Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen stirred a lot of controversy last week at the Next Web conference when he premiered the documentary above, The Truth About Wikipedia. It has now been posted to YouTube and is worth watching when you have a spare 45 minutes. The film pits Andrew Keen, the disapproving author of The Culture of the Amateur, and Bob McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, against Wikipedia co-founders Larry Sanger, Jimmy Wales, and Web 2.0 guru Tim O’Reilly, among others. The film is masterfully made and shows many points of view, but it ends up being more than anything else a vehicle for Keen to put forth his diatribes against Wikipedia. You definitely get the sense that he wins the argument in the movie. And, in fact, when I asked van Veelen afterwards on stage who he personally agreed with the most (I was the conference MC), he admitted it was Keen. This siding with the enemy, as it were, actually makes the documentary more thought-provoking. People in the audience were seething, and one man came prepared with a speech denouncing the filmmaker.
In the film, Keen actually argues that we need gatekeepers for the truth, and those gatekeepers should be experts. Of course, he misses the point that the relatively small handful of people who do most of the writing and editing on Wikipedia may very well be experts in their topic areas, or become experts by writing and researching Wikipedia articles. That is not to say that controversies do not arise all the time about factual inaccuracies, edit wars, and companies trying to conduct PR campaigns by changing their Wikipedia entries. But the film also misses the point that Wikipedia is very much a market of ideas. Like any market, information at any given point in time can be wrong, but in the end it turns out to be right more often than not. Whether you agree with Keen or with the Wikipedians depends on your definition of truth. Keen is an absolutist. There is Truth, and everything else is fiction. Experts are the guardians of that truth. But the truth is that Truth itself is always evolving, even the experts’ notion of it.
(via The Next Web).
And for those of you with even more time on your hands, here is van Veelen’s 50-minute documentary from last year on Google:
Michael Moore should jump on this
“But the truth is that Truth itself is always evolving, even the experts’ notion of it.”
That statement has already evolved into an untruth.
We have a great video of Jimmy Wales and Andrew Keen debating Web 2.0 on FORA.tv:
http://fora.tv/..._Debate_Web_2_0
Wikipedia has been useful to me yet it doesn’t stop me from getting resources elsewhere (books). So far the content have been up to date and accurate (of my personal researches, so far). Besides, what is expertise anyways? Journalists write about subjects they were assigned to and just like Wiki resource people have to research data before submitting and publishing the story. Do political speech writers have to be politicians to be able to write in political linggo? Was Dr. Spock ever a parent?
the author is an assHOLE, what has his shitty book contributed. It has no value to anybody but himself. I think almost everybody knows that wikipedia has it’s flaws, however it’s benefits far out weigh it’s short comings. It’s currently the best system on the web of gathering information.
i suspect when wikipedia’s article growth starts to flat line, they will adopt a better method of quality control since they no longer need rapid growth to reach critical mass. Some people think that wikipedia is already there
Watched it yesterday on tv, First time I heard ‘web2.0′ on public television
but seriously Mahalo too is a wiki, yet they have good Quality Control. So I don’t agree that there is not QA for wiki’s
Tales (on twitter)
Wikipedia offers a great service to the community and in my research conducted there, it tends to be more accurate than not, and isn’t that what inquisitive minds wants?
I love that the topic of journalists and journalism has come up in this discussion because it is very similar. A reporter may go out and do a story without knowing a single thing about the actual topic at hand, but they come back with a lot of information.
Even if the initial ‘report’ in the newspaper, online, or on TV wasn’t completely accurate, it’s a step toward “The Truth” Big T truth, the ultimate Truth of the story. That’s a lot how I see wikipedia, we all know it’s downfalls but more often than not, what is there is a stepping stone to further information and research about any given topic.
It may not be ‘completely accurate’ or “The Truth”, but it’s a lot better than falling blindly into a cave on a topic.
Keen has appeared numerous times on Canada’s CBC Radio 1. He’s smug, arrogant, and dismissive. Beyond that, he’s also wrong.
I understand his basic argument that opening up references like Wikipedia to “anyone” leads to some pretty bizarre points of view (though they’re often corrected quickly). But his entire thesis fails on one major point: The gatekeepers of information in times past, namely the Mainstream Media, have failed miserably in recent times. It has become clear that many of the people in the MSM share a very particular political view and their reporting is mirroring it. Dan Rather and his crew at CBS News epitomize everything that is wrong with Keen and his views.
Keen can have as many gatekeepers as he wants. I’ve learned more, and I would venture been misguided fewer times, with Wikipedia than I ever could from ‘experts’ on NPR or CNN or so many other places.
nice article, that truth is evolving, people need to know
I think most people know that Wikipedia is not going to be totally accurate. Personally, I use it as more of a search device, as instead of using the wiki article. (i.e. using the wikipedia article just for the reference links). Keen is right in that there needs to be experts disseminating the truth, but I don’t think that people look to Wikipedia as being as truthful as say, the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Also, I don’t buy the “truth is evolving” argument. By saying that “the truth is that Truth itself is always evolving”, you have made a “true” statement, and the argument chases it’s tail. If I am missing something here, enlighten me.
The things that bothers me is that it is nearly impossible to correct an inaccuracy on wikipedia.
I do use it to get general data, but for information on a company…it is pretty useless.
Wikis are launch pads, they are often the first or second result on Google. Wikipedia is very much a meeting place, a faded backwards truth that has enough information to get the idea across…but however isn’t accurate enough to cite. The evolution of the internet has caused information to become more and more free and correctable. Truth isn’t evolving, ideas are just being exchanged. Wikipedia is a place where an idea of truth is held, even if this idea is written by a Phd. I’m not saying Wikipedia is wrong, however it can not be correct.
I can sort of agree with your point when you say ‘truth is evolving’. Scientific textbooks now are very different to those fifty years ago.
And yes, the ‘expert’s notion of it (by which I assume you mean people researching this at the top level – not well-meaning amateurs) is evolving.
The problem is that the changes on Wikipedia don’t represent ‘evolution’. They are changes, and they’re the product of lively debate, certainly. But the debate is far too often tainted by the fact that many of the people contributing simply aren’t ‘qualified’ enough to know what they are talking about.
Which makes Wikipedia unreliable and me a Keen subscriber. And don’t throw out the ‘Britannica is unreliable too’ – my argument is not the relative merits of encyclopedias, it is the contention that ‘the evolution of truth’ can be witnessed on Wikipedia.
Your Perception IS Your Reality!
Or in Wikipedia’s case “Our perception is what we make it”. If a majority of people think marketing is dead then its dead and no “expert” can say otherwise.
And who are these gatekeepers or experts? Are Michael Dell and his cronies the experts? Because they are running Dell into the ground. If you ask music industry experts how the music industry is or should be run I think I will pass on the their expert opinions.
Maybe we should have two versions of Wiki one for bullshit and that is for corporations and MBA’s, and another one for us with the real power, the ones who decide if its shit or not.
There are some interesting issues at play here. Forgive the geekness, but I was a Literary and narrative theory guy in a past life:
1. There’s a school of thought that says all knowledge is a social construct – whatever the majority of people believe to be true is truth. To say that there is empirical or absolute truth is to – at some point – fall back on some divine order. Math may be the ultimate exception of truth that can’t be broken down. But take dualities: Jacques Derrida – father of deconstructionism – says that any time you break down a duality, the poles reverse. many things taken for granted as truth fall the same way, once you dig a little deeper. Even more, Truth with a capital T is to be distrusted as it lends itself to hegemony. Pretty geeky, right? But good points there.
2. Authority is rarely valid. Anyone ever read Feakonomics – it’s been proven that most people labeled experts are secretly flogging a private agenda. The media is a great example, but there are many others of experts acting in self-interest.
3. There is no such thing as objectivity – at least as expressed by a human. read any article written by any journalist and you’ll be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t subtly, even unconsciously, use language to take sides or promote an agenda. That is, if you read closely and between the lines.
Far better to announce something like wikipedia as not-authority that might frequently be valid than to live under the false belief that the Truth is out there if we just listen to the authorit…I mean, experts. Be a skeptic when you take in any media and you’re far better off.
Sarcasm is only funny when it’s understated. However, I don’t think that he or anyone should lump Sanger and Wales into the same mind set.
For what it’s worth, the title of Keen’s book is “The Cult of the Amateur”. It is only fitting that we all have to proofread and fact check your post.
What a pompous ass. Sounds like a classic Liberal Fascist. “What we need is a select group of elitists, and they’ll tell you all what to think.”
I’ll check out the video later, should be interesting.
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I haven’t bothered to watch it yet, but did anyone happen to bring up the studies that showed Wikipedia tends to be more accurate than Britannica?
That keen guy seems like an arrogant ass.
Van Veelen’s documentary makes the case — ironically — for the kinds of checks and balances that a collaborative medium like Wikipedia provides. If Van Veelen were writing about Wikipedia in one of the interactive forums that Andrew Keen disdains — such as Wikipedia — he would be challenged for unfairly framing the narrative around Keen’s critiques. In Wikipedian terms, Keen’s viewpoint is given “undue weight”.
I agree with Larry Sanger that dealing with unreasonable people on Wikipedia is a tiresome process with an uncertain outcome. But traditional media also has its share of people who misuse the authority implicit in one-way communications to push a point of view that wouldn’t fare so well in more egalitarian discourse.
I am with wiki folks. I don’t think that people should not trust web 2.0 crowd. I hope people will learn that nothing that is written/said/seen can be trusted. I hate when people say, it must be true because I have seen in on TV. Many times I had to correct journalist because they had incorrect facts. I only hope more people will learn that nothing can be trusted – that they need to listen to more sources – and in the end everyone will benefit – by having the media/blogs etc. reporting more truthfully.
The title of this article sounds like Colbert-bait.
And what is a filmmaker doing in a web conference?
He should get over it – wikipedia rocks.
But let’s keep it simple, he’s just looking for the easy way to
gain some reputation.
And the documentary very boring nothing essencial in there.
Oh and Keen? What an arrogant a*****e. I guess bad childhood.
There are a hundered people dying every day and yet if wikipedia
has valid content is more important like not the history is tought
different in each part of the country. So what is truth?
Wow. These comments say some fairly sad things about techcrunch posters.
Wikipedia is free. You pay for Jstor. There’s a reason for this.
It’s that simple.
The “experts” aren’t CNN or NPR, this isn’t wikipedia vs. traditional journalism, way to completely not grasp the point.
@ Dan Leeds – It may have been geeky but it was informative – thanks for your comment.
It makes me wonder – there are many more people who say you should question what is written in Wikipedia then there are people who say you should question what is written in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Is that because the Encyclopedia Britannica is never wrong – or is it that we are told it is never wrong?
Interesting discussion.
Cheers – Eric
If you want the Truth: http://www.thet...uthproject.org/
Well since the truth is always evolving next time you have a bill evolve it to 0, and instead of visiting the dr just look at Wikipedia for the answer, there is no truth it’s all your perception. Need to do your taxes just ask a wiki expert who cares if they don’t know the rules they have become experts by reading wikipedia.
Look Wikipedia says it’s an encyclopedia, it’s not. It’s a great resource to find out what was the name of that actress on that show (just like imdb) or look up the odd bit of history. I would never trust it with any current event issue or use it for anything that requires scientific expertise.
Maybe that makes me a pompous ass but I’ll be a pompous ass who has his taxes done properly and pays his bills on time.
I’d rather be wrong for an hour than wrong for a year.
“”In the film, Keen actually argues that we need gatekeepers for the truth, and those gatekeepers should be experts.”"
The Catholic Church tried to put forth the same argument during the early rumblings of the Protestant Reformation, but the real problem lies in hermeneutics. Who’s version of the truth is legit? Does not the community ultimately decide what its truth will be?
When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for this planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.
I confess that I would enjoy seeing some gatekeeper shut the door on Andrew Keen.
But alas, his continuing ubiquity as the person willing to take “the other side” in a discussion of Wikipedia proves his core thesis false. If not for the Internet, we never would have heard of him, and any “elite” status he has seems to be based not on formal credentials, but on the same sort of self-promotional agenda-pushing that he abhors in every other user of the Internet.
You speak of truth. Might not there also be Truth 2.0?
Anyway, who takes wikipedia that serious?
You have to think about “how true” vs “how much truth”. Wikipedia trades-off quality for quantity and the numbers work in Wikipedia’s favor: in exchange for losing single-digit percentage points in accuracy, it gains an order of magnitude of more information compared to traditional encyclopedias.
Thought to share this pertinent link – a list of errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica that have been corrected in wikipedia: http://en.wikip...6dia_Britannica
Interesting documentary. The fact is that society is always going to need experts. However, web 2.0 has given people new way to establish themselves as experts. Becoming an A list blogger, Wikipedia editors and many more ways in web 2.0 require as much (or probably more) efforts as traditional ways.
I think Keen is right when he says society needs gatekeepers and experts. But it will be wrong to think that Web 2.0 is an easy way to establish one as expert.
In my experience Wikipedia has been almost universally accurate. It’s particularly great on topics that you can’t get much information on from traditional sources, say for instance the TV show South Park.
Yes, there are mistakes but traditional encyclopedias have mistakes too.
@William – “I confess that I would enjoy seeing some gatekeeper shut the door on Andrew Keen.” The irony of this silly remark is so fun, on so many levels. It establishes exactly one of his points (a point obvious to many other of us), that Web 2.0 is a bit like a cult, and you simply don’t want to hear voices that are not in line with your own.
@abhilash – many, probably most A-list bloggers and Wikipedia admins are not experts at anything. (Not even, necessarily, about Wikipedia or about blogging — but maybe there.) You are abusing the perfectly good word “expert.”
Speaking as an epistemologist — basically, almost everything anyone (including both Andrew and his critics above) says about relativism, social constructionism, and the nature or criteria of truth or knowledge are, basically, uninformed garbage. Philosophy is one of those subjects that everyone thinks he can speak intelligently about, but almost no one can in fact.
The vector at which this video was aiming is the Citizendium: http://www.citizendium.org/ If you liked the video or thought it was intriguing, you’ll find CZ intriguing. If you had a knee-jerk negative reaction to it, you’ll have a knee-jerk negative reaction to CZ.
At the very least i think that we can all agree that it should be easier to discuss facts over the wikipedia than over “the brit”… It’s more open to debate, and that is what science is for, right?
I am repeatedly amazed at the attention Keen gets. Here is a guy with no prior qualifications as a media or cultural critic writing a book about media and culture — the pure-T definition of an amateur. How come that gets so seldom pointed out? It’s so ironic — he’s no more qualified to write about media than I am to write about particle physics. He attacks the very thing he does and hardly anybody ever calls him on it.
This is a class war if you hadnt noticed. We as people of whatever country have been and continue to be lied to by media, academia, and authority, sometimes working in concert.
It should be no surprise that given such a fantastic opportunity that individuals would revolt against the bonds of false truth and manipulative control of information.
Wikipedia suffers from the same mallady as traditional media, but it can be undone, redone, or improved. Unlike all the other uni-directional psuedo-information around us.
This is a revolution, and it will not be televised. Close your “Encyclopedia Titanica” and grow up.
45 minutes watching a documentary about Wikipedia, jesus. About as worthwhile as a 45 minute documentary on the merits of Marmite. For the benefit of Americans, Marmite is a bitter-tasting sandwich spread that is so well-known for polarising British opinion the manufacturers adopted “You either love it or hate it” as a slogan and showed adverts of people eating Marmite and reacting with disgust. Until Wikipedia entered popular consciousness, an argument over whether Marmite tasted good or not was possibly the most pointless waste of time imaginable.
Shame most people here won’t comprehend the analogy, because it’s really quite apposite. There are some people who think that the wisdom of crowds is wonderful, some who think that it can’t possibly produce anything worthwhile. The 99% of us in the middle will continue reading Wikipedia while taking it with a grain of salt. And would rather stick our heads in a bucket of s— than spend 45 minutes watching the first two groups argue, because their positions are totally intractable.
No, Wikipedia is not a perfect substitute for proper research. Facebook is not a perfect substitute for a social life. A packet of crisps (potato chips) is not a perfect substitute for a cooked, balanced meal. That doesn’t make them worthless, even if some people misguidedly use them as perfect substitutes.
Here is an example of Wikipedia’s “scholarship”. Editor MarnetteD’s poor writing skills bring Wikipedia into disrepute. Errors on his/her OWN PERSONAL PAGE on Wikipedia: (1) “Mar 25 2005″. Is this the way to write a date? In what language? Isn’t there a comma? (2) “The last decade has seen an outpouring of interest in, and publications about Oscar and the people in his life, I have read and seen most of it.” A RUN-ON SENTENCE. Don’t we learn about run-on sentences in grade school? (3) “priviledged” WHAT WORD IS THIS? AND IN WHAT LANGUAGE? One can only conclude that MarnetteD is illiterate, but “This user has made over 15,000 contributions to Wikipedia.” A priceless, perfect advertisement for what is wrong with Wikipedia.
Ha. I also have an example of how silly Wikipedia is. Go to User: Sarcasticidealist’s page, and it begins: “My name’s Steve Smith . . . In real life I’m a sometime student at the University of Alberta and Athabasca University (no degree from either, despite eight years of half-hearted effort).” No degree after eight years, and Mr. Smith, according to his user page, looks to be a significant figure on wikipedia. Has this fellow ever written a single peer-reviewed article? Odd, that. The page in question is here: http://en.wikip...rcasticidealist
Mrs. Thornhill and Fielding,
Fun snark. But did you evaluate the quality of what these people have done on the site? Here’s one of Smith’s pages:
http://en.wikip...lection%2C_1892
It appears to be well sourced, thorough, and on an issue few resources have the scope to cover. I would suggest this is more a success story than an indication of Wikipedia’s silliness.
A cursory glance at the article mentioned directly above reveals that the article has not been peer-reviewed.
(1) This line is grammatically incorrect:
“Several of the aldermanic candidates Strang, Goodridge, Daly, and Fraser – made campaign speeches at the nomination meeting, but these were brief and promised only that the candidate would serve the town to the best of his ability if elected.”
(2) The sixth reference reads, “Masson, Jack: Alberta’s Local Governments, 1994, pp 459”
It should read, say:
“Masson, Jack, Alberta’s Local Governments, 1994, p. 459.”
or
“Masson, Jack. Alberta’s Local Governments, 1994, p. 459”
But (a) in what world does such a reference employ a colon? And (b) “pp” is only used when more than one page is referenced, as a first year university student would know.
(3) Seven of the ten references have no page numbers at all!
All in all, perhaps the general research is admirable, but the outcome is relatively shoddy, and in places embarrassing. This article would be rejected for publication in an academic journal in its present form.
Mr. Thornhill/Fielding/Bernstein,
Thanks for drawing my attention to the problems with the article (and thank you also for drawing my attention to your comments here). I’m off to fix them, although I certainly have no intention of submitting this to an academic journal any time soon.
Cheers,
Steve the Un-degreed