Every once in a while we, the consumers of the "free" Internet fall into a lull of false security, believing that our civil rights, privacy and best interests are at the heart of the essential services the names of which have become household words. After all, as the proponents of these services claim - "it's free." Who are we then to complain when Winamp becomes a protected interest of AOL, LiveJournal of Movable Type, HowStuffWorks becomes an advertising whorehouse ("Do you want to know how our banner advertising algorithms work, Jimmy?"), Google designs an e-mail service that spies on you or injects intrusive advertising into everything in sight and the great and benevolent Wikipedia starts making deals with advertisers?
As I said often: if you stab me, stab me in the chest, like Microsoft does every once in a while: tell me up-front how you are going to screw me and, hell, I may even grow to like it. The point is, I can deal with deception when I know where it's coming from, but now - with this new phenomenon of "grassroots innovation," which protects the whoremongers of the Internet with its legions of mindless zealots - now this is dangerous.
I really liked the concept of Wikipedia: a free repository of information where everyone and anyone may edit any article, a place where professional politics do not sway the flow of free information - or so I thought. Not half a year ago I staunchly defended Wikipedia for the availability of otherwise hard-to-find information at the user's fingertips. However, when that information started to be sold for advertising revenue and I posted a statement about Wikipedia's selling-out on a page dedicated to the discussion of the issue, it was immediately deleted and I was labelled a "troll," despite the fact that I faithfully maintained a small number of articles, particularly the Michael Turner article I created and the Alex Colville article (as well, I honestly revised a multitude of other articles).
But all this is beside the point. Allow me to demonstrate the problem:
Here is a quotation from the Wikipedia biography of its founder, Jimmy Wales; pay close attention to the language:
In 1996, Wales founded a search portal called Bomis which (as a side business among other projects) sold original images depicting nude and partially-nude women (but not masturbation or other sexual acts), and included a "Bomis Babes" blog. Because of his position with Bomis, Wales has been described as a peddler of pornography by a small number of his critics. Wales disputes this, however, telling Wired that "If R-rated movies are porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not." Bomis has since ceased the adult-content portion of its business, and Wales is no longer actively involved in the company. While Wales was CEO, Bomis donated over one hundred thousand dollars (primarily through salaries and providing free Internet access) to Nupedia and Wikipedia, and continued supporting them into 2002.Interesting. Here is a quotation from another source:
"We are dangerous and must be stopped" wrote Jimmy Wales [...] on a Bomis banner advertisement he proudly promoted. [...] Wales also wrote, "Did you know: Bomis doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, but we do have it written down somewhere" [...] Bomis, in case you didn't know is a company - Bomis, Inc. - which until very recently was the legal registrant of the domain name Wikipedia.org. Wales change the "ownership" of that domain name after an OfficialWire article exposed the fact that his porn business controlled Wikipedia.Finally, here is an excerpt from Wales's interview on C-SPAN in September of 2005:
Lamb: What was - what's the story - is it - I'm probably not pronouncing it right, is it Bomis?
Bomis.com was that it?
Wales: Right, yes.
Lamb: Dirty pictures?
Wales: That's a much exaggerated story. So, yes, Bomis is a search engine and...
Lamb: It's Bomis...
Wales: ...Web directory, yes.
Lamb: ...and you started it?
Wales: Yes, years ago and I'm not involved in the company anymore at all.
Lamb: Well, what's the dirty picture thing?
Wales: Well, Bomis is - it's a search engine so there's all kinds of content on there. And Bomis always had a market similar to say Maxim magazine. So it's kind of a guy-oriented search engine. But, yes, no. The story is much exaggerated by - through history so.
Wales: Something I struggle with constantly by the...
Lamb: At some point somebody said you drove a Hyundai but then there was a parenthesis around it, no, he actually has a Ferrari.
Wales: Well, I do actually have a Ferrari. It doesn't work at the moment and my Ferrari cost less than most people's SUVs.
This is precisely the problem that bothers me: when in the past we have rejected the Internet altogether as a source of facts, we have now embraced it as such, all too fast. Doing too little research most of the time, relying on quick-fix solutions like Wikipedia, we suckered ourselves into a world where the definition of terms becomes a dangerous thing. And it's not a question of censorship - it's worse - because Wikipidia relies on a patchwork of sources which cannot be weighed against one another, because the process is not transparent enough, and because many contributors recycle information from other online sources that emulate Wikipedia - that may even have information licensed from Wikipedia, under open-source licensing! Answers.com's copyright page reads:
Wikipedia - All articles are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.And the kicker? The Prime Minister of Norway is defamed in ten seconds and the mistake is not corrected for 22.5 hours. A man was be accused of a crime (more information here, here and here) and the mistake is not corrected for 132 days! This is just the tip of the iceberg. I thought to myself, sure, maybe a website called Wikipedia Watch wouldn't be the most objective source on the issue, but then Rogers Cadenhead, a former journalist and Internet pundit, clearly outlines Wales's battles with the users of Wikipedia to revise his own biography, trying to redefine "pornography" with doublespeak and to clean-up Bomis. What a mess.
(see 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights' for details).
Wikipedia's corporate issues aside - the slant of its contributors towards special interests, such as pædophilia, socialists and Neo-Nazis (more controversy here and here), the pollution Google's search results by facilitating search redundancies skewed towards Google's aforementioned advertising (more here), and the legal and satirical responses of those feeling Wikipedia is completely morally and legally unaccountable to the uttering of falsehoods, libel and slander - are all clearly pointing to the fact there is something radically wrong with Wikipedia. Far be it from me to claim to only be aroused by straight pornography, and I readily admit that at heart I am a dictator, holding to certain values (such as the forced silencing of those I deem "evil" - Neo-Nazi movements for instance - a belief which is conventionally "undemocratic" and, thus, ironically, closer to Nazi ideology) - but one thing is certain - I do not claim to be the alpha and omega of all knowledge, an unbiased, open and free repository of information - which Wikipedia most definitely does, deceiving millions of people on a daily basis.
Perhaps this problem can be best summarised by Andrew Orlowski's article in The Register, where, in his interview with a former Encyclopedia Britannica editor, Robert McHenry, he discusses about the "inforot" effect and the zealotry surrounding Wikipedia's operation:
McHenry: But it [Wikipedia] isn't successful, and looks like it won't be.In drawing interesting parallels and contrasts between Wikipedia and Linux, (an originally "grassroots" movement-turned-corporate empire, in my view), Orlowski elucidates an implication that the dichotomy between Wikipedia and Britannica parallels that of Linux and Microsoft, respectively. "It's hard to compete with free," David Gerard, "a senior Wikipedia 'administrator/janitor'," sings the familiar tune of the open-source camp in the article. In this context, Orlowski's pointing to Linux developers' view that "code actually has to work, not merely be written" cannot stand, since the effectiveness of a kernel and the effectiveness of an article are still equally subjective (why would there be Windows-Mac-Linux camps otherwise?)
Orlowski: Why is it failing?
McHenry: Because they've boxed themselves in by ideology. The more they try to impose standards, the more the utopian user community will peel away and find something else to do.
It was always a doomed idea. It was bad from the start. But it's got the public playing the encylopædia game. To extend the analogy, it's also like playing a game in the sense that playing it has no consequences. If something goes wrong, you just restart. No problem!
So what are we to make of this? I would contend - the same lesson we have learned from the aforementioned "source" debate: keep it closed and you can only argue with its effectiveness subjectively, in terms of preference and taste (be it code or article); keep it open and you will create a utopia which will eventually and inevitably organise itself, standardise itself, and position itself along the lines of the best profit strategies, just like Red Hat organised itself into a multi-million dollar empire, just like Movable Type imposed licensing restrictions and bought out LiveJournal, Google sold out to ads, ads and more ads (which, by the way, can be exploited by Trojan horses!), and AOL bought Winamp and started bundling crap like eMusic with it and charging one easy payment of $19.95 for a full-featured version.
Don't get me wrong - and I'll insist on this again and again - it's not that capitalism is wrong, but it's the web of lies (pun not intended) that is being cast over us again and again - this sense that our corporations are "enviro-friendly," "caring," "understanding" and "have been there for us" - that is wrong. I say, close-source it all and never look back. I got suckered into the socialist glitz of Wikipedia, even cited it in a few of my essays, but the fact that it can represent the opinions of individuals and outright lies is completely unacceptable.
From this moment on, I will no longer cite or link to a single Wikipedia article, unless to support this case; oh, I'll read them, but I'll read them like any other source I can find using Google. What more, I will still correct Wikipedia articles, simply because there are mistakes there and there are no academically-trained editorial staff in place in the organisation. Orlowski's article cites the experience of one Wikipedia contributor:
I've only had one quick and experimental experience with the damn thing myself. I corrected some howling, stupid, this-will-get-you-a-fail-in-first-year-engineering-exams mistakes in the article on the Joule cycle (gas turbine). My corrections were undone - back to the howling mistakes - within less than an hour.Wikipedia, just like any other cultural fad, will eventually become an object of worship for its zealots alone, and its experiment with reader-powered editing will disintegrate into either a complete centralisation (which is not likely, since Wikipedia would not be able to compete on the level of established, closed-source encylopædias), or complete decentralisation, and will lose all of its remaining credibility. Meanwhile, we should take care to recognise its deleterious effects on education, its self-serving efforts in profiteering, assisting unwanted advertising and spreading misinformation. Wikipedia is not an encylopædia.
Mike, Mike, I know its a topic of considerable interest to you, one you do love to get passionate about, but really: "The point is, I can deal with deception when I know where it's coming from,..." does lack some logic.
Otherwise it's good to know that you are still trying to change the world. Keep up the good fight.
Mhumm. Perhaps this is a problem with my use of certain terms. I've e-mailed you my defence of this contention.
After a discussion with Raoul, we have established that his contention was that deception, when known, is not deception. To this my answer is that we always expect a certain amount of deception from certain individuals or agencies, such as the government or credit card companies. Sometimes, we may even know which direction that deception will come from or which form it will take (i.e. more taxes or higher interest rates). This knowledge, in turn, can sometimes help us protect ourselves (i.e. vote for a different government or get a better credit card). Indeed, this would not be complete deception; this is why I suspected different definition of terms to be a problematic aspect of this debate.
Acknowledging that all true business (and thus, by extension, capitalism) requires a certain amount of deception, my call is for the businessmen to put their cards on the table, so we get to choose to tolerate the lesser corporate abuse in return for a product or service, instead of choosing the ostensibly-painless means and then eventually (and suddenly, when we least expect it) get raped in the proverbial ass by a price increase, changed interest rate, increased advertising, reduced service or loss of moral accountability.
With such an arrangement, the users or consumers would gain a sense of alternative, of choice (albeit quite dismal, at that), and the corporations would gain plausible deniability, since they would be able to claim they have transparently offered a service and it was taken while other alternatives to it existed.
Well thought out article, man. Kudos - seriously! I remember hearing last year that one of the most important women Wikipedia hired (CFO or CIO, can't remember) actually had a criminal record - she shot an ex-boyfriend or something.
Hey, thanks, man! ;) It's really good to see that my older entries are not entirely lost and forgotten (but, out of curiosity, how did you come across this post?)
As for Wikipedia: frankly, I'm no longer surprised by anything that comes out of that place. *shrug* Here's my most recent rant on the issue, by the way.
It's a good thing I never took these things seriously and assumed email neither private nor secure. On a side note, I trust people with criminal records and questionable pasts.
Uh, what things are we talking about?
Mhumm. I can't quite agree with you here, sir; to me, if a person is good, I disregard his or her past completely.
you know.... that picture on the yacht could almost be mistaken for you...
AHAHAHAHA! Sweetie, I can live with that. Jimmy Wales is my kind of asshole. ;)
but you'd be the creator of wikipedia???
isnt that the stuff of your nightmares?
You mean, making money off shady advertising schemes, misrepresenting my business practices and changing the truth about myself in my own "free encyclopedia"? Meh. See how much fun being a petty tyrant can be? ;)