the current AOIR debate about wikipedia highlights another problem. It is quite easy to make legally defamatory statements on Wikipedia. Normally, the remedy is a law suit for civil damages. But if the author is anonymous, whom does one sue? And yes, I know that defamation law suits are expensive and hard to do. But at least the legal remedy is there in principle -- when the author is known. But the Wikipedia approach is like someone flooding the mail with anonymous defamatory photocopies. Barry _____________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________
An interesting side note: the distinction between 'transient' and 'fixed' communication or media appears to underlay the legal notion of defamation. Wikipedia doesn't fit cleanly into either of those categories. Should a work that is universally and indefinitely editable be subject to the same requirements as traditional slander and libel? It could certainly have an effect on an individual's reputation, but at the same time that individual (or any other) is empowered to immediately remove the offending passage. --Judd --Judd Antin School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS) University of California Berkeley jantin@sims.berkeley.edu http://technotaste.com blog: http://technotaste.com/blog Barry Wellman wrote:
the current AOIR debate about wikipedia highlights another problem. It is quite easy to make legally defamatory statements on Wikipedia.
Normally, the remedy is a law suit for civil damages.
But if the author is anonymous, whom does one sue?
And yes, I know that defamation law suits are expensive and hard to do. But at least the legal remedy is there in principle -- when the author is known. But the Wikipedia approach is like someone flooding the mail with anonymous defamatory photocopies.
Barry _____________________________________________________________________
Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________
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This and the other earlier discussion reminds me of my early days researching open source communities (7 years ago!)- a lot of people just simply refused to believe that any good could come out of distributed innovation communities - we now know better.... for me wikipedia is still in its early days and the rules are just now being figured out --- for example it is now being reported that NEW ARTICLES - will need to be started by REGISTERED Users: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051205/ap_on_hi_te/wikipedia_rules graf: Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering. The change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler, a one-time administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, complained in an op-ed published in USA Today that a biography of him on Wikipedia claimed he had been suspected in the assassinations of the former attorney general and his brother..... Today - coincidentally - today I had the pleasure of hosting Denise Anthony from Dartmouth at the Sloan Innovation Seminar - her paper is VERY interesting because it shows that there is significant value from the anonymous contributors: Her paper: "Explaining Quality in Internet Collective Goods: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the case of Wikipedia" is available at: http://web.mit.edu/iandeseminar/Papers/Fall2005/anthony.pdf Abstract: One important innovation in information and communication technology developed over the past decade was organizational rather than merely technological. Open source production is remarkable because it converts a private commodity (typically software) into a public good. A number of studies examine the factors motivating contributions to open source production goods, but we argue it is important to understand the causes of high quality contributions to such goods. In this paper, we analyze quality in the open source online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We find that, for users who create an online persona through a registered user name, the quality of contributions increases as the number of contributions increase, consistent with the idea of experts motivated by reputation and committed to the Wikipedia community. Unexpectedly, however, we find the highest quality contributions come from the vast numbers of anonymous “Good Samaritans” who contribute infrequently. Our findings that Good Samaritans as well as committed “Zealots” contribute high quality content to Wikipedia suggest that open source production is remarkable as much for its organizational as its technological innovation that enables vast numbers of anonymous one-time contributors to create high quality, essentially public goods. Best, Karim Judd Antin wrote:
An interesting side note: the distinction between 'transient' and 'fixed' communication or media appears to underlay the legal notion of defamation. Wikipedia doesn't fit cleanly into either of those categories. Should a work that is universally and indefinitely editable be subject to the same requirements as traditional slander and libel? It could certainly have an effect on an individual's reputation, but at the same time that individual (or any other) is empowered to immediately remove the offending passage.
--Judd
--Judd Antin School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS) University of California Berkeley jantin@sims.berkeley.edu http://technotaste.com blog: http://technotaste.com/blog
Barry Wellman wrote:
the current AOIR debate about wikipedia highlights another problem. It is quite easy to make legally defamatory statements on Wikipedia.
Normally, the remedy is a law suit for civil damages.
But if the author is anonymous, whom does one sue?
And yes, I know that defamation law suits are expensive and hard to do. But at least the legal remedy is there in principle -- when the author is known. But the Wikipedia approach is like someone flooding the mail with anonymous defamatory photocopies.
Barry _____________________________________________________________________
Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________
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-- Karim R. Lakhani MIT Sloan | The Boston Consulting Group Mobile: +1 (617) 851-1224 http://spoudaiospaizen.net http://web.mit.edu/lakhani/www | http://opensource.mit.edu My *new* book: http://tinyurl.com/cjxj6
Speaking as an instructor at a fairly large and fairly mainstream university who's seen the widespread and apparently spontaneous adoption of Wikipedia as a taken-for-granted (as in "Why are you marking me down for this?") citational source among undergraduates, I'd venture to guess that part of the problem is this: we who profess to theorize new media have yet to grapple significantly with the implications of news items such as this this: http://slashdot.org/articles/05/12/05/2010247.shtml?tid=95&tid=99 in which the nature of new media proves itself once again to exceed the glacial engines of academic thought. Wikipedia as an information source responds *instantly* to updates; all well and good. But the news media responds equally quickly, giving us stories in the Sunday times, on Google News (itself a logical outgrowth of Wiki's information aesthetic -- no less an distinctive and individual brand for its nonprofit status) and in the very-definition-of-cutting-edge Slashot.com. Wikipedia itself responds to the response by mutating its operating procedure. In short: old media (which, for better or worse, we must admit to understanding as the media of our youths, the media in which we were schooled) ticked along at a reassuringly slow pace -- suited to the rythyms of graduate students and university faculty toiling away at their research projects in libraries, journals, print, textbooks, classroom curricula. Wikipedia, both as an information source and a legal/cultural entity, updates *fast* -- faster, I suspect, than even the dedicated legions of bloggers can cope with. Even as we debate the relative merits and disadvantages of Wikipedia, we academics & theorists fall into the subtly ridiculous category of the quaint -- the ones who are doomed to remember (and repeat ad nauseum, like old Abe Simpson) "the way it used to be." Meanwhile, I wonder in the face of the coming semester: what's the best way to sensitize my 20 and 21-year-old students to the alarm that I feel in the face of Wikipedia? How do I get them involved? And how do I assign credit for it? Bob --------------------------------------- Bob Rehak Department of Communication and Culture Mottier Hall, 1790 East Tenth St. Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405-9700 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal www.sagepub.co.uk/animation
--- Bob Rehak <zencat@indiana.edu> wrote: <snip>
Meanwhile, I wonder in the face of the coming semester: what's the best way to sensitize my 20 and 21-year-old students to the alarm that I feel in the face of Wikipedia? How do I get them involved? And how do I assign credit for it?
Bob
---------------------------------------
Bob Rehak
Department of Communication and Culture Mottier Hall, 1790 East Tenth St. Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405-9700
<snip> This, on verifying online sources, is taken from an initial project proposal worked up some years ago. But it didn't develop anywhere. Maybe it should now, but I think some of the suggested approaches worth highlighting: Resource Credibility: Teaching Critical Thinking and On-Line Media Literacy Skills Cable, radio, satellite and television news programming costs are in the millions of pounds/dollars etc. Add to these the costs of newspapers, magazines and other printed news publications, and the risks in some countries of libel or slander prosecutions, most publishers and journalists carefully check the veracity of the stories they investigate and write, and their facts, and will often take legal advice before publishing high risk stories. Other organisations, such as academic journals and universities use peer-review methods to make sure that what is published is well-founded. That does not stop dubious, error-ridden, or wholly false stories being reported, nor government (and other organisations) propaganda being printed. Academic journals, despite heavey weight co-authors, and peer review, are not immune from plagiarism (although not necessarily false information) and papers based on falsified data. <snip> How can we verify or be assured that what we see, hear, and read is accurate and credible, when the problem is magnified many fold on-line, as anyone can publish a website, in a few hours, and say anything they want - often without a credible basis for it. (I often claim online to be tall, thin, blonde, and gorgeous. But no one ever said wishful thinking wasn't allowed online.) <snip> Here are a few things that users should be checking when they visit a site to read news, review articles and features, read opinion and editorial columns, or conduct research: # Who's the author or website creator, and what's their authority, or claimed authority? Is it written by known journalists (but note that not even Pulitzer prize winners have always been what they seem)? While many won't tell you that they are unqualified to make the statements they make at the site, they leave clues. What are the credentials offered at the site for the site authors. If the person states that he is a professor at Outer Siberia University, you should check for links to the university. Has the person listed awards? If so, are there links to the entities that gave the awards so you can check? Is this person a published author? If so, does Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or Borders have his book listed online? Search for other sites that reference this person. Not everyone is an award-winning professor and published author, but most good sources are cited elsewhere online. # What's the bias of the site? Whose points of view aren't covered? Bias isn't necessarily bad, as long as it is clear to the site viewer. Remember that everyone has their bias, but some are more significant than others. Is this a site that performs "unbiased" reviews of advertisers? If so, have they disclosed that fact to the readers? Are they a nonprofit entity with a particular mission or purpose? Where was the site created? Is it from an international group that might have a country or culture bias? Is it a U.S. site which might have a U.S. bias? Often, you can detect bias by reading closely. The good sites will identify their mission. Think about who is creating the content, whose points of view are included, and whose are excluded. Students should try to achieve balance by including different biases and points of view when they do their research. # How current is this information? Does the page, report, or feature have a publication date - or perhaps a "last updated" date notation? Archive news materials should be clearly dated for the point at which they were published, and NOT be changed. Any changes such as annotations, links, or addendums subsequent to that date should be clearly identified. A current news site can expected to be updated regularly, with new stories or further enhancements appearing at least daily. It will depend on the nature of the site. For example, if it is largely a clone of a printed (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) publication it may not change at all between publication dates. If it claims to be electronic or special on-line edition, you'd expect to see hourly or perhaps more frequent changes with 'breaking' news. If the site doesn't contain a "last updated" date, look to see if there's a "recent additions" or "what's new" section of the site, and see how often it is changed. You want to make sure the content is updated often, since it tells you two things: that the site gets regular attention, and that it contains recent information. A good news site site is updated regularly. If you can't tell when a site was last updated, send an e-mail to the webmaster at "webmaster @[the name of the site]." Ask how often the site is updated and the date it was last updated. # Are the news stories well-written and, if a feature, well and consistently argued? Depending on the explicit or known bias of the organisation or site, there may well be consistency in the stories carried, and the general political 'look and feel'. More 'objective' news organisations may carry articles and features that are apparently contradictory, and encourage readers to contribute to a debate - both on and off line. Look for the themes of a site and the stories and articles acrreied. Are they presenting alternate and opposing views? Are there links to additional resources, or related stories. Have you compared it to the same story or topic carried by other news sites? If, for example during the Iraq War, stories are pooled (i.e. one report is made by one reporter and then shared by either news services such as AP, Reuters, or UPI, or by several newspapers, this should be clear. If a report appears subject to censorship, this should also be made clear. # What have they linked to? Do the links work? Do they link to credible sites, and do credible sites link to them? Are the links correctly described? Are they current? Who else links to them? Again, is the link information updated and accurate, or do the links not work anymore? There may be real experts in judging the credibility of resources, but it does not have to be a well designed or elaborate hoax or con to fool some of the brightest brains around - cf. the Sunday Times, AJP Taylor, and the Hitker Diaries. Using your own critical faculties anjd common sense may be the best test, using some of these commonsense approaches. Dominic Pinto BA MIEEE MCMI MRi FRSA Independent Advisor 36 Bedfordbury Flat 29 Covent Garden London WC2N 4DQ e-m: dominic.pinto@ieee.org M: +44 780 302-8268 Ph: +44 207 379-8341
At 22:45 Uhr -0500 5.12.2005, Barry Wellman wrote:
the current AOIR debate about wikipedia highlights another problem. It is quite easy to make legally defamatory statements on Wikipedia.
Empirically, these statements are only harmful on a significant scale if anyone looks at them, believes them (and - in some cases - repeats them). The Seigenthaler episode is a good example. Being rather ignorant about the Who's Who in the media business I wouldn't have known of Seigenthaler and would never have connected him with the Robert Kennedy assassination, if it weren't for this discussion on air-l. The discussion only evolved because Seigenthaler himself (or his attourneys or his PR consultants) chose not to simply erase the false information but to contact mainstream classic media outlets. Ironically, in doing this Seigenthaler created a memory trace of a connection between his name and the assassinantion in many more minds than if he had just corrected the false information in the wikipedia entry. Maybe someone could dig a bit into the wikipedia logs and compare view stats for the versions of the Seigenthaler article on wikipedia? Ulf
participants (6)
-
Barry Wellman -
Bob Rehak -
Dominic Pinto -
Judd Antin -
Karim R. Lakhani -
Ulf-Dietrich Reips