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Wikipedia The untrustworthy reference book

By Bruce Clement

Want to find out about something on the web? The chances are you'll end up at Wikipedia, either directly or because Google sees Wikipedia as important and ranks its results highly. Wikipedia is available in many languages and I really only know the English language version that is edited by talented people from all over the world, but largely by editors in English speaking countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom as well as it's home country the United States.

A lot of people trust the information they get from Wikipedia and generally the information there is pretty good, but unfortunately Wikipedia can't be relied on to provide accurate answers and the reason for this is also the same reason that it has been such a success. Wikipedia is a contraction of Wiki Encyclopedia and anyone can edit practically any page at Wikipedia. You can edit, I can edit, bored school children can edit. This means that at any moment the page you retrieve is probably good, but may contain anything from biased information or commercial spam to a puerile string of rude words.

The puerile strings of rude words are usually removed very quickly, sometimes automatically and sometimes by a small army of volunteer editors from all over the world. I know, I'm one of these volunteer editors. Every so often I look at the recent changes by anonymous users page and try to remove bad edits that the robots missed. Because spammers are pretty dumb, spam links are usually very easy to spot, but more subtle vandalism is something that only an expert in a field is likely to spot, and because very few people are experts in many fields, random Wikipedia editors looking at random pages are unlikely to spot the vandalism and it can stay there for a very long time.

The other problem with the vandalism is that talented and dedicated editors from all over the world who should be working on improving Wikipedia are spending a lot of time reverting this vandalism. Specialists should be editing articles on their area of expertise, other editors could be editing and improving articles on things they know, such as their country or home town. British editors could be improving articles on England, Scotland, Wales, etc. I could be improving articles on NZ.

How do you as a user of Wikipedia protect yourself? The official answer is that just like a paper encyclopedia, all information in Wikipedia is supposed to be referenced to source documents. Unfortunately a very large number of pages are not properly sourced and those that are sourced can have sources that general readers would have trouble understanding.

The next best way to protect yourself is to use common sense, if you see something that looks like arrant nonsense, wait a minute and refresh the page, if the nonsense goes away, you're probably safe. For extra safety every page has history and discussion pages and a quick look there will show if the page is frequently edited or has known problems.

If you spot something you know to be wrong, you can always fix it. Be careful, that's the start of the process that got me started as a regular Wikipedia editor.

The late Douglas Adams described the fictional Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe as being definitive as

"though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it was always reality that's got it wrong."

Sometimes I feel like this about Wikipedia. I'd hate to live without the wealth of information it provides, but I always treat it with caution.

PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE

Bruce Clement
The Author's personal homepage and hub
www.clement.co.nz

I created an account at Wikipedia a few weeks ago after editing a few Las Vegas pages, thinking that since I've visited Las Vegas 17 times I could make a good contribution to Wikipedia's level of accuracy in reference to Las Vegas tourist attractions. Next time I tried to log in, one of their moderators or editors or whatever had banned me FOREVER, calling me a spammer because I signed up with the user name "urbanphotos", which is similar to my web site (urbanphotos.net). They banned the user name and banned my IP address. Turning away potentially good contributors without engaging them in any dialog first is certainly not going to help improve Wikipedia.

I just had a look at your edit history there (all edits are public knowledge, once you know where to look). You didn't vandalize, you just made some constructive comments in the article discussion page for Las Vegas.

It seems totally unfair that you were banned for nothing when some other people disrupt wikipedia for months without more than warning.

You could appeal but I'm assuming that you now have a sour taste in the mouth and won't go back, which is a real shame.

I sympathize with urbanphotos; something similar happened to me at the Open Directory where I served as an editor for a few months. All too often volunteer projects end up being mismanaged by petty bureaucrats.

As I see it, the main problem with the Wikipedia is not spam but the fact that no matter how much you contribute, you get exactly zero credit or recognition. Jimmy Wales gets all the credit. My prediction is that the Wikipedia is a short-term phenomenon, and in the long run it will give way to resources that are structured more intelligently.

nick May 18, 2009 21:37

hi bruce yes i think we all should be aware of this , as i would imagine a lot of internet, visitors still may not, know this, but as i say this im sure there are a lot of us that do know this, so we should when looking for info about a subject, well this is what i do at least, find five answers that are the same and you have a answer usually, if looking for a particular subnect that you are not sure of.
so thanks again for bringing this to the attention of us at quassia.

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