The Wiki Club
Our friends at Takimag have posted an excellent column by John Derbyshire on the sins of Wikipedia.
Derbyshire tried to correct his own entry, posted by someone obviously out to get him. He sums up the entire fraud in the sentence: "They can say what they like about you, employing any level of sub-literacy for the purpose, and there isn’t a darn thing you can do about it. I had heard this, but just hadn’t believed they are really so brazen." Welcome to the club! Some lunatic Nordicist completely vandalized my entry, and despite the efforts of well-meaning souls, it is still, the last time I looked, a hopeless tissue of lies and disinformation.
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I approved this just to put on display the idiocy of people in the blogosphere. First, Mr. Hablicher cannot even spell n'est-ce pas. Then he introduces an entirely irrelevant reference to Germany. "Whatever you do, don't mention the war." Where is Basil Fawlty when you need him?
I am reposting WF Habicher's ridiculous writeback so that I can mark the original as spam and keep him from escaping from his looney bin into a world of comparative sanity.
1 Comment by Hermann on 6 August 2009:
Just trying this out.
Turn around is fair play, nes pas?
The Germans and Germany have been subjected to this kind of slander for almost 100 years.
and the confederates have ben slimed even longer!
and Southerners continue to be slandered to this very day.
Speaking of slandering Southerners, I once informed Dr Wilson, here on this site, of an slanderous Wikipedia article on the League of the South, which also had an obviously intentional misquote of Dr Michael Hill. Dr Wilson responded by dismissing Wikipedia as unreliable, and mentioned the effort he had made to correct an article on himself, to no avail.
Curious, I looked up the article on Dr Wilson, and saw why he had wanted to have it corrected. In the discussion section on the article, there was a running debate between editors, with one or two of them apparently taking heed of Dr Wilson's objections and trying to correct the article. The debate reached the level of accusation.
There are some honest people working with Wikipedia, but their efforts are largely vain and Wikipedia is a hopeless morass. Even when using it for reference on completely apolitical subjects, one must use other sources first, and, when finally falling back on Wikipedia, verify everything you see there if possible, even the smallest details. It's better not use it at all.
We're actually discussing Wikipedia on "Chronicles"? About time we got into some meaty stuff!
Twitter, anyone?
I believe that if people who use "blogs" are "bloggers", then people who use Twitter are "twits".
I like that Mark @7. Can I use it?
The wiki is indeed an unreliable online ecyclopedia. The wiki oage on GSE (grapefruit seed extract) is a total misrepresentation of the properties of the substance, making it appear to be worthless as an antibacterial or as an antiinfective agent. This isn't true at all, and the substance is used in place of chlorine in municipal water supplies in some South American countries to great effect.
The page is monitored by a robot program of some sort which regards any editing as "vandalism". I can only imagine that the same sort of disinformation is being presented on other wiki pages, so I usually just skip it as a reference source.
And what does wikipedia say about Rose Kennedy? I once amended that entry to say she had no kids that lived. Oh if only it were true!
"Some lunatic Nordicist completely vandalized my entry. . ."
"I approved this just to put on display the idiocy of people in the blogosphere."
And people (less appreciative than I) look at me confusedly on hearing me chuckle while reading the magazine.
To the moderator:
I added to my name as I realized there were other Andrew variants regularly posting.
I avoid using Wikipedia at each and every available opportunity.
@ 8 Rodney
Be my guest.
If anyone is really surprised by the fact that Wikipedia is unreliable, then they are naive. Ever since the serpent coaxed Eve into that fateful bite humankind has been buying snake oil. My poorer great-ancestors and relatives were skeptical of snake oil salesmen and all manner of shysters, of necessity; my more recent (richer) ancestors and relatives (including myself at times) have lost that healthy skepticism. The Internet's main positive attribute is speed. The fact that most information (or misinformation) available on the Net must be inspected with a critical and skeptical eye is its main negative attribute.
That some people are surprised by the fact that Wikipedia has succumbed to shysters should be no surprise to persons with some sense.
#14 - Agree, but then most information available anywhere must be inspected with a critical and skeptical eye. Why should Wiki or the internet be different? According to the late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the expression "he lies like print" soon followed the invention of the printing press.
I have been under the impression that Wikipedia was started and is run by a pornographer. If true, enough said.
In my experience (having been a short lived Wikipedia editor), I concluded that there are editors (pawns like me), first level moderators, second level moderators and Adolf Hitler. I could not post anything that was not a "commonly accepted truth". Definition of that type of "truth" was explained as the one that must have appeared in "reputable media" (CNN, NY Times, Boston Globe, etc.) Now the journalists are re-writing history and Adolf is sitting back puttin all the pieces together.
The sense of powerlessness is so overwhelming, that I can imagine myself listening to the "news" on Deutsche Beobachter during the late 1930s to hear the "truth" about the Jews and the "communist threat" to Germany.
Good bye and good riddance.
"The Comments" ~~: there are intelligent, learned, and well-read people who regularly offer comments. They are here every day and somehow find something to say, every day. It appears to be a compulsion, not to say addiction. They're trigger-happy. Their brains are hot..so hot that common-sense goes by the wayside: a lot that is written is just sheer, embarrasing nonsense. They think too little and speak too much....really. A little discipline, gentlemen.
Chess: if you see agood move---sit on your hands...
@ Mr. Pavlovich
I understand why you feel powerless in front of this behemoth, however, as far as the counting goes, Mr. Stalin´s Dictatorship was in every sense MUCH WORSE thant whatever the Adolph´s followers came with, in sheer violence, death toll, culture destruction, etc., and I´m not a nazi sympathizer, however I know the history.
In reference to wikipedia, it´s not surprising, since wikipedia has no moral compass at all, just look the way they portray vices and crimes like paedophilia or how they justify or minimize leftist crimes....
There are some offshoots of the wiki idea which work well as a means of gathering information. One is the Linux freeware distros which employ their own privately moderated wikis dedicated to the developers and users communities which spring up around the Linux freeware OS distros.
One with which I'm acquainted is the Puppy Linux OS wiki which is open to registered members who use and work on development of the distro. Puppy is an OS which is only 85-100meg in size and which will load from a live CD into your system's RAM and will run completely in RAM without having to be installed to your hard drive.
The wiki model is a good idea for gathering and disseminating information, but Wikipedia is an example of how any repository of information can be coopted by propagandists and diverted from its intended purpose.
Some Wikipedia articles do get straightened out eventually, while others get worse and worse.
I know Clyde Wilson has complained about his entry in the past - the entry began as very hostile, but then someone added lengthy paragraphs of praise, some but not all of which have since been cut; now praise and hostility sit uneasily side by side while the supposed goal of "neutral point of view" is wholly lost. Thomas Fleming's entry is worse - it is all hostile, in more than one way (several paragraphs of out-of-context quotations posted by a racist making him to be a leftist, then more of the same posted by a leftist making him to be a racist!) and simply awful - perhaps the worst Wikipedia entry I have ever read.
On the other hand, I read the League of the South entry (which I had never done before) and the Michael Hill quotation complained of is apparently gone. Of course, it could be back by the time you read this!