Wikipedia Lies

On Wikipedia's front page, displayed prominently, is the daily "featured article". Featured articles, Wikipedia tells us, "represent the best of what Wikipedia has to offer." They are articles "that showcase the polished result of the collaborative efforts that drive Wikipedia". They are selected after a demanding process which guarantees that each and every featured article "meets the highest standards and can serve as an example of [Wikipedia's] end goal".

Today's featured article is devoted to actress Uma Thurman. It stumbles immediately, describing Thurman as "a former fashion model" despite also reporting that Thurman is currently a "spokesmodel" for several fashion houses. It then discusses her "famously large feet" in a small section cobbled together from long phrases taken virtually verbatim from the Internet Movie Database, without footnoting. It claims that Thurman's recent bout with "body dysmorphic disorder" is "undoubtedly" rooted in incidents in her childhood, particularly a suggestion that she needed a "nose job". (This is a particularly interesting demonstration of Wikipedia's "verifiability" policies in action, since the only evidence of Thurman's "disorder" comes from an interview she gave to Talk magazine: "Ever since I had a baby I've had that body dysmorphic disorder. I see myself as fat.")

On and on the folly goes. Thurman is, we are earnestly told, best-known for her post-1980's films (the last 90% of her movie career); she is "six feet tall" (most sources list her as 5'11"); Woody Allen's Sweet And Lowdown, which snared two Oscar nominations, was a trivial, low-budget film. Also falling into the minor, "low-budget" category is Vatel, scripted by Tom Stoppard, nominated for one Oscar, featuring notable European actors like Gerard Depardieu and Arielle Dombasle. Vatel, probably the highest-budgeted French film of its year, and paying Thurman a measly $2 million, is not considered worthy of an article in Wikipedia, unlike the legendary American actress Kadee Strickland.

Kadee Strickland. Kadee Strickland. No discussion of Wikipedia's featured articles would be complete without mention of the notorious affaire Strickland. Kadee Strickland is an actress of no great note who somehow made Wikipedia's front page on her birthday last year. Her featured article is notorious, even among Wikipedians, as an outlandishly worshipful piece written by an earnest and devoted (not to say, outright, obsessive) admirer. Plumped out by unreservedly favorable quotations from pseudoprofessional reviews whose lifegoals seem to center on invitations to press junkets and free screenings (as well as a few distorted quotations from genuine working, recognizable critics), the article studiously avoids the fact that the actual high points of Strickland's career consist only of having one screen performance termed "adequate" by The New York Times and managing to work in low-rent films and trivial roles for seven years without taking her shirt off on camera. Not found in the Wikipedia article is the more interesting fact that she has been romantically linked to the acclaimed playwright/actor Stephen Adly Guirgis, a point that is likely to interfere with one of the central lifegoals of the article's main author.

Next Tuesday's featured article will be "Mosque". "Mosque" is a sincere, superficial, and occasionally turgid effort which strives to be inoffensive, but occasionally does so at considerable cost. The article insists that only a "small" number of mosques are associated with fanaticism, terrorism and violence; that may well be so (or not), but the claim completely fails Wikipedia's so-often-touted verifiability policy, since the article's authors provide no references or support for it. Also interesting is the peculiar discussion of "gender separation" in mosques, which is almost completely at odds with an article coincidentally appearing in today's New York Times. Presumably the discrepancies arise from differing practices at the Times, whose research methods and sources are not limited to arbitrarily phrased Google searches.

Last Thursday's featured article was devoted to the Ku Klux Klan. Wikipedia's clumsy implementation of its "neutral point of view" policy leaves it vulnerable to exploitation by white supremacist revisionists, but here most of their work seems to have been done in advance by Wikipedians with no large grasp of American history. Hugo Black was not a dominant figure in the Alabama Klan, for example, and there is little reason (at best) to link the Klan to contemporary "progressives." The article's presentation of Klan membership trends ignores its resurgence in the 1950s, and minimizes the KKK role in resistance to desegregation. The article's authors present anecdotal accounts of resistance to the Klan in that era, while mentioning the Klan's systematic campaigns of terrorism and murder rather bloodlessly, minimizing their significance.

Among the Klan atrocities ignored in the supposedly "comprehensive" featured article is the murder of Jonathan Myrick Daniels, an unarmed Episcopal seminarian gunned down at point-blank range by an Alabaman Klansman. Wikipedia has a short, already partially sanitized article on Daniels, but at least one Wikipedian, going by the username "Zoe" is unsatisfied with the article's tone. declaring it "hagiographic." It is not clear what "Zoe" wants, but he or she has recently harassed one Wikipedian who disagrees with his/her opinion into leaving the would-be encyclopedia. Perhaps "Zoe" would like the article to take a more balanced tone, presenting the positive aspects of cold-blooded murder; perhaps "Zoe" would like it to discuss the teenage misbehaviours (whatever they might have been) or other sins of the murder victim.

Are these featured articles "the best" that Wikipedians can produce? I doubt it, although it seems that given the behaviours the Wikilluminati encourage, they are likely to be among the best that Wikipedians will produce. Are they "well written", "comprehensive", "factually accurate", and "neutral", as Wikipedia claims failures to meet those requirements cannot survive its stringent review process. Of course not. That is just another of

Wikipedia's lies

Wikipedia has no article on the subject of apartheid.

Wikipedia has articles on such subjects as "Israeli apartheid," "global apartheid," and "gender apartheid." Apartheid itself, however, per Wikipedia's standards for "notability" and significance, is not important enough to be the subject of an independent article. Instead, the subject of apartheid is relegated to one of a series of superficial articles on the history of South Africa.

That article, "History of South Africa in the apartheid era," shows Wikipedia at its mealy-mouthed and pedantic worst. Most of the pertinent "history" is just a laundry list of South African statutes, some described with such benign neutrality as to suggest that the oppressive regime was actually motivated by benevolent motives and administered with stern evenhandedness. While the social consequences of South Africa's military interventions in Angola and Mozambique are set out in some detail, the consequences of apartheid itself are either ignored or swept away in the broadest and most general descriptions. (None of the article's linked references provide any substantial information on apartheid's consequences, although Wikipedia's peculiar scruples compel it to provide links to sites documenting the deficiencies of the post-apartheid government in dealing with those consequences.)

Wikipedia also, quite peculiarly, silences the voices of black South Africans in discussing this "era". Only whites, whether from South Africa or other nations, are quoted. White Afrikaner attitudes are presented at some length (sometimes without logic, as with Wikipedia's suggestion that the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s somehow motivated the development of the apartheid regime, whose essentials were in place in the late 1940s); worse, they are presented with extraordinary sympathy, as with the Wikipedia declaration that "Brutal police and military actions seemed entirely justifiable." Black attitudes are simply ignored; in one flagrant display, Wikipedia goes so far as to cite the de Klerk Foundation's dismissal of the influence of economic sanctions in forcing an end to apartheid, but ignores the contrary view held by, among many, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

In marked contrast, Wikipedia does not shy away from citing Archbishop Tutu in its discussion of "Israeli apartheid." Tutu is credited with promoting the use of the term in articles he wrote after visiting Israel. Wikipedia, which touts its strict "verifiability" standards, has included this claim in various articles for several years. But a genuinely careful and honest reader could scour the archbishop's cited text in vain for examples of that controversial phrase. Instead, while Tutu strongly criticized aspects of Israel's occupation policy in a 2002 address, he never used the inflammatory phrase Wikipedia falsely places in his mouth. An early version of the phrase was attached to an edited reprint of Tutu's speech by a partisan, unreliable British newspaper; the exact phrase was used only in a magazine headline over a piece coauthored by Tutu (not used in the actual text credited in part to him). The address usually (but falsely) cited as proof of Tutu's use of the phrase was actually published as "Israel, the unjust stewards"; Tutu's preferred title (as he said in the address itself) was "Give Peace a Chance, for Peace is Possible". The words Tutu actually spoke criticize both sides; he reserves his strongest criticisms for Israel for explicitly theological, not political reasons: Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: What is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless?

Why does Wikipedia so casually trivialize the consequences of apartheid? Why does Wikipedia so completely silence the voices of black South Africans? Why does Wikipedia credit words he never spoke to Desmond Tutu, erasing his clear and often-repeated statements that "in our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were the Jews"?

Wikipedians are racially insensitive. Wikipedia is a haven for both the traditional antisemitism of the right and its modern complement on the left. Wikipedia values its false and superficial "civility" more than accuracy and simple decency. Carrying out these peculiar ideas,

Wikipedia lies.

Long, long ago, in a social galaxy far, far away, my first journalism professor described Reader's Digest as the most viciously dishonest magazine in the United States. This set most of us aback; Reader's Digest was to us a boring magazine that our grandmothers doted on, full of harmless little articles and a handful of funny but familiar jokes.

Then he set us straight. Going on for more than an hour, he described his ideals for journalism, explaining how the Digest subverted them month after month, lying to its readers about the scpe of its coverage, lying to them about its claim to nonpartisanship and neutrality, lying to them, most of all, about its seductive but utterly barren claim that reading the Digest was a sound way to keep reasonably informed about America and the world, covering some subjects fairly and comprehensively, giving guideposts to follow to learn about the rest.

As Mary McCarthy might have said, every word the Digest printed was a lie, not excepting "a" and "the".

Wikipedia is the Reader's Digest of the World Wide Web, a bloated, self-aggrandizing, and thoroughly unprincipled affair run by a sorry batch of con artists who have convinced not only many readers but, even more sadly, themselves, that they hold the keys to enabling the world to access the full realm of human knowledge. It is the same false claim the Digest made years ago, just written larger as a greater falsehood.

I'll talk about Wikipedia's actual articles often enough here, but my immediate provocations, deserving attention, involve people (and a newspaper) talking about Wikipedia.

Yesterday the New York Times printed an article explaining how Wikipedia's claim to be a free, communal, enterprise, "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", wasn't true any more. It wasn't a very good article, since Wikipedia had been flying those colors falsely for a few years, but it has the Wikilluminati up in arms against the Times on their semipublic "mailing list" that's hard to find and harder still to be admitted to (despite claims of openness). I'll talk about the article more when the dust finishes mushrooming, but what I found more interesting was the response on that mailing list to a user's announcement that he was leaving the Wikipedia project, with some pointed comments about Wikipedia's failure to live up to its ideals.

Wikipedia, you must see, prides itself on its "civility". Users must be "civil" to each other or be blocked from editing and commenting. Users must "Assume Good Faith" about each other, and should not criticize each other or make uncomplimentary suggestions about motives without real, strong, evidence to back up their words. The mailing list must be particularly civil, inhabited by the most important and most influential of the Wikilluminati, must it not?. It is the only place in Wikipedia where founder and "god-king" Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales speaks regularly. It is where the inner circle gathers.

But what do we read there? What is the response when an adept, highly skilled, well-educated, articulate user who has made valuable contributions on difficult subjects like mathematical category theory, the work of Alfred Tarski, and the technical aspects of linguistics, a published academician, can no longer tolerate Wikipedia's less savory aspects? He is attacked as a "Mark 1 Disgruntled User" and his comments are described as "fatuous"; his comments are summarily dismissed (without explanation) as a malicious gesture to "blacken" Wikipedia's reputation; and his writing is mocked as subliterate, the effort of someone who does not actually speak English (as though this is somehow an appropriate criticism of someone drawn from a worldwide pool of editors). These comments do not come from run-of-the mill Wikipedians, but from administrators and, in two cases, from the inner circle of the Wikilluminati, two of the dozen or so members of the "Arbitration Committee," the semi-secretive Masters of the WikiUniverse, who day after day chastise and punish Wikipedians for making the same sort of mean-spirited comments about other editors. What is the explanation for this dissonance, this unfairness, this apparent distancing from the ideals Wikipedia so proudly proclaims?

Wikipedia lies.