Search engines rank their pages near the top. While Wikipedia itself does not run ads, they are the most-scraped site on the web. Scrapers need content - any content will do - in order to carry ads from Google and other advertisers. This entire effect is turning Wikipedia into a generator of spam. It is primarily Google's fault, since Wikipedia might find it difficult to address the issue of scraping even if they wanted to. Google doesn't care; their ad money comes right off the top.
Articles in Wikipedia are supposed to be neutral in tone, and assertions are supposed to be backed up with citations. What's happening is that any collection of citations that appears balanced is all that anybody expects. If the title or snippet in a link itself contributes to this impression, then the full text is not researched by anyone. No one has time for that. Just grab a few catchy snippets from Google and slap them at the end of the Wikipedia article. It's a full-circle dance: garbage in, garbage out, garbage back in. A few cycles of this, and it all turns into a big, stinking heap.
Wikipedia is a potential menace to anyone who values privacy. It needs to be watched closely.
There is a problem with the structure of Wikipedia. The basic problem is that no one, neither the Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, nor the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible for the content. If you don't believe me, then carefully read Wikipedia's disclaimer.
At the same time that no one claims responsibility, there are two unique characteristics of Wikipedia that can be very damaging to a person, corporation, or group. The first is that anyone can edit an article, and there is no guarantee that any article you read has not been edited maliciously, and remains uncorrected in that state, at the precise time that you access that article.
On November 9, 2005, a childish prankster edited the Wikipedia article on Norway's prime minister. The IP address of the perpetrator came from a regional network in southern Norway that services a large number of schools. The most serious of the several changes is seen here in the last sentence, taken from MSN's cache copy:
It took Wikipedia 22.5 hours to detect and correct this prank. Meanwhile, an unknown number of surfers downloaded and saved the page. It ranks number one in MSN, Google, and Yahoo for a search on the prime minister's name.
The problem with Wikipedia is that this sort of occurrence is built into the system. Vandalism is commonplace. The major variable is the length of time between the crime and its detection. If you click on a Wikipedia entry, are you looking at a vandalized article, or a corrected article? No one knows, and no one is responsible when a vandal remains undetected.
Now then, how would you, if you were a Google critic, like to have your very own article in Wikipedia? Keep in mind that the teenagers who think Wikipedia is cool tend to be the same teenagers who think Google is cool. What are the chances that the article on you will get sabotaged? When it is, how quickly will it get corrected? Place your bets.
The second unique characteristic is that Wikipedia articles, and in some cases even the free-for-all "talk" discussions behind the articles, rank very highly in the major search engines. This means that Wikipedia's potential for inflicting damage is amplified by several orders of magnitude.
As someone who has been jostling with Wikipedia administrators for several weeks, I am very interested in whom I should sue if I wanted to sue. This assumes, of course, that I've decided I've been clearly libeled by Wikipedia's article on me, and/or the discussion page attached to it. At the moment, this is an intellectual interest of mine, and I am not currently claiming that I have been libeled. This could change very quickly. I maintain that I qualify as a "private person," which means that I do not have to show that the article about me is maliciously untrue. The bar for private persons is lower for a finding of libel, as compared to public persons. I also believe that if I ever succeed in a libel case, the fact that the article on me ranks very well in the big search engines will convince the jury to award damages.
Why did I put up the information about administrators on this page? Simply because if I ever decide that I have cause to sue, I'm not sure who should be sued. The first step, it seems to me, would be to seek a subpoena for log information from Wikimedia Foundation. Administrators and editors who are involved, but who cannot otherwise be identified, could be traced through their IP addresses in the Wikipedia logs. If a court decides that a subpoena for these addresses is in order, then it would also support a subpoena for more information from the Internet service providers behind those IP addresses.
If there is a clear case of libel, I don't believe a court would decide that no one is responsible. If Wikimedia Foundation, and the specific editors and administrators who either inserted the libelous information, or failed to delete it, are all not responsible for the libel, then that would make the libel something akin to an act of God. The Wikimedia process doesn't quite qualify as God, as far as I can tell, although it apparently sees itself as approaching that status someday soon.
Wikipedia does not even comes close to qualifying as a service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. For one thing, this is not a copyright issue. For another, Wikipedia develops its own information, and its editors put their own spin on the information, and choose which sources to cite, and delete information they feel is inappropriate. By way of contrast, Google, for example, merely makes a faithful cache copy of whatever they find elsewhere, and passes along this copy or ranks it alongside similar material. The two situations are entirely different. No one associated with Wikipedia should assume that the law protects them the same way it protects Google. And no one should assume that the EFF will come running to Wikipedia's defense in a libel case.
I think a probable outcome in court would place most of the blame on Wikimedia Foundation itself. The very structure of Wikipedia is geared toward maximum anonymity and minimum accountability. The Foundation is facilitating and implicitly encouraging situations such as the one in which I find myself. I think the case against the Foundation would be stronger than the case against individual administrators and/or editors, based on the fact that the potential for libel is ingrained within the Wikipedia process.
But I really don't know. What I do know is that the editors and administrators feel that they are untouchable, and the Wikimedia Foundation also feels that it is untouchable because it has a disclaimer. This is not a satisfactory situation for Wikipedia in the long run. If push comes to shove, it will not prevail in a court of law.
I'm hopeful that this controversy over the article on me will help clarify the need for improvements in Wikipedia's structure. There needs to be a greater degree of accountability in the structure, even at the expense of everyone's freedom to anonymously edit anything forever.
The privacy issues interest me even more than the libel issue. Unfortunately, the laws on privacy are less clear, and discussions on privacy will not be as focused. In Florida, where Wikipedia is located, there is an invasion of privacy statute that might apply in this case, even assuming that everything in the article is true. At issue would be the public disclosure of truthful private information that a reasonable person would find objectionable. Would a reasonable person find Wikipedia's mention of facts about my 1960s activism objectionable? Not at the moment, hopefully, and yet it wouldn't take much for this situation to change. Another act of terrorism on U.S. soil, followed by a stronger version of the U.S. Patriot Act, and "reasonable" people might feel that I should, once again, be watched by the FBI, CIA, and local police the way I was in the 1960s. Does Wikipedia consider issues such as this? Of course not - information wants to be free, and nothing must stand in its way.
A greater degree of accountability in the Wikipedia structure, as discussed above, would also be the very first step toward resolving the privacy problem. For me, the two issues stem from a common problem, and both share the same first step toward a solution.
This two-page site will eventually become a larger site that examines the phenomenon of Wikipedia. We are interested in them because they have a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information. Search engines rank their pages near the top. While Wikipedia itself does not run ads, they are the most-scraped site on the web. Scrapers need content - any content will do - in order to carry ads from Google and other advertisers. This entire effect is turning Wikipedia into a generator of spam. It is primarily Google's fault, since Wikipedia might find it difficult to address the issue of scraping even if they wanted to. Google doesn't care; their ad money comes right off the top.
For example, it did not take long, using the Google and Yahoo engines, to find 52 different domains that scraped Wikipedia's page on rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Interestingly, Google listed more than four times the number of duplicate scrapes than Yahoo. This could be related to the fact that 83 percent of these scraped pages carry ads - almost always ads from Google. Some of these scrapes are template-generated across different domains, suggesting that they are created by programs. At that point zombie PCs might be dispatched to click on the ads.
Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, probably approves of this practice. After he made a fortune in futures trading, he started up Bomis.com in the mid-1990s. Bomis was one of the first sites to scrape the ad-free Open Directory Project, and turn it into a huge mass of paid links and ads, mixed together with porn.
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to thesum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." - Jimmy Wales, July 2004
Another problem is that most of the administrators at Wikipedia prefer to exercise their police functions anonymously. The process itself is open, but the identities of the administrators are usually cloaked behind a username and a Gmail address. (Gmail does not show an originating IP address in the email headers, which means that you cannot geolocate the originator, or even know whether one administrator is really a different person than another administrator.) If an admin has a political or personal agenda, he can do a fair amount of damage with the special editing tools available to him. The victim may not even find out that this is happening until it's too late. From Wikipedia, the material is spread like a virus by search engines and other scrapers, and the damage is amplified by orders of magnitude. There is no recourse for the victim, and no one can be held accountable. Once it's all over the web, no one has the power to put it back into the bottle.
This is an open letter that was written to Jimmy Wales. For more information on the context of this letter, see Google Watch.
Public Information Research, Inc. PO Box 680635San Antonio, TX 78268-0635In a follow-up email to Mr. Wales, it was pointed out that SlimVirgin had an agenda before she began the stub on Daniel Brandt. Since Brandt was not notified of the stub posted on September 28, 2005, and knew almost nothing about Wikipedia, and had never heard of SlimVirgin, it was fortunate that he accidentally saw the stub on a search engine. This was just two weeks later, which meant that there was still time before it began spreading uncontrollably on the web. Soon he discovered that SlimVirgin was not as neutral as she pretended, and asked for a complete deletion. Here are some earlier comments from SlimVirgin:
October 16, 2005
Mr. Jimmy WalesWikimedia Foundation, Inc.200 2nd Avenue South, #358St. Petersburg FL 33701-4313
Dear Mr. Wales:
I sent you an email a couple of hours ago requesting deletion of the article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Brandt and am following that email with this fax. I ask that this page be permanently deleted. It was started as a stub by SlimVirgin on September 28, apparently acting as an authorized agent of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. This anonymous person started the stub without my knowledge, and cited sources for information on me without vetting these sources.
She and I went back and forth on this piece for several days, and she reverted me more than once. In the end, I remained unsatisfied with my ability to influence this article about me, particularly with respect to the sources cited. At this point I renewed my original request to have the entire thing deleted.
Since I sent my email to you, she put it into delete status. She says that she was able to do this because she and I were the only two who contributed to the piece, and we both agreed to the deletion. She also says that any other admins can undo this speedy deletion if they add an edit.
I am asking you to insure that no other admins can undo the deletion. I presume that you and the directors of Wikimedia Foundation are legally responsible for the actions of your anonymous administrators.
I consider this entire episode a privacy violation. My only interest in trying to shape the article was to determine how much power I had to address this situation short of a deletion. I am now satisfied that I lack sufficient power, and ask that it remain deleted permanently.
Sincerely,
Daniel BrandtPresident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chip_Berlet/Archive_1On the basis of this evidence, Jimmy Wales should have apologized and revoked SlimVirgin's administrative privileges. Instead, he praised her and scolded Brandt, the victim. Even if there had been a sincere consensus among all involved for the article in question, Brandt would have needed to check in frequently to make sure that the article wasn't changed by other anonymous, hostile editors. This is a fundamental weakness in the Wikipedia development model.
"Daniel Brandt is not a reputable source. He is an extreme leftwing activist and conspiracy theorist. He soaks up any material people send to him so long as it suits his ideology and incorporates it into Namebase. He's the author of Google Watch. Slim 21:57, Dec 28, 2004 (UTC)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:John_Train_Salon
"Weed, I removed Daniel Brandt. He's not a credible source, not a journalist, and seems to write only for his own website i.e. he's a blogger. It's not appropriate to use someone's personal website as a source. There's no evidence that Roy Godson is an intelligence operative and the weasel catch-all phrase "representatives from intelligence-linked funding sources" is typical Brandt and typical LaRouche. This article is turning into an EIR piece. People are being associated with other people they once stood next to for 10 minutes etc. Please stop or this issue will have to go back to the ArbCom, with all the work for all of us that will entail.... Others should chip in with what they think of Daniel Brandt as a source. I know he wouldn't be used by mainstream journalists unless they checked his information independently, which isn't to say they wouldn't use him to point them in a certain direction. My main concern about Brandt is that he self-publishes. The few things I believe he published in the 80s were in outlets with little, if any, editorial oversight. Herschel, do you know whether he has published anywhere reputable; or whether he is quoted in the mainstream press? I know he's been quoted a bit regarding Google Watch, but it's not clear it's taken seriously. We can't use information from people who only self-publish on their websites, otherwise any of us could start up a website today then quote ourselves in Wikipedia. (Not that this would surprise me, mind you.) Slim 05:51, Jan 6, 2005 (UTC)"
Articles in Wikipedia are supposed to be neutral in tone, and assertions are supposed to be backed up with citations. What's happening is that any collection of citations that appears balanced is all that anybody expects. If the title or snippet in a link itself contributes to this impression, then the full text is not researched by anyone. No one has time for that. Just grab a few catchy snippets from Google and slap them at the end of the Wikipedia article. It's a full-circle dance: garbage in, garbage out, garbage back in. A few cycles of this, and it all turns into a big, stinking heap.
Wikipedia is a potential menace to anyone who values privacy. It needs to be watched closely.
Halloween update: It's back!
Brandt posted this at Inside Google on October 31.
Initially the article was deleted because SlimVirgin, the administrator who created the stub on September 28, and I agreed to a speedy deletion, after we worked together on the piece for several days. That was my initial request when I first complained to SlimVirgin - either delete the whole thing or lose those two biased links on me. We finally agreed to this deletion when I discovered that she was previously biased against me, based on independent evidence going back months that had nothing to do with Google. She also refused in the end to relent on one of the two links. Jimmy Wales was made aware that we had deleted the article, but he declined to intervene. He did defend SlimVirgin as one of his best editors, and scolded me for reverting two links on Google-Watch, and restored them, and said, "Don't do that again." SlimVirgin warned me that she didn't have the power to keep the article on me deleted if another administrator decided to resurrect it.
Then Mr. Philipp Lenssen waltzes into the picture. He is not a neutral party, as the link that I objected to most has been happily cited by him on his blog more than once. I consider him to be a "Google-lapdog blogger." SlimVirgin has properly recused herself from any editing on the resurrected version of the article, which is quite different from the one that she and I abandoned. It is much more amateurish, by an order of magnitude. I'll say one thing in SlimVirgin's favor - she's a brilliant editor and writer when she is truly neutral.
Lenssen got one of the secret-police Wikipedia administrators to undelete the piece. This secret policeman is named Canderson7. I asked him for his real name and he scolded me for making a legal threat, citing one of the alphabet-soup of Wikipedia acronyms that pointed to some paragraph on implicit legal threats. All I did was politely ask for his real name and location "for legal reasons." Anyway, Canderson7 did his thing and went away. Now Lenssen and other editors (everyone except me, of course) are free to violate my privacy and play games with the facts.
Believe it or not, Lenssen's position is that I don't have the right to touch any articles that mention me, but he has the right to spin like crazy, and add gratuitous links that defame me, and generally turn the whole article into an unfortunate joke. This piece of crap will be number one on all engines within a few months in a search for my name. It will follow me for the rest of my life.
I want it deleted, and I need your support. Even if SlimVirgin and I had arrived at an agreement, the entire structure of Wikipedia, with which I am now somewhat familiar for the first time, means that any Tom, Dick and Philipp can come along and pervert the piece. That's why I want a complete deletion. That's the most important thing for me.
Along the way, I'd also like accountability for the anonymous editors and administrators who lurk at Wikipedia. I should be able to know who SlimVirgin and Canderson7 are, for example. I don't think even Jimmy knows who most of his anonymous administrators are. This opens up Wikipedia to infiltration by agents of corporations, governments, or cults. It's a flaw in the structure.
And finally, I believe that articles on living persons should be generated in such a way that the person is notified, if at all possible, that the article is under development, and has the right to demand minimal standards of evidence to back up assertions made in the article. SlimVirgin had contact information for me but did not notify me of the initial stub she started - I found out by accident.
Wikipedia has a NPOV (neutral point of view) policy that simply means you should have a footnote handy. But that's all - any footnote from any blogger or forum anywhere on the web is all you need. No one expects anyone at Wikipedia to dig deeper.
Wikipedia is fine if you like trivia. It's great for things that no one cares about. But it goes too far when it sets amateur editors and anonymous administrators loose on the reputations of others.
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