Whither Wikipedia?
by Joseph Janes
Fri, 02/12/2010 - 12:19
The collaborative encyclopedia faces growing pains
PrintYou’ve got to feel a bit for Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales. Here’s a guy with a fairly simple but incredibly powerful idea: Create a way for people to share what they know with the wider world and in the process build a resource that can be of great benefit to everyone.
As he said in a recent message to the Wikipedia community, “One person writes something, somebody improves it a little, and it keeps getting better, over time.” Later, in bold face, he says, “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”
Lofty stuff, and you can’t deny he and the project have been incredibly successful. I can’t help wondering, though, whether it has all turned out quite the way he had in mind. The wild success and popular embrace of Wikipedia has given way of late to reports of difficulties.
It doesn’t take advertising, so there’s the continuing need to raise funds. (The above statements come from a recent fundraising appeal. With just the faintest whiff of anxiety, Wales also says, “We need to protect the space where this important work happens. We need to protect Wikipedia.”) And as we all well know, in a down economy, that sort of fundraising gets harder.
There are other darker clouds on the Wikihorizon. We’ve heard about increasing bureaucratization and calcification of its procedures, that there are fewer people participating and more people who seem more dedicated to committees and process than to writing new articles. (I’m sure there are more than a few organizational-theory dissertations gestating on this.)
Those might someday spell difficulty for the project, if the product starts to dim in terms of usefulness or interest. It’s also possible that something better might come along to dislodge or supersede it. This seems less likely, since, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, Wikipedia is pretty firmly lodged in the pantheon of Internet Tools Everybody Knows. That’s not to say it couldn’t be supplanted, though it would have to be by something more popular or sexier, since there wouldn’t be much competition on speed, cost, or quality.
It’s also possible that some other technology—a more mobile-friendly or natively mobile tool, for example, could come along that would make the current Wikipedia passé. It sends a bit of a shiver to conceive of a text- or tweet-based “encyclopedia” (maybe I shouldn’t even say that, lest such a creature arise), but it’s not beyond conception.
For now, Wikipedia is doing fine. Usage and visibility are strong, it met its 2009 fundraising goal of $7.5 million, and there’s no clear rival lurking in the shadows. (Neither, though, is there a clear heir apparent should Jimmy ever be unwilling or unable to continue his role as God-King. One wonders what would happen if he were suddenly not in charge.)
Wikipedia, like any socially or collaboratively structured entity, requires a virtuous spiral to thrive. People have to enjoy and value working on it, which makes a good product that people like working on, which attracts more people who like it, which makes it better, and so on.
That spiral can reverse, though, if the work becomes difficult or unpleasant or frustrating, if the neutral point of view Wikipedia fosters goes out of fashion or can’t be enforced, or if consensus breaks down; then the process and the product suffers, people get turned off and leave, and down it goes—not with a bang but with a whimper. And in the process, the rules of the game for recording and sharing “all” of human knowledge will have been rewritten, probably forever, which has very broad implications indeed … but that’s another story.
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Comments
Knowledge on the cheap
I’m a reference librarian, and I was intrigued by Wikipedia at first. It struck me as an informational version of Adam Smith’s "invisible hand": Contributors around the world with a passion for a subject would correct and push one another, resulting in ever increasing quality of information contained in the cloud of entries for that subject. An upward spiral of information, pushed by the invisible force of many caring hands!
Trouble is, too many of the passionate are neither critical nor careful. Too many can’t spell or write. Too many engage in edit wars. Too many overestimate their expertise. Some have an ax to grind. And for many entries — especially those related to niche interests — there is no community of interested contributors, and you get the take on the subject of just one, or a very few, persons.
The greatest problem with Wikipedia may be anonymity. There is no penalty for carelessness or idiocy if you don’t have to give your real name.
Too often the process ends up being the illiterate and the innumerate correcting one another. I no longer contribute articles, but still routinely correct the typos, errors, and inconsistencies I encounter. But it’s an absurd effort, like trying to stand on a beach in Chile with my hand up to stop the tsunami.
In the beginning, however, I took Joe Janes’ exhortation to librarians to heart: If you don’t like what you see, participate and make it better.
I launched numerous entries, that is, was the first person to create pages for the particular topics. I worked hard on them, taking care to write carefully, to check facts, to cite sources. I gained an appreciation I had not had before for just how hard it is to write a good encyclopedia article. It made me appreciate what the editors and contributors to traditional encyclopedias had accomplished down though the years.
And then unknown parties edited my work, and instead of improving it, made hash of it.
Do you think I’ll contribute to Wikipedia again? When hell freezes over.
I will admit that Wikipedia can be useful, especially as a starting point for information on offbeat topics or niche interests that traditional encyclopedias omit. But when I use it, I take what I find with a very large grain of salt and proceed accordingly.
It is useful, but it is also a godawful mess and mishmash, and never to be fully trusted.
The time will come when a few perceptive individuals will admit that the old library notion of "authority" wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
In one sense, Jimmy Wales has crowdsourced all the world’s knowledge, thinking he can thus gather it into a comprehensive source on the cheap.
But even the net, it seems, can’t overcome a fundamental fact of life: Quality work means hard work and sweating the details. And, alas for the populists, it probably also means authority.
Mobile wikipedia
Mobile wikipedia is here already http://mobile.wikipedia.org/
It is the same info in a form more suited for mobile phones
The Wikipedia guidelines for lead sections (above the table of contents) mean that in most cases that the lead is already usable as a quick summary of the article (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lead). Wikipedians think a lot about how their info can be made more easily reusable. If something else ever does come along to replace Wikipedia it will probably be based on the Wikipedia data and it will probably be done by disaffected wikipedians. For now the disaffected wikipedians are (mostly) working within the project to make it better.
How to get involved as a librarian
Dear librarians! If you’re interested in contributing to Wikipedia…. Wikipedia needs you :) As Joe writes, the site requires people working on it to stay afloat, and to stay useful. One of the site’s major challenges right now is to increase the reader-editor ratio.
If you’re interested, consider joining the Wikiproject Librarians: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Librarians to get ideas, and to meet other librarians who are editors.
Some projects might include:
* working on LIS articles :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_basic_library_and_information_science_topics
* adding references to some of the thousands and thousands of articles that are lacking refs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
and much more.
There are many guides on how to get started as an editor:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents is a portal to probably all of the help pages that you’ll ever need
* the books "How Wikipedia Works" (disclaimer: written by me) or "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" both offer step by step instructions on how to edit.
But the best way is just to dive in and start working on something you care about. Add a reference. Fact-check something. Fix someone’s atrocious grammar. Library students, reference Wikipedia articles as a way to practice answering reference questions ("What *is* the average body mass of a hyena? Can I find a reference for that?"). Wikipedia is a huge and complicated and endlessly messy place, but it also tries (sometimes more successfully than others) to be welcoming and open to new editors. And Wikipedia, for all its faults, has more than a little in common with the mission of libraries: making the world’s knowledge available and accessible to all.
There is a lot of soul-seeking going on right now about the future of Wikipedia (both inside and outside the organization) — that’s because we don’t know what the future is. No one ever planned Wikipedia, or sat down and said "let’s build the world’s largest and most-used encyclopedia" — it just turned out that way. But now, it’s a hugely important project — used, I guarantee, by just about all of your students and patrons and adminstrators, and folks looking things up around the world — and because of that it’s a project worthy of the time and attention of experts. And who better than librarians to make sure the pages read by millions are well-referenced, accurate, and point to the best possible resources on their topics? A highly read page on Wikipedia will be seen and used by more people than just about any other resource out there, print or online, and it’s in all of our best interests that those pages are as high quality as possible.
— Phoebe Ayers, reference librarian, Physical Sciences and Engineering Library, UC Davis
Quality issues
I used to link to Wikipedia all the time in my blog, largely because I found I used idiomatic phrasing and references that weren’t familiar to readers in other countries.
Unfortunately, I found that the Wikipedia entries on some subjects changed frequently, so that I really had no idea what information people would get when they clicked on the link. And I found one entry flat-out wrong, contradicting what I knew, what I found in dictionaries, and what Wikipedia says in its own policy statements.
Now I sometimes use sources cited, but I won’t use Wikipedia itself.
I don’t quite understand your
I don’t quite understand your concern. Just because you found one article that was incorrect at the time, that’s enough for you to think the whole project is useless? But any (every) other source, no matter how respected or reliable it is perceived, is likely to contain errors, too. Take Britannica, for (the most convenient) example. Have you ever tried looking up something there you REALLY know a lot about? If not, give it a try. The number of inaccuracies, omissions, subtle biased spins, or plain old mistakes will make your head hurt. With Wikipedia, at least, you have a chance to make corrections…
Other "reliable sources" aren’t really all that much better. If you ever did any serious research on any subject at all, you’d know that the hardest part is to reconcile and find explanations for the discrepancies between different (and equally "reliable") sources. That’s just the nature of things.
If it is the changing nature
If it is the changing nature that gives you rief, why not use the permanent link? Every version has a permanent id that can be use to form a link (for exemple, the permanent url to the current version of the American Library Association artice is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=American_Library_Association&o…), that way you do not have to worry about later changes. I would never think of citing Wikipedia without using the permanent link, just as it is common sense to give the year of the Brittannica version one is citing.
I’ve always thought that
I’ve always thought that people will not do quality work if they are not getting paid for it. Sure some people might get other benefits out of contributing, but over time, the number of people willing to contribute and improve content will decrease. Everyone wants the benefits of using it, but few are willing to put in the time and energy to make it a quality service. As a librarian myself, I get paid to research and answer questions all day long, why on earth would I want to do that for free in my spare time?
Good points. Wikipedia is
Good points. Wikipedia is based on the premise that one can get something for nothing. In most of the situations in which one finds oneself in our world, that is a faulty premise. Creating a quality reference source costs time and money. Wikipedia’s fundamental assumption is that they can avoid facing that reality. They can’t.
it does take both time and money, however
Except that it’s taken tons of time and tons of money to create Wikipedia — it just hasn’t been applied in the traditional matter. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers have spent hundreds of thousands of hours, day in and day out, creating the site; and the infrastructure to run it has been funded (to the tune of millions) by readers who find it useful. Wikipedia’s fundamental assumption is that open and free educational resources are useful, and that seems to be true.
Librarians and Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a great opportunity for librarians to apply our craft to the evolving information landscape of the Internet. Wikipedia can be adapted to serve the Internet as the Library of Congress Subject Headings (and their associated rules) serve libraries: As the bedrock of organization and definition making it possible to learn in greater depth about a subject and find materials related to it.
Quality?
Interesting that you should say that there "wouldn’t be much competition on speed, cost, or QUALITY." Are the tides against Wikipedia turning? Wherefore? I haven’t been made aware of any major changes in people’s perception of Wikipedia, especially among teachers. Everyone still uses it of course and I’ve personally had more than my share of reference questions where I’ve been sure that an answer from there would suffice. But still, the quality comment surprises me.