The leaves that hung but never grew

I have to admit that I have sometimes used Wikipedia, though never for anything important: but thanks to the Google rules that (very foolishly as I now think) favour it in the rankings, it’s always there, at or near the top of the list, whenever I want to run a quick check on a date or something of that kind. A short while ago I was struck with the notion that perhaps I ought to give something back by tidying up a few little corners. Early modern crime seemed a good place to start, since I could see it needed plenty of attention. As a result of this, I took a look at the pages that advise on editing policy.

This is when I began to understand just how incoherent the grand Wikipedia project has become; and perhaps always has been.

Wikipedia is greatly preoccupied with the issue of reliability. It is keen that its editors should reference scholarly publications: on the page headed ‘Wikipedia: Reliable sources’ it explains that such material is more reliable because it has been ‘thoroughly vetted by the scholarly community’, and states that ‘Items that are signed are more reliable than unsigned articles because it tells whether an expert wrote it and took responsibility for it.’ Well, that seems fairly reasonable, within some obvious limits.

On the other hand, Wikipedia is plainly queasy about expert editors, apparently because of its fear of anyone’s using it for self-promotion. Thus, on the page headed ‘Wikipedia: Conflict of interest’, it says: ‘Editing in an area in which you have professional or academic expertise is not, in itself, a conflict of interest. Using material you yourself have written or published is allowed within reason, but only if it is notable and conforms to the content policies. Excessive self-citation is strongly discouraged.’ (my emboldening). Well, it hardly needs saying that one person’s within reason is another person’s excessive.

The same page also carries a warning against editors working on any topic where they may have a relationship, including an academic relationship, that may influence their opinion. But it is of course in the nature of the scholarly world that scholars very often know each other, or know something of each other: they work in the same academic departments, or meet at conferences, and/or correspond, and so on. If having some kind of personal relationship with other people working in the field is supposed to be a disqualification, then that rules out pretty much anyone with a connection with academia.

So it seems the consensus among Wikipedians is that it is best if those who edit it are highly industrious amateurs, who take the trouble to read and reference scholarly publications, but who haven’t actually published and don’t move in academic or expert circles.

I was reminded of all this today when I went looking for a famous statement by the Leveller Thomas Rainsborough (aka Rainborowe). There is a piece in the Guardian about the Putney debates of 1647 and their significance. Now, I have Woodhouse’s edition of the Putney transcripts on my shelves, but I couldn’t be bothered to look for this quotation using the index if I could find the page number quickly online.

Well, the earliest open access link that turned up was a Wikipedia page on the Leveller Thomas Rawton, claimed in that article to have uttered the words I was looking for. It looks all hunky dory, complete with references: except two of these are fake, and a third (Woodhouse) has no Rawton in the index. Evidently someone has invented a Leveller hero, modelled fairly closely on Rainsborough, though with changes to some details (a ship called the Lion becomes the Leopard, and so on). This has been up on Wikipedia since 7 January, when it was created by a joker who called himself MaximKGB. Since then, several Wikipedians have industriously polished it, adding section headings, adding and disambiguating internal links, and, the big joke, adding the fictitious Rawton to Wikipedia categories like ‘New Model Army’ and ‘Levellers’. So these days ‘Rawton’ turns up on the Leveller page, alongside Rainsborough. But none of these people have noticed that he never existed; even the blatant resemblances to Rainsborough have failed to rouse their suspicions.

The thing that, several weeks ago, finally made me abandon my plan to do a bit of work on a neglected corner of Wikipedia was finding the following injunction on the page headed ‘Wikipedia: Reliable sources’: ‘Articles and posts on Wikipedia or other open wikis should never be used as third-party sources.’ (my emboldening). Of course this is absolutely right. Completely open, anonymously edited wikis cannot by their nature ever be reliable. And even if an article is reliable at the point when you link to it, it can be corrupted two minutes later. And errors, and spoofs, can lie around uncorrected more or less indefinitely. The Wikipedians fully understand this. So why are they pissing around, wasting the time of their often very dedicated editors, misleading the public, and corrupting the search engine page rankings with their massive network of internal links, coupled with their insistence on marking their external links ‘no follow’?* Just reading that one statement, ‘posts on Wikipedia or other open wikis should never be used as ... sources’ was enough to bring it home to me that tinkering with Wikipedia was completely pointless. The premises on which Wikipedia is based are incoherent. It is at best a grand but senseless folly.

I am still irritated that the Wikipedia article on the highwayman James Maclaine states ‘MacLaine is thought to be the original model for Macheath the Knife, antihero of John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera".’ (Maclaine was born in 1724; The Beggar’s Opera premiered in 1728. Also, ’Macheath the Knife’ is an ignorant conflation of Captain Macheath from The Beggar’s Opera and Mac the Knife from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.) But I am not going to do anything about it.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,”
They said, “it would be grand!”

“If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
“That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–1898)

from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ in Through the Looking Glass (1872)

*On Wikipedia’s ‘no follow’ policy see Charles Arthur, ‘Has Wikipedia become an internet black hole?’, Guardian, 25 Jan. 2007


tag: Wikipedia

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