The Big Episode on Wikipedia
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. ♪

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. Just Mr. Green Jeans and Zipper Face and Madam Lux all here together. Bring you stuff you should know. Who do I get to be this week? You get to pick. Oh, I'll be Zipper Face, of course.

Oh, yeah, I was going to be zipper face, but okay. I'll be Mr. Green Jeans. All right. What was that, from Captain Kangaroo? The only one I recognize is Mr. Green Jeans. I've never heard of the other two. I made them up. Oh, okay, perfect. You just heard of them just now, Chuck. I'm not losing my mind. No, you're with it. You're with it, man. So, Chuck, I'm really kind of excited about this one today. We're doing Wikipedia today.

And as longtime listeners of Stuff You Should Know are already aware, we have a standing ban for our writers on using Wikipedia as a source. Don't even peek at it. Maybe, maybe to confirm a date.

or something like that, but just leave Wikipedia out of it. And it's really twofold. There's two reasons. One, it's long been notoriously unreliable because anybody can edit any page or write whatever they want on a Wikipedia page. So that inherently makes it unreliable by nature. And number two, we would never want to be accused of

Wikipedia as like our source article. And when you read how some topic works, it's really difficult for that not to infect the way that you interpret it and report it later on, meaning that you could accidentally kind of copy the structure of a Wikipedia article. We never want to do that. So those two reasons, we've always kind of banned Wikipedia, right? Yeah. I mean, we don't use ourselves except for, like you said, you know, confirmation of the object.

Odd thing. Occasionally I will use it as a – I will go to the – and we've talked about this too, the links to the original articles and papers and studies and things like that. It could be handy. And it's handy in my everyday life, but we've never used it and that's why it's – even though it shouldn't bother me. It still gets under my skin when –

And I don't read reviews that much, but when people say like, all these guys do is sit down and read Wikipedia articles to you. Right, right. Because people say that. They do say that, and we want them to be able to be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Right.

The thing is, I have to say this. I haven't decided we need to alter our editorial policies or anything like that. But after researching Wikipedia, I have come to have a slightly different, actually a radically different opinion of Wikipedia as a whole, collectively put together, and just what it is, what it stands for, and just how reliable it is. Turns out,

But like our our view is maybe a little rooted in pre 2013, 2012, and it may be time to just kind of evolve. But still, again, not touch our editorial policy. Yeah. I mean, I've always you've always been the the one who's a little more grudgy. Oh, I thought that was both of us. I thought we agreed on that. No, I mean, I don't think we should use it for a reference, but I've always enjoyed the site.

And I think you've always been a little more, had your nose turned up a little more, which I totally respect. I don't know if I would characterize it as nose turned up. I'm not sure what it is, but I don't know. Is it nose turned up? Is that what I've been doing all these years? Maybe. But hey, you're in a, you're a...

Uneducated, smart. Milk toast about town. Dude, no. And I think you've always just been a little bit like, no, that's just not for me, which I get. Okay. All right. Well, then I'm here to say I renounce that elitist view and I am a lot more accepting of Wikipedia and what it is and what it does. All right. Okay. Great, I guess. You can call me Saul from now on. Oh, wait, Paul. You better. I had it backwards, didn't I?

Are you speaking biblicky? Yeah. Biblicky? Bibicky? Bibicky. I don't know. Let's not get into that. We should quickly just go through A, what it is. And Dave helped us out with this and just a few sort of fun stats at the beginning.

But Wikipedia, of course, is an online encyclopedia created or maintained by Wikipedians who are users, just everyday people. So that's what it is. But what it really is, is the largest reference work ever created by.

90 times larger than the 120 volume Encyclopedia Britannica. That's impressive. 62 million articles, 300 plus languages, 4 billion plus visitors a month, edging up toward 300,000 Wikipedians or Wikipedia editors. And that's all I got. But actually, I got one more. I did see, and this is in 2008.

So this is a long time ago. There was one computer scientist who estimated that up to that point, there were 100 million hours spent developing and getting Wikipedia up to that point. Wow. Did you mention how many edits are made every second? Nah. Okay. I didn't think you did. And I'm glad you didn't because this one's my favorite. You like it? This is, I think, a 2022 estimate. 5.2 Wikipedia edits are made every second.

And each month, 14 million edits are made. And as we kind of talk about how Wikipedia actually works, that will become more and more significant as we go. Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, that's sort of the overview of some stats and how it's defined. But what it really is, and Dave kind of nailed it on the head as far as their ethos, it's kind of a utopian idea and an experiment that people –

can get on the internet and not just sling insults, but they can get on the internet and create an important volume of knowledge for people. Yeah, I saw a great quote that said, it's a good thing that Wikipedia works in practice because it certainly doesn't work in theory.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. And no matter where you are around the world, that's not 100% true, but in a large area, a swath of the world, there are Wikipedias for you in your language about your culture, whether you speak Zulu or Tartar or Sanskrit, Old English, Creole, Haitian, Esperanto, Yoruba, Piedmontese, Yiddish, all of them have their own Wikipedia. There's a lot, a lot of different Wikipediae

I'm just adding I to anything plural from now on. That's my new thing. But it's really impressive. Like the idea that people came together and did this for free as volunteers. And now we have, like you said, by far the largest reference work ever created. That's right. A site, and we'll get into all of this, the whys of all this, but, you know, it's a site with no ads. It is a very lo-fi site that is overseen by the Wikimedia. Yeah, that's right. Wikimedia Foundation.

It is funded by donations. I know at times when you go to Wikipedia, everyone but you, that is, occasionally you might see a little hat out and say, hey, why don't you drop a couple of bucks in this thing if you like using the site? I've donated to Wikipedia. Now I get emails for it, too. Oh, see? That's how they get you. You give them an inch and they take a mile, you know? Operating budget of about $168 million a year, which is...

Surprising to me. I didn't know...

It would cost that much. Oh, I thought that was low. I was surprised. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the biggest websites in the entire world. I think it's number three or five, depending who you ask for number of visits, monthly visits. Yeah, but for something to be completely created for free, that seems high. I get that. But $165 million of that is Jimmy Wales' compensation. Right. Yeah.

And let's talk about who Jimmy Wales is. That's a lie, by the way, everybody. Yeah, we should get into the history of it and hop in the old Wayback Machine. Oh. Fire it up. We're not going to have to go far, so we don't need much fuel. Trying to be more efficient with our travels these days in this thing. Yeah, we're using hamsters instead of kerosene lately. That's right. So we're going to go back to the mid-1990s when the World Wide Web was just a young babe in the crib. ♪ music playing ♪

And very adorably, when all these websites started popping up, there were people that were like, hey, you know what we need now? People have got to be able to find this stuff. So we need web directories. This is obviously before Google was a...

just a very convenient way or Bing or your search engine of choice. Don't leave Edge out. Or Edge had come along. So in 1994, Yahoo had a pretty popular web directory going on. And if you're young enough to where you don't even know what that means, that means literally you would go to a page and it would say like sports, entertainment, kind of like a newspaper. Here's all 10 websites on sports. Exactly. And it would list sports.

those websites. Uh, but then came along a company called Bomas. Uh, it was an early.com who said, no, you know what? I think we should do like an open source version of this, uh, web directory and we'll, uh, we'll call it a web ring. Yeah. And the whole premise was if you were a part of the web ring, your site was, you would have a little thing saying like, um,

like baseball or something like that at the bottom of your site. And that was your connection to the web ring. And you could click next, and it would take you to the next site that had been connected to the first site because they're both about baseball or something way more niche than that. And anybody, because like you said, it was open source, could make their own web ring. There were usually webmasters who looked at the sites, approved them, actually put them together. But

But eventually, as you had more and more sites added to this ring, you had a more and more dense collection of information about one usually fairly niche topic. Apparently, Pamela Anderson was like one of the biggest web rings right out of the gate back in 1996. But that was the premise of what Wikipedia eventually was built on. It was open source. People could contribute. And the initial body of knowledge was built upon by more and more people.

Yeah. And BOMAS got popular. They kind of focused on man stuff, for lack of a better term. And I think that's what they literally called it. It was like car things and sports things, Pamela Anderson. And then they quickly realized, hey, naked women are.

on the internet performs really well as it turns out. So they really started focusing on that kind of adult material, I guess, to call it something a little tame and chiefly nude pictures of women. And they really drilled down on that and got very, very popular because of that.

But then pivoted pretty quickly because Jimmy Wales, the guy you mentioned, one of the founders of BOMUS, had a larger, more pure vision in mind when he said, hey, I think we could create a free encyclopedia for.

So we founded Newpedia, which was financed by BOMAS. Yeah. And everybody uses an encyclopedia, whether you just need to make a quick reference, whether you're a kid writing a research paper, whether you're a parent researching your kid's research paper. Like people just need an encyclopedia. It's a basic thing. So let's create one and then let's sell ads against it.

Which is, there's nothing wrong with that. That's what we do. We put out free content and then there's ads. Like that was essentially the basic premise of websites forever and still generally is, right? Yeah.

The thing about it that made it a little more than just like a money-making scheme was that from the outset, James Wales and his partner, a guy named Larry Sanger, were really, really – like they placed a tremendous amount of emphasis on truth and correctness and their articles being error-free. So it wasn't just something they slapped together –

It had nothing to do with long tail or any terrible ideas like that. It was really well-researched articles vetted by academics and professionals with ads sold against it. That was Newpedia. And it was a great idea, except that in the go-go hustle early part of the Internet, where you could just get things in like that, Newpedia was glacially slow. And that was ultimately its downfall.

Yeah, for sure. And that's N-U, by the way, not N-E-W, N-U-P-D-I-A. It was slow because they, like you said, they wanted to get things right. There was a seven step process in place before anything was published. So it was sort of the traditional publishing model that had been used for, you know, how long, however long publishing, traditional publishing had been around like this, which is

You have something reviewed, whether you work for a newspaper and you do your fact checking or you have your editor in chief checking on things. In this case, Larry Sanger was the editor in chief of Newpedia. Or you have things reviewed by experts. And then you published. That was what they were doing, sort of in that order. You write something, you review it, review it through that seven step process, and then you publish it online and

And it was, like you said, slow. I think 21 articles came out in that first year. And Sanger, it seemed like in particular, was pretty frustrated with that speed. Yeah, for sure. Getting content out. For sure. So just put that aside. These guys are kind of in suspended animation at this moment in, I think, 1999, end of 1999. Yeah.

A few years earlier than that, there was a guy named Ward Cunningham in the very early 90s. He was a software engineer. He was trying to figure out how to share ideas at his company that anybody at the company could kind of contribute to, right? So he actually took an Apple program called HyperCard and created a hypertext program that he called QuickWeb.

I believe was the first name for it. And that was basically where anybody could go into this program and contribute to this body of knowledge, this body of information, and it would grow and grow and grow and things would link to other things. That's hypertext. And very fortunately, Ward Cunningham went on vacation to Hawaii also in the early 90s.

And he noticed that there were little airport shuttles called WikiWiki airport buses, which means quick. Wiki means quick. And he just loved that name. So he changed the name from QuickWeb to WikiWikiWeb. And that was the first wiki, what we understand as a wiki, a bunch of user-generated content that anybody can contribute to and edit and link to other stuff. The whole thing just becomes self-referential and grows as a result.

Yeah, and it was basically, in his mind, a way for programmers to talk to one another about programming. But he realized he was on to a larger concept, not so much that he tried to get a patent on the concept of Wiki, which was probably a grave error. But he said at the time he didn't think anyone would be interested in something like that, so it wasn't worth pursuing. The other thing we should mention about Ward Cunningham was

is he has now been credited with what's known as Cunningham's Law. Have you ever heard of this? I have. Which is kind of the foundation of the Internet in some ways, and definitely Wikipedia, which is, he said, the best way to get a correct answer online is not by asking a question, but by posing a wrong answer online.

And it was sort of a theory, but it has kind of proved to be true in his mind, at least. And I agree that like when you ask someone something online, it can be very hard or slow to get a correct answer. But if you post something wrong, then people are very, very quick to correct you. And so that was sort of the basis of his WikiWiki web with programmers talking to one another. Yeah, and it's preserved at wiki.c2.com. And like, I can't make heads or tails of any of it.

But it's still there. It's super cute and quaint looking, but it's neat. The usability is really amazing too, especially for what he built it on. That'd be fun if you could go to a year of the internet. You know what I mean? You can. I think you can on Internet Archive. No, I mean like...

Turn your internet into 2000, like 2001 or 1997 and not just read things, but have it just be like from that year and what it was like. I got you. Just give Chip GPT like three more months. Right. You're probably right.

So now we're going to come back to Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and this dispute over who came up with the idea of taking the wiki concept that Ward Cunningham came up with and applying it to the encyclopedia concept that Wales and Sanger had come up with, Newpedia. It doesn't ultimately matter, but just to name check, a guy named Jeremy Rosenfeld was a BOMUS employee. He's the one who Jimmy Wales says came up with the idea of using a wiki concept.

Larry Sanger said he came up with the idea after having dinner with a guy named Ben Kovitz. He says he even remembers that he ordered enchiladas at the dinner. That's how much he remembers it. Either way, regardless, within two weeks of that dinner that Larry Sanger had where he was introduced to the concept of a wiki, Newpedia had become a wiki.

And the Newpedia advisory board was like, we don't like this idea. This smells of like brand new stuff and we're afraid of it. And also what's the, what's this whole concept of, of write, publish, and then review. That's, that's, that's like sacrilegious. Like you can't do that. And so Wales and Sanger said, all right, you guys stay over here with Newpedia. We're going to go over here with our thing. We're going to call it Wikipedia and Wikipedia within two weeks,

was born on January 15th, 2001. Larry Sanger had that dinner on January 2nd, 2001. That's right. And as far as that claim, for what it's worth, the actual Wikipedia article on Sanger confirms that it was him. Well, then it must be true. I don't know if Jimmy Wales just begrudgingly allows that to stay there or not, but everything I saw kind of said it was Sanger. Yeah.

So just like I said, take it for what it's worth. It's funny you mentioned Jimmy Wales begrudgingly just letting it stay there because he was caught very early on in the early days of Wikipedia editing the Bomis.com Wikipedia entry to remove soft core pornography from it. Like the word soft core pornography. And he got called out for that.

And they're like, dude, that's how that was our foundation at first. So but that's a really good example of what's starting to happen at this time around 2001 with Wikipedia. It's brand new, but people are starting to kind of come to it, figure it out, get the hang of it and become like enthralled by it and starting to like write articles, edit articles, discuss how to how to best make an edit. Like it's starting to kind of grow now.

But it took a truly horrible event for Wikipedia to truly come into its own for the very first time. And let's say we take a break, Chuck. That's quite a cliffhanger. Welcome to Stunned You Should Know. What is it?

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Come on in, grab a cold one, get fitted by a pro, and shop the latest dials. Visit Decovas.com. That's T-E-C-O-V-A-S dot com. And don't go gently, y'all. All right, so you were hanging on a cliff here. You talked about a terrible event.

You probably don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what that event was, considering Wikipedia really got cranking in January of 2001. It kind of sped along for about nine months, growing pretty quickly compared to initially. I think there were about 10,000 articles written over that period. And then 9-11 happened.

And that changed everything because new sites crashed. Everyone was trying to get information and they were going to these, you know, super heavily ad filled websites, websites with videos, pop-up ads, all kinds of things that like slow traffic down and overload things. And all these people are trying to go to these sites to find out news and information with

Wikipedia is there with its lo-fi, no ads, no pop-ups, no video kind of layout, and it didn't crash. And so the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack article on Wikipedia says,

grew at a speed that I don't know any web page has ever grown before. No, and that was it. It's like Wikipedia, the idea, finally took off on September 11th and the days after because people were searching for information on it. Like every second they were just looking for more and more info. Stuff was, news was coming out hard and fast like that. And with the news sites down, that Wikipedia article became like the de facto source of information. And so as more people came to it and were like, what is this?

and then kind of figured out right there on the fly how Wikipedia worked, they actually stuck around and started adding to the article, editing the article, discussing like the wording for the article. And that single article on the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack

That became the cornerstone of how Wikipedia developed. That article did in all of the discussions. And still today, they archived all the discussions all the way back to the first day. And it is really interesting to see like the arguments and discussions that people got into over that because it was at the time and then in the years following, it's just always been such a controversial topic and such a sacred topic too here in the United States. Yeah.

Yeah. And not only just the topic, but kind of everything that they were, all the subtopics. And that was where Wikipedia really, um, came to find what it was and what it wasn't because they were doing things like truly helpful things at the time, like a list of victims, um, uh,

blood drives and links to where you could go to help and donate and things like that. But as that was happening, like you said, it was sort of happening in real time. And their talk page was flooded with people saying, well, wait a minute, I'm not sure. Beyond just like editing, you know, the news and facts, they were like, well, what are we doing here? We need to be truthful and accurate, of course. But do we have stuff like, is this an encyclopedia or not? Like, do we have a list of victims?

you know, I hate to say it, but like people who aren't well-known because an encyclopedia probably wouldn't. Would we have links to blood drives? Probably not because an encyclopedia wouldn't. So as they went through those really pretty tough discussions, what Wikipedia wasn't became pretty clear. Yeah, it became what's known as the five pillars, which we'll talk about in a second. But

But one of the things that emerged from it too was they weren't there to report the news. So anybody who had breaking news, it became clear Wikipedia was not a place for that. They were meant to be behind the curve. They report on reliable sources reporting. That's what the entries were built on. And that was a huge, huge foundation that was kind of laid that day, I guess. Yeah.

But just as one little aside, at this time, shortly after this, Wikipedia attracted a lot of people. People started sticking around and writing other articles that were related to the 2001 September 11th attacks. And it just started to grow. At the same time, it also attracted trolls, essentially out of the gate. And there were trolls on the site and

Larry Sanger did not have the stomach for that at all. And I don't blame him. Trolls suck. They're the worst. But he quit because he said, we need to have some sort of structure here. We need to have a constitution. We need a way to vet these claims and these facts that are in these articles. We got to slow this down, man. And Jimmy Wales is like, no, we're not going to do that. We've met in Ayn Rand chat forums, for God's sake. We're not going to

we're not going to do this. We're going to go the opposite direction. We'll figure it out as we go. And so Larry Sanger quit and became one of the biggest critics of Wikipedia. He was only there for, I think, 14 months. Yeah. Vice called him their most outspoken critic. In 2007, he said the site was broken beyond repair. He has said that there's a large – and this is just a few of the criticisms, of course. There's very, very many –

You might want to say he has a bone to pick with Wikipedia, but I also feel like he truly believes his stuff. Sure. He said that it has a massive left-wing bias and has used examples on everything from LGTBQ websites to –

Donald Trump versus Barack Obama's. I keep saying websites. I should call them Wikipedia articles rather. Oh, yeah. Okay. Donald Trump's page versus Barack Obama's page. All kinds of stuff basically saying that, hey, we're only getting one point of view here. We're not getting the right wing side of things. We're not getting the libertarian viewpoint on things.

So he's had a bone to pick with Wikipedia, although I think he has softened it here and there, saying that – I think he said that the bias is probably the least of their problems. So that's not like really where he's hanging his hat. I don't want to make it seem like that. Well, what's interesting is his criticisms seem to have worked themselves out because one of the things that Wikipedia strives for is neutrality. As close to neutrality and objective –

I keep wanting to use the word reporting, but that's wrong. Reporting makes it documenting. That's neutral, objective documentation of knowledge. That's what it's after, right? And so I was looking at banned users, and a lot of them seem to be like social justice warriors who are like righting wrongs, and they get banned for life.

So, I mean, I don't think that it necessarily has a political bias one way or the other. If anything, politically, from what I can tell, that's where it's closest to neutral of all. Gender, ethnicity, that's a different story. But politically, it does seem to be pretty centrist. Yeah. Well, Sanger doesn't feel like it, at least. But, you know, that's his take. Well, get him on the phone.

Oh, man. What if we took callers? That'd be great. Go ahead, caller. I've always wanted to say that. Hey, long time, first time. So in 2002, Wikipedia avoided what would have been a sea change when they thought about getting ads on the site, making money, you know, the good old fashioned web way.

And the people of Wikipedia got upset. Users were like, no, no, no, this is what makes you guys different. You can't do that. In Spain, there were some Spanish Wikipedians who got so upset they created their own app

Well, I guess you would say encyclopedia Libra, but it's just spelled differently. They said, you know, that scared them off basically to where they created their own. And he said, all right, I hear you loud and clear. We'll launch the Wikimedia Foundation. That was pretty early on. It was in 2003. And then they changed from dot com to dot org. Right. They shut down new media that same year.

And got together and figured out these five pillars that you mentioned earlier, one of which you just referenced, which was neutrality. Yeah. So there are five pillars, the fundamental principles of Wikipedia. Yeah.

And a lot of these were find its roots in that September 11th, 2001 page. But they've also really been refined and developed over time. And I think I think we should cut to the last one first, because it really kind of gives a it gives you like the right impression when you hear the rest of the rules.

And the last one is that Wikipedia has no firm rules. There's no one in charge. There's a group of people who are volunteer administrators who actually can ban you. They actually can delete entire entries if they feel like that's necessary. But those people are few and far between, and they are meant to not wield their power. Essentially, no one's in charge. No one owns an article. And there are different competing philosophies

about how Wikipedia should be built, how articles should be written, what's truth, what's a reliable source. And these competing philosophies battle one another or engage in conversation and dialogue with one another on the talk page for these amazing, like the really well-written, well-researched articles or entries that people like really care about. There's really fascinating discussions about

about, you know, just wording, like just what word to use or this word doesn't quite fit or what's a reliable citation. And the reason why it works is because it will constantly evolve, right?

in that setup. There's no rigidity. It's like whatever philosophy wins out, wins out in that one specific disagreement over that one specific edit on that one specific entry. And then the next time, it may have a completely different outcome. But collectively as a whole, that leads to the neutrality that we referenced earlier.

That's right. So that's, I guess, five and two. Pillar number one is that it's an encyclopedia, which speaks for itself. Sure. Number three is that it's free. Well, also kind of part three, because you said that no one owns a Wikipedia article. I imagine that can be tough at times if you have...

If you have created an entry that is very, very niche that you knew a lot about and you care a lot about, I imagine it can be very tough to sort of hand that over and say, okay, like, I guess anyone can change this. Right.

So that must be hard, but still a pillar. And then number four is editors should treat each other with respect and civility. I'm sure that that well, we know that that has gotten out of hand because there's been reports of bullying within the what are they called? Wikipedians. But the pillar, at least, is to avoid these edit wars.

And work with your fellow editors instead of against them to not bully, to have patience with new editors and things like that. And try and foster like kind of a different community for what usually happens online. Yeah, and what's amazing is it generally works. The whole premise of that pillar is assume good faith. It's such an important point that it's abbreviated as AGF.

And that is that if you see somebody adding some dumb, dumb fact that's clearly a conspiracy theory as if it's fact to some article, don't take that act as like they're willfully trying to harm that article or hurt Wikipedia or personally insult you.

What they're doing, probably if you assume good faith, is in their mind, they think they're actually helping Wikipedia. They're helping the site. They're making this entry more legit, even though they're totally, completely wrong. So if you come at it from that premise where you assume good faith, then that's where it's least likely to devolve into an argument or name-calling or threats or wiki-bullying. And that seems to be like the...

case or the place that the editors that I saw will go from, like that whole assuming good faith first part. A lot of them do. Not all of them, obviously, because it's the internet. For sure. All right. I say we take another break and come back with blocks and bands and whether or not Wikipedia is truly reliable. Sound good? That sounds great, Chuck. Welcome to Stonish and No More.

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So even though you assume good faith, that you're supposed to assume good faith, like we said, it can become clear that somebody's willfully being a jerk. There's a whole thing called vandalism where you are purposefully inserting incorrect stuff into an article just to mess with people, right? Just to mess with the article. It can be hilarious. It can be

Spamming is another one where you promote yourself or your product, which is just, you should just know that you don't do that, but people do that. What else, Chuck? Well, obviously we've talked about the bullying and harassment. The three revert rule, which is basically you don't revert or change or undo three edits on the same page within 24 hours, which is kind of like a slow your roll move a little bit.

Copyright violations, pretty self-explanatory. Using multiple Wikipedia accounts, which they call sock puppetry. It's very cute. And anything just that's against the idea of what they're trying to do, which is to build out this encyclopedia. And all of this is not decided upon by just your average user or Wikipedia, Wikipedia-an, rather, but

The volunteer administrators, I think the English Wikipedia has more than 800 administrators, and they are Wikipedians. They're just really experienced ones who know the ins and outs and take it really seriously. They do not work for the Wikimedia Foundation and get a cut of that $160 million a year. But they're the ones in charge of determining when a block or a ban can happen, blocks being –

temporary. They can, they can be longer, uh, duration wise. They can be shorter, can be a one specific thing you did in an article or, uh, the whole article that you're blocked from, um, for a little while, uh, you can appeal those, but it's meant to be a preventative measure and not a punitive. Um, and then you have the ban, which is kind of speaks for itself. That's,

It's usually a site ban, which means you just you can't come on here anymore. You know, you can go on, but you can't make a single edit. All you can do is sit there and read, pal. Oh, well, yeah. I mean, we're talking about editing, not like anyone can read anything. Sure, sure. Right. And also anybody can edit unless you've been blocked or banned and you don't even have to create an account, which is one of the cool things.

But there's entire site bans. So, like, you can be completely banned from English Wikipedia or you could be globally banned. So, any Wikipedia in any language and I believe some of the other wiki projects like Wiktionary, like, you just, you'll be, you can't do anything on those. Yeah. So, that kind of brings us to where we started with this whole thing and why we didn't use it

um, why we don't use it and started out at least and still don't is that, is it, uh, is it reputable? Is it truthful? Is it accurate? Um, you usually can't use Wikipedia as a source, uh, for a school paper. Um, certainly not a college paper. Uh, we make up our own rules as Josh and Chuck do stuff you should know. So we could do whatever we wanted. That was just something that we did from the beginning. Like no one,

I don't think anyone told us to do that, did they? No. Apparently it was just my idea because I'm a big snob. No, not at all. We were both on board. There was a study in 2005, and I tried to find something more recent, but they compared 42 entries on Wikipedia to the same thing in the Encyclopedia Britannica and found that the average mistakes per article was four for Wikipedia, three for the Britannica article,

which is a little bit startling. The difference is between Wikipedia and Britannica is that you can change something really fast on Wikipedia. And Encyclopedia Britannica, at least for the hard copy volumes, obviously is going to have to wait until the next publish. And they tested out the speed of Wikipedia changes or, I guess, corrections. And they filed false information in 33 different articles about dead philosophers. And in 48 hours, a third of those had been fixed.

And three of those within 60 seconds. Yeah, I looked those up and some of them are hilarious. They all seem rather innocuous. But if you stop and think about what they're saying, they're pretty funny. Like Wittgenstein was fined for poisoning squirrels in his yard or Spinoza supported himself by selling stolen jewelry or that David Hume used to wrestle with local sportsmen. Like just we just.

But just completely like the way that the sentences were written, like you would totally buy them and they still got corrected. And that's kind of like the whole premise of Wikipedia is like eventually somebody is going to find that and they're going to correct it. It might be in a minute. It might be in 48 hours. It might be in six weeks. But eventually it's going to get created. Like you'll eventually get to the truth or correctness, I guess. Yeah. And Dave points out, and this is really interesting.

Really, the truth of the matter is something as large as Wikipedia created by users, there's going to be some great articles, there's going to be some good ones, and there's going to be some not so great ones. Stubs. That's just how it shakes out.

And so they're actually labeled now, which is something that a lot of people may not really realize, but they can be labeled good or featured. If it's good, that means it's got a little small plus sign inside a green circle. There are close to 40,000 good articles on the English version. If it's featured, that means it's the cream of the crop as far as Wikipedia vetting goes. And there are close to 6,500 that are featured with that bronze star.

Yeah. I saw the Museum of Bad Art as a featured article. There's just tons of them, thousands, right? And you can just go look at the list and be like, oh, okay, this is a really good article. I'm going to read this one. Despite all that, I think the featured articles represent one out of every 1,050 articles on the site. It's a very low percentage. And because of that,

Wikipedia even says Wikipedia is not a reliable source. They say it. It's expressed on their website. And you can't actually use a Wikipedia entry as a citation on another Wikipedia entry. You link to other stuff. You can hyperlink it, but you can't use that to prove or support that sentence or that fact or whatever. And there's the reason why, one of the reasons why it was kind of perfectly captured by that amazing comic XKCD article.

And they coined the term cytogenesis, where somebody can put in a fake fact on a Wikipedia page and then go to that Wikipedia page to prove that their fact is correct. Right. So it's like the snake that eats its tail. And there's actually a example of that. There's an Australian duo called Peking Duck and.

And one of their fans got backstage because he inserted his name as a relative of one of the band members and showed it to like the guy who was guarding the backstage and ended up getting backstage because of it. Isn't that amazing? Pretty amazing. I love that story. And apparently Peking Duck, they said it was a genius mastermind move. So I guess they appreciated it too. So, you know, we mentioned bias earlier, the

politics, but the real bias comes in, like you mentioned at the beginning, with kind of who is, who these Wikipedians are. 87% of these editors are men and 89% are white. That means 176% are white men.

Half of them are in Europe and 20% live in North America. So unsurprisingly, you're going to have some gender bias playing out. I think less than 19% of the English language biographies are about women. And those are also the articles that are most often flagged for deletion as being not notable enough. And they've combated this over the years in different ways. They get together sometimes and organize edit-a-thons.

where they try and boost content about women and minorities, people of color, ethnic diversity, like anything like that they could have an edit-a-thon about to try and, you know, bring more of a light onto those groups. Yeah, and we have to say there's, so that whole idea, that premise that Wikipedia is unreliable, it seems to basically find a single source initially. There's a journalist named John Seigenthaler

who had a joke entry made about him. He was an advisor, I think, to Bobby Kennedy. And the hoaxster wrote that he was a suspect in the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy. And John Siegenthaler heard about this, and he did not find that funny at all.

He just happened to be one of the founding editors of USA Today. So he took to the pages of USA Today and completely excoriated Wikipedia and called it out as a completely unreliable, irresponsible research tool, right? That was 2005.

And that really kind of laid the foundation for Wikipedia's bad reputation for a while. But if you go on to the Wikipedia entry about Wikipedia, which I read some of, they even say around starting sometime in about the 2010s, that reputation started to get shed. And we're finally reaching the point today where people are saying, go use Wikipedia, just use it as like a

introduction to your topic and then go out and do further research. So it's really kind of come into its own 20 years on. That's right. If you want to get into editing, there are tutorials. There's an introduction tutorial.

of how to do everything from creating things from scratch to editing. I mean, good luck creating something from scratch and finding something that doesn't exist already at this point. And if you want a gamified version, you can check out the Wikipedia adventure to help with your tutorial. And they also have a help desk.

And the tea house, which is where new editors can learn the ropes in a friendly manner. Yeah. And I think just going on the talk page of any article will kind of familiarize you with what you should be doing if you want to contribute. But do contribute. It's nice. I said it's nice. I don't think Chuck has anything else because he didn't respond. So I think that means it's time for a listener mail.

I'm going to call this Bonsai Inspiration. It's very cool. Hey guys, a few years ago, you did the bonsai episode. My dad and I listened to it, became very inspired. I have a horticultural degree from USU. That's Utah, by the way. He thought it might be interested too. So as father and son, we began working on trees. Fast forward to today, we have 30 different trees. We've lost a few along the way, but I've learned so much.

Through a bonsai show in 2017, we became members of the Utah Bonsai Club. Nice. And have both entered bonsai into a show hosted by Red Butte Gardens. Nice.

Who would have thought that a simple podcast could have inspired my dad and I to do this and go this far with it? I would love to give my dad a shout out. He turned 60 this year. Proud of him and what we've accomplished. That is from Nathan Staker in Utah and his pops, Mr. Brent Staker. Nice. Congratulations, Nathan and Brent. That's pretty great. We love inspiring people. Beautiful trees.

Very beautiful. If you want to be like Nathan and Brent and let us know how we inspired you to do something cool, we love that kind of thing, you can send it in an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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BuyAToyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then, there are moments that remind us to be more human. Thank you for calling Amica Insurance. Hey, I was just in an accident. Don't worry, we'll get you taken care of. At Amica, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking.

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