Les Jones

Tech > Wikipedia

Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Brittanica questions the value of Wikipedia. I've always been skeptical of the whole Wiki concept. It has its uses. But as a definitive resource? No, thanks, for the reasons McHenry spells out:

Take the statements of faith in the efficacy of collaborative editing, replace the shibboleth "community" with the banal "committee," and the surprise dissolves before your eyes. Or, if you are of a statistical turn of mind, think a little about regression to the mean and the shape of the normal distribution curve. However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler.

He tests the idea by fact-checking an entry he knows will deal with a tricky subject. It turns out that an earlier version of the article had it right, but it was later "corrected" with bad information. It's the open source "many eyes" solution gone bad, since - unlike software - factual and historical information isn't self-evidently correct or incorrect by looking at it or compiling it.

Found via Slashdot. So McHenry notes a specific entry he checks for accuracy, only to find inconsistent, incomplete information. Some Slashdot users note that the strength of Wiki is that someone who notices the inconsistency can look up the facts in another source and correct the Wikipedia entry (ignoring the fact that in this case the Wiki process replaced good information with bad). Best response:

That begs the question: Does the Wikipedia exist to provide reference information for visitors ... or does it exist simply for people to edit it, giving writers some sort of vague satisfaction that their contribution has been accepted?

In other words, if you're already an authority on a subject, why are you looking it up on Wikipedia? And if you don't know anything about a subject and you have access to a better reference, why would you use Wikipedia? And in either case, how would the Wikipedia entry get corrected? If the best we can hope for from Wikipedia entries is a footnote saying "I looked this up in a real, honest-to-God encylopedia so I'm sure it's right" then Wikipedia is just Encyclopedia Cheapannica-but-Crummannica.