yelvington.com

The other night I gave a speech at the John Siegenthaler Center at Vanderbilt University in which I urged the new-media workshop students to look something up on Wikipedia, which is, of course, infallible. That drew a good laugh. Siegenthaler, unfortunately, wasn't appearing until later in the week, so I couldn't tease directly.

When you edit a page on Wikipedia, your changes are journaled and your identity (or at least your IP address) is noted. A Caltech grad student and hacker has built a search tool that works on that information, and Wired has launched a crowdsourced project to surface changes that are ... ahem ... interesting.

The results?

• Scientologists removing criticism. Gee, no surprise there.
• The Israeli government removing criticism.
• Electronic Arts removing criticism.
• Diebold removing ... you guessed, it, criticism!
• Dow Chemical removing references to some of its great products, such as Bhopal, Agent Orange and breast implants.
• Dell Computer ... guess what they did?
• Somebody at the Washington Post changing the record to say the Washington Examiner is owned by Charles Manson. Wait a minute ... who owns the Washington Times? These cult guys all run together in my mind, sort of helter-skelter.
• Fox News not only removing criticism, but also tampering with entries for Al Franken and Keith Olberman.
• The BBC changing the Dubya to mean "Wanker" instead of "Walker" and the New York Times adding "jerk jerk jerk" to George W. Bush's entry. Ah, well, it could be worse. Reuters identified him as a mass murderer.

Now, surely all those edits were cowboy actions by some low-level idiot in those organizations, unsanctioned by anyone in charge. I for one would be shocked, shocked ....

Well, it does make for some fun reading.

I think this is fascinating: GalaxyZoo.org is asking volunteers to look at pictures of the sky and scientifically classify entire galaxies. Spiral? Elliptical? Clockwise? Anticlockwise? It turns out the human eye and the human brain are much better at this sort of thing than any currently available technology.

But isn't science about precision? But what if they're wrong? My bet is that the underlying system relies on the establishment of a consensus.

Most people are reasonable and of good will, which is why free societies work as well as they do. If you design a system that accepts the fact that some people will make mistakes, and others may be vandals, but you allow the larger number to define the outcome, then you accommodate the realities of human nature. This is the principle behind open processes ranging from Wikipedia to democracy, and it's something that we in the media business need to learn to use.