Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts

Thursday, August 07, 2008

The Case Against Bruce Ivins

The Smoking Gun has a collection of documents about the government's case against suicidal government bioweapons researcher Bruce Ivins that is fascinating. Apparently he engaged in an "edit war" on the Wikipedia entry for the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority (which my mother belonged to). He regularly posted negative information there, and became angry when it was deleted. He claimed that KKG had labeled him an "enemy" and issued a "fatwah" against him, and he broke into a KKG sorority house to steal a KKG handbook during his postdoc fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill.

The documents also show ties between Ivins and the American Family Affiliation, a conservative Christian group known for threatening boycotts against companies that do things like support gay rights, and with pro-life groups.

He was a regular user of pseudonyms and multiple email addresses.

The documents show that he was clearly a very disturbed individual.

(Previously.)

UPDATE (August 9, 2008): Ivins' coworker Meryl Nass lays out the case for reasonable doubt about Ivins' involvement at her blog.

Hume's Ghost points out in the comments that the anthrax attacks were used to help justify the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that the anthrax apparently originated there. One of the Glenn Greenwald articles Hume's Ghost alludes to, about false claims that the anthrax contained bentonite which tied it to Iraq, may be found here. A nice quote from that article:

Critically, ABC News never retracted its story (they merely noted, as they had done from the start, that the White House denied the reports). And thus, the linkage between Saddam and the anthrax attacks -- every bit as false as the linkage between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks -- persisted.

We now know -- we knew even before news of Ivins' suicide last night, and know especially in light of it -- that the anthrax attacks didn't come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government's scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government -- from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role -- I'd argue a very major role -- in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue -- including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework -- were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and -- as importantly -- to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.
Greenwald goes on, in a series of updates, to point out that several of the pieces of evidence of Ivins' unusual behavior that is now pointed to as evidence of his guilt were already published in newspapers in 2004.

In a followup, Greenwald writes about whether journalists should expose sources who lie to them. I think I good case can be made that they should, in cases where the source is lying as opposed to being used as a dupe, and the journalist has good evidence to that effect. Being exposed for such lies would act as a disincentive for such lying to take place.

UPDATE (July 30, 2009): The New York Times reports that the National Academy of Sciences has assembled a 15-member panel to review the scientific work done by the FBI to identify Ivins as the culprit. The process is expected to take a year and a half to complete.

UPDATE (November 27, 2009): Glenn Greenwald argues that the case on Ivins shouldn't be closed, and cites various mainstream sources that agree.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Prosecution target for anthrax attacks commits suicide

Upon learning that he was about to be the target of a prosecution for the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, U.S. government biodefense researcher Bruce Ivins killed himself on Tuesday with an overdose of Tylenol with codeine.

Ivins became a suspect after it was discovered that he had failed to report anthrax contaminations at his lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 2002. In late 2008, he was ordered to stay away from a social worker who had counseled him, Jean Duley, who would have testified against him at his trial. In Duley's application for a protective order, she said that Ivins had stalked her and threatened to kill her.

Ivins worked at the same lab where a prior "person of interest" in the case, Stephen Hatfill, also worked. Hatfill was cleared of involvement with the attacks and won a $5.8 million settlement from the Justice Department after he sued for harassment and privacy act violations. Hatfill also won a $10 million libel judgment against Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest for an article by Donald Foster which claimed that Hatfill's writings and travels connected him to the anthrax attacks.

Ivins' attorney claims that he was innocent, but if that were the case, wouldn't his response have been more like Hatfill's? Perhaps, perhaps not. Private investigator and former CNN reporter Pat Clawson, who was also a spokesperson for Hatfill,
said on Friday that news organizations and the public should be “deeply skeptical” about any notion that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax killer unless and until solid evidence is brought forth.

“Everybody is jumping to the conclusion that because this guy committed suicide, he must be the anthrax killer,” Mr. Clawson said. “That is a lousy premise. The pressure of these F.B.I. investigations on individuals is phenomenal, and it is quite likely that this guy cracked under that pressure but had nothing to do with the killings.”

Ivins was a church-going Catholic and a married father of two.

(Hat tip to Greg Laden.)

UPDATE (August 7, 2008): The government's case against Ivins includes tracing the strain of anthrax to his specific lab, the fact that he worked long periods alone in a secure lab that housed that strain and could not account for his activity, that when asked to provide spores from his laboratory to investigators he gave them different spores and then lied about it, that he sent an email to an associate after 9/11 saying that terrorists have "anthrax and sarin gas" and have "decreed death to all Jews and Americans," language similar to statements in threatening letters included in the mailed anthrax envelopes. All of the spores used in the anthrax attacks came from a single flask in Ivins' lab, RMR-1029. That's probably the most conclusive evidence that Ivins was behind the attacks.

Apparently Ivins also engaged in an "edit war" on the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority's Wikipedia page, repeatedly posting negative information there, and thought that the group had declared a "fatwah" on him. (Via The Agitator.)

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Zeitgeist: The Movie

Last night I attended an event at which one of the attendees promoted "Zeitgeist: The Movie." I was prompted to finally watch this piece of pernicious nonsense back in January when a commenter at this blog made reference to it, and I forced myself to sit through the whole thing. The movie is in three segments--the first is on the origins of Christianity, in which it argues that Jesus was a myth derived from Egyptian myth, based on the work of Acharya S. The second is 9/11 conspiracy theory. The third is an argument that the U.S. Federal Reserve is a scam. It's almost entirely garbage, dependent on crackpot sources.

I posted a series of comments about the movie as I watched it, but I'll summarize those here and add a bit more.

The first part argues that Christianity is derived from Egyptian myth, primarily by pointing out parallels between them. The arguments are apparently derived from the self-published "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S (Dorothy M. Murdock) and perhaps also from Tom Harpur's The Pagan Christ, both works of pseudoscholarship based on the work of other pseudoscholars like 18th century archaeologist Godfrey Higgins, 19th century amateur Egyptologist and poet Gerald Massey, and Alvin Boyd Kuhn, a high school language teacher and promoter of Theosophy) and entirely ignores actual work in Egyptology. For example, the film draws a list of comparisons between Horus and Jesus that is just fabricated--Horus wasn't born of a virgin, he was the child of Isis and Osiris, though Isis was impregnated by Osiris through some magic after he was dead. There have been parallels drawn between Isis and Mary that are more plausible (especially in iconography), but the movie exaggerates them, too, and fails to note the considerable areas of dissimilarity. A quick look at the Wikipedia entries on Horus and Isis is sufficient to show that the comparison is strained. The significance of a December 25 birthdate is nonexistent--Christianity did acquire attributes of pagan religions later in its history, and it has clearly been a syncretistic religion, but while this is evidence of falsehood in Christian traditions, it is not a clue to its origin.

For accurate information about Christianity and the formation of the Christian tradition, virtually any mainstream academic work will be more reliable. There has been a lot discovered since the work of 19th century Theosophists, both in the form of document manuscripts and archaeology, that sheds light on the early history of Christianity. In discussions at the James Randi Educational Foundation Forums, poster GreNME wrote:
Oh, those people were mostly made of of the beginnings of the Theosophist movements (Blavatsky and the like) or people with similar stated motivations but not the same organizational structure (like Graves). Yeah, Dorothy [Murdock] cites regularly enough from these people (especially Graves and Massey), but the thrust or crux of her writing tends to be more similar to those like Allegro-- taking the message into a realm of New-Age-y attempts to center on mid-20th-century discoveries about the mystery schools.

That's why I mentioned Ehrman, by the way. I had the opportunity to send him a question on the topic of the "out of Egypt" mystery school centric literature coming out about by those like Dorothy, and his response was essentially that people who stick to that thin and shallow an interpretation of the mystery schools really don't understand the materials they're trying to work with in the first place.

I've read a few very well-worded academic arguments against a historical Jesus, but none of them rely on the mystery schools, Egyptian mythology, Krishna, or Mithras. They tend to focus on the culture of the region at the time and the unreliability of the few Roman authors who are used by apologists today. For me, all said and done, I don't much care because I'm not a Christian anyway. It's only reliably traceable back to Paul anyway, in my opinion.
So read some Bart Ehrman for a more accurate picture. The best case I've read for Jesus being a myth is in the books of G.A. Wells, though I'm not inclined to buy it. (Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle has also been recommended as a strong case for Jesus being mythical, but I've not read it.) I think the Arabic text of Josephus' reference to Jesus in Antiquities of the Jews provides strong evidence that Josephus did refer to a historical Jesus and that his text was altered by later Christian interpolation rather than an insertion completely made up out of whole cloth.

Some of the same kind of errors (via dependence on sources like Harpur and Kersey Graves) that are in "Zeitgeist" are also in Brian Flemming's "The God Who Wasn't There," for which you an find a nice fair-minded critique, along with responses from Flemming and Richard Carrier, in "God Who Wasn't There: an Analysis."

The second part is standard 9/11 conspiracy theory that has been refuted in previous posts at this blog. It completely ignores radical Islam and the actual events that led up to September 11, 2001, and like all such conspiracy theories, completely fails to provide a coherent explanation that incorporates the level of detail in the 9/11 Commission Report. That report is a flawed document, to be sure, but it is still far, far more comprehensive, detailed, and accurately sourced than anything the 9/11 truthers put out. The right way to investigate 9/11 is to start with the 9/11 Commission Report, with accounts of the movements and actions of the 19 terrorists, and going back farther to the 1993 WTC bombing, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and the Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, the murder of Emir Shalabi, the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane by El-Sayyid Nosair, the killing of Rashad Khalifa in Tucson in 1990 and the role of James Williams and Wadih el-Hage (secretary for Osama bin Laden in Sudan), and so on.

The U.S. government's connection is that it funded the mujahideen insurgents in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, and then walked away after the Soviets were defeated, allowing rich Saudis to step in. There's no question that "blowback" has played a major role, and I'll also agree that the Bush Administration has hugely exploited the 9/11 attacks to its advantage and to expand presidential power (as the PBS Frontline on "Cheney's Law" documents, which I highly recommend watching and you can see online).

The right way to investigate 9/11 is to stick to reliable sources and accounts that attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, not bullshit stories made by collecting a few bits of data from unreliable sources and constructing elaborate fantasies of speculation. Some reliable sources I recommend are Gerald Posner's Why America Slept, James Bamford's A Pretext for War, and James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans. Specifically on 9/11 conspiracy theory, read the book of critiques published by Popular Mechanics and visit websites like 911myths.com and Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.

Instead, Zeitgeist relies on crackpots like Michael Ruppert and Ted Gunderson, both former police officers who have a long history of promoting nonsensical conspiracy theories. Ruppert is best known for his claims to have found that the CIA was peddling drugs (itself a plausible claim, even if not well substantiated by him) while he was a narcotics detective for the LAPD; after being removed from the force in 1978, he has gone on to argue for Peak Oil and 9/11 conspiracy theory. In 2006, after facing charges of sexual harassment from a former employee whom he admits he paraded around the office in his underwear in front of, he fled to Venezuela, then moved to Canada, and then to New York and Los Angeles. Gunderson spouted nonsense about satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and has endorsed the accuracy of phony psychic Sylvia Browne, as well as promoting wild claims of child sexual abuse by "some of America's leading politicians" including George W. Bush, which makes him sound like the crazy mind-control sex slave claimants, "Brice Taylor" (Susan Ford), Cathy O'Brien, and Kola Boof (the last of whom makes the sex slave claims without the mind control claims).

The film provides no good sources for any of its claims, and seems to contradict itself. It claims there's no evidence connecting Osama bin Laden to the attacks (despite the fact that we have people like al Qaeda member Ramzi Binalshibh, who attempted to enter the U.S. to enter a flight school but was denied a visa, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, head of al Qaeda's media committee and main plotter of the attacks, in custody), yet turns around and suggests that there's something suspicious about the Bush family connections to the bin Laden family and that two members of the bin Laden family lived in Falls Church, Virginia "right next to CIA Headquarters." Why would that connection be relevant or suspicious if Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with it?

Osama bin Laden's father had 55 children and 22 wives, and there are currently about 600 bin Laden family members--most appear to be law-abiding citizens who have disowned Osama. The two Falls Church residents, however, were two of Osama's sons, Abdallah and Omar, the latter of whom was a member of al Qaeda.

The charge of the FBI being told to "back off" from bin Laden investigations from the White House is now known to have been approved by counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, not exactly a fan of George W. Bush, whose testimony on the issue has been somewhat inconsistent. While Clarke originally claimed the plan came from top officials in the White House and was approved in consultation with the FBI, he subsequently said that he took personal responsibility for the decision to allow the bin Laden family members to leave the U.S., and that he didn't think it was a mistake, and that he'd do it again.

The third section of the movie is about the U.S. Federal Reserve, which appears to be derived from John Birch Society propaganda, with a bonus argument that the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and thus federal income tax is invalid. It argues that the Panic of 1907 was caused by (rather than, as was actually the case, ended by) J.P. Morgan, and makes no mention of the Knickerbocker Trust. It argues that the Federal Reserve Act was put into effect by a conspiracy of international bankers and the Rockefellers through Sen. Nelson Aldrich, and claims that the Federal Reserve is entirely private. But the Fed's head and board of governors is appointed by the president, which isn't mentioned by the film. Wikipedia gets theFed's legal status right, it's part of the federal government but with a fair degree of independence so that politicians can't directly manipulate monetary policy. Its status is accurately described in Bill Woolsey's October 2004 article in Liberty magazine, "Who Owns the Fed?". A number of other Federal Reserve conspiracy claims are debunked here.

It then goes off into tax evader craziness, claiming that the 16th Amendment wasn't properly ratified, but without actually discussing the evidence. That argument is made in William J. Benson and Martin J. Beckman's book The Law That Never Was, which documents errors in the ratification documents, such as typos, alternate capitalization, alternate pluralization, etc. Courts have ruled that Benson's argument doesn't work and that his selling his book as part of a tax evasion defense package constitutes fraud, and he's served time in jail for tax evasion.

As an aside, while reviewing the above I came across an even more interesting argument against income tax (not in Zeitgeist) discussed by Cecil Adams in his "Straight Dope" column. The argument states that the 16th Amendment is invalid because Ohio was not a state at the time of ratification, and William H. Taft, who was president, was therefore not legally president since he was not a U.S. Citizen. Everybody thought Ohio was made a state in 1803, but in 1953 when Ohio was preparing for its 150th anniversary of statehood, they found that Congress had defined its boundaries and approved its constitution, but failed to admit it to statehood. Ohio made an appeal for statehood (delivering it to Congress by horseback) and Congress passed a resolution granting it retroactively. Cecil Adams' description and commentary about it is worth reading.

Tax protestor claims more generally are refuted at this GWU law professor's website, and a nice case study refutation is Sheldon Richman's three-part "Beware Income-Tax Casuistry."

"Zeitgeist: The Movie" was apparently put out by "GMP, LLC", which is a company based in Port Chester, NY registered to a James Coyman, who has been claimed to be the person behind the pseudonym "Peter Joseph" credited for the writing, producing, directing, and editing of the film. Other documents online associate GMP, LLC with John Giura, former vice chairman of north Chicago company CGI Holding Corporation (now Think Partnership, Inc., traded on AmEx under the symbol THK), a company with a subsidiary, WebSourced, Inc., which is "a leader in search engine marketing (see www.keywordranking.com) and on-line dating (see www.Cherish.com)." A John Giura has directed a music video for the Nashville, TN band Clem Snide, and a John P. Giura from New York City directed a 20-min short film called "Inside Trip" shown at the 2002 Maryland Film Festival, as well as some other videos found online attributed to him and his JPG Studio in NYC. The short festival film stars former Olympic wrestler John P. Giura, who has apparently lived in Oak Park, IL and New York City. In 1986, a John Giura of Oak Park, IL who was a partner in the firm of Stein, Roe, and Farnham, was charged by the SEC for participation in a complex "kickback and payoff" scheme which victimized Teamster union pension funds in upstate New York. It's not clear which, if any, of these is associated with the GMP, LLC that put out Zeitgeist. [See update below.]

There is a movie at Google Video titled "Zeitgeist Refuted" that appears to be itself filled with bad arguments promoting Christianity. Though I've only watched a small part of it, it doesn't seem to actually respond to the claims of "Zeitgeist: The Movie."

Other responses to "Zeitgeist: The Movie" include:

The criticism section of the Wikipedia article on "Zeitgeist: The Movie"
The Web Skeptic wiki entry on "Zeitgeist: The Movie"
The site "Zeitgeist, the movie Debunked"
Jay Kinney's review of "Zeitgeist" at boingboing
Tim Callahan's, "The Greatest Story Ever Garbled," a debunking of part I of "Zeitgeist" for Skeptic magazine's e-skeptic newsletter

Henry Makow's site, which amusingly takes issue with part one but swallows whole the nonsense in parts two and three and concludes that Zeitgeist is itself the product of a conspiracy, is worth a laugh.

UPDATE (August 6, 2009): I decided to add to the main post the text of my comment from October 30, 2008 below, about "Zeitgeist Addendum":

I watched a little bit (the first 30 minutes) of the "Zeitgeist Addendum," which looks to be largely derived from "Money is Debt," another video floating around the Internet. I skimmed through much of the rest.

It's somewhat more accurate than the previous parts, but has the same flaws as "Money is Debt," most seriously in its discussion of interest. The creators of both films do not seem to understand the time-value of money, or that the expansion of the money supply doesn't create problems so long as non-monetary wealth is also expanding. No matter what you use as money, there will always be a system of credit that rides on top of it, of the sort that has been contracting rapidly in the current financial crisis. (This contraction has been *increasing* the value of the U.S. dollar this year.)

The idea that money creates slavery and that if we just got rid of fractional reserve banking, nobody would be forced to work for a living is a bit ridiculous.

Looks like part 2 of the film is based on John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which is a book I've read. His book was entertaining, but mostly unbelievable, and he's not a credible source. Note that he claims that we all have the shamanic ability to shapeshift and become invisible, for example.

Some of the stuff he talks about is correct, such as U.S. intervention using the CIA in the Middle East and South America, the history of which is told in Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes.

In part III, the film suggests that we only need money because of scarcity, and that scarcity is a fiction. But scarcity isn't a fiction, scarcity exists because there is no limit to what people can want and desire--there can be scarcity even when a resource is abundant.

My impression is that the "Addendum" is just as bogus as the first three parts--it's largely lifted from other sources, and those sources are unreliable.

UPDATE (January 5, 2010): Better speculation by salvorhardin at Democratic Underground says that "Peter Joseph" is Peter J. Merola. This appears to be a correct identification if the Animation World Network's announcement of a multimedia event from May 29-June 3, 2007 is accurate:
ZEITGIEST is a unique and ambitious multimedia, musical event by P.J. Merola. This event is free and not for profit. It runs from May 29 - June 3, 2007 at 8:00-9:30 pm.

ZEITGEIST is an abstract, aesthetic exploration of personal belief and social myth -- told through a multimedia work of live solo percussion, stereo video displays and electronic music. Using animation, live performance, drama, humor, and narrative, ZEITGEIST attempts to bring its audience to a place that most likely counters what they believe as true.

Please visit http://www.zeitgeistnyc.com for a video preview and to make reservations.


The "GMP" is then "Gentle Machine Productions," as reported here. Gentle Machine Productions released a CD GMP001 titled "J.S. Bach on the Marimba," arranged by P.J. Merola, with P.J. Merola playing the marimba.

The Village Voice ran a story in 2004 about P.J. Merola and his brother Eric.

Friday, August 17, 2007

Answers in Genesis Wikipedia edits

Thanks to Wikiscanner, here are a few of the anonymous Wikipedia edits made by people at Answers in Genesis:

November 18, 2005: Changed a sentence in the entry on "Answers in Genesis" from "...according to Biblical myth, there was no death in the Garden of Eden" to "...according to the Biblical record, there was no death in the Garden of Eden."

December 5, 2006: Vandalized the entry on "Football" to add the words "Football sucks".

December 28, 2006: Added an entry for www.articledirect.com to the entry on "Free content." Does an AiG employee have another business on the side?

May 24, 2007: Modifies a sentence in the entry on "Creation Museum" from "This museum portrays the Earth's history interpreting the genesis literally" (ick!) to "The museum presents the account of man's origins and early history according to the Book of Genesis."

There are several other edits of "Creation Museum" and I didn't review them all, but most were reasonable improvements to the article, with the occasional biased statement that propounded creationism as true.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Wikiscanner

Virgil Griffith has put together a fascinating data-mining tool that compares anonymous Wikipedia edits to WHOIS records for IP addresses, to allow users to examine edits made by people at particular organizations. The tool can be used to examine edits by people at the NSA (Ft. Meade), the CIA, the Church of Scientology, Bob Jones University, the Environmental Protection Agency, Diebold, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Wal-Mart, Pfizer, Raytheon, The New York Times, Al-Jazeera, the WorldNetDaily, Fox News, the Republican and Democratic Party, the Vatican, among many others. The organizations listed here are all listed on the side of the tool's main search page, but there are many more in the drop-down list of user-submitted organizations, and you can specify organization names and locations.

Wired magazine has assembled a list of some of the more interesting edits, such as someone at Diebold deleting references to security flaws in electronic voting machines and someone at the CIA editing song lyrics from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Griffith, who built Wikiscanner while working at the Santa Fe Institute, begins graduate work in September at Caltech on theoretical neurobiology and artificial life under Christoph Koch and Chris Adami.

It's wonderful when data mining can be used for good purposes.

(Hat tip to Scott Peterson on the SKEPTIC list.)

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Wikigroaning

From jwz's blog:

The Art of Wikigroaning

The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah. Yeeaaah, we know, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. (We're calling it Wikigroaning for a reason.) The next step is to find your own article pair and share it with your friends, who will usually look for their own pairs and you end up spending a good hour or two in a groaning arms race. The game ends after that, usually without any clear winners... but hey, it beats doing work.

Modern warfareLightsaber combat
LizardsDragons
Prime numberOptimus Prime
Civil warCivil War (comic book)
Gray's AnatomyGrey's Anatomy
Raphael (archangel)Raphael (ninja turtle)
Citizen KaneClerks 2
Vulcan (mythology)Pon Farr
John LockeJohn Locke (Lost)
Category:American philosphers List of big-bust models and performers
Women's suffrage List of fictional gynoids and female cyborgs

A much longer list of entries to compare is at jwz's blog.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Where the wisdom of crowds fails

Richard Bennett has an interesting post about Wikipedia and the decentralization of knowledge collection titled "Teaching the hive mind to discriminate." He argues that while Wikipedia is good at accumulating the knowledge of a large number of individuals, it also collects their "prejudice, mistaken beliefs, wishful thinking, and conformance to tradition." It is unrealistic to expect that these erroneous beliefs will automatically be weeded out because "expertise is not as widely dispersed as participation":
So the real question about information and group scaling is this: are there procedures for separating good information from false information (”discrimination”) that are effective enough to allow groups to be scaled indefinitely without a loss of information quality? It’s an article of faith in the Wikipedia “community” that such procedures exist, and that they’re essentially self-operative. That’s the mythos of “emergence”, that systems, including human systems, automatically self-organize in such a way as to reward good behavior and information and purge bad information. This seems to be based on the underlying assumption that people being basically good, the good will always prevail in any group.
Readers of this blog know that I would argue that many religious and political beliefs are examples that support Bennett's position.

On a related point, Ed Felten has a recent post about how reputation systems on the Internet can be manipulated, referencing a pair of articles at Wired by Annalee Newitz. A common flaw is that the reputations of the raters themselves is either not taken into account or is easily manipulated. If there were a way of reliably weighting expertise of raters within appropriate knowledge domains, that could provide a method of discrimination to sort out the good from the bad information.

This is a subject that my planned (but never completed) Ph.D. dissertation in epistemology (on social epistemology, specifically on obtaining knowledge based on the knowledge of others) at the University of Arizona should have touched upon.

One philosopher who had touched on this subject at the time I was working on my Ph.D. (back in the early 1990s) was Philip Kitcher, whose book The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (1993, Oxford University Press) contains a chapter titled "The Organization of Cognitive Labor" (originally published as "The Division of Cognitive Labor" in the Journal of Philosophy, 87(1990):5-21).

Friday, February 23, 2007

Conservapedia

The blogosphere has been making fun of absurdities at Conservapedia, Andrew Schlafly's attempt to create a conservative-oriented version of Wikipedia. Orac points out that Conservapeia promotes the anti-vaccination Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (Schlafly is their legal counsel). Mark Chu-Carroll points out that even math has a liberal bias, according to Conservapedia. P.Z. Myers looks at some of Conservapedia's coverage of evolution.

Perhaps most entertaining is Jon Swift's coverage of Conservapedia, which contains links to many of the Science Bloggers' commentaries.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Britannica asks Nature for retraction on Wikipedia comparison

Back in December, I wrote about criticisms of Wikipedia in Communications of the ACM and a study published by Nature which found that Wikipedia's coverage of scientific subjects was about as accurate as that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Now Britannica has demanded a retraction of the Nature study on the grounds that its "research [is] invalid, its study poorly carried out, and its findings [are] 'so error-laden that it was completely without merit.'" (Inside quote is from Britannica's response, outside quote from Seattle Times coverage.)

Britannica's website has a 20-page PDF (7 pages of response, 13 pages of supporting information in two appendixes) that is a response to the Nature study, titled "Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature." This response states that "Nature's research was invalid. As we demonstrate below, almost everything about the journal's investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica."

The initial criticism of the response is that, while the Nature study headline claimed that "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries," the actual study showed that Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica.

The next criticism is that as they reviewed the alleged inaccuracies, they "discovered in Nature's work a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results." Nature refused to supply the complete reviewer reports comparing Britannica to Wikipedia articles, so Britannica reviewed the truncated reviewer reports that had been posted to the web, along with the articles which were supplied by Nature.

Several of the Britannica articles reviewed were not from the Encyclopedia, but from editions of the Britannica Book of the Year. Britannica notes that "Yearbook authors are often given greater latitude to express personal views than writers of encyclopedia articles." In one instance, a sentence in an article on Steven Wolfram "in which point of view figured significantly" was counted as an inaccuracy. In one case, an article on ethanol, the source of the article was from the Britannica Student Encyclopedia, "a more basic work for younger readers."

A more significant flaw was that in some cases, reviewers criticized articles for omissions when they were only sent excerpts from the articles. The report notes that the reviewer of an article on lipids was sent only a 350-word introduction rather than the full 6,000-word article, which covered the items marked as omissions on the basis of the introduction alone. Similarly, what was delivered to reviewers as articles on kin selection and punctuated equilibrium were actually only sections from a longer article on the theory of evolution, and what was identified as an article on field-effect transistors was a section of the entry on integrated circuits. In another case, an article on aldol reaction was composed of selections taken from two separate Britannica articles, connected together with language apparently authored by Nature's editors.

Another flaw in the Nature study was that Nature did not require reviewers to document their assertions; where they disagreed with articles being reviewed, the reviewers were taken to be authoritative. The Britannica response supplies two examples where the reviewers were incorrect.

Finally, Nature failed to distinguish minor from major errors, treating all as equal even though Wikipedia had more significant issues, and counted as omissions cases where Britannica made editorial judgments to cover specific information in either a different way than the reviewer preferred or in other articles in the encyclopedia.

I think Britannica makes their case--the study shouldn't be relied upon as evidence that Wikipedia's coverage of science is as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Congress banned from Wikipedia for abuses

Wikipedia has banned the IP blocks of U.S. Congress from the ability to make changes, due to repeated abuses by Congressional staffers who
repeatedly engage in revert wars, blank content, engage in libelous behavior or violate WP:NPOV, WP:CIV [Wikipedia's standards for neutral point of view and civility]. The editors from these IP ranges are rude and abrasive, immature, and show no understanding of Wikipedia policy. The editors also frequently try to whitewash the actions of certain politicians. They treat Wikipedia articles about politicians as though they own the articles, replacing community articles with their own sanctioned biographies and engaging in revert wars when other users dispute this sudden change. They also violate Wikipedia:Verifiability, by deleting verified reports, while adding flattering things about members of Congress that are unverified.
A newspaper article has been written on this subject in the Lowell Sun by Evan Lehmann.

A list of further details is in the Wikipedia entry on Congressional Staffer Edits.

Kudos to Wikipedia for treating Congress the way it deserves to be treated.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica

The December 2005 issue of Communications of the ACM contains an "Inside Risks" column raising concerns about some of the risks of Wikipedia:
relying on Wikipedia presents numerous risks:

* Accuracy: You cannot be sure which information is accurate and which is not. Misinformation has a negative value; even if you get it for free, you've paid too much.

* Motives: You cannot know the motives of the contributors to an article. They may be altruists, political or commercial opportunists, practical jokers, or even vandals (WP: ``Wikipedia:Most_vandalized_pages'').

* Uncertain Expertise: Some contributors exceed their expertise and supply speculations, rumors, hearsay, or incorrect information. It is difficult to determine how qualified an article's contributors are; the revision histories often identify them by pseudonyms, making it hard to check credentials and sources.

* Volatility: Contributions and corrections may be negated by future contributors. One of the co-authors of this column found it disconcerting that he had the power to independently alter the Wikipedia article about himself and negate the others' opinions. Volatility creates a conundrum for citations: Should you cite the version of the article that you read (meaning that those who follow your link may miss corrections and other improvements), or the latest version (which may differ significantly from the article you saw)?

* Coverage: Voluntary contributions largely represent the interests and knowledge of a self-selected set of contributors. They are not part of a careful plan to organize human knowledge. Topics that interest the young and Internet-savvy are well-covered, while events that happened ``before the Web'' may be covered inadequately or inaccurately, if at all. More is written about current news than about historical knowledge.

* Sources: Many articles do not cite independent sources. Few articles contain citations to works not digitized and stored in the open Internet.

But the authors don't seem to recognize that most of these risks apply to all published sources, not just Wikipedia or online sources. The reliability of sources on the Internet needs to be examined, just as the reliability of conventionally published sources needs to be examined. They also don't mention that volatility can be a benefit, reflecting rapid change as more or better information becomes available.

A comparison by Nature found that the treatment of scientific subjects by Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica is of comparable accuracy. This CNN article, referencing Tom Panelas of Britannica, says "Britannica researchers plan to review the Nature study and correct any errors discovered."

I bet Wikipedia will have its errors corrected before the Encyclopedia Britannica will. I encourage writers to continue criticizing Wikipedia for inaccuracies they discover--their criticisms are beneficial, as they spur corrections. For example, if you read former Britannica editor Robert McHenry's critique of the Wikipedia entry on Alexander Hamilton and then read the entry as it stands today, you'll see that all the specific complaints he had have been corrected.

Friday, September 09, 2005

Space Opera in Scientology

Tomorrow's featured article on Wikipedia is "Space Opera in Scientology Doctrine," a very well-written entry that tells you pretty much all you need to know about Scientology's cosmology. Oh, the entry on Xenu is also a good one.