An article in the Chronicle Of Higher Education serves as a stark lesson in how policies, procedures and bureaucracy can warp an organization’s purpose and lead to self-destructive conduct that injures stakeholders and destroys trust. The entity at issue: Wikipedia. And now we know why, despite the immense growth and improvement in the web’s community encyclopedia, it still can’t be trusted….and may never be trustworthy.
Historian and researcher Timothy Messer-Kruse tells of his decade-long effort to correct misinformation in Wikipedia relating to the Haymarket riot and subsequent trial in 1886, a landmark episode in the social, political and labor history of America. Messer-Kruse discovered that the entry included an outright error that had become standard in the historical accounts, but that he had personally proven was false through meticulous research. But Wikipedia wasn’t interested in accuracy:
“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.”
“More popular views”? History and science are littered with “popular views” that are dead wrong and that cause untold misery as a result. Shouldn’t an information resource be dedicated to getting the information right? Well, according to the bots who run Wikipedia, apparently not:
“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.”
So that’s Wikipedia’s policy: if misinformation is widespread enough, it will receive precedence over a more accurate source. The flaw in the jaw-dropping message Messer-Kruse received is that a source having information that is determined to be false can no longer be “taken as reliable.” Including incorrect information means that the source isn’t reliable. The fact that the source was “taken as reliable” doesn’t make false information preferable to the truth.
Messer-Kruse refused to give up his effort to make the online resource that comes up first when you Google “Haymarket riot” accurate on the topic:
“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.”
And that’s the problem. Wikipedia is run by people who don’t have any relevant expertise except in running community-edited information sources. They rely on quantity, because they don’t have the qualifications to determine quality. So they install rules to prevent a determined zealot with an eccentric perspective from changing an account that had been contributed to by many theoretically objective sources. Unfortunately, those same rules prevent a genuine expert from helping Wikipedia stop participating in ongoing public misinformation. (My father had a similar experience with Wikipedia when he found an outright error regarding a World War II battle that he participated in. The wrong Belgian town was named in the article, and my father tried to correct it; he had been interviewed in several books on the battle. When asked for his sources, he wrote back, “I was there.” When the Wiki representative responded that this wasn’t a valid credential, my father, asked me, “What good is an information source that isn’t interested in the truth?)
I understand why Wikipedia is like this, but it doesn’t change the fact that a source that is structured to favor a popular misconception over a credible correction has no integrity—ironic, since integrity is the primary justification for rigid adherence to rules. If the most recent researcher on the Haymarket riot can’t improve the Wikipedia entry on that topic, then no information in Wikipedia is trustworthy.
And if the Wikipedia policies lead to that result, I have to assume that the people that run Wikipedia either want it that way, or are too incompetent to run an encyclopedia.
Ethics Alarms 
I read about that last night. This is the same problem we have with global warming, the same problem courts have with expert testimony. Her problem isn’t that Wikipedia doesn’t recognize the correct information. The field of history itself doesn’t recognize the correct information. As the original article states, she found the correct information by just looking up the trial transcripts. There was extensive evidence presented against the defendants including over 100 witnesses and innovative forensic evidence. Why did the history books say there was not evidence? It isn’t like it wasn’t known at the time. Why did the history books print the incorrect story for over 100 years? They lied. They all lied. They wanted to report that it was a peaceful demonstration by anarchists and trade union activists that was brutally broken up by vicious, racist police and Pinkerton guards. They wanted the convicted to be “Martyrs” and the police and the company to be villains. They couldn’t do that if they told the truth.
Unfortunately, I think Wikipedia is not the unethical party here. You have 100 years of historian saying one thing and one historian now saying something else. Yes, she is probably correct, but how do YOU know? Did YOU read the trial transcripst? Do you know how all the other experts from the last 100 years reached the opposite conclusion? Everything she wrote in her article could be false for all you know. She appears to be the only historian in the world with this opinion. Who are YOU to disregard every other historian in favor of this one? That brings me to the real unethical party, the field of history. The historians of world have perpetuated this lie for over 100 years. It will take the historians of the world to undo it. Wikipedia should not overturn the consensus of an entire field because one ‘expert’ says otherwise. Until the consensus of that field changes, the Wikipedia entry shouldn’t change. The fact that the consensus is wrong says magnitudes about the ethics and integrity of the field in question, however.
I’m going to have to side with Wikipedia here. A popular encyclopedia should reflect the general consensus among experts (e.g. people reasonably familiar with a topic) even if this consensus happens to be wrong. I’ll explain why with a thought experiment. Say Wikipedia existed in 1915 and Einstein logged in and changed the entry on gravity. He would write that gravity is not a force, as was the common consensus, but a consequence of the curvature of spacetime. Einstein would have been right, but his edit would have been immediately reversed, and the Wikipedia editors would have been correct to do so because his theory was not yet commonly accepted. The thing is, for every Einstein who challenges common knowledge and wins, there are hundreds if not thousands of cranks who think you can get sunbeams from cucumbers, or something like that (okay, bad example, because you can get light from cucumbers, but you get the point). If Wikipedia allowed every “expert” with an opinion contrary to the mainstream to make lasting changes, the whole encyclopedia would be chaos.
As for the example about your father, there should be countless books correctly stating where the battle took place. He could have just cited one of those. If the historical consensus is wrong, then the problem goes beyond Wikipedia, and your father would have been doing the world a service to correct the historical record, but correcting it on Wikipedia would not solve the problem (someone else would read one of these allegedly reliable books and change it back, completely innocently).
I explained to my father why he couldn’t make a change that he knew was true. I also said in the post that I understood why Wikipedia was the way it was. But is is still absurd for an online source to take so long to change, as the Haymarket example demonstrated. Misinformation accumulates over decades, and the Wikipedia formula requires decades to fix it. The Encyclodedia Brittanica print edition was faster!
At least Wikipedia contains the seeds of its own solution. If I know Wikipedia is wrong, I can correct it. If it gets changed back to its former incorrect state, I can see that the consensus is wrong and then publish articles, books, etc. to correct it. You are correct that this would take me decades, but the solution might be faster if it were undertaken by a better scholar than I.
I don’t know much about the Haymarket riot and subsequent trial, and now I don’t want to go to Wikipedia and read up on it there. Based on Michael’s point, it sounds like it is a controversial subject, with one’s view of what happened coloured by one’s opinion of the 19th Century labour movement, capitalism, etc. If this is the case, then there is no surprise that there have been problems with Wikipedia. Wikipedia often doesn’t handle controversy very well (just look at the Wikipedia page about their lamest edit wars). It’s different from an encyclopedia written by one person, who gets to editorialize.
Wikipedia is a joke!! With my friends if we are arguing about something the rule is you can not go to wikipedia as a reference.
I have found that Wikipedia is a convenient source for non-controversial information. I am not going to use it to look up information about President Obama or Mitt Romney, but if someone wants an overview of Big Bang theory or the Standard Model, or needs to know the formula for nicotine, it is pretty reliable. Many such topics have a knowledgeable person who monitors that page and they change any inaccurate information. The better pages also have links to more detailed primary and secondary sources. You always have to use common sense, however. If you suddenly see that the population of African elephants has dramatically increased in the last 10 years you should be suspicious. That being said, why weren’t we (or our teachers) suspicious of the Haymarket Martyrs or when the history books said the Rosenbergs were innocent?
I can’t say too much about the Haymarket Martyrs, but if my old grade school is any indication, I think it’s become more commonly acknowledged now in public education that the Rosenbergs were in fact guilty. With regard to your questions, I think it’s in part because popular passions about such issues have somewhat faded, and also simply because school textbooks will always inevitably somewhat lag behind scholarship. In a similar light, I’d guess that the US history classes are somewhat more favorable to LBJ and Nixon and less so to Kennedy nowadays.
Disclaimer: I should note that my high school history teachers were the type to read up on the subject for themselves, so their representativeness is questionable.