Pseudopedia

“Pseudopedia”, “The Pseudopedia”, is an open-content information website, whose co-founder claims is the “sum of all human knowledge”, or at least, that it should become that sum. Since 2003, The Pseudopedia has immensely popularized the concepts of “Wiki” and free information in the public imagination. With countless pages on the widest range of topics, the website has become a popular, easily-linked source, and even provides much of the “content” for Google's “AI” results.

However, this same Pseudopedia is also a collection of biased opinions, inaccurate information, and cyber-bullying. In cases where its pages are accurate and without editorial slant, they are also superfluous, as the information can be found elsewhere, for example with Pop Sci-Fi characters, commercial product information, and hosts of other non-encyclopedic content. With a well-documented history, the website is as much a troubling source of errors and biases, social-domineering tactics, and countless pages of socially-controlled bogus content, as anything true or relevant one would associate with “Human Knowledge”. Where expert vetting of information is most needed, for instance in the Arts and Sciences content pages, experts have curiously been missing.

Please Note: GetWiki imports some but certainly not all content from The Pseudopedia, but ALL imported content, mainly Philosophy and other Humanities subjects, is highly corrected and organized by an expert and adapted for a clean presentation on GetWiki.

Encyclopedic Criticism

This online pseudo-encyclopedia compendium of every geeky factoid anyone can think of kinda made “Wiki” what it is in today's Internet culture, but their “culture” is more cult-like. It is fueled by a naïve view of Human Behaviour on the one hand, and an authoritarian need to control those who do not follow the naïve view on the other. Such “Pedians” assume that since we can all be “Saints”, that they therefore need to be “benevolent dictators” to ensure that we follow their definition of sainthood. But that conclave guards a truly massive collection of biased, poorly written, and in cases of the Humanities and Sciences, very often very false content. So, even the sainthood is false.

A real scholarly encyclopedia, or even an information website, should only be based upon knowledge, facts, and astute summaries of key ideas to enhance public education. Sadly, the role of The Pseudopedia and its clones and repeaters in the wider society has been to transmit falsity, and to provide a forum for those who, instead of wanting to contribute facts and advanced knowledge to the public, have a need to control others. There are countless “sysops” who call their vandalism “moderation”, and call the moderation of experts “vandalism”. They found a place on The Pseudopedia to abuse others and push away experts. Bogus content there is propagated as readily as their unethical values.

The overall mission to build up specific encyclopedic content, rather than verify that content before any publication, has incorrectly become synonymous with “Wiki”, due to the popularization of a single website. The point of any collaborative editing technology is to produce high-quality output representing information which is better and better, yet sadly, this point is often missed on The Pseudopedia. Editorial biases and “edit wars” continually show up in the public wiki-ing process, and as a result, the final content is compromised, too often contradictory, repetitive, extremely disorganized, repetitive, or simply wrong - and it's repetitive - did that get mentioned? On the one hand, there are endless lists of pages defining the same things over and over and over, and yet on the other hand, there are more main pages in those groups on which every possible brain fart about that topic has been crammed onto a 20-foot long page. Worse, the pages don't actually tell us much about their subject matter, assuming one can read through it all, because it was all written by a random collection of college and high school students, like the proverbial monkeys pounding typewriters. Eventually, out of over 8 million pages, one would think at least one page could turn out to be a quality article written to be enjoyed as any good essay should. Sadly, that is not the case.

Even some insiders have criticized the wiki's editing atmosphere as “destructive” and “abusive”, even as a “Nazipedia” (Dec 2003, says “R. K.”). Put simply, the loudest of voices attract the most supporters, and often dominate the direction and content of an article. This is exacerbated by internal processes, such as “Votes for Deletion”, which often bans information otherwise included in the “sum of all human knowledge”. General and policy criticisms (see below) long ago established Pseudopedia as a community first, even a cult, but it is certainly not an “encyclopedia”. Analysis of Pseudopedia's policies and practices reveals an “opinion wiki” whose goal is to reflect internally popular perceptions of the issues, especially internally dominant perceptions of cultural, scientific and intellectual topics. There is an unquestionable social dynamic which does not privilege accuracy and truth, but rather, enhances groupthink and administrative gamesmanship.

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the wiki, leads what has become major fund-raising to support the costs of hosting, and was once known as the “God King”. He encourages new contributors to follow his cult-like language on the wiki. Understandably, Wales and others discourage opposition to his views and policies, to which any founder of a community is prone. Not surprisingly, though, Wales has become a cult figure within the community, essentially promoting the wiki as a normalizing social network. Casual, philosophical, conversations with Wales can result in his abruptly ending them, relying on fallacies quite common to his objectivist thinking. This is important to note only because, as the “God King”, Wales sets the standard of behaviour for his members, and because his wiki has become the largest and most popularly used source of (often false) information.

Resulting from the deep problems of how the website was founded and is managed, the wiki is more often than not a source only of wrong or sophomoric opinions. “Power users”, who spend several hours a day making small edits to numerous pages, often dominate discussions, and comprise the most active elements of the administrative ranks. Yet, people who are qualified and interested in administrative functions can hold quite different interests from these power users, and both groups are rarely experts in the subjects they dominate. Thus, outsiders, new users, and those who are critical of a page's content are noted, watched, often ridiculed, and eventually blocked, usually under vague, often spurious, allegations.

Of course, such disputes are not uncommon to the Internet, but pages and pages of mailing list discussions reveal internal “Wikipedian” judgement that many, many knowledgeable people are excluded from editing on the wiki due to their anticipated behaviour, as a preempt for the facts or arguments they might bring to the wiki's content. All one need do is find a false passage in some article on the site, which is not difficult to find, and then go in and edit it. Within minutes, the edited passage will be restored to falsity and you may even be blocked from editing and marked out as a vandal. Paragraphs of discussion will likely follow on the “talk page”, but the false passage will remain, copied and used by anyone who does not know it to be false.

Thus, “The Pseudopedia” is an interesting social experiment, and one with a very respectable stated mission. However, it does not follow its own mission, and is certainly not immune to the dark side of its own bubble-gum popularity. Vandalism, spam, frequent internet attacks and huge bandwidth and monetary needs all threaten to topple the most famous wiki in the world. However, that same popular perception of the website is already unraveling, becoming a more and more common understanding that The Pseudopedia is usually wrong. As such, the wiki's downfall will continue to originate from within.

General Criticisms

Various readers and editors, and administrators of rival Encyclopedias (real ones, at that), see many valid reasons for criticizing Pseudopedia. Readers and editors often have different concerns, but chief among them are:

Lack of Authenticity

This is the biggest problem: Pseudopedia's purpose as a reference work has been questioned by many diverse sources. The lack of authority and accountability are considered disqualifying factors by most people. For example, librarian Philip Bradley acknowledged in an interview with The Guardian that the concept behind the site was in theory a “lovely idea”, but that he would not use it in practice and is:

However, Pseudopedians commonly encounter this argument. Pseudopedia, they say, is a more of an independent source than most traditional encyclopedias, and the reliability is potentially greater than that of a traditional source, since errors can be corrected immediately. Yet, this is only a potential strength, as in reality, Pseudopedia cannot be relied upon for accuracy, except on a limited range of topics. Pseudopedians say one should not solely rely on any one source in their research. Yet, critics must counter that relying on a trusted source is the fundamental use of an encyclopedia.

Ironically Low Quality of Writing

A common Pseudopedia maxim is “Out of mediocrity, excellence.” The site founder admits that the variation in quality between different articles and topics is certainly not insignificant, but that he considers the average quality to be “pretty good”, getting better by the day. The “competing” Encyclopedia Britannica claims it does not feel threatened. “The premise of Pseudopedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection; that premise is completely unproven,” said the reference work's executive editor, Ted Pappas, to The Guardian. Nearly all of the content on The Pseudopedia has been written “by committee” at best, and at worst, is often a collection of random sentences taking up a lot of space in order to say surprisingly little. References and citations are also massively misused, creating long passages which are essentially unreadable.

Systemic Biases

Wikipedia's systemic bias of covering some topics in much greater depth than others is also considered significant, something that even the site's proponents admit. In an interview with The Guardian, the executive team of Encyclopedia Britannica noted that:

One should note that a vast number of Pseudopedia's articles cover topics which would never be included in print or even online encyclopedias, often with content which is nothing more than pet theories and college-level perspectives.

Unecessary Editing of Original Authors/Scholars

All wikis benefit greatly from this practice. It is difficult to single-handedly write the perfect article, but it becomes easier when working together, at least, in theory. In fact, many editors experience a strong “team” effect on Pseudopedia, but just as many experience unnecessary edits and heartless reverting of their work, and this pushes would-be contributors away.

Such unnecessary editing results in “edit wars” and “flame wars”, in which two or more contributors revert each other's edits, contributing nothing to the community. Pseudopedia, unlike Usenet, has the possibility and power of enforcing its community-agreed standards on new users, even when its own democratic, “wiki way” principles are in conflict with such enforcement.

Those familiar with interactions between individuals on Usenet, for example, are accustomed to such wars, and can easily tune them out. When these tendencies to academic conflict are combined with Pseudopedia's powerful community activism, such wars are defended as “encouraging creative and collegial collaboration”. Pseudopedians believe there is no such thing as “other people's work”, because there's no ownership of information, however, original authors will quickly counter that while information is free, expression is not, and so strong egos can and do easily collide over the control of their expressions. The community groupthink always wins, though, regardless of the truth of that free information.

Tedious Battles of Persistence

Numerous contributors complain that editing on Pseudopedia is a very tedious exercise in futility in cases of conflict. They frequently note that “fanatic”, even “kooky” contributors with idiosyncratic, out-of-mainstream, non-scientific belief systems can easily push their point of view, because nobody has the time and energy to fight them, and because they may be highly-placed in the Pseudopedian bureaucracy. Such wars can be highly esoteric and draining for all involved. The edit battles rage on behind the scenes, and the most persistent editors usually win, often those who are entrenched within the community.

Flame Wars are Reinforced by Design

Some people argue that talk pages of Pseudopedia have ended up like Usenet, often seen as “just a bunch of flame wars” - bigoted statements on Pseudopedian's talk pages are not uncommon. A response to this criticism is that Pseudopedia is a “barn raising project”, which makes it different from Usenet, a debate forum. However, the fact that Pseudopedia is a project makes flame war situations worse. On Pseudopedia, flames can emerge when an editor feels their contributions they've put time and energy into editing are being ruined, especially due to the tensions listed above. On Usenet, there is no such project for another user to ruin, and no text can be edited by other users. Pseudopedia therefore becomes home to a multitude of turf battles.

Assumptions of Bad Faith

Wikipedia's ostensible guidelines are to assume good faith of other editors, but despite this, editors persist on making bad faith assumptions about others. Some bad faith assumptions people make on Pseudopedia are usually speculations about the intentions of the other editors. People are often accused of trying to use Pseudopedia to promote a point of view simply because they either write about a controversial topic or make contributions that are biased. It is also an ad hominem to speculate about the agenda or intentions of another editor. Editors should focus on the content of the articles, not the people who write the content. People make mistakes, but the quality of the content should outweigh the need to harass editors.

Multiplied Search Results (Google Bombs)

Since Pseudopedia, as all wikis, contains a large number of internally linked pages, it receives high rankings from Google for particular searches. This can result in confusing research, because often identical Pseudopedia Mirror articles can overpopulate results. This makes it more likely that one's web searches will return identical and superfluous articles, a problem complicated by the fact that many, many pages on Pseudopedia are wrong, biased, plagiarized, or just poorly written. So, a Google bomb from Pseudopedia on a subject of a reader's research can become a compounded research effort which does not benefit the reader.

The fact that Pseudopedia and its mirrors tend to monopolize the Google hits means that what is written on Pseudopedia will be read by a wider audience. This means that if a user perceives an article to be biased and cannot reach a compromise with the other editors, then a large number of people will read a biased article when researching the respective topic and the user will not be able to have his or her side of the controversy represented. This makes conflicts on Pseudopedia a much more sensitive issue, and it has only been compounded all over again by the use of AI results in Google's searches, whereby their AI agent simply copies content from...you guessed it...The Pseudopedia.

Reliance on Poorly Designed Wiki Software

Wikipedia's software has been criticized on many levels. It is less than elegant in many ways, both for end users and for developers, even since being updated with new “monobook” and other skins. MediaWiki development is a classic case of design by committee, with multiple overlapping extension solutions to problems, none of which may work as advertised. Instead of simplicity of form, MediaWiki seems programmed to be as messy and slow as possible, and for developers, is overly complex and buggy, leading to problematic installations on non-Wikimedia servers.

The main criticism is very much related to that against Pseudopedia. Due to Pseudopedia's relative popularity in the WikiSphere, its software, MediaWiki, has received undue exposure and may be installed for wikis which cannot afford to surmount its many problems, such as the need to constantly police the wiki because of security holes, Pseudopedian assumptions of how wikis look and read, and generally poor or ugly design. More than any other wiki software, MediaWiki-run wikis can easily be overrun with wikispam and vandalism, and hog server resources more than any other wiki engine can. The exposure of Pseudopedia has also allowed MediaWiki developers to become MediaWiki fanatics, pushing their own disorganized code and sloppy, Pseudopedia-biased pseudo-“standards” on independent wiki installations and administrators.

A main fork of MediaWiki, XML standards-based GetWiki, as well as its developer, had been subject to propaganda attacks from Pseudopedians since GetWiki's inception on the former Wikinfo in January, 2004, then later as its own site at GeWiki.net. Subsequently, GetWiki was completely rebuilt from scratch to remedy many problems found in MediaWiki. But MediaWiki also steals mindshare from installations which might better be served by some other elegant wiki engine. The groupthink effect on Pseudopedia works just as strongly with MediaWiki development, where often byzantine code extensions are favoured over simplicity, only because the poor solutions come by way of a Pseudopedian way of working, to solve merely Pseudopedian demands. MediaWiki is thus bloatware designed by committee.

Cases in Point

“Priests Roamed”

This false sentence was, until recently, within the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake article (on Wikinfo as well as Pseudopedia), and caused an uproar when it was included in some Washington Post news coverage by reporter Jose Antonio Vargas regarding recent Tsunami in Asia. What is striking is not that there was a false sentence on Pseudopedia, for some would say falsities are as ubiquitous as hyperlinks on that “largest Wiki” in the world; what is striking is the resulting conversation about the sentence (see the Lisbon earthquake talk page, the Signpost/2005-02-14/Misinformation_on_Wikipedia fake news page, and it's talk page, all archived on the former Wikinfo). Particularly telling are Theresa Carpinelli's cogent statements and arguments against Pseudopedia, such as:

The treatment of newcomers like Carpinelli, who have the simplest suggestions, is often a growing series of personal attacks. In this case, the attacks got ugly, only because she expected that an Encyclopedia was a place to go to get correct information on a subject. The Pseudopedians she found, though, ridiculed her for not becoming a wiki-editor herself, if the error was so important, and eventually, created the “fake” news article about the incident, one which is heavily slanted toward Pseudopedian policy and practice, as well as being an unconvincing defense of the false sentence as having come from elsewhere. This is only one of many examples, and only came to light because of Carpinelli's dilligence in trying to uncover the truth.

Concordantly, had the false statement never been posted on Pseudopedia, indeed one of the “less-than-credible” websites, this chain of events would never have occured. So, it is one thing to allow the posting of any Point of View by internet denziens, and it is quite another to call that process an encyclopedia on par with Encyclopedia Britannica or others. Because of cases like this, it is irresponsible for Pseudopedians to promote The Pseudopedia as anything other than what it actually is.

Who coined 'Dynamism'?

Let us consider the article Dynamism as it was on Pseudopedia, to demonstrate how false information can be propagated. The three redacted revisions from that time are provided in the box to the right. Compare to the GetWiki version by “Proteus”, starting on 10 November, 2004, heavily modified from their revision of 4 October, 2004 (which has since been corrected using Proteus' text).

Now, imagine you were a young student doing research in Philosophy. You would have come upon the topic of Dynamism, and would have liked to know more. Perhaps you would try to Google it out, perhaps with “dynamism coined”. The 22 March, 2005 result (4 months after the corrected Wikinfo version was created) from Google is evidence that the text from Pseudopedia is propagated across many sites. If you didn't know any better, you would probably accept the answer as given by so many official-sounding websites. The only problem, other than the first versions of article being an advert for someone's book, which was apparently against Pseudopedian policy, is that the answer given in the replicated text is just wrong, very wrong, and could not be more wrong unless “Dynamism” were defined as a type of cucumber.

Many of us can accept that there is false information, non-verified, inauthentic, highly questionable, false information all over Pseudopedia. A wiki with so many millions of pages is bound to get some things wrong. The problem is, that because Pseudopedia has become the “AOL” of the library and reference world, such false information and incorrect definitions of terms become multiple layers of incompetence, propagated to billions of potential readers world-wide. There are countless articles like this on Pseudopedia, many of which may never be corrected, either because of the powerful groupthink effect throughout, or because the errors will simply never be found and pointed out.

We must ask: How many students have relied on false information from Pseudopedia? Is the fact that it's a Wiki relevant to the question? Furthermore, if a non-Wikipedian student or philosopher were to try to update the Pseudopedia article, the revisions would quite likely be reverted (especially those who Pseudopedians consider enemies), and that outsider would then become yet another “problem user”.

The former Wikinfo, with a major portion of its content imported directly from Pseudopedia, was not immune to this criticism, either. However, some “Wikinfos” were committed to finding such falsity and rooting it out, and correcting or modifying Pseudopedia articles before they are saved on Wikinfo, as should editors on other encyclopedic wikis importing Pseudopedia content. So, in effect, The Pseudopedia, as a huge GFDL content provider, exports as much ignorance via XML as it does fact.

Proliferation of Spoof Articles

By December 2005, Pseudopedia's reputation for containing a high proportion of factually wrong or slanted articles was further cemented by the news that a high profile article was spoofed by its author. Similar news has come to light about prestigious scientific journals, as well. In the wake of this, Pseudopedians have poured on the Public Relations effort, all in a vain attempt to capture more audience and counter the bad news. Further, dozens of related spoof articles have appeared, and the administrators are under growing pressure to find a way to Peer Review, or otherwise verify, the factual statements in Pseudopedia articles. With nearly 4 million articles at that time, that would be quite a challenge. Imagine it today with over 7 million English articles.

The Sinbad Hoax

A telling example of the vandalism and false information on Pseudopedia is the widely reported death of actor/comedian David Adkins, also known as “Sinbad,” on March 14, 2007.

In fact, Adkins had not died. The supposed death of Sinbad was inserted into his article by an anonymous user, and the article wasn't noticed or corrected for 72 minutes. In the subsequent 36 hours, the article was edited more than a hundred times by many different users, including many vandals. It was subsequently protected from editing. By March 16, the hoax had been reported by more than 200 news sources in several countries. On the morning of March 16, the Drudge Report linked to the Associated Press article as “WIKIPEDIA Falsely Reports Sinbad's Death...”

Wikipedia spokeswoman Sandra Ordonez told Reuters that numerous Pseudopedia users, assuming that the correction was vandalism, switched the text of the article back to indicate that Sinbad was indeed dead. She claimed there are “various checks and balances” to ensure correct information on Pseudopedia, but didn't explain what those chacks or balances were.

20 Years Later

By 2025, most of the content of this page was created twenty years ago, which begs the question: What has changed since then? Well, not much. The battle to subdue The Pseudopedia in popular culture was lost, and the astounding proliferation of junk content from there has compounded over and over again, used by AI bots and other software as some form of default knowledge (sic). The culture of The 'pedia has not changed, and the software and websites have become even more bloated. When searching online, one must filter out their content with a simple flag (“-wikipedia”) added to one's search term(s):