Out of Egypt:

the moral bankruptcy of wikipedia

A few weeks back I linked a New Yorker article on Wikipedia, which I thought was surprisingly positive. Well, it turns out the article was even more inaccurate than I thought, because the main source for it - "Essjay" - was never interviewed in person, and the magazine didn't clearly state that they were taking Essjay's word.

In hindsight, though, the truth is much more believable than the lie was. What real professor of canon law would spend hours each day editing a website largely run by ideologues and "NPOV" axe-grinding lunatics? Wikipedia's credibility problems have only gotten worse in the last year. Though the site is still interesting, and useful at points, its dominance of Google searches - not to mention SMS information services, chat hyperlinks, answers.com, and spam blogs - is deeply troubling.

The real moral bankruptcy is shown by craven capitalist "Jimbo" Wales' initial statement about the Essjay affair, as quoted in the New Yorker's correction: "'I regarded it as a pseudonym, and don't really have a problem with it.'" Wales' original partner Larry Sanger, who left back when Wikipedia still seemed like a promising experiment, has some worthwhile observations about the whole situation.

As for me, I still browse Wikipedia, of course, and find it immensely useful at points, and entertaining even when its quality is more suspect. Yet since the Wikipedia community has proven completely resistant to the quality-control standards of the real world - showing just how little title it has to the name "encyclopedia" - I've stopped even trying to contribute to it. The future of the WP content lies in other communities, who take what has already been created and work with it in an environment with reasonable checks in place and with respect for real academic authority. This, of course, is the advantage of the WP license - we can "fork" their content with impunity, then afterward only allow editing according to a more regulated system.

I've noticed how wikipedia is almost always near the top of my google searches, sometimes even above the actual website that I want to get to. It seems like a small thing, but it's actually really annoying to me. Plus it's probably annoying to the businesses that get pushed down the list.

Posted by: heidi at March 6, 2007 5:04 PM