The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia. [What happens when a historian tries to edit Wikipedia]

[salvorhardin]

Granted, he was trying to correct a point of consensus with original research. OTOH, he's spent a decade researching the Haymarket Riot, so you'd think he'd know a thing or two about it.

For the past 10 years I've immersed myself in the details of one of the most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot and trial of 1886. Along the way I've written two books and a couple of articles about the episode. In some circles that affords me a presumption of expertise on the subject. Not, however, on Wikipedia.

The bomb thrown during an anarchist rally in Chicago sparked America's first Red Scare, a high-profile show trial, and a worldwide clemency movement for the seven condemned men. Today the martyrs' graves are a national historic site, the location of the bombing is marked by a public sculpture, and the event is recounted in most American history textbooks. Its Wikipedia entry is detailed and elaborate.

A couple of years ago, on a slow day at the office, I decided to experiment with editing one particularly misleading assertion chiseled into the Wikipedia article. The description of the trial stated, "The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. ... "

.....

So I removed the line about there being "no evidence" and provided a full explanation in Wikipedia's behind-the-scenes editing log. Within minutes my changes were reversed. The explanation: "You must provide reliable sources for your assertions to make changes along these lines to the article."

That was curious, as I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress. I also noted one of my own peer-reviewed articles. One of the people who had assumed the role of keeper of this bit of history for Wikipedia quoted the Web site's "undue weight" policy, which states that "articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views." He then scolded me. "You should not delete information supported by the majority of sources to replace it with a minority view."

Full post: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704

[saras]

1. Wikipedia is not fact, and makes no pretense of it. Wikipedia represents consensus reality

...and consensus reality means that the stupid get an equal vote.

[izquierdista]

2. And if the stupid STILL aren't happy...

They go to Conservapedia.

[Bill USA]

3. Here's a reporters 'take' on Messer-Kruse's judgement that the individuals were fairly convicted ...

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-09-14/entertainment/ct-ent-0915-museum-general-haymarket-20110915_1_separate-trials-haymarket-square-haymarket-incident

Messer-Kruse's greatest discovery: "Textbooks ignore the transcript and say the trial was unfair. But if you judge it by the standards of its day, it was (fair). In those days, you were convicted by testimony, not fingerprints and DNA. They had 162 witnesses and a lot of he said/she said. But then, that's what a trial was."

(That view is bound to stir up controversy among historians and legal scholars who [font size="3"]more generally consider the trial a travesty[/font].)

[saras]

8. They're NOT contradictory. Most trials were travesties then. So? This is surprising?

We have really solid evidence that eyewitness testimony doesn't work worth a damn. It didn't USED TO work really good and then go bad. It has NEVER produced much in the way of justice. The most obvious of common criminals get convicted, usually.

[jeff47]

4. As in so many things

XKCD has a comic on this....

[Jim Lane]

5. My preliminary impression is that he's giving Wikipedia a bum rap.

There's been extensive discussion about this on Wikipedia, including an article in the Signpost, the internal newsletter. It seems to me that the professor didn't recognize or didn't understand all the implications of Wikipedia's commitment to cooperative editing. Statements won't be accepted as definitive merely because a professor asserts them -- especially when they contradict statements made by other authorities.

It does also seem, however, that there was some "ownership" of the article going on. Ownership, in Wikipedia, means that one editor or a small group come to have a proprietary attitude toward the article, and resist changes from newcomers. That attitude is itself a violation of the collaborative editing ideal, but it does happen. It seems in this instance to have made the work of improving the article more tedious than it should have been.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. However, links to the trial testimony should override incorrect 'authorities'

It seems clear he made a very good case that evidence was presented at the trial. An attitude of "I don't care this has been disproved, the majority of earlier sources claim this, therefore we'll stick to the incorrect sources" is going to hurt Wikipedia in the long run.

[Jim Lane]

7. Unfortunately, that's also the argument made by, for example, climate change deniers

Wikipedia's policy is to state the prevailing view among experts, while giving whatever weight is appropriate to minority views. Depending on whether the minority is one person (one "crackpot" if you disagree with that view) or a significant contingent within the field, the appropriate weight might be none at all, a brief mention, or a more thorough presentation.

The alternative is for a bunch of nonexpert Wikipedians, most of them pseudonymous, consisting of whichever volunteers happened to show up to edit that article, to constitute themselves as a review panel to adjudicate a dispute among experts. I pick the example of the climate change deniers because they're actually active on Wikipedia. They keep trying to weaken articles that report the scientific consensus about anthropogenic global warming. I don't mean to imply that you agree with them, but they would take the argument of the form you suggest and happily assert that the earlier incorrect AGW views have been disproved.

The professor who wrote about the Haymarket affair concluded his Chronicle article by expressing the hope that his analysis of the trial transcript would convince other experts in the field, and that his view could then be treated in Wikipedia the way he wanted. That's the correct approach. Wikipedia relies on the community of professional historians about the Haymarket affair, and relies on the community of climate scientists about AGW, and so forth.

The approach isn't perfect. If there had been a Wikipedia in Copernicus's time, the article on astronomy would initially have stated the geocentric universe as fact, then moved to mentioning heliocentrism as a minority viewpoint, and eventually (by some time in the seventeenth century) stated heliocentrism as fact and simply omitted any reference to geocentrism except as part of the subject's history. Wikipedia has made the decision that it will reflect what the experts currently say, rather than trying to identify an unorthodox viewpoint that will eventually be accepted as fact. Given the project's limitations, I think that's the correct decision.