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