An article in Saturday's New York Times continued the reactionary rejection of the intellectual establishment against Wikipedia. The article makes some fine points, leading with a key question that embodies the established world-view:

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, currently serves up the following: Five billion pages a month. More than 120 languages. In excess of one million English-language articles. And a single nagging epistemological question: Can an article be judged as credible without knowing its author?

That's a good question, and the article goes on to hold up Encyclopaedia Britannica as the pinnacle for which to aim:

Once upon a time, Encyclopaedia Britannica recruited Einstein, Freud, Curie, Mencken and even Houdini as contributors. The names helped the encyclopedia bolster its credibility. Wikipedia, by contrast, provides almost no clues for the typical article by which reliability can be appraised.

That desire to lionise the big names of a field is of course the same propensity we see at conferences to promote the name and reputation above the actualy content or value, and even in blogging to make an A-list. If that's the way we want to define authority, by designating a recognised expert and vesting their opinion with papal infallibility, then Wikipedia is indeed doomed.

Yet the article has two important failings as it picks over all the flaws in the new, crowd-based-editing world of Wikipedia. First, it neglects the findings of an (ironically) expert-led investigation by Nature magazine (hardly a new-wave publication) that the content of Wikipedia is usually as accurate as the content of Britannica. Second, it fails to examine the world-view of Britannica with the same rigour. Yes, the crowd-based approach can fail, but Nature said (quoted in C|Net):

"An expert-led investigation carried out by Nature--the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science," the journal wrote, "suggests that such high-profile examples (like the Seigenthaler and Curry situations) are the exception rather than the rule."

So if the results seem as good, what's the issue. Well, I think the issues are that the flaws in the authority of the Wikipedia data are transparent rather than opaque as they are in the case of Brittanica, and the consequence is that there's an implicit need for the exercise of judgement in using Wikipedia pages, which is also implicit but un-noticed in Britannica.

Named Sources

To expand on those two points, let's consider the two approaches a little more. Wikipedia's problem is not that the author is unknown; frankly I am not going to know who the expert on most subjects is anyway. I place much more value in the fact the page is edited by a crowd and the edit history is transparent. The real defect is that it allows anyone to edit and say anything on a subject. That means when you read a page, it could just have been altered spuriously by a vandal or, worse, by someone attempting to subvert the reality of the subject under discussion. These days the system is pretty sensitive to the issue and I see "possibly flawed" warnings appearing all over the place. As a result of all these indicators - edit lists, warnings, Talk pages and more - I am able to weight the value of the material and decide for myself how much to trust what I read.

By contrast, Britannica conceals the editorial biases of its contributors and presents every entry as unimpeachable fact. There's no scope to challenge or alter it, and more importantly no indicators to help me weight the information being cited. I just have to trust the brand - a matter of faith. And that's just not how things work in a connected society.

How To Trust

The issue here seems to me not that there's some defect with Wikipedia. Rather, there is a professional distaste of the establishment writers with the application of James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds to the creation of reference materials. They make the error of believing that the question is still the consumer age question "who should I trust". But in a participation age, the question we should care about is actually "how should I trust". Only Wikipedia gives me the data I need to answer that question.

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Posted by webmink to WebMink at 3/13/2006 06:11:00 AM