I’ve already pointed to a Reuters story that tracked the evolution of the Wikipedia entry for Ken Lay in the minutes after his death was known to the public. The story looks at individual edits, which included some misinformation, and describes how the story was in flux as the news came out. It concludes that Wikipedia is a poor source of information because the article was edited several times in a short period to correct errors.
Today Washington Post technology columnist Frank Ahrens takes this silliness to the next level by using this small data set to warn readers that articles may be edited by “insane crazy people with an agenda.” I wonder if he’s written about AM talk radio in the past. Describing one edit where a contributor incorrectly wrote that the guilt of ruining the lives of investors led Lay to suicide, Ahrens notes how the editor left out an “l” from “finally” and adds the parenthetical comment,
Is it the speed with which flamers type that inevitably leads to typos? Or is it a political statement, a willful rebellion against the bourgeoisie strictures of so-called conventional spelling? Or are they just idiots? Discuss.
OK, I’ll bite. Ahrens, I’m not sure you’re using the term “flamers” correctly — I typically think of flamers as Internet users who send hostile messages or posts to other internet users, not people who post biased or incorrect information online. I’m sure newspaper reporters never turn in copy with typos. I don’t mean to defend this user, but speculating about possible political motivations behind a missing letter is silly, and using this data point to attack the credibility of an open online project is a willful misrepresentation.
Ahrens does note that this error was corrected in a minute by another editor, but his tone suggests that Wikipedia encourages the dissemination of misinformation. (”Somehow, one minute later, actual news managed to elbow its way into Wikipedia.”) If Ahrens cared to do any actual reporting, he might have noted that WIkipedia has had, since its inception, a Neutral Point of View policy that instructs editors to remove this kind of editorializing, but the journalist seems more interested in making knee-jerk claims about the integrity of his profession. He says later that “At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.”
The Ken Lay entry provides an interesting case study on how the online encyclopedia operates, but both Reuters and Ahrens draw the wrong conclusions. I suspect that most of these edits were based on reporting from day-time cable news. If you’ve ever watched a cable news channel report a breaking news story, you’ll know that information trickles bit-by-bit, and the the on-air talent frequently speculate about the news. It would not surprise me if a newsreader learned that Ken Lay died, suggested he committed suicide, and presented this to the audience. If Ahrens is going to complain about Wikipedia changing a story over a short period of time, he should point his attention to his peer journalists on cable.
Update: There are some good comments on this post over on Slashdot.
