The Isuzu Experiment
August 29th, 2004
Update (9/5): Please don’t do this: vandalizing the site is not a good way to test it. If you want to test Wikipedia, please do it non-destructively.
Joi Ito points to an ongoing discussion regarding the authority of wikipedia as a source of information and knowledge. The discussion was prompted by an article in the Syracuse Post-Standard that suggests, in part, that wikipedia “take[s] the idea of open source one step too far” by allowing the user to make corrections.
The article has been correctly ridiculed by many, including Mike at Techdirt. In a later posting, he suggests an experiment: why not go to a certain page, insert something provably incorrect, and see how long it lasts.
No matter which side of the debate you find yourself on, this sounds like an interesting experiment. So, I have made not one, but 13 changes to the wikipedia site. I will leave them there for a bit (probably two weeks) to see how quickly they get cleaned up. I’ll report the results here, and repair any damage I’ve done after the period is complete. My hypothesis is that most of the errors will remain intact.
Does that invalidate Wikipedia? Certainly not! If anything, the general correctness and extent of Wikipedia is a tribute to humankind. It suggests the Kropotkin may be right: that the “survival of the fittest” requires that the fittest cooperate. It means that there are very few Vandals like me who are interfering with its mission.
September 7th, 2004 at 7:18 pm
[...] e by Robert Paterson I shortly noticed these two: Adina Levin in describing the recent experiments to test Wikipedia’s resilience spots that the real power of Wikipedia’s def [...]
August 31st, 2004 at 7:34 pm
[...] validity and reputation of the Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia. The experiment by Alex Halavais was to place 13 demonstrably wrong items into the W [...]
September 1st, 2004 at 2:39 am
[...] through the summer and then the first day of classes, when I have no chance of keeping up, I do something that brings a buttload or two of people to my blog. So, with apologies to the shotgu [...]
September 1st, 2004 at 2:28 pm
[...] colosa”. L’esperimento è stato allora intrapreso da Alex Halavais, che ha inserito 13 errori in 13 articoli. L’intenzione era di lasciare gli errori un paio di settimane, e in [...]
September 2nd, 2004 at 6:13 am
[...] around in a library and create an escalating snowball of bad information. There are cases like Alex Halavais’ intentional introduction of false information that might temporarily pois [...]
September 5th, 2004 at 3:00 pm
[...] nsert subtly wrong information and it won’t be detected which is a shame as earlier, less subtle attempts have failed. It’s not going to stop me using wikipedia, and given enoug [...]
December 13th, 2004 at 12:37 am
[...] This is old news now, but the School Library Journal ran a follow-up article on the piece critical of Wikipedia that appeared in the Syracuse Post-Standard. Tavis Hampton, a media spe [...]
June 4th, 2005 at 11:30 pm
[...] t on Wikipedia’s Heavy Metal Umlaut pageA Wired News story on Wiki NewsMy attempt to break Wikipedia. Sorry again for the short notice; please don’t take it as a model _. [...]
August 29th, 2004 at 5:16 pm
Interesting experiment indeed. What about experimenting with things that are obviously wrong, some that are factually wrong but are popularly believed and things that are debateable (but not hotly debated because those topics do get a lot of attention).
P.S. your first link on this post is a little messed up
August 29th, 2004 at 5:50 pm
Thanks, David, I relinked.
All the changes were “factual” in nature, though some fairly obscure. And *all* were identified and removed within a couple of hours. I could have been a bit trickier in how I made changes; nonetheless, I am impressed.
August 29th, 2004 at 8:30 pm
Alex,
Great! I’m really happy that someone took me up on the experiment — and the results (which surprise me a bit as well). That’s great news. I’ll be sure to let Al know next time he emails me (there have been many more this weekend…) to tell me how awful Wikipedia is.
To be honest, I thought about doing the experiment myself, but couldn’t bring myself to make a change. It just felt… wrong.
I would be interested, also, in other suggestions on ways to make the experiment even better — it would be nice to have this to show to others who trash Wikipedia as well.
Finally, I did notice that *someone* (don’t know if it was you) put up Al’s name as a “famous Syracusian” and the page was reverted in 45 minutes (with a note saying “very funny”).
August 29th, 2004 at 8:48 pm
I know what you mean about feeling bad about it. It was actually painful for me to do this in some cases, which may be the reason it doesn’t happen too often. I tried to be a bit more subtle on my change to the Syracuse page (saying that Frederick Douglass had lived there for some time–relatively plausible given his time in Rochester).
If I were to do it again (I won’t), I would have spread my changes out over a few days, and posted from different username/ip addresses. I know that some of the more obscure changes were caught in a chain from some of the less obscure ones. I guess I don’t make a particularly good wiki troll; which isn’t a terrible thing to be bad at.
August 29th, 2004 at 9:06 pm
Alex, you may have forgotten that there’s a (fairly large) number of people who read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recent_Changes religiously (usually as an RSS feed).
So when you made your change, it popped up on a lot of screens — and one or another glanced at it, said “that’s wrong,” and fixed it. Indeed, check out the RC Patrol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RC_patrol for some idea of how this happens.
One of the results of Wattenberg & Viegas’ “Historyflow” work ( http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/gallery.htm ) is that because of the recent-changes watchers, changes to Wikipedia tend to be catacylsmic and sudden: a great deal of interest gathers around a single page, many changes are made, and a new steady state is negotiated. (Look for pictures in the their gallery labelled as “indexed by time” to see how this works.)
The short version is: with “The Magic of RSS”, stuff that gets changed needn’t be unearthed–it’s right there to see.
I look forward to your writeup.
August 29th, 2004 at 9:39 pm
Not much to write up, beyond what you see here :). I went, I changed, they conquered.
I did figure the changes would largely fly under the radar with the several hundred changes made today. Guess I misunderestimated ‘em.
August 29th, 2004 at 9:57 pm
Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia Project
The core issue of collaborative editing, that of accuracy and trust, has reached a point in debate where research is needed to advance the practice of content use and development. Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globle offered a Wikipedia criticism…
August 29th, 2004 at 10:02 pm
Better to be ignored?
Opened up Bloglines to find that “Syracuse” is showing up across many a radar today. Unfortunately, it’s for the wrong reason. Turns out that Al Fasoldt, a staff writer for the Syracuse Post-Standard, has written an article criticizing Wikipedia. Tu…
August 30th, 2004 at 12:49 am
More on Wikipedia’s Reputation
August 30th, 2004 at 6:17 am
I don’t know how you made your changes, but if you just went about and changed a number of articles, it will be likely that seeing one of your changes being wrong, someone would do a check on your other changes. So unless you took the precaution of making your edits from different IP numbers/user names, the various chances basically improved each other’s chance of being reverted.
August 30th, 2004 at 8:00 am
Alex, would you go out and spray-paint graffitti on a school building as a way of testing to see whether the school has janitors?
Don’t your actions feel a little bit irresponsible to you?
August 30th, 2004 at 11:09 am
Andre: Yes, you are right, I think that several of these were discovered because people looked to see what other changes were taking place. Nonetheless, three different editor/readers independently found errors within a couple hours, so I suspect the others would have been found fairly quickly.
Dan: I did consider this before I made the changes. I think your analogy is flawed. A better question would be whether I would chalk the walls or drop dirt on a floor to see whether a school’s janitors were doing their job. This is exactly what Michelin and others do to evaluate hotels.
As always, you have to weigh the costs of something like this against the benefits. The costs included time spent by editors to review the changes, and the possibility that someone might be misled by the changes until they were fixed. The outcome was to provide a demonstration that the system works. Because I did this, and made it public, it means others do not have to: there is a public demonstration of how well the system works.
Often, the only way to detect the weaknesses in a system is to attempt to behave like someone willing to exploit those weaknesses. If the changes had not been detected, I (obviously) would have removed them myself. The net impact would have been minimal, but it would have highlighted a flaw in the system that could be exploited, and would have called into question the veracity of the content currently hosted.
So, I made the determination that the social costs involved in testing the system were worth the social rewards of a demonstration of its strength. I wish I had designed my attack a bit better (see above), but I think that the public knowledge that false statements are quickly dealt with helps to bolster Wikipedia as a more reliable source.
August 30th, 2004 at 2:31 pm
The Great Wikipedia Authority Debate
Last Wednesday, the Syracuse Post-Standard published an article lambasting the authority of Wikipedia because it is user-edited and anyone can make a change to its content (Librarian: Don’t use Wikipedia as source). Techdirt took the article to task f…
August 30th, 2004 at 2:42 pm
Your penance is to fix errors in ten articles, or start three new ones.
August 30th, 2004 at 3:26 pm
David G.: Will do.
August 30th, 2004 at 7:57 pm
that’s an interesting experiment, but it’s not really comparable to how actual errors would be introduced into wikipedia articles. first, as others have noted, the errors would come from different sources (different IP addresses). also, they wouldn’t be announced on the authors’ websites. i’d like to see how well this would work with these aspects changed. of course, given the criticism you’ve recieved already, i wouldn’t expect you to do it again.
August 30th, 2004 at 8:56 pm
The power of millions of geeks united
A few days ago, Al Fasoldt wrote an open letter to librarians in the Syracuse Post-Standard to not use Wikipedia on the grounds that it couldn’t be trusted (The Wikipedia is an encyclopedia editted by the users). Challenged by some…
August 31st, 2004 at 4:23 am
for recent change, there is also #enrc.wikipedia on freenode irc server, but it’s not working as well as it used to work.
August 31st, 2004 at 6:33 am
Err… how will this prove anything? It’s like announcing you’re going to hijack a plane while you’re at the boarding gate. Do you think anyone will notice?
For this to be a valid experiment, no announcement should be made until two weeks after.
“The any fool can go in and insert rubbish” concern is valid. That it took hours to correct the damage is not really cause for celebration. Someone could still have accessed the errorneous data during that time.
August 31st, 2004 at 10:59 am
brilliant! I’m still confused by the people who complain about Wikipedia, but don’t go nuts over the factual errors in printed works. Wikipedia can at least be fixed. For my money, the W’pedia is the best reference on the net.
Even cited it in my master’s paper…
August 31st, 2004 at 11:00 am
Like any good scientist, you must reveal your method. What changes did you make?
August 31st, 2004 at 1:43 pm
First, I think your method is flawed, as 13 changes by one user to multiple entries would certainly be detected, and would come under serious scrutiny as soon as one of them turns out to be incorrect.
Second, your experiment proves that the concept of building a wiki-based encyclopedia is flawed, because any unsuspecting user who read the article(s) that you changed before they were reverted received wrong or misleading information. That’s because encyclopedias are supposed to give information seekers correct information at any given time, not prove that they are self-repairing knowledge-building processes.
Third, I have been monitoring five articles on the German wikipedia with multiple errors in them for about a month now. In that time, two typos, but none of the factual errors were corrected, and one article was bloated up to twice its original size without adding any additional relevant information.
August 31st, 2004 at 2:18 pm
Some people are missing the point, which is that “errors” are weeded out by consensus, not by editorial fiat. This isn’t a weakness, but rather an aspect of the same strength that makes Wikipedia possible in the first place. Namely, the people who use Wikipedia have a vested interest in high-quality content, so it makes more sense to provide them with the means to do so than to impede that process.
Saying that Alex’s test was “too obvious” is another misunderstanding of the challenge. If Alex’s casual changes were spotted and corrected much more quickly than even he imagined, what does that say about “real” casual vandals and their chances?
August 31st, 2004 at 2:46 pm
The neverending story
Alex Halavais proves that Wikipedia is not trustworthy and curiously interprets his experiment as a proof why Wikipedia works. In the meantime, a number of Wikipedia advocates attack a journalist because he quoted the Wikipedia disclaimer and was disap…
August 31st, 2004 at 3:10 pm
Alex, if all your changes got reverted, then I think the experiment may in fact have failed. The strength of Wikipedia should be to correct errors, not to remove them. (Of course, this depends on the nature of the errors you introduced.)
@Horst: according to your own argument, any encyclopaedia that contains at least one error is flawed. Since I find it hard to imagine that there exists one perfect (printed) encyclopaedia, that would mean the whole concept of encyclopaedias is flawed. I think you might want to take a second look at your reasoning.
August 31st, 2004 at 4:18 pm
On Wikipedia
I love Wikipedia, an open encyclopedia that is built from the ground up by volunteers. Anyone can create an entry, and anyone can edit any entry (and, in turn, have their revised entry edited by someone else). Wikipedia is an
August 31st, 2004 at 5:13 pm
The Isuzu Experiment
I love the idea in theory of a Wikipedia-like experiment with collaborative editing by Christians of a biblical ‘commentary-concordance’. Two huge potential problems are the, um, theological differences between us (since Wikis, by intention, allow ed…
August 31st, 2004 at 6:29 pm
Can you share the changes (or your username/IP address so we can look them up)?
September 1st, 2004 at 1:39 am
@Branko: No, that was not my point at all. My point is about knowledge building vs. knowledge retrieval, and how a constant building process (as in a wiki) is not helpful for a user who is looking for information.
Wikipedia is a great experiment in knowledge sharing and knowledge building, but it’s useless for anyone who is not interested in sharing or building, but instead wants quick, correct answers.
September 1st, 2004 at 2:46 am
To Horst and all others who believe there is something like “one absolute correct answer” for topic descriptions which one would find in a ***pedia: Think again. Truth is a fragile tissue people gather around them. The fragility of it enables you to develop. But if you wrap yourself in it too tightly you will loose the broader view on temporal reality or worse get smothered.
September 1st, 2004 at 3:00 am
The right way to validate Wikipedia and the strength of this open-editing model is to find some factually incorrect material and use the change log history to determine how long it has been there.
Intentionally falsifying information as an experiment is no different then pentration testing (old school hacking) but it does disrupt other people’s legitimiate use of the resource.
If you really want to test: don’t make small one-sentence errors that anyone can verify with google. Make a substituantal contributation with an error in it. Most people go for the easy fixes – they are less likely to question three long paragraphs of well-written text.
Anyone can identify grafitti done by a vandal, which is what your experiment simulated. It is much harder to identify a well-done Van gough fakery.
September 1st, 2004 at 5:43 am
Web News
And another round of web news! Woman Chows 38 Lobsters in Eating Contest Jibjab “This Land Is Your Land” parody wins legal battle sIFR – dynamic browser text replacement MovableType 3.1 released The Giants of Anime are coming Tarantino̵…
September 1st, 2004 at 10:07 am
Interesting experiment. I’m not sure what it shows, exactly, apart from the active response of the correctors (and whether they found out through their own searches on their particular speciality topics or through recent changes updates remains to be seen.) The other issue here is that announcing that there have been changes made before the experiment is finished immediately sends loads of people running to wikipedia to see if they can find the false errors. If I hadn’t read the comments, I’d have done it myself. So perhaps it doesn’t really say much about the equilibrium of the system if a percentage of the error-seekers aren’t normally users of the wikipedia.
September 1st, 2004 at 10:45 am
I’ve seen lots of incorrect entries on Wikipedia but an even more common issue is very politcal statements in many articles. Particular any articles about computers and software.
September 2nd, 2004 at 9:09 pm
Life on the Virtual Commons and the Wikipedia
Alex Halavais tried an experiment in which he slightly defaced 13 Wikipedia pages. To his surprise, all were fixed within hours. On Alex’s blog, I noted that Wikipedia makes a point of looking for damage, and tries hard to fix…
September 3rd, 2004 at 8:58 pm
Online communities, tags, authority and reputation
For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough
September 5th, 2004 at 10:00 am
Half-way there
So I’m busy writing my thesis at the moment which is why this blog is semi-dead, I guess you could say that it’s in a coma as it should recover when I finish (my thesis is due to be finished on the last day of this month!) I think at the moment, I’m…
September 5th, 2004 at 1:05 pm
Stress Testing Wiki Authority
Slashdot has picked up on the Wikipedia accuracy/authority/reputation meme as Frozen North did the same Techdirt experiment as Alex Halavais. Not so needless to say, testing the rigor of Wikipedia by vandalizing a community resource isn’t the bes…
September 5th, 2004 at 1:23 pm
Toutes les expériences ne sont pas bonnes à tenter…
Alex Halavais est une personne expérimentée en matière d’utilisation des nouvelles technologies au service des apprentissages. Dans le contexte où nous venons de débuter l’utilisation d’un wiki, j’ai lu avec beaucoup d’intérêt ce billet du type “…
September 6th, 2004 at 10:52 am
Yes, the windows *are* made of glass. Now Wikipedia has to deal with random people throwing rocks from random directions. Purposely vandalizing a resource like Wikipedia as a “test” has inspired a slew of copycats with good intentions but poor judgement.
September 7th, 2004 at 2:19 pm
Reed’s law in several places
It is the nature of mind to filter experience through the most recent or most strongly held concepts.
No wonder then that after (finally) coming across Reed’s Law thanks to this thought-provoking article by Robert Paterson I shortly spotted these…
September 7th, 2004 at 2:32 pm
It’s worth noting that real (print) encyclopedias often have false entries, as do most commercial maps, phone books, etc. These are inserted by the publishers as IP-protection (if you see them repeated in somebody else’s book, you know they copied yours illegally).
I would tend to agree with previous comments that the right metric here is the average age of removed errors – that is, scan the change log for changes that fix factual errors, then average the time between introduction of the error and removal of the error.
September 8th, 2004 at 1:57 pm
Wikipedia, edición colaborativa y autoridad
Para los que no lo conocen Wikipedia es una enciclopedia online, abierta y colaborativa, cuyo esfuerzo ya suma ediciones en varios idiomas. Empezó en Inglés en Marzo del 2001 (ya tienen más de 300.000 articulos)y en Mayo ya estaba online…
September 8th, 2004 at 8:51 pm
Decentralized Authoring Can Be Self-Healing
BoingBoing in Wikipedia proves its amazing self-healing powers pointed us to The Isuzu Experiment, which goes like this: Joi Ito points to an ongoing discussion regarding the authority of wikipedia as a source of information and knowledge. The discussi…
October 30th, 2004 at 11:31 am
Wikipedia roundup
Wikipedia and its critics, plus mention of H2G2 and various versions of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica.
November 22nd, 2004 at 11:00 am
Wikipedia, edición colaborativa y autoridad
Para los que no lo conocen Wikipedia es una enciclopedia online, abierta y colaborativa, cuyo esfuerzo ya suma ediciones en varios idiomas. Empez� en Ingl�s en Marzo del 2001 (ya tienen m�s de 300.000 articulos)y en Mayo ya estaba online…
November 27th, 2004 at 12:34 am
Reliability and Veracity of Blogs and Wikipedia
Why is it important what an uninformed, small-town librarian thinks of blogs and Wikipedia?
August 16th, 2005 at 5:44 am
Alex: I applaud you for having the spherical obloids to conduct this experiment off your own back. The results do seem to show that the organic nature of Wikipedia does work. To the people who criticize Wikipedia based on the fact that it may have on occasion some slightly erroneous information: may I remind you that most countries (yours included) have for years been teaching scandalously erroneous accounts of history to their children, from state-sanctioned history books! Wikipedia will, over time, help to address this in a very positive manner.
November 1st, 2005 at 1:45 pm
Je trouve la discussion vraiment trsè intéressante et je suis moi-même une contributrice occasionnelle de Wikipédia. J’ai donc un peu développé (en français, pour une fois) l’idée sur mon blog, à cette adresse : http://www.mariesg-becker.org/blog/index.php/2005/11/01/77-wikipedia
Pour dire que rien ne fera descendre Wikipédia dans mon estime. A mon avis…
January 12th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
[...] From BoingBoing, an experiment to introduce false information into Wikipedia. Results: all 13 introduced errors were corrected within a matter of hours. The very idea of Wikipedia rocks; the fact that it actually exists is just off the scale of coolness. [...]
March 24th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
[...] Explicar las bondades de las comunidades online y la “reputación” a un periodista a veces es complicado; explicarselo a uno que no acepta siguiera mirar ejemplos sobre el tiempo que un error anónimo y sin aviso, tarda en ser corregido en Wikipedia es peor. Alex Havalis introdujo 13 errores en diferentes artÃculos de Wikipedia. [...]
March 31st, 2006 at 6:10 am
[...] Det är ett förfarande som nog börjar bli lite väl vanligt nu. Först var förmodligen Alex Halavais med sitt Isuzu-experiment, men många har följt i hans spår – något som Halavais själv tog avstånd från redan 2004. Vinterns Seigenthaler-kontrovers (som jag uppmärksammade i december) kan på sätt och vis också föras till kategorin “experiment med faktafel”. [...]
March 31st, 2006 at 6:14 am
[...] Felaktiga uppgifter kan inte kvarstå länge i ett verk som läses av så många människor, läsare som dessutom själva kan ändra uppgifter. BBC-artikeln anför bland annat som exempel hur professorn och bloggaren Alex Halavais medvetet matade in ett antal felaktiga uppgifter. Enligt Halavais’ egen bloggpost om The Isuzu Experiment tog det inte lång tid innan felen hade rättats (och den klentrogne professorns hypoteser kommit på skam): All the changes were “factual” in nature, though some fairly obscure. And *all* were identified and removed within a couple of hours. [...]
April 15th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
Intresting experiement. I wonder however if you really need to do the experiement to pove your point? There is enough mis-information on wikipedia to correct without having to deliberatelypost something up. I am not bashing wikipedia, I appluade the project. What an under taking. I am just saying some people who contribute to this project, do so with a malice to decieve, and some just continue to prepetrate wrong information, because they really do not know the right information. So why deliberately post up wrong information? Some information I might not know is even wrong and take it as fact. And if I did know the facts on certain postings/pages, I could post them up or make corrections and yet be thought of as being a liar. Illustartion, and not to brag but to show a point. I have a page I found on a friend, Martin Lee Gore of Depeche Mode. I have been friends with him since 1977. Note I am not making any other claim other than I have been friends with him since 1977. I found his profile page or biography on here, and have noticed some thing that are factually incorrect. I know they are wrong because I personally know the man. I have correct some, others I have not corrected, or I have corrected but they have been changed again. What is intresting is that people who are doing this are fans, and they promote the inccorect information, most liely innocently. They have the wrong information that they think is correct information, so they see something they believe is incorrect and they correct it with wrong information… So I have to ask once again, knowing what I just told you, what point is your experiment? Does it prove anything? Does it invailidate Wikipedia? In the end it only proves a known fact or an accepted known fact, Wikipedia is an open source of good information, but not the only source. Most of what wikipedia states is reliable and it’s delieberately not decieving. Thats already known and accepted to be true and reliable information. So for the last time, did you hve to do this experiement?
September 1st, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Some people have complained that the experiment was announced before it began. Perhaps someone else is running a similar experiment without telling anyone anything?
October 24th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
[...] This was behind a pay-wall before now, but the Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article on the relationship between Wikipedia and academia. I was quoted in there, and it focusses a little on the Isuzu Experiment but I guess that’s not all bad. As always, I think that there is space there for missed nuance (the nature of a short article), and I feel like I should hedge some of the things there. For example, although I do mostly make changes anonymously, in part because I am a known wikispammer and I don’t want the name to influence people’s perception of the edit. However, in the case of the Com Theory article, I did do it as myself. It doesn’t show up in the history because the article was moved (from “Theories of Communication”). And I know that traditional institutional scholars do contribute to Wikipedia, and that contribution is often valued. [...]
January 11th, 2007 at 11:48 am
My concern is also that some information is deleted or left out.
My suggestion about many listing currently in the encylopedia, especially political ones, is that a wide spectrum of ‘opinions’ be provided in appropriate settings.
That is there is good, bad and evil in most all things, and we must be careful not to stereotype most things as ‘black or white’, things change over time, and observations are relative to time and space.
There is a resistance to change, even thought the change is truthful, and we should also judge this vehicle on the basis of its ability to overcome ‘paradigm paralysis, and communicate to the world, important truths that may be in conflict with the ‘power forces’ at play.
Caesar J. B. Squitti
January 16th, 2007 at 6:19 am
Even if you “prove” that Wikipedia’s not perfect, that’s fine. All I need to go is use it to see for myself that it’s pretty darn good. Good is good enougn for me:)
January 24th, 2007 at 4:38 am
I will make some try to summarize what I have read by far on this topic.
First, I don’t think that announcing the experiment was influential to Wikipedia in any way; the people there are committed (and they proved it when they defeated Alex’s small-scale experiment) to providing accurate information and they obviously take seriously their commitment. Therego, it is very unlikely that they go to Google in hunt for information about vandals which plot to defeat Wikipedia and is very likely that they take their time for their mission/commitment. Will somebody argue this? I think it’s obvious.
Second, I agree with many people here: why spit at Wikipedia for inaccuracies when the most paper sources of information are (in _times_) more inaccurate. Also: why requiring 100% accurate information for anything? Virtually everything beyond the traditional and well-known sciences as physics and chemistry (not just these, of course) is a temporary information in a sense, and is subject to change over time in a variety of ways: ambiguous statements will be clarified, insufficient details will be filled, more opinions on the topic will be listed, new discoveries will be made, and so on. Also, if you want 100% accuracy, you should pay a team of scientists and analyzers for it; there is no free lunch and most of the information on the whole Web is published _voluntarily_ with the free will and the blessing of the author. Anyone who thinks that he/she will ever stumble upon perfect information (beyond the simplest things like what is “electrical impedance”) was perhaps never been an author of information which were of use to other humans. In short, at this point I say that yes, Wikipedia surely has errors in it, but it has been developed in such a way that it could evolve (fixing the errors, growing the information, clarifying). The paper encyclopedias and other sources cannot do this, at least not as fast and not as cheap in the terms of money.
Third: about what is “accurate”. I agree with other humans here that some information is not really an information, but just an information, if you follow me. Example: politics, tries for analysis of commercial products (like processors and video cards), religious articles. They (and many others) are all subjective, mainly because the authors have relied on what other humans said (which could always be a lie due to political goals or commercial interests) or because the topic is not exactly scientific. My experience with Wikipedia was that the authors have _tried_ to give some information in a scientific way, for example to say that the Christians are worshipping Jesus because of his sacrifice on the cross and also they could point that other Christians are worshipping other humans and actions more, like those who worship Holy Maria in greater extent (no criticisms here, please, I never actually read the Christian article on Wikipedia). But these are just scientific methods when one tries to classify the information he/she gots. Anyone felt offended? Well, there are a number of forums where you can argue forever on these topics. Again, Wikipedians _tried_ to give some information. How far they succeeded, they and they alone can judge themselves only. No other humans. If there is fault here, it is the subjectivity of the topic itself. Will somebody support me at this point?
Fourth: it’s almost all about the money and about the resistance to change, or even both at a time. Somebody used Alex’s experiment to try to spit at Wikipedia. Big deal! Smart humans always analyze the performer’s reasons _first_ and before analyzing the deed itself. My personal thought is that if commercial encyclopedian (or paid news site) owners are trying to ruin Wikipedia’s reputation, this is because if their users know better Wikipedia, their money flow will eventually go dry. Their users are accustomed that Mr. Actual News or Mrs. Expert In Everything will inform them for money and so they question the reliability of a free source like Wikipedia — and yes, when you give money, you expect perfect servicing. But apart from these bad words I said, I do not think that commercial informers and free sources of information can be compared at all. They exist in different universes. And finally (on this point) let us not forget that if humankind stops to rely on The Big Brother to supply it with everything (including information) and if the humankind becomes careful in thinking and responsible of what it produces and how this can help others, then the humankind will not be so easily manipulated so that not to stop some world leaders to destroy foreign countries with reasons which nobody actually believes in (and many other horrible acts throughout the history, too). So, such humans will try to compromise and ruin Wikipedia and the like as long as they can breathe and speak at all, be sure of that! Since I have read here that some countries (unfortunately, mine too; it’s Bulgaria) are teaching kids with false history, I assume there are humans who support me on this point. :)
Fifth: how Wikipedians did the job. Does it really matter that they used RC Patrol? Everybody with a normal level of IQ could say that they anticipated such abuse and they have taken care that their machines will help them coping with this problem in the best possible regard. So, isn’t it stupid somebody to say that if it weren’t RSS, they could never do it. Well, if it weren’t some guys which never cared for Earth’s atmosphere, perhaps today you would still go to your job with a horse, right? :) It’s the result which is important. How do they do it — it is their business. Are you one of them? No. So, what do you care? The system obviously works. How it works, you don’t care. It would be more useful if the critics proposed to Wikipedians something which will make their life even more easier and help them more to fulfill their noble mission, not to speak like a child — “if I did not injured myself on the leg yesterday, today I would outrun you”. Pfew, how could such humans ever write such stupidities on a public anyway? Don’t they feel little stupid about it? Please, somebody tell me.
Sixth: the useful things that could be done. While so many humans took the time to write about the topic, I did not seen not a one of them to have been gone through changelogs of even a single Wikipedia article and write about it. That would be far more useful than criticizing the scientificness of the Alex’s approach. Yes, I am in this number also, I know. I agree with few others here which pointed that analyzing changelogs will be far more painless and harmless for Wikipedians. I personally know four people which regularly take their lunch time for correcting slight errors (or, more often, making clarifications and eliminating ambiguities) in Wikipedian articles they read, since they are almost experts on the topic and sometimes they need the whole picture. It’s nothing hard, really: get your lunch in a box from the near restaurant, return to office while nobody is there, eat slowly and easy and do the edit job (also easy, else errors will occur and you will become vandal without actually knowing it).
If anybody could point me to Wikipedian article with a good chance for finding old errors and their fixtures, I will handle a single article changelog analysis myself. I even intend to find article in my area (programming) and do a job I feel it’s worth doing. I will post it when I am done.
Summary:
It’s all about wanting to contribute and to help. Everybody can criticize. It’s not always necessary to do it — the people which post information to such big source like Wikipedia are expected to be (and proved to be) responsible enough to criticize themselves alone in order to achieve development of the good information.
I am looking forward to see comments from everybody which felt affected by my post, including Alex.
Best wishes.
—————————–
[Dimitar Panayotov, Bulgaria]
January 24th, 2007 at 11:13 am
Dimitar: Very thoughtful (and extensive!) comment. I agree with much of what you have to say here. I am particularly emphaticly in agreement with your sixth point. A detailed analysis of how particular changes are made, and wherever possible, the context and motivation of those changes, would be a really strong contribution to better understanding the “magic” of how Wikipedia works.
I suspect that the minimal effort to make a change (e.g., during a lunch break) is what allows it to grow at the periphery. If so, it seems to me that having a clear model of this would allow for its applicatoin in other contexts. Think of it as a kind of antidote to the broken window hypothesis. Seeing that things are getting cleaned up encourages others to take just a moment to do the same. But understanding those micro-motivations would get us a lot closer to understanding Wikipedia.
February 12th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
I love wikipedia so much, my name is John and I am a athletic director at Cadillac High School. Just wanted to say, Alex is my hero!!!!!!!!
February 19th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Caroline writes:
February 28th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
The Zero Void Show Says:
“Most of what wikipedia states is reliable and it’s delieberately not decieving. Thats already known and accepted to be true and reliable information [on Wikipedia]. So for the last time, did you hve to do this experiement?”
Is easy to say that after TWO years of the original post… =)
August 11th, 2008 at 10:41 am
[...] clear—I am not among those “some people,” and I would never use my caprice (the “Isuzu Experiment”) as anything approaching substantial evidence. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where [...]
February 8th, 2010 at 2:22 am
[...] Alexander (2004). The Isuzu Experiment. [Elektronisk]. Tillgänglig <http://alex.halavais.net/the-isuzu-experiment> samt <http://alex.halavais.net/return-of-joe-isuzu> [...]