Five Years Later, Who Rules Google?

4.71K

Choire

12/20/07 08:30PM

Filed to: the loser is you

Five years ago, blogger Rogers Cadenhead recalls, blogging sorta-evangelist and RSS king Dave Winer made a long bet with Martin Nisenholtz, the senior VP for digital operations at the New York Times. The proposition was this: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site." The best part is, their arguments at the time both pro and con are pretty hilarious—because they've been rendered obsolete. Though technically one of them won, there was another real winner, Cadenhead points out.

By his count, blogs actually beat the Times in Google results. But someone else beat both of them:

Wikipedia, which was only one year old in 2002, ranks higher today on four of the five news stories: 12th for Chinese exports, fifth for oil prices, first for the Iraq war, fourth for the mortgage crisis and first for the Virginia Tech killings.
Winer predicted a news environment "changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want." Nisenholtz expected the professional media to remain the authoritative source for "unbiased, accurate, and coherent" information.
Instead, our most trusted source on the biggest news stories of 2007 is a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover.

Oh, Jimmy Wales, you Wiki-player! You gamed the system!

Long Bet Winner: Weblogs vs. The New York Times [Cadenhead]

The following replies are approved. To see additional replies that are pending approval, click Show Pending. Warning: These may contain graphic material.

Furious George Choire 12/21/07 12:52AM

@Michael Jahn: Truth be told, I think there are a lot of '60s parallels to be drawn here, and there will be even more in the coming years. Hackers will be the new anarchists, and sites like Wikipedia will be the new pseudofascist orthodoxy to rail against. It's already happening. At least the pseudofascist orthodoxy part. Google has quietly grown from Internet darling into multi-tentacled, unstoppable corporate hegemon. Wikipedia has grown from a fun information exchange and cultural experiment into a sort of parody of itself: a top-down hierarchy that purports to be democratic.

Fuck, man, I was born in 1980, and I have no real perspective about the '60s countercultural movements aside from what I've read in the likes of Steal This Book and other such manifestos. Nevertheless, from what I have read and heard, the battle with "The Man" on the Internet is very much a case of "same shit, different day."

People may laugh this stuff off now, but holy shit, I can picture a very frightening universe one day in which central sources of knowledge and data are used for political, corporate, PR, or other purposes without our consent and outside the jurisdiction of our laws. Look at Google Earth. That shit is Scary with a capital S.

So yes, please, go ahead and fuck with Wikipedia. Work to discredit articles by mixing up dates or names and inserting lines of libelous disinformation. Delete paragraphs. Replace pages with gibberish. And this part is key: expose Wikipedia to as much copyright infringement liability as possible. This, I've discovered after nearly two years of persistent gadflyism/vandalism on their site, is their Achilles heel. Post copyrighted images in articles without obtaining consent. This will REALLY fuck them up, but good, because it exposes them to very real and very budget-draining lawsuits. By the way, you're not liable at all when this happens. The liability is entirely on them.

So let's all go kill us some digital pigs.

Furious George Choire 12/20/07 10:06PM

@MisterHippity: I'm not Wikipedia's biggest fan either, and in fact, I've actively been involved in many coordinated and highly organized efforts to disrupt or discredit Wikipedia through disinformation, spam, and other means.

And actually, the writing of entries wholesale by PR flaks is a lot more prevalent than one might suspect. I'd roughly estimate that 50% (if not more) of Wikipedia articles concerning companies, bands, living people, products, and technologies are PR fluff pieces. Some of the drug-related articles read like TV commercials, and some of the business entries read like brochures.

Of course, Wikipedia administrators have lately taken upon themselves to prevent the very thing Wikipedia is supposed to be about: the free exchange, addition, deletion, and revision of information in the articles. Nowadays, good luck adding anything to an article before it's automatically reverted as "vandalism," and your account is banned on sight. This is why I can't fucking stand the site anymore. It used to hold so much promise; lately it's become a fascist haven for big corporations and the jackbooted brownshirts who would protect their PR communiques.

So, in summation, I think it's everyone's civic duty to vandalize and spam the fuck out of Wikipedia. It's become a menace, and it needs to be brought down a couple pegs. For its own good. Seriously.

Atelier Choire 12/20/07 10:16PM

Wikipedia is a truly horrible phenomenon. With blogs, at the very least the reader knows that what they are reading may be mostly unedited opinion, and can adjust their expectation for accuracy/bias based on how much or little they know about the source, and those sources can ultimately be held responsible for what they write. If its garbage, then their reputation will follow suit. Its all just more information to help people form their own opinions, which is a truly good thing. Wikipedia, however, grants complete anonymity to any person or group who may have an axe to grind on any subject whatsoever, thus absolving them of any responsibility for their actions, then adds insult to injury by cloaking the whole affair in a facade of authority and accuracy. Jon Stuart called it "truth by consensus", and that is a very scary thought, as truth is not something which is, by definition, up for debate or alteration.

MisterHippity Choire 12/20/07 09:35PM

@Michael Jahn: Of course a lot of entries are written by PR flaks. I predicted that would happen when I first heard about Wikipedia two years ago.

Imagine what corporate and political PR flaks would do if they could write all the news stories or books that mentioned their clients themselves?

Now consider that they basically CAN do this on Wikipedia. Of course they'll go ahead and do it. And their efforts will become increaslingly widespread and sophisticated over time, to the point that their contributions will be so pervasive and subtle that it will be impossile to reliably detect them — but they will change the gist of almost every entry totally in their client's favor.

Soon, you won't be able to trust anything you read on that site (assuming that you can now). No "police" will be able to correct this.

The flaks will spam Wikipedia so thoroughly and effectively it will be widely recognized to be totally devoid of any usefulness or legitimacy within two years from now.

I hate Wikipedia. Can you tell? The sort of naive idiocy that it represents just annoys me to no end.