Sobering article on Wikipedia (Stacy Schiff, The New Yorker, 07/31/06)

[swag]

I and others here are quite free about quoting and linking information from Wikipedia, but there are reasons to have a second look at this practice. Stacy Schiff provides an interesting read that looks at whether it's such a good idea to take what Wikipedia says as factual, how Wikipedia stacks up to Britannica, et al., how Wikipedia deals with the inevitable conflicts that arise frome having a "community" of interested individuals, and how Wikipedia is groping, like many other sites (this one probably included), with the evolving demands of administering an anarchy.

Excerpt:

For all its protocol, Wikipedia’s bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was briefly a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration. “User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written deposition. “His views on climate science are singular and narrow.” A decision from the arbitration committee was three months in coming, after which Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day parole. The punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin, with two thousand pages on his watchlist—a feature that enables users to compile a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to them. He says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best page on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user who spends the most time on the site—or who yells the loudest—wins.

Connolley believes that Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about,” a view that is echoed by many academics and former contributors, including Larry Sanger, who argues that too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions. He left Wikipedia in March, 2002, after Wales ran out of money to support the site during the dot-com bust. Sanger concluded that he had become a symbol of authority in an anti-authoritarian community. “Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule,” he told me. (Sanger is now the director of collaborative projects at the online foundation Digital Universe, where he is helping to develop a Web-based encyclopedia, a hybrid between a wiki and a traditional reference work. He promises that it will have “the lowest error rate in history.”) Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that “ ‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is “infested with moonbats.” (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. “The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks,” Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn’t. There is no such test for truth.
. . .

Is Wikipedia accurate? Last year, Nature published a survey comparing forty-two entries on scientific topics on Wikipedia with their counterparts in Encyclopædia Britannica. According to the survey, Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Britannica’s, a result that, oddly, was hailed as a triumph for the upstart. Such exercises in nitpicking are relatively meaningless, as no reference work is infallible. Britannica issued a public statement refuting the survey’s findings, and took out a half-page advertisement in the Times, which said, in part, “Britannica has never claimed to be error-free. We have a reputation not for unattainable perfection but for strong scholarship, sound judgment, and disciplined editorial review.” Later, Jorge Cauz, Britannica’s president, told me in an e-mail that if Wikipedia continued without some kind of editorial oversight it would “decline into a hulking mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and, many times, unreadable articles.” Wales has said that he would consider Britannica a competitor, “except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within five years.”

Larry Sanger proposes a fine distinction between knowledge that is useful and knowledge that is reliable, and there is no question that Wikipedia beats every other source when it comes to breadth, efficiency, and accessibility. Yet the site’s virtues are also liabilities. Cauz scoffed at the notion of “good enough knowledge.” “I hate that,” he said, pointing out that there is no way to know which facts in an entry to trust. Or, as Robert McHenry, a veteran editor at Britannica, put it, “We can get the wrong answer to a question quicker than our fathers and mothers could find a pencil.”

. . . more

[Warpy]

1. Sensible people use Wiki as a jumping off point

because most entries that are worth anything contain hyperlinks to articles backing up the entry. Those articles are where to find the real substance.

[ima_sinnic]

2. as a copy editor for an editing service website, I see a lot of students

using only Wikipedia as their reference source in their papers.
Hopefully their teachers/professors are discouraging this practice--just as it would be lazy and unthinkable, actually, to use the Encyclopedia Britannica as a source in a scholarly paper in my field of biology.

[delete_bush]

3. I'm not sure how Wiki's editing process works,

but I did run across this gem last Feb. Somehow this got through, although didn't last long before being removed.

Many, including FAIR, have highlighted Hannity's 1997 coverage of the Abner Louima case. Louima alleged that severe internal injuries to his intestines and bladder were the result of sodomization by NYPD officers. Hannity charged that Louima fabricated the abuse, frequently referring to him as "lying Louima". Hannity also arranged interviews with people who claimed that Louima had a homosexual past, and that the injuries were likely to be the result of a "gay sex act". Weeks later, Hannity was found in a public restroom with his hands on the genitals of a 7 year old boy claiming, "Jesus Christ this kid is hung like a bull."