Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/30/cheap-truth-is-expensive.html
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Didn’t Google get into a whole lot of trouble many years ago when they tried doing this with Google Books?
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Nope. They won.
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Wikipedia is a key battleground in the war against disinformation, and the Internet Archive’s measures – which were presented to Congressional staffers yesterday – are a huge advance on the state of the art.
I’ll put money on the staffers for GOP politicians reacting by going back to the office and yelling “we must put a stop to this now!”
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Good. Good. And good. The IA and Wikipedia embody the best aspects of what the web can be. I don’t rely on Wikipedia for solid, reliable info, but it is one hell of a good starting place for any given subject. The book scans on IA are a treasure of treasures.
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I love the Internet Archive because of initiatives like this. However, I guess it bears mentioning that because they do little filtering, they also have a lot of dreck. (For example, do a search on “hollow Earth”.)
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The research library at the University I went to had some self-published books. With diagrams, even. It’s fine; their mission says archival > curation.
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Except that the quantity of conservative propaganda being published today means that this counter measure will only delay the disinformation wars until such a time comes as those books begin being used as citations
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Sounds good, I might lift it for my wiki.
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“I’m not out here kerfin’ my squishpads cribbing Argonate crystals for the laser swap so some wiki-lifter can come along and bitjack my archives!”
– some science fiction story somewhere on the Internet Archive, probably…
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so, is this an aautomatic thing?
Could one read books by writing heavily cited articles?
Hey, if they didn’t want me to create my own wiki with a Raspberry Pi and a terabyte HD, they shouldn’t have topic-blocked me on Scientology 11 years ago.
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Google has digitized many many books,which is great, but many are only available as small snippets. The Internet Archive program has a few pages immediately, and then you can borrow the full book. So a bit different model.
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Indeed, the Internet Archive is putting in the links to books automatically. It helps if there is an ISBN-- it is easier. And we prioritize acquisition digitization to those books cited often.
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So far the idea a digital library of lendable books, and woven into Wikipedia, has been well received in DC. A nice respite.
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Great to hear. Also, thank you so much for your wonderful project. You and your team are truly changing the world for the better, and I will continue to support your mission (as should all Happy Mutants reading this).
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Funny, I was thinking we would hear about a new publisher, something like Fox Books: Don’t Worry, It’s Heavily “Curated” Truths.
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