The world’s most popular website for, what a professor of mine once called “largely unreliable,” online reference material is facing a dilemma: fewer people are interested in contributing to it and editing it. Wikipedia is considered largely reliable by the online community and tends to have a lot of self-monitoring. However, those numbers have been falling with enough velocity to worry those who run the organization. Because virtually all of its editors are volunteers, reworking the convoluted editing protocols would be in Wikipedia’s best interests. In fact, The Associated Press reported earlier this month that the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is working to do just that by simplifying editing rules to attract more contributors and increase participation in actively editing the site. That’s no small task at three million entries and growing.
The non-profit organization is looking to add 5,000 editors by the end of June 2012 through outsourcing style ideas such as having university undergraduates contribute and edit as part of their course curricula. Another creative tactic to keep users engaged is the Wikilove feature.
Looking up Wikipedia on Wikipedia causes... nothing to happen, actually.
Wikilove was created to encourage users to stay involved and, according to Wikipedia, “is a term that refers to a general spirit of collegiality and mutual understanding among wiki users.” The idea is simple enough: maintain neutrality, be accepting of newcomers, assume good faith, follow the “Wikiquette”, etc.
For such an onerous task as cultivating the collective knowledge of all mankind, it would seem that the more altruistic types in society step up in droves to accumulate, validate, and disseminate the vast swaths of knowledge available on Wikipedia. The encyclopedic site’s 90,000 contributors who do the legwork of a global army do act as a formidable foe to the disinformers.
So, perhaps it is not that unreliable considering the volume of data. In fact, one study, conducted by Nature in 2005 found that, on the average, Wikipedia had 3.86 mistakes per article versus Enclyclopedia Brittanica online’s 2.92. This didn’t sit well with Brittanica, however, who fired back with their own review, calling Nature’s study “fatally flawed”. Nature in turn responded to Brittanica with their own “point-by-point rebuttal”. Tom Chesny from Nottingham University Business School published his own study in 2007 that said experts believe in Wikipedia’s validity more than non-experts. Clearly there is still some dispute.
So, while Wikipedia’s credibility has improved significantly in the 10 years since it was created, pranks and biased entries have not helped its case. A personal favorite of mine happened last year when a Star Trek fan replaced all of the instances of “spiders” in the entry for the movie Arachnophobia with “Jean Luc Picards”. I suppose it matters which entries you’re investigating. Recently, for instance, Michelle Bachmann’s cronies set out to change history by making John Quincy Adams, not the senior Adams, a founding father of the United States in an effort to validate her blatant lack of knowledge about American colonial history. Self-monitoring is great, but the ability of any schmuck with a $10/month internet connection to go out and rewrite history obviously has its risks.
Whatever the fate of Wikipedia, it behooves them to draw larger and more varied crowds of people who are scholars in their fields instead of geeky 20-somethings, the only ones savvy enough to understand the protocols. It can only continue to boost their credibility and give them the added bonus of working with solid research, which can help Wikipedia entries avoid that all-too-often condemning phrase “the neutrality of this article is disputed.”
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