WiReD magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson has copped to lifting chunks of material for his second book Free from Wikipedia and other sources without credit. But it could be about to get a lot worse.

In addition to the Wikipedia cut’n'pastes, Anderson appears to have lifted passages from several other texts too. And in a quite surreal twist, we discover that the Long Tail author had left a hard drive backup wide open and unsecured for Google to index, then accused one of his accusers of “hacking”.

Does the WiReD editor and New Economy guru need basic lessons in how to use a computer?

Waldo Jaquith of Virginia Quarterly Review unearthed a dozen suspect passages after what he called “a cursory investigation”, and posted his findings here on Tuesday. Wikipedia entries for ‘There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch’, ‘Learning Curve’ and ‘Usury’ had been pasted into Anderson’s book.

In addition to Wikipedia citations, which Anderson reproduced with the errors intact (oops), Jacquith suggests he also lifted from an essay and a recent book. Presented with the evidence, Anderson blamed haste and (curiously) not being able to decide on a presentation format for citations, for his decision to omit the citations altogether. Other examples were “writethroughs”, he said.

Then lit blogger Edward Champion documented several more examples which he says show

“a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes — in some cases, nearly verbatim.”

Champion’s examples of churnalism include blog posts, a corporate websites and (again) Wikipedia.

Handbags at dawn

In a memorable exchange with the humourless [*] Anderson, Champion responded:

“Even accounting for the fool’s weight that Wikipedia has in even the most generalized research situation, surely an ‘according to Wikipedia’ would have solved the problem. Except that if you actually copped to the fact that you cadged from Wikipedia, you’d be a laughing stock, wouldn’t you? Your ‘expertise’ — that country bumpkin approach to slinging conceptual generalizations around — would be called into question, wouldn’t it?”.

The bit in [our] italics is an early candidate for Quote of the Year.

Champion also discovered that Anderson had shared a backup of his personal hard drive with the entire universe. Anderson said he’d accidentally left the password off the backup, and then accused Champion of depositing files on the hard drive. Paging tech support for Mr Anderson…

And the rest of the iceberg has yet to be measured. One correspondent noted yesterday that in The Long Fail, Anderson’s first hit, Anderson describes a walk he supposedly took around a Wal-Mart in Oakland, where

“There are no copies of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street or Nirvana’s Nevermind”

This bears a remarkable resemblance to a 2004 article in Rolling Stone magazine by Warren Cohen, who wrote:

“At a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Thorton, Colorado, for example, there were no copies of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street or Nirvana’s Nevermind.”

The papers have been having great fun with the story, which has gained legs because of Anderson’s dog-ate-my-footnotes defence. But maybe they shouldn’t cast the first stone.

Pranking the newspapers by planting phoney material into the Hive Mind’s favourite reference source is an artform, and the papers oblige only too easily. When they’re not cutting and pasting from each other, they’re cutting and pasting from Wikipedia.

As we first reported, almost all the British obituary pages fell for the odd fact that Ronnie Hazlehurst had come out of retirement with S Club 7. Tabloid factoids spill from the web straight into print.

And last month an Irish prankster made up quotes for robo-repeaters at the BBC, the Graun, and the Independent (amongst others) to recycle. Newspapers blame the web for their demise, while churning out a crappy version of it in print.

And Anderson’s lame thesis (The Long Tail is now thoroughly shot to pieces, while Free is hedged with qualifications) wouldn’t have got out of the door if the papers had treated them with critical thinking, rather than slack-jawed wonder.

After pressure over the weekend from Wikipedia’s Il Duce Jimmy Wales, the encyclopedia’s most illustrious fake professor Ryan Jordan has resigned his post at Wikia Inc.

An assiduous editor with the nickname “Essjay”, the 24-year old Jordan passed himself off as an older and more mature character: a Professor of Theology with two PhDs – these impressive credentials even winning him fame in a New Yorker feature. The deception did little to stop Jordan’s meteoric ascent. Wales appointed Jordan to “ArbCom”, Wikpedia’s Supreme Court, and even found him a position at his own commercial venture, Wikia Inc.

The deception was initially unearthed by Daniel Brandt in January, and has been simmering since early February, when Wikipedians themselves put two and two together: the Essjay that Wales had blessed couldn’t be the character that Essjay claimed to be. It breezed into public view last week, with a short disclaimer on the New Yorker‘s website.

Wales initially said he was happy with Jordan’s deception, but changed his mind over the weekend, inviting Jordan to resign his positions of responsibility on Wikipedia. The 24-year quit Wikia Inc. yesterday.

(We don’t know if Jordan detached himself from the project completely, however – one blogger advised him to rejoin using a different pseudonym, and, presumably, a new fictional identity. What will it be this time?)

The incident raises more questions than it answers, as neither Wales, Jordan, nor the editors at the New Yorker appears to show a shred of regret for their behavior. And this is what turns a dull story about the procedures of a tediously procedural website into a kind of modern morality play.

We’re so busy being sorry, we’ve no time to apologize

It’s also one that’s thrown up some moments of comic relief.

In its account of the episode today, the New York Times cites Jordan, in his professorial disguise, defending his use of the seminal IDG philosophy textbook, Catholicism for Dummies, explaining —

“This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it’s [sic] credibility.”

(And er, we all know what that’s worth).

On Saturday, Wales said that the fictional persona Jordan had invented, had been used to deceive Wikipedians — a bad thing !

For Wales’ explanation to be plausible, we must therefore assume he hadn’t checked Essjay’s credentials when he promoted him to Arbitration Committee, and was ignorant of the background of his newest staffer when Jordan was employed by Wikia Inc. And he never read the New Yorker…

All these things are possible – but even with the presumption of innocence, it does leave you wondering what goes on in Jimbo’s head.

As for Jordan, he was anything but contrite. He expressed regret only for hurting his fellow Wikipedians’ feelings — not for doing anything wrong — which as Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger recounts, is a defiant non-apology.

And the New Yorker, after being alerted to the deception by Brandt, conducted a thorough investigation — which miraculously exonerated its internal fact-checker and star writer!

This sorry apology was produced:

“We were comfortable with the material we got from Essjay because of Wikipedia’s confirmation of his work and their endorsement of him.”

(In other words, the New Yorker found some fictional characters to endorse another fictional character — which made it all OK. You wonder why they didn’t just take the afternoon off and go and see Lord of the Rings).

The august weekly continued:

“In retrospect, we should have let our readers know that we had been unable to corroborate Essjay’s identity beyond what he told us.”

Ah, yes — wouldn’t that have rather spoiled the story?

So to sum up, everyone’s sorry, but no one owns up to doing anything wrong. There may be a parallel to be drawn with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair – who has apologized for many things in the course of his premiership, but nothing he actually did. It’s easy to emote, but hard to take responsibility, so we shouldn’t be surprised by the Wikipedians aping our ruling class, for whom anything goes, so long as it’s accompanied with a televised sniffle.

Does it matter?

The episode has been quite a calamity for the project: Wikipedia funders now regret their contributions, and senior Wikipedia editors regret their personal investment in the project. May we add three points that are in danger of being overlooked-

Firstly, there’s the issue of “deception” and the New Yorker. Pranking the media should not be considered a crime; it’s an honorable activity. Journalists are deceived on a daily basis — and should be more often, as it keeps us on our toes. When you hear journalists complaining about this onerous obligation — of sifting their sources, you know that privilege has won out over duty. Yet this is something the Pulitzer Prize winner commissioned to write the now notorious feature failed to do.

Make no mistake, Jordan’s appearance in the hallowed pages of the New Yorker was not due to his 16,000 edits on Wikipedia, or his natural charisma, or photogenic charms — it was because his sales blurb claimed that he was a Professor of Theology with four degrees. Who better to fulfill Stacy Schiff’s brief, to marvel at one of the Wonders of the Modern World? Schiff duly delivered what her editors required: a piece of advertising copy.

It stands as a a warning that evangelism and reporting don’t really mix.

Secondly, there’s the very elephant in the room that Schiff failed to mention: the cult-like aspect of Web 2.0-flavoured technology-evangelism that we see in projects like Wikipedia. What did the New Yorker miss? Only the obvious, as reader Michael Paxton pointed out via email:

“I know this will sound ridiculous, but it is beginning to seem that Wikiology is, more and more, taking on the form of the much maligned (pseudo)religion, Scientology.”

“The personality cult, the rejection of conventional truths and realities that challenge the core objectives, the once informal steering groups hardening into a shell of dogma that realises that rejection.

Hell, the moment I read ArbComm I immediately thought of the Scientology’s ‘Sea Org’. Both the role as upholders of the core objectives (on behalf of the leader) and the affected air of hand chosen adjudicators of martial law seem to simply add to the rather scarey similarity.”

Please, oh please, warn us if Jimmy Wales ever starts building a navy!”

Not all idealists on the Wikipedia cause are prepared to let this go. Here’s a crie de coeur from an editor in despair, spotted last week:

We’ve stopped being an encyclopedia. We’ve stopped using common sense. We’ve taken our eye of the big picture and focused on ourselves, our myopic power games, our petty process, and our internal need to keep every one in line. We count sources to determine notability — because we need objective rules. Never mind the fact it is absurd. We fight little wars with [[Daniel Brandt|monsters of out own imagination]]. Never mind the fact they cheapen us. We care not for the damage we do to the real world and its real people, or potential we miss, as long as we can make little rules and have little people follow them.

I’m sick of the little people and their little rules. For now, I want no part of them. I thought there were signs of hope. And I was wrong. + :If this is a direct or indirect result of [[List of Internet phenomena]], I feel some responsibility for the situation. Please e-mail me. [[User:Newyorkbrad|Newyorkbrad]] 18:00, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Which may be the last sound of any conscience the project had ebbing away.

Thirdly, and (almost) finally — there’s the question of what Wikipedia’s place in the world really is.

A few months ago at a social event, your reporter had an epiphany – but then we all need to get out more. A random stranger was expressing delight at finding “stuff” — information, factoids — on the internet, but couldn’t grasp that Wikipedia wasn’t owned by Google. When you type in a word, or question, doesn’t “stuff” just come out of the computer?

It was hard to explain that Wikipedia was a separate entity that wasn’t owned by Google, and even harder to explain — forgive me, dear readers, for I didn’t have the courage to explain this — that it was actually Wikipedia that now “owned” Google.

Here we must salute Shelley Powers, for adding a broader perspective:

I’ve recently stopped using Wikipedia, or stopped using it as an original source. I’ve found two things:

First, Google’s results have degraded in the last year or so. When one ignores Wikipedia in the results, on many subjects most of the results are placement by search engine optimization–typically garbage–or some form of comment or usenet group or some such that’s not especially helpful. Good results are now more likely found in the second or third pages.

Second, I find that I’m having to go to more than one page to find information, but when I do, I uncover all sorts of new and interesting goodies. That’s one of the most dangerous aspects of Wikipedia (aside from the whole ‘truth’ thing), or any single-source of information: we lose the ability to discover things on the net through sheer serendipity.

So the task of “organizing all the world’s information and making it useful” – Google’s mission statement, and the rod which broke its own back — is beyond the capability of the cleverest algorithms humans can devise.

In other words, the popular media conditions us to expect such wonders from technology, that when we type in a word or phrase, good honest wisdom pours out. But Google, with its insane mission to record everything that ever happened ever, can’t cope with this super-abundance of recorded material. So it falls back on the unpaid volunteers of Wikipedia to do its job for it.

But wait, it gets worse!

Where I find Wikipedia useful — and huge areas can be discarded as heresay, tedious arguments between pedants — is when some monomanic fan has lovingly assembled a list derived from his (or her, but it’s usually a him) area of expertise — and then fiercely defended that turf.

That’s sort of what we had with the Usenet FAQs, round about 1995 or 1996, if you want to look at the glass half full. They were often better written, better organized, and free of the banalities of prose that only committee-editing can generate: a kind of pseudo-authoritative waffle that is Wikipedia’s hallmark.

In other words, we’re just about back to where we started — and that’s the really scary thought.

So we can chuck away all the nonsense about “democratization of knowledge”, and “new forms of production”, and similar such drivel offered by the eggheads of Web 2.0 — and conclude that after millions of man hours effort, human volunteers can’t do a much better job than the algorithms, either.

History has its precedents, where human sacrifice prevailed: Stalin may have defeated Hitler by throwing 20 million bodies at the oncoming armies of the Reich, but no amount of volunteer Wikipedians will make the web “better”, by any measure, than it was a decade ago when no one used it.

We’re really back to square one.

Maybe this time, we can forget about such utopian dreams as an “information revolution”, and get some real information professionals involved, such as librarians and editors, to earn their keep. Maybe we can rid ourselves of the illusion that “everyone talking at once” will generate some kind of wisdom, when all Google and Wikipedia have demonstrated is that it’s a giant Tower of Babel. Everyone’s talking alright, but there’s nothing worth listening to.

One character who’s laughing all the way to the bank, though, is Wales himself. Having exhausted the expendable (and unpaid) human labour creating Wikipedia, his stealth project Wikia is set to cream the profits. Wikia already boasts three times the referrals Wikipedia ever had, and finally Jimbo has a success story to take back to his old bond trader pals.

More on this — which is the real deception behind the great Wikipedia adventure — in our next bulletin.

Scientists have been able to identify human DNA for over 40 years. And here at The Register, we have access to our own stock of Martian DNA – courtesy, of course, of cult commentator and philosopher amanfromMars.

The startling discovery that DNA may have leaped across planetary boundaries comes courtesy of literary agent John Brockman.

Brockman runs an online groupthink “salon”, called Edge.org, where his indentured science authors and a select band of ideologically-correct journalists are invited to congratulate each other on their insight. (Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Edge before – it’s only ever mentioned by Blokes who are already in it, or Blokes who would sell their mothers to get in.)

But it’s here, at Edge, that Brockman may have unearthed the greatest scoop of his lifetime; for here at least, one Martian-human hybrid walks amongst us.

New Year’s Day found a curious declaration credited to one “Kevin Kelly” – editor in chief of WiReD magazine.

“The success of the Wikipedia (sic) keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better,” he writes.

Of course, that’s an easy mistake to make… if you’ve just arrived from another planet. Here’s a more accurate measure of success, from earth-bound observers SomethingAwful.

Yet the alien visitor must be impressed by the high ethical standards exhibited by the project, its fair-mindedness, tolerance and generosity, and of course, its uniquely bottom-up democratic nature, for he is mightily impressed. So much so, that he sees in it a new way of organising society:

“The reality of a working Wikipedia has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable… I hate to say it but there is a new type of communism or socialism loose in the world.”

Alarm bells really ought to be clanging by this point. The Martian-Martian hybrid is using terms he has apparently heard, but doesn’t really understand – and can’t relate to the world around him.

The next statement can be construed as a promise that the hybrid DNA is here to stay:

“It may take several decades for this shifting world perspective to show its full colours …

Finally, here’s the clincher:

“I am convinced that the full impact of the Wikipedia is still subterranean, and that its mind-changing power is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existence proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.”

Pure Martian.

Only it’s not Santa.

Wikipedia’s Maximum Leader and peripatetic salesman Jimmy Wales breezed into London yesterday. This time he’s pitching Jimbo’s Big Bag of Trivia at teachers and lecturers.

Wikipedia should be permitted as a source in citations he now says, reversing his earlier position that students who cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source “deserved to get an F grade”.

Wales’ logic is that the students are going to use it anyway, so why not permit them to cite it as a source?

He also claims the site has become more reliable. Under Wales’ advice, it’s effectively become locked-down, shedding its “democratic” aspirations in all but name. Today, all edits on a topic are sent to a single 14-year old in Kalamazoo, Michigan, whose judgement is final.

“There is no substitute for peer critique,” he told a conference.

What – not even people who know what they’re talking about?

The project has a febrile, end-of-an-era atmosphere these days, which can’t have escaped someone with Wales’ fine antennae for public relations.

A Slashdot discussion from two years ago would have seen a vigorous defence of the project – with the full range of excuses being deployed. (You can find a taxonomy of them here – which we need to update). But the discussion in response to Cade Metz’s story here about the Wikipedia administrators’ death list prompted a full-on comedy festival. There was nary a voice raised in its defence.

So as it gears up to exploit its global brand commercially, Wikipedia is passing into popular culture as a place where strangely obsessive people go to argue the toss and play games with each other. It’s a sort of public Milgram Experiment: how cruel can nerds be to each other? How much pointless bureaucracy can they create?

Seth Finkelstein brought out these aspects yesterday in a real savaging at The Guardian, but he expressed it even more succinctly on his blog. Seth writes:

“The problem is that Wikipedia is extensively marketed as some sort of harbinger of novel social organization that produces collective good. The reality is it’s just a very old sort of social organization, one that gets people to work for free in part by pandering to their group impulses.”

One source close to the project had this to say of the secret mailing list:

“It’s really indicative of the state of Wikipedia. The vandalism IS getting more and more out of control. The wiki way just isn’t working anymore.”

The huge gap between Wikipedia’s aspirations (it’s a really fine site for trivia) and the reality is the essence of comedy.

However, it seems the only people prepared to defend the project anymore – or more accurately, choose to overlook this reality gap – are people in media and marketing, and nature’s natural bureaucrats.

You can almost forgive the marketeers, that’s what they do. And the robo-droids and rule-makers who see in Wikipedia a model for self-advancement through a large organisation will always be with us. But what excuse do journalists have?

It’s a great example of what Adam Curtis warned of in a recent interview. Hacks should spend a bit more time reporting the world, he told us, rather than fantasising about it.

But when his obituaries appeared yesterday, there was an odd addition to Hazlehurst’s canon. Apparently he had emerged from retirement a few years ago to co-write the song ‘Reach’, a hit for Simon “Spice Girls” Fuller’s creation S Club 7.

“There could only be one source for this,” suggests Shaun Rolph, who tipped us off.

And yes – you can probably guess what it is:

A couple of seconds in Google takes you to a real, primary source, EMI Publishing, where the correct credit for ‘Reach’ is hidden in plain view: Cathy Dennis and Andrew Todd. The MCPS confirmed to us that the royalties are split 50:50 between the two composers.

So who fell for this?

Step forward BBC News, the Grauniad 2.0, the Independent, the Times, The Stage and Reuters – who all cut and pasted the phoney factoid from Wikipedia without a second thought. The Times‘ obituary writer professed to be surprised by Ronnie’s late-career comeback – but not so surprised he felt the need to check whether it was actually true.

Hats off to the Telegraph, however, for not supping from the poison cup of Web 2.0.

(For you trainspotters: an anonymous edit introduced the hoax into the entries for both Hazlehurst and the song last month; an editor spotted the hoax on the WWiki’s page about the song, but not the page for the composer. Subsequently, diligent Wikipedians even corrected the spelling of “Hazlehurst” – but not the false information itself.)

Recently, Tom Melly wrote here about how lazy hacks could look no further than Wikipedia for biographical information about his late father George – and rightly put the blame for the spread of misinformation on the journalists themselves.

But this is the first case of obituarists being hoaxed in such large numbers. It’s as well Wikipedia hasn’t branched out into the Funerals and Tombstones business.

Yet.

Adds Shaun:

“He was at the Beeb for 20 years and they clearly just spent five minutes on Wikipedia to prepare his obit. I’d feel happier if he had written Reach. I’d like to have seen S Club going through Hebden Bridge in a tin bath.”

With fantastic timing, the Guardian Arts blog asked yesterday, “Could the birth of literary software herald the rise of robotic authors?”.

Er… they’re working on it, folks. Starting with robotic reporters.

Wikipedia comes in for a fair amount of criticism these days from El Reg and other publications, but I can’t help wondering if we’re missing the real point regarding its status as an encyclopedia. Most of the arguments hinge on its accuracy, or lack of it. But if our criteria for an encyclopedia is a guarantee of 100 per cent accuracy, then there are no encyclopaedias now, and there never have been. So is Wikipedia an encylopedia, and, if not, can it ever be one? Reluctantly, I think the answer is a resounding ‘no’, and here’s why.

This is a tale of personal experience, so a bit of background is needed. In the first place, I am a casual editor on Wikipedia under the username Tomandlu. I’ve contributed to articles on various novels, historical events, and so on (including, for reasons I fail to recall, the tuberculate pelagic octopus – don’t you hate it when that happens?). So, I like Wikipedia, I really do. Besides, any resource that has anything as bizarre as the Death Star talkpage gets my vote.

My father is George Melly, the British jazz-singer and writer. Needless to say, I keep an eye on Wikipedia’s article on him. I try to avoid any bias, although I did once suggest that a particular anecdote wasn’t really noteworthy or accurate. (It was a trout not a salmon, and he didn’t wank on it, just near it; besides, if a wank-adote is really required, then there’s a far better one involving cat impressions and a plate.)

…Read more at The Register.

Nature magazine has some tough questions to answer after it let its Wikipedia fetish get the better of its responsibilities to reporting science. The Encyclopedia Britannica has published a devastating response to Nature‘s December comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica, and accuses the journal of misrepresenting its own evidence.

Where the evidence didn’t fit, says Britannica, Nature‘s news team just made it up. Britannica has called on the journal to repudiate the report, which was put together by its news team.

Independent experts were sent 50 unattributed articles from both Wikipedia and Britannica, and the journal claimed that Britannica turned up 123 “errors” to Wikipedia’s 162.

But Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children’s version and Britannica’s “book of the year” to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry.

Nice “Mash-Up” – but bad science.

Says Britannica -

“Almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading.

“Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.”

In one case, for example. Nature’s peer reviewer was sent only the 350 word introduction to a 6,000 word Britannica article on lipids – which was criticized for containing omissions.

A pattern also emerges which raises questions about the choice of the domain experts picked by Nature‘s journalists.

Several got their facts wrong, and in many other cases, simply offered differences of opinion.

“Dozens of the so-called inaccuracies they attributed to us were nothing of the kind; they were the result of reviewers expressing opinions that differed from ours about what should be included in an encyclopedia article. In these cases Britannica’s coverage was actually sound.”

Nature only published a summary of the errors its experts found some time after the initial story, and has yet to disclose all the reviewer’s notes.

So how could a respected science publication make such a grave series of errors?

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the Wiki

When Nature published the news story in December, it followed weeks of bad publicity for Wikipedia, and was a gift for the project’s beleaguered supporters.

In October, a co-founder had agreed that several entries were “horrific crap”. A former newspaper editor and Kennedy aide John Siegenthaler Snr. then wrote an article explaining how libellous modifications had lain unchecked for months. By early December, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales was becoming a regular feature on CNN cable news, explaining away the site’s deficiencies.

“Nature‘s investigation suggests that Britannica’s advantage may not be great,” concluded the journal’s news editor Jim Giles.

Nature accompanied this favorable news report with a cheerful, spin-heavy editorial that owed more to an evangelical recruitment drive than it did a rational analysis of empirical evidence. It urged readers to “push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia.”

(Former Britannica editor Robert McHenry dubbed Wikipedia the “Faith based encyclopedia”, and the project certainly reflects the religious zeal of some of its keenest supporters. Regular Register readers will be familiar with the rhetoric. See Wikipedia ‘to make universities obsolete‘).

Hundreds of publications pounced on the Nature story, and echoed the spin that Wikipedia was as good as Britannica – downplaying or omitting to mention the quality gap. The press loves an upbeat story, and what can be more uplifting than the utopian idea that we’re all experts – at whatever subject we choose?

The journal didn’t, however, disclose the evidence for these conclusions until some days later, when journalists had retired for their annual Christmas holiday break. And this evidence raised troubling questions, as Nicholas Carr noted last month. Many publications had assumed Nature‘s Wikipedia story was objectively reporting the work of scientists – Nature’s staple – rather than a news report assembled by journalists pretending to be scientists.

And now we know it was anything but scientific.

Carr noted that Nature‘s reviewers considered trivial errors and serious mistakes as roughly equal. So why did Nature risk its reputation in such a way?

Perhaps the clue lies not in the news report, but in the evangelism of the accompanying editorial. Nature‘s news and features editor Jim Giles, who was responsible for the Wikipedia story, has a fondness for “collective intelligence”, one critical website suggests.

“As long as enough scientists with relevant knowledge played the market, the price should reflect the latest developments in climate research,” Giles concluded of one market experiment in 2002.

The idea became notorious two years ago when DARPA, under retired Admiral Poindexter, invested in an online “terror casino” to predict world events such as assassinations. The public didn’t quite share the sunny view of this utopian experiment, and Poindexter was invited to resign.

What do these seemingly disparate projects have in common? The idea that you can vote for the truth.

We thought it pretty odd, back in December, to discover a popular science journal recommending readers support less accurate information. It’s even stranger to find this institution apparently violating fundamental principles of empiricism.

But these are strange times – and high summer for supporters of junk science.

“He who feels punctured must have been a bubble – Lao Tsu

A funny thing happened last week. Author and broadcaster – and veteran OpenOffice user – Andrew Brown wrote a piece in The Guardian a fortnight ago demolishing some of the more absurd myths around open source software projects. Frustrating bugs went unfixed for years, he noted, giving lie to the myth that simply because anyone could, in theory, make improvements, then improvements that users care most about would actually be made. Brown has written two books using OpenOffice, and performed his duty as a diligent user. If this was commercial software, he’d be a MVC, or “Most Valuable Customer”, and if OpenOffice was an airline, he’d be bumped up to First Class every time he showed up at the airport.

But what was particularly interesting was the range of responses to this critique, because they mirrored the responses received by The Register from Wikipedians. I have a theory about why these are similar, but first let’s see what people said about Brown’s piece. He published them on his blog here and here.

Here’s the typical response:

out?”

As we observed with Wikipedia, passing off the responsibility onto the user for dealing with the inadequacies of the software, or information, is a trait open projects seem to share.

Then there’s the age-old response that a deficiency is a FeatureNotABug.

‘spaces typed at the end of a line won’t show’ How is this a bug? It’s just a different way of displaying text. Is a printer in error because it doesn’t visually show you there is a space at the end of each line? No. There’s no reason why it should have to show a space at the end of the line. That’s you being very pernickety, not a bug.

Noel Slevin

Silly Mr. Brown, for not spotting that. More accurately, this response is classified as “Blaming The User For Being Stupid”. Again, that’s a Wikipedian trait too, and there were plenty more in the same vein.

Note the subtle variations. There’s the “Hypothetical Utopia” defense, which ignores the present for an imaginary future in which the FOSS processes work as they ideally should:

So, yes, there is a problem with the open-source model. But I wonder whether things will change if OO is adopted by cities that have skilled IT departments that can be directed to fix THOSE PARTICULAR bugs, or to make THOSE PARTICULAR enhancements, that are of importance to THAT PARTICULAR city? I can imagine city council directing the IT representative to get the bug fixed and to report back at the next meeting. Within a couple of meetings, either the bug will be fixed or the city will drop OO. This is a tight feedback loop that involves skilled workers.

Then there’s the “Never Mind the Quality, Feel The Price”.

[paraphrased] Any bugs in OpenOffice are counter balanced by the fact that it is free!

And that’s one of the commonest defenses of Wikipedia, which imagines a world in which the population is so starved of information (books and libraries don’t exist here, for example, nor do wise teachers), that every globbet of information that drips from a computer network must be applauded as an “information revolution”. In this world, the speed or price of information trumps all considerations of its quality. But as is so often pointed out, we’re hardly living in a world starved of information. We’re drowning under vast quantities of ropey information, and none the wiser for the experience.

Back to the onslaught on The Open Office User Who Dared Complain.

There’s the parry called “Flood The Area with Improbably Large Numbers”, in which downloads (or in Wikipedia’s case, the number of articles) are quoted. We shall spare you this.

But a significant proportion of responses take the counterattack, and question the critic’s motives, knowledge and quite possibly, moral inadequacies too.

Darryl LeCount’s lofty ticking off is typical:

I found Andrew Brown’s vitriolic attack on OpenOffice.org to be ill-informed, heavily biased against open source software and extremely inconsistent. He claims to “like” OpenOffice, initially using it out of “a mixture of perversity, stinginess, and vague anti-Microsoft sentiment”, before launching into a tirade about how buggy it is and how flawed the open source model is. The author has clearly neither had extensive experience of using Mozilla Firefox, Blender, or Linux, and it is also clear that he has had little involvement with the development of these products despite his vague claims.

So Mr. Brown’s critique of one product is invalidated because he hasn’t used enough of them. A snobbish variation on “user is stupid”.

Finally, there’s the kind of response which supposes that the only reason a critique was made was to drive up page traffic.

I think the author of the article has achieved exactly what he intended to do and that is generate traffic to his blog and article. If you were a good objective writer you would not need to resort to this tactic. It’s a bit pathetic that you feel the need to be so negative at the expense of something you get for free. Let’s face it, this article could just as easily have been positive but that just would not have generated the traffic right

We hate to see a sad face, at this time of year. But we also get the feeling that advocates of this, the Page View Whore counterattack, rarely meet advocates of the Flood The Area With Improbably Large Numbers counterattack, because if the project was as popular as the latter insist, then publishers would write only write nice things about open projects, to drive up their traffic. We’ll spare you the rest, but the entire defense is summed up at the end of a tedious “Fisking” delivered by one Dave Lister, who sums up Brown’s arguments bafflingly, so:

“I like OpenOffice.” translation: I really want Open Source to get better

Silly Andrew, for harboring such hopes. So what are we dealing with, here?

Well, in his Guardian piece, Andrew Brown pointed out that successful open source projects keep their users happy, and if the users share the same background, common goals, and level of technical knowledge as the authors, then the users can indeed contribute to a virtuous circle. bind and Apache spring to mind.

But when the skills and experience are, to steal a Rumsfeld-ism, “asymmetric”, there’s friction. Many of Andrew Brown’s OpenOffice critics have no idea of what a user really wants to do with the software, and can only cognize he’s rejecting their gift of free software. Many Wikipedia defenders have no sympathy for readers who complain about unreliable, or badly written information, and can only cognize a world mocking their careful handiwork, what one critic calls a “defective data device” with “-pedia” in the name.

(One Australian doctor wrote to describe how he’d made just one Wikipedia edit in his life, to correct an entry about a medical procedure, which if carried out, would result in death. Heck, this is an information revolution, and every revolution is going to have casualties!)

So perhaps it isn’t such a mystery. Open projects are by nature idealistic, a little gift to the world. When this gift is spurned, the rejection must feel terrible.

Why would an ungrateful world reject this gift?

Let’s find out.

Read more at El Reg.