What I Know Is...

At dinner the other day I had someone raggin' on Wikipedia, and I felt the need to step in. It didn't do much good (at least, it didn't convert him to my point of view, which is the only 'good' I'm going to allow for here), which was not unexpected. Wikipedia has become so ubiquitous that most of the 'it's just made up' or 'anyone can do it' criticisms have fallen by the wayside. It's hard to constantly dismiss a service you use with great effect, every day of the week. The only people who are still staunch critics of Wikipedia are those who do not regularly use it, and they can therefore be difficult to convince of its positives.

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites on the internet, one of the most consulted resources on the planet. It's a universal repository of the world's knowledge, accessible to everyone with a connection and watched over by a community of independent guiding individuals. With it you can take a good stab at answering any non-subjective, fact-based question you can come up with, and if it doesn't have the answer its editors will eventually get around to looking it up. Or if you already know, you could make the page yourself, with the guidance and correction of the community and their code of conduct. It's basically the collective wet-dream of Ancient Greek philosophers and 1960s science fiction.

However, Wikipedia’s most egalitarian dynamic is the source of its most persistent criticism: anyone can edit it, you don’t have to pay for it, and therefore it’s all incorrect. Wrong. Bullshit. Outright lies (often with some sort of agenda).

There have been several well publicised acts of Wikipedia vandalism, in which people deliberately introduced incorrect and occasionally defamatory information to particular pages. There are instances of omission or out-of-date data, and perceived bias (in America, and possibly only America, Wikipedia has been reported to have a ‘liberal’ bias, and other services have sprung up to mirror or counter this).

You know, instead of me telling you all this, why not peruse the Wikipedia article on its own reliability? It’s extremely interesting.

Criticisms of Wikipedia seem to be fading away. Many of its opponents have had their queries or criticisms addressed and have tentatively given the initiative their approval. One suspects that many of its critics have simply found it too convenient, or found it their first place of research too many times to remain vociferous in their disapproval.

One thing you might note from the article linked above is that the most vocal critics of Wikipedia seem to be editors or ex-editors of other encyclopaedias. The easy joke to make is: ‘well they would say that, wouldn’t they.’ None of them could possibly admit that Wikipedia –a free service – can perform the functions of their own, paid publications as well or better than they can. As well as being a little embarrassing, they’d be out of a job (probably not because the encyclopaedia would fold, but I wouldn’t want to have to explain my Wikipedia thumbs-up to the board of directors on Monday morning).

However, I think it a little truculent to assume a reactionary stance on the part of these people. They are responsible for publications that have a dedication – a paid, professional dedication – to the truth. They are correct to point out that, in a system that is open to anyone, perfection is either unattainable or impossible to keep hold of. They make a salient point. I just don’t think they are operating in possession of all the facts.

Firstly one must remove all the assumptions or criticisms that are addressed by Wikipedia themselves. Primary among them is the idea that Wikipedia claims to be in any way incontrovertible. Wikipedia knows that people mess with it. It knows because the people who edit it spend much of their time removing incorrect information. But the fact that some of the information might be incorrect does not invalidate the rest. Wikipedia freely admits to its flaws, but doesn’t need to advertise them. To do so would undermine the principles of sharing factual information.

Look at it this way. Say the staff of the Encyclopaedia Britannica sat down before the launch of the latest edition. New research will, over time, either disprove or modify some of the information their book contains. New theories will either solidify or be dropped. It is also always possible, however unlikely, that some mistake might have slipped through their net. They cannot say with absolute certainty that every single word in the book is correct, now and forever, because that is simply impossible. Firstly, this does not negate the books usefulness as a research tool, not a jot. Secondly, it does not mean they are going to whack a big sticker on the front of every edition saying ‘Caution! One of these facts may prove to be false.’ To do so would invalidate (subjectively, not statistically) every other fact contained within. They don’t have to do that, in fact they shouldn’t, and neither should Wikipedia.

Next, it’s becoming increasingly hard to argue with Wikipedia’s results. As the community gathers strength (and let us not forget that Wikipedia is only ten years old. Britannica has been around since 1768), articles get bigger, better structured and better referenced. The kinks are slowly being ironed out, and now Wikipedia’s rate of major mistakes is comparable to paid services.

Thirdly, well, if you’re looking to really do some research, I would suggest looking at more than one book. To begin with, academic institutions came down hard on Wikipedia, refusing to countenance its use in a scholarly environment. While one might argue that it is Wikipedia’s slow trudge towards better quality that has led to the relaxing of these guidelines, a cynic would suggest that it’s because every single student in the world uses it as their primary research tool, if only to get a basic understanding of the concept they were supposed to have learned about in that class they slept through. Nowadays, most academic institutions (and this change was visible even during my own university career) limit themselves to wearily pointing out Wikipedia’s possible problems and suggesting that it might be an idea if students varied their sources a little bit. This final part is nothing new: students have always been told to research from multiple sources to get a better understanding and confirm the veracity of their statements. The most enterprising of lazy students will note that the bigger Wikipedia articles have lists of references at the bottom: the perfect place to start wider reading (without having to find that pesky reading list that you immediately lost on day 1 of the term).

Finally, most people are unaware of how Wikipedia actually operates behind the scenes. This is a little surprising, considering how simple it is to go and have a poke around. You can edit articles with relative ease, and create a user profile and start writing your own stuff within minutes. What people might who try might note, however, is how frickin’ difficult it is to just jump on there and start fucking with things.

Every change made to a Wikipedia article is visible to other users. There are teams of Wikipedia users, dozens, scores, hundreds, who spend a lot of their free time trawling around checking these immediate edits. If they don’t make the cut, they get cut. Straight away. In almost half the cases, before anyone else might have time to read them.

When I tried to create my first Wikipedia article I was staggered by how in-depth the code of conduct was. I did my best to follow it, and made an article for an upcoming book by a well-known children’s author. I had the new releases catalogue next to me, so I had a source, and I was fairly certain that no one else would have made that page. Off I went, and stuck to their style guidelines as best as I was able. All the information was demonstrably correct; the style was neutral and objective, the page itself linked to another page about the real-life individual the novel was about.

It lasted less than two days before it was marked for what is known as ‘speedy deletion.’ When I enquired as to why, I was told that the subject in question was not demonstrably notable: there was no apparent demand for the article, no one wanted to know, the very fact of the books existence was not enough to get it a page dedicated to it.

I tried to get sniffy about this but was stumped by the sheer objective weight of the person I was dealing with. He demonstrated what made an article notable, and more important, how that could be proved. ‘It doesn’t matter if you think it’s notable,’ he said (I am paraphrasing, his replies were marked by politeness but a certain brevity, I suspect I was not the only newbie he was gently remonstrating with). ‘You might even be right, but you need to be able to prove it.’

I gave up on that article, although I want to eventually become a bigger part of the Wikipedia community. For now I’ll edit any mistakes that I see (still waiting on that) and watch how it’s done. Hopefully my brief and unsuccessful foray points out how comprehensive the moderating is, and also how stringent the code: it’s a little eye-opening to see how every article matches the guidelines (even if it’s badly written or apparently pointless).

So if Wikipedia is easy to defend (and it is: I did all this in an hour, and guess what my primary source was), and if its criticisms are either easy to address or in some cases simply unfair and unrealistic, why the bad vibes, Joe Public?

I think it’s probably because it’s free, and anyone can edit it. That sounds like a tautology based on what I’ve discussed previously, but I want you to look at the above statement very carefully.

It’s free, and anyone can edit it. This has no inherent negative connotations. Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean it can’t be as good as or better than a paid service. The water that comes out of the tap is consistently demonstrated to be better for you than water you pay a pound for. And just because anyone can edit it, doesn’t mean that those who make edits might be poorly informed or somehow malicious. The fact that anyone can edit it means that you have a potentially limitless knowledge base on which to draw, making it, in statistical terms at least, the greatest learning tool in existence.

That isn’t how people see it, but I think that says more about people than Wikipedia. It’s become a natural assumption that anything free is somehow inferior to something you have to pay for. It’s the natural assumption that most people are idiots, and any initiative maintained by a collection of people must reflect this, even if the evidence suggests otherwise. If the masses are in charge, it must be somehow inferior to something created by the elite.

But knowledge is self-duplicating. The more people who know about it the more of it there is. That means that although a contributor may not have a PhD, they can still crib off the notes of someone who does. It’s the same knowledge. Having a PhD doesn’t make it more intrinsically right. If that knowledge could not be verified then no one would be able to get a PhD in the first place. Wikipedia is not merely the URL each article inhabits. It is a window to all knowledge relevant to the subject, regardless of who discovered, formulated or described that knowledge. The person who made the page is irrelevant, as it should be in the best encyclopaedia.