Stephen Colbert jokingly called Wikipedia’s strange notions of reality “wikiality”; his suggestions for edits to the Wikipedia articles about elephants caused the Wikipedia servers to crash and the article to be “protected.”
But Wikipedia in general suffers from a severe bias; articles about controversial topics reward persistence over accuracy. Wikiality is especially a problem in articles criticizing the plaintiffs’ bar. Articles on Fred Baron, ATLA, and John Edwards’s legal career have been sanitized into hagiographies; articles on medical malpractice and tort reform have been rewritten to emphasize the anti-reform position, deleting pro-reform statistics, arguments, and evidence.
9 Comments
Ted:
Interesting charge.
I’ll be checking out those links, and the histories, to see what the story is.
If true, it indicates a bias in Wikipedia.
I suspect there’s more there than you had time to say in just three sentences.
Is there a blog anywhere, a “wikipedia watch” if you will, that has noted the history of Wikipedia edit wars over tort reform? If not, one could easily be constructed based on the history and Talk pages of the entries involved.
Eh N.
Man, slow news day?
Wikiality effects any writing of history or current events. It’s just much slower than wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great tool for research even though it is filled with truthiness and deliberate “vandalism.” You can have confidence that the history revisionism at Wikipedia is current. đŸ™‚
Wikipedia is a fantastic place to start research on a topic. I always advise our patrons not to trust what they read there, though, and make sure they verify it through a realiable source.
Wikipedia certainly needs more people who understand the law and are not pro-lawyer to assist keeping articles more neutral. Citeable facts and opinions are of more weight than unsubstantiated personal opinion, of course; that the plaintiff’s bar publishes a lot of information for its supporters to cite, of course, is part of why that opinion gets a good representation there.
I did, however, use information obtained here (Overlawyered) on the Ford Pinto article to counter the common distortions about those lawsuits, so that’s at least something – but there’s much else to cover.
I agree, Matthew — for example, those very same bogus claims about the Ford Pinto are cited uncritically in the Wikipedia tort reform article. The very same editors who censor citations to Overlawyered as “biased” add extensive quotes from the left-wing Economic Policy Institute.
As to the Edwards edit, if statements like this: “studies later showed that Edwards’ theory that the failure to do [[caesarean section]]s caused cerebral palsy had no scientific basis.{{”
were actually true, they might have accepted it. But there is no study which has shown that John Edwards’ verdicts lacked a scientific basis.
Matt’s statement is incorrect on two accounts.
1) There are many studies showing that there’s no relationship between c-sections and cerebral palsy, as Overlawyered has documented.
2) Whether or not Matt Bish agrees with those studies is irrelevant: if pro-Edwards editors adhered to Wikipedia’s ostensible “NPOV” guidelines, they would acknowledge the argument that Edwards’ lawsuits lacked scientific merit — a point of view that even the New York Times acknowledged in its coverage of Edwards’ legal career.
Hello,
Just wanted to let you know I linked to your blog in my column on CBSNews.com today. Thanks!
If you want to take a look, here’s the link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/08/blogophile/main1873436.shtml
Thanks,
Melissa