One-click Content, No Guarantees Wikipedia is the first

One-Click Content, No Guarantees
    Should you trust the world’s first user-generated encyclopedia?
    If you logged on to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia last January to do research on current members of the U.S. Congress, you may have been surprised to find that the official entry for a Representative noted that he smelled of "cow dung".
    Within hours, Wikipedia administrators had intercepted the renegade edits—but not before the incident provoked a nationwide media furor, spurring questions about the encyclopedia’s credibility. As the first-ever major reference work with a democratic premise—that anyone can contribute an article or edit an entry—Wikipedia has generated shared scholarly efforts to rival those of any literary or philosophical movement in history. Its signature strength, however, is also its greatest vulnerability. User-generated articles are often inaccurate or irrelevant, and vandals like the political jokesters are a constant threat. As a result, the role of the encyclopedia’s gatekeepers assumes added importance. Who are they, and how do they go about the business of deciding which new content will pass through their crucible? Can we trust online encyclopedias? These are the questions I’m going to explore in today’s mini-lecture.
    Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Donal Wales, a former Chicago options trader, Wikipedia has morphed into a cultural phenomenon on a par with Google. Internet users have contributed more than 3 million articles in 200 languages to the site, and every few seconds, a new article or edit is added to Wikipedia’s 180-gigabyte database. Overseeing the entire gargantuan knowledge machine are the Wikipedia elite:about 800 longtime contributors who have volunteered to maintain the site and help ensure its accuracy.
    The influx of information is so great that it’s easy to characterize content-control efforts as potshots into a crowd, but Wikipedians—as regular contributors like to call themselves—claim the review process is actually carefully executed and multilayered. The first line of defense is the so-called recent changes patrol, an online SWAT team made up of hundreds of volunteers who comb new or recently modified content for errors. If there’s outright vandalism, the recent changes patrol will avert the situation fairly quickly.
    In many cases, however, the decision to keep or cut is not as straightforward.A lot of stuff is borderline. A question often asked is:"Is it verifiable? Is it important enough to go into the encyclopedia?" Disputes among administrators—senior Wikipedians who have the power to block or roll back edits on an entry, or even to delete an entry outright—about the validity or relevance of a fact or article can lead to pages—long online debates. When Florida author and programmer Rogers Cadenhead wrote an entry about himself, for instance, the question at issue was not whether Cadenhead was guilty of self-promotion, but whether he was notable enough to warrant his own entry. "Keep author of popular books," one Wikipedian weighed in. "Writing a book itself does not mean the person should be included," another administrator fired back. Someone looked up the books on Amazon, and Cadenhead’s sales rankings are 30 000 and 80 000. In the end, Cadenhead’s entry was kept—along with a note about the controversy.
    The give-and-take review process is similar to a collegiate debate round. After each Wikipedian speaks his or her piece, all administrators familiar with the issue are polled for a consensus, and changes are made accordingly.
    Unlike advisors at publications like the World Book Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Bri-tannica, Wikipedia administrators need not have scholarly credentials— the only requirements for the positions are keen research skills, a critical eye, and lots of spare time. The more users and gatekeepers who weigh in on an entry, the thinking goes, the more detailed and accurate it becomes, ideally producing a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
    Many publishers and academics, however, have criticized the Wikipedia model on the grounds that it generates the informational equivalent of sludge. The lack of formal gatekeeping procedures, they say, ensures that the lowest common denominator will prevail—and since no experts or editors are hired to vet articles, no clear standards exist for accuracy or writing quality. Leaving Wikipedia open for anyone to contribute means that its content and accuracy will tend toward the mediocre.
    Still, many users and contributors agree that the system works well, if not perfectly, in practice. And for those who assume that Wikipedia’s policies translate into general inaccuracy, in a head-to-head comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica in the journal Nature last year, Britannica had an average of three errors per published science article, while Wikipedia had four—a difference so slight it left the primacy of Britannica’s venerated review process in question.
    That’s not to say Wikipedia users should ever feel so confident as to take the encyclopedia’s content on faith. Wales, the founder, advises readers to check their online finds against other sources and to be aware of Wikipedia’s unique strengths and weaknesses, especially when gathering information for research projects. Now let me end my lecture with Wales’ words: "No encyclopedia article is intended to be a primary source—it’s just an introductory summary, and people should approach it that way—Wikipedia’s timeliness is really impressive, and so is the sheer amount of brainpower we bring to bear on complicated questions. But because everything is so open and fluid, you have to be aware that anything on the site could be broken at any given moment. It’s a live work in progress."