Or “Why You Shouldn’t Trust Wikipedia Part
14,242”
Update: The Wikipedia page has
deleted the whole line. This might be in
response to a Gawker story (which I won’t link to) where they allegedly called
his mom and asked her if it was true and she denied it. That led to people proclaiming that Erickson
was lying, instead of that it being a disputed account. Because that is the most obvious
explanation, instead of the mother being embarrassed and not wanting to admit
it.
So, on Pearl
Harbor day this year, Erick Erickson tweeted this out:
This in turn
led to a deep discussion about getting past the racism of some of our parents and
commending him for being honest about his upbringing and...
Just kidding,
everyone attacked him for his candor and, even though he didn’t endorse what
his parents did, they assumed he agreed with them.
And it even
found its way into his
Wikipedia page.
See if you see what is wrong with this image:
 |
| (I have the whole thing screencapped in case it changes.) |
Yep, according
to Wikipedia, “Erickson's parents refused to let his family eat Asian children on December 7th.” Apparently Mr. Erickson had an insatiable
desire to each Asian children, at least when he was growing up, and his parents
could only prevent him from eating said children on one day a year, or
something.
Nor is this
the only thing Wikipedia has ever gotten laughably wrong when it comes to
conservatives. For instance, during the
Bush administration, Wikipedia said Condi Rice was trained to be a “concert
penis” and littered Bush’s entry with the word “jerk.”
I think the
big picture is this. The words on your
screen do not appear by magic. There is
a human hand behind each word, even these you are reading right now. They can be driven by an honest desire to get
at the truth, or they can be driven by unconscious bias or even a conscious agenda. About three and a half years ago when I first
embarked on my quest to hold Brett Kimberlin accountable for the crimes he
committed against me, I recognized that I need to establish my
credibility. So I provided my source
documents and even video evidence to support my story. As I said
back
then: “
In other words, you won’t have to believe my
word on this. You will only have to believe your eyes.”
Always be
skeptical about what any person is telling you, even from a source as authoritative
as a textbook. Make sure that there are
fact checkers who are not asleep at the switch or so filled with bias
themselves that they can’t recognize an error when it appears. In computer programing they have an acronym:
GIGO. It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out,
meaning that if your inputted information is bad, your output will suffer. In our democracy we have to base our
decisions on the information we have, and if the information we have is
garbage, our decisions will be garbage.
So you need to screen your sources of information for trustworthiness.
As for Wikipedia,
it’s just not trustworthy--at least not on politically charged topics.
---------------------------------------
Sidebar: as a matter of full
disclosure, Mr. Erickson was a co-defendant in some of the Brett-Kimberlin-related
litigation and even apparently settled. If you think that somehow creates a bias in
me that affects this article, that seems unlikely. At best, it means that when someone talked
about it on Twitter, I was slightly more likely to notice the story because I know
him a little. But once I noticed it for
any reason I doubt I would have drawn different conclusions.
Also, regular
readers might wonder, “hey, Aaron! You’re blogging again! Does this mean you will be filling us in on
what has been happening in Kimberlin Saga?
Yes, I will be working on that, soon.
