If Wikipedia doesn't remain true to its principles, another site will
William Blackstock 6:15pm
Amid the excitement of a new President’s inauguration, it seems natural enough that the deaths of veteran American senators Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy were missed by the mainstream media. Fortunate, then, that the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia carried the news.
Only, of course, neither man was dead – it was a wiki-screw up and Wikipedia’s founder and “benevolent dictator”, Jimmy Wales (pictured), is furious about it.
Though this sort of mistake happens often enough in newspapers (remember Mark Twain’s famous response to reading his obituary: “the report of my death was an exaggeration”) Wales has decided that anonymous editing of the site is to blame, and he has suggested restrictions on who can contribute.
Wales wants the English-language version of the sites to follow the German, which means anonymous changes will be vetted before they are put online. In theory, this will prevent both mistakes and vandalism.
But the issues with these changes are already apparent with the German Wikipedia. Because the vetting process requires time and effort, changes are much slower to appear. On top of that, one of the core beliefs of the Wiki philosophy is that anyone can change anything on the site, as long as it is for the better. If that principle is eroded, then the whole point of Wikipedia is under threat.
I got started as a Wikipedia editor by correcting spelling mistakes that irritated me in an article. Many of my first edits were anonymous and I found the fact that I could contribute and make immediate changes to improve the site extremely exciting. In fact, the majority of minor edits I make are still done without signing in to my account because of the (admittedly minor) hassle. Without that initial feeling that I was doing something to make a difference, I might have quickly lost interest and moved on to something else.
Instead, through Wikipedia, I found Project Gutenberg and became involved in that too. I’m sure my story isn’t an isolated one, either. Although the majority of minor edits are done by a relatively small group, the large edits that add a lot of content are more likely to be made by individuals with an interest in the article’s topic. Many of these are anonymous edits.
The people in charge of these decisions need to be very careful about bias. Wikipedia takes great pride in its neutral point of view. If a smaller group of people are responsible for which changes stick, then there is there is a far greater possibility that they could push an agenda. Prominent editors are revered by the community and Wikipedia’s team of admins are chosen because they are “trustworthy”, but it’s far from a democracy.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop another site rising to take Wikipedia’s place, should the proposed changes prove unpopular enough. Wikipedia’s content is freely distributable under the GNU Free Document Licence. All that’s stopping another similar site springing up is the required webspace for over 2 and a half million articles! Wikipedia’s name might carry some weight. It is certainly very well-known now, but so was AltaVista or HotBot 10 years ago and who remembers them now?
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Tanuki
January 29th, 2009 7:37pm Report this commentAh yes, Wonkipedia - worth *precisely* what you pay for it. A lovely demonstration of what happens if you give a million geeks unfettered access to a tripewriter. It's not Shakespeare, and it's not the Encyclopedia Galactica.
Bob
January 29th, 2009 7:46pm Report this commentPerhaps they only need to bring moderation in certain areas, areas that are prone to being corrupted by organisations, the BBC for instance, famous for it's number of edits.
Those of us familiar with the above type of corruption might start to have a bit more trust in what we are reading.
Anan
January 29th, 2009 8:17pm Report this commentAn interesting article with some good points. Wikipedia is indeed far from neutrality. Whatever low- and mid-level editors want is what is published in the end for any article covering a heated topic, ranging from wars to even the different forms of Linux. There can never be a truly agenda-free encyclopaedia, unless it is written by aliens or non-sentient robots. But rather than the whole bias issue, I think Big "Wiki" will die a slow and painful death like Altavista and HotBot (your mentioning them brought a smile to my face as I too had forgotten about them for some time!) simply due to innaccuracies and unreliability, the most important and fundamental problems a knowledge resource should not have.
TUCAN
January 29th, 2009 8:19pm Report this commentWales has to let go! Wikipedia will only be exciting if it is allowed to grow organically, and police itself without interference.
salieri
January 29th, 2009 8:30pm Report this commentA million poorly informed geeks, please, Tanuki. Any encylopaedia is worth only as much as the reliability of its contributors. Interest and ignorance are not equivalent, or at least weren't until this false god replaced all other collections of information. It has ease of access and nothing else to commend it. Its factual content is not accessible, however, and its accuracy is often wayward. It's written for 40-year-olds by 14-year-olds. I speak from the bitter experience of getting my children to unlearn its indigestible drivel.
GIGO = garbage in, garbage out.
William Blackstock
January 30th, 2009 11:21am Report this commentThanks for the responses, guys. I love the idea of Wikipedia; I have ever since I read The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and first played Civilisation: Call to Power with its Nanopedia wonder. The only problem with an encyclopedia of everything is that it can't work if everyone can contribute. It's still a fantastic source of random information on things you've never heard about and is broadly accurate for that.
Salieri, I think the 14 year-olds thing is sadly accurate. One of the longest articles on the site is about Knuckles the Echidna (a minor character in the Sonic the Hedgehog games), here is a short list (as seen on Somethingawful) of just a few articles that are shorter than the one about Knuckles: Echidnas, The Internet, The Internal Combustion Engine, William Shakespeare, Western Culture. When Shakespeare is no longer considered less deserving of words than a pink, dreadlocked rat-thing then Wikipedia will have finally come of age.
Ian Buss
January 30th, 2009 1:44pm Report this commentAn alternative free online encyclopedia that does just this is Citizendium (http://en.citizendium.org/). It is at an early stage I think, but has a more robust editing process. I believe it was set up by one of the founders of Wikipedia but not sure. It's worth a look anyway.
Anan
January 30th, 2009 4:04pm Report this commentThe whole attraction of Wikipedia was not that it was yet another source of information on standard topics which could be found in any old book or other website. Rather, it was useful and interesting that it also had pages which described other aspects of our lives, including televsion series, films, cartoons, music and musicians, and computer and video games. There are even pages created which describe the life and personal and educational history of fictional characters such as Jack Bauer. That is not what makes Wikipedia rubbish. What makes it bad are the factual errors and editor bias that plagues every topic that has even the slightest controversy.
If, having read the page on the internal combustion engine, you find improtant information missing, what is stopping you from adding that information yourself? The Knuckles page may be longer, but perhaps that is because there are more authors who are able to add more information about this character. If you know something about Shakespeare that isn't on his page, then why dont you add it yourself? Nothing and no one is stopping you. Perhaps it is the failure of anyone over 30 to grasp this simple concept that there are such differences in page length of entertainment versus factual articles?
Jimmy Wales
February 2nd, 2009 11:28am Report this commentIt's a real shame that so many people have failed to understand my position. The idea that I'm agitating to close the open editing model of Wikipedia is just silly.
In all the reading people may have done about this, they are very unlikely to come across the actual truth: which is that I am in favor of opening up more articles to public editing than ever before.
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