Wikipedia changed the world. Before it came along, you had to go to the library to get the answers you sought. And you and your friends had to just agree to disagree on facts. And as the internet grew and commercialized, Wikipedia remains free and open.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. Just mister Green Jeans and Zipper Face and Madam Lucks all here together bring you stuff.
You should Who do I get to beat this week?
You get to pick?
Oh, I'll be Zipper Base of course.
Oh yeah, I was gonna be Zipper Face, but okay, I'll be mister green Jeans all right? From what was that from Captain Kangaroo.
The only one I recognize is mister green Jeans. I've never heard of the other two.
I made them up. Oh okay, perfect, you just heard of them just now.
I'm not losing my mind.
No, you're with it. You're with it man, So Chuck, I'm really kind of excited about this one. Today we're doing Wikipedia, and as longtime listeners of Stuff you Should Know are already aware, we have a standing ban for our writers on using Wikipedia as a source. Don't even peek at it. Maybe maybe to confirm a date or something like that, but just leave Wikipedia out of it. And it's really twofold. There's two reasons. One, it's long been notoriously unreliable because anybody can edit any page or write whatever they want on a Wikipedia page, so that inherently makes it unreliable by nature. And number two, we would never want to be accused of using Wikipedia as like our source article. And when you read how some topic works, it's really difficult for that not to infect the way that you interpret it and report it later on, meaning that you could accidentally kind of copy the structure of a Wikipedia article. We never want to do that. So those two reasons we've always kind of banned Wikipedia.
Right, yeah, I mean we don't use ourselves except for, like you said, you know, confirmation of the odd thing. Occasionally I will use it as a I will go to the and we've talked about this too, the links to the original articles and write papers and studies and things like that. It could be handy, and it's handy in my everyday life, but we've never used it. And that's why it's even though it shouldn't bother me, it still gets under my skin when and I don't read reviews that much, but when people say like.
Well these go do a suit down read Wikipedia articles to you.
Right, right, Because people say that they do say that, and we want them to be able to be wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The thing is, I have to say this. I haven't. I haven't decided we need to alter our editorial policies or anything like that. But after researching Wikipedia, I have come to have a slightly different, actually a radically different opinion of Wikipedia as a whole, collectively put together, and just what it is, what it stands for, and just how reliable it is. Turns out like our view was maybe a little rooted in pre twenty thirteen, twenty twelve, and it may be time to just kind of evolve, but still again not touch our editorial policy.
Yeah.
I mean I've always You've always been the one who was a little more grudgey.
Oh, I thought that was both of us. I thought we'd agreed on that. Huh.
No, I mean I don't think we should use it for a reference, But I've always enjoyed the site, and I think you've always been a little more had your nose turned up a little more, which I totally respect.
I don't know if I would characterize it as nose turned up. I'm not sure what it is, but I don't know is it nose turned up? Is that what I've been doing all these years.
Maybe, but hey, you're in a you're an educated.
Smart toast about town dude.
No, and I think you've always just been a little bit like that's just not for me, which I get.
All right, Well, then I'm here to say I renounced that elitist view and I am a lot more accepting of Wikipedia and what it is and what it does.
All right, Okay, great, I guess.
Call me Saul from now on. Oh wait, Paul, you better I head it backwards, didn't.
I are you speaking biblicaly? Yeah, biblicy, bibugy, bibby. I don't know. Let's not get into that.
We should quickly just go through a what it is, and Dave helped us out with this and just a few sort of fun stats at the beginning. But Wikipedia, of course, is an online encyclopedia created or you know, maintained by wikipedians who are users, just everyday people.
So that's what it is.
But what it really is is the large's reference work ever, created ninety times larger than the one hundred and twenty volume encyclop Encyclopedia Britannica.
That's IMPRESSIB sixty two.
Million articles, three hundred plus languages, four billion plus visitors a month, edging up towards three hundred thousand Wikipedians or Wikipedia editors.
And that's all I got.
But actually I got one more I did see And this is in two thousand and eight, so this is a long time ago. There was one computer scientist who estimated that up to that point there were one hundred million hours spent developing and getting Wikipedia up to that point.
Wow. Did you mention how many edits are made every second?
Yeah?
Okay, I didn't think you did, And I'm glad you didn't because this one's my favorite.
You like it.
This is a I think a twenty twenty two estimate. Five point two Wikipedia edits are made every second. Wow, And each month fourteen million edits are made. And you as we kind of talk about how Wikipedia actually works, that will become more and more significant as we go.
Yeah, for sure.
So, I mean that's sort of the overview of some stats and how it's defined, but what it really is, and they've kind of nailed it on the head as far as their ethos. It's kind of a utopian idea and an experiment that people can get on the Internet, and not justly insults, but they can get on the Internet and create an important volume of knowledge for people.
Yeah. I saw a great quote that said, it's a good thing that Wikipedia works in practice, because it certainly doesn't work in theory.
Oh interesting.
Yeah, and no matter where you are around the world, that's not one hundred percent true. But in a large area, a swath of the world, there are Wikipedias for you in your language about your culture. Whether you speak Zulu or Tartar, or Sanskrit, Old English, Creole, Haitian Esperanto, Yoruba, Piedmontese, Yiddish, all of them have their own Wikipedia. There's all a lot of different WIKIPEDIAI I'm just adding eye to anything plural from now on. That's my new thing. But it's really impressive, like the idea that people came together and did this for free as volunteers, and now we have, like you said, by far, the largest reference work ever created.
That's right, a site and we'll get into all this, the whys of all this, but you know it's a site with no ads. It is a very low fi site that is overseen by the Wikimedia Yeah, that's right, Wikimedia Foundation.
It is funded by donations.
I know at times when you go to Wikipedia, everyone but you, that is, occasionally you might see a little a hat out and said, hey, wouldn't you drop a couple of bucks in this thing if you like using the site.
I've donated to Wikipedia. Now I get emails for it too.
I see. That's how they get you.
You give them an inch and they take a mile. You know.
Operating budget of about one hundred and sixty eight million dollars a year, which is surprising to me. I didn't know it would cost that much.
Oh, I thought that was low. I was surprised. Yeah, I mean it's one of the biggest websites in the entire world. I think it's number three or five, depending who you ask for number of visits monthly visits like.
Yeah, but for something to have be completely created for free, mm hm, that seems high.
I get that. But one hundred and sixty five million of that is Jimmy Wales's compensation, right, and let's talk about who Jimmy Wales is. That's the lie, by the way, everybody.
Yeah, we should get into the history of it and hop in the old wayback machine. Oh, fire it up. We're not gonna have to go far, so we don't need much fuel. Trying to be more efficient with our travels these days in this thing.
Yeah, we're using hamsters instead of kerosene lately.
That's right.
So we're gonna go back to the mid nineteen nineties when the World Wide Web was just a young babe in the crib.
And very adorably.
When all these websites websites started popping up, there were people that were like, hey, you know what we need now is we got to be people, got to be able to find this stuff, So we need web directories. This is obviously before Google was a just a very convenient way or any or Bang or you know your search engine of choice.
Don't leave Edge out her Edge.
Had come along.
So in nineteen ninety four, Yahoo had a pretty popular web directory going on. And if you're young enough to where you don't even know what that means, that means literally you would go to a page and it would say, like sports entertainment, kind of like a newspaper.
Here's all ten websites on sports.
Exactly, and it would list those websites. But then came along a company called Bomus. It was an early dot com who said no, you know what I think we should do, like an open source version of this web directory and we'll call it a webring.
Yeah, And the whole premise was if you were a part of the webring, your site was you would have a little thing saying like baseball or something like that the bottom of your site, and that was your connection to the webring, and you could click next and it would take you to the next site that had been connected to the first site, because they're both about baseball or something way more niche than that. And anybody, because like you said, it was open source, could make their own webring. There were usually webmasters who looked at the sites, approved them, actually put them together. But eventually, as you had more and more sites added to this ring, you had a more and more dense collection of information about one usually fairly niche topic. Apparently Pamela Anderson was like one of the biggest webrings right out of the gate back in nineteen ninety six. But that was the premise of what Wikipedia eventually was built on. It was open source, people could contribute, and the the initial body of knowledge was built upon by more and more people.
Yeah, and Bomas got popular. They kind of focused on manned stuff for lack of a better term, and I think that's what they literally called it. It was like car things and sports things, Pamela Anderson. And then they quickly realized, hey, naked women on the Internet performs really well, as it turns out, so they really started focusing on that kind of adult material. I guess to call it something a little tame and chiefly nude pictures of women. And they really drilled down on that and got very, very popular because of that, but then pivoted pretty quickly because Jimmy Wales, the guy you mentioned, one of the founders of Bomas, had a larger, more pure vision in mind when he said, hey, I think we could create a free encyclopedia. So we founded new Pedia, which was financed by Bone.
Yeah, and everybody uses an encyclopedia, whether you just need to make a quick reference, whether you're a kid writing a research paper, whether you're a parent researching your kid's research paper. Like, people just need an encyclopedia. It's a basic thing. So let's create one and then let's sell ads against it. There's nothing wrong with that. That's what we do. We put out free content and then there's ads that like that was essentially the basic premise of websites forever and still generally is right. The thing about it that made it a little more than just like a money making scheme was that from the outset, James Wales and his partner, a guy named Larry Sanger, were really, really like they placed a tremendous amount of emphasis on truth and correctness and their articles being error free. So it wasn't just something they slapped together. It had nothing to do with long tail or any terrible ideas like that. It was really well researched article was vetted by academics and professionals, with ads sold against it. That was new Pedia and it was a great idea, except that in the like go go hustle early part of the Internet where you could just get things in like that, New Pedia was glacially slow, and it was that was ultimately its downfall.
Yeah, for sure, And that's in you, by the way, not in ew in Upedia. It was slow because they, like you said, they wanted to get things right. There was a seven step process in place before anything was published, so it was sort of the traditional publishing model that had been used for you know how long However, long publishing traditional publishing had been around like this, which is, you you have something reviewed, whether you work for a newspaper and you do your fact checking, or you have your editor in chief checking on things. In this case, Larry Sanger was the editor in chief of new Pedia, or you know, have things reviewed by experts and then you published. That was what they were doing sort of in that order. You write something, you review it, review it through that seven step process, and then you publish it online.
And it was, like you said, slow.
I think twenty one articles came out in that first year, and Sanger, it seemed like, in particular, was pretty frustrated with that speed.
Yeah, for sure, getting content out.
For sure. So just put that aside. These guys are kind of in suspended animation at this moment. In I think nineteen ninety nine, end of nineteen ninety nine, a few years earlier earlier than that, there was a guy named Wag Cunningham in the very early nineties. He was a software engineer. He was trying to figure out how to share ideas at his company that anybody at the company could like kind of contribute to, right, So he actually took an Apple program called HyperCard and created a hypertext program that he called quick weeb I believe was the first name for and that was basically where anybody could go into this program and contribute to this body of knowledge, this body of information, and it would grow and grow and grow, and things would link to other things. That's hypertext and very fortunately. Ward Cunningham went on vacation to Hawaii also in the early nineties, and he noticed that there were little airport shuttles called wiki wiki airport buses, which means quick wiki means quick and he just loved that name. So he changed the name from quick web to wiki wiki Web, and that was the first wiki. What we understand is a wiki a bunch of user generated content that anybody can contribute to and edit and link to other stuff. The whole thing just becomes self referential and grows as a result.
Yeah, and it was basically, in his mind, a way for programmers to talk to one another about programming. But he realized he was on to a larger concept. Not so much that he tried to get a patent on the concept of a wiki, which was probably a grave error, but he said at the time he didn't think like anyone would be interested in something like that, so it wasn't worth pursuing.
The other thing we should mention about.
Ward Cunningham is he has now been credited with what's known as Cunningham's law.
Have you ever heard of this?
I have?
Which is kind of the foundation of the Internet in some ways, and definitely Wikipedia, which is he said the best way to get a correct answer online is not by asking a question, but by posing a wrong answer. And it was sort of a theory but has kind of proved to be true in his mind at least. And I agree that, like, when you ask someone something online, it can be very hard or slow to get a correct answer, but if you post something wrong then people are very very quick to correct you. And so that was sort of the basis of his WikiWikiWeb with programmers talking to one another.
Yeah, and it's preserved at wiki dot C two dot com, And like, I can't make heads or tails of any of it, but it's still there. It's super cute and quaint looking, but it's neat. The usability is really amazing too, especially for what he built it on.
That'd be fun if you could go to a year of the Internet.
I know, what I'm man, and I think you can on Internet archive.
No, I mean like turn your Internet into two thousand, like two thousand and one or nineteen ninety seven, and not just read things, but have it just be like from that year and what it was like.
I got to just give check GPT like three more months.
Right, you're probably right.
So now we're going to come back to Jimmy Wales Larry Sanger and this dispute over who came up with the idea of taking the wiki concept that Ward Cunningham came up with and applying it to the encyclopedia concept that Wales and Sanger had come up with new Pedia. It doesn't ultimately matter, but just to name check, a guy named Jeremy Rosenfeld was a bonus employee. He's the one who Jimmy Whale says came up with the idea of using a wiki. Larry Sanger said he came up with the idea after having dinner with a guy named Ben Kovitz. He says he even remembers that he ordered enchiladas at the dinner. That's how much he remembers it either way, regardless, within two weeks of that dinner, that Larry Sanger had where he was introduced to the concept of a wiki. New Pedia had become a wiki, and the new Pedia advisory board was like, we don't like this idea. The smells of like brand new stuff and we're afraid of it. And also, what's this whole concept of write, publish and then review. That's that's like sacrilegious, Like you can't do that. And so Wales and Sanger said, all right, you guys stay over here with new Pedia. We're gonna go over here with our thing. We're gonna call it Wikipedia, and Wikipedia within two weeks was born on January fifteenth, two thousand and one. Larry's had that dinner on January second, two thousand and one.
That's right.
And as far as that claim for what it's worth, the actual Wikipedia article on Sanger confirms that it was him. Well, then I don't know, true, I don't know Jimmy Wales just begrudgingly allows that to stay there or not. But everything I saw kind of said it was Sanger. So just like I said, take it for what it's worth.
It's funny you mentioned Jimmy Wales begrudgingly just letting it stay there because He was caught very early on in the early days of Wikipedia, editing the Bonus dot com Wikipedia entry to remove softcore pornography from it, say like the words softcore pornography, and he got called out for that.
And they're like, dude, that's how that was our foundation at first.
So but that's a really good example of what's starting to happen at this time around two thousand and one with Wikipedia. It's brand new, but people are starting to kind of come to it, figure it out out, get the hang of it, and become like enthralled by it and starting to like write articles, edit articles, discuss how to how to best make an edit. Like it's starting to kind of grow. But it took a truly horrible event for Wikipedia to truly come into its own for the very first time. And I say, we take a break, Chuck.
That's quite a cliffhanger to stop. You should.
All right, So you were hanging on a cliff here. You talked about a terrible event. You probably don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what that event was. Considering Wikipedia really got cranking in January of two thousand and one, kind of sped along for about nine months, growing pretty quickly compared to initially. I think there were about ten thousand articles written over that period. And then nine to eleven happened, and that changed everything because news sites crashed. Everyone was trying to get information and they were going to these you know, super heavily ad filled websites, websites with videos, pop up ads, all kinds of things that like slow traffic down and overload things, and all these people were trying to go to these sites to find out news and information. Wikipedia is there with its lo fi, no ads, no pop ups, no video kind of layout, and it didn't crash. And so the September eleventh, two thousand and one terrorist attack article on Wikipedia grew at a speed that I don't know any web page has ever grown before.
No, and that was that it's like Wikipedia. The idea finally took off on September eleventh and the days after because people were searching for information on it, like every second, they were just looking for more and more info. Stuff was news was coming out hard and fast like that, and with the news sites down, that Wikipedia article became like the de facto source of information, and so as more people came to it and were like what is this and then kind of figured out right there on the fly how Wikipedia worked. They actually stuck around and started adding to the article, editing the article, discussing like the wording for the article, and that single article on the September eleventh, two thousand and one terrorist attack that became the cornerstone of how Wikipedia developed. That article did in all of the discussions, and still today they archived all the discussions all the way back to the first day, and it is really interesting to see like the arguments and discussions that people got into over that because it was at the time and then in the years following, it's just always been such a controversial topic and such a sacred topic too here in the United States.
Yeah, and not only just the topic, but kind of everything that they were, all the subtopics, and that was where Wikipedia really came to find what it was and what it wasn't because they were doing things like truly helpful things at the time, like a list of victims, blood drives and links to where you could go to help and donate and things like that. But as that was happening, like you said, it was sort of happening in real time, and their talk page was flooded with people saying, well, wait a minute, I'm not sure beyond just like editing, you know, the news and facts. They were like, well, what are we doing here? We need to be truthful and accurate, of course, but do we have stuff like is this an encyclopedia or not? Like do we have a list of victims of you know, I hate to say it, but like people who aren't well known, because an encyclopedia probably wouldn't. Would we have links to blood drives? Probably not, because an encyclopedia wouldn't. So as they went through those really pretty tough discussions, what Wikipedia wasn't became pretty clear.
Yeah, it became what's known as the five pillars, which we'll talk about in a second. But one of the things that emerged from it too was they weren't there to report the news. So anybody who had breaking news, it became clear Wikipedia was not a place for that. They were meant to be behind the curve. They report on reliable sources reporting. That's what the entries were built on, and that was a huge, huge foundation that was kind of laid that day, I guess. But just as one little aside at this time, shortly After this, Wikipedia attracted a lot of people. People started sticking around and writing other articles that were related to the two thousand and one September eleventh attacks, and it just started to grow. At the same time, it also attracted trolls essentially out of the gate, and there were trolls on the site. And Larry Sanger did not have the stomach for that at all. And I don't blame him. Trolls sucked. They're the worst. But he quit because he said, we need to have some sort of structure here. We need to have a constitution, We need a way to vet these these claims and these facts that are in these articles. We got to slow this down, man. And Jimmy Wales is like, no, that's we're not going to do that. We've met in ein ran chat forums, for God's sake, We're not gonna We're not gonna do this. We're going to go the opposite direction. We'll figure it out as as we go. And so Larry Sanger quit and became one of the biggest critics of Wikipedia. He was only there for I think fourteen months.
Yeah, Weiss called them their most outspoken critic In two thousand and seven, he said the site was broken beyond repair. He has said that there's a large and this is just a few of the criticisms. Of course, there's very very many. You might want to say he has a bone to pick with Wikipedia, but I also feel like he truly believes his stuff. Sure, he said that it has a massive left wing bias and has used examples on everything from LGTBQ websites to Donald Trump versus Barack Obama's I keep saying websites, I should call them Wikipedia articles rather Oh yeah, okay, Donald Trump's page versus Barack Obama's page, all kinds of stuff, basically saying that, hey, we're only getting one point of view here. We're not getting the right wing side of things, We're not getting the libertarian viewpoint on things. So he's had a bone to pick with Wikipedia, although I think he has softened it here and there saying that I think he said that the bias is probably the least of their problems. So that's not like really where he's.
Hand has had. I don't want to make it seem like that.
Well, what's interesting is his criticism seem to have worked themselves out because one of the things that Wikipedia strives for is neutrality is close to neutrality and objective, I don't. I keep wanting to use the word reporting, but that's wrong. Reporting makes it documenting. It's neutral, objective, documentation of knowledge. That's what it's after, right. And So I was looking at banned users and a lot of them seem to be like social justice warriors who are like righting wrongs and they get banned for life. So I mean, I don't think that it necessarily has a political bias one way or the other, if anything. Politically, from what I can tell, it's that's where it's closest to neutral. Of all gender, ethnicity, that's a different story. But politically it does seem to be pretty centrist.
Yeah, well Sanger doesn't feel like it at least, but you know that's his take.
Well get him on the phone.
Oh man, what if we took Collers, that'd be great, Go ahead, Collar. I've always wanted to say that, Hey, long time, first time. So in two thousand and two, Wikipedia avoided what would have been a sea change when they thought about getting ads on the site and making money, you know, the good old fashioned webway, and the people of Wikipedia got upset. Users were like no, no, no, this is what makes you guys different. You can't do that in Spain. There were some Spanish Wikipedians who got so upset they created their own well, I guess you would say Encyclopedia libra, but it's just spelled differently. They said, you know, that scared them off, basically to where they're created their own And he said, all right, I'll hear you loud and clear. We'll launch the Wikimedia Foundation.
That was pretty early on.
It was in two thousand and three, and then they change from dot com to dot org. They shut down new Pedia that same year and got together and figured out these five pillars that you mentioned earlier, one of which you just reference, which was neutrality.
Yeah. So there are five pillars the fundamental principles of Wikipedia, and a lot of these were find its roots in that September eleventh, two thousand and one page, but they've also really been refined and developed over time. And I think we should cut to the last one first because it really kind of gives a It gives you, like the right impression when you hear the rest of the rules. And the last one is that Wikipedia has no firm rules. There's no one in charge. There's a group of people who are volunteer administrators who actually can ban you. They actually can delete like entire entries if they feel like that's necessary. But those are those people are few and far between, and they are meant to like not wield their power. Essentially, no one's in charge, No one owns an article, and there are different competing philosophies about how Wikipedia should be built, how articles should be written, what's truth, what's a reliable source? And these competing philosophies battle one another or engage in conversation and dialogue with one another on the talk page for these amazing like like the really well written, well researched articles or entries that people really care about. There's really fascinating discussions about, you know, just wording, like just what word to use or this word doesn't quite fit, or what's a reliable citation? And that the reason why it works is because there's it will constantly evolve in that in that setup, there's no rigidity. It's like whatever philosophy wins out wins out, and that one specific disagreement over that one specific edit on that one specific entry, and then the next time it may have a completely different outcome, but collectively as a whole, that leads to that leads to the neutrality that we referenced earlier.
That's right, So that's I guess five and two. Pillar Number one is that it's an encyclopedia, which speaks for itself. Number three is that it's free. And that well also kind of part three because you said that no one owns a Wikipedia article. I imagine that can be tough at times. If you have, if you're if you have created an entry that is very very niche that you knew a lot about and you care a lot about, I imagine it can it can be very tough to sort of hand that over and say, okay, like I guess anyone can change this right, so that that must be hard, but still a pillar.
And the number four is.
Editors should treat each other with respect and civility. I'm sure that that well, we know that that is gotten out of hand because there's been reports of bullying within the what are they called wikipedians. But the pillar at least is to avoid these edit wars and work with your fellow editors instead of against them, to not bully, to have patients with new editors, and things like that and try and foster like kind of a different community for what usually happens online.
Yeah, what's amazing is it generally works. The whole premise of that pillar is assume good faith. That it's such a it's such an important point that it's abbreviate is AGF, and that is that if you see somebody adding some dumb, dumb fact that's clearly a conspiracy theory, as if it's fact to some article, don't don't take that act as a like like they're willfully trying to harm that article or hurt Wikipedia or personally insult you. What they're doing probably if you assume good faith is in their mind they think they're actually helping Wikipedia, they're helping the site, they're making this entry more legit, even though they're totally completely wrong. So if you come at it from that premise where you assume good faith, then that's where it's going to. That's where it's least likely to devolve into an argument or name calling or threats or wiki bullying. And that seems to be like the the case or the place that the editors that I saw will go from. Like that whole assuming good faith first part a lot of them, do not all of them obviously, because it's the Internet for sure.
All Right, I say we take another break and come back with blocks and bands and whether or not Wikipedia is truly reliable?
Is that sound good?
That sounds great, Chuck? All right, Still you should know so even though you assume good faith that you're supposed to assume good faith, like we said, it can become clear that somebody's like willfully being a jerk. There's a whole thing called vandalism, where you are purposefully like inserting incorrect stuff into an article just to mess with people, right, just to mess with the article. It can be hilarious. Spamming is another one, where you promote yourself or your product, which is just you should just know that you don't do that, but people do that.
What else, well, obviously we've talked about the bullying and harassment, the three revert rule, which is basically you don't revert or change or undo three edits on the same page within twenty four hours, which is kind of like a slow year role move a little bit. Copyright violations pretty self explanatory. Using multiple Wikipedia accounts, which they call sock puppetry. It's very cute and anything. Just that's against the idea of what they're trying to do, which is to build out this encyclopedia and all of this is this is not decided upon by just your average user or Wikipedia Wikipedia, and rather but the volunteer administrators. I think the English Wikipedia has more than eight hundred administrators, and they are Wikipedians. They're just really experienced ones who know the ins and outs and take it really seriously. They do not work for the Wikimedia Foundation and get a cut of that one hundred and sixty million bucks a year, right, but they're the ones in charge of determining when a block or a ban can happen.
Blocks being.
Temporary, they can be longer duration wise, it can be shorter, can be a one specific thing you did in an article or the whole article that you're blocked from for a little while. You can appeal those, but it's meant to be a preventative measure and not a punitive. And then you have the ban, which kind of speaks for itself. It's usually a site band, which means you just you can't come on here anymore.
You know, you can go on, but you can't make a single edit. All you can do is sit there and read pal.
Oh well yeah, I mean we're talking about editing, not like anyone can read anything.
Sure, sure, right, And also anybody can edit unless you've been blocked or banned, and you don't even have to create an account, which is one of the cool things. But there's entire site bands, so like you can be completely banned from English Wikipedia, or you could be globally banned, so any Wikipedia in any language. And I believe some of the other Wiki projects like wictionary, like you just you'll be you can't do anything on those.
Yeah, So that kind of brings us to where we started with this whole thing and why we didn't use it. Why we don't use it and started out at least and still don't. Is that is it? Is it reputable? Is it truthful? Is it accurate? You usually can't use Wikipedia as a source for a school paper, certainly not a college paper. We make up our own rules, as Josh and Chuck do stuff, you should know, so we could do whatever we wanted. Sure, that was just something that we did from the beginning. Like, no one, I don't think anyone told us to do that, did they?
No? Apparently it was just my idea because I'm a big snob.
Right, No, not at all. We were both on board.
There was a study into two thousand and five and there's I tried to find something more recent, but they compared forty two entries on Wikipedia to the same thing in the Encyclopedia Britannica and found that the average mistakes per article was four for Wikipedia, three for the Britannica, which is a little bit startling. Yeah, the differences between Wikipedia and Britannica is that you can change something really fast on Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, at least for the hard copy volumes. You know, obviously he's going to have to wait till the next publish. And they've tested out the speed of Wikipedia changes or I guess corrections, and they filed false information in thirty three different articles about dead philosophers, and in forty eight hours, a third of those had been fixed, and three of those within sixty seconds.
Yeah. I looked those up and some of them are hilarious. They all seem rather innocuous, but if you stop and think about what they're saying, they're pretty funny. Like Wickenstein was fined for poisoning squirrels in his yard, or Spinoza supported himself by selling stolen jewelry, or that David Hume used to wrestle with local sportsmen, like we just but just completely like the way that the sentences were written, like you would totally buy them and they still got corrected. And that's kind of like the whole premise of Wikipedia is like eventually somebody's going to find that and they're going to correct it. Might be in a minute, it might be in forty eight hours, it might be in six weeks, but eventually it's going to get created, like you'll eventually get to the truth or correctness.
I guess, yeah, And Dave points out and this is really really the truth of the matter is something as as large as Wikipedia created by users. There's going to be some great articles. There's going to be some good ones, and there's going to be some not so great ones. Just how it shakes out, and so are they're actually labeled now, which is something that a lot of people may not really realize, but they can be labeled good or fee. If it's good, that means it's got a little small plus sign inside a green circle. They're close to forty thousand good articles on the English version. If it's featured, that means it's the cream of the crop as far as Wikipedia vetting goes. And there are close to sixty five hundred that are featured with that bronze star.
Yeah, I saw the Museum of Bad Art as a featured article. There's a but there's just tons of them, thousands, right, And you can just go look at the list and be like, oh, Okay, this is a really good article. I'm going to read this one. Despite all that, I think the featured articles represent one out of every thousand and fifty articles on the site. It's a very low percentage. And because of that, Wikipedia even says Wikipedia is not a reliable source. They say it it's expressed on their website. And you can't actually use a Wikipedia entry as a citation on another Wikipedia entry. You link to other stuff, you can hyperlink it, but you can't use that to or support that sentence or that fact or whatever. And there's the reason why. One of the reasons why. It was kind of perfectly captured by that amazing comic XKCD, and they coined the term cytogenesis, where somebody can put in a fake fact on a Wikipedia page and then go to that Wikipedia page to prove that their fact is correct. Right, So it's like this snake that eats its tail. And there's actually an example of that. There's an Australian duo called Peaking Duck and one of their fans got backstage because he inserted his name as a relative of one of the band members and showed it to like the guy who was guarding the backstage and ended up getting backstage because of it. Isn't that amazing?
Pretty amazing?
I love that story, And apparently Peaking Duck they said it was a genius mastermind move, so I guess they appreciated it too.
So so, you know, we mentioned a bias earlier.
With politics, but the real bias comes in, like you mentioned at the beginning with kind of who is who these wikipedians are, eighty seven percent of these editors are men and eighty nine percent are white.
That means one hundred and seventy six percent are white men.
Half of them are in Europe and twenty percent live in North America. So unsurprisingly you're going to have some gender bias playing out. I think less than nineteen percent of the English language biographies are about women, and those are also the articles that are most often flagged for deletion as being you know, not notable enough. And they've combatd this over the years in different ways. They get together sometimes and organize edit athons where they try and boost content about women and minorities, people of color, ethnic diversity, like anything like that. They could have an edit to though about to try and you know, bring more, bring more of a light onto those groups.
Yeah, and we have to say, there's so that whole idea that premise that Wikipedia is unreliable. It seems to basically find a single source. Initially, there's a journalist named John Seigenthaler who had a joke Entry made about him. He was an advisor, i think to Bobby Kennedy, and the Hoaxter wrote that he was a suspect in the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy and John Siegenthaler heard about this, and he did not find that funny at all. He just happened to be one of the founding editors of USA Today. So he took to the pages of USA Today and completely excoriated Wikipedia, called it out as a completely unreliable irresponsible research tool, right. That was two thousand and five, and that really kind of laid the foundation for Wikipedia's bad reputation for a while. But if you go on to the Wikipedia entry about Wikipedia, which I admit I read some of, they even say around starting sometime in about the twenty tens, that reputation started to get shed and we're finally reaching the point today where people are saying, go use Wikipedia, just use it as like a an introduction to your topic, and then go out and do further research. So it's really kind of come into its own twenty years on.
That's right.
If you want to get into editing, there are tutorials. There's an introduction tutorial of how to do everything from creating things from scratch to editing. I mean, good luck creating something from scratch and finding something that doesn't exist already at this point. And if you want a gamified version, you can check out the Wikipedia Adventure to help with your tutorial, and they also have a help desk and the Tea House, which is where new editors can learn the ropes in a friendly manner.
Yeah, and I think just going on the talk page of any article will kind of familiarize you with what you should be doing. If you want to contribue, but do contribute. It's nice, I said, it's nice. I don't think Chuck has anything else because he didn't respond, So I think that means it's time for a listener mail.
I'm going to call this bonsai inspiration.
It was very cool.
Hey guys, a few years ago you did the bon Si episode. My dad and I listened to it became very inspired. I have a horticultural degree from USU.
That's Utah.
By the way, he thought it might be interested too, so as father and son, we began working on trees. Fast forward to today, we have thirty different trees. We've lost a few along the way, but have learned so much through a Bonsi show. In twenty seventeen, we became members of the Utah bon Si Club and have both entered bon Sai into a show hosted bly hosted by Red Butte Gardens. Who would have thought that a simple podcast could have inspired my dad and I to do this and go this far with it. I would love to give my dad a shout out. He turned sixty this year. Proud of him and what we've accomplished. That is from Nathan Staker in Utah and as Pop's mister, Brent Steaker.
Nice congratulations Nathan and Brent. That's pretty great. We love inspiring people.
Beautiful trees, very beautiful.
If you want to be like Nathan and Brent and let us know how we inspired you to do something cool, We love that kind of thing, you can send it in an email to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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