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skyringI can hardly type this for laughing. I've mentioned Wikipedia previously here, where I take a small amount of innocent pleasure in hunting down and fixing errors. Much like I do on BookCrossing, really, where I enjoy tracking down mangled BCIDs or helping people with their HTML. It fair makes my day when I get a good feedback result or a book gets journalled that would otherwise have turned up lost or I can help somebody who's forgotten their password. I know I've done something positive.
Not so on Wikipedia! I discovered it about six months ago and thought to myself "What a fascinating concept!" But I wondered about the accuracy of an encyclopaedia edited by users. And the potential for bias. As it happens, I know a fair bit about Australian politics, so I went hunting for articles about Australian politics and found errors and bias aplenty. It's not blatant, but if you look at the details rather than the bold statements, you find a lot to work on. For instance, one of the enduring myths about a previous Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is that he brought the troops home from Vietnam. People will put money on it. And sure enough, I looked up his article and there it was.
WRONG! Whitlam didn't bring any troops back. All of our combat units had been brought home months before Whitlam got into power. You ask one of these people to name the units Whitlam pulled out and they sort of trail off into nothingness. So I fixed that. Just a simple matter of hitting the "edit" button and removing the error. mmmm. That was nice! I've made the cyberworld a better place.
Oddly enough, there's a few people on Wikipedia who don't like being corrected. They take it personal. It's a bit like road rage. Logic and reason go out the window.
What's making me laugh is the hypocrisy of these folk. Wikipedia is building up a bureaucracy with all sorts of rules and procedures to deal with conflict. I don't think it works very well and the stress and workload on the people doing the arbitration must be horrendous, but in what passes for a Wikipedia Supreme Court, I find that I'm under attack. People are saying all sorts of nasty things about me, really sinking the boot into me. Their complaint? That I'm attacking them! I'm not sure that they can see the lack of moral depth to their position. Another person, a young lady who may or may not have dyslexia, thinks that when I cast an eye over her edits and correct her spelling, I'm stalking and harrassing her. She just quoted an extract from this very LiveJournal blog as evidence against me. Huh? Who's doing the stalking?
And on and on. The loudest howls are from someone who, in the Australian vernacular, has tickets on himself. He thinks he's an expert on the Australian constitution, but confuses constitutional practice (what the politicians do) with constitutional law (what judges do). I really liked it when he claimed that two ex-Governors-General made a comment on a certain matter, because I knew that both of them had died years before. Perhaps they were speaking in a grave voice. Like the people who claim that Whitlam brought the troops home, this guy fades away when asked to back up his weird claims.
So I went looking at his contributions to the Wikipedia project and friends, I hit the jackpot! Here was someone who imagined that there was a "President of the United Kingdom". Here was someone who said "The Irish Constitution makes it clear that a president's term of office expires on the day before the inauguration of their precedessor."
I thought that was kind of cute, a term of office that expired seven years before it commenced, so I changed that "predecessor" to "successor" and it made more sense. This guy then changed it back again!
But he realised he'd made a mistake, so he changed his wording to "The Irish Constitution makes it clear that a president's term of office expires on the day after the inauguration of their precedessor". That's still a term of minus seven years, Mister Expert.
So I fixed it again. And AGAIN he changed it back!
Finally, after I'd corrected him for the third time, the penny must have dropped. But do you think he thanked me for my time and trouble? Hell no. His aim in life is to get me booted off Wikipedia so I don't embarrass him any further.
Yeah, like that would work. Wikipedia allows anonymous efforts, so all I would have to do would be to hop on my bike, trundle down Constitution Avenue to Civic where there are any number of hotspots, and enjoy a cup of coffee while I fixed up his latest idiocies. A different IP address every day. What could he do? Complain that some bastard was making him look like an idiot?
In other news, it's cold and cloudy and we're hoping for more rain.
Not so on Wikipedia! I discovered it about six months ago and thought to myself "What a fascinating concept!" But I wondered about the accuracy of an encyclopaedia edited by users. And the potential for bias. As it happens, I know a fair bit about Australian politics, so I went hunting for articles about Australian politics and found errors and bias aplenty. It's not blatant, but if you look at the details rather than the bold statements, you find a lot to work on. For instance, one of the enduring myths about a previous Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is that he brought the troops home from Vietnam. People will put money on it. And sure enough, I looked up his article and there it was.
WRONG! Whitlam didn't bring any troops back. All of our combat units had been brought home months before Whitlam got into power. You ask one of these people to name the units Whitlam pulled out and they sort of trail off into nothingness. So I fixed that. Just a simple matter of hitting the "edit" button and removing the error. mmmm. That was nice! I've made the cyberworld a better place.
Oddly enough, there's a few people on Wikipedia who don't like being corrected. They take it personal. It's a bit like road rage. Logic and reason go out the window.
What's making me laugh is the hypocrisy of these folk. Wikipedia is building up a bureaucracy with all sorts of rules and procedures to deal with conflict. I don't think it works very well and the stress and workload on the people doing the arbitration must be horrendous, but in what passes for a Wikipedia Supreme Court, I find that I'm under attack. People are saying all sorts of nasty things about me, really sinking the boot into me. Their complaint? That I'm attacking them! I'm not sure that they can see the lack of moral depth to their position. Another person, a young lady who may or may not have dyslexia, thinks that when I cast an eye over her edits and correct her spelling, I'm stalking and harrassing her. She just quoted an extract from this very LiveJournal blog as evidence against me. Huh? Who's doing the stalking?
And on and on. The loudest howls are from someone who, in the Australian vernacular, has tickets on himself. He thinks he's an expert on the Australian constitution, but confuses constitutional practice (what the politicians do) with constitutional law (what judges do). I really liked it when he claimed that two ex-Governors-General made a comment on a certain matter, because I knew that both of them had died years before. Perhaps they were speaking in a grave voice. Like the people who claim that Whitlam brought the troops home, this guy fades away when asked to back up his weird claims.
So I went looking at his contributions to the Wikipedia project and friends, I hit the jackpot! Here was someone who imagined that there was a "President of the United Kingdom". Here was someone who said "The Irish Constitution makes it clear that a president's term of office expires on the day before the inauguration of their precedessor."
I thought that was kind of cute, a term of office that expired seven years before it commenced, so I changed that "predecessor" to "successor" and it made more sense. This guy then changed it back again!
But he realised he'd made a mistake, so he changed his wording to "The Irish Constitution makes it clear that a president's term of office expires on the day after the inauguration of their precedessor". That's still a term of minus seven years, Mister Expert.
So I fixed it again. And AGAIN he changed it back!
Finally, after I'd corrected him for the third time, the penny must have dropped. But do you think he thanked me for my time and trouble? Hell no. His aim in life is to get me booted off Wikipedia so I don't embarrass him any further.
Yeah, like that would work. Wikipedia allows anonymous efforts, so all I would have to do would be to hop on my bike, trundle down Constitution Avenue to Civic where there are any number of hotspots, and enjoy a cup of coffee while I fixed up his latest idiocies. A different IP address every day. What could he do? Complain that some bastard was making him look like an idiot?
In other news, it's cold and cloudy and we're hoping for more rain.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-20 01:13 am (UTC)I was involved with the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) for quite a while before I discovered BookCrossing. It was fun finding obscure websites and finding the appropriate place in the directory to list them. Of course there were people there that were more interested in building their own little kingdoms, so some of what you describe occurred there as well.
Glad you're having such a good time!
Date: 2005-06-20 02:34 am (UTC)Re: Glad you're having such a good time!
Date: 2005-06-20 04:20 am (UTC)People have a "watchlist" of articles that interest them and keep a close eye on any changes.
Every so often you get "revert wars" over two different versions of an article, but if you revert the same article more than three times in a day you get a day's suspension.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-20 02:48 am (UTC)Egos seem to be so fragile online...honesty a rare commodity. I would have thought that accurate data would be more desirable...
no subject
Date: 2005-06-20 08:07 am (UTC)"Tickets on himself"? I like that expression :-)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 09:46 pm (UTC)I guess it's the people who are:
1) up themselves and
2) don't understand my sense of humour
that feel this way.
Perhaps they think I'm laughing at them.
And they'd be right, mostly. I just love exposing hypocrisy, and when someone tries to pretend they know more than I do and I demonstrate that they don't, that rings my bells.
Not that I'm an expert at anything. I just read a lot of books and soak up information. And chances are that I'll have a book on some arcane subject somewhere on my shelves.
Yesterday I opened up an article on the conquest of Mount Everest. There was some tiny error that needed fixing - a missing full stop or something equally trivial - but I spotted something else that didn't quite tally and I just reached behind me to where I had a copy of Sir Edmund Hillary's "High Adventure" and checked what he'd actually written. Didn't even have to get out of my chair.
I suppose this means I've got tickets on myself too!
no subject
Date: 2005-06-23 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 11:00 pm (UTC)Besides which, the pattern would be me correcting errors. There's absolutely no point in protecting an arrogant editor who thinks that there is a "President of the United Kingdom" and that you store things in a "cuppord" from someone who knows better and takes pleasure in pointing it out.
Pete, fresh from a trivia night victory