What's Wrong with Wikipedia?

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, was founded by Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001. (The expert-written Nupedia was founded first; it is now defunct, and Sanger is developing a successor called Digital Universe.)2 It has grown rapidly and as of this writing contains 1,426,958 articles in the English-language version. There are versions of Wikipedia in 228 other languages; sixteen of these have more than 50,000 articles each.

Wikipedia's main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.

What's wrong with it?

Wikipedia is subject to the same defects that afflict any endeavor in which large numbers of people are involved, and where they have appreciable power to control outcomes. To put it otherwise, it has the same problems democracy has.3 Those problems are, at bottom, willful ignorance and misguided zealotry. (The latter often flows from the former.) In Wikipedia's case, this has led to factions distorting selected articles in order to make their side look good or the other side look bad, and to the so-called "revert wars" in which backers of contending versions of an article repeatedly make their version the current one seen by the public.

Some specific problems

There has been controversy over Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy, with the site receiving criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials. Information is sometimes unconfirmed and questionable, lacking proper sources that could legitimize articles. However, a 2005 comparison performed by the science journal Nature of sections of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica found that the two were close in terms of the accuracy of their articles on the natural sciences. However, this study has now been challenged by Encyclopedia Britannica, whose staff described it as "fatally flawed."

More recently a scandal involving Carolyn Bothwell Doran has arisen. Hired at the beginning of 2007 as Chief Operating Officer, this lady is some piece of work. Her record includes passing bad checks and convictions for DUI. She also apparently shot her boyfriend in the chest. Previous to that, while she and her husband were both CIA officers, he drowned on a Caribbean vacation. Later that year she was jailed for another DUI incident with hit-and-run. As Wikitruth coyly puts it, "she... well, she stopped being the Chief Operating Officer. Her information page was quietly shunted away, her name quietly removed." While it is disturbing that she was hired without a sufficiently thorough background check...

The best coverage of this comes from The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/wikimedia_coo_convicted_felon/ . It's a complicated story. Suffice it to say that Wikipedia was remiss in its background checking of a high-level employee. And Wikipedia Review published a timeline of the affair: http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20071220/carolyn-doran-timeline-of-events/

Oddly enough, Googling her name turns up several pages on her at Wikipedia. She still has a Wikimedia user page (though it is blank.) The page recording the Wikipedia Foundation board's decision to hire her on 22 January is still extant.

I signed up as a volunteer editor in late 2005 and since then have been involved in editing various articles on an intermittent basis. What follows reflects my personal experience, plus some recent research and discussion on Usenet.

The central feature of Wikipedia's operation is that it should be open to anyone to edit. This idealistic precept has, not unexpectedly, led to less than ideal results in the real world. The problems can be grouped into three areas: Invalid information, pranks and vandalism, and the so-called "edit wars" or "revert wars".

Incorrect information

The canonical example is the case of John Seigenthaler, a veteran journalist. His biography on Wikipedia was pranked in 2005 by an anonymous editor who made it appear that Seigenthaler was involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Seigenthaler's takedown of the libelous statement appeared in USA today on 29 November 2005, and a virtual firestorm erupted. Wikipedia was already regarded as a source of dubious accuracy generally. This only deepened its disrepute. In a short time the false information had propagated to other sources. This incident led to stronger safeguards against such defamation on Wikipedia.

Can these problems be fixed?

Sources

1 A long-neglected update. I last looked at this essay on 10 February 2008.

2 As reported by The Register on 15 June 2006, Wales has edited his own biography to remove Sanger's name as co-founder. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

3 Note that America today does not have this problem. That is because America is no longer a true democracy, or even a true representative republic. That is because the vast majority of its people are not in control of the nation's policies, and many of them do not even realize this. Instead, a wealthy elite has by persistent application of generous dollops of money (campaign contributions and lobbying) effectively subverted the workings of government, including elections in some cases.

To Open The Sky