Wikipedia -- How much do you trust it

[SportsDino]

I'm the only one who votes a 2?

Read it for fictional universe entertainment reading as described in sterlingice's post, but other than that... only for amusement.

Framing the argument is very important, it doesn't have to be Orwellian in scale to be useful (although you could argue Iraq is an example of yet another war sold by propaganda... granted MOST WARS have been since the era where leaders started pretending they had a reason for war).

Hell, you give me a tool like CNBC and I could probably bankrupt half the daytraders in this country within a year. More people than you would believe jump on the rumor of information rather than the reality... so something like wikipedia becoming a trusted norm is very terrifying to me. Granted, I think its terrifying we trust the nightly news at all already, so maybe its just one more on the pile of professional bullshit artists.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by SportsDino

Hell, you give me a tool like CNBC...

Well, they are a bunch of tools...

SI

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

But I think it's an excellent illustrative point. What has pretty much everyone agreed with? "I go there to get a basic idea about something". If you can control the jumping off point for people, then you can control how the argument is even framed. That renders individual facts moot. So, even if you are factually correct- if you're only including the facts that support your case and suppressing equally true and possibly more damaging facts, aren't you pretty much tainting an argument?

We see this "controlling the framing" all the time in politics. It reminds me of the "Al Gore invented the internet" thing. He actually did create the bill which funded the growth of the internet from small academic network to what we have today. His exact quote was "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" which is completely true and has been backed up by all sorts of early internet figures. But if you can paint him as claiming "I invented the internet", then you can even have a Snickers commercial coming out making fun of him because a lot of people, for whatever reasons and motives they have, can't be bothered to actually examine facts.

And it's only getting worse now that people have more access to more "news" outlets of greater or lesser repute. Companies, who have much greater resources than all but a few individuals, realize that if you can just cloud an argument with enough half truths and unverifiable "facts", then you can make a simple argument much more complicated (see both sides of global warming, case for a public health care option, etc).

Furthermore, how many people are just saying "I go there for a basic idea about X" and then never do anything more? I know I'll sometimes go check the sources but a lot of times, I just assume it's probably correct. So, obviously there's that danger.

And where does it fall in the minds of the average "internet consumer"? If you have a middling newspaper (say, not the New York Times but the Albuquerque Journal) who discovers a factual inaccuracy, I bet most people would assume the newspaper was who got the story wrong and not mighty wikipedia. And those are the journalists we're talking about that are supposed to be the safeguard, correct? I bet more people trust wikipedia than them now anyways.

SI

i think you're way overselling the dangers. sure that may be true for controversial issues, but if you're going to go brush up about say...The University of Idaho, or William the Conqueror, or string theory...then i think it's a perfectly innocuous jumping-off point. i'd read what wikipedia had to say about string theory to give myself some type of general background and then google for more "serious" sources. for william the conqueror, i wouldn't use it to write a paper or in serious academic discussion but for basic biographical facts sure.

more often than not i use it when i'm sitting in front of the tv to look up a person/place/thing/idea referred to on the tv if i'm not familiar with it or if i just want to dig a lil deeper or i'm forgetting or something.

i wouldn't ever use it for academic purposes or for controversial things. i think it's up to the user to keep in mind bias of any source they're reading though.

[SirFozzie]

Some of the things I could tell you about WP.. especially in contentious areas, like the Troubles.. oy vey.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

Some of the things I could tell you about WP.. especially in contentious areas, like the Troubles.. oy vey.

I see you even got into it about the Gary Weiss article recently. I just recently discovered the "discussion" section of wikipedia and was checking it out on a few of the more "controversial" topics I could think of and that's still brewing.

Speaking of which, there's an inherent danger similar to what everyone was talking about above- you have a guy who was going around, not only editing pages about other stuff but making sure his own wiki page was clean despite all sorts of sockpuppetry editing.

SI

[SirFozzie]

Oh, I have a.. bit of a history there.

Emails show journalist rigged Wikipedia's naked shorts • The Register

For the on wiki history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...anmoreland/RfC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...Mantanmoreland

[SportsDino]

Even more hilarioius, Overstock's owner Byrne eventually got settlements from the naked shorters for several million dollars... so if anyone needs to understand how information manipulation turns into money, it is a must read story. (Search for Miscreant's Ball maybe)

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

Oh, I have a.. bit of a history there.

Emails show journalist rigged Wikipedia's naked shorts • The Register

For the on wiki history:

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Mantanmoreland/RfC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Mantanmoreland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Man, you're like the wiki bounty hunter. Oh, and have like a million stars and awards on there for your bounty hunting ways. Pumpy better watch out

SI

[SirFozzie]

ha!

[sterlingice]

I'm eating my lunch today and I have one of those Yoplait yogurt cups. On the lid it says "no high fructose corn syrup" and I say to myself "hey, this is pretty sweet- it must have a lot of sugar in it". So I look at the ingredients and there it is but further down the list, I see aspartame. Then I say to myself- which one is that: saccharine or nutrasweet? I don't see the logo for either so I go to, of course, wikipedia and in the first paragraph, I see that it was NutraSweet. So far, so good.

Then I start thinking "Hey, I'm not a big sugar substitute fan. Every time I see a study, it seems like it turns out we're best at metabolizing sugar. Let's see what ye olde wikipedia says".

There's a big section on "safety and health effects". However, every single entry points out just how safe aspartame is, so long as you don't have a rare genetic disorder (PKU). However, the whole thing reads like an advocacy Q&A with passages like "The methanol from aspartame is unlikely to be a safety concern for several reasons". Or any time there is a possible problem, it's juxtaposed next to an entry talking about how safe it has been shown to be in some other clinical study (going so far as to mention one study only had 6 people but considering it as authoritative).

It seems like you can't have anything on wiki without some sort of controversy, manufactured or otherwise, but somehow this page has managed to stay scrubbed squeaky clean.

SI

[Chief Rum]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

I'm eating my lunch today and I have one of those Yoplait yogurt cups. On the lid it says "no high fructose corn syrup" and I say to myself "hey, this is pretty sweet- it must have a lot of sugar in it". So I look at the ingredients and there it is but further down the list, I see aspartame. Then I say to myself- which one is that: saccharine or nutrasweet? I don't see the logo for either so I go to, of course, wikipedia and in the first paragraph, I see that it was NutraSweet. So far, so good.

Then I start thinking "Hey, I'm not a big sugar substitute fan. Every time I see a study, it seems like it turns out we're best at metabolizing sugar. Let's see what ye olde wikipedia says".

There's a big section on "safety and health effects". However, every single entry points out just how safe aspartame is, so long as you don't have a rare genetic disorder (PKU). However, the whole thing reads like an advocacy Q&A with passages like "The methanol from aspartame is unlikely to be a safety concern for several reasons". Or any time there is a possible problem, it's juxtaposed next to an entry talking about how safe it has been shown to be in some other clinical study (going so far as to mention one study only had 6 people but considering it as authoritative).

It seems like you can't have anything on wiki without some sort of controversy, manufactured or otherwise, but somehow this page has managed to stay scrubbed squeaky clean.

SI

What makes you think this has rated squeaky clean? Do you mean that you're surprised studies of a questionable nature posted on the aspartame wiki haven't drawn more widespread criticism?

I don't really think there are too many controversies about wiki's info, from what I have seen. So long as people take info from there with a grain of salt, I don't think it's something too many people are concerned about.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by Chief Rum

What makes you think this has rated squeaky clean? Do you mean that you're surprised studies of a questionable nature posted on the aspartame wiki haven't drawn more widespread criticism?

I don't really think there are too many controversies about wiki's info, from what I have seen. So long as people take info from there with a grain of salt, I don't think it's something too many people are concerned about.

No, I mean that, as I read the wikipedia page, aspartame appears to be perfectly safe. And it may be. But it seems like most wikipedia entries will take pains to point out potential controversies and present alternative narratives but there is none to be found here.

This goes back to the argument upthread (from 3 years ago) about how it's not about the facts themselves but the framing where the real power of wikipedia lies.

SI

[Chief Rum]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

No, I mean that, as I read the wikipedia page, aspartame appears to be perfectly safe. And it may be. But it seems like most wikipedia entries will take pains to point out potential controversies and present alternative narratives but there is none to be found here.

This goes back to the argument upthread (from 3 years ago) about how it's not about the facts themselves but the framing where the real power of wikipedia lies.

SI

Aw okay, I get that. Yeah, that is a bit of a surprise, although it seems like more studies have been coming out proclaiming aspartame to be safe at current usage. I know the EU's version of the FDA just completed its own study and came to that conclusion.

[lighthousekeeper]

Originally Posted by Chief Rum

Aw okay, I get that. Yeah, that is a bit of a surprise, although it seems like more studies have been coming out proclaiming aspartame to be safe at current usage. I know the EU's version of the FDA just completed its own study and came to that conclusion.

Source: EFSA Press Release: EFSA completes full risk assessment on aspartame and concludes it is safe at current levels of exposure

[ColtCrazy]

I found that wikipedia article interesting too, especially since I have blinding headaches if I have anything with aspartame in it. There is a separate wiki article about controversies, but seems to dismiss them as a hoax. Wish my headaches were a hoax.

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by ColtCrazy

I found that wikipedia article interesting too, especially since I have blinding headaches if I have anything with aspartame in it. There is a separate wiki article about controversies, but seems to dismiss them as a hoax. Wish my headaches were a hoax.

I have a friend whose kidney's basically like...can't process Splenda. Any little HINT of Splenda in anything and boom...stabbing kidney pain.

[Desnudo]

A lot more than the one paragraph five years out of date encyclopedia I had to use in school.