Wikipedia and the Ministry of Truth

Originally published 6/9/2011

A very interesting social networking phenomenon occurred over the last few days.  You’ve probably already heard at least part of the story: the former Governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate had occasion to be in Boston a few days ago, and while there she made a speech containing some very creative, if factually inaccurate, statements about the ride of Paul Revere.  This in and of itself isn’t news.  Politicians as a rule have been, are, and always will be creative with facts and figures when it suits their political goals.  What was much more interesting to me was the resulting social fallout on the web, and in particular the battle over the truth.

I’ll assume that you, the reader, are familiar with Wikipedia—the online encyclopedia of everything created and maintained by the social denizens of the internet.  I’ll assume that you also know that 1) anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry and 2) the quality of the content of any given Wikipedia entry is variable: sometimes the content is superb and well referenced, sometimes it is not.

The interesting thing about the fallout from the Paul Revere speech is that supporters of the politician that made the remarks almost immediately took to the web and attempted to update the “Paul Revere” entry in Wikipedia to match the “facts” relayed in the speech.  This, of course, was not unnoticed by others who are not so much fans of the politician, who re-edited the Wikipedia entry to remove the factually inaccurate material.  And thus, over the course of the next few days, the battle for the “truth” was waged in one small corner of the internet, with the article being edited, re-edited, and re-re-edited repeatedly.  The page went from around 2,000 hits per day to 140,000 on Monday June 6^th.  The page edits jumped from a handful per month to several dozen per day.

I expect we’ll see much more of this in the future, particularly during political campaigns.  And while somewhat annoying and disheartening, there was a positive outcome to all the Wikipedia shenanigans.  The Paul Revere content actually improved.  As the New York Times political blog “The Caucus” wrote:

As a result, the Revere article has become much longer, and much better sourced -– a version of what Wikipedia users call the “Streisand Effect,” which is described as when “an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.”

(Two weeks ago, I blogged about another instance of the so-called “Streisand Effect” that recently took place in England, where an attempt to quash the reporting of an alleged affair by a well-known soccer star had the complete opposite effect: the backlash spread the information far and wide.  The moral of the story: if you say or do something stupid, it’s probably better to acknowledge it and move on than it is to try to cover it up.)

In Nineteen Eighty-Four (the book, not the year), George Orwell invented a fictional “ministry of truth,” whose job it was to eliminate all books and other written references to facts which did not fit the official version of the truth as reported by the government.  While such an official ministry is thankfully still fictitious, it’s clear that political parties, candidates and special interest groups have de facto or de jure ministries standing by, ready to spring into action whenever an ugly truth stands in the way of their beautiful argument (thank you Thomas Huxley).  

I find it hopeful to think that in this day and age when the truth is so easily bent and altered, that the actual truth still stands a fighting chance of winning.