Frequently Asked Questions

What is "disinformation"?

Like many good questions, this is hard to answer. It may be easier to answer questions like "At what point does opinion or advocacy become disinformation?" or "Can history or ideology remain simplified without being disinforming?" Such distinctions are studied in the fields of conceptual metaphor, information warfare, psychological operations, scientific method, historical method and the sociology of knowledge. One distinction that most students of these topics accept is that someone with an economic self-interest is rarely a neutral observer.

Is disinformation just lying?

No. The word "lying" usually implies a teller's awareness of spreading untruths. Long study in psychology, e.g. false memory syndrome and groupthink, suggests that honest advocates of a view can rarely tell when they have accepted some questionable premise or evidence along with the valid evidence for that view. Such views may reflect not a desire to disinform, but rather a biased mind-set or paradigm where some central dogma has become accepted as true.

Why are PR firms a threat?

Public relations, the profession that trades in "perception management" and in altering mindsets and conceptual metaphors in public life, often has both economic self-interest and a commitment to a point of view. Thus an active scrutiny of activities and ethical codes of such professions is advised: the statements it produces must usually be considered disinformation by definition, at least by opponents, until proven otherwise.

What is the Disinfopedia's role in increasing public scrutiny?

Because of its global scope and experience with prior projects like Wikipedia and others by PR Watch, a project like Disinfopedia may be able to support the public scrutiny process more effectively than was possible with prior methods. If not, that will become obvious and a more effective successor that will serve public purposes better can evolve, learning from this project's flaws and successes.

What is "wiki"?

A WikiWiki is a collection of interlinked web pages, any of which can be visited and edited by anyone at any time using collaborative software. The concept and software was invented by Ward Cunningham.

What if someone tries to vandalize or insert disinformation into the Disinfopedia itself?

The Center for Media and Democracy, which sponsors Disinfopedia, has other channels through which we can expose people who attempt to manipulate its content, such as the Center's PR Watch website and its "Weekly Spin" email. The Disinfopedia software also includes a number of features that make it possible to detect and manage vandalism. In keeping with our philosophy of creating a community-based "information commons," these features enable the entire community of Internet users to collaborate in overseeing its content, in effect serving as a sort of online "neighborhood watch committee":

Visitors to the site are invited to create individual user IDs. This makes it easy to track the editing activities of each logged-in user. Anonymous contributions by users who do not log in receive closer scrutiny than known and trusted users.
Logged-in users can create their own individual "watch lists" that let them keep an eye on articles that they feel deserve particular monitoring. They can also call up a list of all recent changes to the entire site.
The software keeps an archive of all past versions of each article, making it easy to undo malicious or misguided changes by reverting to a previous version.
Trusted users can be given "sysop" status, which lets them ban users who engage in vandalism. If a particular page becomes a target for repeat vandalism attempts, sysops can also mark that page as "protected," so that only other sysops can change it.
There are means for public accountability of the sysops and others with privileges, for now by notifying disinfopedia@prwatch.org of activities you consider to be endangering the public policy purpose of the service as described above.

Since anyone can add information, why should anyone trust the Disinfopedia as authoritative?

As the authors of a book titled Trust Us, We're Experts, PR Watch editors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber have given quite a bit of thought to the question of what makes information credible. Disinfopedia intentionally avoids invoking "trusted authority figures." Instead, its credibility will depend on the degree to which articles are well-written and backed with supporting documentation.

How will the Disinfopedia address questions of bias, particularly with regard to controversial topics?

Rather than using the terminology of "objectivity" or a "neutral point of view," we prefer the concepts of "fairness and accuracy." It is "fair and accurate," for example, to say that most climate scientists believe human activities are contributing to global warming, so there is no need to take a "neutral point of view" with regard to this question. Of course, bias is an issue in any information system, but Disinfopedia's users will constitute a community of peers whose combined influence helps compensate for the bias of single individuals.

As an "encyclopedia of propaganda," Disinfopedia is bound to deal with controversial topics. However, the Wikipedia system upon which it is based has shown considerable ability to produce articles that examine controversial topics in a fair and accurate way. Indeed, some of the most controversial topics yield the best articles.

When did Disinfopedia start?

On December 18, 2002, PR Watch editor Sheldon Rampton attended a conference in Amsterdam hosted by World-Information.org and first learned about the successful Wikipedia project to develop a free open content encyclopedia. Using Wikipedia as a model, he created Disinfopedia in January 2003. The project was publicly launched on March 10, 2003.

Who owns Disinfopedia?

The owner of the server and the domain names is the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). However, the articles are released by their authors under the GNU Free Documentation License, so the articles are open content. Therefore, it cannot be said that the owner of Disinfopedia articles is CMD. See "Disinfopedia:Copyrights" and "Disinfopedia:Readers' FAQ" for information on how you can use Disinfopedia content. (Please note, however, that other articles on the PR Watch website remain copyrighted property of the Center for Media and Democracy and should not be used without permission.)

If you are writing an article or book and are using information from Disinfopedia, we suggest citing the Disinfopedia article as the source along with its URL and the date when you visited it.

Who is responsible for the articles on Disinfopedia?

The Disinfopedia is a collaborative endeavor. Many people have contributed to different parts of this project, and anyone can do so--including you! All you need to know is how to edit a page.

You can learn who is responsible for the most recent versions of any given page by clicking on the "Older versions" link. But remember, if you spot an error in the latest revision and you don't correct it, then you share responsibility for the error. So be bold in updating pages!

If you are uncertain or find the wording confusing, quote the material on the associated talk page and leave a question for the next more knowledgeable reader or editor. This helps eliminate errors, inaccuracies or misleading wording more quickly and is highly appreciated by the collborative online community. Thank you!

The truly unique thing about Disinfopedia.org is its emphasis on collaborative, "open document" writing and editing. This means anyone can create and edit any article on Disinfopedia.