Wikipedia Article Hijacked
I fear I have never had the time to get up to full speed with regard to the Wiki world or the procedures of Wikipedia. But I am told by a kind reader that a small group of ideologues has taken over the Wikipedia article on me in a way that is contrary to Wiki ethics and etiquette. Wikis have the virtue that they can be corrected, but somehow these individuals got it locked up, whatever that means. Then that version had an NPOV put on it, and there is a new "sandbox" but it also has flaws.
I don't have the time or inclination to deal with this issue myself, and I am not asking that the piece be slanted in my favor, whatever that might be. It seems to me an encyclopedia article on a historian should have summaries of his or her books and articles by someone who has actually read them, and contain verifiable biographical facts (would be glad to provide these). Anyway, if some knowledgeable readers of Informed Comment could do what they could to set the matter right by Wikipedia standards, I would be grateful. Again, I'm just asking for the facts, Ma'am.
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/22/2006 12:03:00 AM
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19 Comments:
I fished around for an appropriate comment til reminded of John Stuart Mill:
Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
Juan, .
I read I.C. for your in-depth coverage, but you may need to respond to the Wikipedia problem with a campaign of bumper sticker short bullet points.
The Wikipedia problem will ultimately be solved by you,
with clear simple to read writing in I.C. on this complex world of ours.
Best wishes and cheers.
I have quoted from Wikitopia but only when it jibed with my understanding of the topic in question. The whole concept of open source encyclopedias seemed brain dead from the beginning, the notion that community consensus ends up equating to truth is what got us into the Iraqi quagmire to start with.
Now the end result is that the 'Juan Cole' article is frozen in the objectionable form that raised questions in the first place and it is not at all clear who gets to arbitrate. Meanwhile we are subjected to this:
"Goldberg took issue with Cole's characteristic ad hominem style in responding to detractors, but some pundits, such as James Wolcott support that style of argumentation"
You don't know whether to laugh or cry. But Wikipedia by not taking down the whole article has fatally undercut whatever credibility it once had.
The fact that they are dragging in NRO and dumping on Wolcott all in one sentence tells you all you need to know.
Amusingly, according to Wikipedia's original research policy, no one can come ask you for biographical details, because this would mean producing a primary source and posting it on Wikipedia. Simultaneously, under their Neutral Point of View policy (and, to some extent, their verifiability policy), you yourself are obliged not to write your own biography. Sadly, the quickest way to get things like this fixed is threatening Jim Wales, the owner of Wikimedia, with a libel suit.
Failing that, you're unlikely to get Wikipedia's "editors" to stop bickering about topics they don't actually know anything about, so the implication that you're an antisemite is probably going to stick around for a long, long time.
It seems to me that the main problem with the page is the "Controversy" section, which is way too long and verbose. At least it's somewhat shorter in the new draft.
Meh, Wikipedia was apparently well intentioned, but its experiment has failed. It has no credibility. I wouldn't waste time worrying about it.
I like wikipedia. It's very handy, and many of the entries are of very high quality.
Articles on Ariel Sharon, George W Bush and the like are to be taken for what they are, sandboxes within which people play out their prejudices. Unsurprisingly "Juan Cole" is being used as the medium for this sort of propaganda.
My father used to read The World Telegram and Sun, The Daily Mirror, The Journal American, The Daily News, The Herald Tribune, and The New York Times everyday. He told me when I asked that if you read the same thing in three papers you might begin to consider it worthy of note.
That's the way it ought to be. Anyone who takes an article in wikipedia at face value is foolish indeed, especially one that is put there just for the value of its epiphenomenal commentary.
Don't worry about it.
O Mr. Cole Its unbelievable. You said something like that !!!"I remain convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides"
Unbelievable!!
This term "antisemite" has taken on a life of its own. While it was coined by an antisemite, it seems to have been hijacked by a very small group of people. It is odd to me to see articles discussing the Israeli Left referring to them as "antisemites". I guess we are one step away from a whole round of "self hatred" articles.
In case anyone is interested, I made another sandbox version which some may consider more reasonable.
Let me turn to a more substantive point, which I learned something about recently from Wikipedia. I understand full well that the term "anti-Semite" has been exploided and misused by certain defenders of Isreal. But it would be nice to acknowledge from time to time that the term "anti-Zionist" has also been exploited and abused by people who hate Jews. I'm not talking about anyone from the Middle East in this case (although there are examples), nor even about weirdos like David Duke. I have in mind, for example, the Polish "anti-Zionist" campaign of 1967-1969, which was really an anti-Jewish campaign. I know because my own parents left Poland at that time. Everyone in my father's family left Poland then. (My mother's family is not Jewish, so they stayed.) They had absolutely no prior connection to Zionism, but they were still told that their real loyalty was to Israel. (And that they should therefore leave Poland.) In fact my grandparents did move to Tel Aviv (because they were too old to work and could draw a pension there), but everyone else went to Sweden and North America.
This had always been a family story. I never anticipated that what I thought was an obscure turn of events in Poland would eventually be fully documented in Wikipedia. In particular, I had no idea that I grew up in the West rather than in Poland becuase of a chain of events that began with the Six-Day War.
Dr. Cole,
Wikipedia has the reputation for being 80% accurate. In the case of your article, the problem seems to stem from an imbalance of factoids and opinion pieces that cast your research in an unfavorable light. The solution, then, is for your readers to provide balance.
This is a tremendous opportunity. The fact that there is much more information that could be presented, for example remarks concerning specific actions taken by some of our idiot neo-con warlords before the consequences had fully revealed themselves, provides an forum for both balance regarding your blog, publications and public remarks, and an expose of neo-con idiocy.
I suggest readers sign up to Wikipedia and use its editing capabilities to the fullest.
Regards,
It is just wrong and unrealistic to say that Wikipedia has no credibility. It has a lot of credibility, even though some Wikipedia pages have no credibility. (I would say that Wikipedia is 95% credible rather than 80% credible.) It is true that the biography page for Juan Cole has lost credibility, and the ultimate solution will be to provide balance, or better yet, restraint. Don't go there, weapons in hand, with the aim of making it "Fair and Balanced" in the style of Fox News or Al Jazeera.
On that note, it would be even better to provide an Arabic translation of the Juan Cole page. Since, after all, Juan has said that the world is short of Arabic translations of Western writing, why not start with his biography page? You should understand that the "translation" would really be an Arabic version that doesn't have to have the ideological heat of the current English-language failure.
Maybe one shouldn't complain about quality of free ice-cream, but I was struck by the rambling, sloppy character of the entry on Juan Cole. In its present form it is about 80% longer than the Wikipedia biography of John Maynard Keynes! Much as I appreciate Informed Comment, that's simply daft. The editors badly need to clear up their ideas of what belongs in a biography and what doesn't.
The issue is not whether 80% or 95% of the articles are reliable (I would guess higher rather than lower). Rather, it is the very small percentage of controversial articles tend to be important ones. (The Cole one probably gets 10k times more hits than an article on some small, obscure municipality in rural Texas that is probably quite accurate).
The current combatants will eventually reach some kind of truce, the page will be unprotected, and then the process will essentially repeat itself ad infinitum, with occasional periods of stability.
A wiki is a great idea for a small, homogeneous group of like-minded individuals pursuing a common goal. When it is scaled to encompass a mission as broad in scope as Wikipedia, it devolves (in places) to essentially a world-writable bulletin board.
Just looking at the length of the accompanying talk page makes my head ache. Juan, by all means, don't get involved. You have better things to do with your time -- and so do I.
It's true that the most dubious articles in Wikipedia attract a lot of attention, but the fact is that Wikipedia is also widely used for ordinary, respectable purposes. It's important on those days when you don't even remember where you got the information. My kids have used Wikipedia many times for their school projects. I've also learned a lot from it that I just plain didn't know about medicines, physics, history, you name it.
That is why Wikipedia is so widely republished by other sites, including commercial vendors. Some of them don't even credit Wikipedia for plainly harvested content.
Wikipedia is a fact of life, just like Google, HTML, and the United States Constitution. You have to take it seriously, despite its flaws. Which is not to say that anyone should or shouldn't get involved. If you don't trust Wikipedia, then by all means, don't get involved.
It sadly does seem to be a small cadre of Cole detractor-editors who have dragged the page into hit-piece journalism territory. I know the discussion quite well as I waded in for the first time as a non-anonymous Wiki editor after being frankly agog at the nonsense going on.
Happily, Wiki guidelines on these things actually are quite clear, and if one views pages of much more controversial characters like George Bush, you'll find the tone much more reasonable and absent the blatantly biased phrasing present in Cole's current locked page.
I think this is because Cole is a person of intense controversy to a small set of people. A small number of detractors were able for a time to affect the page aversely. Larger controversies seem more immune to this phenomena.
In my own area of expertise Wikipedia is probably the best publicly available source. Just bear in mind that while it may look like print, it is not print. It evolves. The article on Cole is frozen while the process of sorting it out takes place. Wikipedia is not in the business of shuttting people up just because some people think they're crazy. Nor does it aim to provide definitive accounts of anything. It is above all an excellent first stop which will generally tell you what someone is known for and where you can learn more.
I also think Dr. Cole is overreacting here. The page hasn't actually been hijacked, it has just been frozen in an unsatisfactory form and marked as such. Meanwhile on the talk page they have been looking at their options, including putting in a stub. They have a large range of mechanisms for dealing with these common problems, but it takes time to work through them. Sometimes lots of time.
All: the Wikipedia site is now fixed. It's no longer a problem. I hope the posters who delighted in saying "this problem proves Wikipedia is not credible" will be quick to note the reasonably prompt solution. Dumb things get put on Wikipedia but, sooner or later, they get fixed. This is a good case in point.
it took 15 days to unfreeze it. the same group of Likudniks kept on blocking action wanting to keep up a strong quote from a right wing nutjob accusing the prof of being anti-semitic. the same nutjob had written an article titled "What occupation?."
Even now the article is mainly about Israel instead of the Prof's main area of expertise- Shiia Islam and its relation to the Sunna and the West.
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