The Best Comments From Paul Ford's Dialog
On Friday, writer, coder and human Paul Ford answered your questions about his latest piece on the beautiful mess of Wikipedia. All in all, he wrote over 3,000 words, answering questions on the future of Wikipedia, the systemic bias within their dominantly male staff of volunteer editors, and, of course, code.
We highly recommend diving into the full discussion, but here are a few highlights.
On Whether You'll Ever Be Able To Cite From Wikipedia
Peter Ng: Hi Paul, I remember when I used the World Book encyclopedia as canonical knowledge when doing research as a youngster. It was accepted that is was accurate and vetted by the proper authorities on those topics. How do you feel about people using Wikipedia as such a source nowadays? What are your thoughts on the accuracy of Wikipedia? Should we really trust it?
Paul Ford: Hi, Peter! Excellent question. Okay so I would be personally highly suspicious of a paper that only cited Wikipedia because I am old and naturally suspicious. I think most people would because the very nature of the medium makes it open to manipulation. However it is an amazing tool for grounding your thinking and I can't imagine there's a researcher or journalist working today who doesn't check in on Wikipedia pages to learn the basics of unfamiliar subjects — and the key thing is that the citations at the bottom can be very, very helpful, in my opinion, because Wikipedia serves as a way to get to a bunch of useful sources that are often going to be more accurate, checked, vetted, and researched. Of course this isn't ALWAYS the case, you have to use common sense about the citations, too.
Mike Peralta: At what point, and maybe it's happening currently, will the education system take Wikipedia as a credible source of knowledge at least to the level of a printed encyclopedia? When I was in HS, 2005-2009, the idea that you could use Wikipedia for any type of academic research was ridiculous to teachers, I'm curious if you think that will/has changed.
Paul Ford: I think the citations are pretty useful! I think you'll never be able to be 100% certain that Wikipedia is correct so it'll always be necessary to hedge a little, but I think that we've all sort of figured out the role of Wikipedia in culture and made our peace with its weirdness. Maybe first drafts could make use of Wikipedia citations and second drafts could level up to different kinds of sources. But I mean, I think people in general acknowledge how useful Wikipedia can be.
On The Future Of Wikipedia
Ryan Hoover: Hey, Paul! Unfair question: Will Wikipedia exist in 50 years? If not, what might supersede it?
Paul Ford: Ryan! Nice to hear from you. I think Wikipedia will definitely exist in 50 years but it could be in a very different form. I mean right now Wikipedia is something that we access through rectangular screens and I think as long as there are rectangular screens we can expect to see it continue to grow (although its growth HAS slowed in recent years). But if we start to get more of our information from, like, tiny whistling robot birds or something, or direct brainpipes, or sexual Google thermostats, or whatever, then Wikipedia might be in trouble in the same way that the Encyclopedia Britannica was in trouble. A change in FORM would yield a change in content. But it's awfully hard to imagine something overtaking it without a major change in platform (mobile is still like a page, at least so far, so Wikipedia will do well on mobile–but it's hard to COMPOSE on mobile, and more difficult to make little edits, so the reader/writer ratio will probably suffer.
On Code
Party Skeleton: What's the most poorly-coded site you've seen?
Paul Ford: Aside from the code I've written, HMMMMMmmmmm. I mean the code that works is good code. Really beautiful code that never ships is bad code. There were a ton of bad data formats in the late 1990s and early 2000s where people were trying to make EVERYTHING XML. Those were painful.
On His Favorite Wiki Pages
Chris Duffy: What's your favorite Wikipedia page?
Paul Ford: I love the lists of lists because meta stuff cracks me up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists, and I love the parenthetical in this URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizz_(birding), and this User page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jooler/List_of_films_by_gory_death_scene but I think the BEST EVER Wikipedia page is almost definitely:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_sandwiches
On Wikipedia's Gender Gap
Shane Ferro: Hi Paul, I'm curious as to what you think about the massive gender imbalance in wikipedia editors. Does this have anything to do with the technical aspects of editing at all, or is it just a cultural thing? Do you have any thoughts on what it means to have such a huge repository of information almost entirely controlled by a male perspective? Then again, does it matter? It's not like the 1771 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica contained a lot of gender neutral perspectives…
Paul Ford: I think it matters hugely. I mean it's hard when you see things get rejected because they don't fit within the notability guidelines. Leslie Harpold was hugely important to a huge cohort of people on the Internet and I always felt that the rejection of an article about her for years was mostly due to her not fitting within a very sort of…traditional and patriarchal set of guidelines (finally that issue was resolved) That's a personal issue though. I just think that like with anything if you don't have lots of women involved you're not seeing the whole story. Even if that's a page about something somewhat "neutral" like physics, but even moreso on nearly everything related to history. It's a huge subject, a real problem here and on the entire Internet, and I'm basically unqualified to talk about it, though, so I'm going to stop here.
Pepper: You write that "the ultimate significance of Wikipedia may be that mansplaining exists as a fundamental concept and is quite possibly unstoppable." What are some possible ways to change that and not make that an inevitability?
Paul Ford: Oh god I really really wish I knew. I mean I think the men need to kind of shut up? Which then they're like OMG I WILL NEVER SHUT UP FREEEEEEEDOM like Braveheart, and the women are like, "I WOULD contribute if there wasn't all this yelling," and the men are like FREEEEEEEEEDOM, and the women are like "I'm going to go do literally anything else but this," and then Twitter gets involved, and Reddit, and various foundations and mailing lists, and this repeats for 20 years, so I just don't know I'm going to just try to be nice to people and hire women when I can I know this does not answer your question.
On Keeping The Trolls Out Of Wikipedia
Maya Prohovnik: Why do you think Wikipedia has been able to remain a (relatively) neutral and troll-free zone on the internet where so many other online communities have failed? Is it just that the volunteers stay on top of it and remove inappropriate additions right away? Or do you think that even the worst humans have some respect for Wikipedia's mission because it's useful to them too?
Paul Ford: No, it's TOTALLY on the volunteers. Lots of people have tried to do some weird bad things to Wikipedia and sometimes succeeded. As a result Wikipedia is a little rigid—the idea that you can edit anything at any time as a user is not totally true anymore, and controversial or in-the-news articles tend to get locked down, and special areas like the home page are often locked down to all but a fairly select group of humans. There's a pretty massive human system backed by some serious programming about who can access what that keep the site moving. Plus the NPOV (neutral point of view) while it is not without its problems did give people a sort of benchmark in which to deal with thorny stuff. But if you look at the TALK pages you can see the real gristle and meat of conversations and some pretty doofy stuff. Wikipedia made room for all of that, but developed a set of shared rules around what an article should be, and that's helped it stay good-ish.
Bummed you missed out on the discussion? It's okay! This Monday at 2 p.m. EST, author Merve Emre will be answering your questions about her latest piece on the secret history of Myers-Briggs. We hope to see you there!
