Wikipedia: Fight!

Posted by Joshua S. Hill

April 22, 2008

Wikipedia has created more controversy than O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton put together in its short history. The online encyclopedia, open to editing by the general public, is both an invaluable location for research, and a minefield of badly backed up opinions.

A recent article from Lawrence Solomon, of the Financial Post, at the National Post (make up your mind Solomon), has once again focused in on the problems being faced by Wikipedia in a day and age where everyone has their own opinion.

Solomon cleverly disguises his story as a Wikipedia story, while actually focusing almost entirely upon global warming research. Entitled “Wikipedia Zealots,” you might have expected that he could have found more than one example. His subtitle – “The thought police at the supposedly independent site are fervently enforcing the climate orthodoxy” – also suggests this idea.

But alas, Solomon decides that one example is enough for his needs.

Without giving you the entire two page story, I’ll try to summarize. Solomon attempted to create changes on a Wikipedia page for Naomi Oreskes. His intent was to set straight the record on the criticisms laid upon Oreskes by the scientific community, focusing on Benny Peiser. He made the edits to the page, but found that they were immediately edited out again.

This is a common theme for many quarrels at Wikipedia, so this is by no means a new topic. However this is where Solomon begins to make a fool of himself. He focuses all his mediocre writing talent against a user named Tabletop, who – despite what Solomon claims – has made no changes to the Oreskes page other than a spelling correction.

The editor who continued to remove Solomon’s edits was in fact KimDabelsteinPetersen. And, despite what Solomon claims, his edits were not removed because of his stance, but because there was absolutely no evidence.

Wikipedia is based upon the necessary sourcing of all information. Spend any length of time listening to a neutral Wikipedia party, and you will realize that unless you properly source a piece of information, it will be removed.

Only a quick look through the log for the Naomi Oreskes will find that Solomon’s edits were not being removed so that a global warming bias could be kept, but because there was no supporting evidence to his claims. Subsequently, Solomon’s claims that “I have checked with Peiser and he disputes Tabletop’s version” is not valid.

In his article, Solomon quotes Tabletop (though of course, by now we know that it wasn’t actually Tabletop), as saying in the log “We have a reliable source to this. What Peiser has said to *you* is irrelevant.”

That none of Solomon’s quotes are evident within the log page is a mystery to me. I will not claim that he is making them up, or paraphrasing, because I do not 100% understand Wikipedia’s method.

The main issue is that Lawrence Solomon’s article is nothing but flaming in the good old fashioned sense of the word. His research is negligible and at times simply 100% incorrect. His knowledge of Wikipedia is almost non-existent, despite attempting to sound like he is in the know. His entire article, for good or bad, is proof in and of itself of those he was attempting to lambaste.

I had planned to finish this article here; however I decided I would give Mr. Solomon one last chance to do himself some good. I went back to the National Post and looked for a more recent Solomon article, to see if he had indeed apologized and retracted his comments.

In fact, Mr. Solomon had already apologized to Tabletop within the Wikipedia backend;

Tabletop, I have done you an immense injustice to have thought you could be KimDabelsteinPetersen. I apologize for this.Larry 15:20, 13 April 2008 (UTC)Lawrence Solomon

However, instead of making this apology public, and retracting what he said in his column, Solomon wrote another Wikipedia article, this time entitled “Hide your name on Wicked Pedia.” My heart sank, or, more realistically, I realized just what type of person I was dealing with.

Mr. Solomon continued his attack on those he believes are the “paragon of modern propaganda” and still did not admit his own mistakes. In addition, a rather surprising amount of naivety began to insert itself in to Solomon’s article, when he couldn’t understand why no one believed him to be who he said he was. As if the internet wasn’t a place where you could pretend to be whoever you wanted to be.

I’ll finish now, but let me say this just once; if you are going to go out and publically roast someone or something, do your research. It doesn’t take all that long, and you’ll save yourself from looking like a moron.

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