The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia :- Wiki & History - the Skinny

CDfm

Here is a chatty & funny little piece by author & historian Timothy Messer-Kruse on Wikipedia as a reliable history source.

It gives a great insight to how wiki works and how it is not a reliable source for history.

The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia

Mark Shaver for The Chronicle Review

Mark Shaver for The Chronicle Review



By Timothy Messer-Kruse
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. ... "
Coincidentally, that is the claim that initially hooked me on the topic. In 2001 I was teaching a labor-history course, and our textbook contained nearly the same wording that appeared on Wikipedia. One of my students raised her hand: "If the trial went on for six weeks and no evidence was presented, what did they talk about all those days?" I've been working to answer her question ever since.
I have not resolved all the mysteries that surround the bombing, but I have dug deeply enough to be sure that the claim that the trial was bereft of evidence is flatly wrong. One hundred and eighteen witnesses were called to testify, many of them unindicted co-conspirators who detailed secret meetings where plans to attack police stations were mapped out, coded messages were placed in radical newspapers, and bombs were assembled in one of the defendants' rooms.
In what was one of the first uses of forensic chemistry in an American courtroom, the city's foremost chemists showed that the metallurgical profile of a bomb found in one of the anarchists' homes was unlike any commercial metal but was similar in composition to a piece of shrapnel cut from the body of a slain police officer. So overwhelming was the evidence against one of the defendants that his lawyers even admitted that their client spent the afternoon before the Haymarket rally building bombs, arguing that he was acting in self-defense.
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."
The "undue weight" policy posed a problem. Scholars have been publishing the same ideas about the Haymarket case for more than a century. The last published bibliography of titles on the subject has 1,530 entries.
"Explain to me, then, how a 'minority' source with facts on its side would ever appear against a wrong 'majority' one?" I asked the Wiki-gatekeeper. He responded, "You're more than welcome to discuss reliable sources here, that's what the talk page is for. However, you might want to have a quick look at Wikipedia's civility policy."
I tried to edit the page again. Within 10 seconds I was informed that my citations to the primary documents were insufficient, as Wikipedia requires its contributors to rely on secondary sources, or, as my critic informed me, "published books." Another editor cheerfully tutored me in what this means: "Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that."
Tempted to win simply through sheer tenacity, I edited the page again. My triumph was even more fleeting than before. Within seconds the page was changed back. The reason: "reverting possible vandalism." Fearing that I would forever have to wear the scarlet letter of Wikipedia vandal, I relented but noted with some consolation that in the wake of my protest, the editors made a slight gesture of reconciliation—they added the word "credible" so that it now read, "The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer credible evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. ... " Though that was still inaccurate, I decided not to attempt to correct the entry again until I could clear the hurdles my anonymous interlocutors had set before me.
So I waited two years, until my book on the trial was published. "Now, at last, I have a proper Wikipedia leg to stand on," I thought as I opened the page and found at least a dozen statements that were factual errors, including some that contradicted their own cited sources. I found myself hesitant to write, eerily aware that the self-deputized protectors of the page were reading over my shoulder, itching to revert my edits and tutor me in Wiki-decorum. I made a small edit, testing the waters.
My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."
I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to continue to shout that the sky was blue.
Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University. He is author of The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks, to be published later this year by the University of Illinois Press.

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

Sometimes people approach history as a debate to be won when it should be a fact to be uncovered or verified.

Wiki is great for lots of things and i read it but it is not a credible source.

I find source squabbles on H & H hard going and thats why I am posting this.

Manach

Wikipedia is a great private reference, as it allows the reader to quickly acquire a reasonable overview of nearly any subject. Its open-source nature lends it to this. However as a academic source, it is that same open nature that is an issue, with various study guides frowning on it's use in assignments.
It does not have the same level of interpretation of facts as would be subject to peer-reviewed academic articles or published books on the subject in question. So in causal debate on boards, as a means to clarify a point IMHO it is acceptable, but it should be treated as one step up from an opinion and not as a key source.

dubhthach

Perhaps we should use Michael Collins analogy of a "Stepping stone ..." -- however that didn't turn out so well for him personally, awh well!

Gee Bag

Had to post this, its a Wikipedia article about the reliability of Wikipedia!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_reliability

Turns out to be pretty good actually!

Gee Bag

I've read the article again, and I can't help but think that the author must have come across as a complete troll to the editors.

He swoops in from nowhere to repeatedly attempt to edit a single page in a short space of time. He references an article he has written himself as his main source. When challenged he claims he is an expert on the subject.

If boards.ie is anything to go by when someone mentions Brits, the amount of trolling and nonsense on Wikipedia must be unreal. Just imagine the input they must get for Israel-Palestine alone!

As for minority opinions, how could this feasibly work in practice? Would David Icke be allowed edit the Royal Family's page to state as a fact that they are alien lizards, referencing a book by David Icke, or would the Holocaust page have a section explaining how it in fact never happened because the Jews made it all up.

The issue he trys to hang his point on seems so minor as to be almost irrelevant (i.e. the common misunderstanding regarding the quality of eviednce). The level of detail in a Wikipedia article is not going to have the level of detail that a professor who has written two books on the subject could muster. If it did, no one would ever read it.

CDfm

@Geebag , I am not asking you to accept it but check it

I am going to take an example.

Roger Casement's sexuality

The Black Diaries and Casement's sexuality

The Black Diaries are a set of diaries, claimed to have been written by Casement and covering the years 1903, 1910 and 1911. If accepted as genuine, the diaries would portray Casement as a promiscuous homosexual sex tourist with a fondness for young men.[24] In 1916, after Casement's conviction for treason, photographs of the diaries were circulated by the British government to individuals urging commutation of Casement's death sentence. At a time of strong social conservatism, not least among Irish Catholics, the Black Diaries undermined or at least suppressed support for Casement.
The question of whether the diaries are genuine or forgeries has been much debated. The original diaries may be seen at the British National Archives in Kew.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Casement

It implies the diaries were a British forgery.

Now DeValera wrote to the British government c 1932 looking for the return of Casements body. They mentioned his homosexuality which DeValera accepted it and it did not bother him.

That's 80 years ago.

So the makey up nature of Irish history has only been really challenged in the last 20 or so years and the conspiracy theory is in the wiki.

slowburner

I just had to quote this:

For Mr. Seigenthaler, whose biography on Wikipedia has since been corrected, the lesson is simple: "We live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research, but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04seelye.html

Manic Moran

I can relate to his problem. At this point I refer only to authors I know who have used primary documents or the documents themselves if I can get to them. I have become somewhat suspicious of authors citing each other.

Unfortunately, some concepts have become just so ingrained in popular thought that it's almost a losing battle to get then corrected. It's even worse when the primary document is sill classified. I have a clearance, I have seen the documents, but I can't provide them. (My focus is military).

On the plus side, at least 'common knowledge' gives me ideas for articles to write about. Unfortunately, it only has benefit to those who were reading at the time of publication, even just a week later I end up having to say "actually, that's not true, see my most recent article"

NTM