Stuff You Should Know - The Big Episode on Wikipedia

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Wikipedia changed the world. Before it came along, you had to go to the library to get the answers you sought. And you and your friends had to just agree to disagree on facts. And as the internet grew and commercialized, Wikipedia remains free and open.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. From the Scopes Monkey Trial to OJ Simpson, trials have always made us reflect on the world we live in. I'm Mira Hayward, and my podcast, History on Trial, will explore fascinating trials from American history. Join me in revealing the true story behind the headlines and discover how the legal battles of the past have shaped our present. Listen and subscribe to History on Trial, now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. Just Mr. Greenjeans and Zipperface and Madame Lux all here together to bring you stuff you shouldn't have. Who do I get to be this week? You get to pick. Oh, I'll be Zipperface, of course. Oh yeah, I was gonna be Zipperface, but okay. I'll be Mr. Greenjeans.

What was that, from Captain Kangaroo? The only one I recognize is Mr. Greenjeans. I've never heard of the other two. I made them up. Oh, okay, perfect. You just heard of them just now, Chuck. I'm not losing my mind. No, you're with it.

You're with it, man. 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. And 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 it 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, well 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 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

a 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. 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 you've always been the, the one who was a little more grudgy. Oh, I thought that was both of us. I thought we agreed on that.

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, 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. Milk 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 it backwards, didn't I?

Are you speaking Biblicy? Yeah. Biblicy? Bibiccy? Bibiccy. I don't know. Let's not get into that. Are you speaking Bibliki? Yeah. Bibliki? Bibi-ki? Bibi-ki? I don't know. Let's not 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, you know, maintained by Wikipedia and so we're users just everyday people. So that's what it is. But what it really is is the largest reference work ever created 90 times larger than the 120 volume and cycli be 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 was 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. I'm glad you didn't because this one's my favorite. You like it? This is 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 I mean, 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 sling 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, Yoruba, Piedmontese, Yiddish, all of them have

their own Wikipedia. There's a lot, a lot of different Wikipedia-yai. 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 this, the whys of all this, but you know it's a site with no ads. It is a very lo-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, why don't you drop a couple of bucks in this thing if you like using the site. I've donated to Wikipedia. Now I get emails for it too.

Now 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. I mean, it's one of the biggest websites in the entire world. I think it's number three or five, depending who you ask for number of

visits, um, monthly visits, like. Yeah. But for something to have, be completely created for free, that seems high. I get that. Like, that's... Yeah, but for something to be completely created for free, that seems high. I get that. But 165 million of that is Jimmy Wales' compensation. Right. And let's talk about who Jimmy Wales is.

That's a lie, by the way, everybody. Yeah, we should get into the history of it and hop in the old way back machine, fire it up, we're not gonna have to go far, so we don't need much fuel, trying to be more efficient with our travels these days in this thing. Yeah, we're using hamsters instead of kerosene 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? People have got to be able to find this stuff. So we need web directories. This is obviously before Google was just a very convenient way or Bing or your search engine of choice. Don't leave Edge out.

Her 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.

Uh, but then came along a company called BOMAS. Uh, it was an early.com. He said, no, you know what? I think we should do like an open source version of this, uh, web directory. And we'll, uh, 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 baseball or something like that at 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. Uh, 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 Newpedia, 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 kid's research paper, like people 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 then there's ads that, that's like, that was essentially the basic premise of websites forever and still generally is right. Um, the, the thing about it that made it a little more than just like a, a moneymaking scheme was that from the outset, James Wales and, uh, his partner, a guy named Larry Sanger were were really, 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.

That was Newpedia. And it was a great idea, except that in the like go-go hustle, uh, early part of the internet where you could just get things done like that, Newpedia was glacially slow and it was, that was ultimately its downfall. Yeah, for sure. And that's NU by the way, not N-E-W, N-U-P-E-D-I-A. Uh, it was slow because they, like you said, they wanted to get things right. There was a seven step process, uh, in place before anything was published.

So it was sort of the traditional publishing model, um, that had been used for, you know, however long publishing, traditional publishing had been around like this, which is, um, you 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 Newpedia. 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. Yeah, for sure. 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, end of 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 contribute to. 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 quick web to WikiWiki web 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 a way for programmers to talk to one another about programming. But he realized he was onto a larger concept, not so much that he tried to get a patent on the concept of a 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 the correct answer online is not by asking a question but by posing a wrong answer and it was sort a theory, but it has kind of proved to be true in his mind, at least, and I agree, that when you ask someone something online, it can be very hard or slow to get a correct answer, but if you post something wrong, then people are very, very quick to correct you. And so that was sort of the basis of his WikiWiki 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. You know what I mean? 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, yeah, you're probably right. So now we're gonna come back to Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and this dispute over who came up with the idea of taking the wiki concept that Ward Cunningham came up with and applying it to the encyclopedia concept that Wales and Sanger had come up with Newpedia. 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 Kovitz. He says he even remembers that he ordered enchiladas at the dinner. That's how much he remembers it. Either way, regardless, within two weeks of that dinner that Larry Sanger had, where he was introduced to the concept of a wiki, Newpedia had become a wiki. And the Newpedia 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 write, publish, and then review? That's like sacrilegious. Like you can't do that. And so Wales and Sanger said, all right, you guys stay over here with Newpedia. We're gonna go over here with our thing. We're gonna call it Wikipedia.

And Wikipedia, within two weeks, was born on January 15th, 2001. Larry Sanger had that dinner on January 2, 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 it must be true. 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. So like the word softcore pornography. And he got called out for that.

And they were like, dude, that was our foundation at first. But 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 enthralled by it. And starting to write, 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 best

make an edit, like 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. For so many people living with an autoimmune condition, the emotional toll is as real as the physical symptoms. Starting this May, join host, Martine Hackett, for season three of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio Production, and Partnership with Arginics.

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in my new podcast, A Really Good Cry. We're going to talk about and go through all the things that are sometimes difficult to process alone. We're going to go over how to regulate your emotions, diving deep into holistic personal development, and just building your mindset to have a happier, healthier life. We're going to be talking with some of my best friends. I didn't know we were going to go there, Amir! People that I admire. When we say listen to your body, really tune in to what's going on.

Authors of books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right? And basically have conversations that can help us get through this crazy thing we call life. I already believe in myself. I already see myself. And so when people give me an opportunity,

I'm just like, oh great, you see me too. We'll laugh together, we'll cry together, and find a way through all of our emotions. Never forget it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to A Really Good Cry with Rali Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, so you were 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.

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. And then 9-11 happened and that changed everything because new sites crashed. Everyone was trying to get information and they were going to these super heavily ad-filled websites, websites with videos, pop-up ads, all kinds of things that 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 lo-fi

No ads no pop-ups no video kind of layout and it didn't crash and so the September 11th 2001 terrorist attack article on Wikipedia Grew at a speed that I don't know any web page has ever grown before. No, and 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. And with the new sites down, that Wikipedia article became like the de facto source of

information. And so as more people came to it and were like, what is this? And then kind of 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. And that single article on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, that became the cornerstone of how Wikipedia developed. That article did in all of the discussions. And 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, and not only just the topic, but kind of 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,

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 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 Sanger did not have the stomach for that at all. And I don't blame them.

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 a way 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 met in Ayn Rand 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 Sanger quit and became one of the biggest critics

of Wikipedia. He was only there for I think 14 months. Pete Yeah. Vice called him 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 Wikipedia, but I also feel like he truly believes his stuff. Sure. He said that it has a massive left-wing bias and has used examples on everything from LGTBQ

websites to Donald Trump versus Barack Obama's, I keep saying websites, I should call them Wikipedia articles rather. Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, those things are different. 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.

Um, so he's, he's had a bone to pick with, uh, Wikipedia, although I think he has softened it here and there saying that, um, I think he said that the bias is probably the least of their problems. Um, so that's not like really where he's hanging his head. I don't want to make it seem like that. Well, what's interesting is it, his criticism seemed to have worked themselves out because one of the things that Wikipedia strives for is neutrality is close to neutrality and objective.

Um, I don't, I keep wanting to use the word reporting, but that's wrong. Reporting makes it documenting that's wrong. Reporting makes it documenting. That'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. 06.00 Yeah, well, Sanger doesn't feel like it, at least. But, you know, that's his take. 06.00 Well, get him on the phone. Oh man, what if we took Caller's? That'd be great. Go ahead, Caller. I've always wanted to say that. Hey, long time, first time. In 2002, Wikipedia avoided a, what would have been a sea change when they thought about getting ads on the site, making money, you know, the good old fashioned web way. 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 Wikipedians who got so upset they created their own, well, I guess you would say encyclopedia, Libra, but it's just spelled differently. They said, you know, that 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 Newpedia 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. And I think we should cut to the last one first, because it really kind of gives a, it gives you like 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 like entire entries if they feel like that's necessary. But those people are few and far between and they are meant to 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 like 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. It's 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, five and two. Pillar number one is that it's an encyclopedia, which speaks for itself. Sure. Number three is that it's free, well, also kind of part three,

because you said that no one owns a Wikipedia article. Right. I imagine that can be tough at times if you have, 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, 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, well, we know that that has gotten out of hand because there's been reports of bullying within the, what are they called, Wikipedians. But the pillar, at least least is to avoid these edit wars and work with your fellow editors instead of against them to not bully, to have patience with new editors and things like that and try and foster

kind of a different community for what usually happens online. Yeah, and what's amazing is it generally works. The whole premise of that pillar is assume good faith. 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 to some article, don't take that act as 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

least likely to devolve into an argument or name calling or 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. Sound good? That sounds great, Chuck. All right. Man, what an astonishing note. For so many people living with an autoimmune condition, the emotional toll is as real as the physical symptoms. Starting this May, join host Martine Hackett for season three of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio Production, and Partnership with Argenics. From myasthenia gravis, or MG, to chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, also known as CIDP, Untold Stories highlights the realities of

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That's what it is. In each episode, we'll talk about love, friendship, heartbreaks, men, and of course, our favorite secrets. Get in here! How's your spirit? My spirit is, it's poppin'. I was like, text your ex. I'm like, touch the blame. Ego will have you crying over a closed door

that had nothing behind it. And I say, be yourself, have fun, and have a good giggle. Listen to The Super Secret Bestie Club as part of the My Kultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 like 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've 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 your roll move a little bit. Copyright violations, pretty self-explanatory.

Using 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, Wikipediaan rather, but the volunteer administrators, I think the English Wikipedia has more than 800 administrators and they are Wikipedians. 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 $160 million a year. But they're the ones in charge of determining when a block or a ban can happen, blocks being

temporary. of determining when a block or a ban can happen. Blocks being temporary, they can be longer, duration-wise, they can be shorter, can be 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 ban, which is, kind of speaks for itself. appeal those, but it's meant to be a preventative measure and not a punitive. And then you have the ban, which is kind of speaks for itself.

It's usually a site ban, 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. Sure, sure. 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 bans. So like you can be completely banned from English Wikipedia, or you could be globally banned. So any Wikipedia in any language and I believe some of the other Wiki projects

like Wiktionary, like you just, youionary, you can't do anything on those. Yeah, so 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 it reputable, is it truthful, is it accurate? You usually can't use Wikipedia as a 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? No. Apparently it was just my idea idea because I'm a big snob. No, not at all. We were both on board. There was a study in 2005,

and 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 and found that the average mistakes per article was four for Wikipedia, three for the Britannica, which is a little bit startling. Yeah. 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, you know, 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 Wittgenstein 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. Like just, we just, but just completely like the way that the sentences were written, like 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, 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, really the truth of the matter, is something is 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. Stubs. That's 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. There are 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, oh, 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 thousand fifty articles on the site. It's a very low percentage. And 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 fact or whatever. And there's the reason why, one of the reasons why, it 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 Peking 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, the guy who was guarding the backstage and ended up getting backstage because of it. Isn't that amazing?

Pretty amazing. I love that story. And apparently Peking Duck, they said it was a genius mastermind move. So I guess they appreciated it too. So you know, 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 Wikipedians 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 gonna 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 not notable enough. And they've combated this over the years in different ways. They have, they get together sometimes in organized edit-athons, where they try and boost content about women and minorities, people of color, ethnic diversity, like anything like that they could have an edit-a-thon

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 Seigenthaler who had a joke entry made about him.

He was an advisor, I think, to Bobby Kennedy and the hoaxer wrote that he was a suspect in the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy. And John Seigenthaler 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 on to the Wikipedia entry about Wikipedia, which I admit 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 a 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 wanna 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 Tea 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 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 gonna 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, that's Utah by the way. He thought I 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 have 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. That is from Nathan Staker in Utah and his 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 stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts at myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. For so many people living with an autoimmune condition like myasthenia gravis or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, the emotional toll can be as real as the physical symptoms. That's why in an all new season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition

from Ruby Studio and Argenics, host Martine Hackett gets to the heart of the emotional journey for individuals living with these conditions. To find community and inspiration on your journey, listen now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From the Scopes Monkey trial to O.J. Simpson, trials have always made us reflect on the world we live in. I'm Mira Hayward, and my podcast, History on Trial, will explore fascinating trials from American history.

Join me in revealing the true story behind the headlines and discover how the legal battles of the past have shaped our present. Listen and subscribe to History on Trial now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol. The joy they brought to the nation. You're free completely. No one is there to destroy you. The danger they endured.

They said my head should be cut off. I'm John Legend. Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.