By Stevie Smith Apr 12, 2007, 14:34 GMT
Described as the “free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit” should we really be criticising Wikipedia so fervently for its reliability and accuracy based on the notion that the general public has direct influence over its content?
Wikipedia UK spokesperson David Gerard certainly doesn’t think so, offering that those critical quarters pointing accusatory fingers in Wikipedia’s direction are perhaps over egging the bread, as it were.
“The problem is that sometimes people take us to be more reliable than we are,” commented Gerard in a Manchester Evening News article concerning the reliability of the online encyclopaedia. “If you read it with critical thinking you’ll get value out of it. It’s not reliable in that you can trust every word.”
In terms of monitoring and controlling the site’s content for quality and accuracy (or lack thereof), rather than employ a submissions process or merely restrict usage to those qualified to provide tangible knowledge, Gerard insists that Wikipedia’s success lies its willingness to be “painfully open” concerning the information it supplies.
“Instead of controlling stuff we tend to let stuff in and then fix it when it’s wrong. You get bad stuff but you get a lot of good stuff you wouldn’t get otherwise,” he said.
However, that’s not a belief shared by Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger, who has recently launched Citizendium.org as a direct rival to Wikipedia’s hugely popular online service. According to Sanger, Wikipedia delivers “frequently unreliable content” and is also “broken beyond repair”.
Although Wikipedia is one of the top ten visited sites on the Web, contains in excess of 6 million articles published across more than 100 different languages, and is a massively popular source of information, it’s often a haunt for information vandals that alter facts with ridiculous rumour, proclaim living celebrities as dead, and even announce that a town in Ireland has formed an armed militia to combat the swell of local werewolves. Perhaps more of a concern is the belief that many of Wikipedia’s supposed experts are in fact little more than information charlatans. Most recently, a long-time contributor to Wikipedia’s archive of articles was revealed to be a 24-year-old college drop-out who had been passing himself off as a university professor.
Larry Sanger’s comments have arisen this week following a claim made by the UK Education Secretary at the annual conference of the National Association of Schoolteachers and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) in Northern Ireland. Alan Johnson praised the online encyclopaedia, saying it “enables anybody to access information which was once the preserve only of those who could afford the subscription to Encyclopaedia Britannica and could spend the time necessary to navigate its maze of indexes and content pages.”
Speaking to The Times, the Wikipedia co-founder reacted to the UK Education Secretary’s viewpoint by saying: “I’m afraid that Mr Johnson does not realise the many problems afflicting Wikipedia, from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content, and to a whole series of scandals. While Wikipedia is still quite useful and an amazing phenomenon, I have come to the view that it is also broken beyond repair.”
Sanger’s newly launched Citizendium now exists as a rival encyclopaedic source to that of Wikipedia and, although it too will be sculpted by its online users, approved academics will fact check and edit the site’s evolving content for accuracy, reliability, and continuity.
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