Monday morning, as I was getting ready to head out the door to campus, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a story about Wikipedia–mostly positive. The next day, the Wall Street Journal hosted one of their mini-debates, pitting the Wikipedia model against the traditional model of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia is all over the news right now, and getting pretty good press.
That doesn’t change the nature of that very strange beast.
You should always, with any research source, be prepared to double-check what you find there. That one of the basic, hard truths of research. It’s why instructors demand multiple sources. It’s why we think Great Ideas come out of a Great Conversation. And it is, at least theoretically, the guiding principle of Wikipedia. Lots of people pooling their knowledge ought to be better able to sort out the facts more effectively than a single expert. Research takes time, and each of us only have some much of that commodity. I’m more than a bit obsessive about my research, as the minutia and apparent trivia on my other blog might suggest. I put in long hours, and there are never, ever enough hours to get through the thing you need to read to understand the thing your were reading in order to figure out what to read next to translate that section of something you need to get through to finish a paragraph in an article you should have sent off a week ago. That’s another hard truth. One of the most valuable resources I have as a scholar is other scholars and enthusiasts who can double-check me at times. So Wikipedia ought to be a huge help, since there are many, many enthusiasts out there working away, sifting facts. But that’s not quite the way it works out.
Last April, I checked the state of the entry on William B. Greene (1819-1878), about whom I am currently writing a book. It was pretty awful. As I reported at the time:
the William Batchelder Greene page (as it then appeared) was full of incorrect facts and included a long quotation, attributed to Greene, that was actually by the editors of the 1946 Indian edition of Mutual Banking (later reprinted by Gordon Press.) There was not a single error on the page that I couldn’t source by Wikipedia standards, and some of you have been around long enough to remember when I had the widely-reported-but-incorrect birth-year of 1818 (not, correctly, 1819) prominently displayed in the URL for my main Greene page.
Most of the work, which was good as far as it went, had been done by an editor (or groups of editors, perhaps, using a single account) who was otherwise known for controversial and combatative practices. I was aware of this fact, so I added an explanation to the “talk page” for the entry, explaining and partially sourcing my changes. And that was that. There were no subsequent reverts or edit wars. And the entry remains just as it has been since, give or take a few very minor edits, mostly in the links sections. You can look at the “history page” to see the whole story, and to visit the article in any of its states.
So is this a story of Wikipedia’s success or its failure? Wikipedia makes much of the ability of its editors to correct errors in Encyclopedia Britannica. But it’s clear that it is subject to just the same sorts of errors. My intervention into the situation was as an expert—one of just a few experts, if there are indeed even a few, on Greene. And I haven’t added to the entry since. Why? Not because I’m saving all my research for publication. I publish lots of it on my own blog. But there I know that it will not be altered by others. I take responsibility for my work, which may be wrong. If you want to dig, you can find a couple of retractions on my blog. This seems to be a case for an expert. But the other reason is that Wikipedia doesn’t really know how to deal with experts.
At first glance, you might think that Wikipedia was a functioning anarchy, or something very close. Everyone contributes with no distinction except whether they can convince others that their edits are correct. Conflict resolution aims at developing consensus. Moderators rise from the ranks of the editors by a roughly meritocratic method. “Jimbo” Wales, the founder, intervenes selectively, but that is pretty much inescapable when you have your utopia running on a particular somebody’s computer. In fact, what we have is a kind of planned society where the right set of rules are supposed to generate the right sorts of interactions. For an expert, the most troubling and puzzling of these is the prohibition against what Wikipedia calls original research, and the elevation of citable sources over facts. Wikipedia wants to establish some criteria for the validity of material in its entries. It would be best to aim directly for factual material, but apparently faith in the ability of the editors doesn’t really extend to their ability to separate wheat from chaff in that regard. Instead, the principle relied on is citability. You can make a claim in a Wikipedia entry as long as someone else has already made in it a “reliable source.” Original research appears to have been initially an awkward way to talk about crankish, ideosyncratic stuff, but Wikipedia has actually developed a rather conservative streak. It may be democratic in the realm of participation, but the arguments and opinions in the articles need to have been vetted by particular standards before they can be incorporated into the Wikipedia.
No “partisan” websites. No self-published work. But also no very specific standards regarding how professionally published works are to be compared. Wikipedia seems to prefer secondary sources to primary sources. Even when the original sources seem quite clear, they are subject to concerns about interpretation—as if secondary sources didn’t also need to be interpreted.
The result is that Wikipedia has developed a pretty serious conservative streak. I’ll cut you loose looking at some very controversial stuff for your midterm paper, but the problem is subtler than you’re likely to believe if you look at the really controversial pages. Wikipedia is stuck using the commercial criteria of publishers as a means of establishing the validity of sources—at a time when even university presses find they have to reach out for popular audiences at least as much as they can fall back on rigorous scholarly standards. (As the ex-proprietor of a recently failed bookstore, I could tell you a bit about market pressures in that business. . .) At a time when publishing is becoming less centralized—and this is after all the very phenomenon that Wikipedia is taken to be such a fine example of—they have stepped back from recognizing the value of alternative media. Their standards are narrower than scholarly standards, and narrower than the standards of the marketplace. The contradictions involved don’t matter much if you just want to check a date or get a brief bio of a major figure, but they do undercut the radical claims made for the project.
Some entries to check out, to see how the process works:
- Wikipedia:Citing sources
- Wikipedia:Resolving disputes
- Wikipedia:Requests for comment
- Wikipedia:Arbitration policy/Past decisions
- Wikipedia:Expert Retention
While you’re looking around, see what you can find about the “green” and “libertarian” constituencies to which Carson is proposing his “platform.” Don’t forget to look at the “talk” pages of entries to see if there are controversies.
