Wikipedia has come some way in just a year, as these two graphs, originally posted by Sébastien Paquet, show.
Earlier this year (September), Wikipedia passed the one million article mark. Joi Ito commented:
'Wikipedia is in more than 100 languages with 14 currently having over 10,000 articles. It is ranked one of the ten most popular reference sites on the Internet according to Alexa.com (trumping Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times). At the current rate of growth, Wikipedia will double in size again by next spring.'
You know when you've arrived when a parody site launches alongside of you.
But there are problems:
- Amazing though it is, Wikipedia is not flawless. It's got a problem common to almost all peer production projects: people work on what they want to work on. (This "problem" is probably the secret sauce that makes peer production projects work... which is what makes it such a difficult problem to tackle.) Most of the people who work on Wikipedia are white, male technocrats from the US and Europe. They're especially knowledgeable about certain subjects - technology, science fiction, libertarianism, life in the US/Europe - and tend to write about these subjects. As a result, the resource tends to be extremely deep on technical topics and shallow in other areas. Nigeria's brilliant author, Chinua Achebe gets a 1582 byte "stub" of an article, while the GSM mobile phone standard gets 16,500 bytes of main entry, with dozens of related articles. This caught the eye of Wikipedia contributor Xed, who identified this as a systemic, structural bias in the Wikipedia system. He's launched a project called CROSSBOW - Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias On Wikipedia - which is looking for ways to address these biases and increase the number of articles on less-covered topics and increase the visibility of the "less travelled" articles that exist. … I feel the solution to systemic bias in Wikipedia is the same as the solution to systemic bias in open source software development and in the blogosphere: broaden the sphere of producers. … I'd love to do some work trying to help determine the "holes" in Wikipedia - I'm very interested in thoughts people have on methodology. Does it make sense to hold Wikipedia up against a traditional encyclopedia like Brittanica, and look for areas Wikipedia doesn't cover? Or does that miss the whole point of a peer-created work? Ethan Zuckerman
- Wikipedia has frozen the page about Bush because it was being flip-flopped so fast. Instead, Wikipedia wants to come up with a non-controversial core of facts. Why? Because that can serve as an authority for all. This reliance on facts is interesting. Some of us (including me) thought the Web would join facts and values more firmly than ever because of the dominance of voice on the Web. Instead, are facts separating out? And are facts becoming commoditized? Go back to the basic notion of truth: Correspondence of a proposition with the world. Truth is abstracted from individuals (and from voice?), according to this idea, since it doesn't matter who utters the proposition. Authority comes from trust that this particular source removes his or her (and historically, of course, it's mainly been his) interests and utters true (objective) statements. Blogs seem to change that. They are full of voice expressing interests. Does this mean that they are only accidentally true at best? Or are we seeing the emergence of multi-subjectivity that has the authority of objectivity? Will facts become commoditized and conspicuously split off from the voices that try to find the truths that facts support? David Weinberger
- BBC News Online wikiproxy is an experiment by the author of whitelabel.org blog that takes the BBC News Online site and turns words in text into links to Wikipedia articles. And, it links on the right hand side of a story to blogs that link back to the page. This has stirred some worry about the accuracy of Wikipedia articles, and some have the opinion that the BBC wikiproxy links to wikipedia could erode faith in the accuracy of BBC news due to the open nature of wikipedia. A difference in the wikipedia system and the way more traditional mediums like books, television and and printed magazines is that readers and content creators can discuss everything about the information presented. This consensus-style structure has some drawbacks, but it also has some benefits when enough community members voluntarily follow systematic guidelines and procedures (which appears to be happening on wikipedia.org). Ultimately, the bottom line is, has there ever really been a time when people have been able to blindly trust any information source without thinking, judging and reasoning for themselves? Arguably, collaborative systems like wikipedia can make thinking, judging and reasoning for yourself easier by allowing for constructive dialogue. That's the real value in Wikipedia and other online collaborative systems, for those willing to pursue it. Smart Mobs
- Guardian Unlimited has an article on Wikipedia. Having run the editorial division of Encyclopaedia Britannica for several years, I've followed the rise of this open-source encyclopedia was great interest, and wonder how much it can serve as a model for other large-scale knowledge-creation projects. It has no editors, no fact checkers and anyone can contribute an entry - or delete one. It should have been a recipe for disaster, but instead Wikipedia became one of the internet's most inspiring success stories. ... The current Encyclopedia Britannica has 44m words of text. Wikipedia already has more than 250m words in it. Britannica's most recent edition has 65,000 entries in print and 75,000 entries online. Wikipedia's English site has some 360,000 entries and is growing every day. [Ed: The Britannica also spends several million dollars a year on editorial salaries, costs, etc.] But numbers mean nothing if the quality is no good. And this is where the arguments start. IFTF's Future Now (Franz Dill; see also here)
The launch of WikiNews led to a plethora of comment: Rebecca MacKinnon, Joi Ito, David Weinberger, Dan Gillmor …
Out of all this, I plucked:
Wikis … have a powerfully destabilizing effect on voice and authority, two things that have traditionally been under the control of instructors in higher ed. Ubiquitous networking and portable devices provide a backchannel environment that changes discussion in the classroom in a profound way. I’m not preaching technological determinism here—simply saying that we need to be aware of the destabilizing power of the tools, and to begin to address those effects directly in our thinking and writing about educational technology. Liz Lawley
This is a list of previously controversial issues. The primary characteristic of a controversial issue is that the article is constantly being edited in a circular manner, or even worse, is provoking edit wars. This page is conceived as a location for articles that regularly become biased and need to be fixed, or articles that were once the subject of an NPOV dispute and are likely to suffer future disputes. Articles listed here may need more work to approach a neutral point of view than is usual. For articles that are currently unbalanced, see NPOV dispute instead. Articles on this list should be checked from time to time to monitor developments in the presentation of the issues. Use the "related changes" link to quickly review changes to these articles. Wikipedia
I've overlooked here the attempts run by some to assess the authority — and the ability to repair itself — of Wikipedia (see Alex Halavais, Dispatches from the Frozen North, etc), but I have blogged about these before. And then, of course, there's the librarian-vs-Wikipedia saga.
I expect we'll see a slew of articles in 2005 on the issue of authority surrounding Wikipedia and WikiNews. Here's one sneaking in at the end of 2004, from Mitch Ratcliffe:
As journalists, bloggers, citizen journalists or civic journalists, we need to acknowledge the obligation to examine our own subjectivity and point it out as frequently as possible. Having been cloaked behind a veil of professionalism and craving the spotlight of celebrity for half a century, journalism has largely forgotten that essential elements of the practice of recording events is humility and scathing self-examination. …
Thinking that an article can be finished is another problem, because we've entered a time when news, because of its relationship to history and the ease and rapidity of editing and publication, is never complete. …
News is expensive, which is why it has suffered under the yoke of increasingly profit-driven companies. WikiNews' intention, to distribute the news gathering and editing process, is excellent, but the artifact produced should not be a single article, but an interface to dozens or hundreds of reports that allow the inquisitive reader to explore the many faces of events. A readership accustomed to this approach to the news may be more tolerant, more judicious and participate in the events that make news due to their increased confidence in their ability to embrace uncertainty than the modern human weaned on one or two major media sources.
