WikiProblems

The Times Magazine has an article on the accuracy issues of Wikipedia.

ACCORDING to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler's biography, true?

The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby."

"Nothing was ever proven," the biography added.

Mr. Seigenthaler discovered that the false information had been on the site for several months and that an unknown number of people had read it, and possibly posted it on or linked it to other sites.

If any assassination was going on, Mr. Seigenthaler (who is 78 and did edit The Tennessean) wrote last week in an op-ed article in USA Today, it was of his character.

The case triggered extensive debate on the Internet over the value and reliability of Wikipedia, and more broadly, over the nature of online information.

Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries.

Mistakes are expected to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users.

The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.

It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.

Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?

By and large, my answer is "yes." However, anything as open and huge as Wikipedia is bound to have a certain number of vandals who post garbage. As the article points out, the project is so overwhelmingly gigantic you cannot have adequate oversight. I love Wikipedia for the fast answers but it seems to me that they should begin some sort of registration mechanism so that your right to contribute is revoked if you cause problems. Allowing people to contribute anonymously at this level only invites trouble.

Comments

[AGJ]

It's always wise to take anything from the Net with a grain of salt, but I've found Wikipedia to be reliable for the most part. I haven't come across anything I've had reason to question -- so far. Yet as you say mistakes can happen.

[Dave]

My favorite Wikipedia problem involved their entry for the gymnast Mary Lou Retton. The article claimed (I don't know if it's been changed) that Retton was the most famous athlete to be on a Wheaties box. "Most famous" is rather subjective and hard to determine, but in any event, considering Michael Jordan was on a Wheaties box, the claim that Retton is the most famous to have appeared seems dubious.