Reliability of Wikipedia

Authorship and management process

During December 2005, Wikipedia had about 27,000 users who made at least five edits that month; 17,000 of these active users worked on the English edition. A more active group of about 4,000 users made more than 100 edits per month, over half of these users having worked in the English edition. According to Wikimedia, one-quarter of Wikipedia's traffic comes from users without accounts, who are less likely to be editors.

Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers, stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators, which number in the hundreds. Administrators are the largest such group, privileged with the ability to prevent articles from being edited, delete articles, or block users from editing in accordance with community policy. Many users have been temporarily or permanently blocked from editing Wikipedia. Vandalism or the minor infraction of policies may result in a warning or temporary block, while long-term or permanent blocks for prolonged and serious infractions are given by Jimmy Wales or, on its English edition, an elected Arbitration Committee.

Former Nupedia editor-in-chief, Larry Sanger, has said that having the GFDL license as a "guarantee of freedom is a strong motivation to work on a free encyclopedia." In a study of Wikipedia as a community, economics professor Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation. Wikipedia has been viewed as an experiment in a variety of social, political, and economic systems, including anarchy, democracy, and communism. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though that is a consequence. Critics of Wikipedia have also viewed it as an oligarchy which is controlled primarily by its administrators, stewards, and bureaucrats, or simply by a small number of its contributors.Template:Fact Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch has referred to Jimbo Wales as the "dictator" of Wikipedia; however, most Wikipedia users either do not consider Wales to be a dictator, or consider him to be one who rarely gives non-negotiable orders.

Criticism and controversy

Template:Weasel Template:Further Wikipedia has become increasingly controversial as it has gained prominence and popularity, with critics alleging that Wikipedia's open nature makes it unauthoritative and unreliable, that it exhibits severe systemic bias and inconsistency, and that the group dynamics of its community are hindering its goals.Template:Fact Wikipedia has also been criticized for its use of dubious sources, its disregard for credentials, and its vulnerability to vandalism and special interest groups. Critics of Wikipedia include Wikipedia editors themselves, ex-editors, representatives of other encyclopedias, and even subjects of articles.

A number of independent studies indicate that Wikipedia is of similar order of magnitude of reliability to other reputable sources, such as Encyclopedia Brittanica.

At the end of 2005, controversy arose after journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr. found that his biography had been written largely as a hoax, which had gone undetected for almost 4 months. This led to several policy decisions within Wikimedia regarding creation of articles and the overview process, iintended to address some of the flaws which had allowed the hoax to go undetected for that time.

The Wikipedia model

Wikipedia has been both praised and criticized for being open to editing by anyone. Proponents contend that open editing improves quality over time Template:Fact, while critics allege that non-expert editing undermines quality.

Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority. It is criticised as having no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians, academics, and the editors of more formally written encyclopedias. Many university lecturers discourage their students from using any encyclopedia as a reference in academic work, preferring primary sources instead. A critical website, Wikipedia Watch, was created by Daniel Brandt to denounce Wikipedia as having "…a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information."

Some critics have suggested that Wikipedia cannot justifiably be called an "encyclopedia", a term which (it is claimed) implies a high degree of reliability and authority that Wikipedia, due to its open editorial policies, may not be able to maintain.Template:Fact However, Wikipedia does meet all the criteria for the basic definition of the word encyclopedia. One difference from book encyclopedia is online web editing with wikipedia's history function. A deleted text will remain in the history tab and others users can look up an individual's work history to gauge the author's merit.

Reliability

Critics of Wikipedia often charge that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work, and that some editors may employ clever use of semantics to make possibly biased statements sound more credible.[1] Wikipedia contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and the editors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, librarian Philip Bradley said that he would not use Wikipedia and is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window." Although Wikipedia has a policy of citing primary sources, this is only sometimes adhered to. Similarly, Encyclopædia Britannica's executive editor, Ted Pappas, was quoted in The Guardian as saying: "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection. That premise is completely unproven." On October 24, 2005, The Guardian published an article "Can you trust Wikipedia?" where a group of experts critically reviewed entries for their fields. Discussing Wikipedia as an academic source, Danah Boyd said in 2005 that "[i]t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes."

Academic circles have not been exclusively dismissive of Wikipedia as a reference. Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light", and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves.

In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," former Britannica editor Robert McHenry criticized the wiki approach, writing:

"[H]owever closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler… The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."

Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger criticized Wikipedia in late 2004 for having, according to Sanger, an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise.

The English-language website at times also suffered from frequent timeouts, server errors and occasional downtime due to heavy user traffic. These problems have had a negative effect on Wikipedia's desired image as a fast and reliable source of information.

Ultimately, the reliability of Wikipedia depends upon the articles that it is composed of. While some pages have their content brought into disrepute due to strong opinions (such as George W. Bush), many articles cover subjects that do not produce such emotive responses and therefore are more reliable (such as nitrogen). Full use of referencing to recognised academic sources, several rounds of editing and discussions of the page can add to the credibility of sources.

Wikipedia's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in improved accuracy. Referencing Linus' law of open-source development, Sanger stated earlier: "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow." Technology figure Joi Ito wrote on Wikipedia's authority, "[a]lthough it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds authoritative or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived." Conversely, in an informal test of Wikipedia's ability to detect misinformation, its author remarked that its process "isn't really a fact-checking mechanism so much as a voting mechanism", and that material which did not appear "blatantly false" may be accepted as true.

A web-based survey conducted from December 2005 to May 2006 assessed the "accuracy and completeness of Wikipedia articles". Fifty people (a fairly low response rate) accepted an invitation to assess an article. Of the fifty, thirty-eight agreed or strongly agreed that the article was accurate, and twenty-three agreed or strongly agreed that it was complete. Eighteen people compared the article they reviewed to the article on the same topic in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Six of those people found the Britannica article more or substantially more accurate and seven found the Britannica article to be more or substantially more complete. The survey did not attempt random selection of the participants, and it is not clear how the participants were invited.

The German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of Brockhaus Multimedial, Microsoft Encarta, and Wikipedia in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. In overall score, Wikipedia was rated 3.6 out of 5 points ("B-") In an analysis of online encyclopedias, Indiana University professors Emigh and Herring wrote that "Wikipedia improves on traditional information sources, especially for the content areas in which it is strong, such as technology and current events.". The journal Nature reported in 2005 that science articles in Wikipedia were comparable in accuracy to those in Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia had an average of four mistakes per article; Britannica contained three.

On March 24, 2006, Britannica provided a rebuttal labeling the study "fatally flawed". However, Kenneth Kister's Kister's Best Encyclopedias, 2nd edition (1994) compared the accuracy of Britannica to several other encyclopedias. Britannica — although more accurate than many — was ranked lower than Encyclopedia Americana, World Book Encyclopedia, and Compton's Encyclopedia, all of which received perfect scores. It is unclear how Wikipedia would fare if it is compared to those works.

Coverage

Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances was five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair." (As of December 2005, this is no longer the case.) Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger stated in 2004, "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven."

Wikipedia has been praised for making it possible for articles to be updated or created in response to current events. For example, the then-new article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident.Template:Fact Its editors have also argued that, as a website, Wikipedia is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.

In January 2006, The Christian Science Monitor published an article describing the reach of Wikipedia, taking into account its accuracy and editing process.

"Be Bold" has become an unofficial slogan of Wikipedia.

Community

The Wikipedia community consists of users who are proportionally few, but highly active. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices." Editors on Wikinfo, a fork of Wikipedia, similarly argue that new or controversial editors to Wikipedia are often unjustly labeled "trolls" or "problem users" and blocked from editing. Its community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article (a common complaint about open-source software development as well). It has also been described as "cult-like",, although, as these instances demonstrate, not always with entirely negative connotations.

In a page on researching with Wikipedia, the community view is argued that Wikipedia is valuable for being a social community. That is, authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen. Wikipedia editions also often contain reference desks in which the community answers questions.

Responses to criticisms

In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in Wikipedia articles. The idea is to provide source provenance on each interval of text in an article and temporal provenance as to its vintage. In this way a reader can know "who has used the facilities before him" and how long the community has had to process the information in an article to provide calibration on the "sense of security". However, these proposals for provenance are quite controversial. Aaron Krowne wrote a rebuttal article in which he criticized McHenry's methods, and labeled them "FUD", the marketing technique of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt".