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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey in, welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.
Just Mr. Green Jeans and zipper face and madame looks all here together.
Bring you stuff you should know.
Who do I get to meet this week?
You get to pick.
No, I'll be zipper face of course.
Oh yeah, I was going to be zipper face, but okay.
I'll be Mr. Green Jeans.
All right.
From what was that?
From Captain Kangaroo?
The only one I recognize is Mr. Green Jeans.
I've never heard of the other two.
I made them up.
Okay, perfect.
He just heard of them just now, Chuck.
I'm not losing my mind.
No, you're with it.
You're with it, man.
Okay.
So Chuck, I'm really kind of excited about this one today.
We're doing Wikipedia and as long time listeners of Stuff You Should Know
are already aware, we have a standing ban for our writers on using Wikipedia as a source.
Don't even peek at it.
Maybe, maybe to confirm a date or something like that, but just leave Wikipedia out of it.
And it's really twofold.
There's two reasons.
One, it's long been notoriously unreliable because anybody can edit any page or write whatever
they want on a Wikipedia page.
So that inherently makes it unreliable by nature.
In number two, we would never want to be accused of using Wikipedia as like our source article.
And when you read how some topic works, it's really difficult for that not to infect
the way that you interpret it and report it later on, meaning that you could accidentally
kind of copy the structure of a Wikipedia article.
We never want to do that.
So those two reasons, we've always kind of banned Wikipedia, right?
Yeah.
I mean, we don't use ourselves, except for like you said, confirmation of the odd thing.
Occasionally, I will use it as a, I will go to the, and we've talked about this too,
the links to the original articles and papers and studies and things like that.
It could be handy.
And it's handy in my everyday life, but we've never used it and that's why it's, even though
it shouldn't bother me, it still gets under my skin when, and I don't read reviews that
much, but when people say like, all these guys do sit down and read Wikipedia articles
to you.
Right.
Right.
Because people say that.
They do say that and we want them to be able to be wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The thing is I have to say this.
I haven't, I haven't decided we need to alter our editorial policies or anything like that.
But after researching Wikipedia, I have come to have a slightly different, actually radically
different opinion of Wikipedia as a whole collectively put together and just what it is,
what it stands for and just how reliable it is.
Turns out like our, our view is maybe a little rooted in pre-2013, 2012.
And it may be time to just kind of evolve, but still again, not touch our editorial policy.
Yeah.
I mean, I've always, you've always been the one who's a little more grudgy.
Oh, I thought that was both of us.
I thought we were pretty down there.
No, I mean, I don't think we should use it for a reference, but I've always enjoyed
the site.
And I think you've always had been a little more, had your nose turned up a little more,
which I totally respect.
I don't know if I would characterize it as nose turned up.
I'm not sure what it is, but I don't know.
Is it nose turned up?
Is that what I've been doing all these years?
Maybe.
But hey, you're an educated, smart, toast about town.
Dude.
No.
And I think you've always just been a little bit like, no, that's just not for me, which
I get.
Okay.
All right.
Well, then I'm here to say I renounce that elitist view.
And I am a lot more accepting of Wikipedia and what it is and what it does.
All right.
Okay.
Great.
I guess.
You can call me Saul from now on.
Oh, wait, Paul.
You better.
I had a backwards, didn't I?
Are you speaking Bibliki?
Yeah.
Bibliki?
Bibliki?
Bibliki.
I don't know.
Listen, I get into that.
We should quickly just go through A what it is and Dave helped us out with this and
just a few sort of fun stats at the beginning.
But Wikipedia, of course, is an online encyclopedia created or maintained by Wikipedia's
who are users just everyday people.
So that's what it is.
But what it really is is the largeance reference work ever created.
90 times larger than the 120 volume encyclopedia Britannica.
That's impressive.
62 million articles, 300 plus languages, 4 billion plus visitors a month, edging up toward
300,000 Wikipedia editors.
And that's all I got.
But actually I got one more.
I did see, and this is in 2008.
So this is a long time ago.
There was one computer scientist who estimated that up to that point.
There were 100 million hours spent developing and getting Wikipedia up to that point.
Wow.
Did you mention how many edits are made every second?
Nah.
Okay, I didn't think you did.
And I'm glad you didn't because this one's my favorite.
You like it.
This was a, I think a 2022 estimate.
5.2 Wikipedia edits are made every second.
Wow.
And each month 14 million edits are made.
And as we kind of talk about how Wikipedia actually works, that will become more and more
significant as we go.
Yeah, for sure.
So that means that's sort of the overview of some stats and how it's defined.
But what it really is, and Dave kind of nailed it on the head as far as their ethos.
It's kind of a utopian idea and an experiment that people can get on the internet and not
just lean insults.
But they can get on the internet and create an important volume of knowledge for people.
Yeah, I saw a great quote that said it's a good thing that Wikipedia works in practice
because it certainly doesn't work in theory.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
And no matter where you are around the world, that's not 100% true.
But in a large area, a swath of the world, there are Wikipedia's for you in your language
about your culture, whether you speak Zulu or Tartar or Sanskrit, Old English, Creole
Haitian, Esperanto, Uruba, Pied Montes, Yiddish, all of them have their own Wikipedia.
There's a lot, a lot of different Wikipedia.
I'm just adding I to anything plural from now on.
That's my new thing.
But it's really impressive.
Like the idea that people came together and did this for free as volunteers.
And now we have, like you said, by far the largest reference work ever created.
That's right.
A site, and we'll get into all of this, the wise of all this.
But to cite with no ads, it is a very low-fi site that is overseen by the Wikimedia.
Yeah, that's right.
Wikimedia Foundation.
It is funded by donations.
I know at times when you go to Wikipedia, everyone but you that is.
Occasionally you might see a little hat out and said, hey, wouldn't you drop a couple
of bucks in this thing if you like using the site?
I donated to Wikipedia.
Now I get emails for it too.
Oh, yeah.
I'll see.
That's how they get you.
You give them an inch and they take a mile, you know?
Operating budget of about $168 million a year, which is surprising to me.
I didn't know.
It would cost that much.
Oh, I thought that was low.
I was surprised.
Yeah.
That's one of the biggest websites in the entire world.
I think it's number three or five, depending who you ask for a number of visits, monthly
visits.
Like that's for something to have be completely created for free.
That seems high.
I get that.
But $165 million of that is Jimmy Wales' compensation.
Right.
Let's talk about who Jimmy Wales is.
That's the lie, by the way, everybody.
Yeah.
We went into the history of it and hopped in the old way back machine, fired up.
We're not going to have to go far so we don't need much fuel, trying to be more efficient
with our travel these days and this thing.
Yeah, we're using hamsters instead of carousine lately.
That's right.
So we're going to go back to the mid 1990s when the World Wide Web was just a young babe
in the crib.
And very adorably, when all these websites started popping up, there were people that were
like, hey, you know what we need now is we got to be able to, people got to be able to
find this stuff.
So we need web directories.
This is obviously before Google was a just a very convenient way or any or banger, you
know, your search engine of choice.
Don't leave edge out.
Or edge had come along. So in 1994, Yahoo had a pretty popular web directory going on.
And if you're young enough to where you don't even know what that means, that means literally
you would go to a page and it would say like sports entertainment, kind of like a newspaper.
Here's all 10 websites on sports.
Exactly.
And it would list those websites.
But then came along a company called Bomas.
It was an early dot com who said, no, you know what?
I think we should do like an open source version of this web directory and we'll call it
a web ring.
Yeah.
And the whole premise was if you were a part of the web ring, your site was, you would
have a little thing saying like, like baseball or something like that, the bottom of your
site.
And that was your connection to the web ring.
And you could click next and it would take you to the next site that had been connected
to the first site because they're both about baseball or something way more niche than
that.
And anybody, because like you said, it was open source, could make their own web ring.
There were usually webmasters who looked at the sites, approved them, actually put them
together.
But eventually as you had more and more sites added to this ring, you had a more and more
dense collection of information about one, usually fairly niche topic.
Apparently Pamela Anderson was like one of the biggest web rings right out of the gate
back in 1996.
But that was the premise of what Wikipedia eventually was built on.
It was open source.
People could contribute.
And the initial body of knowledge was built upon by more and more people.
Yeah.
And Bomas got popular.
They kind of focused on man stuff for lack of a better term.
And I think that's what they literally called it.
It was like car things and sports things.
Pamela Anderson.
And then they quickly realized, hey, naked women on the internet performs really well as
it turns out.
So they really started focusing on that kind of adult material, I guess, to call it something
a little tame and chiefly nude pictures of women.
And they really drilled down on that and got very, very popular because of that.
But then pivoted pretty quickly because Jimmy Wales, the guy you mentioned, one of the founders
of Bomas had a larger, more pure vision in mind when he said, hey, I think we could create
a free encyclopedia.
So we founded new pedea, which was financed by Bomas.
Yeah.
And everybody uses an encyclopedia, whether you just need to make a quick reference, whether
you're a kid writing a research paper, whether you're a parent researching your kids research
paper.
You'll just need an encyclopedia.
It's a basic thing.
So let's create one and then let's sell ads against it, which is, there's nothing wrong
with that.
That's what we do.
We put out free content and there's ads that, like that was essentially the basic premise
of websites forever and still generally is, right?
The thing about it that made it a little more than just like a money making scheme was
that from the outset, James Wales and his partner, a guy named Larry Sanger, were really,
like they placed a tremendous amount of emphasis on truth and correctness and their articles
being error free.
So it wasn't just something they slapped together.
It had nothing to do with long tail or any terrible ideas like that.
It was really well researched articles vetted by academics and professionals with ads sold
against it.
It was a great idea, except that in the like, go-go hustle, early part of the internet,
where you could just get things like that, new pdf was glacial slow and it was ultimately
its downfall.
Yeah, for sure.
And that's in you, by the way, not in EW, in Eupdia.
It was slow because they, like you said, they wanted to get things right.
There was a seven step process in place before anything was published.
So it was sort of the traditional way.
People publishing model that had been used for, you know, however long publishing, traditional
publishing had been around like this, which is you have something reviewed, whether you
work for a newspaper and you do your fact checking or you have your editor in chief checking
on things.
In this case, Larry Sanger was the editor in chief of new pdf or you, you know, have things
reviewed by experts.
And then you published, that was what they were doing, sort of in that order.
You write something, you review it, review it through that seven step process and then
you publish it online and it was, like you said, slow.
I think 21 articles came out in that first year and Sanger, it seemed like in particular
was pretty frustrated with that speed of getting content out.
For sure.
So just put that aside, these guys are kind of in suspended animation at this moment in
I think 1999 and 1999.
A few years earlier than that, there was a guy named Ward Cunningham in the very early
90s.
He was a software engineer.
He was trying to figure out how to share ideas at his company that anybody at the company
could like kind of contribute to, right?
So he actually took an Apple program called HyperCard and created a HyperText program that
he called QuickWeb, I believe was the first name for it.
And that was basically where anybody could go into this program and contribute to this
body of knowledge, this body of information and it would grow and grow and grow and things
would link to other things that's HyperText.
And very fortunately, Ward Cunningham went on vacation to Hawaii also in the early 90s.
And he noticed that there were little airport shuttles called WikiWiki Airport buses,
which means quick, Wiki means quick.
And he just loved that name.
So he changed the name from QuickWeb to WikiWikiWeb.
And that was the first Wiki, what we understand is a Wiki.
A bunch of user generated content that anybody can contribute to and edit and link to other
stuff.
The whole thing just becomes self-referential and grows as a result.
Yeah.
And it was basically in his mind away for programmers to talk to one another about programming.
But he realized he was on to a larger concept, not so much that he tried to get a patent
on the concept of Wiki, which was probably a grave error.
But he said at the time he didn't think like anyone would be interested in something
like that.
So it wasn't worth pursuing.
The other thing we should mention about Ward Cunningham is he has now been credited with
what's known as Cunningham's law.
Have you ever heard of this?
I have.
Which is kind of the foundation of the internet in some ways.
And definitely Wikipedia, which is he said the best way to get a correct answer online
is not by asking a question, but by posing a wrong answer.
And it was sort of a theory, but it has kind of proved to be true in his mind at least.
And I agree that like when you ask someone something online, it can be very hard or slow
to get a correct answer.
But if you pose something wrong, then people are very, very quick to correct you.
And so that was sort of the basis of his Wiki, Wiki web with programmers talking to one
another.
Yeah.
And it's preserved at wiki.c2.com.
And like I can't make heads or tails of any of it.
But it's still there.
It's super cute and quaint looking, but it's neat.
The usability is really amazing too, especially for what he built it on.
That'd be fun if you could go to a year of the internet.
I don't want to mean.
And I think you can on internet archive.
No, I mean, like turn your internet into like 2001 or 1997 and not just read things, but
have it just be like from that year and what it was like.
I got you.
Just give Chip Gpt like three more months.
Right.
You're probably right.
So now we're going to come back to Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger and this dispute over who
came up with the idea of taking the wiki concept that word cunning ham came up with.
And applying it to the encyclopedia concept that Wales and Sanger had come up with new
pedia.
It doesn't ultimately matter, but just to name check, a guy named Jeremy Rosenfeld was
a bonus employee.
He's the one who Jimmy Wales says came up with the idea of using a wiki.
Larry Sanger said he came up with the idea after having dinner with a guy named Ben
Covitz.
He says he even remembers that he ordered enchiladas at the dinner.
That's how much he remembers it.
Another way regardless, within two weeks of that dinner that Larry Sanger had where he
was introduced to the concept of a wiki, new pedia had become a wiki.
And the new pedia advisory board was like, we don't like this idea.
This smells of like brand new stuff and we're afraid of it.
And also what's this whole concept of right, publish and then review?
That's like sacrilegious.
Like you can't do that.
And so, Wales and Sanger said, all right, you guys say over here with new pedia, we're
going to go over here with our thing.
We're going to call it wikipedia.
And wikipedia within two weeks was born on January 15th, 2001.
Larry Sanger had that dinner on January 2nd, 2001.
That's right.
And as far as that claim for what it's worth, the actual wikipedia article on Sanger confirms
that it was him.
Well, then I don't know.
I don't know if Jimmy Wales just begrudgingly allows that to stay there or not.
But everything I saw kind of said it was Sanger.
So just like I said, take it for what it's worth.
It's funny you mentioned Jimmy Wales begrudgingly just letting it stay there because he was caught
very early on in the early days of wikipedia editing the bonus.com wikipedia entry to remove
soft core pornography from it.
That's it, like the word soft core pornography and he got called out for that.
And they're like, dude, that's how that was our foundation at first.
So that's a really good example of what's starting to happen at this time around 2001 with
wikipedia.
It's brand new, but people are starting to kind of come to it, figure it out, get the
hang of it and become like enthralled by it.
And starting to like write articles, edit articles, discuss how to how to best make an
edit.
It's starting to kind of grow, but it took a truly horrible event for wikipedia to truly
come into its own for the very first time.
And let's see, we take a break, Chuck.
That's quite a cliffhanger.
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Alright.
We're hanging on a cliff here.
You talked about a terrible event.
You probably don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what that event was, considering
Wikipedia really got cranking in January of 2001.
It kind of sped along for about nine months, growing pretty quickly compared to initially,
I think there were about 10,000 articles written over that period.
Then 9.11 happened.
That changed everything because news sites crashed.
Everyone was trying to get information.
They were going to these super heavily filled websites with videos, pop-up ads, all kinds
of things like slow traffic down and overload things.
All these people were trying to go to these sites to find out news and information.
Wikipedia is there with its low-fi, no ads, no pop-ups, no video, kind of layout and it
didn't crash.
The September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack article on Wikipedia grew at a speed that I don't
know any webpage has ever grown before.
No.
That was it.
It's like Wikipedia, the idea finally took off on September 11th and the days after because
people were searching for information on it.
Every second they were just looking for more and more info.
Stuff was news was coming out hard and fast like that.
With the news sites down, that Wikipedia article became the de facto source of information.
As more people came to it and were like, what is this?
Then figured out right there on the fly how Wikipedia worked.
They actually stuck around and started adding to the article, editing the article, discussing
like the wording for the article.
That single article on the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack, that became the cornerstone
of how Wikipedia developed that article did in all of the discussions.
Still today they archived all the discussions all the way back to the first day and it is
really interesting to see the arguments and discussions that people got into over that
because it was at the time and then in the years following it's just always been such
a controversial topic and such a sacred topic too here in the United States.
Yeah, not only just the topic but everything that they were all the subtopics and that
was where Wikipedia really came to find what it was and what it wasn't because they were
doing things like truly helpful things at the time, like a list of victims, blood drives
and links to where you could go to help and donate and things like that.
But as that was happening, like you said, it was sort of happening in real time and their
talk page was flooded with people saying, well, wait a minute, I'm not sure, beyond just
like editing the news and facts, they were like, well, what are we doing here?
We need to be truthful and accurate of course, but do we have stuff like is this an encyclopedia
or not?
Like do we have a list of victims of, you know, I hate to say it, but like people who aren't
well known because an encyclopedia probably wouldn't, would we have links to blood drives,
probably not because an encyclopedia wouldn't.
So as they went through those really pretty tough discussions, what Wikipedia wasn't became
pretty clear.
Yeah, it became what's known as the five pillars which we'll talk about in a second.
But one of the things that emerged from it too was they weren't there to report the
news.
So anybody who had breaking news, it became clear Wikipedia was not a place for that.
They were meant to be behind the curve, they report on reliable sources reporting.
That's what the entries were built on and that was a huge, huge foundation that was
kind of laid that day, I guess.
But just as one little aside, at this time, shortly after this, Wikipedia attracted a lot
of people.
People started sticking around and writing other articles that were related to the 2001
September 11th attacks and it just started to grow.
At the same time, it also attracted trolls, essentially out of the gate.
And there were trolls on the site and Larry Sangre did not have the stomach for that at
all.
And I don't blame him, trolls suck, they're the worst.
But he quit because he said we need to have some sort of structure here.
We need to have a constitution.
We need to weigh to vet these claims and these facts that are in these articles.
We got to slow this down, man.
And Jimmy Wales is like, no, we're not going to do that.
We've met in iron ran chat forums for God's sake.
We're not going to do this.
We're going to go the opposite direction.
We'll figure it out as we go.
And so Larry Sangre quit and became one of the biggest critics of Wikipedia.
He was only there for I think 14 months.
Yeah, Vice called on their most outspoken critic in 2007.
He said the site was broken beyond repair.
He has said that there's a large, and this is just a few of the criticisms, of course.
There's very, very many.
You might want to say he has a bone to pick with with Wikipedia, but I also feel like
he truly believes this stuff.
Sure.
He said that it has a massive left wing bias and has used examples on everything from
LGBTQ websites to Donald Trump versus Barack Obama's.
I keep saying websites.
I should call them Wikipedia articles, rather.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, let's see.
Donald Trump's pages versus Barack Obama's page, all kinds of stuff basically saying that,
hey, we're only getting one point of view here.
We're not getting the right wing side of things.
We're not getting the libertarian viewpoint on things.
So he's had a bone to pick with Wikipedia, although I think he has softened it here and
there saying that I think he said that the bias is probably the least of their problems.
So that's not like really where he's hanging his hat.
I don't want to make it seem like that.
Well, what's interesting is his criticism seemed to have worked themselves out because
one of the things that Wikipedia strives for is neutrality.
It's close to neutrality and objective.
I keep wanting to use a word reporting, but that's wrong.
Reporting makes it documenting.
It's neutral objective documentation of knowledge.
That's what it's after, right?
And so I was looking at banned users and a lot of them seem to be like social justice warriors
who are like writing wrongs and they get banned for life.
So I mean, I don't think that it necessarily has a political bias one way or the other.
If anything, politically from what I can tell, that's where it's closest to neutral of
all.
Gender, ethnicity, that's a different story, but politically it does seem to be pretty
centrist.
Yeah.
Well, the singer doesn't feel like it at least, but you know, that's his take.
Well, get him on the phone.
Oh, man.
What if we took collars?
That'd be great.
Go ahead, golly.
I thought I wanted to say that.
Long time first time.
So in 2002, Wikipedia avoided a what would have been a sea change when they thought about
getting ads on the side, making money, you know, the good old fashioned webway.
And the people of Wikipedia got upset.
Users were like, no, no, no, this is what makes you guys different.
You can't do that.
In Spain, there were some Spanish Wikipedia into got so upset they created their own.
Well, I guess you would say in cyclopedia, Libra, but it's just spelled differently.
They said, you know, they scared them off basically to where they created their own.
And he said, all right, I'll hear you loud and clear.
We'll launch the Wikimedia Foundation.
That was pretty early on.
It was in 2003 and then they changed from.com to.org.
Right.
They shut down new pdia that same year and got together and figured out these five pillars
that you mentioned earlier, one of which you just referenced, which was neutrality.
Yeah.
So there are five pillars, the fundamental principles of Wikipedia.
And a lot of these were, find its roots in that September 11th, 2001 page.
But they've also really been refined and developed over time.
I think we should cut to the last one first because it really kind of gives you the right
impression when you hear the rest of the rules.
And the last one is that Wikipedia has no firm rules.
There's no one in charge.
There's a group of people who are volunteer administrators who actually can ban you.
They actually can delete entire entries if they feel like that's necessary.
But those people are few and far between and they are meant to like not wield their power.
Essentially no one's in charge, no one owns an article.
And there are different competing philosophies about how Wikipedia should be built, how articles
should be written, what's truth, what's a reliable source.
And these competing philosophies battle one another or engage in conversation and dialogue
with one another on the talk page for these amazing, like the really well written,
well researched articles or entries that people really care about.
There's really fascinating discussions about just wording, like just what word to use or
this word doesn't quite fit or what's a reliable citation.
And the reason why it works is because it will constantly evolve in that setup.
There's no rigidity.
Like whatever philosophy wins out, wins out in that one specific disagreement over that
one specific edit on that one specific entry.
And then the next time it may have a completely different outcome.
But collectively as a whole, that leads to that leads to the neutrality that we referenced
earlier.
That's right.
So that's I guess five and two.
Pillar number one is that it's an encyclopedia which speaks for itself.
Number three is that it's free.
And that, well, also kind of part three because you said that no one owns a Wikipedia article.
I imagine that can be tough at times if you have created an entry that is very, very niche
that you knew a lot about and you care a lot about.
I imagine it can be very tough to sort of hand that over and say, okay, like I guess
anyone can change this, right?
So that must be hard, but still a pillar.
And then number four is editors should treat each other with respect and civility.
I'm sure that that, well, we know that that has gotten out of hand because there's been
reports of bullying within the, what are they called, Wikipedia ins.
But the pillar at least is to avoid these edit wars and work with your fellow editors
instead of against them to not bully, to have patients with new editors and things like
that and try and foster like kind of a different community for what usually happens online.
Yeah, what's amazing is it generally works.
The whole premise of that pillar is assume good faith that it's such an important point
that it's abbreviated as AGF.
And that is that if you see somebody adding some dumb, dumb fact that's clearly a conspiracy
theory as if it's fact is some article don't take that act as a like they're willfully
trying to harm that article or hurt Wikipedia or personally insult you.
What they're doing, probably if you assume good faith is in their mind, they think they're
actually helping Wikipedia.
They're helping the site.
They're making this entry more legit, even though they're totally completely wrong.
So if you come at it from that premise where you assume good faith, then that's where
it's going to, that's where it's least likely to devolve into an argument or name calling
earth threats or wiki bullying.
And that seems to be like the case or the place that the editors that I saw will go from
like that whole assuming good faith first part.
A lot of them do, not all of them obviously because it's the internet.
For sure, all right, I say we take another break and come back with blocks and bands
and whether or not Wikipedia is truly reliable.
Is that on good?
And that sounds great Chuck.
All right.
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So even though you assume good faith, you're supposed to assume good faith, like we said,
it can become clear that somebody's like willfully being a jerk.
There's a whole thing called vandalism where you are purposefully inserting incorrect stuff
into an article just to mess with people, right?
Just to mess with the article.
It can be hilarious.
Spamming is another one where you promote yourself or your product which is just, you should
just know that you don't do that but people do that.
What else, Chuck?
Well, obviously we talked about the bullying and harassment.
The three revert rule, which is basically you don't revert or change or undo three edits
on the same page within 24 hours, which is kind of like a slow year roll move a little
bit.
Copyright violations, pretty self explanatory.
Being multiple Wikipedia accounts, which they call sock puppetry, which is very cute.
And anything just that's against the idea of what they're trying to do, which is to build
out this encyclopedia.
And all of this is not decided upon by just your average user or Wikipedia, Wikipedia and
rather.
But the volunteer administrators, I think the English Wikipedia has more than 800 administrators
and they are Wikipedia and they're just really experienced ones who know the ins and outs
and take it really seriously.
They do not work for the Wikimedia Foundation and get a cut of that $168 million a year.
But they're the ones in charge of determining when a block or a band can happen.
Blocks being temporary.
They can be longer, duration wise, they can be shorter.
And be a one specific thing you did in an article or the whole article that you're blocked
from for a little while.
You can appeal those, but it's meant to be a preventative measure and not a punitive.
And then you have the band, which is kind of speaks for itself.
That's it's usually a site band, which means you just you can't come on here anymore.
You know, you can go on, but you can't make a single edit.
All you can do is sit there and read, pal.
Oh, well, yeah.
I mean, we're talking about editing.
Not like anyone can read anything.
You're short, right?
And also anybody can edit unless you've been blocked or banned and you don't even have
to create an account, which is one of the cool things.
But there's entire site bands so like you can be completely banned from English Wikipedia
or you could be globally banned.
So any Wikipedia and any language and I believe some of the other wiki projects like Wicked
Scenery, like you just you'll be you can't do anything on those.
Yeah.
That kind of brings us to where we started with this whole thing and why we didn't use
it.
Why we don't use it and started out at least and still don't is that is it is it is it
reputable?
Is it truthful?
Is it accurate?
You usually can't use Wicked PDFs of source for a school paper.
Certainly not a college paper.
We make up our own rules as Josh and Chuck do stuff you should know so we could do whatever
we wanted.
That was just something that we did from the beginning like no one I don't think anyone
told us to do that.
Did they know apparently it was just my idea because I'm a big snob.
Right.
No, not at all.
We were both on board.
There was a study in 2005 and there's I tried to find something more recent but they
compared 42 entries on Wikipedia to the same thing in the encyclopedia Britannica and
found that the average mistakes per article was four for Wikipedia three for the Britannica
which is a little bit startling.
The difference is between Wikipedia and Britannica is that you can change something really
fast on Wikipedia and encyclopedia Britannica at least for the hard copy volumes.
Obviously, he's going to have to wait till the next publish and they tested out the speed
of Wikipedia changes or I guess corrections and they filed false information in 33 different
articles about dead philosophers and in 48 hours, a third of those had been fixed and
three of those within 60 seconds.
Yeah, I looked those up and some of them are hilarious.
They all seem rather innocuous but if you stop and think about what they're saying, they're
pretty funny.
Like, Vic and Stein was fined for poisoning squirrels in his yard or Spinoza supported himself
by selling stolen jewelry or that David Hume used to wrestle with local sportsmen.
But just completely like the way that the sentences were written, you would totally buy
them and they still got corrected.
And that's kind of like the whole premise of Wikipedia is like eventually somebody's
going to find that and they're going to correct it might be in a minute, it might be in
48 hours, it might be in six weeks but eventually it's going to get created.
Like you'll eventually get to the truth or correctness I guess.
Yeah, and Dave points out and this is really the truth of the matter is something as large
as Wikipedia created by users, there's going to be some great articles, there's going
to be some good ones and there's going to be some not so great ones.
Just how it shakes out.
And so they're actually labeled now which is something that a lot of people may not really
realize but they can be labeled good or featured.
If it's good that means it's got a little small plus sign inside a green circle, they're
close to 40,000 good articles on the English version.
If it's featured that means it's the cream of the crop as far as Wikipedia vetting goes
and there are close to 6,500 that are featured with that bronze star.
Yeah, I saw the Museum of Bad Art as a featured article.
There's just tons of them, thousands, right?
And you can just go look at the list and be like, okay, this is a really good article.
I'm going to read this one.
Despite all that, I think the featured articles represent one out of every 1,050 articles
on the site.
It's a very low percentage.
Because of that, Wikipedia even says Wikipedia is not a reliable source.
They say it.
It's expressed on their website.
And you can actually use a Wikipedia entry as a citation on another Wikipedia entry.
You link to other stuff.
You can hyperlink it, but you can't use that to prove or support that sentence or that
factor, whatever.
And there's the reason why, one of the reasons why, was kind of perfectly captured by that
amazing comic, XKCD.
And they coined the term cytogenesis where somebody can put in a fake fact on a Wikipedia
page and then go to that Wikipedia page to prove that their fact is correct, right?
So it's like this snake that eats its tail.
And there's actually an example of that.
There's an Australian duo called Peaking Duck.
And one of their fans got backstage because he inserted his name as a relative of one
of the band members and showed it to like the guy who was guarding the backstage and ended
up getting backstage because of it.
In that amazing.
Pretty amazing.
I love that story.
And apparently Peaking Duck, they said it was a genius mastermind move.
So I guess they appreciated it too.
So we mentioned bias earlier with politics, but the real bias comes in like you mentioned
at the beginning with kind of who is, who these Wikipedia's are.
87% of these editors are men and 89% are white.
That means 176% are white men.
Half of them are in Europe and 20% live in North America.
So unsurprisingly, you're going to have some gender bias playing out.
I think less than 19% of the English language biographies are about women.
And those are also the articles that are most often flagged for deletion as being, you
know, not notable enough.
And they've combated this over the years in different ways.
They have, they get together sometimes and organize editathons where they try and boost
content about women and minorities, people of color, ethnic diversity, like anything like
that, they could have an editathon about to try and, you know, bring more of a light
onto those groups.
Yeah, and we have to say there's so that whole idea, that premise that Wikipedia is unreliable,
it seems to basically find a single source initially.
There's a journalist named John Sagan-Thaller who had a joke entry made about him.
He was an advisor, I think, to Bobby Kennedy.
And the hoaxster wrote that he was a suspect in the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and
John Kennedy.
And John Sagan-Thaller heard about this and he did not find that funny at all.
He just happened to be one of the founding editors of USA Today.
So he took to the pages of USA Today and completely excoriated Wikipedia and called it out as
a completely unreliable, irresponsible research tool, right?
That was 2005.
And that really kind of laid the foundation for Wikipedia's bad reputation for a while.
But if you go onto the Wikipedia entry about Wikipedia, which I read some of, they even
say around starting sometime in about the 2010s, that reputation started to get shed.
And we're finally reaching the point today where people are saying, go use Wikipedia, just
use it as like an introduction to your topic and then go out and do further research.
So it's really kind of come into its own 20 years on.
That's right.
If you want to get into editing, there are tutorials.
There's an introduction tutorial of how to do everything from creating things from scratch
to editing.
I mean, good luck creating something from scratch and finding something that doesn't
exist already at this point.
And if you want a gamified version, you can check out the Wikipedia adventure to help with
your tutorial.
And they also have a help desk and the T house, which is where new editors can learn the
ropes in a friendly manner.
Yeah.
And I think just going on the talk page of any article will kind of familiarize you with
what you should be doing if you want to contribute, but do contribute.
It's nice.
I said it's nice.
I don't think Chuck has anything else because he didn't respond.
So I think that means it's time for a listener mail.
I'm going to call this a bonsai inspiration.
It's very cool.
Hey guys, a few years ago, you did the bonsai episode.
My dad and I listened to it, became very inspired.
I have a horticultural degree from USU, as you taught by the way.
He thought it might be interested too.
So as father and son, we began working on trees.
Fast forward to today.
We have 30 different trees.
We've lost a few along the way, but have learned so much.
Through a bonsai show in 2017, we became members of the Utah bonsai club.
And it both entered bonsai into a show hosted by Red butte gardens.
Who would have thought that a simple podcast could have inspired my dad and I to do this
and go this far with it?
I would love to give my dad a shout out.
He turned 60 this year, proud of him, and what we've accomplished.
Let us from Nathan Staker in Utah, and as pops, Mr. Brent Staker.
Nice.
Congratulations, Nathan and Brent.
That's pretty great.
We love inspiring people.
Beautiful trees.
Very beautiful.
If you want to be like Nathan and Brent and let us know how we inspired you to do something
cool, we love that kind of thing.
You can send it in an email to stuffpodcast.com.
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