Interesting Stuff

Regular readers are no doubt aware of my distrust of Wikipedia. It’s great for untrusted knowledge, the sort you get from a friend of a friend of a friend. However, I wouldn’t trust it for anything important, controversial, subtle, or tricky. Whether it’s Stephen Colbert fans changing the elephant populations or Fox News adding libel to its competitors’ entries, whether Diebold is removing the sections about how its voting machines don’t work or just minor details gotten totally wrong, Wikipedia has more misinformation, disinformation, and lack of information than I think its proponents realize. There is now a way to track such edits, but frankly I don’t have time to babysit the internet.

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has pointed out these faults in the system, too, and has tried to remedy them with his new project, Citizendium. It’s similar to Wikipedia, but with several problems fixed. There is no anonymity, so it’s easy to tell what was added by a person with a particular agenda. Misuses, vandalism, and libel get you banned for life. There are experts on particular topics who act as editors and settle any disagreements that arise from the authors (anyone can edit a page, but if an edit war breaks out, the expert steps in and stops it).

The whole thing looks much more accurate and relevant (I haven’t found a random page I wasn’t at least mildly interested in). However, I fear that the project will be doomed to failure because the barrier to entry is too high: before editing any page, you actually need to sign up for an account, which involves convincing a real person that you’re a real person, too. This is as simple as pointing to a website that contains your name and email address in the same sentence, but it means that the vast majority of netizens won’t bother signing up. I hope the project pans out, but it’s been a year and they haven’t yet broken 10,000 pages or 10,000 users. We’ll see if this takes off.

I realize that this would have been more timely before the election, but I’ve come across a very good demonstration of how Diebold voting machines can be compromised without leaving any evidence behind. Seeing this stuff makes it seem much more real than reading about it.

and one more reminder to not trust Wikipedia more than you’d trust a friend of an acquaintance: the entry on Jim Sensenbrenner has had its “controversy” section removed. There is now no mention that Sensenbrenner introduced the controversial PATRIOT and Real ID Acts, nor is there a mention of his travel budget, which is paid for by special interests (against congressional rules) and is the largest of any Congressperson. edit: upon closer reading, these things are sprinkled in among the other sections in the page, but are not as easily accessible as they had been. So remember: don’t trust Wikipedia to be either correct or unbiased, any more than you’d trust anyone you’ve just met. Edit: and don’t trust the pages to keep the same format they have now.

Nothing interesting has happened for nearly a week, and all of a sudden, lots of things are out there! The space shuttle Discovery appears to have launched without incident, and is on its way to take a German dude to the ISS. Former Enron executive Ken Lay died of a heart attack (note that this brought up an excellent example of why Wikipedia should not be trusted (edit: link is broken; use the WayBack Machine to see the article) as much as an actual encyclopedia, since its information is not guaranteed to be correct). Although neither of thise is particularly important news, I thought I’d add them in anyway. More importantly, North Korea had a failed missile test which has prompted much of the rest of the world to be quite alarmed. UN Security Council meetings and economic sanctions appear to be following quite quickly. The test included a Taepodong-2 missile which, if successful, could hit the west coast of the USA. It appears as though Korea will have another missile test in the near future. In Europe, the Italians are cracking down on people who supposedly helped the CIA kidnap people and transfer them to countries where they were tortured. If this is part of the alleged secret CIA torture system throughout Europe, there is a lot more to be uncovered. However, it appears so far to just be a few people. Finally, Israel has continued its incursion into the West Bank, this time attempting to stop Palestinians from firing grenades into villages. The military activity began a week ago when Palestinians kidnapped an Israeli soldier, the first such abduction in over a decade.

Right. I think that’s all for the moment… Oh! and the World Cup final seems to be Italy versus France.