Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation based in St. Petersburg, Florida. It has editions in about 200 languages (about 100 of which are active). Ten editions have more than 50,000 articles each: English, German, French, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish. According to Hitwise, an online measurement company, Wikipedia is currently the most popular reference site on the Internet.

Evaluations

Wikipedia's claim to be or status as an encyclopedia has been controversial, more so as it has gained prominence. Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority. It is considered to have no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians, academics, and the editors of more formally written encyclopedias. Wikipedia is considered to be of sufficient quality in at least some areas by others, notably winning a comparative test by c't. Much of its praise is for being both free-content and open to editing by anyone. Wikipedia editors themselves have been quite active in evaluating, both positively and negatively, the encyclopedia.

Related Topics:
Reference work - Librarian - Academic - Editor - C't

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Quality

Critics argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work. Wikipedia contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and the editors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, librarian Philip Bradley said that he would not use Wikipedia and is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."(Waldman, 2004) Similarly, Encyclopædia Britannica's executive editor, Ted Pappas, was quoted in The Guardian as saying: "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection. That premise is completely unproven."{{ref|Who}} Discussing Wikipedia as an academic source, Danah Boyd said in 2005 that "t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes."{{ref|Boyd}} Wikipedia articles have been referenced by academics in peer-reviewed articles, including those appearing in the journal Science.{{ref|Science}}

Related Topics:
The Guardian - Science

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Academic circles have not been exclusively dismissive of Wikipedia as a reference. Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in the journal Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light" (Linden, 2002), and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves.

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In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," former Britannica editor Robert McHenry criticized the wiki approach, writing,

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:"owever closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler... The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."{{ref|McHenryFBE}}

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In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in Wikipedia articles, e.g., see Wikipedia:Provenance. The idea is to provide source provenance on each interval of text in an article and temporal provenance as to its vintage. In this way a reader can know "who has used the facilities before him" and how long the community has had to process the information in an article to provide calibration on the "sense of security." However, these proposals for provenance are quite controversial (see Wikipedia talk:Provenance). Aaron Krowne wrote a rebuttal article in which he criticized McHenry's methods, and labeled them "FUD," the marketing technique of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt."{{ref|Krowne}}

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Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger criticized Wikipedia in late 2004 for having, according to Sanger, an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise.{{ref|SangerElitism}}

Related Topics:
Nupedia - Larry Sanger

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Wikipedia's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in accuracy. Referencing Linus's law of open-source development, Sanger stated earlier: "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow."{{ref|LinusSanger}} Technology figure Joi Ito wrote on Wikipedia's authority, "lthough it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds authoritative or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived."{{ref|Ito}} Conversely, in an informal test of Wikipedia's ability to detect misinformation, its author remarked that its process "isn't really a fact-checking mechanism so much as a voting mechanism", and that material which did not appear "blatantly false" may be accepted as true.{{ref|HowAuth}}

Related Topics:
Linus's law - Joi Ito

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Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."{{ref|Who2}} Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger stated in 2004, "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven."{{ref|SangerAntiElitism}}

Related Topics:
Hurricane Frances - Chinese art - Coronation Street - Tony Blair

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It has been praised for, as a wiki, allowing articles to be updated or created in response to current events. For example, the then-new article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident. Its editors have also argued as a website, Wikipedia is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.{{ref|TopicCount}}

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The German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of Brockhaus Premium, Microsoft Encarta, and Wikipedia in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. In overall score, Wikipedia was rated 3.6 out of 5 points ("B-"), Brockhaus Premium 3.3, and Microsoft Encarta 3.1.{{ref|Kurzidim}} In an analysis of online encyclopedias, Indiana University professors Emigh and Herring wrote that "Wikipedia improves on traditional information sources, especially for the content areas in which it is strong, such as technology and current events."{{ref|EmighHerring|Kishore}}

Related Topics:
Brockhaus Premium - Microsoft Encarta - October 2004 - Indiana University

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Community

Wikipedia has a community of users who are proportionally few, but highly active. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices." Editors on Wikinfo, a fork of Wikipedia, similarly argue that new or controversial editors to Wikipedia are often unjustly labeled "trolls" or "problem users" and blocked from editing.{{ref|WikiInfoCritical}} Its community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article.{{ref|SoFixItComplaint}}

Related Topics:
Wikinfo - Troll

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In a page on researching with Wikipedia, its authors argue that Wikipedia is valuable for being a social community. That is, authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen.{{ref|Researching2}} Wikipedia editions also often contain reference desks in which the community answers questions.

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Awards

Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004{{ref|MayAwards}}: The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a 10,000 euro grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby award for the "community" category. Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project.

Related Topics:
May 2004 - Prix Ars Electronica - Euro - Austria - Webby award - September 2004 - Japanese Wikipedia

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Wikipedia has received from sources including BBC News, USA Today, The Economist, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, the Chicago Sun-Times, Time Magazine, Reader's Digest and Wired Magazine. Awards to the Wikipedia project and press clippings are listed by Wikimedia contributors on its website.

Related Topics:
BBC News - USA Today - The Economist - Newsweek - BusinessWeek - Chicago Sun-Times - Time Magazine - Reader's Digest - Wired Magazine

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