Wikipedia and the Moral Dilemma

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I use Wikipedia every day, at least once a day and probably more often than that. In their latest fundraising, I sent them $10.00 and if you know how cheap I am these days, that is quite a statement on my part.

And yet....

Every once in a while I come across egregious and even gross inaccuracies and therein lies the moral dilemma. Wikipedia is created by thousands of dedicated individuals most of whom are volunteers and all of whom are committed fanatics who probably have nothing better to do with their lives. I tried just this year to fix one egregious character assassination on their part of a living person (Marc Canter), something they *claim* to take special care about, and it was a nightmare. Its all bullshit my friends, they couldn't care less about accuracy as long as they get their rocks off.

So when I come across mistakes, even gross mistakes, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to tilt at windmills and try to fix their misapprehensions? What good will it do? In situations like this, it is the insider who wins, the one with the most time to waste, usually the one who is most insane, and contrary to some beliefs I am not even slightly insane or at least I have no desire to waste my time trying to correct asshole beliefs.

Never try to teach a pig to sing.

If you want to read the bullshit and try to guess what the mistakes are, please see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_operation

You see, contrary to what you see in the movies, almost all black operations are legal, they are approved through a process that involves the Department of Justice, the Intelligence Committees of Congress, and of course the Executive Office of the President and various of his/her staff.   The process of approval is circumscribed in order to keep things as secret as possible, which is something that this government, as stated in the constitution and as approved by the courts, has the right to do.

You should realize that the process is not perfect, that it has changed over the decades, often in response to perceived abuses of the system by various administrations, and because the various Intelligence agencies believe that they have been used by various Administrations and then allowed to hang.   

You should also realize that almost all Intelligence activities have at their core the violation of someone's law, generally speaking, just not US law.  And yes, this is a tricky point in international relations, one that, upon examination, could make one wonder to what extent nations respect international law and to what extent they just pay lip service to it and invoke it when it is convenient to do so.

What Wikipedia should be saying here is that while black operations do not have normal Congressional oversight, they do have a process of approval that has been approved by Congress and the courts, and that these operations are therefore, in general, believed to be legal activities of the US Government, although by definition they are not ones that they would want to be publicly disclosed.

In other words, the paranoid interpretation that all secret intelligence operations by this country are illegal and not approved by the government is simply not true.

But that said, or at least that is my understanding, do I really want to try and change Wikipedia?

Writing for Wikipedia Part 1

I have wanted to learn how to contribute to Wikipedia for some time now.   This means adding new articles and editing mistakes in existing ones.   So I started reading the online documentation and ran into some surprises, mostly pleasant ones, but surprises nevertheless.

But maybe they should not be surprises, maybe it should have been obvious.

1. There is a rather large culture around writing Wikipedia. They have their own language and their own jargon. It is extensive. Just reading the tutorials takes hours and to read all the documentation would take days. So, considerable and laudable attention has been spent on making it possible for new people to come in and contribute.

2. The technology is very text based, and assumes you can handle basic non-WYSIWYG editing. It feels like solid, old-school geek.

3. A great deal of the documentation involves conflict resolution between authors and a reminder to everyone to be civil.

4. The emphasis on the anonymity of authors and editors and the ability to contribute anonymously at all surprised me.

5. They have the concept of group ownership of any article, an emphasis on “not one single author”, e.g. when you write something you have no more control over the text than any other person.

6. There is an extensive audit system that keeps any change forever and gives one the ability to roll back and forth between edits.  This makes it easy for an "editor" to return an article to a previous state.

8. There are extensive prohibitions on “original research” and "conflict of interest", which includes writing about someone or something you know, because of the likelihood that this will result in bias. Thus for example, I would, at first glance, be discouraged from writing about the history of computer animation because of my knowledge (and hence bias) on the topic.

So the first thing I notice is that my friend and serial-entrepreneur Marc Canter's (1) web page has a pretty amazing, and frankly somewhat offensive if you check the citations, discussion of his alleged politics in the overview/introductory paragraph. This surprised me because I have known Marc for a long time and I certainly knew none of this, nor do I think it is all that relevant to what it is he has done, e.g. to what makes him notable for a Wikipedia entry. At the very least it ought to be in its own section, but by Wikipedia rules it actually ought to be removed because it is not verified by citation.

But since I know Marc, and that is considered conflict of interest, I resisted the temptation to make the edit myself but followed what I read is “procedure”. I went to the “talk” page and made a comment.

This is what I said.

I am new to Wikipedia and I am feeling my way around. Also, I have a COI here, as I have been friends of Marc Canter off and on for 30 years. We are not terribly close (I havent seen him for 15 years) but I know of his work and do admire the man. So my request here is that someone read this and, if they agree, make the simple edits to fix one issue that just slaps you in the face when you read this article. I have read a lot of biographies on Wikipedia and Marc's is the only one that finds it necessary to discuss what may or may not be his political beliefs and the unverified beliefs of his relatives in the summary paragraph. (At least I should say, the only biography of a technical person, maybe there are biographies of Marxist revolutionaries that do so, but Marc is hardly that. ) Furthermore, this discussion of Marc's supposed politics and of the politics of his relatives is unverified ... if you look at the citations you will see that one is to Marc's blog (which should not count for verification) and is no longer an active page, and the other is a semi-pornographic picture of Marc Canter's head put on top of a so-called red diaper baby. I hardly think that this counts as verified, and at the very least is rude and in bad taste, if not actually libel. So the simplest request I could make to improve this page is to remove any mention of Marc's relatives and his politics and delete these two non-citations. Please contact me if you have any questions and I will check back to this talk page from time to time. I have a lot to learn and I hope this is a legitimate use of the talk page. Thank you. Michaelw newyork (talk) 02:05, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

We will see what happens.

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1. Marc was founder of Macromind in 1982 and is one of the most important influences in the creation of interactive multimedia, imho.