From the current Skeptical Adversaria issued by ASKE -- article on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an extraordinary idea: an internet encyclopedia that ‘anyone can edit’. It is based on a principle (‘crowdsourcing’) first articulated in 1906 when Francis Galton discovered that the crowd at a country fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their guesses were averaged. The average was closer to the true weight than the estimate of any member of the crowd, including expert estimates. According to the principle, a crowd of anonymous people editing Wikipedia will produce a reference work that is closer to the truth than the work of any individual editor; closer even than the work of any expert on the subject.

Unfortunately the principle of crowdsourcing has not really worked for Wikipedia, for a number of reasons that sceptics, and all those who care about the scientific method, should be concerned about. Everyone at the country fair had an interest in guessing the weight of the ox correctly. Not everyone who edits Wikipedia has an interest in getting the facts right. This leads to a systematic bias on Wikipedia against scientific neutrality.

I shall briefly talk about the kind of article which is vulnerable to this bias, and give some reasons why it exists at all.

Articles subject to bias

The moon landing hoax is an entertaining place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories

The conspiracy theories involve the idea that the Apollo program and the moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA and other organisations. The talk pages are entertaining, and a testimony to the patience and fortitude of those who have strived - in this case successfully - to maintain neutrality. There are 15 archived pages (e.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories/Archive_15)

bloated with discussions about Russian hoax proponents, daily vandalisation by anonymous IP addresses, fake moon rock and much more. One contributor contests the claim that laser light cannot bounce off the moon, saying it had been done by US scientists before Apollo. Another replies that the 1962 experiment (when a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology determined the distance of the moon from reflected laser pulses) used a very long pulse of the laser. Yet another replies, ‘The people that said the Lusitania was carrying war material were also called idiots at one time. Perhaps you should take a lesson from history. That history may be wrong.’ It is a fertile ground for studying the psychology of conspiracy theory, as well as the psychology of those who spend many years trying to combat the unending stream of vandalism from conspiracy theorists.

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The article on Levitation currently (February 2011) discusses the subject as though it were an established phenomenon.

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The moon landing hoax article, as well as the 9/11 conspiracy theory article are reasonably well-maintained by moderate (i.e. sceptical) editors. So are the pages on Cold Fusion and Speed of Light, not to mention the whole subject of Creation Science, although they are a constant and bloody battleground.

Move away from the pseudoscience ‘mainstream’ and into somewhat more obscure areas, and it is somewhat different. The article on Levitation currently (February 2011) discusses the subject as though it were an established phenomenon. It says, without any qualification, that St. Joannicius the Great levitated above the ground when he prayed, and that he could make himself invisible for people and make others also hidden from sight; that God blessed Saint Martín de Porres with miraculous powers of bilocation, of being able to pass through closed doors (teleportation), and of levitation; that Seraphim of Sarov ‘had a gift to levitate over the ground for some time’; that ‘many mediums have levitated during séances, especially in the 19th century in Britain and America’, although this is qualified by ‘however some were proven to be frauds using wires and stage magic tricks’.

Reasons for bias

1. Asymmetry of interest. The main problem, to return to the analogy with country fairs and oxen, is the way that this analogy breaks down. Everyone at the fair has an interest in estimating the weight of the ox. But sceptics and non-sceptics have entirely different reasons for their interest in a subject of scepticism.

Those who promote ‘alternative’ theories of reality on Wikipedia do this nearly always because they are the main proponents of the theory, or because they have a financial interest in promoting it. A typical example is the article on Electronic Voice Phenomenon, the idea that the spirits of the dead can communicate through radio or TV. It is represented on Wikipedia by Tom Butler, who is a director of ‘Association TransCommunication‘. The association maintains a page on its website advising on how to edit Wikipedia, saying that some Wikipedia editors are adherents of James Randi and Robert Carol and that they have ‘gone to extremes to purge their ranks of people who seek a balanced presentation of frontier subjects, and to disallow the use of what they refer to as "fringe" publications’ http://atransc.org/research/literature_resource_guide.htm.

Another is ‘Integral Theory’ which is ‘an area of discourse emerging from the theoretical psychology and philosophy of Ken Wilber’ and which is a synthesis of ‘Western and non-Western understandings of consciousness with notions of cosmic, biological, human, and divine evolution into an emerging field of scholarly research focused on the complex interactions of ontology, epistemology, and methodology’. Indeed. This page, as well as the page on Wilber, and a whole category of about two dozen articles, are maintained and defended by Wilber or his followers.

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An article in Wikipedia is almost certain to be the first result in a search on an internet search engine such as ‘Google’.

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There are a handful of editors, sceptics or scientists, who have an ideological and independent commitment to the truth, as far it can be derived from ‘reliable sources’. But they have no particular interest in Integral Theory, or in The Seven Cosmic Planes, or Implicate and Explicate Order, Noetic Consciousness, etc., as such. They are interested in all such pages in general, but none in particular. They must spread their resources across all such pages. They can make corrections, but the defenders of the page will generally reverse them later on. It is like policing local crime. The police can come and caution individuals in a neighbourhood, even make arrests. But they cannot maintain a constant presence. As soon as they go to another neighbourhood, crime will return. This makes the struggle uneven, and painful, and in the end the sceptical editors burn out, as has happened on a number of occasions.

2. Conflict of interest. An article in Wikipedia is almost certain to be the first result in a search on an internet search engine such as ‘Google’. This provides a strong incentive for any pressure, cult, crank or nationalist group to promote their point of view. People used to talk about the ‘military-industrial complex’ in the 1960s. Now there is the ‘Google-Wikipedia complex’. Search for ‘Integral Theory’ in Google, and a number of sponsored links appear at the top and at the side, together with thousands of links in the body of the search. These are advertising cures for all kinds of ailments - mental, bodily and spiritual. How do I know whether these cures are reliable, and that their purveyors are reputable? Well, first among these stands the Wikipedia article on Integral Theory. It has some sort of reputation among the public as a reliable source. They do not realise that Wikipedia is just another advertisement. The people and organisations and companies who market these products are also heavily involved in the promotion of the corresponding Wikipedia page.

Thus there is an inherent conflict of interest in the principle of ‘anyone can edit’ and ‘anyone can make their point of view public to everyone on the Internet’. A fringe editor has a strong reward in seeing their biased advertising in full public view. The reward for the sceptic is for no one to see it, and so their contribution is entirely invisible. Since there is no reward system in Wikipedia for enforcing neutrality - editors are anonymous and unpaid and receive no official recognition for their efforts - there is a flaw in the whole ‘compensation system’.

3. Wikipedia policy. In any case, there is a further problem facing sceptics. The default in Wikipedia is that information should stay. The burden of proof, for those who wish to remove claims, is to prove that the claim is not supported by ‘reliable sources’. There is no clear agreement on what a reliable source is (‘article in peer reviewed journal’ does not eliminate nearly enough pseudoscience). Removing bogus claims is a tedious, time-consuming and emotionally draining process.

4. Wikipedia design. Yet another problem is a design flaw in Wikipedia itself. Accounts are anonymous, and although it is prohibited, there is nothing to stop an individual from creating as many different accounts as they want. The use of alternative accounts or ‘sockpuppets’ is widespread.

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Anyone caught playing dirty will be blocked by an administrator, unless they have influence in the Wikipedia administration itself.

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Careful use of these can make support for a certain issue appear stronger than it actually is. It is not uncommon to see five to ten accounts on one talk page, vigorously contesting some disputed point, when in reality there are only two opposing users. Wikipedia has rules against this, but they are difficult to enforce. Both anti-sceptics and sceptics use these tactics, and examination of any ‘sockpuppet investigation’ page (enforced by the Wikipedia administrators) shows the intensity and complexity of the unending sockpuppet wars. Those administrators who police for the use of sock accounts use sophisticated surveillance techniques that match IP addresses, behaviour, tell-tale signs such as edit commentary and so on. They use terms like ‘sock farms’ ‘sockmasters’ ‘sleepers’, and so on, which sound like something out of some cold war spy drama, rather than a comprehensive and reliable reference work. To get a sense of this, see e.g. the investigation on Shutterbug:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Sockpuppet_investigations/Shutterbug (a scientology sockmaster).

5. Wikipedia administration. The final problem is the Wikipedia administration itself. As we saw, both sceptics and anti-sceptics use all kinds of dubious tactics in this dirty war. Anyone caught playing dirty will be blocked by an administrator, unless they have influence in the Wikipedia administration itself. Wikipedia has an administration which is supposed to be neutral, but it was long ago infiltrated both by members of the pseudoscience establishment and sceptic groups (prominent among early members of the administration were both anti-scientologists, who are a sort of sceptic, and members of Ayn Rand’s ‘objectivist‘ cult, who are not). Regular battles in the rank and file are mirrored by intense secret battles in the administration, including the powerful ‘arbitration committee’, who are the final court of appeal.

A number of editors, most of them with academic credentials, were banned between 2005-2008 by a powerful member of the administration (later a member of the Arbitration Committee) who apparently had a commercial interest in ‘Neurolinguistic Programming’ - a lucrative variety of pseudoscience whose business model is selling the methods of curing people of their emotional and existential problems, rather than selling the cure itself. The financial interest in editing Wikipedia is too great for this problem to be solved by any simple method. There is a market for purchasing articles in Wikipedia, as well as a market for ‘administrator accounts’ which give users great power (accounts sell for about $1-2,000, articles can be bought for as little as $200).

Summary

What should sceptics do? My advice is emphatically not to edit Wikipedia. It is painful and one-sided and stressful. A better practice is to select some area of pseudoscience or cultism or crankism, and document its treatment on Wikipedia. Much of the success of Wikipedia is based on credulous media coverage, as well as a flawed study by Nature, often quoted, which compared Wikipedia favourably with Britannica. The page on ‘criticism of Wikipedia’ contains few links to academic studies, and Wikipedia is ripe for such a study.

SKEPTICS’ CORNER