How Important
is Wikipedia in the Grand Scheme of Things?
by Bill Platt
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Wikipedia is the center of the online encyclopedia
universe. Millions of entries on every conceivable topic makes
this website an authority source that many young students and adults turn to
from all corners of the globe.
The widespread popularity of Wikipedia has made it an
easy target for quite a bit of controversy and critique. Many academic
institutions disapprove of any use of unverified Internet sources, including Wikipedia articles. Ironically, Wikipedia
prides itself on the idea that its information is verifiable. Read more about Wikipedia's Verifiability policy here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
Wikipedia Basics
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia
is a free content resource that anyone can submit information to according to
certain submission rules. Articles are written and submitted by anyone
interested in the topic being discussed.
Authenticity is supposedly ensured by the ability of others to edit previously
submitted information and correct any errors. Grossly inappropriate or
incorrect articles can be nominated for deletion. Wikipedia
users are given a week to vote on the appropriate response to a deletion
nomination.
These safeguards have been built into Wikipedia's
design as a way of preserving both its credibility and authenticity. While Wikipedia's systems of checks and balances are not
failsafe, they do eliminate quite a few of the errors that would otherwise
occur.
The fact that the website's content is made up exclusively by donated content
and that it has over 2 million topic articles is a testament to the popularity
of this style. While there are no basic rules for submitting articles, there
are basic guidelines that Wikipedia asks submitting
authors to follow.
Maintaining a neutral tone and presenting the information in a fair unbiased
way are the perfect tones that dictate encyclopedia articles. Authors and
editors are expected to be respectful of the work of others and not to modify
anything without a good reason or verifiable references.
Controversy
Academic institutions and authority reference sources such as encyclopedia
companies have been less impressed with Wikipedia
than the general public. There are many reasons for the less than enthusiastic
response from institutions of higher learning and professional reference
companies.
The publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica became enraged when a study claimed
that the accuracy of Wikipedia was comparable to the
accuracy of Britannica's long-standing published encyclopedia. They widely
disputed the results, insisting that their publication is by far the more
superior publication.
Public opinion sides with Britannica. The majority of most
people, when polled, have great faith in the reputation of Britannica
and hold it in much higher regard than its online counterparts.
The convenience of the Internet encyclopedia version is where a lot of its
competition with Britannica arises. Being able to access any information with
the click of a mouse brings research to a whole new level.
Wikipedia and Academics
Studies are regularly inconsistent on the accuracy of Wikipedia.
There is a wide range in the quality and accuracy of the Wiki
articles online.
Articles are constantly being modified and improved upon. When doing research,
it is very important to double-check all information. Wikipedia
is a great resource, but it should never be trusted as the final word on any
topic.
Members of academia are prone to carry negative feelings towards to the use of Wikipedia. Most become agitated when their students source Wikipedia, because they feel their students are not able to
tell the difference between a good resource and a bad one – a truthful fact or
an erroneous statement.
A commonly held belief is that a student lacks the common sense or ability to
differentiate between a good article and a biased, inadequate presentation of a
story as fact. Academia also points to the general lack of solid research
supporting most Wikipedia articles.
Lazy Research
There is no excuse for laziness, but the blame for it is often placed on the
presence of technology instead of where it actually belongs – on the people who
rely on technology to provide them the shortcuts they take.
The modern age is one of advanced technology and many students are more than
willing to take advantage of the ease of relying on computers and minimal
online research.
The primary function of schools is to teach children. Not only are they
responsible for teaching them facts, but also for teaching them how to think
and solve problems for themselves. When students are no
longer able, or willing, to logically decide something, academics are quick to
blame the ease of access to technological advances, separating themselves from
the blame.
Unfortunately, schools hold as much blame as the technology they bash, for the
falling ability of students to produce results on their own. When I was in high
school during the early 1980's, calculators were prohibited in all classes
except for the advanced mathematics classes that required the use of scientific
calculators. By the mid-1990's, the children of friends were telling me that
they were required to bring a simple calculator to the classroom to assist them
in their basic math calculations.
Academia is generally as responsible for the falling academic performance of
students as website sources such as Wikipedia. Although
academia shares in the blame for falling academic performance with poor
resources like Wikipedia, this shared blame should
not excuse Wikipedia's less than ideal service
record.
One Thousand Monkeys Typing The Next Great Novel
Wikipedia and all of its sister projects are
not perfect. They are websites dedicated to providing knowledge to everyone.
Those willing to share what they have learned donate to this knowledge base in
hopes of helping others. At least, that is what they do in theory.
The Wikipedia frontier has real possibility for the
future, but behind the scenes, it is rife with "monkeys learning to type
the next great novel," as sourced in the Infinite Monkey Theorem at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem).
There are some areas of the Wikipedia that are
definitely lacking in information and credibility, and yet when someone makes a
gesture to add to the Wiki knowledge base, some
editors frame these new contributions as unsupportable and unacceptable
additions to the Wikipedia world.
The Wikipedia world relies upon its published Code Of Conduct to drive the decisions of its editors. Examples
of the Wikipedia Code Of
Conduct include: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BIO
The Wikipedia Monkey Brigade
One extreme example of the "Wikipedia Monkey
Brigade" is the story of how Danny Sullivan noticed the attempt by some
editor to delete the Matt Cutts chapter in the
encyclopedia.
For those involved in the study of search engines, Danny Sullivan is one of the
most recognized experts in the field of search engines, and has been since
1997. As the founder of Search Engine Watch, and now the editor-in-chief of
It seems some Wikipedia
editor decided that Matt Cutts was not notable enough
for his own chapter in the Wikipedia. For those of us
who work in the search engine optimization community, such a suggestion is
absolutely obscene. As a quality control engineer for Google and the voice of
Google's spam detection department, people in the search industry pay close
attention to what Cutts says about the future of
search placement within Google.
Sullivan suggested that the attempt to delete the Matt Cutts
page was at the very least an example of how "inept" the Wikipedia editors have shown themselves to be. You can read
Sullivan's heartfelt argument here: http://searchengineland.com/070108-170335.php
Almost as interesting as Sullivan's blog post about the suggestion to delete
the Matt Cutts page from the Wikipedia,
was the page where people argued the decision about whether the page was worthy
of deletion. You can read that interchange here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Matt_Cutts
Those supporting the deletion of the page were quick
to point out the Wikipedia guidelines on Notability
at: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BIO) Strangely, I had read
the guidelines myself and I felt that Matt Cutts was
a slam-dunk for inclusion.
The Good Faith Argument
Much to my own surprise, the fellow who originally suggested that the Matt Cutts page should have been deleted got into the fray that
resulted from his action. He even made reference to having read Sullivan's
comments and chose to use them as a springboard to belittle Sullivan:
"The sources provided by Sullivan in his blog are interesting and some
would even make great additions to a number of AfD-submitted
articles to help fulfill notability (it's a shame he spent the time to make
personal commentary about me on his blog than to improve these poorly drafted
articles, but to each his own)."
For a guy who quotes the Wikipedia guidelines about
"assuming good faith" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AGF)
as frequently as he does, I think his own comments about Sullivan betray his
double standards about "good faith".
It is true that one would not expect anyone who studied Bioinformatics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics) in college to
understand who the players are in the search industry, but then one would also
not expect a person who knew nothing about an industry to judge who is notable
in that industry either. It would be like me assuming to be able to identify
notable people in the bioinformatics field... Yep, that would be dishonest and
silly.
Final Thoughts
The one thing that makes the world of Wikipedia both great and terrible is the same; it is the
ability of people to make corrections to the Wikipedia
encyclopedia when they see the need to do so. But, the truth is that any monkey
with a keyboard and an Internet connection can create and edit documents in the
Wikipedia community.
Even I am a Wikipedia editor... I may even be a
monkey editor, but at the end of the day, I don't monkey around editing
information about which I am clueless.
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About The Author Bill Platt helps his customers with link building for their websites,
through his program at: http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com
By writing original informational articles that would be of interest to his
client's potential customers, he is able to provide
keyword-embedded links to his client's website from contextually relevent pages on the Internet. If you have more
questions, you may visit Bill's website or give him a call at (405) 780-7745,
between the hours of |
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