May 3
Wiki thoughts
by Avid C. Reader
I’ve always been a fan of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia but
recently I’m starting to loose the faith, and it seems I’m not alone.
Education secretary, Alan Johnson, has gone on record singling it out
for praise as a tool for education but he has been criticised by none
other than Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger who has come to feel
that Wikipedia is now “broken beyond repair.”
The theory behind Wikipedia is fascinating. Anyone can add or edit
any article and the majority of decent and knowledgeable people will
ensure that any errors are ironed out. This has worked out
extraordinarily well and the encyclopaedia now has more than 1.7m
articles in English alone. However, recently cracks have started to
emerge. Well published failures in the system have included articles
edited to libel individuals or defame organisations, contributors who
have lied about their qualifications and mistakes that have included
announcing the death of people who have promptly written to complain.
The community of editors has become increasingly fragmented and
argumentative and the shear size of the project means that articles
with mistakes can now go uncorrected for months. But a more
fundamental problem has started to emerge. Whereas in a normal
encyclopaedia, an editor has the final say over the content and there
is a degree of reliability based upon their work. In essence, they
are the guarantors of the truth. In Wikipedia, the truth is arrived
at by consensus and there is no standard of reliability from one
article to the next.
The problem is most obviously displayed in the more contentious
articles. A piece on Gordon Brown, for example, is a likely target to
be enhanced / sabotaged by people during an election campaign. Public
relations companies now work on the pages for their clients to
improve their image. All of this means that the truth of some
articles is hard to ascertain. But the problems don’t stop there. The
‘truth by consensus’ model is starting to break down even on non-
contentious articles and arguments over even the most simply facts
can mean that the articles are left unreliable.
The Wikipedia project was designed to create order of of anarchy and
has done a remarkable job. Sadly it seems that those same chaotic
forces are now pulling it apart.
1 Comment so far
Your argument is just a lot of allegory. If you want to make any serious argument about the state of Wikipedia, you should look at actual general studies of it.
A study comparing the science articles of Wikipedia and Britannica found very little difference in the quality.
Moreover, this article cites a few studies.
For example:
“On controversial topics, the response can be especially swift. Wikipedia’s article on Islam has been a persistent target of vandalism, but Wikipedia’s defenders of Islam have always proved nimbler than the vandals. Take one fairly typical instance. At 11:20 one morning not too long ago, an anonymous user replaced the entire Islam entry with a single scatological word. At 11:22, a user named Solitude reverted the entry. At 11:25, the anonymous user struck again, this time replacing the article with the phrase “u stink!” By 11:26, another user, Ahoerstemeir, reverted that change – and the vandal disappeared. When MIT’s Fernanda Vi�gas and IBM’s Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave studied Wikipedia, they found that cases of mass deletions, a common form of vandalism, were corrected in a median time of 2.8 minutes. When an obscenity accompanied the mass deletion, the median time dropped to 1.7 minutes.”
The idea that a normal encyclopedia has a “guaranteer of the truth” is far from “a fundamental problem” that “has started to emerge” where Wikipedia is concerned; it’s an argument that has been levied against it from day one. It is no more valid an argument today than it was then—it essentially grants the normal encyclopedia editor a higher status for no reason other than people are generally prejudiced to think of such people as being “experts”.
There is no reason to believe that an encyclopedia under the guidance of “experts” would get it right any more often than a wiki. In order to make the case that they do, one would have to draw on actual empirical evidence. To argue the way that you have done in this post is simply to rely on how attractive an idea seems in it of itself; this is no way to demonstrate anything.
Pointing out particular controversies or errors that are well publicized demonstrates nothing; the difference between Wikipedia and Britannica is that you don’t have to wait for the next edition to come out before errors can be corrected on the former.