: if you've been reading web comics forever and the strikes

1049
00:59:18,040 --> 00:59:20,280
Speaker 1: a chord, let me know. But I remember reading a

1050
00:59:20,280 --> 00:59:24,120
Speaker 1: web comic ages ago where was a whole series about Wikipedia,

1051
00:59:24,560 --> 00:59:27,080
Speaker 1: and one of the things they pointed out, very snarkily

1052
00:59:27,320 --> 00:59:33,800
Speaker 1: was if you were to assume that the the the

1053
00:59:33,960 --> 00:59:36,600
Speaker 1: entries that have the most words are the most important

1054
00:59:36,600 --> 00:59:40,080
Speaker 1: to the human race, then Optimus Prime would be way

1055
00:59:40,160 --> 00:59:43,320
Speaker 1: more important than Neighbraham Lincoln. I feel like that was

1056
00:59:43,360 --> 00:59:46,360
Speaker 1: Penny Arcade somebody, somebody, please please write in and tell

1057
00:59:46,360 --> 00:59:48,720
Speaker 1: me that. I can tell you it was not Penny Arcade. Well,

1058
00:59:48,760 --> 00:59:50,880
Speaker 1: I mean, Penny Arcade very well may have made that

1059
00:59:50,960 --> 00:59:53,480
Speaker 1: same joke, but I don't read Penning Up Penny Arcade,

1060
00:59:53,800 --> 00:59:56,200
Speaker 1: so I know it wasn't Pinning Arcade. All right, Well

1061
00:59:56,200 --> 01:00:00,320
Speaker 1: that's fair. I'm not I'm not criticizing p Look, I

1062
01:00:00,320 --> 01:00:03,000
Speaker 1: don't read any web comics anymore. I just don't have

1063
01:00:03,040 --> 01:00:05,720
Speaker 1: the time. But I used to read a lot of them.

1064
01:00:05,760 --> 01:00:08,280
Speaker 1: I recall. I recall seeing that that as well. At

1065
01:00:08,280 --> 01:00:11,240
Speaker 1: any rate, whoever created it, somebody, somebody writing and tell

1066
01:00:11,280 --> 01:00:14,840
Speaker 1: us because it's gonna bug otherwise. I used to. You

1067
01:00:14,840 --> 01:00:17,240
Speaker 1: know what's worse, I used to have these pinned up

1068
01:00:17,240 --> 01:00:19,200
Speaker 1: in my cubicle. They're not up there anymore, but I

1069
01:00:19,280 --> 01:00:21,120
Speaker 1: used to. I can't even remember, but I used to

1070
01:00:21,160 --> 01:00:23,960
Speaker 1: have them. There's a whole bunch of them. Um. But anyway,

1071
01:00:24,000 --> 01:00:25,959
Speaker 1: that's one of those things. That's one of those things

1072
01:00:26,000 --> 01:00:31,720
Speaker 1: that you could joke about, is that that seemingly irrelevant

1073
01:00:31,800 --> 01:00:34,960
Speaker 1: things would get a huge amount of attention because they

1074
01:00:34,960 --> 01:00:37,680
Speaker 1: were they were interesting that, you know, especially stuff in

1075
01:00:37,680 --> 01:00:43,400
Speaker 1: geek culture that people are really really passionately uh, interested

1076
01:00:43,400 --> 01:00:46,760
Speaker 1: in like you know, which again shows you why they're

1077
01:00:46,800 --> 01:00:50,600
Speaker 1: these wikis now that exist all around these properties, right right,

1078
01:00:50,640 --> 01:00:53,400
Speaker 1: and that's a perfect format for that kind of level

1079
01:00:53,440 --> 01:00:57,480
Speaker 1: of minutia of interstory detail. I mean, it's ridiculous when

1080
01:00:57,520 --> 01:00:59,959
Speaker 1: I can look up a comic book character and see

1081
01:01:00,160 --> 01:01:02,920
Speaker 1: every single iteration of that comic book character, and then

1082
01:01:03,000 --> 01:01:06,920
Speaker 1: I look up and someone who was fundamentally important in

1083
01:01:07,000 --> 01:01:10,000
Speaker 1: some huge moment in history and they have a fraction

1084
01:01:10,640 --> 01:01:13,360
Speaker 1: of that Not that you not that you couldn't cover

1085
01:01:13,560 --> 01:01:17,080
Speaker 1: the important contributions of that person in that amount of space.

1086
01:01:17,120 --> 01:01:19,320
Speaker 1: You might be able to, but it just gives you

1087
01:01:19,360 --> 01:01:21,680
Speaker 1: this weird feeling like if I were to put these

1088
01:01:21,680 --> 01:01:26,600
Speaker 1: in scales, this one so heavy. Any But yeah, and

1089
01:01:26,640 --> 01:01:30,760
Speaker 1: you know what Wikipedia is as as of January, fifth

1090
01:01:30,760 --> 01:01:34,880
Speaker 1: most popular website in the world, behind only Google, Yahoo, Microsoft,

1091
01:01:34,920 --> 01:01:39,600
Speaker 1: and Facebook, and in fact ahead of Amazon, Apple, and eBay.

1092
01:01:39,760 --> 01:01:43,880
Speaker 1: So I yeah, I mean they're doing and again there's

1093
01:01:43,880 --> 01:01:46,480
Speaker 1: a lot of valuable stuff on there. So I know

1094
01:01:46,600 --> 01:01:49,560
Speaker 1: that we definitely kind of criticized Wikipedia quite a bit

1095
01:01:49,560 --> 01:01:52,200
Speaker 1: in this this podcast, but keep in mind we're talking

1096
01:01:52,240 --> 01:01:55,280
Speaker 1: about specifically in the use for things like academic like

1097
01:01:55,280 --> 01:01:57,880
Speaker 1: academic research, and I do want to say what we

1098
01:01:57,920 --> 01:02:00,400
Speaker 1: do what Jonathan and I both do. I think, um,

1099
01:02:00,480 --> 01:02:02,400
Speaker 1: we'll did we say this already? We we we we

1100
01:02:02,440 --> 01:02:05,160
Speaker 1: go to Wikipedia and we go straight to the resource section.

1101
01:02:05,360 --> 01:02:07,200
Speaker 1: You look at the references and you take a look

1102
01:02:07,200 --> 01:02:09,520
Speaker 1: and take a look and see like because there you

1103
01:02:09,520 --> 01:02:13,720
Speaker 1: can learn more about you know, go to the places

1104
01:02:13,760 --> 01:02:16,240
Speaker 1: where the people who have written the article on Wikipedia,

1105
01:02:16,280 --> 01:02:18,520
Speaker 1: where they got their information from. Because I mean that

1106
01:02:18,640 --> 01:02:22,720
Speaker 1: also allows you to remove the interpreter as well, right,

1107
01:02:22,720 --> 01:02:25,000
Speaker 1: because anytime you're reading an article in Wikipedia, you're reading

1108
01:02:25,000 --> 01:02:28,360
Speaker 1: an interpretation of someone else's stuff. Because you know, that's

1109
01:02:28,360 --> 01:02:30,840
Speaker 1: another thing we didn't mention on Wikipedia. You do not

1110
01:02:31,120 --> 01:02:35,040
Speaker 1: publish primary information. You don't publish information for the first

1111
01:02:35,080 --> 01:02:37,960
Speaker 1: time Wikipedia specifically against the rules. Yeah, you have to.

1112
01:02:38,160 --> 01:02:41,120
Speaker 1: You have to. If you're going to present a fact

1113
01:02:41,720 --> 01:02:45,800
Speaker 1: that someone could look up and verify or reject, you

1114
01:02:45,840 --> 01:02:48,040
Speaker 1: have to be able to cite it. And you cannot

1115
01:02:48,120 --> 01:02:51,840
Speaker 1: just do primary publication right there. You know, it can't

1116
01:02:51,840 --> 01:02:54,600
Speaker 1: be like this is this is original research and publishing.

1117
01:02:54,640 --> 01:02:58,920
Speaker 1: You can't do that. Um. And so it's in theory,

1118
01:02:59,320 --> 01:03:02,960
Speaker 1: everything that's verifiable fact within a Wikipedia entry should be

1119
01:03:03,040 --> 01:03:06,360
Speaker 1: referenced somehow. This can also get kind of ridiculous when

1120
01:03:06,400 --> 01:03:09,480
Speaker 1: you start reading things that are, you know, demonstrably true

1121
01:03:09,560 --> 01:03:11,280
Speaker 1: and everyone knows it, and then at the very end

1122
01:03:11,320 --> 01:03:15,800
Speaker 1: of the sentence you see site yeah, like like need citations?

1123
01:03:17,160 --> 01:03:19,800
Speaker 1: Know that the sun, the sun exists. I know that

1124
01:03:19,840 --> 01:03:22,760
Speaker 1: we don't need a citation. Yeah, And sometimes I wonder

1125
01:03:22,760 --> 01:03:26,040
Speaker 1: if that's just trolling as well. Sometimes I'm sure editor

1126
01:03:26,080 --> 01:03:28,640
Speaker 1: trolling where it's like, could you can you provide me

1127
01:03:28,680 --> 01:03:31,720
Speaker 1: with a site citation to prove that this thing that

1128
01:03:31,760 --> 01:03:35,120
Speaker 1: everyone knows is actually a thing. Anyway, So that's our

1129
01:03:35,120 --> 01:03:39,200
Speaker 1: discussion about Wikipedia. Uh. If you guys have suggestions for

1130
01:03:39,440 --> 01:03:41,720
Speaker 1: topics we should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,

1131
01:03:41,760 --> 01:03:43,480
Speaker 1: I highly recommend you get in touch with us and

1132
01:03:43,560 --> 01:03:45,880
Speaker 1: let us know. You can say us an email or

1133
01:03:45,920 --> 01:03:49,920
Speaker 1: address is tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or come

1134
01:03:50,040 --> 01:03:53,320
Speaker 1: visit us on Facebook or Twitter because we're so lonely.

1135
01:03:53,880 --> 01:03:56,520
Speaker 1: Our handle at both those locations is text Stuff H.

1136
01:03:56,760 --> 01:03:58,840
Speaker 1: S W and Lauren and I will talk to you again,

1137
01:03:59,160 --> 01:04:08,200
Speaker 1: really singing for more on this and thousands of other topics.

1138
01:04:08,440 --> 01:04:19,600
Speaker 1: Is that how stuff works dot Com