twopointouch

The largest and perhaps the most daring Web 2.0 project is the Wikipedia. This online encyclopedia is free and it is created through contributions by its users. You or I write and submit articles on a subject of interest, and then other users, rather than officiating editors, add to and correct those articles. With millions of articles already, and about 16,000 active users in any one month, people are clearly keen to add to this common pool of knowledge.

On the philosophy of the site, founder Jimmy Wales quotes the fraudulent quiz winner who became an editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Charles Van Doren, who said: “Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too … It should stop being safe — in politics, in philosophy, in science.” The project depends on offering its users more trust than any traditional website would allow. Long-serving Wikipedian Angela Beesley says, “Wikipedia exists to provide a globally available, free (as in freedom, as well as money), encyclopedic (verifiable and unbiased) resource to everyone in their own language. I subscribe to this goal and I also enjoy working with people who share it with me.”

It started in 2001 as an adjunct to Wales’ previous project, an expert-written encyclopaedia, Nupedia. Nupedia had stumbled at the first hurdle and only amounted to 21 articles after a year’s work. Then Wales and his editor Larry Sanger heard about wikis. Wikis are online content management systems designed to allow collaboration. They put together a wiki site and told the Nupedia mailing list about it. Wales hoped that the new site might allow him to gather a few articles for the Nupedia, but it quickly overtook the expert reference. After one month of opening the new site to user contributions, it had 600 articles. After one year, there were 20,000. In June 2006, it had more than 4,300,000 user-written articles in over 200 languages, including more than 1,200,000 in the English-language version. Plans to produce a paper version of the German-language edition of the Wikipedia, which has a ‘mere’ 417,000 articles, are estimated to involve 100 volumes of 800 pages. By comparison, the print version of the most comprehensive edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica comprises just 26 volumes. According to Nielsen Netratings, Wikipedia is the seventh most popular news and information site in the world, way ahead of any other encyclopaedia or printed newspaper site. In June 2006, tracking site Alexa (www.alexa.com), said Wikipedia was the sixteenth most visited site on the web among its users.

Running an encyclopedia “anyone can edit” is prone to difficulties. The person contributing an article and the people editing it may not be experts in a particular subject. They may not be very good writers. They may, indeed, be malicious and aim to contribute libellous information or deface existing articles through their editing. In November 2004, former Encyclopedia Britannica editor Robert McHenry led the charge in an article entitled, ‘The Faith-Based Encyclopedia’. Observing a number of inaccuracies and internal inconsistencies in an article about Alexander Hamilton, McHenry attacked the ability of Wikipedians to maintain quality without qualified experts, peer review or guiding editorial principles. And, in any case, he noted, inaccuracies aside:

…the article is what might be expected of a high school student, and at that it would be a C paper at best. Yet this article has been “edited” over 150 times. Some of those edits consisted of vandalism, and others were cleanups afterward. But how many Wikipedian editors have read that article and not noticed what I saw on a cursory scan? How long does it take for an article to evolve into a “polished, presentable masterpiece,” or even just into a usable workaday encyclopedia article?

In a further article, McHenry disputes the notion of the combining an encyclopedia with any kind of ‘wisdom of crowds model’:

One simple fact that must be accepted as the basis for any intellectual work is that truth – whatever definition of that word you may subscribe to – is not democratically determined. And another is that talent, whether for soccer or for exposition, is not equally distributed across the population…

The criticisms started to get worse. John Seigenthaler was extremely distressed to learn that, “John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.” He’d never heard such allegations before and was extremely distressed to hear about them, publishing the story of his attempts to track down his traducer in USA Today. Other criticisms of the poor quality of the writing in the Wikipedia and factual inaccuracies found in some entries made by Nick Carr, the author of Does IT Matter, led Jimmy Wales to note on the community message board:

…the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarrassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.

Why? What can we do about it?

The site introduced a greater level of editorial control, locking some subjects from editing by any but well-established contributors. It has also instituted greater controls on the quality of edits and contributions. But the encyclopedia was to receive a robust defence from unusual quarters. In December 2005, UK scientific journal Nature published the results of a test of the accuracy of Wikipedia. They randomly chose articles on scientific topics, along with their corresponding entries in the Britannica. These were sent for review to acknowledged experts in the fields chosen: “The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.” The subheading for the ensuing article championed the online reference, saying, “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries”. Subsequent reports about the study either hailed the Wikipedia as being just as good as its print ancestor, or criticised the methodology of the research and Nature’s conclusions. The Encyclopedia Britannica certainly believes that the study’s methods and conclusions are incorrect. The debate still rages.

In some respects, though, the level of accuracy currently attained by Wikipedia is irrelevant. Its user figures show that it is good enough for most people to trust its results. Certainly good enough for many people to avoid paying a subscription fee to expert-edited encyclopedia sites. And the alleged lack of accuracy in the Wikipedia is something that is being continuously worked on. To choose a random example, the article about Sir Isaac Newton was edited more than 50 times in June 2006 alone. Maybe that fact seems worrying – more than 50 shortcomings in a single article spotted in a single month – but others may see it as reassuring. More than 50 people a month are combing through this article and refining and perfecting and adding to it. The speed at which Wikipedia can be updated may be a weakness in some ways, but it is also certainly a strength, says Wales: “There is a small scandal going on in Germany. One of the questions on the German version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ was wrong. The show had referenced an answer on the German version of Britannica, which was wrong. It was wrong on Wikipedia as well, but we were able to update it immediately.”

If you will forgive the broad statement, the Wikipedia is already the largest single source of knowledge ever created, discounting aggregate sources such as libraries. Yet at the same time, nobody has been paid to write articles for the service. The authors and ad-hoc editors of articles do this without acknowledgement – only a user name on the history page of the article identifies the author, and hundreds of people may have changed that author’s content since it was written. There isn’t even any advertising on Wikipedia – it is paid for by user donations.

The Wikipedia is clearly a very special and unusual project and quite different to the average Web 2.0 startup. However, the point about what people are doing with the web remains. People are very clearly prepared to combine their knowledge and work at making the web a better place for themselves and others. Going through the Isaac Newton article for the 1000^th time to check the facts and add a little extra is quite serious work; work for which there is no reward except the personal satisfaction derived from having contributed. The people who contribute to Wikipedia – and the hundreds of other user-led sites available – are clearly not “surfing” the web. They are making it.

Update: The Atlantic Review has an even longer and more comprehensive article outside of their paywall here.