NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009
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Is it the end of Wikipedia?Can you trust Wikipedia? Most of us have stopped asking and simply bookmarked it. That makes sense when you consider the alternatives: you can explore the first dozen or so Google search results, or you can go straight to the occasionally erroneous Wikipedia entry, typically culled from the very same search results. If you are looking for fast, up-to-date information, it is Wikipedia or Google (not Wikipedia or Britannica), and Wikipedia wins on speed.
Wikipedia still has its critics, skeptics who doubt its merits as a reference source. But even they cannot deny the tremendous social innovation unleashed by Wikipedia-the-project. Every professional conference—on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to journalism to philanthropy—now includes the mandatory, impassioned plea for the industry to adopt The Wikipedia Model, as if it were a set of Lego pieces that could be ordered from eBay and assembled in a newsroom or on the trading floor.
The enthusiasm may not always be well-informed, but it is understandable. From the start, Wikipedia was an improbable outcome. According to a popular techie quip, it works in practice, but not in theory. Think about it: a bunch of strangers—and not the world’s most sociable strangers—leveraged the power of the Internet to create a highly functioning, über-productive community that voluntarily creates usable (and frequently used) knowledge for others. How much money would you have been prepared to bet against that result a decade ago?
In his first book, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia, Andrew Lih leads readers through the site’s exciting history. He is well-suited to the job. In July 2003 Lih joined the then-two-year-old encyclopedia, and within a few months became one of its administrators. (That a novice could move up so quickly illustrates how badly Wikipedia needed talent in its early days.) Since then, he has emerged as a leading explainer of Wikipedia to the masses, offering sharp, informative commentary on the site’s development. Given Wikipedia’s noble mission to democratize access to knowledge, as well as its unfortunate capacity to attract controversy, The Wikipedia Revolution—strikingly readable and largely free of jargon—is sorely needed.
In addition to engaging description and smart history, Lih tries to tackle a larger story: what makes Wikipedia work? Here, unfortunately, he is much less successful.
• • •
Wikipedia owes its existence to the nerdy culture of the first online discussion systems, such as Usenet; the unlikely success of moderated social sites, such as Slashdot, which was so influential in Wikipedia’s early days that the project was briefly known as “the Encyclopedia That Slashdot Built”; and the emergence of a tight community around WikiWikiWeb, the first application to use the wiki style of editing. The dotcom recession also helped by freeing a supply of superbly talented technologists from the burdens of paid employment.
Wikipedia’s editing philosophy is about simplicity, and two of the cofounders, Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, get much of the credit for it. From the earliest days, the community relied on three core rules:
1. Neutrality: entries cannot be partisan and should reflect fact rather than opinion (this “neutral point of view” principle is the site’s only nonnegotiable policy).
2. Verifiability: entries should quote facts that can easily be checked.
3. No Original Research: entries should not contain original and unpublished thought.
At first, decisions were made quickly, and every mention of Wikipedia in the media was met with extensive (and often self-congratulatory) discussion on Wikipedia’s mailing lists. Lih feels nostalgic for those heady days of experimental fluidity, which turned Wikipedia into a magnet for geeks who wanted to test their own tools and approaches, and improve the site in the process. “If there was ever a project that had unhammered nails, thousands and thousands of them, it was Wikipedia,” Lih writes. “And best of all, Wikipedia welcomed anyone with Internet access to start hammering.” The old guard did not object much; “don’t bite the [newcomers]” quickly became an influential policy.
Why do Wikipedians spend countless hours improving the site, often doing mundane, repetitive tasks they would never do for money?
Concerned that excessive bureaucratization might stifle creativity and hamper growth, the early “Wikipedians” adopted a “people first, rules later” philosophy. But as the community expanded and conflicts multiplied, rules and guidelines piled up. By 2006 they constituted one fourth of the site and were one of its fastest-growing areas. Moreover, the ad-hoc rules were often flawed, sometimes even contradictory. Lih points to the dispute over the name of Gdańsk, a Polish city whose “German name (and former official appellation)” is Danzig. Gdańsk /Danzig was the subject of a heated editing war between pro-German and pro-Polish factions. After nearly two years and more than 8000 words of debate, the community settled on a fix that historians had already figured out: use “Danzig” for years between 1308 and 1945 and “Gdańsk” before 1308 and after 1945.
One solution to this disagreement (and many others) would have been to multiply entries: why not have a Gdańsk entry and a Danzig entry? There are, after all, enough electrons to go around. Something like the alternative idea developed at the now-defunct GNE (a recursive acronym for “GNE’s Not an Encyclopedia”—an inside joke in programming circles), which was a collection of unedited articles, “a library of opinions, an attempt to build a comprehensive documentation of all human thought,” with editing itself identified as a source of bias. Wikipedia decided early on to reject this split-the-difference approach. Having a neutral point of view required having a point of view, and the salutary policy was to push contributors to agree on a common statement.
Still, the initial spirit was largely anarchic, which was bound to cause some troubles, as when sensitive celebrities and VIPs discovered errors in their biographies. Wales became a contact point for all high-profile complaints and often stepped in to address them. The German edition of Wikipedia found an elegant solution to this problem by introducing so-called “flagged revisions” of articles. Anonymous users—the majority of visitors to the site—would see an approved (“flagged”) version of the article rather than the latest version. In August 2009 the English edition of Wikipedia announced that it would be adopting the flagged revisions policy for some articles.
• • •
Aside from describing Wikipedia’s history, Lih offers some suggestive reflections on the roots of its remarkable growth and its distinctiveness as a project. After all, the million-dollar question about Wikipedia—the one that foundations and businesses are desperately trying to answer—is not how it works but why it works. Lih’s forays into philosophy, psychology, and sociology, however, are too brief and shallow to be of much use.
Much could have been said on these topics. Two of Wikipedia’s co-founders found each other on philosophy-related mailing lists. Indeed Sanger has a philosophy PhD (his Ohio State doctoral thesis is titled “Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification”), while Wales almost completed a PhD in finance. They came to the project with assumptions about human cooperation that appear to be rooted in philosophy, economics, and evolutionary psychology (among other disciplines), but those ideas are poorly articulated in the book.
Lih does point out that Sanger and Wales were heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (shades of Alan Greenspan), according to which, reality exists independent of consciousness and life’s great purpose is the rational pursuit of self-interest. Wales’s fascination with Rand was so deep that he even named his daughter after a protagonist in one of Rand’s books. But Lih does not explain the steps from Objectivism to an encyclopedia that “could detail what is true in the world without judgments.” After all, didn’t the Encyclopedia Britannica (or Diderot’s Encyclopédie, for that matter) aim to check judgments at the door and detail only “what is true in the world”? And isn’t that the aim of the new computational search engine, WolframAlpha? How does Objectivism enter the picture?
Maybe it doesn’t. While Sanger and Wales present themselves on blogs and at new-media conferences as mavericks with ideas, they did start off with some rather conventional plans for an online encyclopedia. And their decision to switch over to the anyone-can-edit mode—they are still debating which of the two came up with this scheme—may have been a stroke of luck rather than a product of a theory of cooperation or philosophically-rooted convictions about the virtues of self-interest. Linking Wikipedia to Objectivism may simply be an effort at lending some ex post gravitas to the project (or, more likely, its founders).
Lih also could have told us more about the puzzling psychology of Wikipedians. Who are those people? What makes them so addicted to “wikicrack,” to spending countless hours improving the site, often doing mundane, repetitive tasks that they would never do for money? Lih relies on the work of Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler to address the puzzle. Benkler’s studies of “peer production” draw on the thought of Russian anarchist Piotr Kropotkin, who believed that cooperation is as important in the evolution of species as competition and that “mutual aid” is essential to human survival. Lih does not mention that Rand and Kropotkin are not exactly intellectual soulmates. Lih also does not explain how these two diverging philosophies—one prizing egoism, the other altruism—could live happily together in one site. “Wikipedia is the obsessive-compulsive’s dream come true. It has a bottomless pit of source material with which to indulge one’s pet peeves or obsessions,” Lih offers. But we already knew that. What we (still) do not understand is why some people find deleting commas on Wikipedia more rewarding than playing solitaire or browsing Gawker. Is the public-benefit aspect important? The pleasures of a complex cooperative activity? The unusual possibility of being cooperative from home? Lih leaves us wandering.
To be sure, he does offer some fresh insights about Wikipedia itself. For example, he compares the transformation of this initially small project into a digital metropolis to the process of urban planning outlined in Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. There is, indeed, much to be said about the similarities between Wikipedians and Jacobs’s “self-appointed public characters,” the people who hang out and help produce the “social structure of sidewalk life.” But Lih does not push this comparison far enough: he clings, so to speak, to the “life” side of the equation and never ventures into the darker “death” side. Surely, the increased bureaucratization of Wikipedia would destroy some of those public characters that he admires so much. And how will that affect the project?
Experts are forced to engage in pointless debates with Wikipedia’s bureaucratic guardians, many of whom are persuaded only by hyperlinks, not cogent arguments.
Other aspects of Wikipedia’s history are vividly described but lack discerning intellectual treatment. Lih sheds little light on the “routinization” of the charismatic and ultimately benevolent authority of Jimmy Wales, how that authority evolved into a vast bureaucratic apparatus with a Kafkaesque system of rules. And while Lih notes user ambivalence toward voting, he leaves it largely unexplained. The attitude seems to have grown from an earlier Wiki culture developed by Meatball Wiki, one of the projects preceding and inspiring Wikipedia. The meatballers saw voting as an unnecessary distraction. “Don’t vote on everything, and if you can help it, don’t vote on anything,” read one page on the site.
Wikipedia’s elders adopted those views, realizing that voting could be easily gamed and should not be used often. Instead they settled on a kind of enlightened autocracy: ordinary users would express their views on an issue, after which the more powerful administrators would interpret the vox populi and make a decision. Most of the time, consensus would emerge early on, and the decision was easy; however, as Wikipedia began attracting relatively diverse crowds of editors, achieving consensus grew more difficult. Voting opportunities were further reduced as articles became higher-ranked on Google. A high Google rank means more exposure, which led to more vote-rigging. No longer would there be “votes for deletion,” merely “articles for deletion,” which Wikipedians would discuss. A disinterested administrator would gauge the consensus and make a final decision.
For a site that wants to democratize and revolutionize access to knowledge, such a conservative stance on voting seems puzzling and worth studying in detail, but Lih does not explore this incongruity. There is no guarantee that a more democratic Wikipedia would survive, but it would be interesting to investigate why users so quickly and confidently opted for consensus- rather than voting-driven decision-making.
• • •
“Wikipedia approaches its limits,” ran a striking August 2009 headline in the usually sober Guardian.
With infinite storage and lots of free labor, the very notion of “limits” seems misplaced. However, the limits alluded to in the Guardian are more editorial than logistical. The low-hanging fruit is disappearing—Wikipedians can write only so many biographies of Seinfeld characters—and getting new content onto the site is not as easy as it used to be. A recent study by Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) found that Wikipedia’s key growth indicators—the number of new pages and new editors—have floundered for the past two years, while coordination and editing costs have ratcheted up. Today’s Wikipedians waste a growing portion of their editing time on bureaucratic infighting rather than creating new content. According to the PARC study, Wikipedians also exhibit increasing resistance to new content, especially that contributed by occasional editors.
Some of these concerns were predictable. The sum of human knowledge is expanding but still finite; tools to curate it are improving but still imperfect. As Wikipedia has accumulated a wealth of data—its English version contains more than three million articles—opportunities for making novel contributions have diminished. Wikipedia was bound to hit a knowledge constraint at some point, and it may have already done so. The PARC study suggests that article growth peaked in 2007-2008 and has been declining since.
Some obstacles to continued evolution are fundamental. The set of practices operative on Wikipedia is very loosely defined, which was a boon to early growth but is perhaps now an impediment. When Wales and Sanger started the site, they aspired to create a modern encyclopedia that would continue the tradition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie and Encyclopedia Britannica. “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia” became one of the defining principles of the project; eventually it also led to numerous squabbles over what exactly a digital encyclopedia should be. Adhering to the spirit of Diderot and Britannica’s authors required establishing a certain threshold of importance that encyclopedia articles needed to pass. Paper publishers had fixed numbers of pages to work with and had to compromise. With server space cheap, Wikipedia did not face the same challenges. Some Wikipedians—now known as “inclusionists”—viewed this lack of physical constraint as an opportunity. Others—“deletionists”—thought that filling the infinite space with trivia would distract Wikipedians from curating information that truly matters and dilute Wikipedia’s credentials as a reference resource.
Most inclusionists were not extremists: they did not favor articles on that morning’s breakfast. But in a vast range of cases, they thought that limited and imperfect information was better than nothing. Deletionists disagreed, and to resolve the many borderline cases, the community had to find an objective and quantifiable metric for discrimination. Neither cash nor file-size could do the job, so they settled on the principle of notability: “a topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.”
Wikipedians are 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, and around 70 percent of them are under the age of 30.
The principle did not end the debates, but shifted them onto the interpretation of the qualifiers: “significant,” “reliable,” and “independent.” Do mentions in popular blogs such as BoingBoing or TechCrunch provide “significant coverage”? If they do, can those sources be viewed as “reliable” on all subject areas? Can film criticism published in Cahiers du Cinéma count as “independent of its subjects?”
Most such questions had to be answered on a case-by-case basis, and, gradually, those precedents led to the emergence of hundreds of guidelines that could later serve as shortcuts in dispute-resolution. For example, having articles published in MathSciNet is not a guarantee of notability (MathSciNet falls under the insufficient category of “review publications that review virtually all refereed publications in that discipline”), while notability is assured if one has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society or received a Linguapax Prize. Similarly intricate guidelines establish the notability of diplomats, porn stars, athletes, victims of criminal acts, postal codes, irrational numbers, music ensembles, court cases, and even boulevards (a boulevard “heavily lined with commercial or other major non-residential development that serves as the main road within a suburb or some other heavily-developed area” could be notable; roads that simply have “Boulevard” in their names . . . probably not).
In many cases, however, notability cannot be determined even by following thoughtfully developed guidelines. It is, for example, much harder to verify the notability of a figure from the 1920s than from the 1990s. Most of the important characters of that earlier era are gone from public memory, and newspaper archives from those days cannot be accessed easily online (where Wikipedians spend most of their research time). Given that the flow of articles on Wikipedia far outweighs the attention span of its editors, the latter often have to make the same tough choices that print editors do: why waste a day improving one hard-to-nail-down article when one can improve a hundred?
This creates enormous knowledge gaps in Wikipedia and further alienates well-informed subject experts, particularly those who may know much that is hard to verify online. The subject experts—who usually have great demands on their time, as well—are forced to engage in pointless intellectual debates with Wikipedia’s bureaucratic guardians, many of whom are persuaded only by hyperlinks, not cogent arguments. This raises participation costs—busy experts quickly give up and leave the site—and creates tension between “experts with an attitude” and “verifiability freaks,” which partially explains those gaps.
Early on, Wikipedia’s utter disregard for intellectual elites was not obvious, because there was more than enough work for users of all backgrounds: even placing a comma in the right place makes the project better.
But this also means that the bar for improving the encyclopedia is set very low. Thus the standard criticism of Wikipedians: they are obsessed with popular culture and less equipped to document the high-brow. The 711-word entry on nouvelle vague filmmaker Claude Chabrol, for example, is much less impressive than the 1867-word article on Transformers-director Michael Bay.
However, high-brow entries also suffer because Wikipedia’s economics of knowledge creation are fundamentally unsound. As long as an hour of research yields less “Wikipedia value” than an hour spent planting one hundred commas, few enthusiasts will do the intellectual heavy-lifting. Besides, one cannot learn much about Chabrol from a cursory Google search. Thus, the real tragedy of the Wikipedia method is that it reduces intellectual contributions to such granular units that writing a 2000-word entry on Chabrol in one sitting feels like painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And if you do go to such lengths to improve the site, you do not want the bureaucrats—who may know nothing about Chabrol—to judge your contribution. There is something unappealing about the value system of a project that prizes, say, movie reviews quoted from college newspapers over elaborate entries in the authoritative Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, simply because the latter does not have an easy-to-link Web site.
The Google fetish, it should be noted, is not ideological, but practical. Since Wikipedia’s editors are bombarded with editing tasks—one study estimates three new edits every second—they cannot investigate every entry thoroughly. They are constrained by what can be discovered readily—by Google. But most human knowledge, probably, still lies outside of Google’s reach.
If the search-giant’s book-digitization efforts succeed, the conditions in which Wikipedians operate will be radically transformed. Yet such changes would not necessarily translate into new or better Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia’s potential lies in harnessing the “wisdom of crowds”; however, those crowds are only as wise as they are diverse. The individuals who compose the crowd need to bring different sets of expertise to the project. But in Wales’s own words, Wikipedians are “80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30.” This homogeneity, too, may explain the persistence of certain knowledge gaps.
Some might disagree. As long as the information is available online, Wikipedia, they say, will eventually organize it according to the dictates of good judgment. But despite all of the notoriety guidelines clogging the site, judgment is lacking in the world of Wikipedia. There is virtually no sense of relative importance: improving an article about a prominent historical figure is as important as writing the biography of a soap opera character, as long as both are deemed notable. One does not have to be a natural-born elitist to see that relying on this simplistic binary will inevitably keep the focus on the frivolous, which is never in short supply.
Wikipedia’s current troubles may be the products of its remarkable success. In just a few years, it has become the go-to source for a first-cut at any topic. That has raised public expectations about coverage: people now expect important topics to be covered, and they expect the coverage to be good (as judged by experts). At least in its current shape, however, the Wikipedia model is having trouble meeting those demands. It needs a major upgrade, and the Wikipedia community has brought in management consultants to help figure out how to move forward.
Thinking about the encyclopedia’s future would be impossible without realizing how it got where it is now, and Lih’s book provides real illumination of that path. But the history only takes us so far, and in deciding where things should go next, we still need the book that Lih did not quite pull off.
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About the Author
Evgeny Morozov is a Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University and a contributing editor to Foreign Policy. His book on the Internet and democracy is forthcoming in 2010.
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The Library of Congress Subject Heading List solves this problem by providing an organized way "See" references and "See Also" references to bridge these difficulties. Fuzzy logic helps but not completely. Geeks might do well to re-visit those concepts. After all, it was librarians, listing books on the backs of playing cards that led to the concept of indexing and the spread sheet.
This is not true, they would create Wikipedia.
Wikipedia articles do not distinguish between fact, fiction, urban myth, rumor or folk legend, as long as it can be attributed to someone.
Wikipedia is not information, it is noise.
As a teacher of a Postmodernism course, I have come to recognize Wikipedia as a grand experiment in the democratization of knowledge, as a test of the theory that knowledge comes from the discourse of local cultures, that it is not just "out there," as Rand might argue. And though Postmodernism has its limits, Wikipedia seems to be speaking quite well for this theory at least.
What I try to teach my students them now is how to check the reliability of a source. And Wikipedia, with its History and Talk tabs, warning boxes, links, and references, makes this relatively easy. Wikipedia may be slowing down, but it is certainly not dying.
"what makes Wikipedia work? Here, unfortunately, he is much less successful."
Correct. The problem with most discussions of that topic is they wallow in a techno-mysticism, usually rooted in the author *selling* something, typically a consulting or pundit gig (e.g. "mandatory, impassioned plea for the industry to adopt ..."). I've been trying to get two points into the discourse (without much success):
1) Wikipedia has an absolutely enormous, tremendous, humongous _de facto_ marketing subsidy from Google.
2) Wikipedia is a cult.
People generally do not like either of these points, for their consequences.
That Wikipedia is a creature of Google undercuts the marketing PR of the hucksters. It means you can't duplicate it at all by buying what they're selling. It was just a freak resource lottery win from a particular unusual context.
And that Wikipedia is cult has some very unpleasant implications. It's a very old and simple explanation. You can sometimes get people to work for free if you give them a sense of importance and petty authority. But that's often not so laudable, even downright exploitative.
Trying to explain Wikipedia without considering these factors is like trying to explain the Middle East while ignoring both oil and religion.
Evgeny Morozov wrote a crazy title to his piece, and the body of the piece is worthless throughout, imho. Except I didn't know that 80% of Wikipedians are male: Citation Needed!
Wikipedia is not information, it is noise."
Wikipedia articles not only distinguish between them, the articles have sources cited so others can see exactly where the info comes from. Editors are required to cite sources so we know whether information string A is true or not.
Really, that was a baseless and untrue accusation.
You say Wikipedia is a cult. You give no argument to support that opinion. For me, it's just a tool. And so are you.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/sethfinkelstein
Why are lefties still chewing on the Swift Boat Veterans entry all these years later? You lost. Get over it.
Why is Dr. S Fred Singer deleted from any article on global warming. He is an important scientist in the global warming debate yet he and others are routinely made non persons by the global warming cult contingent at Wikipedia.
Orwell wrote of a state so powerful it could rewrite history on the fly to suit its own purposes. Modern technology has made that vision real to an army of volunteer miscreants who want all knowledge written to support their deranged leftist politics.
The single greatest analysis of Wikipedia was done by Encyclopedia Dramatica:
"The People's Communist Republic of WikipediaⓀ, commonly shortened to simply Wikipedia, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in which participants play editors of a hypothetical online encyclopedia. The goal is to try to insert misinformation as well as pushing a point of view that is randomly assigned at signup, while preventing any contrary information from being entered by others. Players with similar misinformation will generally form guilds in order to aid one another. Wikipedia players gain more authority as they progress, with "Administrator" and "Double-O Licensed" rankings granting them access to game processes not available to others."
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Wikipedia
The thing is that Admins lose their status if they're inactive for too long time, so they delete an article every now and then, reason: "too unencyclopedic".
Also, there was a discussion forum about this issue, organized by Wikimedia, but they only invited a very few people while trying to present it as something public.
If you understand German, here's more info:
http://blog.fefe.de/?q=Wiki
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Formerpedian said: "Wikipedia articles do not distinguish between fact, fiction, urban myth, rumor or folk legend, as long as it can be attributed to someone.
Wikipedia is not information, it is noise."
Wikipedia articles not only distinguish between them, the articles have sources cited so others can see exactly where the info comes from. Editors are required to cite sources so we know whether information string A is true or not.
Really, that was a baseless and untrue accusation.
— posted 11/05/2009 at 21:12 by Heilmann Hurt
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Any first year student of history knows that it is important to cite sources. However, it it takes years of experience and a degree of expertise to cultivate the skills necessary to critically evaluate and assess the worth and accuracy of sources. A cursory tour of wikipedia articles dealing with important historical topics would demonstrate the weakness of the information contained therein. The problem isn't just the references and sources that are present, but especially those that are absent. I agree with the author of the article that Wikipedia tends to discourage experts who have knowledge of the kind that is gained over years of painstaking reading and study, rather than through a few internet clicks. Responding to Heilmann Hurt, I must point out that simply seeing where (online) information was 'sourced' (i.e. cut and pasted) is simply not enough. Someone has to check the veracity of those sources, something that would be virtually impossible if the sources were genuine, paper sources from a library or archive as opposed to trivial digital dribble.
A greater degree of elite participation would be helpful, as would a system of rating the importance of valuable information in relation to 'noise'.
Enjoy the following: the following articles name a Robert Crumb comic and a pot noodle ad as their sources. Lovely topics too, though I would never recommend deleting something simply because it is repulsive and irrelevant. ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felching
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Sanchez_(sexual_act)
Yes, it has an abundance of trivia, and stiff-necked editors, and tends to amplify popular mistakes, and has extensive NSFW articles on all kinds of sexual practices. So what? These "shortcomings" underline the greatest strengths of the site.
1) Yes, Wikipedia is top-heavy with pop culture and trivia. But that's hardly a bug at all; especially when coupled with Google, it's an advantage, because trivia is a highly subjective classification. Whole academic disciplines are devoted unearthing what was once considered trivia. For every Wikipedian obsessive going on about the "deep" meaning of the latest Twilight book, or the particular metal alloy of a modern American dime, there's a researcher puzzling over the contents of an antique playbill or the composition of an ancient coin. Infinite (and I know server space is not truly endless, but close enough) information is only a problem without powerful tools (say, Google) to search through them. In fact, Wikipedia is better than most tools, because it preserves all previous versions of itself, which seems like a pain, but which can be usefully referenced for a clearer picture of human understanding than a traditional encyclopedia.
2) Yeah, the editors are arbitrary and short-sighted, riding hobby horses all over contributors. How is that different from every other publication on earth, from paper encyclopedias to academic journals to local newspapers? Tuning the rules of participation (so that the average quality of the site stays high enough) is a real issue that's been fitfully addressed. But that the editors themselves are petty nitpickers outside their depth merely means that Wikipedia is a human institution, run by humans and not angelic beings of infinite compassion and knowledge.
3) Those who complain that Wikipedia isn't sufficiently vetted by experts seem to yearn for the illusory paternalistic certainty of the postwar era, when all sorts of informational sources comforted us with pronouncements of accuracy, diligence, and honesty. Of course, the traditional print and broadcast media were partial, error-prone and biased-- but they were difficult for a civilian to fact-check. In fact, the advent of the web has damaged the sterling reputations of several icons (NY Times, for one), as reader's ability to research from home has grown, and more distortions and outright fraud is discovered.
Now, web-generation readers are no less credulous, lazy or uncritical than their parents, and modern media has grown less informative, rigorous, and truth seeking than ever. But the presumption of accuracy doesn't rest with the publication any more. Wikipedia is not commonly presumed to be authoritative. Instead, in summarizing vast amounts of information (and supplying key search terms for further research), it is generally taken as a first step to finding real, accurate data and original resources. Just as a student should get his knuckles rapped for quoting a regular encyclopedia in a paper, he should get them rapped for quoting Wikipedia. But the student would be crazy not to check Wikipedia first.
It's a great thing.
Just replace "free" with "peanuts" and you've described the whole history of western publishing. As a journalist yourself, you should understand the process. That sense of importance isn't a bug, it's a feature-- without which not a lot of writing gets done.
Even Emily Dickinson sought it out: "Mr. Higginson, Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?"
Only the scholars can save us!
Yes, there is no substitute for study, and experts are bound to be discouraged by shallow citations and inaccurate information that they find on Wikipedia.
But good heavens, you then stoop to attacking the "Felch" article! Looking over it as it stands on 7 November 2009, all I can see is a perfectly accurate article on a human sex act. I'm no felcher myself, but it's a well-formed article that sins only in exploring mostly the provenance of the term itself. It cites R. Crumb to great effect-- certainly, he helped popularize the term among non-felchers. And while his inclusion certainly isn't necessary for a complete article, it's an interesting side-note about a major American author. If Arthur Miller had written a play titled "Death of a Felcher", you'd certainly want that in the article.
The felch article is, in fact, a good example of the strength of Wikipedia. There's a reasonable summary of the act, a note on its disputed meaning, historical citations, and a health warning. It's given me access to knowledge and lingo I didn't have before, and even cited a nice next step if I (shudder to think) wanted to investigate further. What more could I want? Is Britannica ever going to devote a paragraph to felching? For some types of information, Wikipedia is a demonstrably better resource.
I agree that improving the average quality of a Wikipedia entry is important, but I seriously doubt Mr. Antrodemus is eager to dig up more original citations for his favorite article. In this case, Wikipedia is far better than average because it is far more comprehensive than average.
The article has a point about Wikipedia's preference for topics for which there exists information online. Wikipedia demands citations. It is of course easier to come up with citations of publications available online rather than spend a week trawling through the university library in search of citations. That's something you do if you write something important like a PhD dissertation, but you won't do that for a site that you edit for free.
"Those who complain that Wikipedia isn't sufficiently vetted by experts seem to yearn for the illusory paternalistic certainty of the postwar era, when all sorts of informational sources comforted us with pronouncements of accuracy, diligence, and honesty."
Wonderfully well explained! You are absolutely right.
"Of course, the traditional print and broadcast media were partial, error-prone and biased-- but they were difficult for a civilian to fact-check. In fact, the advent of the web has damaged the sterling reputations of several icons (NY Times, for one), as reader's ability to research from home has grown, and more distortions and outright fraud is discovered."
The funniest thing on this note is the current debate over Google Books and Google's plan to archive the world's print. Archiving everything ever printed would make it extremely easy to use computers spot gross plagiarism from an era when no one thought it would ever be detectable. This could (and would) of course destroy some venerable reputations. Distortions are fraud lurk in the most surprising places, and no doubt also in 'reputable' encyclopaedias.
"Whole academic disciplines are devoted unearthing what was once considered trivia. For every Wikipedian obsessive going on about the "deep" meaning of the latest Twilight book, or the particular metal alloy of a modern American dime, there's a researcher puzzling over the contents of an antique playbill or the composition of an ancient coin."
This is so true! Cultural history is a great example. Trivia from the past is very trendy in academic circles.
@#22
I actually learned a lot from the 'felch' article, as well as from many others in the same grain. However, I find that a lot of these articles (on obscure sexual practices, for example) are excessively influenced by (or written by) adherents of minor subcultures. I wouldn't want to deprive these people of their voice, but a lot of that kind of information is totally trivial. My issue is that such articles are really just 'noise' and trivia, and more useful as a snapshot of modern humanity than as a source of quality information. This of course isn't all bad--a pristine copy of today's Wikipedia would be a gold mine for a cultural historian 50 or 100 years from now--just as Youtube and Google Street View would be. I regularly use Wikipedia to learn about popular culture and trivia. I suppose anyone reading this post knows to take it with a proverbial grain of salt. I think 'felch' belongs in an urban or slang dictionary. In any case, the responsibility to judge the accuracy and usefulness of the information found in Wikipedia lies ultimately with the user.
@#23
To the waste of human energy and talent that is university bureaucracy, I say AMEN.
No, they know they'll get a bad grade if they don't cite sources. Remember how stupid people are, and how immature. Thinking about it that may actually be too elitist, but I'm not sure.
>However, it it takes years of experience and a degree of expertise to cultivate the skills >necessary to critically evaluate and assess the worth and accuracy of sources.
The closer we get to the present day and things people deal with in their daily lives the less true this is. And the nerdier the people who deal with it, the more likely it is to be on wikipedia, and well done. You could get at least three quarters of an undergraduate Computer Science or math curriculum done just with Wiki links. But this also means that articles on historical events of the last twenty years or so will be pretty good (also pretty partisan).
Years of experience are a necessary precondition of expertise except in new fields, so I think that's redundant anyway. Merely by being alive, relatively smart, and plugged into the media and popular culture I'm an expert on media criticism. How is The Guardian trying to shape my views? Or The Times, The Telegraph, CNN, whoever?
Very, very few people care enough about history to "critically evaluate and assess the worth and accuracy of sources." but there are enough of them that once Google gets around to digitising all the world's archives that'll let them, they'll be a plague, an infestation of local, regional, national historians.
What I'm saying is that History is not a science, and getting up to the level of self-reflexive criticism of sources that an average Ph.D. of History is at is well within the capacity of enough people that some hobbyists will do it as a hobby, because they want to take part in the activity of history. I'm a bigger elitist than you are, but a small proportion of a very large number is still a pretty big number. Imagine 10,000 people worldwide taking enough of an interest in history that they could write monographs at say, a taught Masters level, based on the records they can pull up on their screen, people with real jobs, for whom it's just a hobby. That's one in every 600K people. Entirely doable, I think.
>A cursory tour of wikipedia articles dealing with important historical topics would >demonstrate the weakness of the information contained therein.
To be all postmodernist, who decided what was an important historical topic? In all seriousness, surprise, surprise. Most people really don't give a fuck about history. Some of those who care are going to be irritating nationalist or sectarian or other identity groups with an agenda.
>The problem isn't just the references and sources that are present, but especially those that >are absent.
This is going to be a historically limited problem. Publicly funded universities have no business assigning copyright to corporations. Scratch the publicly funded. The academic journal system made sense before email, and as a way of facilitating peer-review it still has a certain charm but open-access journals and preprint archives like arxiv.org.
>I agree with the author of the article that Wikipedia tends to discourage experts who have >knowledge of the kind that is gained over years of painstaking reading and study, rather than >through a few internet clicks.
If you want to improve Wikipedia, improve Wikipedia. This will take time, effort and commitment. If you have better things to do, do those instead. If you have better things to do, but still want to improve it, assign your students to write a wikipedia article you think should exist, but doesn't, with references. (That's a you, an academic, not you, antrodemus.)
And this is purely a social science and humanities problem, see Chirality. That leads to articles in Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Electromgnetism.
>Responding to Heilmann Hurt, I must point out that simply seeing where (online) information >was 'sourced' (i.e. cut and pasted) is simply not enough. Someone has to check the >veracity of those sources, something that would be virtually impossible if the sources were >genuine, paper sources from a library or archive as opposed to trivial digital dribble.
Political Historian. Wait 50 years and someone will be writing their Ph.D. thesis on the contribution of... fuck, Youtube to the abortive Iranian anti-clerical revolution. They're all sources, dude. Being curated, or not, does not a worthy source make.
>A greater degree of elite participation would be helpful,
There are vastly more intelligent college graduate potential editors and contributors than actual editors. It's a reference work not original scholarship, it doesn't need "elite" participation, a II.1 final year undergrad is about as high a level as you need to go, and that level, while not common is not all that rare either.
>as would a system of rating the importance of valuable information in relation to 'noise'.
Tada! http://schools-wikipedia.org/
If you really care, or can convince others to care, you can fork wikipedia, like Citizendium (failure so far), or you could continue to use your good judgement and bullshit detector at all times. That's the way to go. If you know a field, every time you hear someone talk about it you hear idiots. I swear to God, I read a Third Edition of an International Relations introduction anthology and I could point out flaws in the economics in it, really, really stupid flaws. Journalists in particular make lots of mistakes, but that's probably more because they write so much, and so publicly than anything especially stupid about them.
Outside their field of expertise, everyone is a moron. If you can remember that you can use Wikipedia, or any other work as you should, as reference until you can say "I know that for myself"
Mouth breathing, mother's basement dwelling, no girlfriend, liberal Democrats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Morozov
OK some kind of academic / journalist. I hadn't seen his description in the left column of the article, but Wikipedia is more informative anyway.
I'm not sure what the point of his rambling article is. I guess it's a "thought piece" à la NYRB. Whatever. It has a few interesting (alleged) facts, but no links to outside sources. I am getting very tired of reading articles that don't usefully link and that don't cite their sources. Guys, that era of journalism is over. It's particularly ironic in an article criticizing Wikipedia, whose basic policies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_pillars_of_Wikipedia
have more integrity and transparency and modernness than any newsroom, or wherever it is they decide to publish this kind of stuff.
The article has the feel of someone looking down from on high, slightly contemptuous, to ask, "So what's this Wikipedia I hear so much about?" It's not the worst of this genre by far, but it's still annoying and uninformed.
"Some might disagree." Yes. Or rather, I'm indifferent. To be honest, I only skimmed the article, because this kind of empty prose wastes my time. I'd rather, for example, read Wikipedia and the sources it links to, or improve it, in my own small way.
The flaws (and virtues) of those who contribute to Wikipedia are great, but their flaws are generally far exceeded by those who take it upon themselves to write about Wikipedia from the outside.
"Outside their field of expertise, everyone is a moron", says Barry Cotter. So true. I'd even add, within it, as well. What we must do is proceed everywhere with humility and awareness of our limits. And try not to waste people's time.
Finally, I'll admit it, and this is POV: I ♥ Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view
Wikipedia is right to point out that having an article reviewed in the "mathematical reviews" is not a sign of special scientific notability. In order to get a professorship in mathematics, one tends to have had some form of articles published; thus having published a scientific article, even one reviewed in AMS' math reviews, is not a sign of scientific notability. Otherwise, just any professor of mathematics could have a Wikipedia page.
Some people argue that this would not be a problem - after all, Wikipedia is not paper and room is not limited. Some resources are however limited:
* Name space - without going to cumbersome article naming and "disambiguation" conventions, there is only one single article that can carry a name.
* Quality control
* Control against vandalism.
Articles about not so well known individuals basically attract the attention of these individuals, friends and family on the one hand, and their enemies (disgruntled former spouses included) on the other hand. A good recipe for problems.
Many Wikipedia articles on advanced scientific topics (e.g. advanced mathematics, theoretical computer science, physics etc.) are actually fairly good, and these are not topics that can be comprehended by a teenager.
The common point of these topics is that few people would claim that they comprehend them even though they don't. Thus, people who don't know what they are talking about steer clear off them.
In contrast, topics on politics, society, history etc. naturally attract people who think they know something even though they don't. This is not the case only of Wikipedia - read books, listen to the radio, watch TV, you'll see that even in "conventional media" many people talk about such issues even though they don't know what they're talking about.
Thus, rule of thumb: the more esoteric a topic is, the more likely the Wikipedia articles have been written by professors, researchers or advanced students.
Know exception: topics that naturally attract "science crackpots" - the kind of people that wish to demonstrate that "Einstein was wrong" or that claim they have a simple proof of Fermat's last theorem or that P is strictly included in NP. These topics are sufficiently "high profile" that they attract such kind of people.
The point of this of this rambling article, since you merely skimmed it before you posted your attacks on it, is that there are problems inherent in wikipedia's editorial process, and these must be fixed if wikipedia is to remain a major reference resource. Morozov isn't ragging on wikipedia. He is praising it as a unique cooperative enterprise, and he wants its users and administrators to recognize how it can be improved. Morozov is a huge geek, if this and his other articles are any indication. I'm sure he uses wikipedia constantly.
Do us all a favor and pay attention to what's written, especially if you're going to take it upon yourself to edit an important encyclopedia.
---
I don't understand why several commenters are protesting that many of the problems wikipedia faces are also experienced by paper encyclopedias. How is that an exoneration of wikipedia? It merely restates what Morozov is arguing: wikipedia faces constraints, many of which are shared by existing publication models. He isn't singling it out because it's online. He's singling it out because it is important. That it's online ensures certain differences from traditional encyclopedias, but the discussion here is really about editorial standards. That would be true in print as well.
I've noticed in the past that wikipedia's partisans are overly defensive when the site faces criticism, and I see that hasn't ceased. Yes, some writers don't grock wikipedia, and their criticisms come off as retrograde and curmudgeonly. This one really doesn't fit in that category. There are ways in which wikipedia can be improved. It's not god's own depository of knowledge.
And comments calling Wikipedia editors "Mouth breathing, mother's basement dwelling, no girlfriend, liberal Democrats" are so stale & unoriginal that I'm no longer bemused. (If you don't like it, don't use it -- simple as that.)
This review of Andrew's book does touch on two systemic problems. One is the growing bureaucratization of Wikipedia, which is slowly choking off its growth; the boast that "anyone can edit" Wikipedia is slowly becoming as accurate as WaMu's slogans claiming it was not just another faceless bank. However, this trend is clearly due to trying to cope with the garbage that is forced into Wikipedia on a unending basis: not only vandalism & articles about someone's lover or pet, but bizarre rants or claims about subjects which are at odds with reality.
The other problem is the "low-hanging fruit" has been largely picked. When I started, a common method for creating articles was to import articles from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and other public domain sources, & stubs of a terse sentence were not uncommon. Now articles are written much as any school paper -- research, writing & rewriting -- & creating stubs are strongly discouraged. No wonder, as Morozov points out, more people devote their time not to research, but trivial edits like planting 100 commas.
I've wondered, over the last few years, which Wikipedia will lose first: its openness to all, its nature as an encyclopedia, or one of its increasingly creaky policies. I'm still not convinced one of these eventually will be lost to keep something called "Wikipedia" running.
Geoff
I will not "pay attention to what's written" if it's a poorly written, blathering article, and no one else will. I came here because http://www.aldaily.com/ indicated it mentioned demographic statistics on Wikipedia editors. But there was little of substance to be found.
I will of course pay close attention to what's written when editing Wikipedia entries, and you're welcome to check whether I do a good job on my user page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Kaicarver
Look, the problems and virtues of Wikipedia are numerous and fascinating, but this article has a very low useful information to quantity of text ratio. If the point of the article is, "these must be fixed if wikipedia is to remain", my reaction is: fixer, fix yourself, and try to say something new, interesting, and constructive.
http://daktre.com/?p=120
Historically, this could just as easily be said of composers, mathematicians, artists, and scientists during the period of their most valued achievements achievements.
It is wretched. And, it is the top Google search result for the term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_economy
You're telling me it took nearly five years of collaborative editing to produce this:
"The consumer economy is the part of an economy directed at end consumers rather than intermediary businesses (i.e., companies which produce things)."
Yes, folks, that is the entire article about what has to be one of the most important aspects of economics of the past half century.
"...the tremendous social innovation unleashed by Wikipedia...", is, I would hazard a guess, that everyone and anyone can now sound as if they've had a real education.
However, Brussels I shall call Brussel when speaking Flemish or Dutch; Bruxelles when French; and Brussels when conversing in English. Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand, I will not call January River, Januarie Rivier or even Fleuve de Janvier. I apologize for my 'notable' lack of consistency.
On a more serious note, Wikipedia's value is in the eye of the beholder. Namely, it depends on the type and the depth of information being sought. If it's information of cursory interest where the importance of veracity is negligent, it's probably as good, if not a better source than most. On the other hand, no serious researcher would accept the content of a single source without corroboration from numerous other academic sources.
There are complex issues revolving around freely available textbook quality information on Wikipedia, versus teacher authored and commercially published textbooks for which students pay a hefty price. Nevertheless, there are numerous academics who quietly contribute to Wikipedia quality information on a high level. Such articles are distinguished by their extensive references to external academic sources, rather than to a Fluffington Post article.
If the number of new articles being added is diminishing, then now it's the time to focus on improving those that are of poor quality. The effectiveness of Wikipedia's increased (and not so silent) oversight will be revealed in the coming months, and I have confidence in their abilities because there are many, very smart, knowledgeable, and dedicated people work there.
To add a constructive note, I'll try to answer the question posed by the article: "What we (still) do not understand is why some people find deleting commas on Wikipedia more rewarding than [XYZ]". (I don't like this contemptuous description of the activity Wikipedia editors as comma deleters, but whatever).
One answer is that Wikipedia is an emergence of the free software / open source philosophy in a less technical area. A broader, somewhat cringe-inducing answer, is that Wikipedia editing is quite simply an act of love.
Joel Spolsky: "People are willing to do for free what they're not willing to do for small amounts of money"
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/29819/quote-about-stackoverflow-as-place-where-people-do-for-free-what-they-wont-do-fo
Dan Pink: "Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators"
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
Clay Shirky: "Perl is a Shinto shrine. Perl is an act of love"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs
plus...
It's not that I trust Wikipedia more or less than I trust Boston Review. It's that Wikipedia does it's own job; e.g., informing me about BR in a close-to neutral tone (citing sources, being sometimes wrong or right). On the other hand, here BR is telling me whether or not Wikipedia is good enough - offering opinions about a culture-news competitor, when what I wanted was an opinion about one book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Evgeny_Morozov
Evgeny: would you care if they deleted it?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/opinion/28iht-edmorozov.html?_r=1
There is a glaring absence of grad students who have spent years researching their topic. They would be doing a great service by sharing their info and their sources.
It's a long haul project. It's not at an end - it's just starting. The basics are in place. Now the real work begins...
For example, you do not need to thesis writing