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Monday 7 July 2008

Wikinonsense

On my old blog I wrote about Wikipedia, a thoroughly pernicious site:

I cannot understand how anyone with the least interest in factual accuracy gives Wikipedia the time of day. I have yet to read an entry on a subject about which I know something that has not been marred by glaring errors. The entry on me, for instance - probably the only subject about which I can claim to the the world's leading expert - has so many basic errors of fact that it is laughable.

I have made a point of never correcting it because once I start, there will be no end to it, as it is forever altered with new errors.

But here is just one sentence:

He is the official biographer for David Blunkett and is an occasional guest on the BBC's flagship Question Time discussion show. 
 
Both statements are wrong. My biography was not official. Nor was it ever stated, anywhere or at any time, by me, my publishers or David Blunkett that it was. I started it off my own back, wrote it to my own schedule and editing criteria and published it as I saw fit. Mr Blunkett gave me interviews for it, but that in no way made it official, since I chose what to report and how. But because someone wholly ignorant of the facts about which they have chosen to write makes that claim on Wikipedia, it will now be repeated elswhere as fact.

As for my being "an occasional guest on the BBC's flagship Question Time discussion show"; I have never appeared on it. Not once. And I think I should know.

I could go through the rest of my entry and point to the similar inaccuracies which litter it, but what would be the point?. Wikipedia is a pernicious tool, and no one should rely on it. Ever.

(No doubt someone will read this and change the entry to reflect my corrections, but that will merely prove my point. If I hadn't happened to be vain enough to look at my entry, and then to write about it here, the errors would stay.) 

The entry on me was, as I predicted, changed. Oliver Kamm has a post today on the same sort of thing, and explains why this ex post facto alteration makes not the least difference to my case:

I recently commented on a trivial error in Wikipedia on which I could speak with some knowledge because it concerned my family. As I had expected, someone then corrected the relevant entry and pronounced that the revision showed that my criticism was ill founded. With respect: it didn't. My beef with Wikipedia is not that it contains errors - all reference sources do - but that by design it makes no discrimination between different kinds of contribution. Wikipedia is an essentially anti-intellectual venture. One correspondent asked why, if I had found an error in Wikipedia, I did not merely join in and correct it myself. My answer, I hope, is clear: because I believe it is better to carp from the sidelines and hope for the eventual implosion of the whole enterprise than to contribute constructively to incremental improvements in it.

But the meat of his post is about a more important error than mistakes about Oliver's family or my books. Here is part of the Wikipedia entry on fascism, explaining the Hitler-Stalin pact:

Initially, the Soviet Union supported a coalition with the western powers against Nazi Germany and popular fronts in various countries against domestic fascism. This policy was largely unsuccessful due to the distrust shown by the western powers (especially Britain) towards the Soviet Union. The Munich Agreement between Germany, France and Britain heightened Soviet fears that the western powers were endeavoring to force them to bear the brunt of a war against Nazism. The lack of eagerness on the part of the British during diplomatic negotiations with the Soviets served to make the situation even worse. The Soviets changed their policy and negotiated a non-aggression pact known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.

:As Oliver writes: 
 

Where do you start with this ignorant, pernicious and ungrammatical Stalinist propaganda? Do CiF's editors know (and perhaps they can tell me) that, instead of providing for their readers a working definition of fascism, they've linked to a piece of dreary agitprop that omits any reference to Stalin's expansionist designs? It's not an article you can judiciously amend with a few historical facts. It's ahistorical nonsense of a high order.

Wikipedia is a dangerous tool. It spreads ignorance and error under the guise of knowledge, and should be treated with scorn by anyone concerned with fact and scholarship.

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