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Why Is Wikipedia So Bad?

Pamela Chappell LIS 600 September 22, 2008

Why Is Wikipedia So Bad?

With the use of computers and the internet information is available more quickly and in greater quantity than ever before. Yet quantity does not mean quality. The internet can provide biased and inaccurate information put out there by anyone who knows how to do it. These are some of the criticisms of Wikipedia which was launched January 15, 2001.1 It has grown into the seventeenth-most-popular site on the Internet, generating more traffic daily than MSNCB.com and the online versions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal combined. . . [T]he site receives as many as fourteen thousand hits per second.2 The popularity of Wikipedia is not in question. And Diane Murley, Web Services Coordinator and Reference Librarian of the Ross-Blake Law Library at Arizona State University, is correct in stating that [students] are going to use Wikipedia no matter how many people tell them not to use it.3 But why are so many information professionals against Wikipedia? Is Wikipedia really that bad compared to other sources of information that are out there? Peter Jasco is an Associate Professor of Library & Information Science at the University of Hawaiis Department of Information and Computer Science. In his 2002 article, Peters Picks and Pan, he referred to Wikipedia as a prank, and a joke at best. When Wikipedia, at the time over the 16,000 mark, put forth a goal of 100,000 articles Jasco saw it as ambitious. There is no way to verify the number, but for perspective, the 6th edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia has 51,682 articles, so this is quite a tall order.4 In her 2006 article, Stacy Schiff notes that [t]he Encyclopedia Britannica . . . has only a hundred and twenty thousand entries in its most comprehensive edition.5
1

Larry Sanger, The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir, Slashdot, April 18, 2008, http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213 (accessed September 13, 2008).
2

Stacy Schiff, Know It All: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise?, The New Yorker, July 31, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/31/060721fa_fact?printable=true (accessed September 17, 2008).
3

Diane Murley, In Defense of Wikipedia, Law Library Journal 100, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 593-9, http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047e841ab1e3a181c233a760af937ca4043c2d72b9 f9c0b683b&fmt=H (accessed September 14, 2008).
4

P. Jacso, Peter's Picks & Pans. Online 26, no. 2 (March/April 2002): 79-82. http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047e845e04328550f2cdeb40fdb9f4a2b32638d1f0d 88bed664&fmt=H (accessed September 18, 2008).
5

Schiff.

This was in response to Wikipedia reaching the one-million articles marker on March 1, 2006. Now in 2008, one is left to wonder if Jasco feels the same about Wikipedia, six years later. When contacted by email he had this to say: . . . it has improved a lot, but there are still many articles which are grossly biased, inaccurate, and even the good ones are constantly vandalized.6

Biased
One of the first policies Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, cofounders of Wikipedia, agreed on was a nonbias or neutrality policy. This was with Nupedia, the predecessor of Wikipedia. And although Wikipedias first rule was Ignore all the rules, there were a couple that were agreed upon within the first six months and both were carryovers from Nupedia. The first was more of a guideline of what Wikipedia was not. Wikipedia was an encyclopedia, not a dictionary and not a place to publish original research. The second was the neutral point of view (NPOV) principle. Sanger quotes the policy in this way: Avoid bias: Since this is an encyclopedia, after a fashion, it would be best if you represented your controversial views either (1) not at all, (2) on *Debate, *Talk, or *Discussion pages linked from the bottom of the page that youre tempted to grace, or (3) represented in a factstating fashion, i.e., which attributes a particular opinion to a particular person or group, rather than asserting the opinion as fact. (3) is strongly preferred. 7 In 2006, the Library Journal sought out three reviewers to examine Wikipedia in their areas of expertise. Karl Helicher (current affairs) found himself pleased by Wikipedias objective presentation of controversial subjects. 8 He decided to explore controversial historical and current event, hoping to find glaring abuses . . . but he did not. 9 He looked at issues such as
6

Peter Jasco, e-mail message to author, September 20, 2008. Sanger.

B. X. Miller, Karl Helicher, and Teresa Berry, I Want My Wikipedia!, Library Journal 131, no. 6 (April 1, 1976): 122, 124, http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047a986a72271795cc656fb446be57d433cf9c635b 6352dba01&fmt=P (accessed September 14, 2008). Of the other two reviewers: Barry X. Miller (popular culture) inferred that [t]he public library is the peoples university, and Wikipedia, verily, is the peoples encyclopedia. Teresa Berry (science) was more hesitant with her praise, recognizing the need for editorial control, peer review and expert contribution. Yet, she still concluded that [d]espite its flaws . . . Wikipedia should not be dismissed. Teresa Berry will be used later.
9

Helicher, I Want My Wikipedia! Emphasis added.

Hurricane Katrina, slavery reparations, social security privatization, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, President George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Bill OReilly, and James Carville. Helicher does acknowledge that the talk pages are frequently biased. Yet this is an area clearly separated from the article and deemed appropriate in Sangers policy (2) listed above.

Inaccurate
It is interesting that Helicher was hoping to find bias and surprisingly did not. Alex Halavais, an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Buffalo, had a similar experience. He decided to put Wikipedia to the test by inserting 13 errors into various entries. One error asserted that abolitionist Frederick Douglass had once lived in Syracuse, and another fooled with the Periodic Table . . . Within two and a half hours, site visitors had corrected all errors.10 It is impressive that the examples of Halavais errors were subtle and yet caught and corrected so quickly. He simply changed the entry to read that Frederick Douglass had once lived in Syracuse, not to something outrageous like Douglass was never a slave. Even Jasco, who belittles Wikipedia as inaccurate, acknowledges the inaccuracies of other encyclopedias: I have been reviewing general and specialized encyclopedias for years, and I know that not even Britannica, Columbia, Grolier, and Collier are perfect. They have some inaccuracies, outdated and incomplete articles, in spite of the million-dollar investments and decades of development by the best topic experts and editors, who are paid for their contributions.11 Wikipedia does not have million-dollar investments and its development is on-going for six years. Its contributors are not always the best topic experts and they are not paid. Can this be such a bad thing? In December 2005 a Nature study compared forty-two scientific entries in Wikipedia to the same in Encyclopedia Britannica (online). It found that Encyclopedia Britannica had an average of three errors per article to Wikipedias average of four.12 In response, Britannica issued a public statement refuting the surveys findings, and took out a half-page advertisement in Times, which said, in part, Britannica has never claimed to be error-free. We have a reputation not for unattainable perfection but for
10

K. Ishizuka, The Wikipedia Wars, School Library Journal 50, no. 11 (November 2004): 245, http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047078950860e6c64875649c144ada92b704c55dc 60dfe6a0c4&fmt=H (accessed September 14, 2008).
11

Jasco. Murley; Schiff.

12

strong scholarship, sound judgment, and disciplined editorial review.13 What Britannica boasts about are other criticisms of Wikipedia. Teresa Berry, a participant in the Library Journals reviews listed above, was hesitant with her praise of Wikipedia, recognizing the need for editorial control, peer review, and expert contribution. Yet, she still concluded that [d]espite its flaws . . . Wikipedia should not be dismissed.14

Vandalism and Editorial Control

Vandalism is an ongoing problem with Wikipedia. Who knows why theses trolls (another term coined by Sanger) do what they do. Surely Wikipedians would consider Alex Halavais a troll for purposefully inserting the thirteen errors into the various articles. Yet Halavais was not being malicious, he was just testing. He was trying to make a point and he did. So did Stephen Colbert on a July 2006 episode of the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. On the show he edited the Stephen Colbert entry and added In conclusion, George Washington did not own slaves, to the George Washington article. Then he urged viewers to edit the entry on elephants to say that the elephant population in Africa had tripled in the past six months.15 Enough Colbert fans followed orders and the Wikipedia servers crashed. When the servers came back up Wikipedia truth-squadders swung into action. They locked down 20 entries on elephants to all but longtime users. They did the same to Colberts entry, and they barred the screen name StephenColbert from making further changes. . . Then Wikipedia took the smart step of posting the pre-Colbert entries alongside the many, many post-Colbert ones to show exactly what was changed and when it was changed by subsequent editors.16 Both these examples of vandalism at first glance seem to show Wikipedias weakness: how easily anyone can edit articles, hence the cry for editorial control. But look again and editorial control is there. With Halavais his thirteen errors were all corrected in two and a half hours. With Colbert Wikipedia administrators responded quickly and corrected the errors and prevented the vandalism from continuing. In fact, in October 2001, in response to the editing wars and vandalism, Jimmy Wales appointed a small cadre of administrators, called admins, to police the site for abuse. Admins
13

Schiff. Berry, I Want My Wikipedia!

14

15

Murley; Frank Ahrens, Its on Wikipedia, So It Must Be True, Washington Post, August 6, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/08/05/AR2006080500114_pf.html (accessed September 5. 2008).
16

Ahrens.

can delete articles or protect them from further changes, block users from editing, and revert text more efficiently than can ordinary users.17 And that is exactly what they did.

Peer Review and Expert Contribution

Jimmy Wales is quoted as saying, Every article [in Wikipedia] is subjected to rigorous and ongoing peer review, which will, over time, result in stronger articles than Britannica.18 If this is true then why do Teresa Berry and others like her disapprove of Wikipedia for its lack of peer review? The issue here is about formal peer review. Formal peer review would be performed by experts of their specific fields of study. Berry states, Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Wikipedia is the inability to ascertain the contributors credentials.19 But what some see as a weakness, others see as part of the beauty of Wikipedia. Schiff writes, Waless most radical contribution may be not to have made information free butin his own alma-matricidal wayto have invented a system that does not favor the PhD over the well-read fifteen year old.20 It is important to note here that Nupedia, Wikipedias predecessor, encompassed all the desired qualities that Wikipedias denouncers seek. It was a nonbiased, accurate, non-vandalized site that was edited and reviewed by mostly PhD professors and highly-experienced professionals. Its Advisory Board agreed to a seven stage approval process and [b]y early winter, 2001, Nupedia had published approved versions of only about 25 articles.21 This one year progress pales in comparison to Wikipedias. In its first month Wikipedia had 600 articles. Wikipedia was created because Wales and Sanger agreed that there needed to be a way in which ordinary people could participate in the idea of a free encyclopedia. Of the two, Sanger says in his memoir, The projects Wikipedia and Nupedia, were naturally complementary parts of a single, symbiotic whole. That is at least how I always regarded them, indeed, from the very

17

Schiff.

18

K. Levack, If Two Heads Are Better than One, Try 7,000 with Wikipedia.EContent 26, no. 4 (April 2003): 12-13. http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c70475635c4138ed26d0f6b8b6b2fb4ae25235b400ea e2f280591&fmt=H (accessed September 15, 2008).
19

Berry, I Want My Wikipedia! Schiff. Sanger.

20

21

founding of Wikipedia.22 Sanger tried to save Nupedia more than once but it was allowed to die.

Conclusion
Bias, inaccuracies, and vandalism are continuous problems that Wikipedias admins will always battle. These are issues that the information professional can do nothing about because these are issues caused by others. Yet there is something that can be done about edit control, formal peer review, and expert contribution. That is simply to do it yourself. Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia. All the complaints could lead one to believe that so called experts and people with credentials were banned from contributing which is not the case. It seems that too many of these qualified people look down their noses instead of offering a helping hand. Lauren Pressley and Carolyn J. McCallum, librarians at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University, use Wikipedia by adding internal links to related entries and external links to [their] digitized collections to existing entries in Wikipedia.23 It appears they see Wikipedia more as a friend than an enemy. Of those information professionals who do not dismiss Wikipedia, it seems that they view it as a tool to teach students about information literacy. Diane Murley appreciates Wikipedia as a good tool to use to teach researchers about the necessity of evaluating sources.24Adam Bennington feels that [i]nstead of demonizing Wikipedia as a poor research tool, academic and school librarians should use it as an occasion to teach information literacy skills.25 And Travis Hampton, a Media Specialist at Longfellow Middle School in Indianapolis, sees advantages to Wikipedia. He says, Many times the articles in Wikipedia spark new ideas and provide helpful links or references . . . Used in isolation, it is insufficient for research, but I would argue that any encyclopedia is.26 Wikipedia is a source of information. It is a main
22

Ibid.

23

Lauren Pressley and Carolyn J. McCallum, Putting the Library in Wikipedia, Online 32, no. 5 (September/October 2008): 39-42, http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047e841ab1e3a181c23f34b6c78907fdc1bafc974d4 552bf4ec&fmt=P (accessed September 13, 2008).
24

Murley.

25

Adam Bennington, Dissecting the Web through Wikipedia, American Libraries 39, no. 7 (August 2008): 46-9, http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047e841ab1e3a181c2377ef7c25c144bf5be8de4eaf 16211713&fmt=H (accessed September 12, 2008).
26

Ishizuka.

responsibility of an information professional to teach information seekers how to obtain what they are looking for. John Feather asserts correctly that [i]n some fields of publishing, the use of computers has facilitated wholly new developments whose products have begun to displace the printed book itself.27 He continues by first recognizing the advantages of the printed book (portable, easily stored, familiar, userfriendly) but then he addresses two major limitations: it is impossible to change, and it can only be consulted in an essentially linear mode.28 The computer can be seen as the answer to these restrictions. For example, with a book, once the material has been printed it can only be updated by printing a new book. Also, the user is limited to the indexing choices of those who produced the book. With an online database information is current and can be updated instantaneously. And the user is open to search for limitless terms at will. To be clear, Feather is not arguing for online databases and against the printed word. He discusses the pros and cons of both and actually finds a solution in the CD-ROM. He concludes, the CD-ROM is the ideal compromise, for it does well what the printed book does badly, and it does cheaply what an online system does expensively.29 Wikipedia is a step above the CD-ROM. Wikipedia can change instantaneously and for free. While the CD-ROM can be reproduced cheaply in is not instantaneous. A Wikipedia user also has all the advantages of searching for topics to the hearts desire. This being the case, Feathers logic can be an used to show a correlation with Wikipedia: Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, does well what the printed encyclopedia does badly, and it does cheaply (free) what the online encyclopedia does expensively. It can be a good thing.

*****

27

John Feather, The Information Market-Place. In The Information Society: A Study of Continuity and Change, 2004, 56.
28

Ibid. Ibid., 62.

29

Bibliography
Ahrens, Frank. Its on Wikipedia, So It Must Be True. Washington Post, August 6, 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/08/05/AR2006080500114_pf.html (accessed September 5. 2008). Bennington, A. Dissecting the Web through Wikipedia. American Libraries 39, no. 7 (August 2008): 46-9. http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047e841ab1e3a181c2377ef7 c25c144bf5be8de4eaf16211713&fmt=H (accessed September 12, 2008). Feather, John. The Information Market-Place. In The Information Society: A Study of Continuity and Change, 43-76. 2004. Ishizuka, K. The Wikipedia Wars. School Library Journal 50, no. 11 (November 2004): 24-5. http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047078950860e6c64875649c 144ada92b704c55dc60dfe6a0c4&fmt=H (accessed September 14, 2008). Jacso, P. Peter's Picks & Pans. Online 26, no. 2 (March/April 2002): 79-82. http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047e845e04328550f2cdeb40f db9f4a2b32638d1f0d88bed664&fmt=H (accessed September 18, 2008). Levack, K. If Two Heads Are Better than One, Try 7,000 with Wikipedia. EContent 26, no. 4 (April 2003): 12-13. http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c70475635c4138ed26d0f6b8b6 b2fb4ae25235b400eae2f280591&fmt=H (accessed September 15, 2008). Miller, B. X., Karl Helicher, and Teresa Berry. I Want My Wikipedia! Library Journal 131, no. 6 (April 1, 1976): 122, 124. http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047a986a72271795cc656fb4

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46be57d433cf9c635b6352dba01&fmt=P (accessed September 14, 2008). Murley, Diane. In Defense of Wikipedia. Law Library Journal 100, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 593-9. http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047e841ab1e3a181c233a760 af937ca4043c2d72b9f9c0b683b&fmt=H (accessed September 14, 2008). Pressley, Lauren, and Carolyn J. McCallum. Putting the Library in Wikipedia. Online 32, no. 5 (September/October 2008): 39-42. http://libproxy.uncg.edu:2072/hww/jumpstart.jhtml? recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e376f00f68b9c7047e841ab1e3a181c23f34b6 c78907fdc1bafc974d4552bf4ec&fmt=P (accessed September 13, 2008). Rainie, Lee, and Bill Tancer. Wikipedia: When in Doubt, Multitudes Seek It Out. Pew Research Center, April 24, 2007. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/460/wikipedia (accessed September 14, 2008). Sanger, Larry. The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir. Slashdot, April 18, 2008. http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213 (accessed September 13, 2008). Schiff, Stacy. Know It All: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise? The New Yorker, July 31, 2006. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/31/060721fa_fact? printable=true (accessed September 17, 2008).

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