Wikipedia's facts-about-facts make the impossible real

My latest Make: column, "Shortcut to Omniscience," talks about the cognitive shift that Wikipedians undergo in order to collaboratively write an encyclopedia, and how that kind of fundamental, subtle change enables networked groups of people to do things that were previously considered impossible.

Here's the thing about expertise: it's hard to define. It may be possible for a small group of relatively homogenous people to agree on who is and isn't an expert, but getting millions of people to do so is practically impossible. The Britannica uses a learned editorial board to decide who will write its entries and who will review them.

Wikipedia turns this on its head by saying, essentially, *Anyone can write our entries but those entries should consist of material cited from reliable sources.* While the Britannica says, *These facts are true*, Wikipedia says, *It is true that these facts were reported by these sources*. The Britannica contains facts, Wikipedia contains facts about facts.

Shortcut to Omniscience

• [nixiebunny]

  Having just written my first Wikipedia entry from scratch, I learned a lot about the concept of “facts about facts” and whether one should trust the published sources quoted in Wikipedia entries.
  I was going to put in some quotes from an article in a trade rag describing the virtues of the gizmo the entry describes, when I realized that this magazine article read a lot like an infomercial. Couple that with some anecdotal information on the Web that the gizmo didn’t really exist at the time it was being described in the trade rag. I began to doubt the veracity of the source, and where does that leave Wikipedia?

• [Robert Nagle]

  Somewhat related: my exchange with a wikipedia editor about whether my self-submitted link about a celebrity constituted spam . I quote myself:

  “Wikipedia is useful for finding out information which is verifiable (and found in some commercially maintained databases). That means birth dates, death dates, colleges attended, ISBN numbers, awards, etc. It is minimally useful for acknowledging controversy about a topic. Wikipedia is semi-competent for providing overviews of laws and physical sciences. Wikipedia is now inadequate in identifying notable people, notable ideas, notable works of art. It is also inadequate in assessing value of a contributed link. It also is inadequate at handling independent media or in documenting phenomenon of no economic value.The need to have “notability” and “reliability” causes Wikipedia to trust known commercial media sources more than unknown ones. That is a bias which ultimately will limit Wikipedia’s usefulness and cause lesser known encylopedias to be more informative and insightful.”

• [FreakCitySF]

  I’ve edited at least 40 articles and still consider myself a complete noob but I’ve found it impossible to make any articles even with sources cited. As soon as you create or edit it’s near instantly viewed by someone on the wikipedia network who questions your actions. And even with citations a few of my edits get shot down. I created an account to make my IP more legit but it doesn’t help anything. I’m disappointed with wiki lately. I never like Wales though and I say good luck raising $7.5 million.

  • [JoshuaZ]

    I’m a long time editor and the way new pages are treated is really awful. There are however a few small tricks one can use to get around the problems. One of the major ones is to first start the article in a sandbox in your userspace and then move it over into mainspace when it is in decent shape.

• [Stephen]

  Britannica and the New York Times also have problems as sources of information.

  Nature found Wikipedia to be as accurate as Britannica:
  http://www.nature.com/nature/britannica/eb_advert_response_final.pdf

  Also, with the exception of a couple of Geology articles in the New Yorker and things like showtimes for theaters, I have yet to read anything in a popular newspaper or magazine about which I had first hand knowledge which the paper or magazine didn’t get wrong. At least with Wikipedia there is some chance of correcting the errors.

• [Anonymous]

  I would argue that Britannica and other ‘walled gardens’ do a much BETTER job of providing useful sources and citations. A lot of things Wikipedia cites are not sources you would cite in an academic paper. As a history major the DNB/Britannica/Elitist sources were overall much, much better at providing me a ‘next step’ in the research process.

  For an example take William Cecil the Wiki article is 12 pages with lots of photos and charts, the DNB entry is 36 pages for just text with additional photos available. The wiki article provides 3 suggestions for further reading only one of which is a good secondary source. The DNB provides 11 plus archival materials, links to likenesses and more. Furthermore the DNB article is written by Wallace MacCaffrey who literally wrote the book on Elizabeth’s reign. While I find Wikipedia valuable for current or trending topics and as a quick and dirty tool I do think Wikipedia has a long way to go before it is seriously ready to compete on academic topics which have well established databases.

  • [Anonymous]

    If you’re a history major, Wikipedia shouldn’t even be your starting point on anything to do with history topics. It works great, however, as an introduction a topic that you are not studying intensely and you do not want a lengthy and overly detailed summary of. For example if I wanted to know the name of the Beatles’ old drummer, or the temperature where water is its densest.

    Wikipedia is also AWESOME at giving information about recent social trends (how many encyclopedias have an article about 4chan or keyboard cat?).

• [Anonymous]

  Of course the social had to be built to make the technological possible, and visa versa, but as http://bit.ly/5biI9C shows wikipedia is now becoming very editorial about what counts as “sources”. The social power of Wikipedia is being killed by an increasingly small group determining that *these sources are true*.

• [thedivineclementine]

  In the U.S. and Spain I could afford to buy textbooks and had access to great libraries, but here in Latin America only the professors buy text books and libraries are sparse. All studying is done from photo copies and the internet.

  Access to quality information has become TOO EXPENSIVE for me and for 90% of my fellow students here.

• [Anonymous]

  Wikipedia is a terrible source of information. Way better system would be to collect articles from actual professional encyclopaedias by paying the republishing cost of those articles by user donations and advertising. This way the professional people who spend time on writing these texts would be compensated for their effort and public would receive actual professionally checked facts and complete reliable articles instead of incomplete collection of little bit this and that scribbled by amateurs.

  • [Itsumishi]

    Wikipedia is a fantastic source of information. It just has to be treated with a grain of salt.

    The economy of your suggestion just wouldn’t work. Wikipedia is currently trying to raise $7.5million to work in it’s current state. Imagine what that cost would blow out to if every article had to be bought from larger encyclopaedias? Also, why would any of them want to sell their articles to what is essentially direct competition?

• [Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

  Cory, in this Make column, you make a cluster of claims that I think are very questionable:
  

  “You might not be able to correct the Wikipedia date for a famous battle that you’re a worldwide expert on, by asserting that you know it’s incorrect. But give an interview to the New York Times about how screwed-up Wikipedia is and cite the true date, and you can go back to the erroneous entry and correct it without argument, by citing the fact as published in the New York Times.

  “This seems completely backward and absurd at first, but remember: Wikipedia is a collection of facts about facts. It’s incredibly hard for the whole world of Wikipedians to look up your credentials and decide that you know what you’re talking about; however, it’s simple for the editorial world to look at The New York Times and see what they’ve reported. And since there’s a consensus that the Times is a reliable source (notwithstanding Jason Blair and other scandals) the edit can now stand.”

  Several things seem to me wrong with this.

  First, speaking as an occasional contributor to Wikipedia, it is very much not my impression that if you cite your own work as published in, or reported by, sources external to Wikipedia, you can get away with it “without argument.” Quite the contrary, my understanding from various Wikipedians is that doing this amounts to painting a very large target on your back, whether or not such self-citing is technically permissible according to Wikipedia’s stated rules.

  Second, and notwithstanding my first point, your hypothetical example doesn’t illustrate the point you’re trying to make about Wikipedia being a “collection of facts about facts.” Because if the New York Times reports that someone they interviewed says that a fact is thus-and-such, the Times has not (as you claim) “reported” that fact; what they’ve reported is that someone makes that claim. The Times does indeed overtly aspire to be a “newspaper of record,” and they do take the position that the things directly reported in Times stories are true. But this position does not cover the factuality of everything being spoken by a Times interview subject. So even if your claim about how Wikipedia operates is correct, your hypothetical example fails to illustrate it; indeed, to the contrary, it opens a very large can of worms.

  I think your larger meta-point about the processes appropriate to different material and economic circumstances is a good one. But I think you’re badly exaggerating the “tractability” of Wikipedia’s endless debate about sources. Like everyone else in Western digital culture circa 2009 AD, I use Wikipedia all the time, but it seems to me that Wikipedia’s editorial culture is deeply and, I’m afraid, intractably confused about what constitutes a “fact about a fact.” And that’s not even touching on the rolling catastrophe that is Wikipedia’s argument over “notability.” If Wikipedia is functional nonetheless (and most of the time it is), it’s probably because at the end of the day the sensible Wikipedians usually make one more edit than the crazy or wrongheaded ones. Not because of the epistemological superiority of Wikipedia’s muddled “facts about facts” debate.

  Third, it’s spelled Jayson Blair. (“This is a minor edit.”)

• [Anonymous]

  A friend of mine created a fake article that was later (obviously) used as source for a local newspaper article. He then cited the article in the wikipedia entry and instantly had a verifiable reference.

• [Laroquod]

  I don’t understand why debate about this issue tends to circle around the drain of comparing Wikipedia to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. We have established a grand new collective trajectory for the way we come at facts, and I think those facts being about facts definitely helped smooth the way for this, at least in terms of triangulating the usual adversaries and not putting them so much in a position of attempting to directly shout each other down — however much disagreement may remain as to the legitimacy of the aboutness of the average wikifact.

  Why would we discard the old trajectory, of a circle of experts whose pedigree is upheld by public reputation? It has different strengths, and will likely have blindspots in different places than the Wikipedia entries. You read them both when you really need to know — knowledge is additive, that’s the whole point.

  If Britannica doesn’t end up as the star representative of the ‘anti-Wikipedian’ approach, then somebody should probably be fired because they should have a plum, assured spot in the marketplace by dint of being the perfect historical brand for everything Wikipedia is not.

• [Anonymous]

  Wikipedia, with a 97% share of the online encyclopedia market, has forced Microsoft to shut down Encarta. How long will it be before Wikipedia claims the prize scalp of Encyclopaedia Britannica?

  Encyclopaedia Britannica did not think that an open source product like Wikipedia would significantly challenge the credibility of its brand. They were dead wrong and Encyclopaedia Britannica’s staff seriously misread the global market. They are now very concerned about the widespread use of a free Wikipedia vs their paid subscription model. From a corporate and financial perspective, Encyclopaedia Britannica is in significant trouble.

  It will be interesting to see if Encyclopaedia Britannica survives, but recent indications do not look good. It is the combination of a) the success of Wikipedia and b) improved search engines that has put financial pressure on Encyclopedia Britannica over recent years. Many libraries, schools & individuals are questioning the need to pay for sets of expensive books, or to subscribe to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, when the content is free on the internet, and much more comprehensive.

  Over the next few years we will see the continued demise of Britannica as it becomes ever less relevant in an open source, Wikipedia-dominated environment.