
An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012) - smacktoward
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia
======
neilk
Wikipedia is not the sum of all knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. Many people
seem confused about what that means.

Primary source: I say $foo! (blog, YouTube, opinion piece)

Secondary source: neilk said $foo. (The New Yorker)

Tertiary source: Reliable, fact-checked publications, such as The New Yorker,
have said that neilk said $foo. (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia is a tertiary source. At best WP represents the range of viewpoints
that learned people have. If many published articles in reputable outlets give
credence to something false, and there's no good refutation in print, there's
not much that Wikipedians can do.

Roth always had an option, one that he seems unaware of. There is an exception
for primary sources for exactly this sort of thing.[1]. All he had to do was
publish a blog post or a tweet or have his publishers do so for him.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_using_self-
published_works#For_claims_by_self-published_authors_about_themselves)

~~~
scrollaway
Wikipedia probably falls more in the secondary source category.

In fact, I'm quite certain it does. If you think about the numbers between the
amount of information and citations on wikipedia, vs. the amount of
information that is on "reliable, fact-checked publications", it becomes
obvious that there is an immense amount of first-party information and
citations.

~~~
sjwright
The vast majority of citations are secondary sources.

------
skookumchuck
A large fraction of accepted knowledge about history and events is simply
false. Just read a newspaper account about an event you have personal
knowledge about. Sloppiness, inaccuracy, omission of crucial facts, bias,
fabrications, etc., are commonplace.

It's why historians continuously churn out new books on the same topics. How
many biographies of Abe Lincoln are there? I get 10,000+ hits on "Lincoln
Biography" on Amazon :-)

------
reaperducer
Things like this are the reason I stopped contributing to Wikipedia. People
with no knowledge or expertise are able to change facts at will, maliciously
or otherwise.

Someone once compared looking things up on Wikipedia to asking a question of
ten random strangers at a bus stop. I think it's gotten much worse since then.

~~~
ajross
> Things like this are the reason I stopped contributing to Wikipedia. People
> with no knowledge or expertise are able to change facts at will, maliciously
> or otherwise.

Have you stopped _reading_ Wikipedia though? That seems like the real test.
Who cares if you "contribute"? Is it your go-to source for random research or
is it not? It is for me. If it's not for you, then what is?

"Things like this" are just evidence that encyclopedias are not reliable
sources for items[1] involving controversy or interpretation. They never have
been and they never will be. That's what analysis is for. The job of the
encyclopedia, if it's done right, is just to document the existence of an
argument and the lack of consensus (and in the modern world link to the
relevant conflicting sources). And... it seems like Wikipedia did its job
here?

[1] Like the apparrently apocryphal inspiration for _The Human Stain_ \--
honestly this seems like a genuine item of controversy here. Artists are _not_
, in general, considered authoritative sources for their own works and for
good reason. History is filled with great works where the author lied about
them a little.

~~~
reaperducer
_> Have you stopped reading Wikipedia though?_

Almost entirely, yes. The only thing I use it for now is looking up wether
certain celebrities are alive or dead.

 _Who cares if you "contribute"?_

Wikipedia should care when anyone with above average knowledge of a certain
field is turned away. The result is people filling those gaps with less-
accurate information.

My point is that if I've given up contributing to Wikipedia, then it's not a
stretch to think that people even better/smarter than me have, as well.
Wikipedia's arrogance and other flaws are making it a repository of mediocre
information, not the best available information. Which brings us back to the
bus stop analogy.

 _Artists are not, in general, considered authoritative sources for their own
works and for good reason_

You should tell that to whomever it is that organizes the hundreds of
thousands of guest lectures from artists that are held around the world each
year.

~~~
ajross
> Almost entirely, yes. The only thing I use it for now is looking up wether
> certain celebrities are alive or dead.

But where do you look up where crabs sit relative to scorpions and spiders in
arthopoda? Or when Kubernetes was released? Or for a quick refresher on who
exactly Samson was in scripture? Seriously, those are just my wikipedia hits
for the _last few hours_. I mean, yeah, I could surely find that info
elsewhere. But I click on the wikipedia link because I know it's going to give
me good information in a format I understand and can rely on.

> You should tell that to whomever it is that organizes the hundreds of
> thousands of guest lectures from artists that are held around the world each
> year.

How is that responsive? "Have something important to say" and "should be
trusted above all other sources" are rather different criteria (and, to be
clear: make up pretty much a precise microcosm of our current argument!).
Listen to artists, their opinions are important. They still occasionally lie
about their own junk and those controversies deserve documentation too.

~~~
forapurpose
> I know it's [Wikipedia is] going to give me good information

It's not good information, though. You don't know if it's good or bad, which
rationally makes the info almost useless for anything serious. In fields I
have expertise in, it's often wrong, politically biased, has serious
omissions, or elevates trivia to importance.

> where do you look up where crabs sit relative to scorpions and spiders in
> arthopoda? Or when Kubernetes was released? Or for a quick refresher on who
> exactly Samson was in scripture?

Encyclopaedia Britannica is a great source IME (though maybe not for
Kubernetes), written by experts. If you hit the paywall, then pay (good info
isn't free and free info isn't good); or if you are desperate find the page in
your favorite search engine and open it from there.

There are many other authoritative sources in their fields. The one thing
Wikipedia is good for is the footnotes, which will identify many of them for
you.

------
Swizec
I’m dying to know, were they able to use this New Yorker article as a
secondary source and fix the Wikipedia entry?

~~~
OscarCunningham
It appears so:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain)

>Roth described in a 2012 piece for The New Yorker how his novel was inspired
by an event in the life of his friend Melvin Tumin, a "professor of sociology
at Princeton for some thirty years". Tumin was subject to a "witch hunt" but
was ultimately found blameless in a matter involving use of allegedly racial
language concerning two African American students.

...

>In the reviews of the book in both the daily and the Sunday New York Times in
2000, Kakutani and Lorrie Moore suggested that the central character of
Coleman Silk might have been inspired by Anatole Broyard, a well-known New
York literary editor of the Times. Other writers in the academic and
mainstream press made the same suggestion. After Broyard's death in 1990, it
had been revealed that he racially passed during his many years employed as a
critic at The New York Times. He was of Louisiana Creole ancestry. However,
Roth himself has stated that he had not known of Broyard's ancestry when he
started writing the book and only learned of it months later.

~~~
JorgeGT
Which proves that despite the naysayers it's actually easy to fix mistakes in
Wikipedia: you just need to become a quintessential American novelist and then
have the _New Yorker_ publish your letters to that effect.

~~~
sjburt
Really, you just need to find a published source for your claim. He would have
suffered the same challenge trying to have his Brittanica entry changed.

------
maboo
This is why Everipedia has "Verified Accounts" \- so that Roth can have his
say on the wiki page, and people know it's coming from him...

One of, like, 100 Wikipedia problems that Everipedia solves, simply by
mimicking other, more modern websites like instagram/twitter.

~~~
forapurpose
Everipedia seems far less reliable than even Wikipedia (which I don't trust).
Based on what I read on their website, it's a mix of fake information and
paid-for propaganda. Some excerpts from their website (EDIT: from last
December, maybe the text has changed since then):

* Header for their footnotes sections: _All information for ... [this topics 's] wiki comes from the below links. Any source is valid, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Pictures, videos, biodata, and files relating to Everipedia are also acceptable encyclopedic sources._

* _Celebrities have verified accounts. Not only does this allow them to have conversations with their fans on their own page, but they can also contribute information to their own pages... without having to rely on secondary sources!_ [Yes, they really used an exclamation point!]

* The Premium Service they offer to the subjects of pages (e.g., to celebrities and companies, not to users): _Features Offered / \- Verified Page and Account / \- In-house Editors write the content / \- No ads / \- 24/7 Prioritized customer support / \- Social Media Promotion / \- Link to Website of Your Choice_

------
tomtimtall
People, the author included seem to think it’s wrong in some way that the
author is not just assumed to be an absolute authority on his work, though I
think it’s quite appropriate and that this example illustrates exactly why you
would want the author to provide his oppinion and statements in a manor that
is referencable.

If he had been allowed to simple change the page at will, then he could at any
time in the futur decide to change the statement after the fact of what the
inspiration was, as it stands now even if he change me his mind the New Yorker
story can be referenced as a fact that he at that time made these claims.

------
JdeBP
Of the several prior discussions, the one at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4678352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4678352)
is definitely worth reading.

