Please pardon the tone of this philippic. I've read too many ignorant complaints about Wikipedia recently, and I'm of a mind to set some things straight. Without further ado, please allow me to present rejoinders to seven common but fallacious claims about Wikipedia.
Wikipedia Modifies Entries
We begin with a category error. Wikipedia is "the free
encyclopedia that anyone can edit," not "the free encyclopedia that
edits itself." Every addition, change, or deletion is carried out by
some individual Wikipedia contributor. To say that it was Wikipedia
that made the modification is to confuse the encyclopedia with the
editor. It's like saying that New York City mugged you.
In other contexts, this kind of verbal slippage is harmless.
There's nothing particularly fallacious about saying that "the New York
Times reported so-and-so" rather than naming the reporter, editor, and
printing-press operator. If something shows up in the Times, then N
times out of N+1, the Times as a bureaucracy has made a conscious
decision that it ought to be printed. Under these circumstances, it
makes sense to treat the actions of the individual as the actions of
the entity.
Wikipedia doesn't work this way. It's
open. Anyone can edit it. It does not necessarily follow that because
some contributor made a particular modification, it must be the case
that the modification reflects an official position of the Wikimedia
foundation, a consensus among the Wikipedia community, absolute truth,
or anything else. It might. Frequently, it does not. Asking whether
it does is the beginning of wisdom, because now you are engaged with
the often messy processes by which Wikipedia evolves. But as long as
you speak of Wikipedia itself as the source of the change, you are
hiding the ball from yourself.
It is fine to black-box Wikipedia if all you are doing is
looking up information in it. But if you wish to make statements about
how it does or doesn't work, it is necessary to look under the
hood.
The Latest Word is the Last Word
More times than I would like to remember, I have seen someone
complain that Wikipedia gets something wrong, as though that were the
end of the matter. In the time it took to write your mournful post
about the brokenness of the Wikipedia model, you could have gone in and
made the necessary change. Indeed, in every case I have ever seen, the
mere fact that someone took the time to complain has caused the
Wikipedian platelets to swing into action and fix the mistake
themselves. Pointing to specific examples of wrongness in Wikipedia is
self-negating; in a month's time, it is more likely that Wikipedia will
have corrected the issue than that you will have acknowledged the
correction.
This phenomenon is an instance of a more general point
Wikipedia is as much a process as it is a product. The process is
designed to produce an encyclopedia of constantly improving quality.
The encyclopedia is a constantly moving target. Thus, while it is
reasonable to say that at present Wikipedia is
defective for X purpose and in its coverage of Y, one should be
cautious with attempts to extrapolate these failings too far into the
future. (After all, if it's extrapolation we're engaged in, any fair
assessment of how quickly Wikipedia has become as useful as it is would
suggest that within a decade it will easily be the most comprehensive
and useful reference work of all time.)
This fallacy is closely related to the first, in that both
treat Wikipedia as monolithic and wholly consistent in all it does. It
is not. Any change can always later be undone; many are. Entries
change course as editors smooth them over; sudden outbreaks of
attention cause entries that have gone astray to be sharply reworked by
more experienced hands; experts who discover factual muddles in their
fields clean up some of the muddles. Sometimes the reverse happens,
too; Wikipedia's improvement is hardly monotonic.
You cannot make sweeping claims about Wikipedia's behavior in
the limit merely by looking at the latest change. Or, at least, you
cannot make such claims with much hope of correctness.
Wikipedia is Chaotic
The freedom inherent in the Wikipedia model is confusing and
frightening. If assuming that Wikipedia will always and forever say
what it says now is a prevalent mistake, the opposite mistake also
claims many victims. They assert that because of its openness,
Wikipedia must be a roiling sea, caught in a neverending process of
constant flux. They see a million monkeys and a million typewriters.
That something as ordered and stable as an encyclopedia could emerge
from such tumult seems inconceivable.
This error is endemic to popular understandings of
evolutionary processes. The same argument would "prove" that
biological evolution is impossible, that free markets cannot work, and
that the human brain is no more capable of thought than a bowl of
oatmeal. Wikipedia, like other complex adaptive systems, exhibits
different properties overall than it does at the micro scale. Yes, any
given article may swing back and forth between two equally wrong
claims. Yes, a random new user make one change and muck up the grammar
of the entry he touches. But the average edit, all in all, improves
Wikipedia's quality,--and there are a lot of
edits.
One of things you quickly realize if you spend any significant
time editing Wikipedia--or reading about Wikipedia--is that it has a
rich and quite structured editing community. From its high-level
editorial policies down through the nits of article naming conventions
and linking styles, Wikipedians have an extensive library of best
practices and wisdom-pooling processes to draw upon. The community
makes decisions by persuasion, by consensus, by voting, and, if
necessary, by fiat--but never forget that it makes
decisions. That its decision-making takes place mostly
bottom-up and on a self-directed as-needed basis does not mean that it
doesn't happen. Wikipedia is not an atomistic universe of monkeys each
at its own typewriter; its contributors share, converse, debate,
cajole, shout, and much much more. This surfeit of collective (and
occasionally dictatorial) decision-making may irk some--and has led to
some high-profile defections over the years--but it has also enabled
Wikipedia to set any number of policies for itself. None are perfectly
observed (nor could they be in such an open editing model), but again,
on average they add order and direction.
To talk about Wikipedia as an encyclopedia and ignore the community is to miss much of the point.
The Vandals Will Have Their Way
It is also tempting to look at Wikipedia's openness and assume
that it cannot work. (That it has worked, and remarkably well, should
have been proof against such temptation. The flesh is weak, it would
appear.) If anyone can edit it, well then, what's to stop the jerks
from coming in and trying to trash the place? There are, after all, an
awful lot of jerks out there.
Well, there are a lot of jerks out there, and they do try a
lot of fairly antisocial tricks, but they don't make much headway, all
in all. Why not? First, because it is exceedingly hard to mess up
Wikipedia or any individual entry in a way that cannot
easily--trivially, even--be fixed. Keeping complete histories of every
page (an underappreciated characteristic of Wikipedia to which we shall
return) means that actual destruction is out of the question; the worst
your average intruder can do is mess up the current state of a page.
But in the revert war that will soon follow, Wikipedia enjoys a second
advantage. There are far more people who are motivated to help
Wikipedia than who are motivated to hurt it. The griefers, vandals,
and script kiddies are up against committed and conscientious monitors
who look both for widespread damage and for questionable edits. Third,
the good guys have interior lines and the high ground. From IP banning
to recent change monitoring, they have a toolkit that has been
designed, in substantial part, to help them preserve the encyclopedia
from its foes.
If you look at Wikipedia as it actually is, these factors
together make it largely vandalism-free. While the
number of malicious edits and the
number of edits to fix the damage may be
comparable, the average time that articles spend
in damaged states is much smaller than the average
time that they spend in fixed states. Large
attacks are quickly detected and fixed; while small and malevolent
changes may last longer, they are comparatively few and far between.
(Anything more systematic would draw enough attention to itself that it
would be quickly rooted out.) Thus, while it is always
possible that a vandal, a propagandist, or
prankster will have come through recently, it is usually highly
unlikely.
Once again, Wikipedia has good statistical properties. The
correctness of any given claim it makes is not guaranteed; it is merely
likely. And, as we have noted, that likelihood is growing with
time.
Wikipedia is Unaccountable
Perhaps the favorite anti-Wikipedia talking point of those who
have spent significant time in journalism is that Wikipedia cannot be
authoritative because its editing model cannot properly vouch for the
assertions it makes. This claim says less about Wikipedia than it does
about the mental blocks of those who make it.
Is the problem that Wikipedia is anonymous, that each article
does not prominently bear the byline of an author willing to stand
behind it? The Economist is anonymous, and so is
the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, Wikipedia
is less anonymous than many stalwart
fact-transmitting institutions. Just have a look through the edit
history of your favorite page. You can see exactly who added which
words, and with a few more clicks, what other articles they've
contributed to. That's a level of transparency that few other
institutions achieve. Most of the time, you know exactly who made a
particular assertion--and whether others have questioned or qualified
it.
Is the problem that Wikipedia's contributors aren't
credentialled experts? Scholars understand that transparency matters
more than credentials. Wikipedia may not cite sources often, but it
cites them more often than most of the competition.
Is the problem that Wikipedia doesn't have institutional
credibility, the way that a newspaper or publisher would? If so, then
the argument is circular. If Wikipedia's ability to return
mostly-reliable facts quickly doesn't help it build institutional
credibility, what exactly would? It's not always right, but it's
usually right.
Or is the problem simply that Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia
that anyone can edit, rather than a large media corporation or a
professional working for one? The last few years have not been good
for scholars and journalists who say, "Trust me; I'm a professional."
Perhaps the Wikipedia model might have something to offer, here. Not
so much "Trust me; I'm an amateur" as "Trust us, we're a whole huge
bunch of amateurs, and our biases and blind spots mostly cancel
out."
Wikipedia Pays Too Much Attention to Trivial Topics
It is sometimes noted that Wikipedia's coverage is
disproportionately heavy on pop culture and Internet phenomena. The
sort of stuff that Wikipedia contributors would be likely to care
about, as is frequently claimed. That is as may be; there's no denying
that Star
Trek, say, receives far more extensive coverage in Wikipedia
than in any traditional encyclopedia ever printed. It remains to be
shown, however, why there's anything wrong with extensive Star Trek
coverage.
In the first place, it is not as though the entry on the Rules of
Acquisition is taking up precious space that could have gone
to expanding the entry on Ignatius
Loyola Donnelly. They coexist in complete harmony; one's
gain need not come at the other's expense. Such are the virtues of
online publication.
Thus, perhaps the complaint is that all the time spent
cataloguing the sayings of the Ferengi could have been better spent on
the link between Donnelly's Populism and his belief in Atlantis.
Perhaps. But it is not as though Wikipedia has a budget that it
squandered on the Grand Nagus. I sincerely doubt that there is a
significant relationship between effort devoted to the one and effort
devoted to the other. If Wikipedia were somehow to shut down its Star
Trek section, it is not as though the editing pace in its other
sections would pick up the slack. The limiting factor on revisions to
Ignatius Loyola Donnelly's entry is probably, well, the anemic level of
interest in Ignatius Loyola Donnelly. Once again, the allegedly
trivial entries neither help nor hurt the supposedly serious
ones.
So maybe the argument is that the fluff somehow degrades the
tone of the encyclopedia. But that can't be much of a concern either.
Are we really going to discredit something useful because it also
chooses to be fun? No one ever forces you to read about Star Trek. If
you want to know how a Geneva
drive works, what matters to you is that Wikipedia have a
damn good entry on it. That the same web site also contains a
multi-part list of
fictional cities is neither here nor there.
In the end, I suspect that this complaint is really based in a
sense that certain topics are unworthy of serious attention, and that
Wikipedia makes the world worse by giving them such attention. Put
another way, certain stuff just doesn't belong in an encyclopedia. To
which I--and the thousands of Wikipedia contributors responsible for
that stuff--say "Ack Thbbbt
." If this many people care about it, and care about it
enough to curate extensive and well-organized expositions of it, who is
to say that they are wrong? The argument that these topics degrade the
quality of Wikipedia amounts to an argument no just that the plebs is
wrong to care about the things it cares about, but that it
should not be given the resources to learn about
them. While I can be as snooty about my media diet as the next guy,
you won't find me saying that Entertainment Tonight
should be banned--or that the Star Trek section of Wikipedia should be
deleted.
Wikipedia is Perfect
Having just debunked six attacks on the possibility of
Wikipedia, I may appear something of a booster. I had better
reestablish my credibility as a realist with some
pointed observations about the genuine issues that
Wikipedia does face.
Wikipedia as it now exists has many
problems. Many entries have small factual errors; many more are
terribly organized. There are duplications and inconsistencies and
strange taxonomies galore. Its coverage of many subjects is thin; its
references to good further reading are often highly spotty. The great
majority of entries could use a good copy-editing.
Wikipedia's editing conventions are not particularly legible
to outsiders or to new contributors. You can quickly figure out Wiki
syntax, but it is less easy to figure out how you should categorize and
cross-link a new entry. Do you need to figure out how to participate
in a deletion debate? Good luck understanding all the relevant
conventions your first time through. Many of the hurt feelings and
crossed lines that contribute to the confusions above are side effects
of this steep learning curve.
The Wikipedia community is very much a work in progress. Many
of its purported policies are observed mostly in the breach. It has
developed any number of healthy habits and productive practices, but it
also has a fair number of difficult personalities and frustrating tics.
Some of these unfortunate tendencies may be cleaned up as its norms
evolve and solidify, but that same process of regularization may
squeeze out some of the flexibility that has allowed Wikipedia to grow
so quickly. It has a suspicion of expertise that is not just
unwarranted but actively counter-productive. And, oh man, if I had a
dollar for every time a Wikipedian has jumped to conclusions or been
too abrupt in dealing with an outsider's attempt to engage with
Wikipedia.
I'm optimistic about Wikipedia's future. It's done great
things in an astonishingly brief time. Every time I turn around, it's
just gotten better and better. I see no fundamental obstacles that
would keep it from being the universal encyclopedia it aspires to be.
But it also faces some significant challenges. There are security,
social, legal, academic, cultural, technical, and financial shoals
ahead. It is quite possible that any one of these could sink
it.
But perhaps the best way to appreciate how remarkable the
Wikipedia model and the Wikipedia community are is to ask what would
happen if something did go catastrophically wrong
and Wikipedia became unusable. We would still have the encyclopedia
that Wikipedia is today. Thanks to the open
license under which Wikipedia has been developed and made
available, anyone with a snapshot of it--and there are many people with
snapshots, even if most of them are link farmers--could continue to
serve it up to the world. In the last half decade, almost entirely
with volunteer labor, Wikipedia has created a quite credible first cut
at an encyclopedia. That's no mean feat. That the community is
thriving and shows every sign of producing credible second, third, and
further cuts . . . well, that's just our extraordinary good
fortune.
(This story has been cross-posted to <a href="http://www.laboratorium.net/archives/SevenWikipediaFallacies.html">The Laboratorium</a>.)