Daily Archives: December 21, 2008

Pirate Story Hoax – Michael Feldstein’s Blog

Michael wrote a cool blog post about a pirate hoax featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here is Michael’s post:

http://mfeldstein.com/the-pirate-hoax/.

The CHE story is like a rerun – a history professor has his students put up a fake Wikipedia page and then try to spam the world with enough incoming links to the point where it has enough credibility to mislead some main-stream folks. At that point the history professor stops the “experiment” and writes an article about how “shocking” this is. Yawn!

Michael rightly characterizes this as “vandalism” as it goes against everything Wikipedia stands for and violates several of Wikipedia policies (which these students and their professor agreed to when they joined Wikipedia).

It is a great post – please read it. My response is below.

Michael, I completely agree with your article. This is very similar to a number of similar titillating stories where some person did something wrong or stupid on purpose – got away with it – and then call a press conference as if there are some sort of “genius”. All systems where humans are involved are inherently imperfect. It amazing me how much energy is put into attacking Wikipedia from many angles and it is also amazing to me how much intelligent people who are otherwise quite rational – have a deep seated fear of Wikipedia. I think that the source of this fear of wikipedia is that it is a Bazaar – not a Cathedral. Folks like professors have spent their whole life to get to a position where their position (at the front of the class) gives them “authority by position” – they have earned their authority (tenure) and it cannot be taken away from them. Truly democratic efforts like Wikipedia do not respect titles such as “Full Professor” and Wikipedia does not give special voting privileges to Full Professors. These people with fancy titles prefer a structure where those “with a title” can override that without a title by fiat. Those who have earned their “Cathedral Membership Level 26” card generally prefer that things be done “Cathedral-style” because then their hard-earned membership card has some value. In the Bazar, everyone is a “Level 1” – and if you stop contributing – you move to “Level 0”. Those of us who are Bazar-dwellers accept this as “how things should be”. We are regularly visited by Cathedral-citizens who try to tell us the value of membership cards and and when Bazar-dwellers say “no thanks” – the Cathedral-citizens move into “discredit the Bazar” mode – and claim that they are doing it in the name of the “greater good” and that they are “protecting everyone” from the terrible Chaos of the Bazar. Ah well – the beat goes on.