Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from how Stuff,
Speaker 1: What's dot com either everyone, and welcome to tex Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren Vocoma. And today we
Speaker 1: wanted to talk a bit about a subject that's kind
Speaker 1: of a sore subject among among writers, teachers, teachers especially,
Speaker 1: I would say, yeah, sometimes librarians, uh, anyone involved in
Speaker 1: heavy research. Yeah. And and it's a matter of some
Speaker 1: debate among lots and lots of people online, and there
Speaker 1: are good points and bad points. We're going to cover
Speaker 1: them all. We are, of course talking about Wikipedia. And
Speaker 1: you guys who are longtime listeners of tech stuff might
Speaker 1: remember that Chris and I did an episode about wikis
Speaker 1: and we touched upon Wikipedia a little bit. But that
Speaker 1: was many years ago. Other stuff has happened, as things
Speaker 1: are wont to do on the course of time, and
Speaker 1: we decided we wanted to really look at what made
Speaker 1: Wikipedia what it was and what it is, and how
Speaker 1: has it changed over the time that it's existed, and
Speaker 1: and some of the reasons why Wikipedia is a very
Speaker 1: useful tool and some reasons why people either maybe maybe
Speaker 1: not dismiss it, but but but in some ways that
Speaker 1: it could perhaps be improved. Yeah, and and reasons why
Speaker 1: some people, uh suggest extreme caution before relying too heavily
Speaker 1: upon it. Um and and before we get really into
Speaker 1: this at all, you know, I used to write for
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot Com a lot. I occasionally still do,
Speaker 1: but I mostly do podcasts now and things like that.
Speaker 1: Blogs are about about the writing level juncture, right, But
Speaker 1: but I used to write these these a long articles.
Speaker 1: And one of the policies and How Stuff Works, UH,
Speaker 1: is that you do not use Wikipedia as a source.
Speaker 1: And uh, I used to be an editor before I
Speaker 1: was a podcaster in social media person. And yes, that
Speaker 1: was one of the things that we very firmly enforced
Speaker 1: are still do. And and really the reason for that
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with whether or not the infant well,
Speaker 1: it has something to do with whether or not the
Speaker 1: information you find on Wikipedia is reliable. But more importantly,
Speaker 1: Wikipedia is a dynamic thing, right. It can be written
Speaker 1: and edited by anybody at any time. And so when
Speaker 1: you sit there and cite something from Wikipedia, it maybe
Speaker 1: the next time someone visits that particular entry, the the
Speaker 1: information has changed, and it may be that the information
Speaker 1: now is more accurate than it was, or maybe less
Speaker 1: accurate at any rate. The things that make Wikipedia a
Speaker 1: useful tool in day to day I need to get
Speaker 1: this information are the same things that make it a
Speaker 1: dangerous tool if you are writing in any sort of
Speaker 1: academic or professional capacity. Apacity. Yeah, thank you editor for
Speaker 1: giving me the word that I don't have. But but really,
Speaker 1: before we get into all the pros and cons that
Speaker 1: I've already just touched on, uh, let's talk about the history.
Speaker 1: So before there was a Wikipedia, back when there was
Speaker 1: just barely a web. Yeah, yeah, it was more more
Speaker 1: local networks of computers and some of them could you know,
Speaker 1: key into other local networks. Yeah, we we did have
Speaker 1: an internet. Uh, and the web was a thing, but
Speaker 1: it was very young. But back in so you know,
Speaker 1: the web essentially is introduced, right, so web has not
Speaker 1: been around for very long. Rick Gates comes up with
Speaker 1: this idea. He says, Uh, you know what would be
Speaker 1: really super awesome if if we were to build an
Speaker 1: encyclopedia that lived on the Internet, and if you made
Speaker 1: that encyclopedia something that anyone could contribute to, so that
Speaker 1: way you could tap into the world's knowledge and people
Speaker 1: who are really experts in whatever field that they're in
Speaker 1: they can go in and share that knowledge, right, and
Speaker 1: and then you have the hitcharch Guide to the Galaxy, right,
Speaker 1: except it's really the Hitchicker's Guide to Earth. Uh. So
Speaker 1: it would be more than mostly harmless Earth in a
Speaker 1: small amount of the surrounding galaxy. Sure. Yeah, But essentially
Speaker 1: the sum total of what human knowledge is could go
Speaker 1: on the Internet and be in a database that you
Speaker 1: could search, and it would be the world's most complete encyclopedia. Uh.
Speaker 1: A fellow by the name of R. L. Samuel came
Speaker 1: up with an idea to call it Interpedia, and it
Speaker 1: was kind of this interesting point of discussion, but it
Speaker 1: never went beyond that. It was just one of those Hey,
Speaker 1: any cool, Yeah exactly. Maybe if someone who has more
Speaker 1: time and resources could do this, it would be awesome. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then in a very important development happened. And I
Speaker 1: was amazed that it happened this early because this was
Speaker 1: the development of the Wicki platform, and the fact that
Speaker 1: it happened in ninety four amazes me because I was
Speaker 1: largely unaware of wikis until Wikipedia came along. Yeah as well, So,
Speaker 1: I mean I had been on the web since the
Speaker 1: early nineties, but I just didn't know about wikis for
Speaker 1: many years, I mean almost a decade. Uh, and it
Speaker 1: was and when I finally did start to learn about wikis,
Speaker 1: they were strange and unusual to me because it was
Speaker 1: a different experience than your average website. Right. Yeah, Usually
Speaker 1: most websites and most books are based on this idea
Speaker 1: that there is one expert who is who is this
Speaker 1: terrific expert and is talking to you about this thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's and that's where it starts and stops. You know,
Speaker 1: no one's arguing with them, particularly, right. There might be
Speaker 1: some form of comment ability on a site where people
Speaker 1: can contribute into the discussion, but in general, the content
Speaker 1: of the site itself is created by a person or
Speaker 1: an organization, but no one else. It's not like, you know,
Speaker 1: Bob can just log in and put in Bob's section,
Speaker 1: and then Joe over here logs in and puts in
Speaker 1: Joe's section. It's Bob and Joe can't do anything because
Speaker 1: they can just go and view the site. Well, the
Speaker 1: wiki was based on a completely different idea, and it
Speaker 1: was designed by a guy named Ward Cunningham and his
Speaker 1: first one was First Software Developers. Yeah, yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: He worked for a software consulting company that he was
Speaker 1: a partner in. It was Cunningham and Cunningham also known
Speaker 1: as C two dot com, and he was developing this,
Speaker 1: uh this platform for Portland Pattern Repository and he called
Speaker 1: it wiki wiki web right, based on the Hawaiian word
Speaker 1: wiki or wiki wiki, which means um, quick quick, Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's a the wiki wiki Shuttle in Honolulu, which is
Speaker 1: an airport shuttle. I've been on the shuttle and I
Speaker 1: remember my wife being really amused every time she saw
Speaker 1: the wiki wiki shuttle. She just loved wiki wiki. Obviously
Speaker 1: I've married the right woman. So, uh so, Ward Cunningham
Speaker 1: comes up with this idea for the wiki and essentially
Speaker 1: what a wiki is is it's a website that has
Speaker 1: collaborative editing tools built into the side itself. So you
Speaker 1: you navigate to the site through a browser, and within
Speaker 1: the browser you can make changes to the site collaboratively.
Speaker 1: So depending upon the level of administrative power you have,
Speaker 1: you can you can edit things, you can add things,
Speaker 1: you can delete things. And it's since it's all within
Speaker 1: the web browser, you're using a basic markup language or
Speaker 1: maybe some sort of rich text editor, and it'll let
Speaker 1: people collaborate on projects, even if they had different machines. Right,
Speaker 1: So if Lauren's using a Mac and I'm using a PC,
Speaker 1: not only do we hate each other, but often we
Speaker 1: can't work on the same thing because our platforms are
Speaker 1: so different. But this is web based, so all we
Speaker 1: have to do is use whichever browsers and then we
Speaker 1: navigate there and we can make these changes and build
Speaker 1: our collaborative I hate you website together and other people
Speaker 1: can join in and explain why they hate everybody too.
Speaker 1: And I don't know why I'm so negative today, but
Speaker 1: apparently that's how this is gonna work. I think Cunningham
Speaker 1: develops this wiki technology, which is what makes Wikipedia possible.
Speaker 1: But we're not at Wikipedia yet now, right, because yeah,
Speaker 1: well go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, that's
Speaker 1: when we start talking about Jimmy Wales, who is kind
Speaker 1: of the face of Wikipedia, right right, Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: gonna say that. At the same time around was when
Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales had dropped out of college. He he had
Speaker 1: started um started a couple months or for a finance
Speaker 1: PhD from Indiana University and wound up instead of doing that,
Speaker 1: going to Chicago to be a futures an options trader
Speaker 1: and supposedly much like Elon Musk, who we have previously profiled,
Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales noticed that, you know, Netscape went public and
Speaker 1: and what quadrupled in value overnight? Netscape did well, yes,
Speaker 1: they did good. Um, and and took note of that
Speaker 1: and said, hey, this internet thing that I've been kind
Speaker 1: of playing around with for a few years, I think
Speaker 1: that this could be a thing. Yeah, this this might
Speaker 1: go places. And of course from this is all before
Speaker 1: the dot com bubble burst too, so back then it
Speaker 1: was all opportunity and wild west and no one was
Speaker 1: really sure and bright shining dreams. Yeah it was. It
Speaker 1: was interesting. Uh. You know, the the roads weren't paved
Speaker 1: with gold, but they were paved with stock options. Uh.
Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales has this thought while he's working for a well,
Speaker 1: he's part owner of a company called Bomus dot com,
Speaker 1: which is a search engine. Yeah, and he owned that
Speaker 1: with two other joint owners, Tim Shell and Michael Davis.
Speaker 1: Comes up with his version, his idea for a free
Speaker 1: collaborative encyclopedia, and he taps a guy named Larry Sanger
Speaker 1: to be the project lead for this new encyclopedia. Now
Speaker 1: he knew Sanger from mailing lists, because this isn't that
Speaker 1: long after the fact that people were just using things
Speaker 1: like Usenet and mailing lists instead of the Web. And
Speaker 1: uh so he got in touch with saner and and
Speaker 1: convinced Singer to head up a project, this this collaborative encyclopedia,
Speaker 1: which at that point did not have a name, right right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know that they've been thinking, I've read about
Speaker 1: open source software and and how open source culture could
Speaker 1: also be a thing and and and a beautiful thing
Speaker 1: and so and yeah, and that was kind of when
Speaker 1: you look back at Tim berners Lee, who's the guy
Speaker 1: who essentially created what we know of as the Web.
Speaker 1: That was sort of his approach to He thought that
Speaker 1: open was the right way to go, that the open
Speaker 1: collaborative way would mean that the Internet becomes the world's tool,
Speaker 1: not any one company or government's tool. And so, uh
Speaker 1: this was sort of the idea of of let's make
Speaker 1: an encyclopedia that follows those same kind of philosophies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so, so Wales and Sanger and a few others
Speaker 1: start to form a project that they call new PDA
Speaker 1: in U p E. D I A. And this is
Speaker 1: a peer reviewed encyclopedia that they were going to put online.
Speaker 1: And you know, because they wanted that they wanted that
Speaker 1: expert opinion to come in, and they wanted everything to
Speaker 1: be as as factual and reliable as possible. Exactly in
Speaker 1: fact Singer that was he was passionate about this. He
Speaker 1: said that, you know, you could create an online encyclopedia
Speaker 1: where everyone just contributes, but if you wanted to be
Speaker 1: a reliable resource, you need that peer review step in there.
Speaker 1: So and it turned it turned out to be extremely
Speaker 1: slow to to a get people to submit anything at all,
Speaker 1: because it was it was intimidating and and be to
Speaker 1: to you know, find the correct expert to to look
Speaker 1: it over. And also, yeah, the review process was, as
Speaker 1: Singer would describe later, laborious. Um so two thousand is
Speaker 1: when nupedia starts, and it starts in the middle of
Speaker 1: two thousand or so, and uh, they had an advisory
Speaker 1: board of a sort of a peer review board made
Speaker 1: up of PhD volunteers. So these are people who are
Speaker 1: not even being paid, theirvolunteering their expertise to review papers
Speaker 1: to make sure that they are they're ready for publications.
Speaker 1: So this is like if you were to submit a
Speaker 1: paper to an academic journal or a scientific journal. You know,
Speaker 1: it's something that it's not just automatically going to get published.
Speaker 1: It has to be reviewed and pass review. There might
Speaker 1: be a lengthy revision process before we'll ever be published.
Speaker 1: So there were seven steps in this review process for
Speaker 1: new Pedia, and they did. They didn't think that that
Speaker 1: it would work. I read somewhere that that Wales really
Speaker 1: thought that, you know, it had been in conversations with
Speaker 1: people on the internet and had realized that if it's
Speaker 1: something that they feel passionate about, that they're usually really
Speaker 1: willing to engage in that conversation and to help. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the idea was that, you know, you get people
Speaker 1: who are really smart. A lot of really smart people
Speaker 1: enjoy spreading knowledge. Not that we would know anything about
Speaker 1: wanting to show off knowledge. Yeah, I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1: really smart, but I still like to do it. So,
Speaker 1: I mean that's why I played trivia is really just
Speaker 1: to show off how smart I am. But I know
Speaker 1: that ppared to these people, I was and still am stupid.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so or at least okay, anyway, thank you,
Speaker 1: Everyone's special and nobody is um. So yeah, the seventh
Speaker 1: step process to publish to review before you would publish
Speaker 1: an article. It turned out that this was a bit
Speaker 1: of a bottleneck um and the very first Newpedia article
Speaker 1: that was ever published was written by Kristoff Hust and
Speaker 1: it was about a tonality and it was published in
Speaker 1: the summer of two thousands, so it was early two
Speaker 1: thousand when they started working on new Pedia. At that time,
Speaker 1: the entire submission and review process was all through mailing lists.
Speaker 1: It was. There wasn't a web based version yet, and
Speaker 1: so the fairst article publishes in the summer of two thousand,
Speaker 1: it was either June or July. According to Sanger, who
Speaker 1: wrote about this I found it on slash Dot. He
Speaker 1: wrote a two part piece that was essentially about the
Speaker 1: whole beginning of Wikipedia, which started with this new Pedia thing. Well,
Speaker 1: in January two Sanger and Wales meet up with a
Speaker 1: guy named Ben COVID's at the infamous Taco stand meeting.
Speaker 1: Taco stand meeting. Yeah, they were in California and they
Speaker 1: were at a taco stand. They started talking and COVID's
Speaker 1: told Whales and Sanger about Cunningham's wiki Wiki web platform
Speaker 1: and they thought about this as being a tool that
Speaker 1: would allow for collaborative work and make it much easier
Speaker 1: to get articles. And and Sandor was still thinking about
Speaker 1: this peer review process, right, right, But they were thinking
Speaker 1: that in order to get more submissions, in order to
Speaker 1: make it a little bit less intimidating for people to,
Speaker 1: you know, to to submit an article to this crazy
Speaker 1: peer review thing, yeah, to say, like, don't worry so
Speaker 1: much about the quality, just submit stuff. Because it turned
Speaker 1: out that, uh, you know that one of the things
Speaker 1: they were worried about was that they needed to have content.
Speaker 1: And part of the philosophy was that if we can
Speaker 1: fix content, if the content it's not perfect, we can
Speaker 1: still edit it once we get it. But if we
Speaker 1: never get any content, there's no encyclopedia, right, because I
Speaker 1: think at the time they had they had maybe twenty articles,
Speaker 1: I mean something, you know, a very low number. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't it was. It was twenty five articles by
Speaker 1: the winter of two thousand one. So summer two thousand
Speaker 1: their first article publishes. More than a year later, they
Speaker 1: have twenty articles on new media, which is more articles
Speaker 1: than I write in a year. But I mean, there
Speaker 1: was fewer than what I wrote in a year. In
Speaker 1: a year, I would write around a hundred articles. So
Speaker 1: it's it's it's kind of you know, but that's that
Speaker 1: shows you there was this bottleneck process and and you know,
Speaker 1: you find out that a volunteer might love their field
Speaker 1: of expertise, but they're still a volunteer, so there's still
Speaker 1: they're still limited by the fact that they have to
Speaker 1: do other things, most of them, unless they're independently wealthy,
Speaker 1: they have other responsibilities they have to attend to. But
Speaker 1: while they were thinking about this, they decided to launch
Speaker 1: a wiki for Newpedia. And they launched that wiki on
Speaker 1: January two thousand one. So newpedia is still a thing,
Speaker 1: but they launch a wiki for it with the idea
Speaker 1: of making it this faster way to contribute articles. And
Speaker 1: I think it actually goes live on January. If any
Speaker 1: of you know about Wikipedia Day and are going like
Speaker 1: that wasn't on the tenth, well that's the here's why
Speaker 1: the wiki goes live on the tenth. The advisory board says,
Speaker 1: I don't want anything to do with that. Like essentially
Speaker 1: what happened was the peer review board looked at the
Speaker 1: wiki and said, look, we have these other backlog of
Speaker 1: articles that we're still reviewing. We cannot deal with this nonsense.
Speaker 1: So what happened was the new Pedia Wiki split from
Speaker 1: Newpedia and became its own thing, and on January fifteenth,
Speaker 1: that became Wikipedia. So Wikipedia began as a branch of
Speaker 1: new Pedia where it was all going to be puer reviewed,
Speaker 1: but then became its own thing where the peer review
Speaker 1: kind of went away. The idea was that the community
Speaker 1: would review, and so it wouldn't be peer reviewed in
Speaker 1: the sense of an official board of experts. It would
Speaker 1: be the community of Wikipedia collectively would be able to
Speaker 1: review and edit the content that was being uploaded. And
Speaker 1: and that that kind of spread of the workload was
Speaker 1: really important, because they had a hundred and fifty entries
Speaker 1: by the end of February. Yeah, it was, and it
Speaker 1: went really pretty crazy. The according to Sanger, he said
Speaker 1: by the end of January two thousand one, there were
Speaker 1: six hundred articles on Wikipedia. But that's Singer this and
Speaker 1: that was from memory, So you gotta keep in mind
Speaker 1: this is Saner writing in two thousand five about what
Speaker 1: happened in two thousand one. So Sanger says that by
Speaker 1: the end of two thousand one there were six hundred articles,
Speaker 1: and by March or by end of January two there
Speaker 1: was six hundred articles by marchd by April and by Madred.
Speaker 1: So not only were more articles coming online, but it
Speaker 1: would growth rate was increasing over time, not exponentially, but
Speaker 1: pretty pretty regularly. So it was very quickly becoming popular.
Speaker 1: And uh uh. And April two thousand one, that's when
Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales decided to to to post a thing where
Speaker 1: he defined that the Wikipedia voice was to be one
Speaker 1: of neutral point of view or n p o V
Speaker 1: and uh. Sancer actually objected to this as well. Not
Speaker 1: that he objected to the idea of neutrality, he thought
Speaker 1: that was important. He objected to the phrase point of
Speaker 1: view because he said that it still means that the
Speaker 1: article has a point of view, and it shouldn't Sander
Speaker 1: in some of his points. I was reading in this
Speaker 1: stuff I saw and slash dot, I was thinking, this
Speaker 1: is getting to be a little bit about semantics. Weird,
Speaker 1: and yeah, a little bit. I respect a lot of
Speaker 1: what he was saying, but I think it's something and
Speaker 1: I think that that you know, pedantic has its place
Speaker 1: on the Internet, absolutely does. Whenever I'm in a comment, uh,
Speaker 1: it's my first weapon of choice. Um. Anyway, So by
Speaker 1: the winter of two thousand one, that's when only articles
Speaker 1: had published on Newpedia, and the approval process moves so
Speaker 1: slowly that even when the tools to review and approve
Speaker 1: articles moved from email to web based clients, it just
Speaker 1: wasn't doing very well. And because it was such a
Speaker 1: slow process, more and more of the people involved in
Speaker 1: it began to neglect it and drop off of it.
Speaker 1: And Wikipedia, but at that same time, was getting more
Speaker 1: and more popular. So yeah, so Sander's responsibilities were starting
Speaker 1: to shift more towards Wikipedia than Newpedia, simply because that's
Speaker 1: where all the action was. So by two thousand one
Speaker 1: and into two thousand two, Newpedia activity had slowed dramatically
Speaker 1: and uh and also the the bubble. By then, the
Speaker 1: dot com bubble had burst, which really kind of wiped
Speaker 1: out a lot of the folks who were contributing in
Speaker 1: some way. So that kind of all uh made the
Speaker 1: funding kind of dry up for Newpedia. Wikipedia, by the way,
Speaker 1: was existing at that time and still is to this
Speaker 1: day on donations. UM. So the Newpedia was trying really
Speaker 1: hard to redefine the rules that were needed to review
Speaker 1: submissions so that they could streamline the process. But by
Speaker 1: that time it was it was too little, too late.
Speaker 1: Uh and and it gets really sad in another year.
Speaker 1: But when I get there, I'll mention it. So um.
Speaker 1: Even at this early stage of Wikipedia, Sanger was really saying,
Speaker 1: let's pay attention to what experts have to say. Let's
Speaker 1: give them special attention and respect, and make sure that
Speaker 1: their voices are the ones we pay the most attention to.
Speaker 1: Not that we won't accept submissions from the general public,
Speaker 1: but that we should pay more attention to things that
Speaker 1: are coming from people who are recognized. Because again, this
Speaker 1: is this is Sander saying that in order to be
Speaker 1: a credible resource for people, you have to have some
Speaker 1: form of review or or you know, you have to
Speaker 1: have some way of of saying the information here is
Speaker 1: from right right, the same way that scientific journals won't
Speaker 1: just you know, accept accept research that has not been
Speaker 1: checked over by a peer review system because least it's
Speaker 1: ideally ideally if you ever hear. In fact, this is
Speaker 1: just a little side note. Uh, this is important if
Speaker 1: you're reading something on Wikipedia and you look at the references.
Speaker 1: It's something that Lauren and I do a lot. Uh,
Speaker 1: It's important also to pay to what the references are
Speaker 1: because there are scientific quote unquote scientific papers out there
Speaker 1: that are actually blogs that aren't scientific papers. So then
Speaker 1: you will quote unquote have a paper published in a
Speaker 1: scientific journal, but it's not a peer reviewed scientific journal. Correct.
Speaker 1: I see this with a lot of free energy papers,
Speaker 1: where free energy is one of those things where like,
Speaker 1: well it was published in such and such, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I check that out. That's that guy's personal blog. He
Speaker 1: called it the Journal of Nuclear Physics, but it's just
Speaker 1: live journal. Yeah. Yeah, we we just did an episode
Speaker 1: about about nuclear power, not fusion power, and yeah there
Speaker 1: was cold fusion and cold fusion and there was a
Speaker 1: lot of that, so that that that's stuck in my head. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: If you do research on cold fusion, you'll find quote
Speaker 1: unquote papers, but they are posted on online resources that
Speaker 1: turn out to be not an actual scientific journal. That
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily mean that the research is unreliable. It just
Speaker 1: means that you don't have that peer review to really
Speaker 1: be sure that it's past muster. And and also before
Speaker 1: I was an editor here, I was actually an editor
Speaker 1: for a medical research journal UM about rheumatism, and so
Speaker 1: so I am intimately acquainted with the peer review process. Yeah. Uh, well,
Speaker 1: moving on talking about the difference between Wikipedia and peer
Speaker 1: review Sanger actually talked about how he had suggested a
Speaker 1: rule called ignore all rules, and in his two five
Speaker 1: recounting of the beginning of Wikipedia, he said that the
Speaker 1: Wikipedia community might be surprised to hear that he was
Speaker 1: the one who's who suggested that, because you know, against
Speaker 1: Sanger was the one who was all about pure review,
Speaker 1: and here he is saying ignore all rules. And his
Speaker 1: his philosophy was that again, they wanted to get as
Speaker 1: much content on Wikipedia as possible, and if the rules
Speaker 1: intimidated someone so that they did not feel like they
Speaker 1: were qualified or capable of posting, he wanted to take
Speaker 1: that barrier away. But he thought of that as a
Speaker 1: temporary measure, something to to get Wikipedia going, to get
Speaker 1: the ball rolling, and then nodded something that would wind
Speaker 1: up being one of the continuing five pillars, not a
Speaker 1: central central tenant of the entire of the entire size. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so ignoral rules. He kind of later on said that
Speaker 1: I I kind of regret saying that now because he
Speaker 1: felt that that was one of the past yeah, of
Speaker 1: of him there was a little bit of a falling out,
Speaker 1: you know. There's Yeah, Sander Singer definitely, Uh. If you
Speaker 1: read his stuff, you see and I mean there's there's
Speaker 1: there's a lot of rancor on both parts, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sander has a lot to say about the direction that
Speaker 1: Wikipedia took and uh, and it it's pretty clear that
Speaker 1: he feels that it's not ideal. I mean, he doesn't
Speaker 1: outright come out and say that this is uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's useless or anything like that, but he has a
Speaker 1: lot of criticisms. Meanwhile, the Wikipedia community, in turn, has
Speaker 1: a lot of criticisms that they direct to Singer, and
Speaker 1: they both sides have relevant points. So even though I'm
Speaker 1: talking a lot about Singer, it's mainly because that's that's
Speaker 1: the account I went with, uh for the history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not that It's not that I necessarily side with Singer.
Speaker 1: I'm not that far to that extreme. Uh. Anyway, a
Speaker 1: lot of the the policies of Wikipedia actually came out
Speaker 1: of the community. It became sort of communal decisions of
Speaker 1: how the site should work, which was kind of interesting
Speaker 1: because they had originally thought of it being sort of
Speaker 1: again an extension of New Pedia but this became more
Speaker 1: of the open communal approach to the Internet, which again
Speaker 1: is more of the Tim Burners Lee approach, which makes
Speaker 1: it a lot harder to direct. You know, you can't
Speaker 1: you know, when you've got a group of fifty people
Speaker 1: who have all decided they want to go left, it's
Speaker 1: really hard to make them go right, you know, when
Speaker 1: you're one guy. Yeah, yeah, And you know, and there's
Speaker 1: there's voting systems in place, there's you know, even back
Speaker 1: in those days, there were a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of ways for people to communicate with each other. These
Speaker 1: ideas that they had for the community. Uh, they had
Speaker 1: decided that that Wikipedia content would always remain free for
Speaker 1: others to read and edit, uh, meaning that there would
Speaker 1: never be a point where there'd be a paywall or
Speaker 1: subscription for Wikipedia. And uh they also, you know, we're
Speaker 1: putting in those policies that allow people to publish rough
Speaker 1: drafts or rough ideas that could be polished over time,
Speaker 1: either by themselves or by other people. And then Google
Speaker 1: started to include Wikipedia and its search results for different topics,
Speaker 1: which meant that there was suddenly a huge rush of
Speaker 1: news people. Yeah, and and Sanger noticed like as more
Speaker 1: people were coming to visit Wikipedia more than we're getting
Speaker 1: involved as editors and contributors. So that meant that even
Speaker 1: that as the Wikipedia traffic was increasing, so was the content.
Speaker 1: You were suddenly seeing even faster growth as far as
Speaker 1: how much information was being contained within Wikipedia. Um and
Speaker 1: the summer of uh, well, one of the before I
Speaker 1: get to the summer two thousand one one thing Sander
Speaker 1: didn't note was that even in those early days that
Speaker 1: he was starting to notice that people who were difficult
Speaker 1: and who were persistent, Uh, we're sometimes irritating very valuable
Speaker 1: members of the Wikipedia community. And the valuable members were like,
Speaker 1: I don't need this, never mind, I'm a volunteer sia,
Speaker 1: and they just left. And then uh, so that meant
Speaker 1: that you started to have more of the persistent, difficult
Speaker 1: type and fewer of the valuable expert types. Uh. And
Speaker 1: Sender saw that as another kind of downfall of Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: and there there was there wasn't really any way to
Speaker 1: counteract that without essentially violating kind of those philosophies that
Speaker 1: Wikipedia was founded upon, right, and you know, one of
Speaker 1: those philosophies is definitely that the editors and contributors should
Speaker 1: be polite to each other, which happens sometimes, but yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: you know, it's human error. Yeah, I mean the vast
Speaker 1: majority I think. I think the vast majority of people
Speaker 1: who are regular contributors to Wikipedia are in general very courteous.
Speaker 1: But all it takes are a few trolls to really
Speaker 1: stir things up. And uh and trolls who are particularly
Speaker 1: effective can cause huge amounts of frustration in a community.
Speaker 1: Um and in fact, that's that's why they do it right.
Speaker 1: With a little effort, they make a big impact. And
Speaker 1: uh boy, we did a whole episode on how trolls work.
Speaker 1: It was a great one. You guys should go back
Speaker 1: and listen to that one. But in summer of two
Speaker 1: thousand one, someone ended up using the editing tools to
Speaker 1: vandalize the front page of Wikipedia, because that was one
Speaker 1: of the ones you could edit back in those days.
Speaker 1: And uh, and so they vandalized it, and then someone
Speaker 1: tried to archive the vandalized page, so Singer when end
Speaker 1: deleted the archive. So then they kind of reposted the
Speaker 1: archives somewhere else and Singer went in and deleted that,
Speaker 1: and this became a big kerfuffle between Singer and the community.
Speaker 1: The community not the entire community. But there were sections
Speaker 1: of the community that said, you are overstepping your balance, right,
Speaker 1: this is not yours to do this with your abusing powers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the fact that you have the ability to do that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that you are that you should do that.
Speaker 1: Like you, you are capable of doing that, but you
Speaker 1: should not do it and uh and Singer was like,
Speaker 1: this is kind of silly. The whole point of this
Speaker 1: is that we don't want the vandalized version of Wikipedia
Speaker 1: to be a representation of Wikipedia. We don't want that
Speaker 1: to come up in search because it hurts the community.
Speaker 1: I don't see where the problem is. And others were saying, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, that's beside the point. It doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: the content is. It is the matter. The matter is
Speaker 1: that you've deleted it. You've overset. If you start deleting,
Speaker 1: then where does it end. Right, You've bypassed the whole process,
Speaker 1: and by bypassing it, you've rendered the process meaningless. And
Speaker 1: it went from kerfuffle to shenanigans. Well in uh in
Speaker 1: two thousand two. February two thousand two, Singer is laid
Speaker 1: off of Wikipedia. At that point, the dot com bubble
Speaker 1: bursting had really started to take its effect. Newpedia essentially
Speaker 1: was petering out at that point, and uh and at
Speaker 1: first Singer was had his had his salary reduced a
Speaker 1: couple of times I think, and then he was laid off.
Speaker 1: He continued to work in a volunteer capacity for a
Speaker 1: little while. Also in February two thousand two, the Spanish
Speaker 1: language version of Wikipedia forked off of the main version
Speaker 1: and became Encyclopedia Libre. And the reason for the split
Speaker 1: was that the the people working on the Spanish side
Speaker 1: were worried that there was going to be problems with censorship,
Speaker 1: I think, things like Saner deleting stuff. And also there
Speaker 1: was worry that Wikipedia would soon start to institute advertising
Speaker 1: on its site to monetize Wikipedia, and that there was
Speaker 1: a worry there that by monetizing Wikipedia, you would compromise
Speaker 1: the site's integrity, which is something that Saner was saying
Speaker 1: didn't exist because of the lack of peer review. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of this interesting like you're you're you're going
Speaker 1: to ruin the integrity of the site, and Sanders like
Speaker 1: what integrity? Uh So that was an interesting discussion, and
Speaker 1: in August of two thousand two, Jimmy Wales said that
Speaker 1: Wikipedia would never run ads on its site, and in fact,
Speaker 1: that's also when Wikipedia dot com became Wikipedia dot org
Speaker 1: as sort of an an example of this is this
Speaker 1: is who we are. We are not We're not a
Speaker 1: we're not a company, We're an organization. Uh. In December
Speaker 1: of that year, in two thousand two, they launched wctionary,
Speaker 1: which is kind of funny because there was a whole
Speaker 1: page on Wikipedia about how Wikipedia is not a diction dictionary,
Speaker 1: so they did dictionary. Now, Lauren, let me ask you this.
Speaker 1: Do you think now I can understand the value of
Speaker 1: an open source, crowdsourced encyclopedia because there are huge disciplines
Speaker 1: of knowledge out there. There are people who are experts,
Speaker 1: and there are people who have experience with it, their
Speaker 1: researchers who really know what they're doing when they're looking
Speaker 1: into that sort of stuff. And the more minds you
Speaker 1: bring into an encyclopedia, the better chance you have of
Speaker 1: getting a fuller picture of whatever it is. Right, do
Speaker 1: you see the same thing being valuable in the dictionary? Well, okay,
Speaker 1: the thing about dictionaries I think now that you ask me,
Speaker 1: is that, um, you know, there are these really terrific,
Speaker 1: very thorough sources like the Oxford English. It's probably the
Speaker 1: pinnacle of English dictionaries. If if I'm allowed to make
Speaker 1: that kind of qualitative statement right now, American heritage myself.
Speaker 1: But you know, well I said that about you, John,
Speaker 1: I support my I support my country. Why do you
Speaker 1: hate America? Lauren? What do you hate America? But well,
Speaker 1: because okay, so so they're they're the there are these
Speaker 1: large resource dictionaries that have a terrific wealth of historical
Speaker 1: information behind them. Um, however, they are a little bit
Speaker 1: slow on the uptake of new words, I see. So
Speaker 1: you would see the value of dictionary being something that
Speaker 1: could incorporate words that are entering the lexicon that would
Speaker 1: maybe take five to ten years to start at at
Speaker 1: the at the fastest speed possible, five to ten years
Speaker 1: to be incorporated into a dictionary classic dictionary. Right And
Speaker 1: also you know, to to do it in a way
Speaker 1: that is that is, you know, a not branded because
Speaker 1: because as as as much as I as much as
Speaker 1: I do love very specific dictionaries, they're their brands, their companies.
Speaker 1: They're they're out there to make a profit. Um at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, and so so having an
Speaker 1: open source one is a really terrific idea, and having
Speaker 1: one that's perhaps better policed than, for example, Urban Dictionary.
Speaker 1: I think I think it's a good a good thing
Speaker 1: to do. Okay, although to be fair, it's still community police.
Speaker 1: Well it is, but I would say that the quality
Speaker 1: of policing on Wictionary versus Urban Dictionary is um, that's fair.
Speaker 1: That's fair. I I can I can agree to that
Speaker 1: because I don't know if any policing that happens on urbans,
Speaker 1: I don't think that that's a thing. So June two
Speaker 1: thousand three, Whales announces the Wikimedia Foundation, which is a
Speaker 1: nonprofit that administrates Wikipedia, And in September two thousand three,
Speaker 1: Nupedia's servers crash and it never comes back. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: just shuts down. The computer failed. So we're just gonna
Speaker 1: believe it. I don't think it ever really got more
Speaker 1: than those articles. That was I think that was about it,
Speaker 1: kind of the peak. Yeah. Wow, So new Pedia was
Speaker 1: a failed experiment. Wikipedia, the what was originally going to
Speaker 1: just be a little offshoot of Newpedia was already a
Speaker 1: rousing success. Yeah. Yeah. There were many other non English
Speaker 1: sites that were that were launching around that time, I
Speaker 1: think that not all of them had officially split off yet,
Speaker 1: but there were there were at least seventeen different languages
Speaker 1: being worked on within Wikipedia. Well, We've got a lot
Speaker 1: more to talk about with Wikipedia, but before we do,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright,
Speaker 1: now back to Wikipedia. Okay, So we just talked about
Speaker 1: two thousand three. Do you have anything between two thousand
Speaker 1: three and two thousand five, because otherwise I'm just going
Speaker 1: to skip around ahead. Um. I believe that in two
Speaker 1: thousand four, Wikia was founded, which is which is the
Speaker 1: for profit uh kind of branch of Wikipedia that um,
Speaker 1: that maintains a whole bunch of of entertainment mostly related wikis. Um.
Speaker 1: I think I think that the the Wikipedia is among
Speaker 1: them stuff like that. Okay, And you know, those are
Speaker 1: the wikis that I've recently become more and more familiar with,
Speaker 1: because you know, pretty much any kind of entertainment thing
Speaker 1: out there has its own wiki, to the point where
Speaker 1: I'm like, I can't believe this has a wiki. I
Speaker 1: can't believe tech stuff doesn't anyway, But so so in
Speaker 1: these these are ads supported, um, however, they're still community
Speaker 1: run and uh, you know, yeah, right right, so so similar.
Speaker 1: But again this is following moral on the Wiki lines
Speaker 1: of philosophy rather than the Wikipedia one. Because again, one
Speaker 1: of the things Stanger also said in his in his
Speaker 1: talks or in his writings was that, um, you know,
Speaker 1: he he saw that the Wicki philosophy was kind of
Speaker 1: counter to that of an encyclopedia, like the two did
Speaker 1: not did not move, you know, I didn't mention a
Speaker 1: very very seamless way, and that uh, that that was
Speaker 1: a concern to him, but that he felt that because
Speaker 1: Wikipedia was specifically supposed to be an encyclopedia, it helped
Speaker 1: guide the policies, uh, for better or for worse. So
Speaker 1: it's the community on Wikipedia is not exactly the same
Speaker 1: as what you would find on your average wiki because
Speaker 1: the process is slightly different because it has a very
Speaker 1: specific purpose to be an encyclopedia. Well. Uh. In two
Speaker 1: thousand five, Wired published a report that said that Jimmy
Speaker 1: Wales had done something that's generally frowned upon within the
Speaker 1: Wikipedia community, and that is to edit your own page
Speaker 1: eighteen times. Apparently, and supposedly the edits that were made,
Speaker 1: um were removing things like, uh, like Sander's involvement in
Speaker 1: the early genesis of Wikipedia. Yeah, essentially, there was there
Speaker 1: was a charge that Wales had removed a sentence that
Speaker 1: had referred to Sander as a co founder of Wikipedia. Um.
Speaker 1: And then there were other things as well. That's that
Speaker 1: Wales said was it was just an attempt to remove
Speaker 1: some inaccuracies. It wasn't. He wasn't trying to white washing
Speaker 1: anything or cleaning it out according to what he was
Speaker 1: saying anyway, but still defends this, by the way, right
Speaker 1: in general, that that's considered bad form on Wikipedia. It's not.
Speaker 1: It's not explicitly against the rules. If you're not, you're
Speaker 1: generally I mean you're you're generally if if you find
Speaker 1: it an accuracy about something that concerns you due to
Speaker 1: an end they have an acrony important and all. Um Uh.
Speaker 1: It is the conflict of interest a bit of it
Speaker 1: that that, Yeah, that you're supposed to submit it to
Speaker 1: an editor who can then make a non conflict of
Speaker 1: interest judgment call about whether or not that it needs
Speaker 1: to be made. That's interesting that particular sequence is going
Speaker 1: to play an important part towards the end of this
Speaker 1: timeline conversation, definitely, because it turns out some people have
Speaker 1: taken advantage of that particular approach to the point where
Speaker 1: they have been able to inserta misleading information or at
Speaker 1: least leaving out important truths in the process of quote
Speaker 1: unquote correcting or adding to an article. But we'll get
Speaker 1: to that in a moment. Yeah, so Wales ends up
Speaker 1: getting heat for this. Uh, even though to this day
Speaker 1: he says that it wasn't it was not a big deal.
Speaker 1: It's not that he doesn't even say he didn't do
Speaker 1: anything wrong. He's like, I don't understand what the big
Speaker 1: deal is here was fixing errors? He's He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I did it. There was nothing wrong with what I did,
Speaker 1: So calm down. But then, you know, other people would say, well,
Speaker 1: if you had just gone through the regular channels, then
Speaker 1: it would have been another story. Uh. May of two
Speaker 1: thousand five was when we had uh an anonymous user
Speaker 1: who was later identified but I'm not going to say
Speaker 1: the name here, but he posted comments in an article
Speaker 1: about Segon Dollar, John Seon Dollar, saying that he was
Speaker 1: a suspect and the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 1: Segon Dollar as a journalist and was a friend to
Speaker 1: Robert Kennedy actually one of his palm bearers. So Segon
Speaker 1: Dollar said that this amounted to Internet character assassination. The
Speaker 1: comments were a hoax. It was supposed to be a joke,
Speaker 1: although I don't know who would find this particularly Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the hoax. It was made in May, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't discovered until September of two thousand five, and then
Speaker 1: the mainstream media caught hold of the story and began
Speaker 1: to cover it. And this ended up being a big
Speaker 1: black eye on Wikipedia because everyone ran with the story saying,
Speaker 1: how can you trust a resource that anyone can go
Speaker 1: into and change and vandalize or create a hoax like this,
Speaker 1: create a joke, Yeah, insert completely false information, or delete
Speaker 1: something so that whatever is left is not an accurate
Speaker 1: portrayal of the actual subject. Crow the entire side is useless. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what, the facialist media is kind of right, right.
Speaker 1: It definitely escalated to from hey, sometimes you can't trust
Speaker 1: what's on Wikipedia to Wikipedia is bad because people are
Speaker 1: evil and they will mislead you. Uh. And and by
Speaker 1: the way, I don't really think either extreme is healthy.
Speaker 1: While I often will dismiss Wikipedia in any sort of
Speaker 1: academic approach. I am not one to say that it's all.
Speaker 1: There's some things about Wikipedia that I find genuinely amusing,
Speaker 1: and there's some things I find genuinely helpful. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: I would never go so far on either side. It's
Speaker 1: good to know. So April two thousand six, we have
Speaker 1: another scandal. A guy from Glasgow whose name I will
Speaker 1: not be able to say, Alan mickel Wraith, mickil Wraith.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be mckil wrath. Have it in front of me.
Speaker 1: That's it's got to be mickil rayth m c I
Speaker 1: l w R a I t H mckill wraith. So
Speaker 1: he created a Wikipedia entry about himself that betrayed him
Speaker 1: as a decorated army officer, something that he was not.
Speaker 1: And again the mainstream media picked up on this and said, like,
Speaker 1: here's a guy who was promoting himself. Uh, created a
Speaker 1: false identity for himself and uh, and this shows that
Speaker 1: you can't trust what's on Wikipedia. Yeah. Meanwhile, all this
Speaker 1: bad press was not particularly affecting the growth of Wikipedia.
Speaker 1: By by mid two thousand six, I think that they
Speaker 1: had five million articles. Yeah, this is they went from
Speaker 1: uh they had one million in English. But probably five
Speaker 1: million I think total total. Yeah, so right, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of debate about well yeah, because
Speaker 1: I got confused. I saw at one point, like in
Speaker 1: two thousand four they hit one million articles, and then
Speaker 1: I read later like in two thousand and six they
Speaker 1: hit one million articles again, and then I realized, oh wait,
Speaker 1: the first one two thousand four was one million articles
Speaker 1: total across all languages. Two thousand six was one million
Speaker 1: in English. But it was the growth was incredible. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in two thousand seven we have another scandal. This
Speaker 1: is when it was discovered that a Wikipedia editor who
Speaker 1: was using a handle called s J E S. S
Speaker 1: J A Y was discovered to have also created a
Speaker 1: false identity. In this case, s J had been uh
Speaker 1: posing as someone who held a PhD uh in uh
Speaker 1: in theology, I assume, because he was saying that he
Speaker 1: was a tenured professor with an expertise in Kennon law,
Speaker 1: and in reality he was a twenty four year old
Speaker 1: guy who had been to several colleges in Kentucky. An
Speaker 1: expert perhaps, but objectively speaking, he was saying that he
Speaker 1: had created this identity in order to give himself a
Speaker 1: buffer so that people who disagreed with him would not
Speaker 1: be able to attack him personally. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: he was just creating a handle. It's just a little
Speaker 1: bit more, uh more involved than just a handle. But
Speaker 1: here's the problem. He was also using his fake credentials
Speaker 1: to back up his arguments whenever he was making edits. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that, that's going beyond. He's saying, like, because
Speaker 1: of my expertise in this field, I know that this
Speaker 1: particular thing should be worded this way rather than that way.
Speaker 1: And he didn't hold those credentials. So the New Yorker
Speaker 1: writes about Wikipedia, and they write about s J before
Speaker 1: finding out that s J is not who he claims
Speaker 1: to be. Then the information breaks that s J is
Speaker 1: actually someone else, and the New Yorker ends up writing
Speaker 1: a pretty strongly worded response to that, and again mainstream
Speaker 1: media blows up, and online it blows up. The community
Speaker 1: begins to sift through all the edits that s J
Speaker 1: made on Wikipedia, particularly in the places where he was
Speaker 1: using his false credentials to bolster his arguments, because now
Speaker 1: the community has the responsibility to fix this, or if
Speaker 1: if in fact needs to be fixed, they have to
Speaker 1: address it. So that they can again show that Wikipedia
Speaker 1: is something you can rely upon at least or that
Speaker 1: it's at least useful and not just be raised to
Speaker 1: the ground. Yeah, it's not just a database of information
Speaker 1: you cannot really be sure is accurate or not. Uh,
Speaker 1: it was, you know, it was fighting a powerful perception problem,
Speaker 1: right right right? That was also, did did you? Uh?
Speaker 1: That was also the year two thousand and seven that
Speaker 1: Virgil griff Griffith released wicket Scanner. I don't know about
Speaker 1: this one, okay, so so so Wicker Scanner Um was
Speaker 1: this you know, terrific little program that he wrote that
Speaker 1: whenever an unregistered anonymous user edits Wikipedia entry, the site
Speaker 1: logs the user's IP address, and and this can come
Speaker 1: in terrifically handy because you know, it's not not all
Speaker 1: the problems are with people pretending to be who they aren't.
Speaker 1: When an anonymous user can log in and talk about
Speaker 1: anything that they want to, you know, for the kind
Speaker 1: of things that we're coming out of this Wicker Scanner
Speaker 1: business were facts like people from Apple I p addresses
Speaker 1: had been editing Microsoft pages on Wikipedia and vice versa,
Speaker 1: which is another reason why we find Wikipedia. It's it's
Speaker 1: one of those reas. Why it's hard to trust stuff
Speaker 1: because sometimes people with an agenda will go in and
Speaker 1: adjust a uh AN entry, either to make one party
Speaker 1: and it look better than than it would otherwise have
Speaker 1: looked or look worse, depending upon the person's agenda. Sure, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I member, you know, and and Democratic Party member's IP
Speaker 1: address was traced to edits about Rush Limbaugh that we're
Speaker 1: extremely unflattering. Yeah, this is This has happened any election year.
Speaker 1: This stuff runs rampant, to the point where sometimes Wikipedia
Speaker 1: will lock down a particular page about a subject in
Speaker 1: order to avoid the crazy number of edits that different
Speaker 1: sides of a debate will will put onto a page
Speaker 1: in order to support their side. I mean, then think
Speaker 1: about it. This is kind of crazy, right. It's like
Speaker 1: if I if I have a disagreement with Lauren about
Speaker 1: a particular subject, and then I go to Wikipedia and
Speaker 1: edit a page so it supports my argument, and then
Speaker 1: I cite Wikipedia as a support for my argument. That's
Speaker 1: it's pretty insidious. That's dirty pool, that's what that is.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to say that all anonymous Wikipedia
Speaker 1: editors are are bad or doing nefarious thing, not at all.
Speaker 1: For example, A couple of the other things came out
Speaker 1: of this is that they found out that a UM
Speaker 1: someone from the CIA contributed a really long entry about
Speaker 1: lightsaber combat, UM someone from DARPA had written fairly extensively
Speaker 1: about Schila booth. I mean, you know, it's it's just stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not always bad, right, Yeah, But and
Speaker 1: we don't mean to suggest that it's always bad or
Speaker 1: that this happens all the time. It's the fact that
Speaker 1: it happens that's the problem. And you don't, you know,
Speaker 1: unless you are actually adept at looking at the edits
Speaker 1: page and understanding what that means, you may not be
Speaker 1: aware of something that's going on that's not quite right.
Speaker 1: And so uh. While while the odds of that actually
Speaker 1: happening on any given page on any given day maybe low,
Speaker 1: because you're talking about lots and lots of people using
Speaker 1: this resource and lots of opportunities to fiddle with it,
Speaker 1: it does happen. That's that's why you're like, you know,
Speaker 1: the answ are with you that you're going to be
Speaker 1: fine whenever you use Wikipedia, but they're still there are
Speaker 1: like thousand regular contributors and seventy seven thousand regular editors
Speaker 1: on Wikipedia as so, and after that whole UH, that
Speaker 1: whole problem with Seagan Dollar where the the quote unquote
Speaker 1: the joke about him being a suspect in the assassination
Speaker 1: of the Kennedy's UH, Wales had instituted a new policy
Speaker 1: saying that unregistered users can no longer post new articles
Speaker 1: at all, because that was that he wanted to head
Speaker 1: off that problem, and then by registering he hoped that
Speaker 1: that would UH create more accountability. Now, of course the
Speaker 1: s J issue showed that there were other problems, and
Speaker 1: Wales came down pretty hard on that to Once all
Speaker 1: the facts came out in two thousand nine, the Arbitration
Speaker 1: Committee had to restrict access to its site from the
Speaker 1: Church of Scientology I p addresses and also banned several
Speaker 1: anti Scientologists edits because the two sides were both manipulating
Speaker 1: the same articles to either post Scientology and a positive
Speaker 1: or a negative light. Obviously when that that was around
Speaker 1: when UH Anonymous I believe was really involved in in
Speaker 1: their crash campaign, so that the thing that was coming
Speaker 1: up into question was the neutral point of view here,
Speaker 1: and both sides were trying to use Wikipedia to bolster
Speaker 1: their own arguments. Uh, and whether you side with one
Speaker 1: or the other, it was clear that both sides had
Speaker 1: agendas and uh, you know, some of those people may
Speaker 1: have been trying very hard to create an objective post,
Speaker 1: but there were a lot of people who really weren't.
Speaker 1: And that's where the banning and the and the IP
Speaker 1: address blocking came in. And that same year, Wikipedia became
Speaker 1: licensed under a Creative Commons right yeah, yeah, UM, which
Speaker 1: which basically just means that it's it's licensed under their
Speaker 1: UM share and share like yeah. So in other words,
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about, uh, get ing chased
Speaker 1: down by lawyers when you're reusing this material and another
Speaker 1: and you cannot, like a person who contributes to Wikipedia
Speaker 1: cannot claim that work to be their own at all.
Speaker 1: They have they have essentially signed off right right, you know,
Speaker 1: it's the content UM is still technically owned by the contributors,
Speaker 1: but it is freely reproducible and distributable. Yeah, and when
Speaker 1: anyone can go in and edit it. Actually, that was
Speaker 1: one of those things that people worried about early on
Speaker 1: in Wikipedia said, wait a minute, I'm an awesome writer.
Speaker 1: I write awesome things. My officer of credit for my
Speaker 1: awesome things or or I even if I don't get credit,
Speaker 1: I certainly shouldn't be subjected to seeing other plebeians coming
Speaker 1: in and editing my awesome prose where I wrote this
Speaker 1: amazing piece on Optimus Prime and his importance to Western culture,
Speaker 1: and some idiot came in and said that he turned
Speaker 1: into this model of of a of a Semitruck, when
Speaker 1: clearly it was this other model of Yeah, that's that.
Speaker 1: That was like an actual argument that happened on Wikipedia, early, early, early,
Speaker 1: early on. Um. But people have to let go because
Speaker 1: that's kind of the way Wikipedia works. And as a writer,
Speaker 1: I can completely understand what the people who get really
Speaker 1: antsy about that. Although I would often turn my writing
Speaker 1: assignments into Chris and then never see them again until
Speaker 1: they were published on the page, and I was all
Speaker 1: right with it. Uh, you learned to let go here
Speaker 1: and how I learned to let go? And I learned
Speaker 1: that this way, I don't have to look at those
Speaker 1: red marks all over my paper because Chris just fixed
Speaker 1: it himself. It was awesome. It made me feel like
Speaker 1: I was a better writer than I actually was. Uh.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and twelve, do you have anything between
Speaker 1: actually we're going to wrap up the timeline pretty soon.
Speaker 1: The two thousand and twelve the big story I have was,
Speaker 1: of course that Wikipedia took place in the blackout day
Speaker 1: on January And yeah, Pippa, Sorry, it's fine, you haven't.
Speaker 1: You haven't been through the whole ordeal of talking about
Speaker 1: Sopa and Pippa. I called it Pipa for about three
Speaker 1: weeks until everyone else in technology just consistently called it Pippa.
Speaker 1: And it's alright, final, I'm been wrong this whole time.
Speaker 1: But yeah, Sopa and Pippa. Those were, of course the
Speaker 1: online Piracy Acts that were in consideration in Congress in
Speaker 1: the United States, and several sites ended up doing blackouts
Speaker 1: to protest this proposed legislation, UH, to bring more attention
Speaker 1: to it, and say, these the way these these laws,
Speaker 1: or these these potential laws are worded, they could seriously
Speaker 1: harm the operation of the Internet and and cause trouble
Speaker 1: to lots of people and lots of organizations, and they
Speaker 1: should not be turned into law. UH. And then in
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen, Oh but but before before we leave,
Speaker 1: two important cultural note. That is the year that Encyclopedia
Speaker 1: Britannica ceased publishing on paper after two hundred and forty
Speaker 1: four years of doing so. You know, it's also kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. There was I remember, and I didn't write
Speaker 1: this down in my my research because it didn't actually
Speaker 1: it didn't occur to me while I was researching it.
Speaker 1: But I remember specifically there was a time when Wikipedia
Speaker 1: was starting to consider looking for experts to send in articles,
Speaker 1: just like the old New PDIA days. They were they
Speaker 1: were actually thinking about going to experts to get expert
Speaker 1: subject matter experts to write information for Wikipedia. At the
Speaker 1: same time, Britannica was looking at the possibility of crowdsourcing articles.
Speaker 1: So it looked like for a moment that these two
Speaker 1: models were about the flip flop that didn't actually happen
Speaker 1: that way, but I remember hearing about that or my
Speaker 1: brain just inventedive one of the two. Also interesting cultural
Speaker 1: point in between two thousand eight and two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: this kind of dead space that that we have created,
Speaker 1: first of on our timeline here, um, the Wikimedia Foundation
Speaker 1: total assets went from five point six million to about
Speaker 1: forty nine point three million. And again it's existing on
Speaker 1: donations and donations only and and so, and that's that's
Speaker 1: fabulous for the concept of shared knowledge, I think. Right,
Speaker 1: that also really interesting to see what kind of I
Speaker 1: mean to know exactly what they mean when they when
Speaker 1: they have those giant banners every year to beg for money, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you see Jimmy Wells face on their saying every page, yeah,
Speaker 1: give money so that this can continue to exist. I mean,
Speaker 1: and not that you shouldn't donate. I just you know,
Speaker 1: I just think that it's it's an interestingly, it's it's
Speaker 1: a really cool number. Yeah, And I think it's it's
Speaker 1: it's cool that they took that approach. I mean, it
Speaker 1: definitely gives them the benefit of saying, look, we're not
Speaker 1: beholden to any organization or company. We are accepting their
Speaker 1: nation crowd crowd source, and this this is really meant
Speaker 1: to be a tool to enrich the human race. Really,
Speaker 1: it's it's meant to really make things better for everybody.
Speaker 1: And it's not meant to be the platform for one
Speaker 1: company to say, hey, by our stuff instead of that
Speaker 1: other guy's stuff. One two the teams speaking about companies.
Speaker 1: So that's this year. Earlier this year a story broke
Speaker 1: that British Petroleum or BP, I should say BP. The
Speaker 1: Brits hate it when I say British Petroleum, because they said, look,
Speaker 1: you don't bring us into this fault. The story was
Speaker 1: that BP had edited its own Wikipedia page. Uh, maybe
Speaker 1: rewriting up to the content in order to make the
Speaker 1: environmental impact at the oil spell Yeah, the deep water
Speaker 1: horizon and the Gulf to make that seem less bad.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's kind of hard to word this properly, but
Speaker 1: essentially that they had sort of whitewashed the disaster and
Speaker 1: the follow up to it. Uh. And here here I'm
Speaker 1: quoting this directly from c NET, which reported on this.
Speaker 1: BP is not directly editing its page, but instead has
Speaker 1: apparently inserted a BP representative into the editing community who
Speaker 1: provides Wikipedia editors with text. The text is then copied
Speaker 1: as is onto the page by Wikipedia editors, while readers
Speaker 1: are none the wiser that sections pretending to be unbiased
Speaker 1: information are in fact vetted by higher ups at EP
Speaker 1: before hitting the page. BP's image clean up cleverly skirts
Speaker 1: Wikipedia's editorial rules, wherein Wikipedia editors are using text that
Speaker 1: VP posts on Wikipedia itself as the source, although the
Speaker 1: text is not published on BP's website. This way, the
Speaker 1: significant involvement of BP in its own entry is completely
Speaker 1: hidden from Wikipedia readers, while Wikipedia editors, as usual argue
Speaker 1: and attack each other over editorial policy, while BPS favorable
Speaker 1: pr editing continues, right and uh, alright, so so there
Speaker 1: there's really one person who was submitting these changes. Uh,
Speaker 1: someone by the name of Arturo silver Silva pardon me, um.
Speaker 1: He was from the corporate communications department in Houston and um,
Speaker 1: and he was actually going through the correct channels to
Speaker 1: submit these changes. He he suggested the changes to editors.
Speaker 1: He identified himself as a BP employee to those editors.
Speaker 1: So essentially what was happening was that he was playing
Speaker 1: by the rules. It was technically in good faith, aside
Speaker 1: from the part that that you know, it was still whitewashing,
Speaker 1: whitewashing the whole, the whole situation. Right. So so these
Speaker 1: are like when we were talking about earlier about how
Speaker 1: you know, Jimmy Wales had edited his own, uh, his
Speaker 1: own article, and that he should have gone through the
Speaker 1: proper channels. These are those channels that we were talking about.
Speaker 1: This is what the VP person was doing, but it
Speaker 1: was still putting in possibly you know, you might say
Speaker 1: biased information is clearly clearly biased. It's from the company
Speaker 1: that the page is about, So you can't you know,
Speaker 1: there's no way it could be unbiased. If I write
Speaker 1: my own Wikipedia page, that's going to be biased. Even
Speaker 1: if I think I'm being objective, I'm still going to
Speaker 1: talk about how freaking awesome I am. You know, so right,
Speaker 1: But you know, I don't know, like like at that point,
Speaker 1: I would personally, and this is speaking as an editor,
Speaker 1: so I might be a little bit upity about it.
Speaker 1: I would blame the editors at that because because if
Speaker 1: they're not if they're not going like, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: maybe not the right source to trust this information from
Speaker 1: UM and this is going beyond a factual a clearly
Speaker 1: factual change. They're not showing good editorial judgment. Correct, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I agree with that. And uh and so you know,
Speaker 1: Jimmy Wales actually came down again and said that that
Speaker 1: while BP is saying essentially that they totally played by
Speaker 1: the rules, he said, that's not what the rules are
Speaker 1: there to protect. The rules are there to protect against
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff that this this company is pulling.
Speaker 1: It's just this company is pulling the tricks within the
Speaker 1: context of the rules, which either means that the rules
Speaker 1: themselves are faulty or the people who are who are
Speaker 1: in charge, like the editors like you were saying, Lauren,
Speaker 1: are faulty at any rate. This is something that if
Speaker 1: I you know, I don't want to put words into
Speaker 1: wales His mouth, but I assume from what he has
Speaker 1: said he would not want this to have happened. Um So, anyway,
Speaker 1: all of that being said, there's an awful lot of
Speaker 1: information on Wikipedia, and a lot of that over two
Speaker 1: million articles in two languages in fact, and that there's
Speaker 1: stuff on there. It's incredibly useful. I mean I I
Speaker 1: use Wikipedia casually all the time, probably every day. It
Speaker 1: is incredibly useful. Um But because of what we've talked about,
Speaker 1: that's why a lot of teachers and and publications like
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works say you cannot use Wikipedia as a source.
Speaker 1: And it's because of the reasons we've listed. It's not
Speaker 1: that it's a bad thing. I actually think that Wikipedia
Speaker 1: is an amazing idea and it's it's actually phn novel
Speaker 1: to me that's worked as well as it has, right, right,
Speaker 1: you know, considering that that certain certain portions the Internet
Speaker 1: can definitely be a wretched have of scummon villainy, right,
Speaker 1: if you look at YouTube comments and then you think,
Speaker 1: this is the same This is the same world that
Speaker 1: we live in where we can go to Wikipedia and
Speaker 1: read an article about something, you know, something really technically advanced,
Speaker 1: and get a really good understanding of it. Uh, and
Speaker 1: it's this is a collaborative effort on the part of
Speaker 1: possibly hundreds of people. And then you go to YouTube
Speaker 1: and you read the comments and you think, how is
Speaker 1: this the same world? How what happened? Uh? So you know,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. But there are also some things that you
Speaker 1: can poke some fun at, like, uh, there was a
Speaker 1: I wish I could remember which web comic this was,
Speaker 1: and listeners, if you happen to know what I'm referring to,
Speaker 1: if you've been reading web comics forever and the strikes
Speaker 1: a chord, let me know. But I remember reading a
Speaker 1: web comic ages ago where was a whole series about Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: and one of the things they pointed out, very snarkily
Speaker 1: was if you were to assume that the the the
Speaker 1: entries that have the most words are the most important
Speaker 1: to the human race, then Optimus Prime would be way
Speaker 1: more important than Neighbraham Lincoln. I feel like that was
Speaker 1: Penny Arcade somebody, somebody, please please write in and tell
Speaker 1: me that. I can tell you it was not Penny Arcade. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, Penny Arcade very well may have made that
Speaker 1: same joke, but I don't read Penning Up Penny Arcade,
Speaker 1: so I know it wasn't Pinning Arcade. All right, Well
Speaker 1: that's fair. I'm not I'm not criticizing p Look, I
Speaker 1: don't read any web comics anymore. I just don't have
Speaker 1: the time. But I used to read a lot of them.
Speaker 1: I recall. I recall seeing that that as well. At
Speaker 1: any rate, whoever created it, somebody, somebody writing and tell
Speaker 1: us because it's gonna bug otherwise. I used to. You
Speaker 1: know what's worse, I used to have these pinned up
Speaker 1: in my cubicle. They're not up there anymore, but I
Speaker 1: used to. I can't even remember, but I used to
Speaker 1: have them. There's a whole bunch of them. Um. But anyway,
Speaker 1: that's one of those things. That's one of those things
Speaker 1: that you could joke about, is that that seemingly irrelevant
Speaker 1: things would get a huge amount of attention because they
Speaker 1: were they were interesting that, you know, especially stuff in
Speaker 1: geek culture that people are really really passionately uh, interested
Speaker 1: in like you know, which again shows you why they're
Speaker 1: these wikis now that exist all around these properties, right right,
Speaker 1: and that's a perfect format for that kind of level
Speaker 1: of minutia of interstory detail. I mean, it's ridiculous when
Speaker 1: I can look up a comic book character and see
Speaker 1: every single iteration of that comic book character, and then
Speaker 1: I look up and someone who was fundamentally important in
Speaker 1: some huge moment in history and they have a fraction
Speaker 1: of that Not that you not that you couldn't cover
Speaker 1: the important contributions of that person in that amount of space.
Speaker 1: You might be able to, but it just gives you
Speaker 1: this weird feeling like if I were to put these
Speaker 1: in scales, this one so heavy. Any But yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know what Wikipedia is as as of January, fifth
Speaker 1: most popular website in the world, behind only Google, Yahoo, Microsoft,
Speaker 1: and Facebook, and in fact ahead of Amazon, Apple, and eBay.
Speaker 1: So I yeah, I mean they're doing and again there's
Speaker 1: a lot of valuable stuff on there. So I know
Speaker 1: that we definitely kind of criticized Wikipedia quite a bit
Speaker 1: in this this podcast, but keep in mind we're talking
Speaker 1: about specifically in the use for things like academic like
Speaker 1: academic research, and I do want to say what we
Speaker 1: do what Jonathan and I both do. I think, um,
Speaker 1: we'll did we say this already? We we we we
Speaker 1: go to Wikipedia and we go straight to the resource section.
Speaker 1: You look at the references and you take a look
Speaker 1: and take a look and see like because there you
Speaker 1: can learn more about you know, go to the places
Speaker 1: where the people who have written the article on Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: where they got their information from. Because I mean that
Speaker 1: also allows you to remove the interpreter as well, right,
Speaker 1: because anytime you're reading an article in Wikipedia, you're reading
Speaker 1: an interpretation of someone else's stuff. Because you know, that's
Speaker 1: another thing we didn't mention on Wikipedia. You do not
Speaker 1: publish primary information. You don't publish information for the first
Speaker 1: time Wikipedia specifically against the rules. Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 1: You have to. If you're going to present a fact
Speaker 1: that someone could look up and verify or reject, you
Speaker 1: have to be able to cite it. And you cannot
Speaker 1: just do primary publication right there. You know, it can't
Speaker 1: be like this is this is original research and publishing.
Speaker 1: You can't do that. Um. And so it's in theory,
Speaker 1: everything that's verifiable fact within a Wikipedia entry should be
Speaker 1: referenced somehow. This can also get kind of ridiculous when
Speaker 1: you start reading things that are, you know, demonstrably true
Speaker 1: and everyone knows it, and then at the very end
Speaker 1: of the sentence you see site yeah, like like need citations?
Speaker 1: Know that the sun, the sun exists. I know that
Speaker 1: we don't need a citation. Yeah, And sometimes I wonder
Speaker 1: if that's just trolling as well. Sometimes I'm sure editor
Speaker 1: trolling where it's like, could you can you provide me
Speaker 1: with a site citation to prove that this thing that
Speaker 1: everyone knows is actually a thing. Anyway, So that's our
Speaker 1: discussion about Wikipedia. Uh. If you guys have suggestions for
Speaker 1: topics we should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend you get in touch with us and
Speaker 1: let us know. You can say us an email or
Speaker 1: address is tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or come
Speaker 1: visit us on Facebook or Twitter because we're so lonely.
Speaker 1: Our handle at both those locations is text Stuff H.
Speaker 1: S W and Lauren and I will talk to you again,
Speaker 1: really singing for more on this and thousands of other topics.
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