Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment
medium.com
medium.com
I have absolutely no recollection of this. Wikipedia has had some trouble, just like any other successful project, but has in my view been widely regarded as a pretty successful project that everyone wants to have around (unless you sold encyclopedias).
That's a really good lesson about sources in general. One can't even trust a primary source, except as an indicator about what someone at close hand thought to write down; it and everything which references it will have biases, slant and perspective.
There is such a thing as truth, but it can only be approximated.
That said, Wikipedia is untrustworthy. It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors. It's important to treat it with a healthy dose of skepticism and base research work on original sources instead. Regardless, though, it's an amazing resource that I'm sure has accelerated research productivity at all levels.
It's a great way to quickly learn about ideas and vocabulary in a field, but it's riddled with misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptive slants, and other errors.
Tertiary sources have always been, in most venues, "acceptable" only as research tools to find primary and secondary sources,
(Oddly, though, its become common in the last few years for even reputable news media sources to cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source. I don't see that really as progress in Wikipedia's acceptance so much as a sign of the increasing laxity of standards in journalism.)
Well, for academic purposes, it still is.
But then again, as then, it's still used for those purposes now, despite the policy.
IIRC from back then it was more like "never us is as a main source" and "for [deity]'s sake don't cite it", which I think is still pretty much the case.
It was often a useful way to find other useful sources though, either through explicit links in the articles or by introducing the reader to useful search terms they'd not thought of or otherwise been introduced to, and people were encouraged to use it for that purpose (but that purpose only).
But on the other hand, I've had other professors still say we aren't allowed.
Maybe they're warming to the idea now.
If you read the history of ubiquitous technologies that we take for granted, you'll see the same attitude repeated. The car, plane, radio, television, light bulb, the UN, etc. you'd have to look at the really early form of these things.
I can't believe nobody has responded to this with [citation needed] yet! ;)
OK seriously now, I kind of remember some rumbling about the challenges facing the project: crowd-sourcing a general purpose encyclopedia, generating enough money to keep things running without showing ads - who would write the content, the quality would be terrible, etc.
I'm not sure it was "widely" considered as doomed, but I'm also sure the breadth and depth of topics and overall result ranges from outright shock to pleasant surprise of the naysayers.
Wikipedia has flaws but overall it is a great reference on a massive variety of topics. Here's an anecdotal example: I'm a hiker and a friend and I ran across a weird looking fruit on the trail. After taking pics and asking around we were told it was an "Osage orange". Never heard of it, so I went to Wikipedia and found a lot of info and yes, that was definitely it. I can't imagine Encyclopedia Brittanica, World Book, any of those I remember from my youth, would have had as much info on the Osage orange!
Space Flight Operations Center (in wiki but not E.B.) Hypertrocta (in wiki but not E.B.) Sokół motorcycles (in wiki but not E.B.) Paradeudorix petersi (in wiki but not E.B.) Bella Voce (in wiki but not E.B.) ...and so on...
Now there is a certain amount of vandalism, rumor, political skew, etc. so you should take what you read in Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but at least it's there. Most of the time it will point you to a more authoritative source in case you think someone's being deceptive about Osage oranges.
It's a fair question. Here's what I could find from 2005 ...
"The One for All model has delivered solid results in a remarkably short time" http://www.wired.com/2005/03/wiki/
Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems Yes it's garbage, but it's delivered so much faster! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_pr...
I remember some years ago the wiki page for Bitcoin insisted it was a ponzi scheme. Wikipedia has a page that defines the essential elements of a ponzi scheme and Bitcoin didn't meet them, but no matter - edits to remove this statement were immediately reverted and diverted to an endless discussion page in which the camper in question couldn't be persuaded by any means, not logic, not evidence, not weight of people disagreeing. I see that these days the issue has been "resolved" by having an entire section called "ponzi scheme dispute" that consists merely of different pundits contradicting each other.
Still, this is better than it used to be.
IMHO that is a good thing more often that not. It means that someone who has heard the rumour will check Wikipedia and find a couple paragraphs about the subject, with links to the most trusted agreed-upon references about who said what.
The alternative is not having the section and requiring those same readers to search their own way through the internet, without having any idea of what sources to trust, and likely getting only one side of the controversy.
That said, call me a pedant, but the term has a clear definition. The statement is either right or wrong. Being able to cite people who merely assert an opinion doesn't make them automatically worth having on an encyclopedia page.
As examples, the wiki page for Barack Obama doesn't mention the claim that he's a Muslim or that his birth certificate was faked anywhere .... because it's factually incorrect nonsense that shouldn't be on a wiki page. Ditto for the page on climate change.
But this sort of thing seems very hit or miss. Whether pages can be kept factual or not seems to depend just as much on whether someone reverts every change to the page, as the facts themselves.
But there is a continuing problem with recent and current events. You get a lot of people trying to produce a single article, and disputes occur.
One example: the Amanda Knox article spent literally years in a slow-moving and entrenched edit war (which nearly gave me a hernia trying to unpick) over whether she was guilty or not - all of which was up in the air due to pending court cases.
As soon as the case died down and tied up, the article instantly became a dead zone and is mostly OK.
I mean for the most part I agree with the quoted articles in that Wikipedia is hard to "verify" other than what you believe sounds true. And sometimes this happens.
1) Someone write something on Wikipedia 2) Person changes it 3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia. 5) Repeat
It is a bit scary how much our source of information is just this one site source without decent "fact" checking other than turf war related reasons.
Here is one: I am pretty certain that Alicia Keys was born in 1980 and not 1981 as her Wikipedia article says. I have no way to prove this based on Wikipedia standards and if you look on "the Internet" you sometimes see 1980 and sometimes see 1981. The editors who turfed her page at the time sided with the 1981 timeline.
And how did they "prove" it was 1981? They showed links to some music related websites with articles about her saying she was born in that year. Completely ignoring alternative sources that said she was born in 1981.
I mean there are certain explanations on why this happened: 1) A major publication cited her DOB as 1981, others followed suit. 2) Alicia keys' handlers want her to be a year younger than she is, so she told her PR people to make sure everyone says she was born a year younger. 3) Someone misheard she was born in 1981, wrote that down on Wikipedia, then everyone else just used Wikipedia as a reference.
The problem I'm trying to get at is, Wikipedia is so popular its hard to figure out if people are just lazy and using it as a source, which perpetuates this cycle of "Fact F on Article A is true because of source S, Source S it turns out, used article A to look up Fact F and reprinted it without really fact checking F.
So yeah, popular, but hard to determine how accurate. /rant.
As illustrated in this useful infographic: https://xkcd.com/978/
Just to mention the total media collapse these days, where Russia & "The West" have so different facts put out in the wild, that you actually can't find what happened, by only reading and selecting a source. What's interesting is that both media don't provide any evidence of what actually happened, they just spread out opinions by other people, which are in most cases subjective.
What Wikipedia did ( and is doing very good ), though is that it gathered multiple knowledge bases under one roof - very general, sometimes, but accurate enough. For example, I've graduated law and could claim that what I can find as articles on that topic is very basic, but true. Also I'm professionally working as a web-dev and still can claim that most articles I find are precisely moderated and reflect the science-books.
It's so funny I always like to "Let's check wikipedia" and people usually reply "That's not an accurate source of information", which IMHO is wrong. Wikipedia is still the most accurate (general) knowledge base to me.
My point is that I don't see how Wikipedia is worse than some random website or book.
1) Reporter discovers something (how???) 2) Reporter submits it 3) Some editor approves/rejects it (how/why???) 4) A very good looking person presents it to you on TV along with audio and visual designed to make it look plausible.
If it turns out to be untrue, is it reported? What if you discover that it is untrue yourself? How do you correct it?
So yeah, even more popular that wikipedia, but hard to determine how accurate.
But who cares?
Can you? These things aren't exactly public record, are they?
Genealogy is a perfectly good answer.
My own pet battle in this war for truth is that "open source" was coined as a synonym for "free software" in 1998 and nobody called free software "open source" before then. There are so many people who argue so vehemently that "open source" was a term that people used naturally for software before 1998, and this gets repeated so often as to become consensus reality.
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
In cases where people have very strong beliefs, they would rather abandon reality than change them.
It's quite common in tech, but is it worth worrying about? US society survives despite all the birthers, con-trail conspiracists, creationists, anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers, people who think the moon landings were staged in Arizona, and so on.
In that context, I think Wikipedia is doing pretty well....
It's only really a problem for "single-issue fanatics" or extremists or whatever: those people who stake so much of their intellectual, emotional and sometimes financial capital on a particular point of view that they have to defend it regardless of the facts. Creationists, for example.
I documented another case that wasn't biographical:
* http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/le...
In fact, the reception is just as split today as it was back then. Especially in light of increased grievances regarding how Wikipedia's bureaucracy operates.
As the most prominent example, the religious people take a deep care not to have this quote of Einstein on his main Wikipedia page: "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends."
The goal is obvious: to present "the smartest people" as believers, "one of them."
So, the UK is the second largest English-speaking country by population. Also, you could say that around 1 in 7 of the English speaking world is from the UK (and that's a lot).
And that's before we consider the ridiculous amount of power and wealth the British Empire had, and just plain history. It's not entirely surprising to see the UK cropping up almost everywhere.
The sourcing policy of course is most skewed towards the cranks when the subject matter is simply too esoteric or plain ridiculous for any reliable source to have ever bothered attempting a detailed critique.
I think the community is waking up to this issue; there have been recent bans for people exhibiting this behaviour. It's hard though because you have to unpick a pattern of behaviour and show it's malicious.
Comprehensive? What?
For me Wikipedia and Stackoverflow are now only reference material; - I rarely even consider contributing. I still pay a bit once in a while for the fundraisers but my feeling is that will decrease as well.
It wasn't considered a failure or doomed in any circle I frequented 10 years ago, and I did a lot (academia, business, entrepreneurship, makers, more) -- and it wasn't so with anyone of the "general population" that I associated with. The only less-than-positive remarks I've heard about Wikipedia where from people who snarked "but anyone anywhere can change a value any time, how can you ever trust that?" Which is, of course, true -- but a variation of which applies to e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica just as well.
Good on ya, Wikipedia! You've come a long way up.
It goes counter to everything on the Internet. You would expect it to read like the comments section of a news article - instead, it's more definitive and factual than news articles themselves. Amazing!
It's all just our natural prejudice towards people who aren't "qualified" or experienced. Humans are pretty terrible at judging qualification. Either they'll use some irrational subconscious criteria like the person dressing appropriately or appearing confident, or they'll rely on faulty measurements like scores on some test or having some sort of certification. Sure these are all useful to some extent but we have to start realizing that design has a limit, especially when you enter fields governed by things other than hard science.
That's not true. Go to this page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_celebrities
pick a list and add yourself into it. Within an hour your change will have been reverted.
This claim that anybody can edit wikipedia is bullshit and rather annoying.
I've had old company listings disappear because they had no links. The company is gone! History! Nothing to link to. So that meant some busybody made it their job to delete that piece.
Wikipedia works like every reasonable Internet community - read: just fine as long as someone is not trying to make money on it, and as long as those attempts are actively and ruthlessly punished. For some the default picture of Internet is comments under a news article on some big portal. For me, the default picture of the Internet is Hacker News.
Are other medias better in that respect?
For reasons related to the above, afaik Google has never tried to nerf its prominence in search results, unlike profit-seeking content farms. That's probably an underestimated reason for its SEO success as well.
On these assumptions I don't see any reason why Google should "nerf" its results, since they effectively present what the user is most likely to be looking for :)
And on a related note, "what the user is most likely to be looking for" is path dependent. Unlike other content sites, I rarely bother using Wikipedia search, because I can invariably find the page by Googling from my browser. If the relevant Wikipedia result wasn't consistently on the first page of Google, I'd tend to go direct to WP when actively looking for Wikipedia articles like I do with other less search-optimised but often superior websites. And if that was the case, Wikipedia would almost never be the result I wanted when Googling subject matter, much like although I'm often interested in BBC News, finding the Beeb's take on a subject is never the reason for me using Google News.
With other sites, you often have to wade through ads and read the whole thing just to answer a simple question. And most of the time, I'm just looking for details on things I already know.