The Internet is amazing. I know, this blog is supposed to be about the problems on the Internet, but I don’t think I can tackle them without first acknowledging what a great technology the Internet represents. I use the Internet all the time. I pay nearly all my bills online, check my bank accounts online, direct my IRAs online, and investigate product prices online. I’ve filed my taxes online through downloaded software which was completely free. Last night I was eating at a restaurant and checked out the nutritional information downloaded through the Internet to my iPod touch. I can get financial reports from publicly traded companies the minute they are released, and in many cases can listen to investor conference calls as they happen. And of course, I use the Internet to educate myself about current events, historical events, and scientific truths.

Before the web
At an early age my parents bought me a World Book Encyclopedia set. I used it mostly for browsing, moving from topic to topic following the “see also” references, which I suppose were the precursor to hyperlinks. I specifically remember enjoying the articles on pi, Einstein, and relativity. I remember reading about World War II and the atomic bomb. I remember reading about Newton, calculus, George Washington, and the United States. I remember adding the stickers from the annual yearbook updates, and reading the articles as I went along affixing them. I can’t say I learned a lot of specific knowledge from the experience, but I’m sure it helped shape my understanding of science and piqued my interest in knowledge in general and science in particular. I wonder what I’m going to provide for my own children to coax them into a life of self-education. I don’t want to shun technology, and I do want my children to be able to go exploring through reading on their own, but I want them to do so in a productive environment, not in an environment of duplicity and chaos.

Enter the web
The world wide web, at least since the birth of the search engine, has always been a great tool for a mature rational thinker with adequate time and research skills. I remember thinking in the late 1990s that nearly any urban legend could be investigated on the Internet and, with enough research, could be confirmed or denied to a high degree of confidence. That’s not to say that the first answer you read would be the right one. In fact, quite often the first result you found would be a retelling of the false tale.  But with enough research you could find the truth, and upon examination the truth would usually hold up better than the lie.

This was a much better situation than the earlier one with Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), which generally contained countless pages of conspiracy theories and nonsense, without the corresponding “other side” of the story. And as time went on, authorities began to become more prevalent on the web, with information which still had to be double-checked, but tended to be more reliable than random websites (and perhaps more importantly, made mistakes of a more predictable nature). Still, the crappy random websites were maintained indefinitely, so it was difficult to claim a conspiracy theory — the lies were there for anyone interested to judge for themselves.

Wikipedia’s beginnings
In 2001, Ben Kovitz told Larry Sanger about wikis over a taco dinner, and 13 days later, Wikipedia was launched. Its open nature immediately fit in with the wild side of the web.

Michael Scott, from NBC’s The Office

To quote the character Michael Scott from The Office, “Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you’re getting the best possible information.” The thing is, that’s the way Wikipedia, and the early web in general, worked. Wikipedia saved every single version of every single article (apart from a very small fraction of exceptions, it still does). Every article had a talk page, where you could challenge any fact in the main article, and with few exceptions in the early days, your challenges stayed there forever and were even searchable by the major search engines. It wasn’t particularly efficient, but a mature rational thinker with adequate time and research skills could generally go a long way toward finding the truth.

Popularity, the double-edged sword
As Wikipedia grew more popular, it started to gain authority. Time and again it would pop up as the first result in a search engine, and more and more people took this to imply that the information contained in it was authoritative. Official and unofficial spokespersons for Wikipedia began to actually propagate this notion – sometimes citing a “study” in Nature which they claimed showed Wikipedia was nearly as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. The problem is, at the same time, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that owns Wikipedia, abandoned most of their oversight functions over the project, per the advice of their general counsel.

Storms on the horizon
All of this spells disaster for the popular website. Much of it has already started to become apparent and will be examined in detail over our future blog postings. Other storms are still beginning to form. Details were just released regarding a poll conducted among Wikipedians asking them what kind of attribution they feel is appropriate for Wikipedia text.

The GNU logo

Under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), the license under which Wikipedians publish their text, a printed book edition of Wikipedia articles would need to list the names of the authors who contributed to those articles, and one out of five Wikipedians surveyed indicated that they expected such attribution. But the Wikimedia Foundation has teamed up with the Free Software Foundation, who controls the the GFDL, and is considering advising third-party distributors that they no longer need to adhere to this aspect of the GFDL. Instead, redistributors would use a Creative Commons license called CC-BY-SA, which, according to the organization that produced the license, does not require such attribution.

We’ll bring you more information on this, and more, here at Akahele. Stay tuned, and be careful.

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